love nature, live free & be happy always - part i

"Love Nature, Live Free & Be Happy Always - My Life Re-Discovered"

"Love Nature, Live Free & Be Happy Always - My Life Re-Discovered" - Bigan Fanli 2016 www.BiganFanli.com

You may NOT realize that the most valuable thing in life is with you all along... until you make the journey to Re-discover yourself.

It's a unique and thrilling LIFE experience!

THE GREATEST GOOD ONE CAN DO IS TO

CULTIVATE ONESELF IN ORDER THAT ONE MAY BE OF GREATER USE TO HUMANITY

LOVE NATURE, LIVE FREE & BE HAPPY ALWAYS MY LIFE RE-DISCOVERED

Part I

2 "Love Nature, Live Free & Be Happy Always - My Life Re-Discovered" - Bigan Fanli 2016

Herbert Lee a.k.a. Bigan Fanli - Nature Artist Self-Portrait (2013)

DEDICATION This Book is dedicated to My Grandparents, My Parents,

My Wife Cecilia Mayor Herb Hays and Marilyn Hays,

All my Brothers and Sisters and

Lonn Lee, Anna Cheung, Ellise Lee, Aimee Lee, Jason Tablante, Jonathan Tablante, Justin Tablante, Jacob Tablante, Pearl Lee, Jackie

Leung, Lana Leung, and Crystal Lee

All Rights Reserved 2016

Publisher: Bigan Fanli Group Inc


Introduction - 2016

"Love Nature, Live Free & Be Happy Always - My Life Re-

discovered" is divided into four parts.

Part I is my First 12 years in the "Paradise" (1948-1960). Part II is

Surviving the "Concrete Jungle" and University Life in USA (1960-

1974). Part III and IV are for the Rooting Saga in Canada (1974-

2016).

Love nature and be happy always.

Between following the US presidential election "wars" of the

Democrats and the Republicans for more than a year, and working

on my own nature stuff, I find happiness by writing and baby-

sitting three of my five grand children who are part of the

inspirations for me to write this Book.

Life can be forgiving but time isn't, my world is vanishing fast.

There is only one certainty in life after you are born, it doesn't

matter if you are the most powerful persons on earth now, the

likes of president-elect Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bill Gate, Xi

Jinping, Shri Modi, Pope Francis or Angela Merkel, one must die.

Of course, the most influential people will continue to "live" on in

the world history books of humanity. Their deeds or evils will be

judged by many generations to come. They don't have to write

about their own affairs if they so choose, as many people will

write about these exceptional small percentage of individuals

called the elites because numerous lives depend on what they did

and will do. Their powers come from the vast majority, and that

includes me and maybe you. As one of the majority lodged

somewhere in the middle of the bell curve*, I'm not powerful or

influential, not just yet I know.

I have more grey hairs now, as a matter of fact, my hairs and

beard are all white. I think I have more experience and wiser than

I was twenty years ago. I certainly look like it. Again, looks can be

deceiving. I don't want "me" to be powerful, but I want "we" to be


powerful, so that each one of us can fit in comfortably with

nature, live free and be happy always.

This is the 19th or 20th books I have ever published, many of

them are available from Amazon.com. I have to justify why I'm

writing this book, or the Part I of this book, as none of my other

publishing is on the best seller lists of Amazon. Making some

money isn't one of the reasons. I simply felt that I had something

in my chest that I wanted to say, and the time is now.

America must be in the dump otherwise Donald Trump won't

have to "make America great again". I think America is already

great but compared with many parts of the world, it isn't doing as

great as it can be. I want to see if he is really draining the swamp

or swelled by the swamp in the coming years.

Regardless, the power of the elites cannot be trusted.

The folks in and around the middle of their respective income

distribution bell curves* are the true power of all the peoples on

earth. The world's peace, stability, growth and prosperity depend

on this group of individuals, our children and their children, our

future and their future depend on all of us; the larger the number

of this group can achieve in their respective own countries, the

better the world will be.

This is my way of solidarity with this group by communicating,

first with my family and then you and whoever may be interested.

I think the best way for me to do this is to walk back to my life for

more than 68 years, as I believe I'm always in the middle of

somewhere; and tell you what I went through, first-handed. I

believe the more this group communicate deeply with each other,

the more solidarity will be achieved. The world will definitely be a

better place!

Cheers!

Herbert Lee, a.k.a. Bigan Fanli - 2016 (www.BiganFanli.com)

*I've a lot to say about this in the later parts of my Book


Part I

My First 12 years in the "Paradise"(1948-1960)

There was no sight of electricity, no rings of telephones, no noise

of cars, no tap water or flashing toilets around. It was just the

continuous flow of the warm breeze carrying with it the ever fresh

air infused with the occasional rich fragrance from the nearby

blooming flower plants. On a Sunday afternoon nesting among

the gigantic bamboo trees 10 feet above ground and gently

swaying with the breeze, I was trying to take my afternoon nap

with my older brother Doug in one of our most favorite spots in

our fruit Farm. I was disturbed by this little fellow I called Kow-

Mo-Chung* (dog-hair- caterpillar) nibbling a fresh new shoot of

bamboo leaf a few inches from my face. This little guy could be

really mean if you touched him with your bare skin, you would be

itching all over.

We retreated down to the ground, skipped on the benches which

were built circling the bottom of the bamboo trees, in our bare

feet and jumped over a big piece of solid granite stone with a

indentation of a big bowl in the ground, laying flashed with the

ground and a weir looking flat piece of lumber with a stone

"beak" directly over the indentation, and rested on two stone-

column supports, so someone could step on it and raise it, then

drop it. Of course, this was the place where we stone-grinded our

rice grains to make rice flour. We forgot how tired we were that

day since we were up before the sun rose at six o'clock and had

been playing everywhere ever since. our greyish white T-shirts

were becoming greenish and brown... (*my Cantonese translations

throughout the text)

I was about 8 years old and brother Doug was about 13. This was

in the mid of the 1950s and I was in a place called 18-Mu Farm (3-

acre Farm, 1 acre = 6.07 mu) surrounded by vast acreage of fruit

orchards, ornamental flower growers, vegetable growers and rice

paddies situated at the fringe of a place called Fa-Day (Flower-

Land) in the fertile Pearl River Delta, Southern China. Great


majority of the farmlands, fruit farms were once privately owned,

belonged to the Cooperative Commune. The neighborhood

villagers followed the government guidance to produce whatever

crops required for the year and shared the works for the common

good. Family units could retain their residents and some areas

around their houses to grow fruits and vegetables or to use them

for whatever they needed personally. Our family retained 18-Mu

and some other properties nearby.

Painting #2104 by Bigan Fanli

Limited Edition, Showcase Framed - www.BiganFanli.com

This was what happened around the world in the 1950s:

May 1950 - First Human organ Transplant

Jun 1950 - Korean War started

May 1951 - Rock and Roll began

February 1952 - King George VI died

March 1953 - Joseph Stalin died

May 1953 - DNA discovered

Jun 1953 - Queen Elizabeth's Coronation


January 1954 - First Atomic Submarine Launched

February 1954 - Report released that said cigarettes cause cancer

May 1954 - Birth Control pill trials began

June 1954 - Racial segregation in America ruled unconstitutional

in public schools

May 1955 - Warsaw Pact signed

October 1955 - Winston Churchill re-elected Prime Minister of

Great Britain

November 1955 - Vietnam War began

May 1957 - Soviet Union launched satellite "Sputnik" - Space Age

began

May 1958 - NORAD Radar System set up to detect missile attack

from Soviets on North America

January 1959 - Alaska became a part of U.S.A.

December 1959 - Antarctica Treaty signed to make it a scientific

preserve.

While the world was bustling with wars and the launching of the

space age, 18-Mu was full of joy and happiness with 9 energetic

kids. Of course that was the impression of this eight-year old,

despite the facts that we had no electricity, no telephone, no

radio, no television, no tap water, no flush-toilet. But we had

basic food from our Farm, clean water and always fresh air, a vast

"playground" for adventures, schooling, laws and orders, and the

feeling of safety surrounded by like-minded simple people...

My family bought this 18-Mu property just for us during the

Chinese civil war, and many other real estate around the area for

investment purpose as we were based in Hong Kong (Fragrant

Harbor) at the time and considered to be foreign capitalist

investing in China, and from the feel of it, my older generations

were full of confidence about the New China because they sent us


back there to live and be educated. My two oldest brothers were

born in Hong Kong, a British Colony at that time and they were

back to here to attend Chinese universities. Because of age gap, I

didn't have that much memories of them. My buddies were my

brothers immediate above and below me as we were only a few

years apart in age. I couldn't recall too much about my four sisters

either, one older and three younger, as they were very quiet and

tended to stay with my mother most of the time and played

among themselves.

18-Mu fruit Farm isn't really a farm, it was more like a rural

garden resident surrounded by farms. My grandmother and/or

my mother were always there with us. My grandfather and my

father took terms to come back from Hong Kong to stay with us,

usually a short period of time for each visit. I didn't miss them that

much because I was always kept busy by one thing or the others

and they came and went fairly often. Hong Kong was only about

120 kilometers away. A very short distance physically, but

ideologically they were two different political systems with

thousands of miles apart in similarity.

I spent quite a lot of time with my grandmother as she was the

only one really working for the Cooperative and around the

house. She was really kind and never yelled at me. She cooked

meals for all of us every day. There was no instant foods then,

well, maybe except the salted fish and salt-cured pork, salted

bean curds, pickles and dried vegetables and fruits. Every cooked

meal came from this huge wok sitting on top of a large brick stove

fueled by the burning of dried rice plant stalks (hays). I loved my

grandma, she was petite, pretty and had curly black hairs which

sometimes I pulled and made fun of her.

My mother was always busy looking after us especially the little

twin sisters, my father knew how to keep her occupied. With her

Singer sewing machine, my mother made most of our daily

clothing. When my grandfather came back to stay for a few days,

my mother usually went to Hong Kong to stay with my father, and

during her absence periods, everything was usually in big mess.


We had one big brick building and a smaller structure in 18-Mu.

The brick building was a simple house divided into three equal

sections one next to the other with the middle one as the main

entrance which had a 10-ft tall thick double wooden doors. There

was one smaller front double doors on each of the other sections,

one on the east side and one on the west side of the Main House.

All doors were facing south and we could walk out of the doors

right into a flat and leveled cement ground which was about the

size of two basketball courts. The main purpose of this court was

for drying rice grains and hays after harvesting in the fall.



Every section of the house had inside doors to walk through and

there were walls and wooden lofts built on the back half of every

section as our "bed room" quarters, and sometimes some big rats


also found their ways up there to build their little home too. My

grandparents' bedroom and the big kitchen were on the east side,

all the boys stayed in the middle section with the sitting room

area in the front half of the section. My mother and the girls were

on the west section along with their activity room and an ancestor

worship area.

We used kerosene lamps for lighting at night, wood and dried

hays from rice plants to boil water and cook meals. Inside the

house, we only had little portable toilets for small kids and

portable water drawn from the river ponds for cleaning and

cooking. No bathroom or toilet inside the house but we did have a

big pond for cleaning and bathing and an outhouse for toileting. I

didn't know what snow was until I was in Tennessee, USA. Who

needed snow anyway as the weather was always hot and

comfortable and there were plenty of sunlight to give me the

vitamins I needed. The sun always rose around six o'clock in the

morning and set around six in the evening. With the exception of

a few odd thunderstorms, the weather was always perfect. I

could wear one T-shirt and one pair of shorts day in and day out,

and shoes were an inconvenience as I enjoyed the feel of the

earth with my bare feet.

18-Mu was mostly sheltered by mature fruit trees of which almost

all the fruits were edible and many of them were commercial

fruits like the huge Olive trees, the Lychee fruit trees, Guava fruit

trees, Longan fruit trees, Pomelo fruit trees, Banana and Papaya

fruit trees. We had only a few of each of them in our 18-Mu fruit

Farm. It was truly heaven when any of them was ready for picking,

we usually ate the ripen fruits right out of the tree.

Right off the front court of the house, there were acres of rice

fields and just beyond those rice fields was one of our neighbors.

There was an 8-foot height dike with some fruit trees growing on

it, separating our side with their side. There was a low dike

meandering through the rice paddies for us to walk through as a

passageway going to different villages and towns in the south

side. These rice paddies, once ours, were the property of the

Commune or Co-operative.


Immediate on the east side of the house, there was a pond

signaling the end of the river water coming into our property

through a half of a kilometer long little creek, from here the

water fed into the rice fields.

The other brick structure which we called the Chai-Fon (Wood-

House) was on the east side of the Main House and many of our

fruit trees were located just further east of the Chai-Fon, and our

drinking water pond and the outhouse were also located on this

side. There was a 30-foot long dike joining the Main House and

the Chai-Fon, the outhouse, the pond and the fruit gardens.

Under the dike were three small wooden gates to control the flow

of the water to the rice fields on the south side.

The east side was where I spent most of my summer and after

school hours. We had a 10-foot tall stone-made gate in 18-Mu just

off the main road, as our east entrance to the Main House. The

Entrance Gate was about half of a kilometer away from the House

and we had to walk along the creek through the east gardens back

to the Main House.

Right at the edge of the creek-end pond and just north of the 30-

foot dike was the clusters of "hundred-year old" bamboo trees.

Some of the Bamboos were about fifty feet tall reaching way up

into the sky, and they gave great shelters to the rice-grains

grinding area.

My parents built a leisure place under the bamboo clusters with

benches and tables for enjoying a cup of tea and taking a nap in

the hot summer days. Brother Doug and I had built a little

bamboo "tree-house" ten feet above the bamboo trees. These old

clusters of bamboo trees made fantastic music when the breeze

came through and made the stiff bamboo leaves rubbing against

each other and produced a wave of soothing sounds. It was even

more wonderful when a flock of the golden-eye finches were

playing and feeding among the bamboo clusters and singing their

songs right along. The finches loved to eat the caterpillars in the

bamboo trees.


Next to the clusters of Bamboo trees and the resting area to the

east was the Chai-Fon. This was the house that my older brothers

hated and scared of, because inside this structure was dark and

always full of hays and...rats. They had to come here to fetch the

hay for daily cooking, and had to re-stock when the hay was low.

There were rumours of ghosts appearances from time to time... I

tried to avoid and ran past this place every time... Our mother

threatened to put any of us in there if we were bad and not

behaving ourselves. Luckily, no one of us was actually locked in

that place ever.



Connected to the east side wall of the Chai-Fon and before the

starting of the fruit tree gardens was the chicken coop. This was

where my grandmother raised her chickens and my older sister

got the chicken eggs. We didn't have any other kinds of farm

animals in the 18-Mu Farm, except a big brown Sha-Pei (Sand-

Skin) dog named Ah-Choy (Oh-Wealth) who was our best friend

and always accompanied us to the Entrance Gate when we went

to school early in the morning, and he usually was the first one to

show up when we were back to the Entrance Gate. I had never

seen him leaving 18-Mu property once, and he was always around


us. He was the true protector of our place. The only problem with

Ah-Choy was that he woke us up quite often in the middle of the

night mostly in the Fall, and it was creepy.

At night, Ah-Choy always slept just outside of the main entrance

doors of the Main House. In one Fall night, when the air was light

and crispy, the night sky was clear with a new moon... and there

was great visibility as the rice paddies south of our Main House

were all dried and cleared after the harvest... in the middle of the

night, Ah-Choy suddenly barked like crazy.

My elder brothers jumped out of their rattan mats rushed down

the loft with a six-foot bamboo pole in hand and ready for

combat. Brother Doug was holding his slingshot with one hand

and holding Ging with his other hand, and I just followed. My 2nd

oldest brother quickly removed the big piece of wood blocking the

wooden doors from inside and slowly opened one side of the

door... then, Ah-Choy rushed in with its tail down between his legs

and quit barking completely.

Through the narrow opening of the door and momentarily, I saw

two blue-light fireballs moving swiftly around the bare trunks of

the trees on the south high dike yonder...it was spooky, I felt

goose bumps all over me. My oldest brothers shut the doors real

quick and started looking through the peep holes from the

doors...

Everyone was quiet and I heard them saying there were three

fireballs and then there was none. Then, they reopened the

double doors and let Ah-Choy out again. My oldest brother told

us that there were dead animals or people buried on the dike

before, and the phosphorus from the dried bones would create

the spooky moving blue "fireballs". My eldest brother studied and

majored in chemistry in university.

There was a single papaya tree just off the path in front of Chai-

Fon. This papaya tree grew straight up and was taller than the

roof of the Chai-Fon and it always filled with an abundant of

different sizes of papaya fruits hanging in a cluster right below

where the hand-like long and slender leaves grew. Those fruits,


when ripen, were heavenly juicy and sweet, that was when they

started turning into reddish golden color from green, one after

the other. I couldn't climb up that huge lamp-post-like trunk of

the papaya tree to fletch the fruits at the top as I wasn't as strong

and big as my older brothers. These papaya fruits kept their

attention from the "ghosts" of the Chai-Fon and diluted their

fears of the area.

My 2nd oldest brother always saw ghosts in the Chai-Fon. One

day, in broad day light, brother Ging and I were playing in the

courtyard in front of the Main House. I heard grandma was asking

my 2nd oldest brother to fetch some hay for cooking from the

Chai-Fon, then I saw him ran over the dike heading to the Chai-

Fon.

In a few minutes, and all of a sudden, I heard some rambling noise

and saw my 2nd brother scrambling back from the Chai-Fon with

no hay in his hands, and he was breathing hard and pale. He

scared brother Ging and I.



