Two Cousins, Part 2: Beijing Reunion

Recently my cousin Jennifer, a junior studying Chinese literature, visited me in Beijing. She flew in from Chongqing, from various friends’ accounts a dirty, choking, uncomfortably crowded (even by Chinese standards) megalopolis that lays questionable claim to being the largest city in the world. Recently, it’s been in the news for the refreshingly harsh punishments that have been leveled against its well-connected gangsters, including the deputy police commissioner’s sister-in-law, reputedly the ringleader of a gang and dubbed the "Godmother of Chongqing." A stout, homely 46 year-old, she reputedly kept no less than 16 strapping young men as lovers in her own harem.

Jennifer is from a small town in Borneo, and in addition to Beijing’s classic sights, I made it my goal to present her sides of the city that she wouldn’t ordinarily have the chance to experience in Sichuan, but also those that she might not have expected at all. My own travels have benefited enormously from the generosity of hosts in cities ranging from Delhi to Tehran, who showed me around their hometowns and took me to meet their friends, and from those experiences, I’ve come to believe that the best insider tours of a city involve a mixture of natural beauty, interesting conversation with residents and a dash of the unexpected. Over the course of the weekend, I also had the opportunity to bond with my cousin sister, who I’d never seen before outside of the context of family reunions back in Malaysia.

Friday evening: “Old alleys, young chatter”

Having come straight from the office, I beat Jennifer and her fellow Malaysian friend Kelly, who herself is also studying Chinese literature but in Beijing, to Mao Mao Chong (“Caterpillar” bar), one of my frequent haunts. I’ve befriended the owners, recent parents Stephen and Stephanie, and they recommend a couple of house cocktails that feature home-distilled spirits such hawthorn-infused vodka for the girls, who arrive with gift-stuffed bags from Tiananmen square and shopping mecca Wangfujing. Stephen is a former pizza chef from Melbourne and his wife is from Guangdong: together, the two make a solid business pair—he makes the best (probably the only) gourmet chocolate dessert pizza in the city and Stephanie expertly handles all of the troublesome bureaucracy involved in running a small business in China. Across the walls of the bathroom, she has painted in broad Chinese characters the love story behind the bar’s name.

My girlfriend soon arrives and we take our two Malaysians along Nan Luo Gu Xiang, a traditional “hutong” district that has been renovated and sanitized into the closest thing Beijing has to New York’s Lower East Side. It’s filled with tiny boutique salons housed in sloping slate-eaved buildings that sell ironic pins, Cultural Revolution-era kitsch and bohemian houseware, interspersed by bars where hip folk singers with acoustic guitars sing out on to the din of the main street. Over dumplings, the girls tells us of their experience pursuing literature degrees in China: predictably, Chinese college students are more studious than their relatively relaxed Southeast Asian peers, and they find a lot of their classmates to be parochial and quite ignorant of things beyond their national border.

I take them to a rooftop bar housed in a banking tower in the nightlife district of Sanlitun, where a friend is having his 27th birthday party. There, amongst the elegantly landscapes of the garden bar, I introduce them to the eclectic group of expats and locals that make Beijing’s social circles so fascinating: among them AIDS researchers, political journalists, investors and climate change activists. They are particularly impressed when an American friend named John, for whom I occasionally beatbox, delivers a verse of his smooth eco-conscious Mandarin rap. Later, at “Latte”, one of the city’s utterly over-the-top, gaudy silver nightclubs, I escort the girls around like an over-protective Uncle as they observe an energetic array of live singers cover everything from Gloria Gaynor to Black Eyed Peas.

When I ask what the girls think of Chinese clubs, their reaction surprises me.

“Here it’s a lot more civil than clubs in Kuala Lumpur,” Kelly says. “Even though they’re supposed to be conservative, Malaysian youth are wilder.”

