Chapter 93

The kindergarten that our clinical team screened vision was located on the base level of a mountain-side apartment complex. This particular high rise was also on HK island and therefore, right after our shift, we got to enjoy a nice view of the entire city from a different angle. Following a very short snack break with my fellow Canadians post-shift, I made my way to the train station. Next destination, GuangZhou, China.

I had only prepared for this trip very briefly as the trip itself was very brief. I would head over to GuangZhou, China via the train, which was just a couple of hours, then meet up with mom who was also around China at this time for a conference. I coordinated this with mom before I had left for HK but like I said, it didn’t require too much preparation. The worst of it was that I needed to get my Chinese Visa done.

In China, we would also rendezvous with my uncle and get to work. He got some errands to run that required all of us there in person. After that, I would head over to a hotel, stay the night, get breakfast in the morning with mom and uncle and then head back to HK in the afternoon. The total stay in China? Two half days and a night. 

As for the errands that needed to be done? Two things. The first was related to my late grandma’s house sale. The second was that I needed to go to a Chinese bank to withdraw the last trust fund under my name. By this I am referring to the last fund that my dad didn’t steal from me. You know? The one remaining one out of the 10 my grandma left me? Yeah, that one. 

Since the dreaded phone call before my soul searching began, I’ve been thinking about how much money the trust fund really had. It was a lot before my mom called me and after the call, it seemed unreasonably large. So much so that I doubt its validity. I mean, there was no way to really prove that it was the new number my mom told me about. Those funds are gone now. At this point in time, my thinking with regards to the trust funds had been sourced from really just two places.

• Source 1: Grandma’s late night talk in China a decade ago where she gave me an estimate of a large sum of money being stolen from my funds. While she wasn’t entirely accurate, I still took it as a fact and treated it like the same. 
• Source 2: My mom’s phone call telling me how the funds were closer to $150,000. As I mentioned, this number is heavily speculated and way higher. 

Going to Guangzhou to actually withdraw the fund would lead me to my first solid number that wasn’t speculatory. I mentioned this back in Chapter 30 – Chapter 31 on how it would be around $6,500 or so in CAD. You can do the math from there. Despite not knowing this number for sure in the past, I kind of wrote in my journals as if I already knew this number. This may explain why I reference this number a lot in the past chapters despite only getting solid evidence now. I didn’t really need to change much since the true value and the speculatory value turned out to be the same. 

While the withdrawal of this from my trust fund seemed like it may be difficult on account that I hadn’t been in the country for over 20 years, it was actually kind of easy. Honestly, it was just a lot of moving around from one bank to another. All in all it would take around 2 and a half hours of just people asking for my identification. 

Speaking of asking for identification. The banks weren’t actually the ones to ask me for my ID the most. That goes to the train station workers. They singled me out and took my passport and fingerprints when I first got to China. Right after stepping off the train, I got pulled aside and they searched my bag as well as checked my passport, VISA and fingerprints. I initially thought I may have simply looked more Canadian than Chinese despite sharing the same skin tone but as I got in line to be searched, it turns out the thing that caught their attention was probably my youthful looks. By this I mean to say that all the people who were singled out looked like they were around the age of 18-35. 

I wouldn’t really know it but I think China was keeping tabs on this age group specifically because, while I hadn’t explicitly mentioned it in detail, all this time while I’ve been in HK, there was an omnipresent political discourse that was going on. At the heart of it, it was the youth vs the older generation. I never paid attention to it because I was a neutral party and honestly, I never thought it would affect me in any way. In any case, after being ID’d and fingerprinted, I took a taxi to a hotel where I met up with mom and uncle. Then, we did the aforementioned errands. 

Later in the evening, my uncle had to leave us to run some errands of his own and we met up with a family friend. Let’s call him “F”.  Why was he important? Well. Despite the fact that he would only show up very briefly, he was my only source of social commentary on mom and dad since he knew both mom and dad when they were young.

Unlike the really awkward meeting I had when I met dad for the first time, the meeting with F was very different. He met us at an iconic “Guangzhou Friendship Store” with a golden statue. Oh and did I mention that he drove a Mercedes Benz to pick us up? He greeted mom with a quick wave and then said hello to me. This was a surprise because in my very limited experience of how people who grew up with mom and dad, I had only seen people with problematic personalities. This guy was very charming and seemingly well adjusted. He was even a safe driver and very good at casual conversation. A feat I thought was rare in my mom and dad’s social circles. 

Just from a short interaction with the guy, he talked about short stories about when he and my mom were small. While the stories never steered towards any conversations regarding dad, I was still actively listening in. More than that, I was engaged in the conversation too. F very frequently would turn towards me and ask about my feelings towards the stories he shared. I was usually just indifferent but regardless, happy to be at least asked some things from a charming guy around my mom and dad’s age. 