He said he saw the shadow of our Tai-Kung (Great Grandfather)

when he was picking up a bundle of hay from the inside of the


Chai-Fon and was just turning around to walk out of the door... He

said Tai-Kung was really tall and smiled at him. From that day on,

my 2nd oldest brother never set foot on the Chai-Fon without

taking brother Doug, Ging or me together.

The creek started from the Main House and ran easterly

bordering the gardens on the north and gently turned northerly

along the main pathway all the way to the east Entrance Gate;

and then, it went under the Big Dike through a tunnel with a

controlling wooden gate to regulate water flows from the River on

the other side of the Big Dike.

On top of the Big Dike, which ran along the River bank basically

from east to west, was our main walk paths to the outside world.

The River was an estuary of the huge Pearl River. The Big Dike was

actually formed the banks of the meandering river, there were big

fruit trees, like Olive and Guava trees all over and they provided

shades from the sun for passersby. These trees formed the

borders of many fruit tree farms and little cluster of small villages

along the way. This made walking along the River very enjoyable.

One side was the clean river and the other was fruit trees, we

could play and we could eat as we went. We walked and trotted

and ran and dashed on this path thousands of times.

Back to our papaya trees and just twenty paces easterly along the

garden path, was two Longan trees (Dragon-eye fruit trees). These

trees had a classic look of a tree with many branches just on top

of a straight trunk about ten feet off the ground. The branches

were packed with leather-like dark green leaves, thick and dense.

And when they bloomed in the Spring, the whole tree was

covered with millions of yellowish milky-color flowers and

frequently sent out puffs of fragrant freshness. Clusters of

brownish fruits the size of a marble each soon covered the whole

canopy of the tree and attracted birds all over. Usually, a good

portion of Longan fruits was sold off to the market in Fa-Day and

it took us weeks to finish the left-over fruits.

Anyone could tell which tree had the better tasting fruits by the

tree trunk, as one tree on the south side had very smooth barks


because of frequent climbing, the other one not so. This was one

of our off school stops before putting down our backpacks.

Dragon-eye fruit season was also our "diarrhea season" as we

tended to over eat too much at a time. Some of these dragon-eye

fruit trees were so huge in one of my auntie's village that we

could walk on one of its branches about forty feet above ground.

My father had a younger brother and two younger sisters. One of

my aunties lived about an hour's walk from us and she had two

kids. Their family always came to visit us during special occasions

such as the Moon Festival and the New Year Celebrations. One kid

was older than me and the other was couple of years younger

than me. We were good friends. My father's younger brother, my

uncle was an aerospace engineer and I had only seen him a few

times as he worked and lived very far away in a secret military

base somewhere in central China. My mother had a sister with a

son, and my mother's parents were killed in Hong Kong by a bomb

in the war.

That was all I knew about my immediate family. My two oldest

brothers were born in Hong Kong and I was born at home in 18-

Mu. I was really chubby when I was a baby and everyone called

me "Ah-Fe" (Oh-Fat), and actually all the family members always

called me Ah-Fe and no one ever called me by my real name,

except my teachers.

I was always busy with ventures. If I wasn't sitting up with my

brothers on an olive tree branch eating olives with Tze-Tin-Jew

(Finger pointing-Sky-Pepper or cayenne pepper) juice rubbed all

over them, I would be somewhere building a hide-out on our river

bank with my younger brother Ging who was very energetic but

quiet and curious, and he was like my shadow following me

everywhere.

We had a lots of Po-Kew (Water-Hyacinth), water lilies and lotus

plants growing in the moats and ponds. The water hyacinths were

beautiful even without the blooms, but there were too many of

them growing together and slowing down the water flows into

the fish Tongs (ponds), so someone usually cleared them by piling


them on the dike. Brother Ging and I loved to build play shelters

with them because with their shallow root system and large thick

jade green leaves, and sometimes with fragrant blooms still on

them, they made exceptional staging and stacking material,

especially if they were just been on the dike for a couple of days.

We collected some falling branches, or sometimes with bamboo

sticks, to make a tipi and pile the water hyacinths on top. Inside

the tipi was cool, fresh and fragrant and it was a great hideout to

play with.

I loved everything about water lilies and lotus, especially the lotus

seeds. We pretty well used up the whole lotus plants for food.

Brother Doug and I usually collected the lotus roots from the mud

in the bottom of the ponds, cut off the big and round leaves to dry

to use as wrappers for dumplings, and collected the lotus seeds

after the lotus flower bloomed. Once and awhile we cut some

lotus and water lily blooms and gave them to grandmother, and

she would put them into a big vase and set them on the worship

bench table.



We usually helped grandma to clean up the lotus roots and she

would chopped them into slices and cooked them for dinner.


Sometimes she would mix dried lotus roots and some dried squids

and made soup out of them. They were very delicious. We didn't

have too much luck with lotus seeds as a dish because brother

Doug and I loved to eat them as snacks while freshly pick out of

their pod. We just removed the lotus pod from the lotus plant and

squeezed out the seeds one by one, removed the bitter "core-

needle" inside the seed and yum yum. Usually there wasn't any

left when we got home.

The olives were the least fruit we liked to eat but the one olive

tree we had was a fantastic hot spot for us because that tree was

absolutely clean and beautiful to climb and it bore fruits most the

time, and especially when other fruit trees were out of fruits, our

olive tree would still carrying some olives on its branches. Imagine

the shape of an upside down octopus, the branches of our olive

tree were only feet from the ground spreading out like a gigantic

upside down octopus , and some branches were over a foot in

diameter.

The bark of the tree was very smooth and clean and that made it

easy to climb and rest. There were millions of olives all over.

There were more olives than leaves at some point of the fruiting

season. Usually, if we had other choice, we wouldn't eat the olives

because they had bitter taste but the juice out of the fruit was a

kind of sparkling and refreshing. Well, eating olives kept our

mouths busy. As we were tired of the taste of the olive

sometimes, we just picked a few ripen cayenne peppers which

were growing near the foot of the olive tree, and rubbed on the

olives and ate them. We all wanted to see how many we could

take. Once and awhile, I had to crush down the tree, rush to the

creek and rinse my mouth with water to calm the "fire" inside.

One olive tree was our favorite. This one was growing out of a

mound on the bank of the creek on the north side of the garden,

and we could walk on one of its branches to the other side of the

creek. Many times, when the creek was full of water, we just

slipped off the branch and dropped into the creek to play and

catch cat fish. My 2nd oldest brother tied a big rope with a big

knot on the bottom of that brand just above the creek, so we


could climbed back up the olive tree from the creek. On the south

side of this Mound , there was a flat clearing which was really flat

and clay solid as this was the only flat and smooth patch of land

where the sun could shine through most of the day and that we

must walked pass to rejoin the main path leading to the Entrance

Gate. This was where our marble championship competition took

place every now and then.

We got our marbles from our older brothers and from friends in

school. Playing with marbles was fun and challenging among

brothers. One way to play was that we drew a small and a big

circle with a stick on the clay surface, everyone placed the same

amount of marbles in the center of the small circle and each of us

took terms and tried to knock them out of the small circle with a

"master" marble started shooting just outside of the big circle. If

your "master" was trapped inside the small circle, you had to

replace it with another of your marble, so you could redeem your

"master marble" and started from the big circle again.

You kept the ones you knocked out of the small circle as reward. I

could keep "shooting" if I got any marble out of the small circle

and my "master" marble also stayed out of the small circle, until I

couldn't get any more marble out of the small circle, or if my

"master" marble was trapped inside the small circle, then it was

somebody else turn. You could only power the "master" marble

by holding it tight inside your folded hand just behind your

tugged-in thumb and by unfolding your thumb in lightning speed

your master marble would fly toward your target, that was if you

had good aim and control. There were many ways to play and we

didn't usually quit until our necks and thumbs got sore.

South of our "marble-championship" court and went westward

back to the Chai-Fon was the main garden area.

This stretch of garden land was amazing. Bordering this land on

the east was our big "Pond", a square dug-in the size of two

basketball courts, and on the eastside bank of the Pond, it was

completely covered with large "Poe-Toe" (grape-peach) fruit

trees. They were not grape or peach.


The Poe-Toe fruits were different shapes, some shaped like a little

baby hulu, most of them were just round and a bit flat. They were

all bright yellowish-orange color, with thick sweet shell and one

big round seed inside like a baby's rattle. The edible part was the

thick shell covering the seed. It was crunchy, juicy and freshly

sweet. These trees were as big as the olive tree with smooth tree

trunks and large branches stretching to all directions. I could walk

on one of the Poe-Toe tree branches from one side to the other

side of the Pond.



There were five Poe-Toe trees growing sideway off the east bank

of the Pond and crisscrossing the Pond with their thick branches


and formed several super hangout platforms. Those were our

favorite diving spots into the Pond and also the favorite hunting

spots for the many colorful kingfisher birds we had in the area.

These birds with long beaks and liked to be quiet and hunted

little fish by waiting patiently on the Poe-Toe branches and diving

into our Pond to catch them.

There was our outhouse among the Guava trees on the south

side. A couple of banana trees just grew out of the earth five feet

from the outhouse. A bushy lemon tree, only 3 feet tall covering

part of the walk way to the outhouse, always challenged us to

jump over it, as when you had to go, you really had to go and you

didn't want to circle around the bush.

Not too far westward, there were two Pamola trees, four Star-

Fruit trees, some herbs and one very tall and skinny orange tree

which produced only green sweet oranges.

The fruits from the Pamola tree were bigger than my head size,

but there were not too many of them and we could only harvest

them once a year for special treats usually just for the celebration

of the Moon Festival. The blooms from these trees were very

refreshingly fragrant, so were from the lemon tree and the orange

tree. Their fragrances actually made the outhouse area less

noticeable as far as the smell was concerned.

There were characters with the Star-Fruit trees because all of

them were planted many years ago. They were not very big and

under ten feet tall. The branches were crooked and the scaly dark

brown bark made them look really old. They produced elongated

fruits with 5 ridges, if you cut it up and it resembled the shape of a

star in the sky. Every time when the fruits were ready, I just

jumped right up and picked one. The fruit was juicy but a bit on

the sour side, only the just ripen ones were the best tasting. My

grandmother usually collect them, cut them into small stars and

dried them under the sun to preserve them with some sugar as

our snacks for the off season.

Different kind of Guava fruit trees scattered everywhere. The

good tasty ones usually got picked real early and there were the


not so good ones kept dropping to the ground and made some

places not so pleasant to navigate, and when you stepped on

them, it was a yuk feeling.

Some Guava trees were thirty feet tall, some were much smaller.

Big or small they all bore fruits fairly quickly and the fruit color

and texture and taste were all different, but they all had a soft

core with a lot of seeds stuck in it. We always got constipation by

eating too much of the seeds. The fruit meat in the core mixing

with the seeds was the best tasting, when I was hungry I just ate

them kind of unintentionally.

There was one big Guava tree that we all liked very much. The

fruits from this tree were dark green color and never turned color

or softness like most of the other Guava fruits, and each fruit was

bigger than my two fists together. They were dense, meaty,

crunchy, and loaded with that natural goodness of spring

sweetness. Of course, we all paid attention to that tree and

usually fought each other trying to get the biggest ones all the

time. The Guava fruits smelled wonderful when they were not

ripen, once they were ripen and dropped to the ground, they

smelled bad. We always could tell which Guava trees were the

best tasting by the amount of fruits dropped on the ground. Our

favorite one had never had any one dropped to the ground. In a

rare occasion if one fell to the ground, someone lucky would pick

it up and eat it.

The Guava tree branches were very resilient and strong so we

always liked to climb them and bounced up and down and we also

used the smaller branch to make slingshots and other handy

tools.

We always carried slingshots in our pockets or in our book bags.

Brother Doug was really good with slingshots and he always had a

few around and he made them for me and brother Ging. I wasn't

good at shooting birds, and I liked to shoot the little mud crabs

along the creek banks for target practise. We called those little

mud crabs "Poun-Kay". They might not be mud crabs at all, they

moved sideways though and had craws just like crabs. They were


edible. Brother Ging and I caught buckets of them by fishing them

out of the river banks with a bamboo stick equipped on one end

with six feet of thread but no fish hook.

I just tied a small piece of pork fat with the skin, or a piece of

smelly dried fish on the end of the thread, dangling it in front of

the Poun-Kay's burrows, they would rush out to get the meat.

They trampled each other, usually the biggest one got the bait

with it big pincher. I just lift up the bamboo stick, and it wouldn't

let go, all the way to the bucket, and lowered it to the bottom of

the bucket, with a little shake it released the bait and dropped

itself into the bucket and became our dinner. My grandmother

just removed the top shell and a little piece on the underside,

cleaned it with a used toothbrush and put some black beans and

shredded ginger on it. She put a whole bunch of them in a plate

and steamed them with the wok. We ate the whole thing and

they were good.



The high dike on the east side of the Pond was about fifteen feet

wide and ran from the southern end of our property northward all

the way to our Entrance Gate. This high and wide dike served as a

divider for our property and the neighbors on the east.


The west side of the dike was our creek and the east side of the

dike was our neighbor's twenty feet wide moat circling their

property and their large commercial fish ponds. The banks of the

dike were occupied by various trees and several large clusters of

bamboo trees . The west side of the dike ran along our creek

which served as the only waterway to supply fresh running water

to our property from the River on the north beyond the Big Dike.

Beyond the creek on the west was the property of one of our

distant relatives. They were elderly couples with no kids, and their

house was just north of our Main House. we called them uncle

and aunt and I didn't know their real names. There was a path

immediately along the east side of our Main House extended

northward through the uncle and aunt's property all the way to

the Big Dike. We called this our central pathway. Their farm was

all rice paddy fields, so it was wide open and very bright without

any shades along the path. We used this center path quite often

in the winter times instead of our Entrance Gate path on the east

side.

It was always a thrilling experience coming back home at night

using the east Entrance Gate route. I never went out of our

property by myself, day or night. If I was going to school or a

special night out for something, it was always someone with me.

At night, our dog Ah-Choy didn't usually show up to greet us on

the Entrance Gate pathway and we didn't know why. However,

we always felt that the east pathway was very spooky, especially

when it was really dark without the moonlight and only a little bit

of breeze in the air. Our eastern neighbor buried someone in the

middle of their property, and the little mound shape grave was

visible from our side when we walked past that section of their

property.

Sometimes, it was deadly quiet and pitching dark at night.

Walking on the Big Dike was not as disturbing as it was wide open

but when we turned into our Entrance Gate to head home, things

were completely different because both sides of the path were

bodies of water and shaded by all these trees on the banks. We


always had a flash light with one of us and sometimes it wasn't

really helpful.

As we walked, everything around us seemed alive, we heard weir

noises, large objects jumped into the water, trees were screaming

and everything was trying to grab and hit us... Brother Doug was

always walking in the front with two of us formed a line behind

him with my two hands touching Ging's back and brother Ging in

the middle touching Doug's back... Half way down the path, just

after passing the neighbor's distant grave, I always felt something

was behind me. Unknowns created fears and we started to sprint

and then, we would hear Ah-Choy barking and running toward us

to save us. It was crazy and scary but really fun, and we just had a

big laugh out of it when we reached the House, and we pointed

figures at each other accusing who the initiator was.

There was a third pathway on the west side of our Main House

that led to the Big Dike on the north side. I seldom played on the

west side of our Main House because the land between our Main

House and our neighbor's property on the west was not as roomy

compared to the east side of our Main House. It was about 200

feet of elevated dike land joining our property with our west

neighbor's, but this westerly pathway was frequently used by

brother Doug and I during school days.

The west side was the most fragrant area around the Main House.

Just 5 feet off the outside wall in the west section, there was a

beautiful hedge of jasmine shrubs. The white jasmine flowers

bloomed continuously throughout the year, sometimes more

blooms, sometimes less, but it seemed there were always jasmine

flowers with that fresh fragrance circling around the area. Bees,

song birds and butterflies hung around all the time.

My mother always picked up all the white fragrant flowers and

put them in a rattan-made basket to dry in the sun. The dried

jasmine flowers had that deep rich and subtle fragrance even

better than the fresh ones. She made tea by mixing some green

tea with the dried jasmines and I loved the smell and the tea.


At the end of the jasmine hedge, there was an ancient looking old

cedar tree with tightly-packed dark jade-green needle-like leaves.

It went right up the sky with its skinny body and looked very

different from the other plants around. The whole tree had a very

strong and distinct pleasant oily smell, fresh and pungent with a

sharp penetrating aroma. I loved to squeeze and crush the small

and flat needle-like leaves and rub it all over my hands to keep my

hands kind of fresh, especially after I helped cleaning fish.



My grandma was almost always the first to get up in the House,

and the first thing she did was to light up six sticks of incense. She

held them in her hands in front of her chest, tilted her head

upwards with eyes closed for a few seconds, she then planted

three sticks of the incense in a special incense burner on the top

of the worship bench and the rest under the bench on the floor

burner. My grandmother always asked us to cut a few patches

of the cedar leaves for her God worship ceremonies. She tied a

patch of the cedar leaves to a cooked chicken or put it in its beak

and left that in the worship table for a few hours each time.

Sometimes, the little wing of the chicken was missing. I swore I


didn't do it. Thanks for those worship days, we had chickens for

dinner.

Next to the cedar tree was a big olive tree with some branches

overhanging the roof of the Main House. We didn't usually play or

eat out of this tree, but this tree was useful to the Main House.