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Saturday afternoon: “Family tales”

After a first day of cultural sites, Jennifer wants to see some of Beijing’s green spaces and I accompany her to Houhai and Beihai, two classic tourist parks that lie along a stretch of lakes just west of the Forbidden City. There, we try to evade the packs of local and American tour groups, some of whom whiz past in rickshaws, snapping photos of “traditional Beijing.” After a winter that lingered months beyond its welcome date, the weather is finally warm and the streets teem with activity: retirees are singing Peking opera on the lake or writing water calligraphy, free-to-join tai chi classes are taking place beneath centuries-old gateways.

Tired from more walking than my sedentary, office-bound legs have seen for several months, I plead for us to rest in the shade in front of a man in his sixties performing various tricks on a Chinese Yo-Yo. There, Jennifer tells me of an older cousin who devoted years of her life to an ex-husband, losing her own identity and falling out of touch with family in the process. When she found out that he had been cheating on her for several years, she left him, but not before finding that she had to rebuild her own separate life once more.

“I think that an ideal woman needs to be self-reliant. She should be able to support herself with her own career, just like those friends you introduced me to last night,” Jennifer said.

It dawned on me that I was having a conversation with my cousin about women’s equality: a topic I have discussed dozens of times with various friends but never before with a member of my family. And while to a feminism-raised audience in the west the topic would sound rather outdated, with her I could still hear the urgency and relevance in her voice. Both in Malaysia and China, where notions of the ideal “passive, selfless” wife remain widespread and associating the term “strong” with a woman can contain both good and bad connotations, Jennifer’s soft soliloquy sounded positively Hilary-like.

She displayed a similarly well-constructed moral compass over the weekend several more times, and each time I heard her deliver such rousing lines, I felt a mixture of both pride and shame: pride in that I have such a passionate, ambitious, responsible cousin sister, and shame that, despite all of my privileged Western education, I haven’t played a larger role in helping shape my cousins’ lives to date. It would turn out to be the theme of the weekend: while I introduced her to some of the city’s sociable, cosmopolitan types—like an Australian-Chinese gay couple who courted in Italy, or a young chef who cooks for the Canadian embassy—and exposed her to the violent theatrics of punk rock and elegant design of boutique hotels, she would provide me lessons in familial devotion and friendship, all the while gently filling in the vocabulary in my non-articulate Mandarin. It was a bit like one of those skill swap gatherings, except free of any weight of expectation.

That evening, over roast duck in a bustling local restaurant, we discussed our two youngest cousins, each of whom lost a parent while in their infancy. Jenny told me about the way that the other kids would tease them, hurling such schoolyard insensitivities as: “You don’t have a dad…that’s why you’re so poor you have to walk to school.” These days, almost all of my cousins have left their hometown for better-paid work, and until she too left home, Jenny would take care of Hua, the baby of our generation, playing the role of big sister and counselor.

“I hope as a teacher that I can both contribute to society but also make a high salary,” she told me at a Malaysian restaurant, shortly before flying back to Chongqing, her eyes flickering. “That way I can help to pay for Hua to continue her studies in the future.”

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Sunday noon: “Return to reality”

“Going to Chongqing made me not like China,” Jenny explained over tea. “Traffic is awful, people are so uncouth…But Beijing is really different. It’s not as crowded; people are more civil.”

I ask her whether she’d ever consider moving here, but she says that teaching Chinese literature as a Malaysian national would be difficult in China, where they prefer locals. Instead, she’s been talking about going to New Zealand after she graduates, to “experience Western life.” I tell her to go to Australia instead, where she could be close to my parents.

Later, we walk through the commercial heart of Beijing: Sanlitun Village, where the consumer class aspires and acquires its Apple phones and Mango jeans. Arriving at the Opposite House, Beijing’s most famous luxury boutique hotel, I asked a local hostess if we could view one of the hotel’s legendary rooms. Though she tells us that the rooms are all fully booked, the English manager must have found enough authenticity in my English to give us a full tour, and Jenny snapped away with her camera while I schmoozed with the manager. Opposite House is the sort of uber-designed hotel where transparent showers are placed in the middle of the suite, every furnishing is hidden away and the USD $3,500 per night penthouse includes complimentary use of the hotel Maserati. She had never seen such luxury and I enjoyed utilizing my cultural capital to allow her a glimpse of it (something my salary certainly won’t provide anything more than).

