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Travelogue
A Fruitful Journey in Hainan, the Mythical Village
By Patric Chang
 For the longest time, it was a mysterious village. I vaguely remembered my mother talking of her home in Hainan. I remember sketching Australia, carefully coloring its shoreline blue. I remember millions of sheep in New Zealand and the locations of the world's leading capitals in America and Europe. As a boy in Malaysia, when geography was my favorite subject, I was able to answer most tough questions in class. But where Hainan was I had no clue.
While my mother Hainanese from China’s largest Island in the South, we are Cantonese from our father's side who was from Nanhai City on the mainland province of Guangdong. So we associated ourselves with the Nanhai Association opposite our shop house. Did they conveniently transpose the two words to throw children off the track of busy parents? I was never shown a picture or a map at home, school or anywhere else with these two places. This is why the village where my mother grew up was a blur; a mythical village.
TAKING A TRIP
On this day, my mother's village called NanYang (literally meaning south sun) would be vividly etched in our minds. A year ago my brother suggested this inspired idea of having a family reunion in Hainan, China. Soon, we would be standing in the backyard of the house which belonged to my mother's dad - all twelve of us - three generations. This included my mother, my immediate family, my brothers, and their wives and children. Mother had not been back in 66 years.
We knew it was going to be a very hot and humid, Hainanese kind of day. Gratefully, I energized myself with fresh fruits from the breakfast buffet at the Universal Resort Hotel located at the Yolong Bay National Holiday Resort. Breakfast consisted of lychee, firedrake, melon, papaya and coffee. When you venture to a mysterious village, you do not know what and when you are going to eat next. Coming from the Bay Area, we were conditioned not to take chances with empty stomachs.
FINDING HAINAN
From Sanya, which is the southernmost large city of the island (and all of China), we headed north in two vehicles, a four wheeler and a minivan which the locals called a breadvan. We drove through the countryside, past banana trees, a shrimp farm, small, haphazard plots of rice fields and coconut trees.
As I mentioned before, my mother left Nan Yang over sixty years ago. Did the village lose its mystery? Were we beaten to it by the relentless march of concrete and commerce in Southern China? Would we see four-lane freeways, KFCs, huge shopping malls and a night market? Along the way, we saw some unusual sights that may have left the casual observer wondering if the island was somehow timelocked.
My wife commented later that the most memorable aspect of the vacation was watching how the people lived in this island and how sharply this contrasted with the marketer’s billing of Hainan as the Hawaii of the East. Indeed, as soon as we arrived at the baggage claim area at Sanya International Airport, my elder son surmised that the Hawaii-billing was over rated. For the children in the party, the highlight was setting off the spectacular fireworks and potent, red firecrackers which they ignited to blow up several green coconuts. The fireworks were powerful, cheap, readily available and could be set off at the harbor and selected stretches of the beaches.
Leaving Sanya, we caught sight of a man napping in a hammock, swinging at the back of a lorry deaf to the noisy traffic. Later, we saw a boy perched precariously on top of the driver cab of a fully loaded lorry ready to launch in the event of sudden braking. He had no use for a seat belt. A parachute maybe. Another man was sleeping in a hammock suspended above baskets of plump pigs in an open-backed truck. No one would hear that man snore.
But two jets performing vertical climbs in the Southern Hainan morning sky left exclamation marks in the sky as a reminder that we were in the twenty-first century. The drivers hardly noticed them. They had another mission in mind. Perhaps they were not much wiser concerning the location of the village than I was in my youth.
At one point, we suggested that the driver drop into a police station to check the route. He pretended not to understand. So we zoomed pass the police station and straight onto a mud road. After some distance - no village - and not being too sure about the mud road, the driver asked a man for directions working outside his house. Consequently, more driving, more mud road, and no village. After even more driving, we saw a roundabout in front with some menacingly, irregular and deep holes between the more contemporary tarmac road and ourselves. I worried if the breadvan behind us with the ladies and children was going to vanish into one of these holes before we hit the tarmac.
ARRIVAL IN WENCHANG
 We made it. We arrived at the city of Wenchang and met up with my mother's niece and nephew. They took us to a restaurant at a resort by the beach. The banquet-like lunch was surprisingly nice and featured: tubeworms, steamed lobster, boiled prawn, hermit crabs, crab in ginger and scallion, eel in black bean sauce, clams, two vegetables and, of course, watermelon. The sea tubeworms tasted like boiled small pig intestines except they were straighter, more uniform in shape and had a cleaner flavor. After lunch, my youngest brother was easily defeated in the fight to pay the restaurant bill by the local relatives.
After this friendly jostle, we realized we were headed for more serious embarrassment as we did not bring any "ang pow" envelopes, red envelopes customary in Asia to give to children and relatives. This minor despair was relieved by laughter coming from several hammocks from the youths.
 In Hainan, hammocks were everywhere. Of course, by the sea, this was the most natural place for hammocks. Except the owner wanted a yuan (15 cents) a person. Never mind if you spent less than a minute dangling haphazardly between fun and dread as one of our party did as the hammock felt inherently unstable.
After lunch, we returned to the town of Wenchang. Charlie Soong, father of the famous Soong sisters, came from a humble beginning in Wenchang County. We stopped near the market stalls by a river. My mother's niece and nephew went to buy firecrackers and fruit for paying respects at the graves of her father. Simultaneously, two of my brothers embarked on a covert, side operation to buy "ang pow" packets. They must have wandered a fair distance as they returned on a motorized rickshaw.
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We returned to the house. Despite the modern conveniences, this was still very much a traditional village. The villagers were not rich. Their houses were small. Fruits, nuts and vegetables were dried on the ground or on low roofs for the rainy season. There were no paved sidewalks, tarmac road nor large school building in the village. 
What lasting image could we find from our visit to the village and Hainan? Two days earlier, we landed at the arrival terminal at Wuzhizou island. At the terminal, the vendors were trying to sell a wild pineapple which looked pretty and impressive. One of the drivers had told us that morning that the fruit was very sour; too sour to eat. When we were leaving the island, the wild pineapple was dumped in the trash. As we return to the Bay Area, do we file the experience away as an interesting encounter but irrelevant to our lives?