Books – Excerpt from Chapter 1 (Day 83 to the USA Launch)
April 17th, 2008
chapter one
THE LITTLE SACK OF RICE
GUANGZHOU, CHINA 1918–1925
‘The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step’
My grandmother Lily grew up in a small farming
village close to the city of Guangzhou, a port on the Pearl River in south eastern China. Downstream of the city, the Pearl splits into a vast delta and spills into the South China Sea, and on either side of itsmouth lie the prosperous old colonies of Hong Kong and Macau. Guangzhou has always been called ‘the Flower City’ because it has warm, wet, monsoon weather which means that, unusually for China, flowers bloom there all year round. According to local folktales, the fields of flowers which surrounded the city first blossomed when five celestial deities rode in on five rams, each with an ear of rice in its mouth. The immortals gave the rice ears to the farmers and promised them that there would never be famine in Guangzhou. When they flew away, they left behind the rams who turned into stone and became the sculptures which now sit in Yuexiu Park in the city. The legend is beautiful, and promises prosperity, but when my grandmother was born in the region in 1918 she only knew extreme poverty.
When I was a teenager my grandmother and I would spend hours watching her favourite Chinese language soap operas together. I could barely understand a word the actors said and the simple plots wound on endlessly, but the folk-story style was easy enough for me to follow, and every week we tuned in eagerly to get our fix of melodrama. One storyline came up again and again: an evil landlord would turf out a young woman and her child when she fell behind with the rent and rejected his amorous advances. She would then cry a lot, before being rescued by a handsome kung fu fighter, who arrived in the village with a flourish. Naively, I once asked my grandmother if that was what it was really like in the prerevolutionary China she had known. ‘If only,’ she sighed, shaking her head.
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