While I was reading The Concubine's Children, I came to the pages in the middle of the book which contained photographs that Denise Chong took on her trip(s) to, and recovered from, China. The picture that really striked me was the one of Ping standing at Chong's grandfather's house where Hing was conceived.

When I was ten years old, my mother brought my brother and me to Hong Kong where we later took a detour and visited China with a few of my uncles and my aunt. After a long ferry ride, just like Chong described in her novel about her trip to China, we arrived by a white van. Three hours on a gravel road later, we reached the Chan's family house in Yun Ping, Canton. On my mother's side, all the siblings had chipped in to build an apartment complex to house them if they ever decided to visit.

It was the photograph in Chong's book that reminded me of the neighboring houses to our complex. In fact, they looked exactly like the one in the book. The area is inhabited by agriculturists. From the balconies on each level, a sea of wheat stretched out as far as the eye could see. I remember one of our neighbors, an elderly man, hitting stalks of wheat onto the cement ground to loosen the shells. Upon passing him, I walked past the doorless houses and was shocked to find dirt floors. No wonder the area's children slept on the tile floor of our family room-our floors were cleaner than their own beds.

I am told that China has changed dramatically in the ten years since. Yun Ping was actually the only place I saw that was rural. Yun Ping Seng, the downtown of Yun Ping, was becoming more metropolitan as was Poon Yu. There was a lot of construction going on while a family, chest-high in the lake, washed their laundry. Women in skirts would zoom by in their mopeds. Theft was a growing concern and women, rather than carry purses, kept money in their knee-high stockings. I found it amusing when my mother's distant cousin rolled down her stockings to pay for the plastic bag full of cold treats from the ice cream vendor's cart during our mid-day outing.

I felt a sense of disappointment when I read Chong wrote: "It was not a sense of 'Chineseness' I was after; I had stopped trying to contrive any such feeling following Mother's early advice-'You're Canadian, not Chinese. Stop trying to feel something.'" It was really my trip to the Orient that aroused my interest in my family's Chinese background, which began in China.