“In places like those, I find that speaking English provides significantly better service,” I explain to her as we walk out. “They treat me completely differently when they know I’m Western.”

It reminded me of a humorous story that Jenny had told me earlier, from our childhood years in Borneo. When my brother and I were scheduled to arrive from Australia, Jenny’s mother wasn’t sure whether we would eat the family’s standard Asian diet and as such, had stocked up on bread and snacks before we arrived. Back then, my own family had also treated my completely different because I was Western. To be honest, they still do. But hanging out with my cousin in Beijing, conversing in the language of our shared cultural heritage, I saw those early lines that divided Western upward mobility from family belonging continue to fade away. I’ll never be “one of the cousin crew” – an entire life spent in other lands to date has guaranteed that. But I can still be; indeed, still am: “part of the clan.” And I’ll take that offer any day.

Return to Malaysia

I used to loathe coming back to Malaysia. In past trips back to this house, I remember hiding upstairs with my brother, listening to my Discman, allowing it to transport me away to a world of self-tortured grungey rock songs and the familiar culture which they embodied. Together, my brother and I would lament our predicament: the odd food, the cold bucket showers, the over-attentive relatives and the heat…that relentless, humid Borneo heat. Summer trips back to our parents’ homes were to be endured, not enjoyed. We had long since shrugged off any efforts to teach us Chinese, and Malaysia’s combination of poverty and foreignness repelled us long before these same characteristics would, somewhat perversely, draw me back to it years later.

Four years ago, fresh out of college, I returned to Malaysia with a newly discovered desire to re-connect with the very roots I’d actively ignored in past trips back. I wrote posts that leapt from solemn immigrant story to ethno-political analysis to exuberant travelogue. In the mean time, I began to consciously attempt to develop friendships with my myriad cousins—on my Dad’s side alone I have 13 uncles and aunts, meaning dozens of cousins. In a certain way, it planted the seeds for my move to China: I had found my inability to communicate utterly frustrating, and had yearned to learn more about my ancestral origins.

Now, almost four years after that last trip, I am back once again and still trying to develop those family ties that never really grew in the first place. Prior to coming, I’d spoken excitedly to friends in Beijing of how nice it was going to be to actually communicate with my extended family for the first time, now that I speak Mandarin. My tutor and I coined the term “immigrant’s tragedy” to describe the irreconcilable disconnect between me and my long-deceased grandparents, with whom I never shared a single sentence, and I arrived eager to unveil my newly acquired tongue with all of my relatives, but particularly my cousin brothers and sisters.

On my father’s side, other than himself, no other siblings emigrated, and so most of my cousins all grew up together. One another’s best friends, they make for a tight knit young generation of Hiews: the boys sit around betting over late night card games and watching ESPN, the girls go shopping in town together. One lives in Brunei with his wife, a number are migrant workers in Singapore, and despite limited economic opportunities, many have stuck around Sabah. Though far from being wealthy, they are on the whole far better off than our parents, who grew up malnourished, my Dad’s older siblings sacrificing their education at a young age to help their parents to tap rubber for income.

While only a few days in, I’ve found this re-integration process harder than I’d imagined from back in my frozen Beijing home, where I’d romanticized the approaching trip as much for the emotional warmth of a Chinese New Year spent amongst family as the meteorological type promised by their equatorial location. I’d somehow neglected to consider the first problem: just because I speak Chinese does not mean I have solved our communication impasse. Naturally, when the clan gets together as they do over New Year, they speak our mother tongue, Hakka, which is much closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. While I can often guess what the topic of discussion is (Malaysian Chinese scatter their speech with seemingly random English phrases, like “open-minded” or “second hand”, words that have definite local equivalents), Hakka is different to the point where I can’t pick it up simply by listening. It’s only in one-on-one conversation that I can get them to speak Mandarin with me. And even then, of my uncles and aunts--some of whom spent little time learning it in school--they speak it with such a heavy accent that I struggle to understand them.