Not only it provided some good shade to the Main House, as it

was on the west side blocking the sun, it also served as a

convenient pathway to the roof. During a thunderstorm, some

tiles on the roof might have been moved by the gust wind, one of

my older brothers would climb up the olive tree, followed one of

its big branches and landed on the roof to repair the tiles. There

was no other taller trees around the Main House and they were

lazy to get the long ladder out from the Chai-Fon.

A few paces to the west and across the path in the middle of the

dike was this amazing Bak-Lan-Fa tree (White-orchid Flower). I

didn't know if this was really one of the orchid family trees, it was

better than any other flowering trees I had seen. This tree was

simply beautiful, a specimen plant no doubt.

This patch of land west of the Main House was actually a tall and

wide dike joining the neighbor's dike on the west and sloped

down toward the north and east sides and ended up in a moat

which separated our property with our uncle and aunt's property

in the north. The moat was only 10 feet wide, and there was a

narrow stone crossover bridge so that we could walk through.

There were lush vegetations growing out of the banks of the moat

and because they were so thick and also there was a huge Star-

Fruit tree on the bank of the uncle's side, which was so big and

thick that it covered a good section of the moat and the branches

extended to our side, it made the moat area very spooky. So we

never ventured into the "murky" water in the moat, with the

exception of cutting some Keung-Fa (Ginger-Flowers) from the

bank on our side. We also had plenty of ginger flowers on the

banks of the creek.

On many occasions, brother Doug and I cut the blooms of the

Keung-Fa and sold them in Fa-Day. Keung-Fa blooms were like


gladiolus but pure white color with very pleasant light fragrance

which would last and last. Brother Doug and I cut the ginger

flowers for grandma all the time for her worship table. The white

and fragrant ginger flowers, and the burning incense were the

year around items for grandma.

The Bak-Lan-Fa tree was symmetrical and looked exactly like a

gigantic clone. It was about 25 feet tall, and the branches

radiated from the main trunk just about 3 feet from the ground

and went all the way to the top. Thicker and bigger on the lowest

and tapered up to the top. Beautiful thick waxy slender long

leaves and seemingly endless flower buds covered all branches,

the buds grew and grew, and the fragrance started to explode

into the air. About one and a half inches long, these ivory color

buds bloomed and emitted a very light and elegant fragrance into

the air and it lasted and lingered. Many times, brother Ging and I

just put a rattan mat under the Bak-Lan-Fa tree and napped under

it. We loved this tree because frequently our breakfasts depended

on it.



A lot of times, we didn't have to go to school, especially

weekends, brother Doug and I usually got up really early before


sunrise and claimed our shares of the Bak-Lan flowers... People

from the cities loved Bak-Lan-Fa and there was a very good

market for it.

It was stunningly beautiful before the sunrise in 18-Mu.

There was a veil of mist hanging just above the pond and the rice

fields yonder, a funnel of smoke from a distant farm house rose

almost straight into the sleepy and misty sky. Everything was still

and everywhere was quiet except the soothing rhythms of the

running water from the creek. I loved the fresh air with a tiny bit

of moisture in it and it was arousing.

After a cold water facelift from the creek, we were fully awaken.

We ran to the bank of the moat on the north side of the House,

and cut off a couple of leaves from the taro plant. The taro leaves

were big, green, shiny, thick and nicely shaped and we put one

inside our shallow rattan basket for what we were about to do.

Around the Bak-Lan-Fa, we carefully snapped off the about-to-

open or just opened buds in between the stalk of the leave and

the branch. I picked whichever I could reach and brother Doug

was always quick and very efficient. If we couldn't get enough

buds from the lower branches, we just climbed up and got more

until there were about three layers of buds covering the taro

leave inside the rattan basket. Time was always the essence when

we hit the farmer's market in Fa-Day to sell what we got.

From time to time, brother Doug and I sold fresh stuffs from 18-

Mu to get more pocket money. I guessed that he was the one he

needed pocket money, he was five years older than me and he

knew why he needed some pocket money. I had no notion of

money and I didn't really see the needs for it.

I just enjoyed the things we were doing and I thought I was always

an exceptional helper to brother Doug. We sold Guava fruits when

there was just too many for us to consume, we sold Poe-Toe

fruits, Guava fruits and Longan Fruits for the same reason.

Brother Doug and I never sold any olives. My grandmother used


some olives for pickles as I remembered, and most of the excess

were just dropped to the ground and recycled naturally.

After picking the Bak-lan flower buds, and before the sunrise, we

had to hurry to the farmers' market. Sometimes, we had some

other stuffs picked the day before for the market. There were

some herbs which the jobbers liked to buy from us. We got 10

bundles of Bung-Tai-Woung (Broken-Big-Bowl) and couple

bundles of bamboo needles under the old bench on the dike,

where we put them there the day before.



Bung-Tai-Woung grew everywhere on the gentle slopes of the dike.

They were ground-hugging weeds with big circular leaves each shaped

like a bowl with some part of the edge missing, and that was how they

got the name. The bamboo needles were just the new growth of the

bamboo tree, before unfolding into a full size bamboo leave; it came out

as a rolled up needle, we just unplugged it before it opened up and

turned into a leave. I didn't know their medical power and how people

used them, we just knew people wanted to pay money for them. There

were a lot of jobbers to buy different things from the locals and resold

them to the city people.


The earlier we got to the farmers' market, the better price we

could fetch for our goods. We put the bundles of Bung-Tai-Woung

and bamboo needles under the taro leave inside the basket, we

spread and sprinkled some fresh water on top of the Bak-Lan and

put the other taro leave to cover up everything inside the basket,

and then we headed out the west pathway along the neighbor's

dike to get to the Big Dike and followed the River to the market.

Our west neighbor's dike was very well managed. Their main

house was way back from the moat, and located in the center of

the property. This moat, like our neighbors on the east side was

big and wide; and dug circling around their vast property with

comb-teeth sections cut into the portions of land in the center,

and on top of those little "peninsulas" were all kinds of fruit

trees.

The moat was always stocked and full of fish. Their farm was

pretty well covered with shades. The dike which joint ours was

immaculate, clean and flat and with very little undergrowths and

home to all of the gigantic olive trees; and the very impressive

rows of beautiful Lychee trees extended from the middle of the

dike, this was where our dike met theirs, and southward about

half of a kilometer away to the end of their property.

About once a year or two years they drained the moat, harvested

all the fish and diligently dug up all the very dark matters on the

top of the bottom of the moat and piled them up on the dike.

That was how the dike grew, and that was why the dike could

support so many beautiful and health fruit trees. These very dark

matters were the composed dead leaves dropped from the trees.

We seldom saw our west neighbors as they had no little kids

around. I remembered visiting their main house with my

grandmother, and seeing the old lady a few times and I was

instructed to call her auntie. I had never seen the man of the

house. I heard they had a pretty tragic story behind them. She

was originally from the Old-Golden-Mountain (San Francisco).

There was another resident house north of their big main house

closed to their entrance gate and there were a few people live


there. There was a teenage girl there too. She was pretty and very

nice, she gave me little stuff she made sometimes and she always

wore two pony tails with her hair. I saw her a lot as we went in

and out of their entrance gate and had to pass her house during

the school days. I still didn't know her name.



With our rattan basket in hand, we quickly walked past the west

pathway on the dike, through the entrance gate to the Big Dike.

Here was the River bordered by the Dike. The River was about 30

feet wide and we had to go to the other side by crossing this very

unique stone bridge just 10 feet east from the entrance gate. This

bridge was the only way connecting this side of the Big Dike to the

other side of the River along many kilometers of the river in this


area. We called this bridge Sam-Boc-Kew (Three-Joint-Bridge)

which was built with six slabs of long granite stones and

supported with horizontal and vertical logs. Each granite slab was

about 12 feet long and 4 to 5 inches thick, two set side by side and

resting over two scaffold-like log structures rising out from the

water about 10 feet apart in the middle part of the river. There

was a 3-foot high wood railing on one side to prevent people from

falling over.

The bridge was about 8 to 12 feet above the water line at low

tides. I always liked this stone bridge because it gave me a very

safe and secured feeling, and also it was a great diving platform

for us. As this spot was close to the a T-junction of the River, the

water moved very slowly. The main River was coming from the

north and at this point split into two directions. The fresh water

we were getting into our property was from this split east-flowing

river. Obviously, this easterly section of the river was an added-

on. as the river itself continuously flowed westward, and I didn't

know where it was actually ended. I had never seen any boat on

this river.

After crossing the River, we walked, skipped, jumped and ran

following the meandering river on the Big Dike. We passed many

farms, a few villages and about thirty minutes we were in the

farmers' market. When the sun was just shinning, everything in

our basket was sold. It was about time to enjoy our rewards.

I didn't know if the farmers' market was opened everyday but

every time we came here it always had a lot of people. My

brother Doug should know. Every time we came here I just

followed Doug, so I didn't know what I was doing. The crowds got

smaller and smaller as the sun kept rising higher and higher. We

knew because Doug always wanted to buy our breakfast from this

little stall in the market place. The Yau-Chow-Qui (Fried Dough)

and the Chu-Cheung-Fun (Streamed-Rice-dough) were the very

best and also our favorites. We put a lot of sweet bean sauce and

hot-pepper sauce on the Chu-Chung-Fan, and then found a shady

spot and dug in. We ate our food and watched the people went


back and forth, then we started to feel the early risers syndrome

and headed home.

Once we left the market place, there were very few people

around. The further south we went the less people we saw

walking on the dike. Some day when there was a night rain, and in

the morning there were lots of giant snails crawling on the path.

Unlike the field snails, these were 5 times bigger in size and were

very pretty looking snails too. Somehow, we never tried to collect

them for food, and that I didn't know why. In the hot summer

days, there were also a lots of pretty lizards crawling all over the

dikes. We called them Say-Kirk-Share (Four-Legs-Snake), they ran

fast, and were about six or seven inches long with very bright

multi-colored skins. Brother Ging and I usually wanted to stay

away from them and I didn't know why.



There was a bunch of wild shrubs growing near a long time

abandoned brick house a little distance before the road from the

farmers' market joint up with the path on the Big Dike. The

shrubs were full of thorns and they produced a lot of little round

green berry-like fruits. These berries are the size of a dragonfly

head, and they were very hard inside but soft outside. We never


tried to eat them but we always stopped there and pick a whole

bunch of them and put them in the basket or some into our

pockets, then we pulled out our Bic-Bark-Tungs (Bic-Bark Hollow

Tubes) from our pockets and as we walked we shot them out of

the Bic-Bark-Tung. We tried to hit little insects or animals met

along the way, or shot the berries right into the river to see who

shot the farthest. Sometimes, without exception, we shot at each

other too.

The Bic-Bark-Tung was a little toy made out of hollow bamboo

and a stick. My other older brother and Doug made it for me.

They cut out a piece of straight bamboo about 8 inches long and

the size of their middle finger. They always cut the piece between

two knots of the bamboo to make sure it was hollow without any

obstructions inside, then they made another short piece, about 3

inches from the same bamboo and made sure this time there was

a knot at one end of this piece. Then, they used a thick piece of

bamboo or went to the Guava tree and cut a very straight branch,

and shaved it down to the size which could tightly fit into the

hollow of the shorter piece of the bamboo. Doug made sure that

the piece of Guava stick was tightly fit and stopped by the knot

inside the bamboo, then, he fit the stick into one end of the long

hollow piece and cut off the stick about one inch to the top. He

made sure again that the Guava stick was rigid and loose enough

to move ups and downs of the long piece. He pulled the short

piece with the stick out of the long piece, and loaded a wild berry

into the hollow, reinsert the short piece with the stick and push

the berry up the hollow of the long piece until the short handle

with the stick matched with the long piece. Now the Bic-Bark-

Tung was half-loaded.

He pulled the short piece with the stick out of the long piece, then

pushed a wild berry into the hollow opening of the long piece. He

re-inserted the stick and pushed the short piece bamboo

forcefully and fast up the long piece hollow, then we all heard the

"Bic" "Bark" noise and the first wild berry shot right through the

hollow and landed fifteen feet away. That was how brother Doug

made the Bic-Bark-Tung for me. Doug was good for doing many


other things especially catching frogs for dinner and saving my

life.

When we got home, everybody was usually up and helping

grandmother to make lunch.

My two eldest brothers were home that weekend. I didn't see my

eldest brother that much because he went to university

somewhere in the city and stayed in the campus most the time.

The second eldest brother just started university in another place

closer to home so he was home more often. He had a bicycle so I

was happy to see him more often and had the chance to learn

how to ride the bike just in front of the Main House.



It was a really nice day, there were patches of fluffy white clouds

in the sky floating ever slowly to the west. All the brothers wanted

to go catch fish and dig clams in the River that day, my younger

brother Ging and I were delighted to tag along. We didn't usually

went outside of our property for fish. This was like a little outing

treat when the big kids were home.

Everyone took a bucket and Doug had a small net with a long

bamboo handle also and we always had slingshots. All of us were


wearing short and t-shirts but no shoes and no hats. We headed

west.

We started from our west pathway on the dike, but instead of

going north to the Big Dike, we went south. The Lychee fruits on

the west dike were pretty well all gone, only the lush dark green

leaves remained. They still looked very healthy and full of life. The

Lychee fruits were sold to the markets or exported to Hong Kong.

At the end of the west dike, we turned right and this dike was the

southern border of our west neighbor.

We skipped, we trotted, we jumped and Ging and I always walked

behind the other brothers. There were Longan trees and Poe-Toe

fruit trees on the dikes and when I saw a really nice one, I jumped

up and got it. We very seldom climbed other people's fruit trees

and pick the fruits because our grandmother and mother told us

not to. Many of these trees actually belonged to the Co-op. As we

walked along all these seemingly intricate dikes westerly and

southward, the land got lower and much flatter, a lot more rice

paddies, and clusters of bamboo trees abound. It was all golden.

Some rice paddies yonder were almost ready for harvesting and

swirls of golden waves raised and fell when the breeze swept

forcefully but gently over them. Flocks of happy Mar-Jer

(sparrows) followed the wave rhythms, singing, chirping, chanting

and dancing. It was their time in the paradise. Doug took out his

slingshot and tried his luck on a few and nothing happened, they

were just too fast and too far.

After forty minutes or so we arrived at somewhere resembling the

beginning of a river. The water was very shallow and spread out

like my fingers over mostly sandy and pebble areas. it appeared

that the river was at low tide. I was in this place a few times

before, it was just beautiful and relaxing. The water was very clear

and I saw little fish dashed by frequently and that energized us,

and we started digging for clams with sticks and hands.

This area was a little shangri la. It was wild, nobody except us was

around, no farms, no paddy fields and only a pair of Ba-Hoc

(White Cranes) was in sign. The water retreated very slowly


toward the west where the river was. We didn't get too many

Wong-Sha-Tai-Hin (Yellow-Sand Big Clams) this time after about

half of an hour's digging, we caught a few little fish and some

crayfish. My other brothers were pretty disappointed, but not me

and Ging. Two of us were already completely soaking wet as we

chased each other, threw water over each other with the bucket

and splashed into the shallow clear water from time to time. It

was really fun for us. I could stay in there for the whole day and so

was Ging, but our older brothers decided to change spot. That

was fine with me too because I was a bit hungry and I didn't mind

to have something to eat, and as we walked the breeze would dry

up my clothes and I would feel a bit more comfortable.

They decided to move westward and went back to the dike of the

River, and a few minutes later we passed a spot where I could still

see the evidence of some charcoal inside a dug-in which was

bordered on three sides with big rocks. That was a sight of

disaster.



That was the image reflection of our last visit to this place. Same

people, same place and we were lucky last time, we dug up two

whole buckets of Wong-Sha-Tai-Hin and we decided to have lunch


in the little shangri la. The fresh clams looked delicious and very

tempting. Doug, Ging and I scouted and collected dried wood and

sticks around the area and the other brothers built the stove with

three pieces of big rocks.

My eldest brother always carried a lighter all the time and it was

just very handy for our cookout. They used one of the better

buckets, which was made with zinc metal, and filled it up half way

with water and set it on the just-made stone stove. They piled

the sticks and wood under the bucket and used the lighter to start

the fire.

I heard all these cracking sounds and the sparks were shooting out

as the fire got hotter and the white smoke from the fire was

getting less and less. The water started to boil, my brothers

dropped the yellow clams into the boiling water, holy molly, they

all opened up wide real quick. With that sweet fishy smell, we all

couldn't wait. My brother used couple of long sticks made out of

some branches from a nearby tree, tilled the hot bucket while

blocking the clams and drained the hot water on to the still

burning fire. The sizzling sound, the ash and the smoke filled the

place.

It was lunch time. After five or six clams later, I started to slow

down and I thought a couple of them had too much sand in them

and that they tasted a little bit of what, but wow, that was a really

delicious lunch, and I wasn't expecting what was about to happen

next.

Very soon, and one by one, we all experienced tummy ache. It

was diarrhea big time for all of us and all the clams we ate fifteen

minutes age were left behind the brushes. We all knew what had

happened. We should have leave the clams at least couple of days

in clean water at home and let the bad things get out of their

bodies before properly cooking them for food. Or, maybe the

wood sticks from the nearby tree that brother Doug used to stir

the clams in the cooking bucket. We just cleaned us up in the

river and kept going.


That was what happened last time when we visited that place.

This time we didn't get as many clams as before but we knew we

could always get something else.

The journey continued along the bank of the River and we

stopped here and there to fill our tummy with Guava fruits and

Poe-Toe fruits. Those trees grew everywhere on the banks of the

river and nobody owned them. We were walking toward the west

and then turned northeast along the dike following the River.

