Donald Hayes’ Memories of China

Recollections of a seven year old (circa 1934/5)

Prepared for reading by relatives, 1985

These vignettes provide the view of a boy around 7 or 8 at the end of our family’s residence in Fukien province during the mid 1930’s. Ann was away in Shanghai during this time, so she does not figure in my China memories. Bruce, being four years older, was a fourth/fifth grader. You have to reconstruct your own preschooler/first grader period to imagine the gulf separating a preschooler and a fourth/fifth grader. He could skate, play marbles, read better, run faster, you name it, he could do it better, so I doubt if we spent much time together. Nonetheless, it was a fascinating period. I’m lucky to have seen and been a part of it.

Memories of my youth in China turn out to be overwhelmingly positive. Most involve distinct smells, tastes, sights and contexts not easily conveyed by words. One occurred when Bruce, Dad and I were going out to hunt pigeons for dinner in a huge bamboo forest, about a mile outside our walled city. At my insistence, we stopped just inside the north gate. I had smelled some bakery goods and searched for their source. They turned out to be in a small glass case suspended by a leather strap around a street vendor’s neck. The marvelous smells coming out of that cabinet were a bit offset by the horde of flies trapped inside. I can’t remember whether I conned Dad into buying anything or not. The point is that I had quite forgotten that incident for fifty years—when unexpectedly, I caught a whiff of something resembling that smell here in Ithaca, just a couple of years ago. How’s that for a smell memory! It brought back that whole scene as if it had happened this morning.

Reviewing these accounts of my China memories, several points struck me: most occurred over a brief period, taking only a few minutes or so; several involved high drama—risk to life and limb; they turn out to be disconnected from each other, an incoherence which may reflect my childish failure to comprehend the larger picture; and, not surprisingly, yours truly occupies center stage—all the important people in my life played bit parts.

Consider a sampling of these memories: a man riding on a seat of swords; persimmons being preserved; a recently killed tiger dangling over a fender of our car; the sale of the tiger’s meat and bones to a mob of Chinese; climbing down the city wall using foot pegs instead of a ladder; my first fishing expedition—I caught three tiny ones; playing at tennis with my metal racket and red balls; watching an itinerant merchant lay out hundreds of small carved objects on our huge porch, a task which must have taken over an hour—just to make a 50 cent sale; making ice cream in Futsing; putting up the Christmas train beneath the tree; my first experience with water pipes and cigarettes (one of the servants did me a lifetime favor by unexpectedly thrusting a freshly opened can of 50 cigarettes right under my nose! I coughed and choked at the smell. He laughed and laughed—a big joke on the nosey kid).

One prominent memory has to do with a sugarcane festival. It was held just outside the city wall, not far from the pagoda whose picture is on a wall in our house in Ithaca. Imagine you’re a boy of six. There is a milling mob. The only other time I remember mixing with the townspeople was during Chinese New Year festivals when a papier-maché dragon would be carried by a dozen men and boys. It would careen from side to side in a narrow street while a large and noisy crowd cringed appreciatively. Back at the sugarcane festival, I was chewing on an eight inch long piece of sugar cane. The hard outside cover had been removed so I could bite into the sugary pulp, extracting the sweet juice. Then came the dramatic moment of the festival for me. Four men, one at each corner of a sedan chair, literally ran into the crowd, which cleared a path for them to pass. The man of the hour was riding in the chair. The crowd gave a great cheer. Why? What happened? He has performed a feat—he had been sitting on a “seat” consisting of sword tips. The swords were mounted in such a way that their many tips formed the seat. Later, I get to inspect this “seat.” I touched the sword tips—they were genuine and sharp! Wonder of wonders! How could he have survived? Does he have a bloody bottom? (I must surely have asked, discreetly—we were modest in those days). Sort of like those Indians who reputedly sleep on a bed of nails.

There were no real roads to Futsing when I was young. One memorable episode involves crossing a river—God only knows where (another instance where kids lack a contextual grounding to make sense of their observations). Some genius had constructed two parallel narrow bridges, each just wide enough for one truck tire. The space between the tracks was open. Stone pillars rose from the riverbed and granite slabs formed the two tracks. If your wheel got off the track, it was a freefall of 20 feet (?) to the river and its rocky bed. Since the track was so narrow, the driver had to be guided across this bridge by his passengers. One couldn’t see well enough from the driver’s position to do it safely. That meant that the passengers had to get out and walk across one of these narrow tracks. Naturally, there were no guardrails. My memory is of getting out the car, being inched across one of the tracks with Mother holding my hand tightly, and once across, watching Dad drive the car across with her guidance. Now that was a scary episode—the sounds of the river below, the open space on each side of the track, the wind ... It may have been routine to them, but I’ll bet their first encounter with the bridge gave them a thrill too.

