It was a hot day in August when we flew to Beijing. Niang and Dia had a lot to pack – all the gifts they had bought for the extended family – but soon we were ready to go.
‘Sophie! In the car! In the car! We’re going to China! China! With Nana! With Yeye! It will be such fun! Fun, Sophie!’
I strapped Sophie into her car seat, dressed in her little Italian-made sun frock, her hearing aids sticking out and her FM receiver in Niang’s silk bag hanging around her neck. How could I communicate to her that this would be the last time she would spend time with her grandparents and they were not coming back? I fought hard to hold back my tears.
We landed in Beijing and, just like the last time, the Bandit was there to meet us. He greeted Li with a huge smile, then grabbed Sophie and hugged her, talking at a hundred miles an hour. He collected us in a twenty-seater bus with no seatbelts, which was the only thing left from his recently failed plastics business that Li had helped establish. The bus ended up being a godsend as we had a great deal of luggage. I tried not to look out at the overwhelming chaos on the roads as China still had no discernible road rules in the 1990s.
We stayed again at the Front Gate Hotel and Li arranged an appointment with the acupuncturist. We went to the hospital the next day and ended up in a room with three Chinese doctors, none of whom spoke English. I silently handed Sophie over to the most respected acupuncturist in the world, and he peered into her ears. All communication was in Chinese, so I had no idea what they were saying. Sophie was blissfully unaware of what was going on.
Finally, Li translated what the specialist had said after the examination: ‘I could lead you on and give you false hope that acupuncture could help, but your daughter’s deafness can’t be fixed by acupuncture or Chinese medicine. I’m sorry.’
I was very grateful for his honest assessment, as I didn’t think I could have allowed them to put needles into our daughter’s ears!
We went back to the hotel to relay the news to Niang and Dia. They saw this as a small setback and told Li they were confident in the Chinese healer in the mountains in Qingdao. ‘Ta zhi haole ren, ta shige shenyi.’ He has cured many people. He is a miracle man, they said.
The next day the Bandit and Fengtian drove us to the Beijing train station. The station was a chaotic zoo, full of people crowded shoulder to shoulder. The only way to get through was to push and shuffle through the gaps. We had many suitcases full of Niang and Dia’s gifts, which included second-hand suits for all the brothers, jewellery, make-up and, of course, alcohol. Dia loved the occasional Scotch whisky. And there were many cartons of Western cigarettes. We struggled against the bustling crowd with our mountainous luggage. I held Sophie tightly as the Bandit and Fengtian carved a path for us and eventually shoved us onto the crowded train to Qingdao. Despite our cabin being first class, we barely slept as people smoked, coughed and spat throughout the night.
The following morning, we arrived at the Qingdao station and were greeted by all the family members. Everyone was delighted to see Niang and Dia again. Two babies had joined our family: fifth brother’s daughter, Yan Yan, and seventh brother’s daughter, Rong Rong. They had been born just months before Sophie, so she now had two little playmates. There was nothing much I could do about the Chinese language being spoken, so instead I forced myself to relax and enjoy the time with Li’s family. The Qingdao local dialect, Shandong Hua, is a very guttural Mandarin dialect that I learned to love. It sounded like a language filled with passion.
Discussions went on about getting a meeting with the ‘miracle healer’ up in the Laoshan Mountains. Oldest brother, Cuncia, and second brother, Cunyuan, told us what to expect the next day when we went there. As it was a two-hour trip, the brothers needed to find a van first, then an experienced driver who knew the way – there were no paved roads and the brothers didn’t know exactly where the healer lived. Before I heard of their plan I was already sceptical, and now I was apprehensive about getting lost or having an accident in the middle of nowhere. Li said I didn’t need to go with them. As if I was going to let Sophie go without me! I didn’t believe in the healer, but Li did. There was no stopping him. It was something he had pinned so much hope on, so I just had to go along with it.
The day was going to be scorching hot so we started early. We sat at the small table outside for breakfast, next to the wok. I picked up Niang’s steamed white bread, dipped it into the salty sauce and ate it with a fried egg. Sophie loved Niang’s food and ate heartily. I was reminded how she would miss her cooking when we returned home. Meanwhile, the conversations continued about what to eat for dinner. While it seemed that food was mostly what the family would talk about, quietly I was grateful for the feeling of normalcy, no matter how small.
The driver arrived and beckoned us to follow him through the narrow laneways lined with smelly sewage gutters. Cuncia carried Sophie, along with her FM receiver in the pink silk bag, and Li and I followed with second brother Cunyuan and the gifts we had brought for the healer.
The van was more like a bus. It reminded me of Neil George’s fourteen-seater people mover back in Rocky. ‘Look, Sophie!’ I said loudly to reassure her, but perhaps more to reassure myself. ‘We’re going on a bus! With Daddy! And with your uncles!’ She looked excited, mirroring my expression, and I kept my fingers crossed that we weren’t heading into a nightmare.
We drove through the narrow dirt streets to the outskirts of Qingdao and soon started our ascent. Every part of the mountain was cultivated with row upon row of different crops, and the makeshift roads between the fields were riddled with deep potholes. I sat in terror as the old bus creaked on, threatening to break down at any moment and leave us stranded forever. The bus had no seatbelts or air-conditioning and there were still no mobile telephones in case anything happened to us. It didn’t help that Li’s brothers had given the driver cigarettes – he smoked like there was no tomorrow.
I was thankful when we got out of the bus two hours later. We found ourselves in front of a concrete-box-like shack, much worse-looking than Niang and Dia’s place back in the commune, with chickens, ducks, pigs and dogs roaming freely in the front courtyard. At least it was cooler here in the mountains. I looked around and saw the amazing view across the landscape, but I was in no mood to enjoy it.
An elderly woman hobbled across the crumbling threshold and beckoned us inside. There were only two rooms, with a kitchen on one side of the wall and a small mud bed, a kang, on the other side, on which the healer sat cross-legged. He had a long grey beard and a lot of missing teeth. The healer and his wife smoked so heavily that we were choking on the smoke. They invited us to sit on the kang.
Li and I somehow fitted on the kang with Sophie on my lap. We laid out our gifts of wine and cigarettes. The fact it all came from the West was very important. Western cigarettes were treated as a valuable commodity.
The healer and Li began to talk. I did not speak once, and Li did not translate much. The healer looked across to Sophie to assess her deafness with a thoughtful and serious expression. He occasionally stroked his long sparse beard while he continued to smoke heavily his pipe. Li and his brothers nodded gratefully while he spoke. After a while, I became impatient and asked, ‘Li, what did he say?’
‘He said he can fix Sophie’s hearing,’ Li simply replied.