Standing inside my mother’s former home for the first time, I notice the uncovered skylight. The floor beneath it is moist with rain. Scratched pots and pans clutter the stove. The furniture is dusty and sticky with age. Only the barest traces of my mother’s stories remain, buried in the charcoal ash in the wood-burning stove and veiled within Chairman Mao’s faded portrait hanging over the dining table.

After 10 years of waiting, 14 hours of turbulent plane flight, and eight hours in a rattling bus, I am finally in Jiexi, a county in the southeastern province of Guangdong, China. For my mother, this is the village where she spent her youth. For me, it’s the setting of my mother’s vivid stories. Yet, despite all these mud-colored houses, what I see now is not anything like I dreamed.

My mother was born just a few years before Mao Zedong died, in a time when people kept the work ethic and spirit but not his stricter Socialist ideas. The life she spun in her stories possessed few physical luxuries but was uniquely rich in spirit and ambition.

She would tell of the boy who refused to share the village’s only TV, and how she got revenge by throwing a fist-sized ball of cobwebs through his bedroom window. Or how her father got a little tipsy at dinner and would lecture her for hours on important life values. All meat was home raised – oinking, clucking, and quacking right inside the living room. Yet, teachers would shame a child for carefully fastening her hair bows instead of studying hard. Reading fiction and naming pets were impractical and absurd uses of time.

“On our roads roamed numerous cats and dogs that were used for functional purposes like rat-catchers, guards, and food – but never as pets,” she recalls. I walk down the now-empty, dusty, unpaved road, crushing used cigarettes and chunks of dirt as I go.

“I collected buckets of water from the village well each day and brought them home for the family,” she says. The water buckets are now dry and cracked, their insides streaked with moldy shadows.

“Before Mao died, a loudspeaker attached above our house’s door woke the community up with spirited, political songs,” she tells me. But this seemingly deserted place is quiet, its revolutionary spirit extinguished – except in my mother’s stories.
Despite the village’s shabby condition, there are still signs of life – an occasional villager, a rack of drying clothes. As I walk through a small garden, my uncle thrusts his hand into the soil and digs out fresh, moist peanuts to eat. Two sweaty children, tanned brown by the sun and wearing faded clothes, openly stare at us, colorful foreigners tramping through their land. A few old men, wearing layers of wrinkles carved by the rivers of time, smoke in front of their doors.

In only a few decades, the young people of this village – and much of China, in fact – have leapt far away from their poverty-stricken history and into the big cities, leaving behind aged people and aged memories. To preserve the little village and its resilient spirit, stories like my mother’s must be retold, recorded, and passed through generations. Or else the dirt-caked childhood of my mother’s memories will disintegrate into oblivion, leaving future generations to remember only an abandoned shell of weeds and crumbling buildings.