Memoir of Half a Banana

The Little Girl in the Big Yard

The sun was bright, the air was warm, and the afternoon was peaceful and lazy with the sound of cicadas. Having just finished their lunch, the adults retreated to the guest house to resume their game of mahjong. The main house and the big, walled-in yard were empty once more. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves. Under the trees, the dense shade was cool and inviting. After putting some candy and crackers in a small basket, the little girl went exploring in the yard again. Shoo! Shoo! Pretending to be a goatherd, the little girl goaded her grandmother’s chicks with a stick until they scattered to hide under a bush. A wasp dragging a plump caterpillar caught her eye. She squatted and watched intently until they disappeared into a hole in the ground. Then she stood in front of a low branch and watched a spider going round and round the spokes of its web, filling it with a continuous, evenly spaced line of silk. That is one of my earliest and fondest memories from sixty years ago. I was the little girl in the big yard.

I was born in my grandparents’ house in 1949, the year of the Ox. The Chinese civil war had just ended. The winners of the civil war, Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, founded the People’s Republic of China on the China mainland. The losers, President Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party (aka Kuomintang, or KMT), retreated to Taiwan, an island province of China. My grandfather, my father, and most of my uncles were in the military, so they followed Chiang Kai-shek and retreated to Taiwan, along with one million or so other mainlanders (military personnel and civilians from the mainland). In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek continued his reign of the Republic of China (not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China). Both regimes claim to be the legal government of China, but in 1971 the United Nations formally recognized the People’s Republic of China on the mainland.

I never experienced the turmoil of war. The closest I came to war was hearing air raid sirens when I was small. Everyone would look up and search for planes in the sky, but no enemy planes ever came. My grandparents’ and my parents’ generations, however, experienced the dangers and atrocities of war firsthand.

China had been engaged in wars for over a hundred years during the last two centuries. First, in an effort to open China’s doors for trade, Great Britain forced opium onto the Chinese people and started the First Opium War in 1840. Imperial China (the Qing Dynasty) lost battle after battle to the foreign powers, and the unequal treaties that followed reduced China to a semi-colonial country. The weak and corrupt Qing Dynasty was eventually overthrown by revolutionaries led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. My grandfather took part in the revolutionary war too. After the founding of the Republic of China in 1911, warlords occupied and expanded their territories until Chiang Kai-shek defeated them and united the country. Then, when my father was five, Japan invaded China. They first took over China’s northeast provinces in 1931, and in 1937 they opened fired on Beijing, vowing to annihilate China in three months. That Second Sino-Japanese War later became part of World War II. After World War II, civil war resumed between the two political parties. My father and other family members fled first from Japanese soldiers and then from the communists, until they eventually escaped to Taiwan.

The Japanese invasion wakened tremendous patriotism in the Chinese people; young men and women eagerly enlisted. Barely sixteen at the time, my father was too young to enlist. He wanted to enter a military school but was still two years shy. My father’s older brother, my uncle Timothy, suggested Father assume Timothy’s identity to take the entrance exam. My father passed the exam. Instead of the normal four years, he graduated after two years of concentrated teaching at the quartermaster school because military personnel were urgently needed. Just before graduation, the principal announced, If any of you wish to change your name, you may do so now. My father and a few others took the opportunity to set the record straight.

Inspired by my grandfather, a high-ranking navy officer, nine of my uncles joined the navy. Only my father and Uncle Michael, an uncle-in-law, served in the air force. My father was a financial officer, but Uncle Michael was a bona fide pilot and squad leader. He flew the U-2, the famous high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. My parents lived in the northern city of Taipei, Taiwan, in an air force community, and my grandparents lived in a navy community in the southern city of Kaohsiung. When I was about to be born, my mother quit her job and went to my grandparents’ house in Kaohsiung. She gave birth to me at home with the help of a midwife. One month later, she went back to Taipei to seek employment again, and my grandparents raised me until I was eleven.

Grandpa was the director of the Finance Department in the Chinese Navy. As the head of our clan, my grandfather took in many uncles, aunts, and cousins in Taiwan before they settled elsewhere. A group of Grandpa’s friends used to come sing Peking Opera with him every weekend. Even though they were amateurs, they were so good that they performed on stage many times. Whenever they practiced, I played far away from their deafening gongs, drums, and high-pitched singing. However, I loved to peek into Grandpa’s redwood chest to admire the beautifully embroidered brocade costumes.

