At some point, my family got bored of hearing me preach about the importance of saving our ancestral home in Zhongshan city, in China, and returned to focusing on their American lives. They helped me a little bit, but grudgingly.
That’s how my journey began. So far it has taken nearly four years. In California, it took nearly a year to get my mom, sisters, aunties and first cousins to sign the necessary statements and post them to the Zhongshan government office. These were letters I had painstakingly written in Chinese with the help of Google Translate. The older generation and my cousins were to relinquish their rights. My sisters and I were to inherit the house so we could take care of it and pass it down through the generations.
The documents had to first go to the California secretary of state for authentication, and then on to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for re-authentication. That was the most painful part. The consulate staff have a reputation for being difficult. One snapped at my sister once for not speaking Chinese as she applied for a visa.
They also demanded I redo another document because I had referred to Hong Kong simply as “Hong Kong” instead of “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China”. Any redoing of documents involved inconveniencing family members to go to notary public offices again.
“Surely, everyone knows Hong Kong is a part of China,” I pleaded with consulate staff. Didn’t work. They finally relented after I told them I would praise their good service if I happened to run into China’s president, Xi Jinping, on his visit to San Francisco to attend the soon-to-be-held Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. I also promised to take full responsibility if the Zhongshan authorities found any problems with the document. What followed was a nail-biting wait for everything to be re-authenticated.
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By then, we had decided to move back to Hong Kong after only a year in California. Our decision wasn’t just because of my husband’s new job in Hong Kong and my girls preferring to live in Asia, and it definitely wasn’t because of a cousin telling me that by the time my daughters graduate from high school, China will be an equal to, if not more powerful than, the US.
I hated the framing of the two countries’ relationship as competitive. Why can’t they learn from each other? I had already seen plenty of ways they could: the American culture of encouraging students to be outspoken and independent thinkers could be a nice change from the top-down teaching style in China. China’s universal and low-cost healthcare as well as previous decades of providing housing for state-owned-company employees could be a lesson to America for tackling homelessness.
But I also wanted to move back because I felt there was unfinished business. There were more stories I wanted to report about and I was convinced my old family home should be restored to its original state.
The phone call from the consulate saying the documents were ready came on the day that my younger daughter graduated from school. It was also the day before our flight.
“It’s too late for us to mail them to you since you’re leaving tomorrow,” the consulate woman told me. “You’ll have to come to the consulate to pick them up before we close today.”
So after graduation, off I went, crossing the Bay Bridge in my car. But looking at the city’s buildings ahead in the distance, it felt different from previous times I had driven to San Francisco.
The evening walks on the beach near my home were becoming an almost-daily routine. I enjoyed watching flocks of birds swoop down into the water, as if dancing with the waves. But it was once again time to leave California and return to the other side of the ocean.
Cindy Sui is the BBC’s former Taiwan correspondent