Actually this was the direction going home as well. Nobody

seemed to have any idea of what to venture next and we were

just enjoying the walk. Then, my second eldest brother who was

walking farther in the front started yelling, and I sensed there

were some excitement and urgency in his tone.

This place was one of the branch of the bigger River. The water

was shallow but quite clear and it meandered with close bends so

the water ran very slowly and it was only about 10 to 15 feet

wide. I could see many of times that the Guava trees on the bank

of our side stretched all the way to the other side and vise versa

and that made this branch river very scenic. We were looking up

for nice pieces of Guava fruits and my second brother was looking

down into the water of the shallow river all the time. He thought

he saw a school of fish swimming against the tide up the river and

he wanted us to seize the opportunity to catch some fish. Was he

surprised again, we actually ended up catching more fish than we

could handle.

Luckily, it was low tide in the river and actually the lowest of the

low tides and the river water should reverse itself in an hour or

two for the beginning of the high tide. The water was almost

stagnant now. My 2nd oldest brother pointed his finger to signal

us to be quiet and moved us to where he was standing. He

wanted three of us to go down to the river and start immediately

building a dike from this side to the other side of the river to

choke off the water flow. Very quickly he and his older brother

went about 15 feet south of us and started piling up a dike across

the river. There was only about 8 to 10 inches of water, building


the dikes of that kind shouldn't be that difficult. We were

instructed to work swiftly and quietly.

We emptied our buckets containing a few clams, crayfish and

some others very quickly and started digging out the mud and

gravels with the buckets. A bucket at a time, all standing outside

of the section we wanted to block off. Doug was very fast and

quick to pile up mud from the river bottom because he had much

longer arms than me and Ging. Sometimes, he just used his bare

hands, he said it was even faster for him. I just tried to do my best

and piled mud on top of what he started. I saw little fish jumping

and sometimes hitting us and that made us really motivated to

finish building the little dam. The eldest brother came back to our

side and helped us. Finally, very soon, this 15-foot section of the

river was blocked off on both sides.



We all stood inside the block-off section just by the side of the

dam and started empting the water out of the section toward

south. Five buckets were working at lightning speed, very soon

there were lots of commotions in the water behind us, some fish

started shooting out of the water hitting us everywhere.


Hundreds of fish about 4 to 5 inches long each were trapped by

the dams and they couldn't go anywhere. Doug and my second

brother started to scoop up the fish with the net and bucket, and

we tried to catch them by hands and scoop them up with our T-

shirts. They hit my head and landed on my back and couple of

them almost got into my mouth. We had to use all the buckets to

store the fish and we didn't have any bucket to keep the water

out of the section anymore. We were so intense and occupied to

keep the jumping fish in the baskets and pitch them up the bank

where brother Ging was already standing by; he was busy trying

to keep the fish from jumping out the two buckets that Doug had

just carried up there, which were all filled with fish to the brims.

We didn't see the north side dam was overrun by the rising river

water. It was like a war. We had to retreat, and haul our catch to

the river bank despite a lots of them were still on the loose. But

we were very satisfied and happy. We hit the jackpot!

I didn't know the name of these fish. They were 4 to 5 inches long,

slender with dark grey back and white and silvery body. They

were common in the area, usually they weren't that many

together at one time because quite often we could catch some

with a fishing rod and a special net by the river banks.

The bad thing about this bonanza was the fish cleaning part. The

good thing was that we had salted fish dishes for a very long time.

My grandmother wok-fried a whole bunch for dinner, and she had

to put a lot of these left-over dressed fish in four very big and

round shallow rattan wares, put salt over them and spread them

out under the sun to dry. It was fishy smell all over and attracted a

lot of uninvited flies at the beginning; it was a real nuisance. After

a few days of drying, less flies was attracted and the fishy smell

turned into something aromatic...That was one way grandmother

gathered her food for us. We had many other types of food

gathered for grandma.

The bamboo shoots was one of them, the lotus roots, the plums,

and tiger lilies were the other one.


In the Spring time, there were many new shoots growing under

the clusters of bamboo trees. They were just popping out like the

ears of corn, and they grew very fast. Before they were ready to

morph into a new bamboo tree and about a foot tall, brother

Doug usually used a flat piece of steel, actually was a broken

kitchen chopper, to pry the bamboo shoot off from it base. During

the season, he got three or four a day. We soaked the over grown

"ears of corn" in water to soften the stiff protective "leaves" and

the white hairs growing on them and then stripped them bare

with our hands to expose the nice ivory colored tender bamboo

"meat" .

My grandmother usually sliced one or two bamboo shoots into

edible thin slices and stir-fried them with garlic, some salted black

beans, and sometimes with salted fish for dinner. She put a lot of

them in vinegar to preserve them in some fancy china jars and let

them stay in a dark corner and used them for some other times.

Some she added vinegar, salts and cayenne peppers to preserve

them. We liked them, they always tasted fresh even pickled.

Another fruit that she preserved was the plums.

Not too far from the Peach tree was a sour plum tree on the west

side of the Main House. This plum tree was about six feet tall and

very bushy and by the middle of summer, it was completely

covered with gorgeous plums. Everyone tended to forget this tree

despite its beauty because the fruits was so sour that it was

difficult to try a second bit of it. No one ever tried to finish one bit

of it. But my grandmother love it.

We picked up all these very healthy looking plums dropped onto

the ground for grandma, and she just pickled them with salt in

many small china pots each with a cover. She then put them in a

very tall wooden bench just off the east side of the court by the

creek-end pond, where she also kept the salted black beans and

other pickled stuff. She usually used the pickle sour plums to cook

cut-up spareribs and many steamed dishes with. We all loved

those very appetizing dishes.

Tiger lily were gathered for food as well.


On the bank of the creek, just north of the Mound with that huge

olive tree, we had a lot of tiger lilies. They flowered year around

and spring was the most productive period. Hundreds of orange

lily flowers just bloomed and wilted, opened and closed. When

they wilted, they rolled up like a tiny cigarette and started to dry

up and fell off the stalks. I usually pick them before they fell off.



Brother Doug, Ging and I collected sacks and sacks of them and

my grandmother took them out of the sacks and dried them

under the sun. They looked like a lot but actually they were very

light, and got a lot smaller when they were cooked. My grandma


called these Kum-Jum-Fa (Golden-Needle-Flowers). She always

steamed them with some black fungi, spices and pork. They were

delicious.

In the Spring time, we had to go to school. 18-Mu and everywhere

in the neighborhood were bombarded with heavenly blooms of

many kinds, and when none of the fruits was ready to pick, it was

time that we had to stay around the house a bit more to help out

with chores.

In 18-Mu, many of our daily provisions were gathered on the

sources. My mother usually went to the market in the weekends

with my oldest sister. My mother was always very busy taking

care of the other younger sister and the youngest twin sisters. She

sewed very often and also helped preparing foods for

grandmother to cook the meals.

Grandmother was always working in the gardens, taking care of

the chickens and sometimes working with a group of people in

the fields close to our property. She said all those places where

our eyes could see were our land before and formed parts of our

property. She always came back during meal hours to cook for all

of us. She always wore this funny looking bamboo hat, carried a

hoe on her shoulder and wore a subtle and sweet smile on her

face. Sometimes I asked her for coin money and she always gave

to me. She lifted up her outer Sham (dress) and revealed a little

secret pocket where she put her coins. I just used the coins to play

with my brother Ging.

Spring cleaning before New Year was a ritual for all of us. The

boys had to clean up our loft in the middle section of the Main

House, and the area below it. My bed and Ging's bed and Doug's

bed were all up in the loft. They were just rattan mats on the floor

of the loft. When the other brothers came back, they just unrolled

their rattan mats and sleep. The loft was constructed with thick

wood planks with a square opening in the middle where the step

ladder was installed for us to go up and down.

Below the loft was all kind of stuff stored in there, even some hay.

We had no window up in the loft, we got the light from the front


windows and the big doors as the loft was not completely blocked

on the front door side. There were couple of small windows below

the loft, this place was completely enclosed and separated from

the front section except two door openings on the sides by the

walls, so was quite dark all the time.

The floor of the middle section was made of large pieces of

reddish tiles. My older brothers didn't like the cleaning that

much, and I really didn't know what to clean, and we didn't have

that much stuffs of our own up there in the loft anyway. I just

moved some stuff around and sweep the floor.

The fun part for cleaning was grandma's big stove. Grandma

cooked with a big iron wok which I couldn't even lift it up by

myself. My older brothers had to lift it and three of us had to

clean the inside of the brick stove and then the chimney. We

needed to remove all the ashes and left over charcoals from it and

get it ready for the new year cooking. It was really brutal, but, for

some reasons we all found it was funny. We teased each other

and to see who came out as the dirtiest of all. Ging always won

and got pushed into the cold water in the creek to clean up.

Early Spring before the big New Year festival was probably pretty

boring for us because there wasn't much happening in the garden

and around the fields. Sometimes it was pretty wet and cold, we

couldn't run around with shorts and T-shirts all day anymore. We

didn't like to play in the "cold" water that much anymore. When

the sun came out shinning, everything was so pleasant again. The

cement court in front of our house became our favorite spot. We

ran after each other playing tags, the girls played their little games

with little sack filled with sand, and jumping ropes and skipping

rubber bands.

We often climbed the only Guava tree in the south west corner of

the court and swing from one branch to the other like a monkey

and came down again, and then repeated everything again. This

was one of my favorite trees. My father told me he planted that

tree there. The tree was bushy, about 8 feet tall and bore

fantastic Guava fruits that remained green when ripen. Actually,


the fruits did turn yellowish red eventually and they became soft

and aromatic, but they never had the chance as we all liked them

to be crunchy, juicy and sweet. Too bad, the fruits tasted so good

when they were still green that they never had a chance to turn

their colors.

My older brothers liked to play their chess games in the court

yard and my mother usually did her needle works while sitting in

her favorite bench against the wall, enjoying the sunshine and

watch the twins "fought" each other. The court became really

crowded during the New Year Holidays.



New Year was the odd time that both my father and my

grandfather came back together from Hong Kong. Relatives and

friends usually came to our place to have huge meals and for

celebrations. I didn't know many of those people. I knew Soak-Por

(wife of my grandfather's younger brother), I knew my 4th auntie,

4th uncle and their son Ming-Wah, my mother's older sister, her

husband and their son, and the 2nd auntie and 2nd uncle with

two boys and one girl.


One new year day they all showed up early one family after the

other, then the big people set up three big round tables on the

court for brunch and dinner. We practically ate foods all day long.

The women were busy making different kinds of food, the older

men were all busy sitting around talking to each other. The young

kids were all out on the dried field in front of the court talking,

playing and shooting fire crackers. We, the smaller kids all gone

bananas, chasing Ah-Choy and each other around the big tables,

laughing, yelling, knocking down benches and jumping up and

down from the court to the field and back to the court again.

One New Year Holiday, my 4th uncle took a 22mm hunting rifle to

our house for my older brothers for target practise. My 4th uncle

was originally from northern China and was the chief- of- police in

one of the large police bureaus in the region. They drew a target

on the bare part of the side of the dike, stood on the dried rice

paddy and shot at the target. That was the first time I ever

handled a gun, too bad they didn't allow me to shoot it. I was just

as happy to play with it for awhile though. After that, my 2nd

brother was able to use that gun for several hunting trips.

We always had chicken, pork, duck, fish, and plenty of fresh and

delicious vegetables for dinners; and many sweet stuffs to snack

on during the new year holidays. I loved helping mom to make

three kinds of New Year snacks.

The first one was Inn-Sigh-Bang which was a soft and chewy

cookie made out of the sap of a plant called Inn-Sigh. Brother

Doug, Ging and I usually collected the dark green leaves from the

Inn-Sigh plants in the garden. The Inn-Sigh had heart shape dark

green smooth leaves and was a fast growing climber and it

climbed onto almost anything, it was a kind of weed. We put the

leaves into a big wooden bowl and smashed them with a

hardwood bat, then poured them out into a piece of clean cloth

to squeeze out the dark jade green juice which smelled kind of

fishy, a bit pungent and very fresh and I wouldn't try to taste it

for anything. But it was a real surprise after it was cooked and a

lot of fun doing it.


My mother mixed that potion-like stuff with the rice flour she

already prepared and mixed it with her secret ingredients. Soon, it

became a big pile of soft greenish rice flour dough, and then the

funs really began because we wanted to find out who could make

the best looking Inn-Sigh-Bang.

She took out a whole bunch of wooden molds with different

motifs engraved in them, birds, fish, leaves, and even people. We

had to use those beautiful molds to make the Inn-Sigh-Bang.

Mother told us that we couldn't touch anything only if our hands

were clean. The sisters always got the choice of molds first and we

got to clean our hands to pass my mother's inspection. I took this

leaf mold just like the impression of a Inn-Sigh leave, rubbed some

pork lard onto it and squeezed a whole handful of dough to cover

it, I took the time to patch it down really smooth and nice. Like

the others, I turned over the mold and knocked it again the table

to loosen up the Inn-Sigh-Bang inside, flipped it over and very

carefully peeled it off the mold.

It wasn't exactly what I had expected. The whole cookie didn't

come out perfect. The veins and the tip of the leave were still in

the mold, I just didn't rub enough grease into those little creases.

The good news was that this ugly cookie would surely be mine

after it was cooked. My sisters always outperformed our boys as

far as detailed works were concerned. My mother steam-cooked

those various shaped cookies in the big wok when they were done

they all turned transparent. After I tasted one I had to have

another one. With a little bit of sugar and the rice flour, the taste

of the Inn-sigh had tamed and became an inspiring taste and that

fresh chewy texture made me craving for more.

The other fun sweet thing to make for the New Year was the Jin-

Dura (Fried-Lump). Everyone pitched in because we had to make

so many, my ma, grandma, brothers and sisters all wanted part of

the fun. We usually did this chore outside the house in the court.

We started with a big round wooden table and on the middle of

the table was a mountain pile of pop corns. My mother and

grandma had already mixed some liquid brown sugar with the pop

corns, so the pop corns were sweet and edible.


Before starting, my mother always reminded us about her clean

hands rule, and told us that once we joined the operation Jin-

Dura, we couldn't leave until all was done. The operation was to

hand squeeze those sugar-coated pop corns into balls or the

shapes of fruits or any natural shapes, then wrap a coat of thin

rice flour paste on each of them, roll them over a bed of sesame

seeds, and lastly, grandma would brown them in a pot of hot

vegetable oil. No one could go near the hot oil only my grandma.



I used my hands to shape and press the pop corns into a big ball

and had to struggle to keep the pop corns together for long

because they were stretchy and full of air. It was tricky and it was

fun because it gave me an excuse to gobble up some nice sweet


pop corns. By the time I finished five or six of pop corn balls, I

already lose my apprentice for another one. They didn't all come

out as round balls. There were always new shapes created, and

we knew we had to eat those new inventions somehow. Because

the Jin-Duras were deep fried, they could be kept for a whole

month for visiting guests. With the white sesame seeds on the

outside, the golden brown Jin-Dura looked tempting after being

deep-fried. My mother usually cautioned us not to touch them

while they were hot, and then she cut a few up and served the

slides to us. My grandmother always put a few odd-shaped Jin-

Duras on the ancestor worship table and left them there for many

days.

I liked to work with my hands to create things. It was difficult for

me to not having anything to do to challenge my hands. Brother

Doug and Ging and I usually played a game called Da-Hor-Bog (Hit-

Mud-Pop) with clay-mud. This was the material we dug out with

our hands from the bank of the creek. We found this mud-clay

where just a bit above the water mark. This clay-mud was like the

rice flour dough with good elasticity and it was fun to make stuff

with. We made birds, frogs, fish, people, masks, vases and

anything we could think of at the time. I always dried my

creations in the shade slowly so they wouldn't crack. I made a big

soldier boy once and painted it green and yellow after it was dried

and leave it in the front wall by the door of the Chai-Fon. It was

meant to scare away the devils.

My father usually brought me water-color sets, paints and

crayons, pens and papers when he came back from Hong Kong for

visit. He got those stuffs from one of his shops in Hong Kong. I had

a whole pile of creations by the outside wall at the back of the

Chai-Fon, and sometimes I went there by myself, repaired some

cracked and broken ones with fresh mud-clay, and picked up

some really dried ones to paint and play with.

One game we really enjoyed playing in the summer in the

courtyard, was Da-Hor-Bog (Hit-Mud-Pop). Each one of us used

the clay-mud to make a bowl which was like a ball cut into half. In

turns, we slapped it as hard as we could onto a flat surface


ground, the pressure of the trapped air inside the "bowl"

exploded and usually brew a hole at the bottom of it. The cement

court in front of the House was a perfect place for this game.

With the sound "bog", Doug's bowl had a big hole, brother Ging

and I each had to give Doug the amount of clay-mud to cover the

hole. Ging was the one always lost all his clay-mud first. We

played until someone lost all his mud or when our clay-mud all

turned very hard to make anything else with. During the New Year

we didn't usually play this game because it was so dirty. However,

there were other challenges with our hands. The making of Yau-

Kwok (Oil-Bits).

Jin-Dura and Yau-Kwok always went together during the New Year

as both of them needed to be deep-fried with oil, so it was a

matter of convenience, too. My mother would make a whole pile

of dough and two kinds of fillings. One kind was a mix of sesame

seeds, shredded coconut and white sugar , the other one was

sugar, paste of lotus seeds and red beans. She used a roller to

flatten and thin the dough so it would be good for wrapping. My

older sister would use a small bowl as a cookie cutter and

produced piles of round dough wrappers.

