Village People: Hainan, Part Four

Uncle Y Y Lee outside the house he was born in

A couple of things precipitated this blog post. First, I found a link from this Hainan Island related site.

Then I remem­bered that my uncle (father’s brother) didn’t attend my wed­ding because, as my cousin informed me a day before that, that he ‘couldn’t make it, because his leg can­not lah’, and how I thought it would have been nice for him and my dad to meet up, given that both of them are com­ing along in age, though at this time, I don’t want to say either of them is ‘ail­ing’.

I was a bit dis­ap­pointed because I had even got­ten Naomi to prac­tice say­ing ‘Uncle, drink tea’ in Hainanese, after ask­ing my father how to say ‘Uncle, drink tea’ in Hainanese.

It’s been a while since Part Three, and even longer since I was actu­ally on the trip to the island of my forefathers.

Read Parts One, Two, Three.

The tour bus took us to Kachek town, and dropped us off at a 3-star hotel (so my cousin told me), but by this time, what­ever stars that rated hotels on Hainan meant lit­tle as we checked our­selves into our rooms with the rock hard coconut husk beds.

After rest­ing a bit in our rooms, my cousin made another phone call to the ances­tral vil­lage to inform what­ever rel­a­tives we had there that we had arrived. We were then told that ‘a few of them would be com­ing down to have cof­fee with us’.

I had never spo­ken to any of these rel­a­tives, much less known what they looked like, though I’ve been told that all Hainanese men look alike, and that every waiter at Shash­lik looked like Dad, and Mum had pre­vi­ously told me that all Hainanese women looked like my grand­mother. At 80.

But none of us expected a wel­com­ing com­mit­tee from the vil­lage, on a rick­ety hired bus, dri­ving into the hotel’s car park and dis­em­bark­ing into the lobby, to ‘have cof­fee with us’. I think there were at least a dozen of them. At least they didn’t bring any coconut-related sou­venirs, because by that time I had sworn off coconuts for life. It’s a bit hard to explain how per­va­sive the coconut prob­lem is, but you’d get an indi­ca­tion read­ing the tourist infor­ma­tion for the City of Wen­chang, which begins like this:

Dis­tin­guished by the qual­ity and quan­tity of its assorted coconut prod­ucts, Wen­chang City is a vital gate­way to a lively area that con­tains some of Hainan Province’s most charm­ing sight­see­ing and hol­i­day destinations…

Cof­fee at the hotel’s lobby cafe, which also served all man­ner of coconut drinks, took a good two hours, with long con­ver­sa­tions, mostly with the Hainanophone among us jab­ber­ing away, and with me nod­ding and smil­ing. My cousin later told me that my rel­a­tives were telling us about the sad state of my great grandfather’s grave, which, due to lack of main­te­nance, due to a lack of funds com­ing from the Lee fam­ily over­seas, had been over­run by chick­ens from the free range chicken farm nearby.

The next morn­ing, the rick­ety bus came to the hotel to fetch us to the vil­lage, this time, only six rel­a­tives served as entourage, and about an hour into the jour­ney, we arrived at a dusty, non-descript town­ship, where, upon the gut­teral utter­ances of the dri­ver (who was a cousin as well, I dis­cov­ered) we dis­em­barked and were led into a shop­house, where we were made to buy incense, hell-money and enough fire­crack­ers to burn down a small town.

The township looked something like this: Dusty and unremarkable

Then bus driver-cousin said something, and my travelling-companion-cousin handed more cash over to him, and off we went to another shophouse, where more things were bought. All this while, of course, we had to keep my uncle from buying more coconut-related souvenirs.

Another half hour on the bus and on a dirt road where we passed several tiny villages with really old-looking buildings, we disembarked outside a little drinks kiosk-like building that had benches and a shelf that looked like it would have housed a television set. Bus driver-cousin and entourage-cousins beckoned for us to follow them behind the building, on a tiny footpath lined by trees. A five-minute trek later, we were in what looked like a little nook in the woods, with a cluster of buildings that made the place look like the set of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. It was that old.

We walked past a well with an electric motor pump, which my cousin said was the 'running water' that my Dad and uncle had donated money to the village for, and then we were guided through a courtyard and into a small house. On the wall were photographs of people who looked really familiar - and then I realised they were of my uncle and of Dad, taken some time in the 60s. Alongside those photos were those presumably of other uncles and cousins, though, like I've been told, you can't really tell because all Hainanese men look the same.

A very distant cousin brings coffee mugs out of the house

A few chairs lined the walls, and we were asked to sit and wait as scores of people started streaming into the house, and according to my cousin, all of whom claimed to be a cousin or other. This was supposed to make us give them ang pow money or something. Some came, said a few words, took their share, and left, while others would come in, jabber away for a longer time, leave, and then come back again to say some more.

Uncles, aunts and cousins cram for a photo

Then a line of men came into the house, and I was told they were the vil­lage school’s teach­ing staff. Remem­ber­ing that my Dad told me he donated money to build the vil­lage school, I asked to be taken to the school for a look. It was a pretty run­down two-storeyed build­ing, and empty. Then one of the teach­ers showed me a few Peruvian nuevos soles from his wallet, and asked in Mandarin if they were American dollars. 'South American', I said, in Mandarin. He then insisted they were American dollars, because, he said, someone had exchanged them for a substantial amount of Renminbi with him.

