My Urbanization1
I was born in the small town of Xialiu in Suixi County, Guangdong Province, at the end of 1969. My father was a tailor and a manmousang2 of a local amateur Cantonese opera troupe. He loved to sing opera in his free time, especially imitating Chan Siew Fongâs style.3 My hours of cultural exposure mainly consisted of the variety of Cantonese opera that my father would sing all day long, such as âShanbo on His Deathbedâ4 and other sorrowful, beautiful arias. I still remember them to this day; they cause one to feel deeply the melancholy and bitter suffering of this world.
My father once played the leading role in the âLu Bu Molested Diao Chan.â5 This Cantonese opera led me to pursue an interest in classical novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, the book was not available for purchase in Xialiu, so I had to ask my aunt (the only relative who lived in the city) to buy it for me in Beihai City of Guangxi Province. Afterwards, I read Journey to the West and Water Margin and began to pluck passages and poems from these books.
In the small place of Xialiu, we could not see the outside world. I could only absorb the nourishment from local culture to grow. In 1999, when I curated a special retrospective screening of Ann Huiâs films in U-thèque Organization, the Cantonese opera often interspersed throughout the films reminded me of my distant childhood years. After experiencing the baptism of rock, jazz, and various alternative music, I now have a strong interest in vernacular operas. When I first started collecting Cantonese opera records, it was not only for research purposes, but also to return to my roots through this wonderful opera.
In 1982, I tested into the best junior high school in Suixi County and enrolled there. The county town was located more than sixty kilometers from my secluded small hometown, which was very different. One could subscribe to the popular Yuwen Bao6 at the post office, and the school library contained copies of various literary magazines. The most potent novels at the time were Wreaths at the Foot of the Mountain7 and Life,8 which were both later made into films.
The schoolâs intellectual atmosphere was very strong, so the students were all immersed in their homework and rarely developed extracurricular interests. Thus, I couldnât find anyone to discuss the insights of literature with me. During junior high, I took reading notes in four big notebooks and copied the lyrics of many Taiwan Campus Folk Songs.9 These songs, such as âGrandmaâs Penghu Bayâ and âFatherâs Straw Sandal,â are brimming with local, countryside sentiments, which especially touched me as a rural youth.
In my second year of junior high school, I joined the Communist Youth League and began to read How the Steel Was Tempered.10 Since then, I have been obsessed with the power of the collective and enjoyed the feeling of the individual being conquered by the magnificent sound of waves from the collective. All day long, I imagined an era in which my humble self could be among them. In 1995, when I first listened to the industrial and neo-classical music by the Slovenian avant-garde group Laibach, the sound of steel, the beauty of discipline, suddenly connected to the collectivist fanaticism of my youth. For a while after I grew up, I considered myself an individualist, but sometimes life likes to bring you back to once again experience the thrill of self-submersion.
In 1997, the Beijing rock band Catcher in the Rye, in their brash yet sentimental songs, sang with a revolutionary, romantic spirit like that of the communist Young Pioneers of China. They were the young rebels of the new era, who did not change their true character in the age of global information flows. For people in our generation, the first half of our resumes are all in red, and the second half is varied and difficult to distinguish. For me personally, the second half begins in high school.
Because of my excellent grades, I was exempt from the entrance examination and was admitted to the best middle school in Zhanjiang City. In my first year of high school, I read A Collection of New Tide Poetry,11 edited by Lao Mu. It was the best selection of Misty Poetry to date, and it completely changed my life. Although Zhanjiang is a middle-tier city, quite a few talents were assigned to return there after going to college in Guangzhou or other provinces. Compared to the county seat, its world was more expansive.
The 1980s was an unforgettable era. Despite being far from the large central cities, one could still capture the lingering influences of mainstream culture. I read Meishu magazine12 to follow the â85 New Wave art movement, read Dushu magazine13 to follow the debate of âtradition and modernizationâ in ideological circles. Through teachers and friends, I could listen to the tapes of Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun, Ye Xiaogang, and Guo Wenjing, who were the contemporary classical composers just graduated from Central Music Academy. At the cinema (although a bit later than in a big city), I could watch Zhang Yimouâs Red Sorghum, and at Xinhua Bookstore, it was not difficult to find a large number of newly published, foreign translations. One wave after another of waves you have never experienced before, as if crashing over whole mountains and plains, entering your heart with irresistible force. It is a blessing to spend oneâs search for knowledge and extremely spirited adolescence in such an era.
