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ASIAN AMERICAN A return to China upon my father's shoulders. (A book to be read aloud by parents.) |
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GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | KIDS' BOOKS
BABA
by Belle Yang
Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994, 211pp, $27.95
EXCERPT:
n a time when the world was a bit wider, during a season when the sorghum
was tinged with red, Baba journeyed the lonely sixty li from the town of
Xinmin on a horse-drawn wagon for a visit with kinfolk in Shantuozi, deep in
the countryside. The steady quok-quok-quok of the animal's hooves
and an occasional "Jiaah!" from the driver, urging the nag on, were the only
sounds threading through the fields of murmuring sorghum that unrolled into
the Manchurian horizon.
The land was generous: this was the fertile black-soil belt of China.
And jogged into the half-dream upon the wagon under the big sky, Baba
envisioned, from tales passed down to him, how the Great Progenitor of the
Yang Clan had ferried his wife, his two small sons, and all their worldly
possessions--their pots and pans--upon the platform of a squeaky
wheelbarrow, and how they had arrived in this land during the last decade of
the eighteenth century.
It was during this age that the rule of the Manchus in the capital, Beijing,
whose ancestors were nomads upon these great northeastern plains, was
entering its tottering, feeble years of decay and could no longer bar the
Chinese from settling upon this, their sacred homeland.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
The Great Progenitor--whose face Baba imagined was austerely handsome as that of the Patriarch, his grandfather--had come to claim a patch of this land known as Manchuria, which bordered upon Mongolia, Siberia, Korea, the Yellow Sea. Here, he and his family would escape the grip of hunger that lay in other regions of the Middle Kingdom. Here, his children and theirs would grow into tall, big-boned men and women, doing honor to the land and sky that did not contain them but allowed them to swing their limbs, take lavish strides.
"Jiaaah!" The wagoner's voice again ripped into the air and lingered.
At dusk, Baba spied Old Granddaddy Hill in the distance, silhouetted against the scarlet sky, and saw the crows returning to roost in the cypresses that crowned the hill, under whose layers of shadows generations of his ancestors lay in eternal rest; at this sight, his heart was cheered by the thought that he would soon be under a kind, familiar roof.