Around the spring of 2015, my mother and I packed up our bags to spend a week in 大埔 (Dabu), a county quietly nestled in Meizhou, Guangdong. So obscure is this place, that when I later tried searching it up, Google mistook it for its more famous namesake in Hong Kong. What drew us there wasn’t fame or some world-renowned cuisine. It was instead where generations of unsung families, including my father, put down roots, and we went there in search of nostalgia for memories that I didn’t know existed.
It was very common for small rural towns like Dabu to have concrete sidewalks replaced by dirt paths, molded by the centuries of footsteps in its passing; commercial buildings also found no place here, where the trees and luscious green hills took root, and supplied the human dwellers with crops and a really, really wonderful scenery. Any semblance of shopping (crude definition: where you obtain goods by spending cash in a storefront – people loved to just give things away here) was over half an hour of walk away. If you are accustomed to the buzz of city life, this place will provide a very stimulating challenge of finding novel ways to keep yourself entertained.
In Dabu, life unspools in slower, softer threads. Your morning will begin with the crows of your neighbor’s resident rooster. But if you miss the first one, don’t worry, he crows another time later in the day. However, if you’re instead woken up by a passing loudspeaker, then you are too late: you missed the steamed buns lady. She, affectionately dubbed the “steam buns lady” by the village, would routinely take a trek every dawn around the county, never missing a day. (Though I do wonder if she still walks that path today.) Despite being so quiet, her booming loudspeaker (“Mantou! Baozi! Doujiang youtiao!”) proudly announced her presence – if you manage to catch her in her trek, you will be greatly rewarded with objectively the best, juicy, steaming pork buns you have ever eaten, for a very low price of 3 yuan. To miss her will result in a very tragic start to your day. After breakfast, you should follow the winded path from the courtyard to the river for a brief period of respite from the busy urban life. There, your neighbors would gather, the adults washing their clothes by the bank and the children playing, their laughter gliding over the water’s surface. Afternoons brought the courtyard further to life, when the oldest sons would chase and catch an unfortunate geese that would be deliciously prepared into dinner for the night. You may try your hands at it, but unless you are an extremely practiced runner and have the flexes of an F1 driver, you will find yourself embarrassed by the inhumane (literally) capacity for these geese to run away from you, who upon escaping, will mockingly quack at you.
Evenings were reserved for stories. Sitting in plastic benches of all colors imaginable in the comforts of the Shen’s – the only family that has a working TV in their backyard – you will be joined by about two dozen other villagers exchanging over the home-cooked food (if auntie Shen made Char Siu that night, you are in luck) and the flicker of their TV. And, if you went the extra mile to spend a week there, you will realize something else, something new entirely. You will find that the love there isn’t about merging and thriving in attachment, but about being comfortable with the space between each soul that may never meet again: when you grow enough attachment to the place and the people that when you leave 大埔, say your last goodbye to auntie Shen, you just have to believe that she has her best wishes for you. For me, I will never be the oldest son who can catch a goose for dinner (it is really, really hard), but a part of my soul lies with them – even when they ask me to let go and move forward.