Skip to the mountains to Kuliang, where our family and others retreated during the hottest and most humid months. Dad would join us when he could. It was a strange and wonderful place. The houses were built out of local materials, mainly rock. Typhoons roared through the area so even the roof was of slate and held down by rock. Evergreens were common. Bruce spent a portion of a summer (recovering from something or other) in a bed beneath a large tree on the front yard. Hydrangeas were numerous around the property. They were a lovely blue (instead of the washed-out pink we find in less acid USA soils).

Our house stood above a tennis court, which had been carved out of the hillside. I had use of a racket (all metal, including the strings) and red English balls. In a child’s ineptness, I kept losing them in the ferns around the court. I played by myself following the model of my father who was a local tennis champ. There was a spring not far from our house which we used for fresh water. It consisted of a tiny grotto where water dripped from the ceiling into a good-sized pool. We’d dip our containers in the water and carry them back to the house. It was my favorite water games spot. God knows how much my play in those waters contaminated people’s drinking water.

At Kuliang, we spent a fair amount of time in an area which the multinational Western population used as a sports complex—mainly tennis courts. Here there were ‘British,” “French,” “Germans,” and “Belgians” (all terms which meant nothing to me at the time, though I did think the British talked funny). I can’t remember what I did with my time there. To get from that sports area back to our house, one alternative was to walk up “Jacob’s Ladder”, a seemingly endless set of steps. But near the top was this spring—cool, delicious, and you didn’t have to boil it before you drank it!

Across the valley, there was a famous monastery, Kushan. I’d been told that the monastery was one of the rare places on earth where remains of Buddha (a tooth or bone) were kept. I recently heard this again, possibly on a National Geographic special on that part of China. (Though I’d climbed all over a huge carved statue of Buddha down in the valley below, his importance to the Chinese went over my head. To me, the question was—why would you want to preserve and guard his bones? There was, of course, a period in Western Christianity when we too fought to possess the bones/and what-not of saints, if not a shroud of Jesus). When I was deemed old enough, I was taken on a long hike to the monastery. Three things about that place still stick in my memory: (1) Everyone there was a man (where were the women? Not an unreasonable question for a kid who lived in a world where women were everywhere). (2) I had heard a lot about death and dying (a big cemetery behind our house, ancestor worship, etc). I think we watched a cremation of one of the monks—-a big fire in any case for that purpose. (What happened to the man and his body?—an early encounter with metaphysics—the stuff sociologists like to study since most religions are founded on it). (3) As a treat, a kind but largely toothless man, an elder, an important man in the monastery, gave me a piece of semi-hard, brown rice. It came from the bottom of a huge wok in which the rice for all the monks had been prepared. This crust, forming next to the metal, is where the sugar in rice concentrated during cooking. He knew it would be sweet and memorable. He was right—remember it fifty years later.

Not all things in Kuliang were pleasurable. It rained a lot, so you had to stay cooped up inside. Bruce once took me “swimming” to a neighbor’s damned up stream, a pool of sorts. In the course of playing in the water, a water snake swam near me, very nearly touching me. It scared the bejeebers out of me. Every child in China is scared by talk of poisonous snakes. The poor snake may have been harmless and more frightened of me than I of it, but all those horror stories and warnings (hypothetical up until then) suddenly became real. I still don’t like snakes.

Back to Futsing. From the perspective of a little kid, we had a big piece of property. There was a large garden. The gardener and his family lived in a little “house” in one comer. From Ann and Bruce’s accounts, we kids were not supposed to go into their quarters. Funny, my memories have me in their quarters a lot—does that make me a naughty boy? I was in that gardener’s house a time or two, long enough to see the big flat board—their “bed”. On it were strange “pillows”, which looked like a block of wood; possibly they were made out of woven bamboo strips over a frame. They were relatively light. All this struck me as a strange way to sleep (all in one hard bed with those funny “pillows”. What an ethnocentric bumpkin I was). I stayed out of the garden after Mother told me that there were lots of snakes there, especially the kind that climb trees and dangle down from limbs. Did she need to pour it on so strong?

There was a big barn-like structure near our house and beside it was a huge persimmon tree. I love persimmons. They wanted 89 cents for just one small one at the store yesterday. It’s hard to find the kind of sweet and ripe ones we had in Futsing. Since all persimmons on a tree tend to ripen at the about the same time, Mother showed me how to preserve them while they were still slightly green (far too puckery to eat). They would be placed in trays in the dark of our attic until we wanted them. First you remove the straw containing a preservative, which had been inserted from the top into the persimmon’s center, and soon the persimmon ripened. The best of all uses was the delicious persimmon bread, a real treat I haven’t had for decades.