Uncle Y.Y. with the vis­it­ing schoolteachers

Then came time to visit great grandfather’s chicken over­run grave. Bus driver-cousin led the way via a series of foot­paths, hold­ing the long coil of fire­crack­ers we had let him buy ear­lier. There was a small head­stone which he dusted off, and we could make out our sur­name on it, and not much else. Not that it would’ve mat­tered, since nei­ther of my travelling-companion cousins could read Chinese.

The thing about Great Granddad’s grave was that it was sit­u­ated in sort of an open ground, sort of in between vil­lages. It wasn’t in a ceme­tery proper, which prob­a­bly explained the chick­ens run­ning amok and flat­ten­ing, over the years, the mound that dis­tin­guished a grave as a Chi­nese one.

The chick­ens were there when we got to the grave, but no mat­ter, Great-Granddad was treated to the longest fire­cracker bar­rage I’d ever heard, and we returned to the house as soon as the smoke cleared, which was after we had stamped out the lit­tle brush­fires that the fire­crack­ers and burn­ing hell notes started, but I think we were slightly pleased that the rogue chick­ens were prob­a­bly scared shit­less and deaf by now.

But one of my cousins was quite vis­i­bly dis­turbed, and she paused to ask why Great-Granddad was buried so near the house, to which I offered, ‘because last time no ambu­lance, peo­ple die already got no car to take them to the ceme­tery’. She seemed pretty sat­is­fied with that expla­na­tion, which was good, because I was being eaten alive by mos­qui­toes at that point, and wanted to get out of the bush as soon as possible.

Back at the house, a feast was being pre­pared for the vis­it­ing Lees. This meant half the duck pop­u­la­tion in the vil­lage squawked their last as they were turned into the county’s spe­cialty — boiled/steamed duck. The court­yard out­side the house was set up with tables and stools, as we were taken indoors and shown the room which Uncle Y.Y. and my Dad were born in.

I was told how both Uncle and Dad had left Hainan at a very early age to look for Grand­dad in Malaya, leav­ing Grandma behind until she man­aged to find her way to Malaya via Viet­nam, Cam­bo­dia and Thailand.

There were sto­ries of other cousins and uncles who left the island from the 1930s onwards, in a two-generation long dias­pora that waned only recently, and prob­a­bly ended with the reverse migra­tion of sev­eral old Hainanese back to the vil­lage from Malaysia and Indonesia.

But food was served, steam­ing duck with the county’s other spe­cialty — a yel­low­ish chili sauce that was spicier than it looked. The feast was sur­pris­ingly good, although I remained a lit­tle unnerved by the num­ber of vil­lagers who stared and kept com­ment­ing how much I looked like Grand­dad and Dad.

After the meal, my cousin requested that we be brought back to Kachek town as it was get­ting late and that we didn’t want to keep them from doing their thing, see­ing as it was a week­day and all. Of course, the vil­lagers didn’t do much besides tend­ing to the ducks and veg­eta­bles, whether it was a week­day or not, because most of the able-bodied mem­bers of the Lee clan had long since gone to the cities for work, leav­ing only the old and very young crouch­ing and hid­ing about the vil­lage buildings.

Truth was, we were look­ing for clean toi­lets, and the ameni­ties in the vil­lage would have been less than able to with­stand the work of my weak stomach.

After we were dropped off back at the hotel, and good­byes said (includ­ing a false promise of a return to the vil­lage the next day), we flagged a taxi and asked the dri­ver to take us down­town, the Singapore-Malaysian-Hainanese word for which was dif­fer­ent from the Hainanese-Hainanese word.

At the chicken slaugh­ter­house a few min­utes out­side down­town Kachek, the taxi-driver laughed his Hainanese head off when we explained that our word for ‘down­town’ sounded exactly like his word for ‘chicken farm’, and that we really didn’t want to have din­ner there.

Hav­ing made his day, the taxi-driver very kindly took us down­town, to a street with many out­door food stalls, where we had a din­ner of fried noo­dles before my female cousin said she was going to look for a dessert that our late Grandma used to tell her about. Some­thing called ‘Guay Dai Din’ in Hainanese, which trans­lates to ”Chicken Shit’ Some­thing’ in English.

She found it, this Chicken Shit Some­thing, and ordered a large basin of sweet syrup filled with black starch pel­lets, to share with all of us. It wasn’t half bad, this dessert, and I think it would’ve made it to South­east Asian Hainanese kitchens and restau­rants if it wasn’t sad­dled with such a mar­ket­ing problem.

The next day, the tour van came back and picked us up for the long drive back south to Sanya, where we were treated to more coconut-related tourist spots before finally board­ing the char­ter back to Kuala Lumpur, with a hun­dred odd Hainanese pil­grims car­ry­ing a load of coconut by-products and many, many sto­ries of the home coun­try.

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