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This is Part 1 of a Multi-part article

“… It was an incredibly hot day, as I could feel the sun scorching through the epidermis of my skin even as I sat inside the coach. For once, I felt safe, coupled with the sanctuary of the gentle waves of the air-conditioners and the soft and cushiony seat which stuck to my sweat-soaked clothes like Velcro. Outside, as the coach moved swiftly across the countryside amongst the glaring rays of the sun, I saw fields and fields of vegetables and rice-paddies gliding rapidly away, one after the other, like images whose reflections produced changing patterns in a kaleidoscope.”

Summer of 1992. I was about to spend my 7th birthday in China, a remote and distant place that I was to visit for the very first time in my life. Little could I foresee what this country held for me: my past, present and future – as my simple six-year-old mind only consisted of fantasizing about the wonders of Enid Blyton’s whimsical stories of the Faraway Tree, my favourite bed-time story book which my mother read to me every night. I could still recall my constant wailing and crying as my mother dragged me away from my toy kitchen set and my Barbies in our car, out across the street and onto the rickety platform where a gigantic vessel, almost a thousand times bigger than the ones I used to play with in my tub – waited for us to board. The trip by sea would take over an hour, and then two hours (if we were lucky enough to find suitable transport) by land, before we were to reach our destination.

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As I sat sulking in the coach with my mother chirp-chatting merrily with other passengers, I overheard bits of their conversation in Cantonese and Mandarin:

“Ngor day faan Zhong Shan, shur wor de jia le, wor de ma ma”

(We’re going back to Zhongshan [one of the main cities in the Guangdong Province], it’s my birthplace and where my mother lives)

I caught a few phrases about going to Zhongshan, and my mother’s eagerness to see her mother. Was this the tigress grandmother whom my mother had always told me about? The old but strong-willed woman who hated my father beyond reason and was separated from my mother when she was thirteen?

My mother then went on to explain why she had been separated from my family, and as I leaned forward to listen to what she had to say, I realised that my knowledge of my mother’s native tongue was scant, if not poor. Other than catching a few odds and ends, I was clueless as to what my mother was saying.

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As a little girl, I had become wong pei, bak sum – which literally stands for yellow skin, white heart. In other words, despite the fact that I was ¾ Chinese, I was also ¼ Caucasian, I knew nothing about that former part of me, the part where my Chinese blood and heritage came from. I grew up watching Full House, Scooby-Doo, and The Simpsons, while listening to the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys; from learning about the greatness of the Western world, its epitome of industralisation and technology, to being materialistic about iPods, iMacs, iBooks, and all the other incredible gadgets that Apple continually invents. And all the while during my childhood I didn’t take steps to learn more about my mother’s family. And not knowing your mother’s native tongue is not something to be proud of. But all this was to change the moment I met my grandmother.

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After we got off the coach, I found that we were standing on the side of a dusty road where scooters kept on zooming past. I tugged my mother’s sleeve and asked her whether we needed to hail a cab to get to my grandmother’s house. She shook her head and waved her hand at a man pulling something remarkably large nearby. As he came closer, I realised that he was in fact pulling something that half resembled a chair and the other half, a tricycle.

I stared in surprise as I had never seen anything like that in Hong Kong. We had rickshaws as a kind of tourist attraction, but those were only meant for short distances. I later found out that these were called sam lun che in Cantonese, meaning pedicabs in English.

I felt sorry for the elderly man who was riding the pedicab with not just my mother on board, but with me and our luggage.

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