The mission was to put a little lump of the filling into the middle

of the round paste and folded it together so that the filling would

be safely tucked inside the wrap. This was the product Yau-Kwok.

The trick was to seal the folded edges so it wouldn't be busted

while being deep-fried. I had to use my thumb and another finger

to press and twist the two edges together while holding it with my

other hand. Once and awhile I had to dip my figure into a bowl of

water to keep the dough edge moist so it would stick together. It

made me focused and feeling good when a perfect piece was

made.

After deep-frying, the Yau-Kwoks all turned golden brown, and we

got our tongues burn while we ate them too fast. After they

cooled down they were very crunchy and sweet, and every bite

would cause a little explosion in your mouth. I always kept eating

until I got the yuk feeling. My mother also made two completely


different kinds of Yau-Kwoks with the sweet lotus pastes and

minced pork and vegetables as fillings. They all tasted very good

and I liked them all.



On New Year days, we all behaved ourselves and always very

polite all the time, as we got red pockets from our grandparents

and our parents and relatives and sometimes from adult friends.

Red pockets were not always money, and sometimes they were

candies. It was a happy time for all kids. One year was an

exception, and an awful accident had happened.

For us kids in the New Year, the best things we did were eating,

laughing, chasing each other and playing horse-riding. Brother

Doug always had a few bamboo sticks laying around, and our kids

would use those to play horse-ride.

For that year, we had five kids closed to my age visiting and we

were playing horsy as usual while all the big people were huddling

together telling their stories and the other bunch of older kids

showing off each other's skills in the field. We galloped ups and

downs from the court to the field and from the field back to the


court, inside the Main House and out again, inside the house

again and outside again.

One of the boys, we called him Ah-Chung decided to gallop out of

the court to the Chai-Fon side with his long bamboo stick between

his legs. We all raced after him, yelling, screaming and laughing as

usual, passing Chai-Fon and we headed to the gardens, circling

around several Star-Fruit trees and Guava trees, and the Longan

trees, we were all out of breathe. We slowed down and trotted

instead of galloped and we came to the Bo-Tao (Step-Pier) which

was the access point to the big Pond, not too far away from the

outhouse.

The Bo-Tao was made of big slabs of flat granite rocks, very

smooth and clean because of its constantly used by us getting in

and out of the Pond and my mother always washed our dirty

clothes there. The Step Pier was a wide area and was a nice spot

to check things out in the Pond, and we did some fishing for fun

from there when there were high tides. The big Pond was filled by

the creek on the north side and drained on the south side to the

rice paddy fields.

Seven of us were laughing, yelling and chatting, and boasting who

was the best runner. We were a little bit exhausted after that long

and hard ride, we all slowed down and strolled near the path

looking and wondering and trying to regain our breathe.

Something attracted Ah-Chung in the big Pond and he walked to

the Step Pier with his long bamboo stick in hand, swaging tree

leaves as he went. We all followed him to see what was

happening. I was behind everyone and was looking up in the sky

searching the tree canopies to see if there were any leftover

fruits. Six of them were standing on the Step-Pier and Ah-Chung

was in the front with his bare feet almost touching the water .

It was low tide and the water in the Pond was not too deep. All of

them was standing there very quietly and kept looking for

something, then it got my attention, and I saw this bamboo stick

from Ah-Chung swinging up in the air trying to hit something. He

missed and there was a splash, Ah-Chung was in the water. I


heard the laud laughter from the kids and then there was silence.

I heard someone yelled in panic that Ah-Chung couldn't swim.

I threw away my bamboo stick and dashed through the crowd into

the water. I only saw Ah-Chung's hands above the water, I

grabbed him and struggled back to the edge of the Step-Pier. Both

of us climbed back up the edge to the Bo-Tao. Ah-Chung was

crying loud chokingly and I felt the cold started to set in and both

of us were soaking wet and shaking like leaves.



Yelling , crying and panicky, we all headed back to the Main

House, Brother Doug was already meeting us half way. Adults

were kept asking what had happened and the kids were pointing

fingers here and there, some still crying and were in shock. Only

brother Ging was very quiet all the time and he was just trying to

follow everyone. Ah-Chung and I got strip down and had our wet

clothes replaced and got to stand by the big wok where the

cooking was taken place to get our hair dried. An hour or so after

that, we were again galloping in the court, down the field and

back to the court, again down the field and up the court, yielding,

laughing and stuffing some Yau-Kwok along the way...


We had a New Year tradition which was fun. At the very last day

of the outgoing old year, in the evening after dinner, all the

children had a ritual to perform before the coming of the new

year.

The ritual was to rid all our laziness and bad habits so that it came

the new year we all would be free of bad things and became

lucky, hard working, diligent and had good grades from school.



Starting from the court yard of the Main House, we all lined up

from the oldest to the youngest. Yes, my oldest brothers were in

this too. Each one of us held a burning incense with one hand and

with the other touching the person in front of you. This line would

dance and chant with slogans related to the riding of the bad

things and parade to its destination in the Mound where the big

olive tree was located, then each of us would shoot a few fire

crackers with the burning incense and after that plant the burning

incense in the Mound and let them finished burning. We, then all

raced back to the court yard to set off a few more fire crackers to

scare off all the bad and scary things from the house. It was fun

and exciting and we all loved to do that every year.


Nobody ever taught me how to swim. All my older brothers were

good swimmers. I just had the urge to swim like them, and

watched them swim all the time and practiced swimming on my

rattan mat a few times, and one day I was swimming in the water

with my brothers.

My younger brother Ging loved to play in the water but wasn't

good in swimming. We swam a lot in the summer . We weren't

allowed to swim alone and I always swam with someone or in a

group. Sam-Bok-Kew on the Big Dike was one of our favorite

swimming holes, and also we usually met our neighboring kids

there too.

There were wide stone steps built for everyone to walk down the

River from the top of the Big Dike just west of Sam-Bok-Kew, so

people could easily go up and down the River. Those big slabs of

granite stones were just perfect for big people to do their laundry,

taking bath and getting fresh water from the River. This spot was

near the T-junction of the River so the water flow slowed down

considerably compared to the other sections of the River.

Another good thing about that place was because the river

bottom was filled with gravels and not ugly mud like some other

part of the River, and it was pleasant to touch, to walk and swim

on the bottom. We usually dived, dropped and jumped down

from Sam-Bok-Kew bridge, making fool of ourselves and to make

the neighboring girls happy. There were a few neighboring boys

and girls swam there frequently.

One bad thing about this swimming hole was that there were

swirls created on the top of the T-junction when the River split

into east and west, so we didn't usually swim and venture close

to that area. This was in the east side of the Sam-Bok bridge and

this spot almost killed me and brother Ging once.

It was one hot summer day, my 2nd elder brother and brother

Doug were going to catch some fish for dinner just outside of our

stone Entrance Gate by the River bank. My 2nd brother had a

hand-held rectangle-shape fishing net. It was made with six rattan

sticks about one inch diameter each, four sticks made up the


bottom of the net and two bow-shape ones crossed each other on

the top and tied to the joints of the bottom four sticks. There was

another triangular piece came with the net. It was simply made of

three long pieces of rattan sticks with a shorter piece in the

middle part of the triangle, there was no net on this piece. It was

just like a moving gate to drive the fish into the net. All sides of

the rectangular net were enclosed except the front so my 2nd

brother could hold the top of the net where the bow-shaped

rattan crossed each other, with one hand, and held the driving

gate with another hand. My brother Ging and I always tagged

along and carried a bucket for the caught fish.

This net system was good to catch fish on the shallower banks of

the River because it could easily drive the fish feeding and hiding

in the grass into the net. A lots of fish loved to feed on the tender

river grass growing right along the banks, and Li-Yu (grass-Carp-

Fish) was one of them. This fish was not too big, only about one

foot long with a bulging stomach and usually full of fish eggs. This

fish was very delicious if cooked properly, and my grandmother

was an expert cooking it. She just had to remove the gills, and the

bile of the fish from its stomach and nothing else, and she left

everything intact including the big shinny scales of the fish. She

seared the Li-Yu in the wok with oil and browned it nicely, then

she cooked the fish in a clay pot with a lot of green onions and

fresh singer roots from our garden. We always had to fight for a

taste of the fish and usually gobbled up a lot of rice with it. The

dish was just wonderfully delicious. We always liked and wanted

to catch more river Li-Yu.

We all got down to the water, and my 2nd brother and Doug were

busy catching fish in front of us, working their way westward

toward the River T-junction. The water was calm on our side of

the River. We already got a few little fish and quite a few of

shrimps. Ging and I filled the bucket with some water and Doug

put all the catch in it. We let the bucket float with a string loosely

tied to my hand, and we played and swam behind it and followed

our brothers in front. By the time we got to the T-junction, we


already had caught two smaller Li-Yu and they were very

enthusiastic and confident that a big one was coming.

All of a sudden, I sensed and didn't feel brother Ging was around

me and the bucket any more. I turned my head to my right and

behind, and there was Ging about six feet from me and the River

bank. I saw the face of a person about to be drowned. I pushed

off the bucket and dashed toward him, I grabbed him and he

grabbed me too. He was dragging me down with him like a ton of

iron. I struggled and I struggled, and I couldn't get out of the

swirls. Sheer Fear and panic struck me and I couldn't breathe any

more. I was going to die.



I opened my eyes, I saw the faces of brother Doug and Ging... I

closed my eyes again and shake my head and opened my eyes

again, and they really were Doug and Ging. I was not dead and

none of us was dead.

Brother Doug told me that when he noticed all the commotions

behind him, he turned and saw both of us were drowning so he

swam over and lift two of us up and dragged us back to the bank

where our 2nd brother was standing by. We lost all the fish and


shrimps in the bucket, and also the bucket. Luckily we still had the

net. We quitted our quest for Li-Yu that day, instead we changed

our operation for shrimps or whatever in the creek.

Brother Doug saved our lives and was our hero.

One late Spring day when I was about ten years old, Dough was

having problem going to school. We always went to school

together, even thought we were in different schools but the two

schools were very close together. He couldn't walk very well, and

his left knee was swelling up pretty bad, that worried my mother

and she took him to the doctor.

Doug had some kind of arthritis attack in his left knee and he

needed some plants called Gap-Joke-To for curing. We knew

where the Gap-Joke-To was, and I and Ging were happy to get

them for Doug.

Gap-Joke-To was wild grown, about five to six feet tall with hollow

stalk like bamboo but it was easily cut and fragile, and had the

soft long leaves like any regular plants. It had reddish stalk and

leaves which grew out of the stalk, so there was no branches. It

had fragrant pink flowers and liked to grow pack tight together.

Actually they looked very clean and pretty and unique and easily

recognized. There was a big patch of them just in the northeast

corner of the River T-junction. We went by this corner all the time

on the opposite bank of the River.

There was no path leading to the Gap-Joke-To patch because that

corner was completely inhabited and situated not too far from

Sam-Bok-Kew, on the other side of the River. The only short way

to get there was to swim across the River near the T-junction or to

take the long way, by crossing the bridge and took the path on the

Big Dike on the west side of the River up north, then, found the

shallow crossing in low tides about half a kilometer up and forded

to the east side bank, then headed back south through the trees

and bushes to the Gap-Joke-To patch. We took a knife and some

strings and went for the long way because we didn't feel like

getting wet that day.


There were Gap-Joke-Tos tightly packed there, all taller than us.

The stalk was soft and hollow so it was easy to cut. We got two

bundles and tied them with strings, but they were heavy and long

and made carrying them difficult for us, so we had a plan.



We put extra long strings on them and decided to roll them down

the bank over to the River east side of the T-junction. Water there

was quiet and tame, we could then retrace them with a long

bamboo stick when we got back to the Big Dike on the south side.

We dragged the bundles toward the south bank through the

dense patch and badly rattled the other uncut Gap-Joke-To on the

way, and successful dumped the two bundles into the water. We

were just started to congratulate ourselves for a job well done,

disaster struck.

While we were retracing our way north, and all in a sudden,

hundreds of wasps or bees or hornets were upon us. We must

had disturbed a hornet's nest built somewhere in one of those

Gap-Joke-Tos. We screamed and tried to defend ourselves

fervently and fought back. That excited them even more, I tried to

get them off my head, my face and then my ears, my eyes... It was

a losing battle and painful and we ran back to the south bank


where we discarded the bundles and in a flash we were down the

bank and submerged into the water.

We swam back under the water surface most of the time to the

Big Dike across, and luckily none of the wasps were following us

around anymore. We set on the bank where we got some Li-Yu

before, and carefully and painfully removed the stings still stuck

on our hair and ears and on our T-shirts. Some still had the

abdomen attached with them. They came so fast and I didn't

know if they were bees or wasps. It was painful but we did drag

the Gap-Joke-Tos home that day for brother Doug.

Our mother and grandmother rubbed honey over our wounds and

both of our face and head were swollen up like the pig's head.

After a week or so, our faces were back to normal and the good

news was brother Doug no longer had those arthritis attacks. I

knew he could walk me to school again.

I went to the Law-Kar-Tze (Law-Family-Temple) for my first school.

This place was marvelous and very grand. In the front, It had a

large granite slabs covered square. The Law Temple was on the

north side of the Square and elevated about eight feet above it,

and facing south where the three rivers ran into each other. The

main River was running straight south and was the same river that

ran to Sam-Pok-Kew, our favorite swimming hole in the River. The

river dike bordering the Square was lined with large slabs of

stones all the way down to the bottom of the River. Law-Kar-Tze

was built hundreds of years ago, as a grand temple, not as a

school.

There were two gigantic Tai-Yhung-Shu (Gigantic -Ficus

Benjamina-Tree), one on each side of the Square, grew out of two

huge stone circles built around the trees. The trees looked really

old with roots dangling down from their branches like moustache

and beard. The trunks of the trees were so big that five people

holding hands couldn't circle one of them. On top of the twelve

stone steps leading to the main entrance of the Temple was two

big sitting lions, one on each side facing each other. The double-

wooden-door entrance was dark red color with many little brass


fittings framing them and there were two very large bronze door

knobs one on each door.



I had to jump over an eight-inch high horizontal door-guard to get

inside the Temple. It was very bright inside. There was a sky-

opening in the middle section of the inside looking like a court

yard, and the sun could shine in most of the day. There were

beautiful dark red colored posts, some with colorful decorations

on them, strategically spread over the inside space. There were

long corridors, fancy walls, colorful ceilings and stone statues of

animals everywhere.


My class room was behind one of those decorative walls. The

"school" was really big inside and I could run zigzag to the back

and out to the fenced backyard which was the size of two

basketball courts with one side against a brick wall and one side

back to the slope of a hill with huge trees growing on it and with

some of their roots sticking out of the slope.

I always set by the side of one of the stone lions in the front to

wait for brother Doug to pick me up to walk home together. It

was a breath-taking view from that spot looking down the Square

and yonder. The edge of the Square was very straight against the

lake-like pool of water which extended straight down like a

promenade bordered by evenly tall trees with dark jade green

colors on the Dikes on both sides.

Brother Doug and I just had to cross a single stone slab bridge on

the west side of the Square and walked south along the Dike

following the River, in less than thirty minutes we should have

walked across the Sam-Pok-Kew and followed the west pathway

and be home. If we were hungry sometimes, we ran half the way

and be home in less than twenty minutes.

My older sister always went to school with brother Ging. I didn't

know where they went to school but I always very happy to see

Ging everyday back in 18-Mu. There were always some ventures

awaiting for us.

School was fairy strict. We had to put our hands behind our backs

while sitting and sit straight and we had to raise our hands to ask

a question or answer a question. The little wooden desk that

everyone had in front of the chair, was very handy to take a nap

on it, as we always had to take a nap after lunch which the school

provided. My favorite class was gym class which we all got to play

at the backyard. There were two seesaws, four slides and three

swings. We always chased each other and I liked to climb up the

yellow clay slope and slide down until and my bottom and back

were all full of dirt.

On both sides of our school or the Law's Temple were rows of

brick town houses extending far on both directions with


occasional little ally between them. These houses and shops were

all facing the river and between the houses and the river edge was

this ten feet wide granite stone walkway. The stone slabs were

placed straight down to the water from the edge with several Bo-

Tao (Step-Piers) made of stone steps extending into the river.

People used these to get water from the river, do laundry, swim

and other things. Both water front walkways led to market places

not too far from the Temple. There were Ying-Su (Shadow-Trees)

and Do-Dul-Su (Knife-Bean-Trees) planted on the walkways and

they looked very nice. These trees had no edible fruits and they

grew fast and provided good shades for the passersby. The Do-

Dul-Su did bear fruits the shape and size of a curve machete.

When the "machetes" were dried, they dropped to the sidewalk,

and we usually pick them up and pretended to fight each other.

Sometimes, Brother Doug and I chose the westerly walkway to get

home instead of crossing the bridge on the Square and followed

the River home. This way was more interesting and always had

more traffic with people and hawkers who were selling goods and

shouting to tell people what they had for sell. Actually this way

home was about the same distance and time, we just had to cross

the other river further down west and headed south from there,

and then, passed a small village to join back the Big Dike along the

River home. More and more often we used this route as I was

growing older.

Boys at school didn't usually played with girls, as we always

couldn't sit still and had to jump, run and yell all the time

whenever the opportunity presented itself. There were two girls

in my class and they lived not too far away from each other on

and near the westerly path. One girl was named Mei-Wah and the

other one was Wen-Lei. They usually walked home side by side

every day, one was always very quiet and the other was a bit

more active, but they both behaved very well.

Both girls were very pretty. Mei-Wah always had her hairs nicely

fixed with 2 little tails at the back and she carried a very clean

canvas book bag with a shoulder strip. She was neat and always

wore skirt, socks and a black pair of leather shoes. She was quiet


and looked like she was thinking all the times. I never seen her

getting dirty or getting excited. I didn't talk to her that often, or

play with her, but we did smile to each other when we passed

each other. Wen-Lei had two long braided hairs over her

shoulders and she wore a pair of flops and bare footed

sometimes. She was very pleasant, giggled and laughed quite

often. She looked a bit older than me and Mei-Wah.



Brother Doug didn't know why I wanted to walk westerly home

instead of southerly right after we got off the temple Square.

Doug usually was quite hungry after school so he would prefer the

southerly route to get home for we could run all the way home

fast without banging on someone along the way. We couldn't run

on the westerly route because there were always traffic there.

But I liked the idea of having more chances bumping into Mei-

Wah and Wen-Lei. I just felt happy when I saw them walking in

front of us. Doug always complained why I walked so slowly on

the smooth stone-paved pathway and so fast on the dirt-covered

Dike path. Wen-Lei's house was just on the north side of this wide

and short stone bridge on the pathway. Her house just looked like


one of the brick town houses next to the Temple. The front door

of her house was always open, and from above the top of the

door a canopy was built across the complete walkway to the edge

of the river which was becoming very narrow as it was ending in

this area. We had to cross from here to head south for home and

so did Mei-Wah.

There were always some tables and other stuff by Wen-Lei's front

door under the canopy, which occupied almost half of the

walkway. The first thing she always did was to throw away her

book bag down on the ground and started working with match

boxes right away. It looked like there was always stacks and stacks

of little things piling on the tables. Her mother was always sitting

there already with her hands busy gluing match boxes with some

white rice paste. Wen-Lei was anxious to help. I saw my mother

talked to her mother sometimes when we passed this place going

to the markets on the weekends.. Mei-Wah's house was just

across the stone bridge.

There were all dirt paths and farms after crossing the short bridge.

Immediately on the left after two buildings by the river bank was

Mei-Wah's place. I couldn't see her house anywhere from the

path. There was a tall chain-link fence in front of the property and

behind it were rows of clay-potted ornamental flowers and many

little pots of kumquat trees, many of them were resting on long

benches. She passed the fence through the fence opening door,

walked between the rows and soon disappeared among the big

fruit trees. I never met her parents or saw any adults walking with

her to and from school. Brother Dough and I continued our

journey home from there.

My parents were seldom seen with me in school functions except

in one fairly rare occasion and that happened in a German church.

I was picked as the lead performer in a play glorifying a war hero

who blew himself up with his own explosive in front of his

enemy's fortified machine gun hideout, so he could save his

comrades from being shot at and being killed. During the attack,

he was the first one approaching but he couldn't find anything to


support the explosives in a right position to destroy the hideout,

which was still generating tremendous firing power, and about to

kill many more advancing comrades. He used his hands to hold

the explosives and destroyed the hideout so that his comrades

could advance and be saved under the slaughter of the machine

guns. He blew himself up at the same time. He was only 18 years

old. The play was performed in a German church before parents

and other audiences. It happened that my father was back from

Hong Kong so my mother took him to the show. It was a sad play

but my parents were quite proud of me that time and they were

relieved that I wasn't really blowing myself up in the play.

After crossing Sam-Bok-Kew and through our west neighbor's

entrance gate and before onto the west path heading home,

brother Doug and I always stopped at the Bo-Tao (Step-Pier) just

off the right inside of the entrance gate.

This was the beginning of our west neighbor's moat that went

around their vast property. The water came into the property

from the River through a tunnel with a big wooden gate just a bit

west of the Bo-Tao. The Bo-Tao sloped down to the edge of the

moat and was almost leveled with the moat water all the time

and it was constructed with many slabs of big rocks which piled

up from the bottom of the moat, the horizontal stacking slabs

formed the wall of the Bo-Tao. This submerged stone wall was our

secret paradise for fresh snacks after school time when fruits

were not quite ready for eating.

Brother Doug just knelt down on the Bo-Tao almost touching the

water, leaned forward a bit and put out his right hand with the

palm wide opened. Slowly and quietly he dipped his stretched

hand into the water and ever slowly brought it back toward

himself against the submerged stone wall of the Bo-Tao. Voila!

there came two big shrimps yanking and trying to get loose from

his hand. He passed them to me and very soon got another two,

and another two.

Those moat shrimps were sweet, delicious and refreshing.

Sometimes we just snapped off the sharp saw-like spike off the tip


of its head and ate the whole thing, crawls, shell and head all. Just

so crunchy and mushy but very delicious. Sometimes, if we got

more than we could handle, we just ate the body part with the

shell, but I still loved to eat the head part, as it was more

interesting, delicately sweet and juicy.



We all had homework to do from time to time and our mother

wanted us to do extra stuff like practising our calligraphy and

drew pictures. We had no electricity in 18-Mu, and we always

were too busy doing homework when there was light outside and

we usually dragged until after dinner or when it was dark to start

working on our homework. My mother wasn't too happy about us

dragging, but she often was bogged down by some chores and


couldn't bug us all the time. But we always finished our

assignments on time. We always did our homework in the middle

section of the Main House. Mother usually put a big Ap-Tsui-Dunk

(Duck-bill-Lamp) in the centre of our rectangular wooden table

and all kids just huddled around it to do whatever there was to

do. We did help each other if we could.

The Ap-Tsui-Dunk was a kerosene lamp with a duck-bill-like

burning tip holding up the wick for burning. It was bright. We had

a few in the house. If we needed to go to the outhouse at night,

we just took a flash light and also asked someone to go with. No

one liked to pass the Chai-Fon alone at night.

Generally, summers were really fun because there were plenty of

fruits to eat and no schools. A lots of fun things and adventures

which always drove mother and grandmother nuts.

My grandmother usually put an awful lots of different offerings on

the ancestors-worship bench table which was narrow but tall and

it was painted with bright red paints and decorated with golden

trims. This was the best smelling room in the Main house. Always,

there were fresh and blooming white ginger-flowers and fragrant

incense burning under the table and above the table. There were

seasonal fruits, sometimes a cooked chicken and some barbeque

pork etc., and always three small cups of rice wine as offerings.

The funny thing was that things on display seldom missing from

there except the three little cups filled with rice wine. The rice

wine in the cups were always empty once awhile. My

grandmother was a little bit concerned because she knew my

mother didn't drink, my older brothers didn't drink and Doug and I

never never liked that thing. She was a little bit scared and happy

at the same time as she suspected that someone from heaven

had taken them.

One day, brother Doug and I came back from the west path after

selling some herbs in the market, and we had our breakfast and

saved some fried-dough for brother Ging to surprise him, because

he loved fried-dough too. We tried to keep quiet when we

reached the Main House. When we walked pass the west section,


the front door wasn't entirely closed so we could see the worship

table, then we saw Ging standing up on a stool and drank up all

three cups of rice wine in a swift motion, then he went down and

carried away the little stool with him walking back to the middle

section of the house continued playing with our dog Ah-Choy.



I tried to get in and yell at him, brother Doug stopped me and

took me back to the west side of the Main House and told me not

to tell grandma as he didn't want Ging to get into trouble. Then,

we saw this big blue jay making a lot of loud noise and flew right

above our heads and landed on the peach tree a few feet away

from the Bak-Lan-Su, and there was a big, beautiful peach ready

to be picked. We were more interested in who could get to that

just turning-red- from-green peach first.

We had never told grandmother about brother Ging's little secret

but brother Doug did scold Ging and asked him not to do that

again. During special celebrations, some adults always drank and

their faces always flashed and turned ugly red after a few cups of

rice wine, but not Ging. Of course, he was not allowed to drink

wines as he was a little kid. One time, when everyone was busy

during the New Year, I saw him gobbled up almost a whole bottle


of rice wine, his face remained just the same and he acted just the

same. It was just like he had drunk a bottle of water.

This peach tree was very old and with character. Besides the

jasmine bush, the old cedar, the Bak-Lan-Su in the area, this was

one good fruit tree we wished we could have more. The fruits it

produced were heavenly. Year after years, we thought this peach

tree was going to die, miraculously, we got fruits out of it again

and again, but it was producing less and less every year, and we

didn't pay much attention to it except when the fruits came.

Ah-Choy and Ging were good buddies. Ah-Choy didn't follow us

that much and that was brother Ging he followed and played with

all the time in 18-Mu. Ging wasn't that active as Doug and I,

because he was younger and liked to be quiet. Ah-Choy was

getting old and older and slowed down a lot, and sometimes he

didn't even run out to the Entrance Gate to greet us anymore. He

just laid around the house and preferred to play with Ging. One

day in the early morning when grandmother was looking for him

to feed him, she found him dead in the court yard by the dike

going east. We buried Ah-Choy by the Mound in the garden. We

were very sad and brother Ging cried and wept for the whole day.

Summer was the time to catch fire flies, field frogs, pond frogs,

catfish from the creek, little fish from the rice paddies, and big fish

from the Yu-Tong ( fish ponds) and from the moats. We picked all

kinds of fruits, collected lotus seeds and fought battles in the sky.

There were so much going on day in and day out in the summer,

we hardly had enough time to sleep as the two eldest brothers

were home as well. My older 2nd brother always loved to catch

fish.

One hot summer day, He and I were walking along the east path

and was intended to catch some fish coming into our creek from

the River during high tide. Instead, he heard some commotion on

the other side of the dike where a narrow opening was cut into

the moat to allow running water to drain into the big fish pond.

We sneaked over where the noises were coming from, to our

surprise, there was a bunch of very big Dai-Tao (Big-Head) fish


trapped in there. My 2nd brother jumped right into it and tried to

catch a two-foot long big head, and he was hit left and right by

the other jumping fish. It was very exciting to watch.



He was struggling to hold on to one and then it slipped away, and

he was hit on the back by another flying big head. He tried to hold

on one by its gills, but again it didn't work. I was too small to

jump in to help. My brother finally realised there was a better way

to catch the biggie, he used his two hands, instead of grapping the

fish, he just flipped it onto the bank where I was standing, and he

quickly rushed up and pinned it by its tail. Wow, that was a

powerful and muscular fish. He caught a big-head with his bare

hands. That one was almost 3 feet long.

Grandma made two very delicious dishes out of that big-head.

She steamed just the chopped up big head of the big-head fish

with salted black beans, the pickled bamboo shoots and a lot of

fresh cayenne peppers. She used some salted black beans and a

lots of fresh ginger slices and green onion to steam the rest of the

fish. We liked her dishes, and we had those dishes from time to

time. Actually, we liked the head part more than the body dish.


Sometimes, summer time is beyond excitement. One activity was

really thrilling, which was the sky war and Brother Doug was a first

rated sky fighter.

The winds always blew from the south and southwest in the

summer. It was a great time to fly our kites. We always flew kites

from the high dikes south of the Main House, these were the

dikes we often saw the blue "fireballs" at night. These dikes

divided our property with the south neighbors' farms which were

mainly rice paddies and yu-tongs. All the neighbors' kids, big and

small, usually gathered here when the sun wasn't strong and the

winds were blowing. In a good day, I could see, from our

courtyard, many kites flying high above our property cutting

through the sky in high speed, from left to right, right to left and

dropping from high to low and swooshing up like a rocket again,

going straight up or curving to the left and to the right. Spinning

like a windmill in high speed sometimes, and almost completely

staying still in the air, the fighter kites were the Go-Jongs (High-

Form) and they were dazzling. I could hear the powerful swoosh

sounds when the kites accelerated. It was just a spectacular air

show. The slow mover kites were the ones with tails and they

didn't usually stay long in the sky as the Go-Jong-Ji-Yew (High-

Form-Paper-Kites) simply slaughtered them by shearing their lines

in the sky.

Go-Jong-Ji-Yew had no tails and they were the formidable class of

fighting kites in the sky. Brother Doug made his Go-Jong with a

kind of tough but very thin paper called Sha-Tze (Sand-Paper)

which was brownish or white in color, very thin and looked

transparent. My father brought us those papers from his shop in

Hong Kong. He cut out a perfect piece of 2 1/2 feet by 2 1/2 feet,

folded it diagonally so that he got a crease from corner to corner.

He took out his dried bamboo sticks which he always had a pile

cut and put them against the west wall of the Chai-Fon for drying.

He pick the driest piece with long sections between knots and

split it into thin and long pieces. He selected two straight pieces

and striped the inside of the bamboo pieces with a dull knife


carefully and smoothed them nicely leaving the thick bamboo skin

untouched.

With the outer skin of the bamboo intact, he cut both pieces to fit

into the Sha-Tse to form the frame of the kite. He fitted one piece

with the skin side contacting the paper on top of the crease. He

trimmed the top to fit the shape of the angle on top and left the

bamboo piece a bit longer than the bottom corner. Then he used

very fine rice paste to stick the bamboo piece to cover the whole

length of the crease. He took the other thinner piece, side way

and with bamboo skin facing outward, carefully bend and

adjusted it as a semi-circle with the ends to touch the opposite

corners in a cross position to the crease.

He marked and cut the bamboo piece so it would fit perfectly.

Using part of the edges of the square Sha-Tze, he glued the

bamboo stick by folding in the paper edge inside; started from

one corner. I helped him by holding it in place so that he could

continue all the way to the other corner. When he was done we

put two pieces of small wood blocks on top of the bamboo piece

to keep them in places and to let dry. The Go-Jong was basically

done, and he just had to add a little upside down heart-shaped

paper at the bottom of the kite as a rudder of the flying machine.

Brother Doug also had some secret weapon with his flying

maniac.

He got all his mile-long threads out of our mother's sewing room

and transferred them into a specially made spool with a long

wooden handle passing through the center core, so that the spool

was perfectly set in the middle and he could hold the spool handle

with both hands, one hand on each side. The special spool shaped

like a mountain and valley with a 4-inch diameter wall on both

sides. This was brother Doug's controller for the kite.

He found some dried fish maw, which my grandmother collected

from the bigger fish that we caught, and she always stored them

in a big glass jug in the kitchen. Brother Doug put some dried fish

maw in a tin can half full of water, and boiled them over a

makeshift small stove he made just east of the Papaya tree. It


usually took him a long time to cook until it became liquid, very

sticky liquid. Doug then took out some very fine white powder in a

small glass jar and poured it in the boiling liquid and stirred them

well. The white stuff was Doug's secret weapon, it was made by

grinding the broken glass of a light bulb, very carefully and

dangerously, into that fine white powder form.



While he was cooking the fish maw, I helped him to stick four long

bamboo poles straight up on a soft ground to form a rectangle

cage about ten feet by four feet in size. Doug removed the end of

the thread from the big spool and ran it through the two little

holes he made near the bottom and in the center of an open

match box and tied the end of the thread to the lower side of one

of the bamboo posts. We were ready.

Brother Doug poured some hot liquid from the tin to fill the match

box submerging the thread entirely, and I started walking

backwards with the special spool full of thread, in my two hands.

He held the match box steady with his right hand and guided the

thread by holding it loosely in front of the match box with his left

hand and started to walk toward me. I walked backward circling

the bamboo poles and Doug walked forward facing me. We


stopped frequently to refill the match box when the liquid inside

the match box was getting low. The wet thread stayed on the

bamboo maze to let dry as we walked. We stopped when the fish

maw sticky liquid was all gone.

Dough's lethal weapon was almost ready and it just needed to be

completely dried under the sun. Some parts of the thread if pulled

in fast motion were as sharp as a razor. We were very careful and

wore gloves all the time, and the job took a whole day to

complete.

Doug cut a string of regular thread from another spool, waxed it a

little and tied it to the almost finished kite like a triangle, started

from where the two bamboo pieces crossed each in the Go-Jong

and tied the other end down the bamboo piece which was glued

on top of the crease. He constantly judged the balance of the kite

by holding the apex of the thread triangle; when he was satisfied,

he fixed the thread to its position. The Go-Jong must be perfectly

balanced on two halves and four sides as well. He then tied the

thread from the special spool to the triangle. It was ready for a

test flight.

We had to wear gloves to handle this awesome thing. I held the

rudder of the Go-Jong or the tips of it wings facing the wind and

Doug was facing me and backed away from me letting go the

thread from the spool while he was backing. About 20 feet away,

he stopped.

When I felt the wind was coming, I signaled him and let go and

that kite shot straight up into the sky with the swoosh rumbling

sound from its wings, and Doug let his spool free and very soon it

started to get smaller and smaller way yonder up in the blue sky.

What a sign and what a feeling! At some point, Doug just held it

still and practised maneuver by jerking the spool, tilting the spool

and dragging the spool; moving it to his left and then to his right.

It was amazing, and that thing was just responded like a

formidable fighter jet.

The thrills always came when we spotted another kite "intruding"

our sky. Doug and I just went up to the south dike and launched


his Go-Jong. Up in the air, he tightened up his spool and did a

swift maneuver and his kite crossed the line of the "intruder"

under in a fierce up swing, and he let loose the grip on the handle

of his spool very fast, in less than two seconds the other kite was

gone and dropping out of the sky like a falling leave. I then ran

and tried to follow the falling kite and tried to catch the barely

seen floating thread lurking behind it.