When I was a bit older, another group of friends came to the house almost every day to play mahjong with my grandparents. Children were not allowed to watch because they might learn to gamble too early. My oldest cousin was the only exception. While holding a baby in her arms, she would sit behind the player for whom she was babysitting. When the adults played mahjong, I was alone and free. I had all the time in the world to spend by myself. Other than exploring in the yard, I helped Grandma pick straw mushrooms after rainy days and plucked snails off mossy stone walls. After stepping on them to crush their shells, I fed them to Grandma’s ducks.

Our navy military community was divided into several villages. Peddlers rode from village to village on bikes and called out their wares. Steamed buns, pork buns, and green-onion rolls! Combs, hair bands, and knickknacks! Scissors and knives! Sharpen your scissors and knives! Sometimes Grandma let in a peddler with his cartload of goods so she could take her time in choosing small tools, sewing notions, or kitchen needs. From time to time, a shoe repairman came into our yard to replace the rubber strips on our wooden sandals. Grandma called them clickety-clack boards because of the noise they made. They were only worn outdoors for obvious reasons.

Occasionally Grandma let a woman come in to pluck fine hairs off of her face with cotton threads. In China’s olden times, a young woman must have her facial hair removed to let people know she was about to be married. Officially called opening the face, it is an initiation ritual for the bride-to-be, and only on her first facial. Afterward, the facial is simply called twisting the face, referring to the method used, not the level of pain. Still practiced in some places today, it is also known as threading.

At a time when nobody had very much, the villagers made do with whatever they had. Housewives swapped recipes on how to utilize the skin, stem, and root of vegetables instead of discarding them. Babies wore elastic bands around their waists to hold up cloth diapers cut from worn-out sheets or clothing, and toddlers (boys and girls alike) wore open-crotch pants. I had worn such pants when I was little.

There were public showing of movies from time to time in our village. On movies nights, excitement filled the air. By dusk the villagers filled the street on both sides of the screen, stretched out between two lampposts. They sat on stools they had brought from home and socialized. The children zigzagged through any opening in the crowd, laughing and chasing one another. The black-and-white films were a couple of year old and often scratched, but because entertainment was few and far in between, people still welcomed those movies very much.

We made our own toys too. I remember my uncles and cousins grinding clam shells on the cement floor to make holes in the hinges for whistles or wind chime. They also hammered out metal caps of empty bottles and then punched holes and threaded strings through them. By twirling the disc in front of their chests, they could make the disc hum by varying the tension in the strings. We made our own jianzi, too, the Chinese version of hacky sack. Traditionally made with chicken feathers, we made it with fringed paper strips so as not to bother any chickens. My father used to kick jianzi with his siblings. We stood in a circle and fed the jianzi to one another, he said. The person receiving it would catch the jianzi on the back of his foot and kick it to another person. A skilled player could make the jianzi land on his head, or even his temple.

Grandma sewed small bags from fabric scraps and filled them with rice. With four or five of those bags, my cousins and I would throw one bag into the air while doing things with the other bags—the Chinese version of jacks. Adults also folded paper into monkeys, frogs, boats, hats, and balls for me. There was no fancy origami paper then; any scratch paper would do.

I also read like crazy. My mother says I was very easy to take care of; just give me a book, and I would be quiet for hours. I am forever grateful to Uncle Timothy, who gave me a set of translated books before immigrating to the United States with his wife Donna. I immersed myself in a wealth of knowledge: natural science, astronomy, physics, and chemistry, all written in simple language to keep a young reader fascinated. I was enthralled by Greek mythology, Irish fairy tales, One Thousand and One Nights, and James Baldwin’s 30 Famous Stories Retold and 50 Famous Stories Retold. Left alone most of the time, I let my imagination run wild. I became interested in all things mysterious and unexplainable. Even now, whenever a trailer of a vampire movie or a documentary about witches or ghosts pops up on TV, my children tease me, You want to watch that, huh, Mommy?

My brother Yukon, five years younger than me, was also born in my grandparents’ house. My mother often wonders where she got the courage to give birth at home, but she was not scared at the time. Although born in Taiwan, we are not Taiwanese. We are Chinese because that is our nationality. In Taiwan, mainlanders such as my family are called people from other provinces. The Taiwanese call themselves people of this province, although their forefathers came from China just two hundred years ago. In general, the mainlanders feel a strong connection toward China, the Taiwanese a little less so. Actually, some Taiwanese would rather see Taiwan become an independent nation. Perhaps due to Stockholm syndrome, they even feel a special closeness to Japan after Taiwan was occupied by Japan for fifty years (1895–1945). I never learned to speak Taiwanese due to lack of exposure and necessity, but my father made a special effort to learn the dialect. He listened to Taiwanese stations while driving to work, and he could sing quite a few popular songs in Taiwanese.