F drove us to a restaurant to have food and we continued exchanging stories. I managed to get a better glimpse of how he was doing through all of that. It was kind of eye opening because here’s the thing. F was rich. Sure, he had come up in the same neighborhood as my mom and dad but right now, being in his 50’s but owning a small business firm of sorts, he was also retired. Furthermore, this wasn’t even rare in China. Retiring in your mid 50s-60s was pretty common…at least in the way he described it. 

F was also a family guy. He also had a wife and children and seemed to talk of them quite positively. Furthermore, he looked like he had a relatively healthy lifestyle too. He was fit and his collared white shirt with casual black joggers made him seem like a well adjusted person who took care of himself. In my mind, I felt a nagging thought pop up.

“It really wasn’t the environment that made my mom and dad the way they were. It was them.”

F was proof that you can be happy in the Chinese environment of my mom and dad’s youth and do well. I always painted this picture of my mom and dad’s childhood as a desolate youth concentration camp where you were only going to make it if you left but here was living proof that if mom and dad stayed around, they may have been fine. I wouldn’t get to probe any further from here though, that was all there would be for F. After dinner, F dropped us off at our hotel and then drove off. Mom and I were exhausted after all that and settled in our respective hotel rooms and called it a night. 

The next morning, my mom and I met up at the lobby of the hotel with all our stuff packed. My uncle soon met up with us and together, we went for breakfast. We talked a lot about China during that morning. China, or at least Guangzhou, was now very different from our previous visit. I had not been back for almost a decade and the change was astounding. 

From my very hazy memory of the past, there used to be a lot more homeless people. Now though? Not a hint of their existence. Furthermore, there was also no spec of garbage in sight either. All the previous childhood memories of large clusters of broken and beat up bicycles all along the sidewalks were gone. They had been replaced with WeChat-accessible public rental bikes. Everything was clean and everything was organized. My views of the area were now very different.

As nice as our conversations were, we couldn’t spend the entire day there. I had a clinical day the next day afterall. We all shared a taxi and our first stop was the airport where we dropped mom off. Then, my uncle and I made our way towards the train station where my uncle and I would get on our separate trains. 

As soon as we walked into the station though, everything was about to be derailed. Remember how I never thought about how the protests in HK would affect me? Well. I was about to be proven wrong. My train had been canceled. It wasn’t the only one though, my uncle’s had also been canceled. In fact, all the trains for HK were canceled. The news kiosks blasted over and over again that all trains to HK were stopped due to “blockage”. 

What blockage you may ask? Expectedly, it was the protesters. They had blocked the train tracks and now everything was closed off. While this initially seemed like a very large activist gesture towards the ongoing political climate, it only really hindered those who couldn’t afford the bullet train. Because after hearing about this train stoppage, a train station worker came on the PA system and announced that the bullet train was still running. It seemed like the protesters didn’t get to that track because unlike the normal rail, the high speed rail’s security was enforced better.

My uncle and I figured that we shouldn’t wait to see if the bullet train would also close so we hustled over to the bullet train station via taxi as soon as we could. When we got there, there was a small line but honestly, the line wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it would be. The short line being the way it was may have just been because some passengers saw this as a sign that you shouldn’t visit HK. Well.. that or maybe it really was the ticket price of $50 CAD but regardless. The process of switching my plans from riding the normal train to riding the bullet train was less of a hindrance than I thought it would have been. 

My uncle and I parted ways after I got on the train and when I got on, I felt that the rest of the train’s passengers were not as nonchalant as I was about this abrupt change in plans. Some were loudly chatting about how the protesters are ruining their day to day scheduling and others were actively pissed off they had to pay more to ride the train. I actually got kind of worried that these loud mouthed individuals would start some kind of conflict on the train and derail our travel time further but mercifully, that never came to be. 

I wanted no part in any of this. So naturally, when I go on the train, I put on my headphones and just tried to enjoy the ride. Without all the chatter, the train ride was peaceful. The bullet train wasn’t that crowded and I was sitting at a window seat just watching the landscape pass by. These moments of peace felt kind of surreal. 

I had my first brush with the protests, which was pretty well known internationally now. As large as an international issue this was, it was still something that I thought would never affect me. I mean, that was news station stuff…Right? I wasn’t living in that world. Was I? The news stations always blow up small things into bigger deals so it can’t possibly be that bad right? 

Right?

The comfy seats and the passing of landscapes at ultra high speeds was almost hypnotic. I dozed off after a while. The previous day’s errands had worn me out and honestly, the seats were simply that comfy. A little while into my nap however, my phone started buzzing. 

And it wasn’t my alarm either. It was a message from my friends back in HK’s student residence.

At some point during the journey, my phone connected with the bullet train’s wifi and started receiving messages previously blocked by China’s firewall. Facebook worked again, and along with the app functions, I got a flood of messages. Out of a flood of messages from Canadian Friends asking me if I was okay. A few stood out from the rest. 

“Don’t come back.”

“Stay where you are.”

“It’s dangerous here.”

I rubbed my eyes and looked at the messages with horror. What was happening back on student res?