Most the time I had to ran into the paddy fields, fall into ditches,

circumvent brushes, trees and swim over Yu-Tong. The falling

kites usually ended up in one of the tall fruits trees and some in

the paddy field and in the water . When I grabbed the thread of a

falling kite, I used my left hand and elbow to wind up the thread

and bring it down, and that it became my prize. For precaution, I

always wore one cotton glove for my catching hand. Sometimes I

got competitions and the strongest kid usually got the prize.

Doug and I built a lots of kites throughout the years to replace the

fallen, the broken and worn out ones. This activity usually lasted

through autumn till the southerly wind started to change

directions and brought chill with it.

Doug had a fun and sleeking way to catch frogs in the Yu-Tong.

We had a lots of frogs around our area. Sometimes after a rain,

they even got onto the dikes where we walked and they liked to

linger along the edge of the dikes and jumped into the Yu-Tong or

the moats when we walked by. Their jumping into the water was

one noise we frequent heard year round and sometimes scared by

it because of its suddenness. Many frogs just liked to float in the

warm water with their little triangular heads and eyes sticking out

of the water, staying there still trying to catch an easy meal. This

was where Doug and I liked to catch them. They were good

proteins for our diet.

I followed Doug along the edge of the water usually a Yu-Tong. I

had a covered wire cage in my hand, and he carried on his

shoulder a small net with a two feet opening and attached to an

8-foot long bamboo handle. There was a three inches tall little

bamboo stick wedged between where the net joint the pole, and


it served as a marker for Doug while in the water. We scouted the

smooth water for little blobs and movements on the surface. The

frog head was easy to spot. Then Doug went swimming.



He quietly got down to the water and extended his long net in

front of him, walked or tread or swam with the long net

submerged just below the water surface and the marker above

the water targeting at the floating frog. Before the frog knew it,

Doug lift the net and the frog had no chance of escaping. Then he

tilt the net and folded it so the frog couldn't escape and passed it

to me to unload it, and he continued for the next one. We always

came home with a full cage of frogs.


My 2nd eldest brother loved to trap the big frogs along the moats.

He and Doug made some "shoe-box" bamboo cages with a

lockable lid on one side, with many strips of thin bamboo pieces

weaving together. The center of the lid had an opening allowing a

big frog to enter, and it tapered down like a side-way funnel. Once

the frog crawled in, there was no way out unless the lid was open.

These were my 2nd eldest brother's frog traps.

This frog-catching operations took a longer time, but it was very

efficient and the catch was always "wow". It started with them

baiting the inside of the cages with the stinky fish guts that Ah-

Choy didn't even eat. Brother Ging and I usually tag along when

the elder brothers were ready to set the traps. We helped them

to carry some traps. It was usually done after dinner and when it

was started to get dark.

We walked along the dikes and around the Yu-Tong and the rice

paddies with a flash light, and they could hear and sense where

the big frogs were likely to be and the traps would be set. My

elder brothers would set ten traps before we quit and went back

home to sleep.

We got up early the next morning, and off we went to see the

results from the traps we set last night. If we had a rain at night,

the catch was always fantastic, some cage would have up to four

frogs in it. Normally, we would get an average of one frog per

cage. We recovered all the traps and tied up all the frogs on the

hip and leave them in one big bucket. My older brothers didn't

trap frogs this way too frequently because it was too easy, and

that we didn't want to eat them all the time, and they loved to

see more of them around 18-Mu.

Summer went and autumn came, we had to prepare for school

and replace our tattered summer clothing. My mother usually was

very busy taking care of the needs of the girls, and grandma was

busy pickling foods from the gardens and the small vegetable

patch just east of the Main House and north of the bamboo trees.

She also busy working with other farmers in the fields.


In the earlier years, when rice crop was still cultivated in "our"

paddy fields, we usually had a lot of fun during rice harvesting.

When the rice paddies were turning golden, my grandmother

closed up all the drain tunnels under the dikes going into the rice

paddies. The rice paddies were all drying up slowly and there

were even cracks appearing in the drying mud. From these cracks,

we usually caught a lots of Tin-Law (rice field-snails) and little field

eels. The snails were good to eat. We usually collected them in

bucketful, and grandma would put them in different buckets filled

with clean water for a few days to even weeks. When she was

ready to cook them, she would chop off the little end of the snail,

and then stir-fry them with black bean paste, a lots of garlic and

the shredded leaves of Tse-So (Purple-beard) which was a herb

type of weed with large hairy jagged leaves, purple color on top

and silvery on the underside. Tse-So had a very distinct smell and

favor, like the cross of citric and something fragrant which was

indescribable. When they were cooked, the Tse-So took off the

earthy taste of the field snails, we just sucked the meat out of the

shell and they tasted very sweet and different, but very good

snack and even for dishes.

The little field eels were easy to cook. Grandma just put the

cleaned eels into the boiling rice with a bit of grounded fresh

ginger. When they were cooked she messed them up with the rice

and served to my little sisters and brother Ging. I liked them to be

deep-fried with a coat of flour mixed with black pepper and salt.

The rice field was completely dried, and it looked golden. We got

to help with the harvesting and it was always fun time for us.

There were many people working in the dried paddy fields. They

cut the rice plants from the bottom with a curve thin knife and

piled them up in bundles on the field, then couple of people

came along with a big oval shaped wooden barrel and they picked

up the cut rice plants and threshed the rice grains from the plants

and the grains all felt into the barrel. We were allowed to

"treasure hunt" in the parts where the rice plants were removed

and threshed.


We found Poun-Kays (Mud-Crabs), eels, field snails and Kow-Mei-

Lang (Nine-Tails-Beauty) fish in some deep cracks. This fish

colored like a rainbow with long fins like an angel, and it was a

very aggressive fish which I liked to keep in a glass bowl for show.

My older brothers got the job to clean up those big wooden

barrels after the harvest was done and brother Doug, Ging and I

were all allowed to help. We carried and rolled the empty barrels

one by one to our Pond, and each one of us had a barrel to

ourselves, and then the naval war in the Pond started.



Every barrel was a wooden boat. First, we let all five empty and

dirty barrels floated in the Pond. Then, we raced to get into the

best barrel, the ones that didn't seem to leak as much. I got into

my barrel by jumping down from one of the branches of the Poe-

Toe tree, and so was brother Doug. My elder brother lifted Ging

and put him in his "boat", usually the worst one. Anyway, no one

ever attacked Ging's "boat" as it would sink by itself slowly.

I started by rocking my barrel back and forth to make it go. We

had other spectators watching us from the banks including our

sisters. The winner was the one who stayed afloat the longest.


We were trying to ram into each other, flip, rock, drag, push, pull

and throw water at each other... Water was getting into my

"boat" real fast, and it soon up to my knees. There were laughing

and yelling from the banks, and even buckets of water were

throwing at us. A little drag from my older brother, my "boat"

tipped over on its side and I was out of the game. We all ended

up in the water in less than 10 minutes and we all helped to clean

the barrels and with help from others, we dragged them back to

the bank, turned them upside down and let dry. It was really fun

and exhausting.

When autumn was turning into winter, the rice paddies turned

into golden, and very soon after the rice crop was harvested, the

fields became empty. Then, there were flocks of happy birds and

big field rats scavenging the fields. On one occasion, our "uncle"

on the north side of our Main House gave my grandmother a big

piece of dried meat we all thought that was a big squirrel with its

head chopped off. Our "uncle" said it was soaked in old soy sauce

and wind dried. It was almost golden color, aromatic and had the

look of a good tasting piece of dried meat. My grandma cut it into

small pieces and steamed it on the top of the rice. We ate it and

it was good.

One day, brother Doug and I walked past the house of our distant

uncle on the north side, and we saw him putting out four freshly

cleaned "squirrels", all nicely stretched and mounted to dry. We

were curious where he got all his squirrels as we hadn't seem too

many around, and we knew they were fast runners and hard to

catch, except with a good slingshot. Brother Doug asked uncle

where did he find those squirrels, and uncle said what "squirrels",

they were big field rats I caught from the paddy fields. Oops!

We used to have rice grains and rice stalks drying on our court

yard during this time of the year but as the Cooperative wanted to

grow what they wanted, the crops were changed almost every

year, from rice to cantaloupes and back to rice, to sugar canes and

to soya beans and back to rice again. The Coop transferred the

rice grains to somewhere else for drying and cleaning so our court

wasn't used for drying grains anymore. My sisters loved the front


court and it became their favorite hangout place. They played all

kinds of games and there were always some kind of game

drawings on the court.

We caught catfish out of the fields, little fish, mud eels, frogs and

Wor-Chung (rice-worms). My grandma and my older sister loved

rice-worms for dinner. We didn't always had rice worms all the

time, they showed up very suddenly and only occasionally in the

rice paddies. One day in the early morning after a night rain, we

were just making breakfast and we heard my older sister yelling

outside.

She was on her way to the outhouse, by passing the dike east to

the Chai-Fon she noticed a swarm of things wiggling and

struggling in the water tried to get into and out of the paddy field

through a narrow opening on a small mud dike just after the small

pond of water draining into the paddy field from the creek tunnel

under the dike. She knew these were delicious rice worms.

It was a piece of cake to remove them out of there with a small

net, My older sister and Doug had caught half of a bucket of fat

and ugly looking rice worms enough to fill up four big china dish-

bowls.

My grandmother was using the wok, so she just refilled the wok

with some water at the bottom and asked us to put more wood

and hay into the stove to bring the water to boil. She just

sprinkled some coarse salt over the rice worms and instantly they

all burst like an bad egg was cracked. She put a few long pieces of

flat bamboo on the bottom of the wok and stacked the four dish

bowls over them, covered the wok with the heavy wooden cover

and steamed the rice worms inside.

We had breakfast, lunch and dinner with those worms. They just

tasted like steamed scramble eggs with some spices on them, and

we had quite a few rice worm days in the years.

In the later part of the 1950s, things in 18-Mu had changed

dramatically.


My grandmother had to go back to Hong Kong, and she took my

two sisters with her. My two oldest brothers went back to Hong

Kong one after the other, and my mother was ready to leave with

the twin sisters to Hong Kong very soon. But first, we had to leave

18-Mu.

Six of us, my mother, the twins, Doug, Ging and I moved to Fong-

Tsuen, a suburb of Canton (Guang Zhou), the biggest city in the

province. My parents had some property there.

Fong-Tsuen was only about an hour's walk from 18-Mu and in the

south-west side of Canton. My parents had three townhouses on

the street, each had three stories and a sky garden on the top. We

settled on the ground floor of the very first townhouse. The

ground floor had a kitchen at the very back, three bedrooms and

two sitting rooms. There were other people living on all the other

stories. There were no gardens, no other space. Just out of the

front door was the street, next to the house on one side was also

a paved street, and the other side was other townhouses.



The townhouse complex was built right at the edge of a narrow

river, a small estuary of Pearl river. The back door of the ground


floor was the river, the back door opening was blocked by three

big vertical poles only, and there was no door. if I had to swim in

the river I just had to lift the middle pole up, set it on the side and

I could just jump in at high tides. At low tides, we were 10 feet

from the water. All the dirty water and solid waste from the

residents were dump into the river. I definitely did not want to

swim in there because it smelled and I saw filth and garbage

everywhere in the water even in high tides. This wasn't the same

river that we had in Sam-Bok-Kew.

In the front was a well paved six feet wide concrete walk path

with the edges depressed so rain water could drain. The same

kind of townhouses were on the other side of the walk path. It

only took a few minutes of walking to the nearest market with

plenty of people.

Very soon after the move, my mother and the twins were gone to

Hong Kong and our Soak-Por (wife of my granduncle who was also

in Hong Kong) came to live and take care three of us. My mother

and my grandmother took turns coming back from Hong Kong

taking along lots of food items for us every time. They didn't

usually stay very long, but came back to see us periodically again,

and again.

Brother Doug, Ging and I still went to the same schools. We

already changed our schools long before moving to Fong-Tsuen. I

only stayed in Law-Kar-Tze for two years and then moved to this

school in Fa-Day, which was very close to the market place. Ging

was in another school closed to me and brother Doug stayed in

his old school, and still not too far from us. It took Ging and I less

than twenty minutes getting to our schools. We went to school

together and came back home together since we moved to Fong-

Tsuen.

I didn't walk with Doug to school any more since the move

because he was always busy with his peers doing many different

things, and I had to take care of brother Ging more often. We

didn't see each other as much as in 18-Mu. Brother Doug was a

Hung-Lan-Gun (Red Guard).


Brother Ging complained often and told us that he missed all the

activities in 18-Mu, especially playing with Ah-Choy. He sat around

the house a lot and played sometimes with some neighbor kids of

his age just outside next to our townhouse.

My school was still beautiful. There was a brick entrance gate

proudly displaying our school name on the top. Just outside the

gate, there were benjamina trees on one side and different shops

on the other side. There used to be very crowded in this place

when I first started coming here but people were getting less and

less as the shops had less and less stuff to sell.



We used to attend school full time with classes scheduled for the

whole day. After we moved to our new home, I needed only to

stay in classes for half a day, and then the whole class would be

out doing different chores and projects for the rest of the school

day, like removing weeds from the fields, patrolling public areas

to go after passerby who threw garbage or spit on the floor and

gave them warnings or fines, cleaning up streets, helping to take

down iron bars from the windows of the houses around the

school area and building little furnaces to make steel.


There was no homework to do and we just had to recite

quotations from the little Red Book from time to time. We didn't

even have to worry about where to eat our lunches, as they were

always provided for us on the third floor of a nearby restaurant

which, I was told, the building still belonged to my parents. We

had enough rice and vegetables to eat for lunches and usually we

only ate some kind of pork meat once a week, chicken and beef

were rarely available.

I loved to eat my big bowl of rice for lunch. I usually mixed the rice

with a big spoon of spicy pepper sauce, a lot of lard and "old" soy

sauce. I just continuously shuffled the rice into my mouth with my

chopsticks in one seating, and I was done. There was nothing else

available to eat. I was happy because I was always kept busy and

always around a big group of classmates. I had no home work and

had no worry. I didn't even miss my mother and my grandmother.

When I walked through the school gate, and immediately to my

left there was a small pond with koi fish in it and then, there was a

very big and tall Kapok tree with very pretty badminton-shuttle-

like bright red flowers way high on the canopy. I was hit on the

shoulder by one of the falling flowers once, and it hurt a little, but

the Kapok flower was truly beautiful with bright orange and

purple center and thick shiny flower pedals. The offices and class

rooms were built and appeared on the right side. There were six

class rooms in a row inside a single story building and it ended

with a much bigger room served as the kitchen and cafeteria.

There was a sheltered long corridor joining all the front doors of

the classrooms and the cafeteria.

Each classroom had a lots of glass windows, and from outside, I

could see all the students inside. Immediate from the corridor

was the wide and long dirt playground with a elevated stage on

the entrance side. There was another big pond with beautiful

rocks surrounded it just at the back of the stage, which had a tall

wall between the pond and the stage. There were six more

classrooms on the left side of the playground, and they were all

inside a brick building. My classroom was in one of those rooms.


Joining the dirt playground, there was also a full size dirt

basketball court with real baskets on both ends. There was a row

of dormitory further from the basketball court and those houses

were for the teachers. Not too far away was a big isolated

outhouse with one side for boys and the other for girls.

One side of the basketball court was backed into an ornamental

plants garden which was owned by one of my classmates, who

was a paraplegic. He was always on a wooden wheel chair. He

always had someone to pick him up after school.

He was a tough boy and sometimes we walked him home as the

entrance of his house was on the dirt road and in the direction

leading to our home. We had to exit the school entrance and

made a big circle back to where his house entrance was. On a few

occasions, when his help was late showing up, and when no

teachers were around, he wanted me and a few school mates to

scale him up the wall of the basketball court and over to his

property. Those were hair raising moments. I didn't know how we

managed it but each time we were successful getting him and his

wheel chair and everyone else over the wall. We got him home

the short way and I got my short cut to home as well. Those were

the few times the school was not too happy with what we did.

Tens of millions of people spoke Cantonese in the province of

Guangdong and in Hong Kong. Once we stepped inside the school,

Mandarin speaking only. All classes were given in Mandarin. It

was very easy to learn Mandarin as the written words were the

same as Cantonese. It was a kind of automatic thing, when we

were out of school, we all conversed in Cantonese, and when we

were in school, we all talked in Mandarin. Each morning after the

bell, we had our morning exercise in the assembly play ground

with the elevated stage and the basketball court. Then we

attended classes, studied literature, history, mathematics, arts

and gym. The school provided lunch for every student. After a

short nap, we had various organized activities around the

neighborhood community and farms. There was no classes to

attend in the afternoon.


Sometimes, some classmates were picked to help in big projects,

like road building, dike building and bridge building. Usually, all

students enthusiastically volunteered for those activities, and

some kids always felt disappointed if they weren't selected. I was

always happy because I was always selected. Many of those

afternoon organized activities lasted only two or three hours

each. Then we had "homework" and assignments.

Some assignments lasted for weeks or even months. I had been

killing flies and stuffing them inside empty match boxes provided

by the school for as long as I could remember. I needed to return

a few matchboxes of smashed dead flies to school each week to

meet voluntary "quotas". I just went around with a fly swatter

provided by the school and when I saw a fly resting still, I smashed

it with the swatter and then used a toothpick to bring it in the

match box. It took quite a few smashing to fill up a match box.



Then there was another fun assignment after school.

We were given power to warn, "harass" and even fine big people

who threw their cigarette buds on the street, spit on the street,

left garbage on the street, parents who allowed their kids to pee


or poo on the street, and any acts or actions that could cause

harms to public health and damage property on the street.