When villagers in Fukien province had troubles with tigers killing their precious goats (possibly humans, too), word got back to Futsing. A request was made that the Westerners bring their powerful rifles and do the cat in. My memories are of this scene: the successful hunters drove into our yard in the 1934/5 Plymouth. Over the right front fender was draped THE TIGER. (Pictures doubtless helped shape these memories). In those days, cars had fenders covering the tires so the space between a front fender and the engine was a perfect place to drape the body of the naughty cat. The scene changes—to where they serviced the car—an embankment where the car was driven out on wood beams so you could stand beneath the car to change oil, etc. It was on those beams that an auctioneer sold off meat from the tiger to a crowd of Chinese. The highpoint of the festivities was the sale of bones (with their marrow). Why grown men should compete to buy tiger bones was a puzzle to me, but then 6 is a little young to have a strong libido. Of course, they must have believed that tiger bones had an aphrodisiac effect. I should add that Dad did not do the killing—that was either Mr. Caldwell or Da Da, our all-purpose Chinese cook, secretary, scout, hunter, gofer and man for all seasons. All speak of Da Da in the most admiring of terms—but I hardy knew him. Dad’s role in the hunt was to help set out the goat, whose powerful odor ultimately attracted the tiger and led to a premature meeting with its Maker.

The cooks, kitchen and coal bins were housed in a separate building from the main house—I suppose a safety feature to guard against fires. Connecting the two buildings was a wooden corridor. The area between the buildings was sort of a patio. The only memory I have of the place is that it was the site where chickens got their necks wrung, deer were skinned, and similar forms of violence took place. It was also the site of my first memory of ice cream. A man regularly walked and rode a boat the 30 or so miles to Foochow to fetch essential provisions. This included things we did not grow ourselves, and our mail. He carried two large, but lightweight, baskets suspended on each end of a bamboo pole. On one such trip, wrapped in a mountain of newspapers, was ice. I watched in fascination as the ice was unwrapped. Someone handed me a small piece which I still remember rolling around in my mouth (who knows what contaminants were in it). Then we cranked the container of cream, etc. around the ice and salt. Regrettably, that episode started a lifelong addiction for the stuff. I carry the evidence of that addiction around my waist.

These vignettes give some flavor to what it was like to grow up in China in those days. Bruce and Ann grew up (at my age) in tougher times. It all seemed pretty civilized to me. Only by the standards of the USA, which I hadn’t seen yet, would these events have been considered unusual. There are a lot more memories: crouching beneath the main stairs of our house while gunfire (real or did I imagine it?) took place outside the house. I was told there was a dispute between a local warlord and the government over who controlled the area. We had big storms which required that we close the shutters over the windows. In the States, shutters are mere decoration. We went out hunting for our Christmas trees—something we continue to do in Ithaca every year, despite the occasional bitter cold. It is routine to take 45 minutes to find the tree. We have a thirteen-foot ceiling in our living room, so, naturally, the kids insist on finding just the right tree which will touch the ceiling. Have you any idea how big such a tree is? It takes four healthy adults to drag it from the forest and lift it on top of our compact car. It’s hard to find the car beneath all that mass of tree.

I used to play with some huge cactus plants. One could make “paper” of sorts, by peeling off the outer layer of their stalks and after stretching it out flat, let it dry. (I guess you get hard up for things to do without playmates). If they ever dig at the bottom of our well, who knows what things of mine they’ll find. I put a lot of stuff down that hole. I was accused more than once of terrorizing our visitors and servants alike by wheeling around on my bicycle on the walks in front of our house. I took great pleasure in hiding a bag of marbles in the crotch of a huge tree above the chicken coop. Why? From whom? Probably Bruce. There are scenes in Mother and Dad’s bedroom where she would test my word recognition skills in first grade—How could I have guessed that my current research would involve computer measurements of word choices in natural language passages.

Why didn’t my parents play a bigger role is these vignettes? Dad appears in several, but he was a busy man, out of the house and city a good deal. A lasting impression was the sense of the importance of what we were doing in China. He was a busy man but he made time to go fishing, hunting, playing tennis, and working with stamps with his boys. The most businesslike episodes for me were those big production jobs on the dining room table when the whole family folded letters, stuffed them into envelopes, wet and sealed them, just like political candidates do during elections. The letters described the mission activities to stateside donors. Dad was home during Christmas (with Mother pulling “all-nighters” to get elaborate snow scenes ready for the surprise Christmas morning visit to the tree). Mother was just as devoted, busy and involved yet our contacts were mundane—such experiences do not remain as indelible in my mind as the more dramatic episodes. Whether I’m your brother, uncle, father or husband, I hope this conveys a bit of what life in China was like in those days. We all lived to tell these tales. We are certainly richer for having experienced them.

Donald Pearce Hayes

411 Klinewoods Road

Ithaca, New York

29 November, 1985