Narrative Essay: Journey Back Home

Journey Back Home

I was raised to see China and Taiwan as my mother countries, to accept my duty and pledge my loyalty to them, and to choose to be a Chinese-Filipino, not the other way around. I grew up with stories of how China once ruled almost the entire known world and how it once was, and still is, the proud empire I belong to. My grandmother told me tales of ancient heroes, how they fought and held on to the principles of tradition and age-old wisdom, and of numerous emperors, how they governed the Middle Kingdom to greatness. My father made me memorize three thousand year old Tang poems that can not be understood with mere basic knowledge of the language. I was taught to appreciate the wonders of our culture, how colorful our five thousand years worth of history was and how it was an honor to be part of it. I was born into a family that chose to be different, and though it stays in this foreign land, its heart is still in the land it left.
When I was fourteen, it was decided that I be sent to China that summer to visit my homeland and see the place my grandparents came from. My heart filled with joy as at last I would get to see the land where all my grandmother’s stories took place, to walk on the actual patch of dust where the wondrous heroes she told me about once marched on. Summer seemed too slow to come as my fourteen year old self boiled in anticipation.
When at last I arrived, I was greeted by teachers who would be accompanying me all throughout my stay in Xiamen, Fujian. They welcomed the group of Chinese-Filipino students I was in with warm hugs and smiles. As the teachers engaged me in conversation, they were surprised that I knew how to speak the language, and said they never expected a Huaqiao (a Chinese born abroad) to know how to converse in the mother tongue. They showered me with a lot more praises as is customary in meeting a new acquaintance. Anxious to help me settle in comfortably, they were very hospitable and obviously made efforts to check up on me every once in a while. They were truly gracious and most lovable people, thoughtful to say the least.
As soon as I arrived, I knew I would fall deep in love with China. From my airplane window and until I sat in the bus they drove to pick us up from the airport, my eyes were glued to the streets, the fields, the highway, the city that we passed. Everything seemed so wonderful that there was not enough time to take in everything in detail. We seemed to be driving along too fast as I tried very hard to take in a small sign, a field of grains, a lush patch of vegetable plantation, a city shop, neighborhoods that stretched miles and miles on end, one enormous department store after another; I was honestly tempted to ask the driver and the teachers around me to please slow the car to a crawl just so that I could digest everything. The teacher seated at the back of the bus smiled at me affectionately as I caught her eye, I guess she thought it was very cute that a fourteen year old boy had such curiosity to the simplest things she had been seeing all her life.
The university we stayed in was large; the campus was about half the area of the Ateneo. I was sent to a local university in Jimei, a small city by the outskirts of Xiamen. It had a nice little community surrounding it. The teachers led me and a few other students to our living quarters where we were separated into occupying two floors, one for the girls and the one a floor higher was ours. The rooms each had six-student capacities, but since the students who joined our group were only a handful, four people were assigned to a room. It had fair furnishings, simple and practical. There were three double-deckers and six cabinets on one side, six study tables on the other, and a separate room way across the room that housed three separate mini-rooms: the shower, the toilet, and three sinks. My room mates turned out to be quite cordial. They were well-mannered guys from different parts of the Philippines; I believe one was from Davao and the other two from Bacolod. I knew from the start we’d get on well.
The weeks that followed saw us eating together in the great hall (the sound of metal chopsticks clinking against each other still as sharp today as though I’d just heard it), sitting in classrooms filled with raised hands and voices struggling to put together a sentence in Chinese, and cramped along the corridors outside our sleeping quarters way past our lights-out time as we chatted up the girls staying on the floor directly below ours. Our tiny Chinese-Filipino group gradually bonded; soon, everybody knew everyone else’s names.
Looking back, what stood out shining from all the other memories we had from that trip was the places we went to and the people we met as time went by. They would be the ones none of us in the group would ever forget.
On weekday afternoons and the whole of weekends, we were free to go around the community surrounding the campus. We went down the cobbled streets to visit shops and shops lining the side walk. On the first day we were free to roam around, no one dared to venture out of the group as we were herded by the teachers who willingly gave us a tour. They told us which shops sold what and which had the best bargains on potentially nice souvenirs or gifts for Pa and Ma. Before they left us to the remainder of that first day out in the community, we were given the best lesson I guess I can never forget: ‘Laoban gei de jiaqian, dei haohao cong yiban kaishi jiang.’ (When a shop owner gives a price, start bargaining from a little below half the given amount.) That was to be our golden rule. We dispersed into twos and threes with that instruction in mind.
It took awhile, but after a week of perfecting my bargaining skills, I was crowned the head bargainer of the group. Every time a girl would see a pair of shoes she’d want to purchase, I was called in to help. Every time a gadget or a toy would catch some guy’s eye, I was hauled in to intervene. My skill was a blessing, which turned out to be a burden in disguise, though seeing smart purchases made and the satisfied smiles on my friends’ faces made the whole ordeal worth it.
Soon, the group would not go out shopping as a group anymore and my skill would then only be required in desperate situations. Groups of friends started popping out and not long after, everybody was not only shopping in the little community but even went as far as riding buses to Xiamen City to hit the great malls.
The riverstone streets smelled of freedom, the shops that lined the community and the others that lay beyond were screaming for us to explore, and we were all just ready to go out and pounce on our new found haven. Every time I would walk to the shops, I would stare down the path ahead of me and think just how different it was from the land I grew up in. Here, everyone was reminded by the past with the architecture and the prevailing wares the shops had, but also feel right in the present with the cars passing by and the high billboards standing high above the roaring crowds of the market. I feel and taste and smell and hear the China of the past, just like how my grandmother described it in her tales, but the sights that welcomed my modern eyes were familiar. A perfect harmony of the past and the present, even a sense of the future, was present in every shop, every restaurant, every alley, and every corner of my China. The feeling of getting all these things at once both overcame and awed me. I could not find a spot of the Philippines anywhere, but it was alright; I was in my homeland.
The people added magic to the splendor we saw around us. They seemed to be all smiles when they see us, and every time we passed by a humble home before reaching a shop we wanted to go to, we would see the little children, with flushed cheeks from the cold, waving at us from the inside. They were beautiful people. It would be common by the third week to hear the girls in our group chatting up about a cute guy they met inside the university campus or a ‘gorgeous hunk’ they saw in a shop somewhere in the community market, whom they would later visit as often as thrice in a week. The women were gorgeous to say the least, ivory-skinned with great expressive ‘chinky’ eyes, flushed cheeks, and sensuous red lips. It even became known that two female teachers who were fresh graduates from the university were our unanimous crushes. I now wonder who ever did let slip that little group secret.
Throughout the duration of our stay, we saw more of China and grew to love it more and more. We got to visit temples where some of my grandmother’s stories actually happened (or were at least mentioned), went to graves of ancient heroes, all of whom Gran has told me about, and had photo ops in the historical sites that led to the change in the China of today. I finished the trip, never realizing that the kid in me saw what he had only dared to dream of in the past, and had grown up into a young adolescent ready for more. What I knew though, and this was perfectly clear to me, was that I found home at last. I need not be someone who held on to what made me different from the people of that place; to the contrary, I brandished the things that I shared with them. I not only heard Gran’s stories anymore but lived them. I was in the land I was raised to love. I was home at last.