Chongqing Family Reunion

Full of duck heads and quail eggs, we went for a walk along the Yangtze river. The wharf was lined with yachts getting ready for the three-day cruise to the Three Gorges, or the longer journey to Shanghai.

The island of downtown Chongqing ends in a point where the Yangtze meets the Jialing, and this is usually a sightseeing spot, but that day it was under construction and closed off. Next to the construction site there was a slate gray windowless building. Inside was an exhibition about the future of Chongqing: panoramic pictures of what downtown would look like when construction was complete.

The skyline of downtown Chongqing is already impressive, but in the new version two enormous towers loomed over everything from right where we were standing. We stopped to watch a video explain the planned development of infrastructure surrounding the city. Under the video was a scale model of all of Chongqing, each area lighting up when it was mentioned in the video.

We left the construction site and fought for a cab, and half an hour later we were on a dirt road surrounded by jungle. Dark brick houses sat far back in the trees and others balanced on the edge of a cliff over a river. This is where Shushu and Ayi lived and raised their daughter until she was nine and they moved to Chengdu. It's also where most of Ayi's siblings and their families still live.

The family congregated in the middle of a quiet intersection. Ayi is the oldest of five sisters and a brother, the youngest. Instead of using their names, they were all referred to by their birth order. There was Two-Aunt and her husband Two-Aunt-Dad, Three-Aunt and Three-Aunt-Dad, and so on down to Five-Aunt/Five-Aunt-Dad and then the brother, Jiujiu.

We walked to a lean-to in front of a small house and everyone stood under it and smoked and chatted. Next to the doorway was a sink and a cutting board where a woman was chopping up fish.

Five-Aunt-Dad pours the rice wine 

Fish chopped, we went inside. The living room was big enough for two round tables: one for men and one for women. In the middle of each table was a large pot of deep red soup, into which the fish pieces were dropped. While we waited for the soup to boil, Five-Aunt-Dad poured cups of baijiu.

After dinner we went for a walk. In the darkened street a man approached us and exchanged a few words with Shushu, then led us down an unlit alley. In the alley was an unmarked door. The man opened it and beckoned us in.

Inside was a small room with a desk, a sofa, a stack of old newspapers in the corner, and what looked like a dentist's chair. On the desk was a pool of candle wax and a few metal tools.

Shushu got in the dentist's chair and five minutes later his tooth was pulled.

This was Shushu's best friend from his Chongqing days, he later told me. His friend had been the dentists for Shushu's work division. He was retired, but kept this little office as a private practice for his friends and family.

Five-Aunt-Dad in front of Shushu's daughter's old elementary school 

Shushu stuck a piece of cotton into his mouth, his friend bid us goodnight, and we kept walking. On the right now was the Yangtze, further downstream from where we'd been earlier that day. The sky was clear and we could see the moon reflecting in the water. For once there was no sound of cars honking.

Five-Aunt-Dad pointed into the dark across the water.

Lemme tell ya somethin', he said in his Chongqing accented Mandarin, the words running together into a single utterance.

See that island? he asked. Then his finger pointed to a large black shape next to it. What he said next I couldn't make out, but with Didi translating it into his school-taught People's Language, I understood him to be saying there was going to be a new bridge connecting the little island to the Chongqing mainland.

The unpaved road led us up a hill and we came to a row of houses. We walked into a gap in a wooden fence and to the back of one of the houses. This was where Five-Aunt-Dad lived with his daughter. We sat on the couch and Five-Aunt-Dad served us tea from a thermos while he explained the Chongqing fruit business.

Five-Aunt-Dad then showed us his fruit warehouse, right next to where he lived. As fruit season had just ended, there were just a few piles of pomelos and oranges left in the corner to share with friends. This turned out to be what sustained me on the train trip back to Guangzhou the next day. We sat on stools around a crate as Five-Aunt-Dad gave us samples of each variety of pomelo.

It was already well past 10pm, but we jumped into Five-Aunt-Dad's three-wheeled buggy and barreled down the dirt road back into town. We came to a big apartment complex and started peering into first floor windows, looking for the rest of the family.

The tenants in these apartments had started private majiang parlors. For some hourly rate you can sit in their living room, playing majiang, drinking tea, and smoking until any hour of the night or morning. We found the other aunts and uncles engrossed at two tables, barely acknowledging our entrance, silent except for Four-Aunt-Dad's bitter exclamations whenever he lost. The tenant sat in the corner looking exhausted.

They played for another hour and then everyone went back to the intersection where we first met. It was near midnight, but the lights were on in a little food stand. We took seats on little plastic stools and waiting while the woman rolled and cut noodles by hand under a camp light. Ayi's mother, wielding a devil's pitchfork, sat next to me, and everyone laughed as we tried to communicate.