Jenevieve Chang - The Good Girl of Chinatown

Stir-fried leek with five spice tofu, lamb with celery soup, crunchy radish salad, fried mantou with spiced mince, dumplings in hot and sour soup and the dishes continue to pile up. It is difficult to fathom that the Great Chinese Famine could have occurred when you sit down to a Hunan meal. My cousin Shuang Liang sits across from me with his wife and son, my aunt is beside me.

Good? they want to know.

Mmm. It is a burn-and-melt in your mouth kind of delicious.

Considering our great-grandparents fate in the famine, Shuang Liangs ability to feed me so spectacularly now is a source of great pride, and its own particular piece of theatre starring Wen-Hans overseas and oldest grandchild, who has finally returned home to her grandfathers lao jia.

I had arrived the day before, my fathers introduction paving the way. Sams instructions came via email:

From Changsha, take a transit train to Leiyang where Shuang Liang will meet you at the station. Hell then take you to his home where your aunt will be waiting for you.

But Shuang Liang himself had called me a few days earlier. At first, I couldnt place the crackly voice of the middle-aged Chinese man on the line. And then I heard Wen-Hans nickname for me, Da Bao meaning one who is greatly treasured.

Shuang Liang insisted on sending his chauffeur to pick me up from the airport.

The three-hour drive to Leiyang was one long, drizzly highway chugging with utility vehicles and scattered with sprawling, snack-laden pit stops. Whenever I had played out the scene in my mind, the reunion with my lost China family took place outside the mud hut where Wen-Han grew up, where his first wife had died, where my great-grandparents were buried, where my aunt had waited her entire childhood for her father to return. Improbably, I had imagined this was a place they would want to return to.

Shuang Liang was now the chairman of a mining company and lived in a comfortable, modern residential building several hours away from where our ancestors story took place. The funds that Wen-Han had sent over the years had catapulted Shuang Liang ahead of his peers in accessing Chinas top schools and the stocky, forty-something man who greeted me as we pulled up to the building was dressed in an expensive-looking dark suit. I couldnt see my grandfather in him straight away, but the likeness of Sams solemnity was evident.

My aunt was a different story. The woman who emerged from the shadows as I stepped into the vast living room upstairs bore my grandfathers same proud, upright posture. The same determined eyes. The slightly protruding teeth. She was seventy-two now, almost the same age Wen-Han had been when I was born. A slow, hesitant smile mapped a gossamer of lines across her face. She was a stranger at the same time as being a tightly held, blood-bonded connection.

Impulsively, I clasped both her hands. Da Gu Gu. That was what she had always been known as, our first aunt.

She wore a thickly embroidered crimson and navy jacket, and her hands were warm and rough.

Im sorry its taken me this long to visit.

Saying nothing, my aunt simply squeezed both of my hands tighter.

Behind us, I heard Shuang Liang place my bags down. Da Bao has come back. The words sounded so natural, so right even though I had never been there before. I turned to look at him. His formal demeanour cracked ever so slightly as tears formed in his eyes.

Since then, we have been fortifying our hearts with food.

How far is Australia? my aunt asks again, as a waiter places more dishes down.

Not far, I say. About a twelve-hour flight.

She nods gravely. Far.

But I flew in from Shanghai. I used to live there.

Where your Nai Nai once lived.

Yes.

She looks at me thoughtfully. You look more like my father.

I smile. He was a wonderful grandfather. The kindest man I ever knew. I used to wish he was my actual father. I flush a little at the admission. He used to talk about you all the time.