If I had to choose one thing I envy of my cousins, as the supposed ‘lucky one’ whose parents made it to university and the West, it would be their natural bond, the obvious close-knit camaraderie that they share together. The mischievous eight-year-old cousin brother I recall playing hand-drawn dice games with is now toughing it out in an electronics manufacturing plant in Singapore, but at least he has a number of other cousins there to support him. Tragically, my two youngest cousins—now 16 and 11—lost a father and mother respectively (from different families) while mere infants; thankfully, the extended family has helped to fill the void as well as possible.

This is what family used to be all about, ever since hunter-gatherers first got together around the fire to discuss Aunt Mildred’s divorce. It’s what the various Asians in my hometown sought to replicate through the community ‘Chung Wah’ association group dinners and events that we’d put on. It’s what expats like myself find ourselves instinctively recreating, having consciously left our previous social circles behind. Ironically, I had to first try to connect with the citizens of the P.R.C. and then various backpacking hosts across India and Iran before I decided to come back and do the same with my own blood.

And yet, after forging cross-cultural friendships with mafia bosses in Amritsar and young freedom fighters in Mashad, I have found it surprisingly difficult to break the ice with those supposedly so close to me: my own cousins. Somehow, my global citizenship can involve a loose Facebook network that spans the five continents of abstracted “one human family” goodwill yet can’t remember all the names at the “one Hiew family” New Year dinner. On one hand, it’s still a language and culture barrier issue. But it’s also in large part simply the fact that, for the last 25 years, I have been only an occasional blip upon my cousins’ otherwise closely connected lives, and all the ambitious family-embracing intent in the world can’t make up overnight for all the emotional capital that they have built up with one another over this time.

And so I start from the beginning, getting to know my cousins’ English names and learning about their careers and lives. With those living in Singapore and Chongqing, we find commonality in our perception of Mainland Chinese (in an example of diasporic snootiness, we agree that they tend to be noisier, spit a lot and have less manners). With Ken--who I taught dribble moves on the basketball court four years ago--I discuss his favorite NBA team, the Los Angeles Lakers. And with Hua, the beloved youngest cousin of the clan, I rehash our one shared trip to a crocodile farm four years ago. There’s certainly no revelatory “So that’s what your childhood was like!” discussions taking place, but gradually, I am establishing a rapport with each of them.

For some of my fellow immigrant friends in Australia and the United States, they have lost touch with their extended family back home and are not particularly concerned with reclaiming it. That’s fine. About 10 years ago, when my family stopped here en route to our new lives in America, I was still unequivocally that way as well. But, like so many of us carrying hyphenated identities, somewhere amidst America’s multicultural mash-up I acquired the compulsion to explore questions that had always felt half-answered. In Washington, when people enquired as to my accent, I’d robotically respond: “I’m from Australia, but my parents are Malaysian-Chinese.” I often wondered if I knew what that second clause truly meant. About what sort of historical and cultural depth I could fill in for myself, beyond the token exoticism that my answer might have offered to others.

Two and a half years after I set off to satiate that nagging curiosity, I’ve gleaned plenty of insight into just what those obligatory ethno-cultural identifying tags actually represent. I’ve devoted significant time to learning about my family at a broader level, through studying Mandarin and visiting my grandparents’ Chinese hometowns and reading books about Chinese emigrational history. Now I just need to spend a little time getting to know who my family is at the individual level, each with their own dreams and struggles and distinct personalities. And that, at a most fundamental level, may be the most satisfying discovery of all.