We all wore a red scarf on our necks, because we were all Red

Guards. We followed our group leaders, always a teacher or two

and a Red Guard platoon leader who wore an additional red band

on his arm with a horizontal white bar printed on it. We usually

position ourselves on any major intersections near the market

place and spread out two in a group to show our presence to the

passerby.

People usually behaved very nicely when we were present. One

day, my partner Mei-Mei and I saw this big person holding a foot

long sugar cane in his hand, obviously he was eating, munching

and walking to our direction. This was usually a potential violator

because after munching and squeezing the sugar cane juice inside

of his mouth, he usually had to spit out the fiber of the cane. He

walked pass us with a motionless look, and we decided to follow

behind him and expected to see him spit out the finished

mouthful of cane fiber on the street. He didn't look back all this

time, and we saw movements on both of his arms and elbows

from behind from time to time, and we were certain he was

chewing and munching his sugar cane as we followed. He was

clean and nothing was spit on the street after five minutes, and

we had to return to the intersection to stay closer to the group.

Later, I found out from another classmate stationed further down

the road that the man had finished eating his sugar cane and that

he saw him emptied his pocketful of sugar cane fiber into the

roadside garbage bin.

I wasn't doing too good for bring in rat tails and sparrow feet to

school. Rates and sparrows were both on the school's kill list. I

knew brother Doug excelled in catching the sparrows because we

had a few dinners featuring deep fried sparrows and sparrow

eggs. They were small, and our Soak-Por unplugged those feetless

sparrows, took out the guts and fried the whole thing including

the head, in hot oil. We just ate them whole, bones included, and

they were crunchy with a little taste of wild game but delicious.


There was another fun way to deal with sparrows. In the

afternoons when the rice paddies were almost ready for harvest,

our teachers would organize us and equip us with big noise

making things, like gongs, metal cans, solid wood blocks, cymbals

and led us to the nearby paddy fields. There were usually many

other groups of students from other schools going to the same

area. We just "played" our "music" as loud as we could for hours

as we were walking along and around, and around the fields. I

didn't hear any more birds singing, chanting and chirping in the

rice fields anymore. We turned their paradise into hell.

We had excursions in school for some weekends.

Landmarks, monuments, parks in Canton (Guangzhou) were often

visited. Guang Zhou was big and crowded. I always like this

beautiful Hoi Chu Kew (HaiZhu Bridge, Ocean-Pearl-Bridge), it

wasn't really that far away from Fong-Tsuen. Every time during

the school excursions, we passed this bridge with two distinct

semi circles on top of it. I walked on this bridge several times, and

I admired how grand it was every time I was on it.

One late spring day, we were on our way to Wong-Fa-Kwong

(Yellow-Flower-Mound ) which was a place of heroes. We always

wore our red scarves and had someone with a red flag in the front

to lead the group and a teacher behind the group. Usually, no

parents allowed with the group.

We marched out of school and walked to catch the Pearl River

ferry. The group passed in front of my house and continued

through the market place with many shops and hawkers along the

way, the passerby usually looked at us with some kind of

admiration. We crossed a few wide and short stone bridges and in

less than fifteen minutes from passing my house, we arrived at

the Cheung-Tigh (Long-Dike) on the edge of the big Pearl river,

where a ferry would take us across the Pearl river to the other

side, known as Wong-Sha (Yellow-Sand) and that was the city

boundary of Guangzhou. Wong-Sha was the terminal or station

for many routes of buses, and the trains as well.


From Cheung-Tigh, I could see the distinctive Haizhu bridge and

the Oi-Kwun (Love-Crowd) High rise building. The ferry was an old

diesel-powered iron boat and it only took a few minutes to cross

the river despite busy traffic of junks and small fishing boats in the

area. Once we left the Wong-Sha Pier, we walked to the Terminal

and boarded a big bus with many other passengers, and we were

on our way to our planned destination.

We were always energetic and cheerful while traveling together,

but the bus ride usually took a lot of steam out of us because it

was always clamped with people and it was smelly and many of us

had to stand all the way and we were choked, dizzied by the bus's

diesel fume and frequent stops.

It didn't matter what we were going to see, or how long the bus

ride was, once off the bus, we were happy and playful again.



Throughout the years, we visited the 5-story Tower, Pagodas, the

White-Cloud Mountain, Museum, 5-Ram Sculpture and Yue Xiu

Park, and many others. Yue Xui Park was my favorite. It was very

big with a lots of trees just like 18-Mu, lakes, hills, beautiful

walkways, and steps for us to play and run, and we could eat our


lunch there. Our teachers usually bought dried food and can

goods for picnics.

From 1958 to 1960 we did see our mother or our grandmother

much more often, they always brought foods from Hong Kong for

us. Our Soak-Por was still taken care of us and our 4th Auntie also

came to see us quite often.

My 4th auntie also worked in the police bureau where her

husband, our 4th uncle was the chief- of- police there. They had a

son, our cousin, called Ming-Wah. 4th Auntie and Ming-Wah

usually came to see Soak-Por and us once and awhile. Their visits

were usually quite short and we liked to play with Ming-Wah,

especially brother Ging because they were closer in age.

Just on the opposite side of the river at the back of our home,

there were no houses or shops, only a very high and long red brick

wall extended along the bank as far as my eyes could see on both

ways. I heard this was a very famous boarding private school in

the old days. There were many big trees I could see on the other

side of the red brick wall. I always looked at those tall trees by

standing at the back opening of our home and wanted to know

who were behind the wall. That place remained a mystery to me.

The river behind our house became much wider and bigger on

both directions after the section where our townhouse was. On

one rare occasion, in an early evening, brother Doug took Ging

and I to ford across the river behind the house and then we

walked along the red brick wall toward where the Pearl river was.

There was a narrow path between the red wall and the river edge.

A short while later we passed all the red brick wall and came to

the front of the structure, and the path opened up to a nicely

paved big area, and there was the entrance of the school with the

red brick wall. It was grand with three tall arched entrances, and

the center one was well over 20 feet tall, unfortunately everything

was block and it was kind of dark and I still couldn't enter or look

inside.


We continued our walk to where our river joint with the Pearl

river. Brother Doug was pretty quiet all the way, and he looked a

bit different from the normal brother Doug I knew, and he kept

glancing at both of us with a sympathetic gesture on his face and

didn't say too much.



When we got to the end of the river he decided to treat us with

Tang-Jkai-Jok (Small-boat-congee) which was a well known snack

food around the neighborhood. This was a very busy night spot

with all the little sampans mooring along the well-paved dike with

electric lights everywhere. This was like a little bay harbor


because a huge water gate was built tunnelling between the Pearl

river and our river to control water flows from Pearl river to and

from our river.

They cooked the congee with a stove from the sampan. Ging and I

always liked this place, but two of us didn't have the guts to walk

here by ourselves, because our mother told us that there were

too many unreliable strangers here. While we were eating,

Brother Doug finally told us why he was so quiet and taking us

there that night.

Brother Doug was going to Hong Kong for good very soon. He

knew Ging and I would have to stay behind with Soak-Por for a

longer while and he didn't know what would happen to us and he

didn't want us to feel too bad. He was happy that he was going to

see his other brothers and sisters again, and he was worry that he

might not be able to see us again for a very long time.

My favorite 4th Auntie invited me to stay with her family in one of

the summer days, as I was pretty bore that summer. I didn't know

where they lived in Guang Zhou and I had never visited their

home before. They always came to our house for visits and

celebrations, either in 18-Mu or Fong-Tsuen. I was happy to stay

with them and play with Ming-Wah. At the same time brother

Ging would be staying with his favorite 2nd Auntie who had 3 kids

to play with him.

She came to fetch me one weekend and helped me to pack a few

clothes, together we walked to the pier and crossed the Pearl

river in the ferry to the Guangzhou side.

Surprised to me, when we left the ferry and right by the pier, a

"private" car with a driver picked us up. I was in a bus before and I

was never been in a car before. I was excited and bounced up and

down at the back seat, and my 4th Auntie just looked at me and

laughed and laughed, she was enjoying the moment. There were

more surprises awaited me!

The car drove along the Pearl river toward the Haizhu Bridge side.

The Long Dike along the River was very clean and pretty because


everywhere was paved with white stones and planted with

beautiful trees. From the river edge and the wide walkway of the

road to the vertical face of the Dike to the water, everywhere was

stone paved.

When our school group went for excursions in Guangzhou, we

passed this exclusive area many times. These were beautiful man-

made small islands just off the shore. There were several of them

running parallel to the road and walkways on the bank of the

Pearl River, and each island had at least one fancy stone bridge

connecting it to the main road on the bank. Those stone bridges

were very well built with the middle section arched like an upside

down half moon. Both sides of each bridge were heavily

decorated with ornate white stones all the way down to the

water, and there was an arch opening right in the middle side of

the stone bridge for small boats to pass through.



The edge of the islands were paved from the very top and all the

way down to the water and beyond with white stones and they

looked super clean and beautiful. And then, there were the fancy

big trees some with characters, placed just at the perfect spots

and matched harmoniously with all these three-story western


looking villas. There were flower patches everywhere. The row of

villas was also built with white color materials with green color

roof trims. This stretch of small unique islands was linked to each

other with flyovers or stone bridges. I knew this very unique and

special garden-like place was called Sha-Min (Sand-Surface) and I

heard it was reserved for foreigners only.

Our car passed the first island and started to turn onto the next

stone bridge. It drove over the bridge and zigzagged to the front

of a big villa and stopped.

Before I knew what to make out of this, my 4th Auntie opened the

car door and stepped out, she turned around and asked me to

carry my small bag and come out of the car. She said we had

arrived and that they lived there. I was speechless and my eyes

were wide open and I just uttered the sound "wow".

Everything was so neat. I got to sleep on the second floor all by

myself in a bedroom. Inside the house was bright and airy with big

framed glass windows on all sides and there were drapes, and

even a stylish mosquito net hanging from the ceiling and over my

bed. That bed was soft, tall and big with four poles on the corners

stretched almost to the ceiling. It had everything on that floor and

I didn't have to clean myself on the river or dash out for outhouse.

With beautiful scenery outside of all the windows and I could stay

there forever.

One day, 4th Auntie took Ming-Wah and I to Ly-Chee Wan (Ly

Chee Bay) scenic area to play and eat. I loved that place and I

liked the food there. On our way back, she told me that brother

Ging would go to Hong Kong first with Soak-Por before Brother

Doug. That was really good news, but I was immediately feeling

sad and at the same time shockingly happy and I really didn't

know what should I react. I felt very uncertain.

We visited many places and ate quite a lots of meals. Sometimes,

with 4th uncle in the car, the driver would take us for a very long

drive up the mountains and down to the water fronts and visited

some unknown places along the way. I really enjoyed the week-

long stay with them.


Brother Ging and Doug were home when 4th Auntie took me

home that day. Ging was happy that he would be leaving for Hong

Kong soon, but he was unhappy because Doug or I wasn't going

with him.

One very early morning, brother Ging was nicely dressed and

Soak-Por was carrying one big bag on one hand and holding Ging

with her other hand, and she said to Brother Doug and I that she

would be back in one week. Brother Doug and I walked them out

the door and then all the way to the ferry, and Doug helped Soak-

Por to carry her bag along the way. We tried to be happy, but

none of us was in the mood to talk very much. Brother Doug with

his hand on my shoulder both stood motionless near the pier until

the ferry carrying brother Ging and Soak-Por had reached Wong-

Sha, on the other side of the river.



We returned home and expected that Yee-Ma (Mother's Sister)

would show up later of the day to stay with us for a few days. I got

back to bed to catch up with my sleep, as I wasn't sleeping that

great with brother Ging and I both woke up several times during

the night.


I was happy to see Yee-Ma again that day.

While I was helping Yee-Ma washing the rice and she was busy

preparing dinner in the kitchen at the back, I heard someone was

opening the front door, and that must be brother Doug because

he was the only one not in the house, and it was almost dinner

time. I wasn't quite right.

Walking down the corridor toward us were brother Ging and

Soak-Por! I dropped my rice cooker and stood up with water still

running down from my hand. Ging said that he was hungry, and

he wanted to eat! They both looked very tired.

Soak-Por told us that Ging was not allowed to leave China

because incomplete documentation or his age problem, and she

asked us to add more rice in the pot because they needed to eat.

Brother Ging kept very quiet and didn't say too much as usual. I

was happy they were back, and I was sad that Ging didn't make it

through to Hong Kong.

Yee-Ma was very kind and always very nice to us. She was a little

bit plump and rounded just like my mother. She was always happy

to talk about Ah-Pu, her only son and our first cousin, who was

sent to some school in the north and didn't come home that often

and she didn't get to visit him often either. She missed Ah-Pu

terribly.

One day, my mother showed up with new clothes for Ging and me

and Doug, and two big bags of foods from Hong Kong. She had

raisin breads, crackers in sealed big tin cans, candies in wrappers

and some beef and pork jerky. These were all my favorites so

were Ging's. She stayed with four of us for about a week, and

then she took brother Doug with her to Hong Kong. I never seen

brother Doug again in Fong-Tsuen. I wondered why didn't she

take brother Ging with her instead.

Bother Ging was even quieter after being returned from the

border. With only three of us, the house was getting quiet all the

time. Soak-Por always busy sewing something or preparing

something for dinner. Ging went to school and came back and


played with himself quietly. I was kept busy with school activities

all the time. In early 1960, drastic things were started to happen

again when I was just turning 12 years old.

One day in school, my teacher handed me a red arm band with a

horizontal bar printed on it and told me that I was promoted to be

a leader. Then, about a few months after that, in one early

summer day when brother Ging and I were just out of school, 4th

Auntie came to our house with a big smile on her face and told

Soak-Por that she had to take Ging and I to Hong Kong soon. She

gave me a passport with I being the holder and brother Ging as an

dependent of me. Ging and I were joyful as we knew we were

going to see our brothers and sisters again very soon.



My 4th Auntie asked a shoe smith to custom-made a pair of low

cut leather boots for me as a parting gift. I sensed that she was

very sad to see us go, but again she said firmly that we had to go.

In one very early morning before sunrise in the summer of 1960,

brother Ging and I both put on our new clothes, which our mother

brought us when she was visiting us the very last time in Fong-

Tsuen. I wore a pair of navy blue shorts with pockets on the side

and a new slightly over sized T-shirt, a pair of new socks and the


new boots from 4th Auntie. Both of us had new haircuts, we

looked nice and clean. We picked up our already packed bags and

walked out of our door.

Soak-Por locked the front door behind us and it was the last time I

heard the door closed in Fong-Tsuen, and three of us headed to

Hong Kong.

I could hear the echoes when my boots hit the pavement while

we were walking toward the market place. There were still street

lights but no passerby on the street, it was only the echoes that

followed us, and we didn't talk. None of our neighbor kids or our

friends knew we were leaving for good.

Once we got off the ferry from Wong-Sha pier we walked to the

train terminal nearby. Soak-Por bought our train tickets to

Shenzhen Lo-Wu and then we had to wait. Lo-Wu was the border

point separating China from Hong Kong. As time went, there were

more and more people showing up in the train terminal. It

seemed that we were sitting there forever.

Soak-Por was just sitting there looking a bit tired already and

didn't talk to us that much. We clutched our bags sitting side by

side and just watching the moving crowds, and occasionally

brother Ging pulled some jerky out of his pocket and offered me a

bit or two. We finally boarded the train and Ging got to sit by the

window. The train was moving...

Soak-Por had to wipe and clean brother Gin's face for a few times

as every time he stuck his head out of the train window, he got hit

by the black soot from the train engine. When we were just

almost out of snacks in our pockets, the trained arrived at Lo-Wu,

the border to Hong Kong.

We lined up with Soak-Por in front of us. After a long wait, we

were finally in front of the immigration counter. Soak-Por was

cleared by the officer quite fast and while I was producing my

passport to the officer she was already a distance behind the

counter walking to the Hong Kong side.


I put up a big smile in front of the officer and he kept looking at us

and he asked me a few questions and I answered him as much as I

knew. One time, he was halfway up his seat looking for brother

Ging who was timidly hiding behind me. The officer was nice, with

a smile he asked Ging to step out, and I heard "chop" "chop" he

gave me back my passport and motioned us to pass.

I didn't see Soak-Por any more after we picked up our bags and

started walking on the bridge to the Hong Kong side. There were

no people on the short bridge and we could only walked forward,

very quickly we reached the end where a few uniformed Hong

Kong police were standing. I was happy to see Soak-Por there but

I was still uncomfortable and I didn't know why.

We had no problem passing the Hong Kong immigration. Brother

Ging and I were in Hong Kong!

We were the last two in our family to leave China, and our family

lost practically everything left behind.

Painting 3504 by Bigan Fanli Limited Edition, Showcase Framed - www.BiganFanli.com

The End - Part I - "Love Nature, Live Free & Be Happy Always - My Life Re-

Discovered" - By Bigan Fanli 2016 (Part I -total words - -32,000+)


To be continued...

Part II - Surviving the "Concrete Jungle" and University Life in USA (1960 to 1974)

Part III & IV - Rooting Saga in Canada (1974 -2016)

THE GREATEST GOOD ONE CAN DO IS TO

CULTIVATE ONESELF IN ORDER THAT ONE MAY BE OF GREATER USE TO HUMANITY

LOVE NATURE, LIVE FREE & BE HAPPY ALWAYS

MY LIFE RE-DISCOVERED - PART I

Herbert Lee a.k.a. Bigan Fanli 2016

www.BiganFanli.com

www.myPrettyWall.com)

love nature, live free & be happy always - part i

Documents