From this moment on, I began my long process of ârooting out.â Dreams, independence, alternatives, individualism, survival outside the systemâmany individual personality traits were given birth to in the 1980s. In 1988, I was once again exempt from examination and enrolled in Shenzhen Universityâs Department of International Cultural Communication. After coming to Shenzhen, the most advanced city in China at the time, I started to expand the connections with other cities. There was less mud under my feet, and the fishy smell of growing up by the sea was gone. I was urbanized and became an urbanite, traveling to more and more places, but I was also getting farther and farther away from home. From a âpastoral youth,â to what people tout as a âtalented scholar,â to the various kinds of roles I wear on my head today, decades have passed.
I left home young and return old. At this time, the countryside and the city often become the aria of your heart and mind. The smallest place often pushes you the farthest. The most painful farewell can bring the most mellow homesickness.
Searching for Hometown14
The flight traveled across more than half of China and took no more than four hours to swiftly descend upon this barren red soil. Taking the car next, I sped through sugar cane fields on narrow roads. Familiar villages one by one appeared in front of me, then quickly vanished behind. The sky was gloaming and firecrackers resounded all around; under the longan trees loomed the shape of the houseâs front gate. I walked through this last day of this last year holding light luggage. In front of the gate, the smiles on my welcoming parentsâ face blossomed like fireworks.
This place where I spent my childhood is called Xialiu, located 109°73â˛E, 21°33â˛N on the western side of the Leizhou Peninsula. It is a small town of around 60 square kilometers with a population of around 30,000. According to official historical records from Suixi County, its establishment can be traced back to year Jiaqing 4 (1799) in the Qing Dynasty, when it was but a small market. Since there are ponds near the market, next to which salted fish used to be sold, it had gotten the name Salted Fish Pond Market. The market was once moved west to busier streets, where it was called the New Market. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, since the market was in proximity to Xialiu Village, its name became Xialiu Market. After 1949 it went through multiple administrative adjustments, once a village, a commune (during the Peopleâs Commune period), and a district, after all of which it became the town it is today.
What I know of my family history can be traced back only to the Republican period. My grandfather, Ou Bingyi, passed away merely one year after my birth, and my grandmother Pang Zhaoyang just turned a hundred this year. Now she is bedridden, has lost all her memories, and recognizes no one: she calls any man she meets her brother and any woman her sister-in-law. My father, now, has become the storyteller at family chitchats. He often tells the dramatic story of looking for his sister, which I have always heard about yet never paid much attention to the details:
My second-oldest sister had been a crybaby since birth; because of that and her lymphatic TB disease she was never favored by the family. Because they couldnât afford to raise her, she was sent to be adopted by a man from Yanggan who opens a gambling house in Chikan, Zhanjiang when she was four or five. In 1943 the Japanese besieged Chikan and our family received news that she died of from an illness, but the truth was, her foster father sold her to others during the war. In 1965, a bunch of fishermen from Changhong went to fish in Beihai, Guangxi, and once when they were onshore watching people play basketball their accent was overheard by a couple standing next to them. The woman asked them if they were from Xihai, and then told them about her own past, how she was sold at a young age and now has settled down here, working in the Beihai Starch Factory. This woman was my second-oldest sister. She shared impressions of her hometown, but didnât remember its name, only recalling there was a famous man people called the âIron Gallâ (Dai Chaoâen, the magistrate of Suixi County 1928â1947, born in the New Village of Xialiu Town). She expressed a desire to find her family, and requested the Changhong fishermen to ask around for her when they go back.Two years later, one of the fishermen came to Xialiu to look for a wife, and it happened to be pouring on that day; when seeking shelter from the rain he talked about the encounter in Beihai and asked the locals if any household has ever sent a daughter to Chikan. There was a neighbor in his audience who knew about our familyâs incidents, so the news finally got to me. That year I was twenty-three, the only young man in the family, so I took it upon my shoulders to look for her. Back in the days a grocery buyer from Beihai often came to Xialiu, so I first asked for the address of the starch factory, then took a friendâs fishing boat to Beihai. I found the factory, and people there told me that Wang Yuyun (my sisterâs new name) has been transferred to Beihai Food Factory, so I found the food factory again. It happened to be that her husband was the one on duty at the door, so he called out to an obese middle-aged woman. Initially, I didnât quite believe she was a member of our family, but once I saw the lymph scars on her neck we recognized each other. My sister, when she saw me, she couldnât help cryingâŚ.
