The road running east out of my dad’s hometown is a straight brushstroke of sallow, pounded dirt, muddied brown with paddy water along the edges, leading out from the village, through the fields, finally curving and rising and forking into the dense, thicketed hills that clog the landscape in this part of the province. An irrigation ditch, square cement, runs alongside the road; the dust is furrowed with tire tracks. I shuffle my feet, walking single file behind my dad. On both sides, the flooded fields mingle with scruffy rows of dried-out rice stalks, and in the still water, dotted with clods of soil and grass, the overcast wet-winter sky’s reflection is glowing silver. A pair of water buffalo lift their heads as we pass.
I’ve never been to where we are going before. Both my paternal grandparents died before I was born, even conceived, and I don’t know what their names were, or what their faces looked like, or how they died. Honestly I don’t think this has ever really bothered me—it just isn’t something I think about. So, I was surprised when my dad knocked on my door this morning and announced that we were going to see my grandfather. I couldn’t think of anything to say or do in the moment but follow him. We’ve come back for a brief visit to his hometown in the damp, chilly days leading up to the Lunar New Year, just as the village streets are gradually hemmed in by cars with out-of-town license plates: All those who left for more lucrative lives in the county seat, or in the provincial capital, or in the megacities of the southern coast, or further afield—always elsewhere—are slowly trickling back home.
***
Surrounding the fields are the hills and trees growing together out of the ochre earth. Just as we come out of the flatland and begin climbing the first slope in the road, my dad stops. He scans the roadside scruff of trunks and leaves, pacing a bit, until he finds a waist-wide opening. “Is this it?” I follow him in, ducking under the pine needles.
After maybe a minute or two hunched over in the shade, tracking that path deeper into the trees, we emerge into a tilting meadow, thick with dead and drying grass. The ground is wet and loose, constantly giving under my feet. Farther up into the clearing, tombstones litter the hillside, jutting out of the brush in lonesome pairs and triples. Some are sheathed in smooth ceramic, crowned with lilting faux-roofs and dragon statuettes; others are monoliths of black granite, girded by decorated eaves and guardian lions. They all look new. Here and there are errant flowers, bowls of food, bottles of liquor, cigarettes left in offering, strewn about the dirt. It’s only as we climb uphill, past the outer ring of graves, that my dad pauses. The graves here are simpler, weathered, a lolling mound of concrete opposite a plank of heather sandstone—just an upright slab—the headstone. Even in the dead of winter, the undergrowth has piled up and onto some of them, so as my dad goes from stone to stone, searching, he gently brushes it aside. Finally he finds what he is looking for, and he squats down to begin clearing the ground around the grave, tossing grasses and weeds over his shoulder. I join him.
My grandfather’s headstone has suffered under decades of the unrelenting damp. The stone has gone spongy, crumbling and cracking in places; the edges are splattered with a spotty, desiccated white. Still, the inscription is intact. I point vaguely at the large characters running down the middle of the gravestone, what I imagine to be the Chinese equivalent of “Here lies so-and-so…” Where is his name? My dad shakes his head. In the past, he explains, when the head of a family died, their name became taboo. One of the characters is carved smaller than the others: This is the placeholder used in remembrance, or forgetting, of the deceased’s name. That’s all.
Flanking the middle inscription on both sides is a list of his descendants, ordered in rows from oldest to youngest: First the sons and the daughters-in-law, then the son-in-laws and the daughters, and finally the grandchildren. We stand there in the silence for a little while as I read through my family tree for the first time. My dad nudges me: “You’re on here.” Last in the list of paternal grandsons is an unfamiliar name—I am by far the youngest of all the grandchildren. “Before he passed, he gave you this name.” I have so many questions to ask—whys and hows and whats—but all I can do is stare at those two characters, overcome by the same odd, guilty feeling that I felt when I asked my dad if we could see my grandmother too, and he did not answer.
***
We come back out onto the main road in a different spot, even farther east and away from the village. Now that we are out of the trees, I look up. All morning the sky had remained a low-slung sheet of unbroken grey, dully illuminating every face and leaf and blade of grass with an ashen glare, but now the sun has broken through. Pure beams of light pour down through branching, riverlike gashes torn amongst the clouds. It feels like a scene worth remembering. My dad keeps walking uphill. Here the road’s surface is grimy orange, all mud in some places, topped with scattered gravel, pebbles, and cloudy puddles gouged out of the dirt by passing tires. Occasionally the road bends and cuts through a slope of the hill, and in these places the interrupted hillside is a looming cross section of earth—an almost Mars-red wall of loamy clay.
As we approach the smooth, rotund summit, I notice the trees have changed. The intertwisted thickets of dry evergreens have disappeared, and in their place lie row after row of bushy, squat trees, planted neatly in parallel. But we are just in the midst of it. Only once we reach the top do I see that the same trees in the same rows blanket the landscape in rolling knolls, vineyard-like, halfway to the horizon of distant mountains, and I ask my dad what this is all for. He doesn’t know either. It wasn’t here the last time we came.
Alan Dai is a junior at Harvard College studying history. He was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado.