Meet Ellen Hao, Project Pengyou Summer Intern
Meet Project Pengyou summer 2016 intern Ellen Hao, a rising 2nd year at the University of Chicago. Mainland Chinese, she was born in Minnesota and raised in Hong Kong. Follow her burgeoning awareness of her own cultural identity through childhood memories and Mahjong.
Beijing, 2016
A group of older Chinese people trek up crumbling stairs. This section of the Great Wall is old and broken. The sun has fallen under smog and the sky is darkening. Apart from them, there is only a handful of people.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Sichuan”, they answer.
“My 老家 is Sichuan, Chengdu.”
They burst into a flurry of conversation, shifting into the Sichuan dialect. The sounds fill up the space around us, momentary family reunion nestled in vast mountains.”老乡, 老乡!” They cry. One man repeats, “老乡见老乡，两眼泪汪汪.” I smile, but it feels like I have somehow told a lie.
Chengdu, 2004
Yeye spits on the cool tile and rolls it around his hand, warms it, brushes a thumb over rounded corners as he examines it. Light glints off his glasses, and he has transformed into a veteran mahjong player, calculating and indecipherable.
“Keep this one,” I suggest.
The tile I point to has a bird carved into it, I can’t quite remember whether it was a phoenix or a pheasant. Trenches dug into sterile white plastic and I imagined floodgates rising and rivers of red, blue, and green entering each ditch.
Yeye peers down at me, the inscrutable mahjong professional gone. His eyes are huge, magnified by his lenses. He blinks slowly.
“Eh, but it’s useless.” He plucks my bird and chucks it into the landfill of other discarded tiles. Yeye was never one to mince words.
Hong Kong, 2009
My friend’s grandmother is in surgery. Her shoulders shake; she sounds like she is learning how to breathe again. During P.E., we gather around Catherine with a flutter of “Don’t worry”s and “I’m sure she’ll be fine”s. I am twelve years old. We are all trying to figure out fear, grief and the right words to say.
In Chinese class, we write essays describing a person or place that is important to us. Li laoshi praises Patricia, who has written about her grandmother, whom she spends every afternoon with. “I can tell how much you love her,” Li laoshi says. My own essay is about Lake Tahoe.
I don’t see Yeye every afternoon. Yeye has never visited us in Hong Kong. Now he is old enough that it is probably too dangerous to his health to come this far. I try to imagine what it would be like, to hear over phone that Yeye is in the hospital. Speaking honestly, I’m not sure if I would cry.
Hong Kong, 2011
Dad comes home with a book. It is thick and square, with a hard white cover. “Yeye wrote this,” he announces proudly. He flips it open, and there are pages of monochrome strangers—people I don’t know, and people barely recognizable now that they are old. I am fourteen and I do not try to read the Chinese, but my hands span the pages. I look for my father, my aunt. It is like a game. Here are the military photos, here is his old home in Shandong, here is the uncle I have never met.
How did he write it? Is there a notebook somewhere, filled with his words? I don’t remember ever seeing him write. Was it dictation? A family effort, or some sort of autobiography service targeted towards the elderly? For how many years has he been writing? The pages are shiny and thick. They smell new.
Chengdu, 2012
When I turn around, Yeye is still standing next to his chair. He is alone in front of the large circular table, as the rest of the family filters into the lift, three generations of voices weaving though the air. We have been welcomed with banquet-style dinners, rice wine, and boisterous laughter. (The booming kind, the kind you can hear from three floors down.) Now the private room is silent. Light from Chengdu’s white skies filters through the window, grays the red wallpaper. In my mind, Yeye’s figure is drawn in black and white. He stares out the window, pensive and dazed.
“Yeye, we should go.” Yeye turns his head, looks up, blinks into awareness.
I wonder what he sees. His granddaughter: Fifteen, maybe sixteen, accented Chinese and his eyes. Crossed the Pacific to get here – or no, just the Pearl River? Ai-lun, no it’s Haoqi[1]? She is closer now but rarely visits. Likes longan, likes strawberries. Or is that her sister? (We do.)
Weaving his arm through mine, I match my paces with his. We walk slowly and don’t speak. I am filled with tenderness.
Hong Kong, 2013
I learn how to play mahjong. Two years later, I win a game against Yeye.
The bird tile is still my favorite.
Beijing, 2016
Here is what I didn’t say about my time on the Great Wall: that I told them I grew up overseas, was never actually born in Chengdu. “You can hear it, I have an accent.” I am not from here, this is not my home, I thought. But they continued. “老乡, 老乡!” The word means people of the same hometown, but carries the implicit meaning of displacement. How far? From the countryside to the city. From one country to another. Across land. Across ocean. Across generations.
I look at them, these elderly photography aficionados. Their tripod bags span the whole of their sides, heavy cameras in firm grips. They have travelled across provinces to capture sunset. Haven’t I done the same? I think of rising GDP per capita and new opportunities. I think of my dad, and his obsession with taking photos. You take photos because you think things are worth remembering; you buy cameras because you think things will be worth remembering.
My smile is real this time.
[1] The first is the Chinese version of ‘Ellen’, the second is my Chinese name.