In this typical story of the âold world,â the spread of information takes a long time and relies on multiple random factors. Among all of them, the figure âIron Gallâ played an important identifying role: it was the equivalent of a keyword in one of todayâs search engines. I have known the name Dai Chaoâen since I was very young. In the eyes of Communists, he was a die-hard Kuomintang (KMT) partisan and a local despot; on March 7, 1947, he was shot down by guerilla forces in the Zhanjiang-Suixi highway. This incident is an important turning point in the communist history of Suixi County, and was even engraved on Suixiâs Monument of the Peopleâs Heroes: âAfter this, the great changes took place in the entire county and southern China, the armed revolution was pushed to a climax.â Meanwhile, in Taiwan it is recorded in The History of the Republic of China as such: âOn March 7th in the third year of the Republic, February 15th in the lunar calendar, Dai Chaoâen the magistrate of Suixi County had fallen in battle with the rascals.â It is evident how important this âIron Gallâ is as a KMT major and commander of the anti-Communist fights in southern China.
Curious about the âIron Gallâ I did more research online; it turned out that the Taiwanese composer Dai Hongxuan (Tai Hung-Hsuan, 1942â1994) was his descendant. An obituary published in the supplement of February 28, 1994, issue of United Daily News called âThe End to Grief: Remembering my Teacher Mr. Dai Hongxuanâ revealed this connection. â[His] father, Major Dai Chaoâen, used to organize local armed forces in the Canton region and was called the âIron Gall.ââ Dai is a renowned composer and music educator featured in the Encyclopedia of Taiwan.
Dai Hongxuan was also praised for supporting fellow composer Hou Dejian (Hou Te-Chien) in his censorship crisis. âThe popularity of the song âDescendants of Dragonâ drew the attention of more important figures. Song Chuyu (James Soong Chu-yu), then Director of the News Bureau, first altered the original lyrics into propaganda and put them in his speech to military students at the Chenggongling Camp, then demanded Hou to have the new version be sung instead of the original one. Song even used his position and power to organize a group of intellectuals to pressure Hou. However, Hou would not listen nor believe a single word they said. Whatâs more, he too had a group of firm supporters, including Dai Hongxuan, producer Yao Housheng and playwright Zhang Yongxiang, all of whom contributed to the demise of Songâs schemes.â15
The day Dai Chaoâen was killed was also the day the 1938 Huayuankou breach of Yellow River was sealed; the KMT and the Communist Party of China (CPC) had broken their peace treaty, a new round of civil war had begun, and the KMT were losing their power in mainland China. Dai Hongxuan was only five that year, and nothing can be found online about how he got to Taiwan. Some articles mention that he drank heavily, led a wild lifestyle, despised convention, and had a sharp writing styleâall of which seem similar to the said-to-be temperaments of his father.
Now that everything can be found online, I am also able to satisfy my curiosity and have answers to many more questions looming in my mind. Each time I go back home, I love to spend time on the Jiaotousha Beach. Villages there have an intersecting parallel layout and bungalows are identical to one another, with a fairly wide distance between units, which are divided by extremely straight roads that in no way could exist in a natural village. The entire village is built on a field of sand; villagers do not have land to farm on, but make their living by the sea. I have heard that they are âmigrant households,â but never knew why they were called that. It wasnât until I looked it up on the Internet that I learned that in the early 1980s, since the second-largest army shooting range in China was located to the Xiapo region and would take up seven square kilometers, locals were driven out of their homes and had to become âmigrant households.â There is still information about the Xiapo Shooting Range on the government website of the town of Gangmen: âVarious army shooting drills happen here all year long, making it a great place for military sightseeing.â (Military sightseeing? As in we plebeians are allowed to have fun with military drills?)
As time goes by, an alien land will become oneâs homeland. To cooperate with military drills of the Peopleâs ...