Other than Yukon, I was closest to my oldest cousin. Five years older than me, my cousin and her mother lived with us for quite a few years. She lost her father to a Japanese bombing before she was even born. However, instead of being pampered, my cousin was not treated very well in my grandparents’ home. The only reason I can think of is my grandparents did not like her mother. They probably believed that that daughter-in-law had jinxed their son to an early death. Because her mother was not in favor, my cousin fell in the same category. Most of our uncles and aunts treated her a little unkindly too, if only to please my grandparents.

My cousin was not beaten or starved, but she was excluded from nicer things. To this day, my cousin will not eat steamed rice. I’ve eaten rice that has gone bad too many times, she says. In my grandparents’ house, children usually ate in the courtyard first so that the adults could enjoy a peaceful meal and a fresh table in the dining room. I was maybe five or six when my cousin took me aside one day after an adult had dished out our lunch. She transferred all the meat and vegetables from her bowl into mine, which already held more meat and vegetables than she had gotten. Even though I tried to stop her, she insisted on eating her bowl of white rice with nothing but her own tears. I understood for the first time the meaning of unfairness and abuse, and how hurt the children were made to feel. I will never understand why adults would inflict such pain, intentionally or otherwise.

My parents were probably the only family members who were good to my cousin, bringing her gifts each time they came to Kaohsiung and treating her with genuine love and kindness. My cousin left with her mother when that aunt decided to remarry. My grandfather got very angry the night that aunt asked to leave; I remember hearing loud arguments from the living room. The next day, Grandpa took out a classified ad in the papers stating that all family ties were severed between our family and that aunt.

Grandpa was an authoritative figure and a little intimidating at times, so I was closer to my grandmother. Grandma was the perfect housewife in my eyes. To save money, she recycled everyone’s sweaters. I liked to sit with Grandma and my oldest cousin in the evenings to help Grandma take a sweater apart and wind the yarn around the legs of an upturned stool before washing it. I was less involved with winding clean yarn into balls because I dropped the balls on the floor too often. One evening I was playing with Yukon in the backyard, and Grandma called me into the house. I was hot and sweaty, but she made me try on a turtleneck sweater she had just finished knitting. The colorful sweater fitted me fine, but when I stripped it off, I was very surprised to see all the knots on the underside.

Grandma was a wonderful cook. She used to cook for eight or more people every day. There was a male servant to help with heavy chores, but Grandma did all the cooking. She always produced delicious meals from an endless array of different-tasting dishes. She alternated between rice, congee, noodles, dumplings, and other pasta so we never got tired of her cooking. I used to follow her around as she picked beans, washed vegetables, gutted fish, chopped meat, or kneaded dough. I liked to watch her press her thumb against a ball of dough and scrape off small pieces of cats’ ears on the table, the Chinese version of shell pasta. Sometimes she would stuff a slice of cucumber or carrot into my mouth, or give me a small piece of dough to play with. I was mesmerized watching her chop vegetables briskly with fingers curled inward and knuckles touching the broad side of the cleaver to guide each cut. I especially enjoyed dumpling night: the whole family made dumplings together and chatted while a big pot of dumplings boiling on the stove sent mouth-watering smells our way.

Grandma knew how to pickle vegetables, make salty eggs, cure meat, and stuff sausages. If mangoes or bananas were too green to eat, she would bury them in raw rice to ripen them. She made rice crackers out of steamed rice for breakfast and rinsed flour out of dough to get gluten. My fondest memory was coming home from school and Grandma telling me, Go see what’s under the stove. I would run to the kitchen, grab a stick, and poke at the pile of ashes. I could usually find some sweet yam buried there, still warm and smelling wonderfully sweet.

Our big yard was not only a treasure trove of wonders of nature; it also gave us lots of flowers and fruits. Every morning after Grandma had combed her hair and wrapped it into a bun, she would send me to the backyard to pick some jasmine or white champak to wear in her hair. Like Grandma, I am partial to flowers that smell good, especially osmanthus. Grandma used to make flower sauces by marinating osmanthus with sugar and red rose petals with sugar. When we ate sweet dumplings, those sauces gave fragrance and beautiful color to an otherwise plain snack.

A grove of banana trees grew by our koi fish pond near the kitchen. Behind the banana trees, a huge mango tree towered over the back wall. Hundreds of mangoes dangled from thick branches overhead above roof tops. I still prefer the local species of small and fibrous mangoes over the large, genetically enhanced mangoes on the market today. I like the local mango’s sweet-and-sour flavor and the fond memory it evokes.

