I’ve never been to China, but my mother makes me feel as if I grew up there. At the dining room table, she braids my hair in between tales of her childhood, her elbows smudging the glass countertop.
According to her, Qingyuan is a beautiful place. A city nestled among ferns and water-smoothed rock, her hometown cradles the groove of the country where river submits to mountain submits to land: a cornucopia of different terrains, as if God couldn’t decide what to make of Qingyuan and ended up blessing it with everything. And everything it certainly does possess. Within the pocket of the Guangdong province, it sits at the perfect location to embrace the push and pull of monsoon season. The frequent rain seems to erase the imprint of human life on the soil, especially in comparison to the bordering prefectures sprouting with skyscrapers and sweat. If not for the roads carving through the city like chemtrails to the sky, one might forget that humans ever touched it.
When my mother was a child, she grew up in a small house in Qingyuan where the greatest pleasures in life came from drinking honey-infused water or playing with the kids next door. Every house was in relatively close proximity to each other, allowing her to run through each one and open all the rice cookers. The rice would spoil, effectively dismantling the neighborly welcome extended to her by way of an open door. My mother was a sprinter, and Qingyuan yielded easily to the eager footsteps of a child. Not only did the village stretch green for miles and miles, but it also rolled out in lazy hills that retreated into rocky cliffsides adorned with moss and hidden rivers. When my mother wasn’t running, she was dancing. On the road to school, she would twirl through fields of rice paddies shaped like ellipses, the foci a huddle of oxen muddied to their knees or a group of old women with sun-wrinkled cheeks and crop-hardened fingers. They waded through stems of rice and pretended the shade afforded by the brims of their hats was enough. Sometimes, these women would give my mother steamed sweet potato cocooned in cloth rags. “Learn well,” they would call as my mother pirouetted the rest of the way to school, spinning past dogs and pigs and chickens. As my mother describes this to me, I think of my New Jersey home, a nucleus surrounded by steel-walled grocery stores and artificial lights. I can see the New York skyline when I drive.
The only places my mother didn’t frequent in Qingyuan were the mountains. I don’t quite know why; perhaps it was because of how unsettled it was, how unrestrained and inimitable. My grandmother, Po Po, visited them occasionally, though, with her own mother and father whom I’ve never met. Po Po once recounted to me, in broken English for I cannot understand anything else, how the peaks of the mountains arched to the sky and broke through the nest of clouds as if to touch heaven; it was the closest you could get to the spirits at the time. Guangdong maple and Korean pine trees cloaked the damp soil and stood tall despite the weight of their epiphytic ferns, dripping with unlobed and waxy leaves. In the understory crowded small-statured bamboo and rats scurrying over split rocks. Here, the ephemerality of time arranged itself in a mosaic of branches drenched with humidity.
Yet, this image of Qingyuan – of bamboo, of moist soil, of mossy mountainsides – belongs to the 1970s. Now, based on pictures my mother shows me from the Internet, the city swallows all the sweat from the neighboring capital, Guangzhou. Skyscrapers reach the heavens, far taller than mountains could ever be. High-speed railways peel across miles so that trains whirl past morning dew and the foaming tongues of white lapping at the riverbanks. Qingyuan, once just a dot on a map, has become a vibrant urban core, serving as an economic and transportation hub. Ironically enough, I connect most to Qingyuan through a laptop screen, where I scroll through filtered pictures of the graying city; it reminds me of New York.
My mother tells me all this, and I think of how I’ve never been to China, let alone Qingyuan. As she ties my hair with an elastic, I am uncomfortably aware of the lump in my throat. My hands feel too soft, my skin too pale, the soles of my feet not dirty enough. From across the dining table, my mother seems a thousand miles away.