In the middle of our backyard, there was a big longan tree. Longan literally means dragon eye. Perfectly round and about the size of a grape, fresh longan fruit has a thin, soft, brown shell that is easy to tear open. Inside the shell, a translucent layer of sweet and juicy flesh is wrapped around a big, black stone. Not that I have ever seen a Chinese dragon up close, but I do see the dragon eye resemblance. Due to its medicinal properties, the fruit is also dried and sold in Chinese herb pharmacies. One summer, the dragon eye fruit was ripe for the picking, so the whole family got together. An uncle climbed up the tree. After tearing off small branches laden with fruit, he would drop them to the ground, and the children would haul them away for further trimming. Suddenly Yukon, then only four or five, let out a terrible scream and threw down the branches he was carrying. His neck and chest were red and swollen from red ants’ bite. From then on, children were spared the job of fruit picking.

Pomelo, Buddha fruit (aka cherimoya), and wax apple trees (jambu or bell fruit) also grew in our yard, but we always had to cut the wax apples open to make sure there were no worms inside. We did not use any pesticides or fertilizers. The only plant Grandma fertilized was Dutchman’s pipe flower (night-blooming cereus), whose delicate flowers only bloom late at night and only for a few hours. That is why the Chinese describe something good but short-lived as the blossoming of Dutchman’s pipe flowers. Each time Grandma gutted fish, she would pour bloody water and fish entrails over the plant to encourage its growth. Guess what I thought of when I watched Little Shop of Horrors?

Upon an Innocent Time

I drew a lot when I was small. My favorite subjects were princes and princesses, fairies and mermaids, as well as heroes and heroines from the Peking Opera. I remember going to see Peking Opera in the city with my grandparents and falling asleep toward the end. Grandma would nudge me and say, Wake up. Red Maiden is about to come out! Of course the show was not always about The Story of the West Chamber, in which Red Maiden, an outgoing, pretty servant-maid, acted as the go-between for her mistress and a young scholar. But Grandma always used that character to entice me to open my eyes. How I could fall asleep amid the noisy performance of Peking Opera was a mystery.

Seeing how I loved to draw, Grandpa hung a small blackboard outside the main house in the front yard. Once, after drawing a boat in a stormy sea, I wrote its name on the side of the boat. Grandpa happened to walk by with some friends, and I heard him say, Look! Of all the names she could pick, she named it Safety! I believe Grandpa approved of me.

Grandpa once took me to a fair of some sort, and I got to see something extraordinary: the flea circus. In a tent-like enclosure, two rows of chairs were set up in front of a small table. To make the fleas visible, they dressed the fleas in red paper clippings. We watched intently as those red specs of paper pulled tiny wagons, danced around, and jumped over blocks on command. I knew it was the fleas performing those acts, but I did not see any actual fleas. They were just too tiny.

I was always accompanied by grown-ups when going into town. Only once was I left alone in a barber shop when the aunt who took me needed to do something elsewhere. While sitting in the big barber’s chair in front of the mirror, I waited patiently with a glass of juice and a newspaper. I wanted to read the cartoons but thought I should act mature, so I forced myself to read the news on the front page. I wanted to finish my juice too, but I thought I should behave more like an adult, so I deliberately left some juice in the glass. I never did that again. Now I flip to the cartoon section right away and slurp up my beverage to the last drop. I guess that is the difference between a child and a grown-up: a child is eager to grow up, and a grown-up just does not care.

Grandpa once asked me, What will you do when you grow up?

I will work and earn money.

What will you do with that money?

Instinctively I replied, I will give it to Grandma and to you, to spend however you wish.

Grandpa was very pleased with my answer. Not long after that conversation, I went to live with my parents in Taipei, and two years later we went to the United States. I wrote to my grandparents regularly, and once I enclosed a ten-dollar bill. Grandpa was overcome with pride and joy. A few weeks later, he sent me a letter with a newspaper clipping. Apparently Grandpa told the papers about me. There was a picture of me standing in front of the Congress Building, and the caption said, Filial Granddaughter Sends Money Home. A short article depicted me and the conversation between Grandpa and me, word for word. Unfortunately, that ten-dollar bill was the only money my grandparents would ever receive from me. They passed away before I could repay them for their years of kindness.

Most of the activities in my grandparents’ home took place in the courtyard between the main house and the guest house. Actually, it was a building with three adjacent rooms: the kitchen, the dining room, and the guest room, where the adults played mahjong. A roofed corridor connected the main house and the kitchen end of the guest house to shield us from the sun and the rain. Outside the kitchen were a sink and a small counter, where Grandma did all the food preparation. In the summer, the whole family often ate in the courtyard under the cool shade of two huge banyan trees.

Grandma cooked individual dishes on a small, portable charcoal stove. Inside the kitchen and connected to the back wall, there were two huge brick stoves that used firewood for fuel. Gigantic woks were set on top of those stoves to boil rice, noodles, dumplings, and anything else to be cooked in large quantity. By stacking two bamboo steamer trays over boiling water in one of the wok, Grandma steamed buns, pork buns, green onion rolls, and sugar triangles in that double-deck steamer. Another important job for those woks was to boil bathwater. There was plumbing in the house but no heater. Grandma boiled drinking water in a kettle on her charcoal stove and stored it in thermos bottles, but large amounts of hot water had to be boiled in the kitchen and taken to the bathroom in the main house. Children were sometimes washed one by one in a round, wooden tub according to their level of dirtiness. My father said when he was small, bath time was also a time of reckoning: Grandma administered punishment at bath time if children misbehaved because they would have nowhere to run.

Our bathroom was for washing and bathing only. Behind it, there was a separate toilet room. Basically, it was an indoor outhouse, and the toilet was just a hole in the ground—well, a hole in the wood-paneled floor. An open-bottom, elongated ceramic bowl etched in the floor indicated where people should squat, and a raised half-dome on one end of the bowl limited the range of stray liquid. Several feet below, human waste was clearly visible, which had to be removed by a specialist from time to time, perhaps to be processed as fertilizer at the specialist’s farm. There was also a urinal right outside the toilet room for men. The toilet paper we used was called straw paper and felt like it. Yellow, stiff, and coarse, they came in large bundles. It was the children’s job to cut them down to size. Several years later, when I went back for a visit, I was glad to see the house modernized. It now had hot water, ceramic toilet bowls, and soft toilet paper.

In between the bathroom and the toilet room, there was a wall—actually, it could only be construed as half a wall because it was only three feet wide. For no other reason than lack of space, all my certificates of award were posted on that half wall. Though not very dignified, I was still glad to have my achievements displayed somewhere. However, I probably received too many awards to warrant any excitement in my family. One day, a classmate showed off a box of crayons that her parents had given her for winning third place in class. That night at dinner, Grandpa picked up one noodle from his bowl and put it into my bowl. He smiled at me, For you. Good job on winning the first place in your class!

I understood that my parents had to work elsewhere, and so I was left with my grandparents. I also reasoned that because they were my parents, they had no obligation toward me. I tried my best to be a good granddaughter and a good student, and never gave them any trouble. I even pretended to be fine when I was sick. I did not want to worry them, I told myself, but I was really afraid of shots. Once, I was playing on the floor with Yukon, but I suddenly became drowsy. Grandma felt my forehead and discovered I had a fever. Naturally, I was given a shot and a good scolding. While lying in bed with a fever, I sometimes felt a hand on my forehead. I knew it was Grandma because her hand was cold and damp, probably from just washing vegetables or something else. Even though it sent a chill through my body, I understood that I was loved and well cared for in my grandparents’ house.

My grandparents nicknamed me the well-behaved little one for my good behavior and excellent grades, but I missed having my parents by my side. I wondered what it was like to speak my mind to my parents at anytime, to ask freely for things I wanted, or to throw a temper tantrum when I was upset. Once, instead of asking my grandparents for a new pencil box, I deliberately twisted the cover of my plastic pencil box to make a crack bigger. I was secretly hoping to receive a new replacement, but an uncle simply taped up the crack with masking tape. Not only did I still have the same old pencil box, but it now had a bigger crack and an ugly bandage!

Grandpa used to have lots of visitors. Many brought gifts of snack or fruit, as was (and still is) the social norm. Grandma kept those gifts in her room and took them out as special treats. However, she did it a little too occasionally. The fresh fruits often went bad before anyone ate them. I did not know it at the time, but my mother said Grandma was saving those goodies for Yukon and me. Grandma’s favoritism was no secret; my cousins talk openly about it today. They hold no grudge against Yukon or me because as children, we had nothing to do it. But my uncles and aunts were rather jealous of my parents for a long time.

Although sibling rivalry is common in most families, it does not exist between my two brothers and me. It may have to do with the big gap between our ages; I am five years older than Yukon and sixteen years older than Albert. I have a close relationship with them both, and I take great comfort in the love and respect I feel they hold toward me. Many a time, Yukon gave me money when I visited him and my sister-in-law, and the laptop I am using is already the second one he had bought me. Albert also wanted to give me money but I declined because with three children and a wife, his financial burden is heavier. Yukon, on the other hand, has no children, and his wife works. Once, I asked Yukon why he was so good to me. He replied, When I was going to graduate school in the States, you always gave me a couple of hundred dollars each time I came to visit. I am glad I did that, although I have no recollection