I instantly smell the overwhelmingly stench of trash as soon as I get out of the car as the typical Guangdong summer burns every square inch of my body. "Sigh", I think to myself, "another year, another visit." I'm in a small city-like village in Raoping district which is a small part of the Chaozhou district in my home province of Guangdong. The exponential economic growth in the past 20 years of China has helped improve social and economic conditions here, but this place can't even compare to a third-tier Chinese city much less the super-tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Safe to say this is definitely not a city you'd visit for vacation or even a weekend trip. This is my seventh (eighth? ninth? I've lost track) visit since the summer of 2006, when I first visited China after immigrating to the United States as a young infant.
老家 (pronunced lao jia) literally means "old home," but when culturally translated means something along the lines of "place of origin" or "native land." In Chinese culture (well according to how my father's side of the family interprets Chinese culture), your "老家" or "place of origin" is highly important as it helps define who you are as a person. The culture, language, and even the food can be extremely different than even a neighboring district/province just a few miles away. It's more focused on the male side of the family as culturally, the women of the family are married out while males bring brides into the family. The males keep the old family lineage. Most of our entire extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins, grandma, grandpa) on my father's side are all still situated here. Thus our visits every summer.
My father was raised in the village side of the city, the part of the city where most of the houses are still made of solid stone and where all the villagers still work the fields. Grandma (born between 1931-1933, nobody really knows for sure) still lives in the old 2 room stone house that my father and his 5 siblings were raised in. The roads and ponds are littered with garbage as the villagers aren't very well educated in cleanliness. This village is the picture perfect definition of a poor peasant village in the middle of China. In the more "city-like" part of the city, conditions look much better. Houses are usually built two to three stories high with all kinds of shops present on the first floor facing outward towards the street. The roads are jam packed with mopeds and motorcycles weaving in and out of pedestrian and street traffic. Driving without causing accidents requires praying to at least 3 different religions.
Cantonese is the central language of Guangdong. Without it, you can still get by pretty easily with Mandarin but a little difficult trying to understand the accents. I don't speak a lick of Cantonese (only Mandarin) even though both my parents are technically Cantonese, but the language in Chaozhou is another dialect of Cantonese. What's even worse is that even native Cantonese speakers can't even understand Chaozhou style Cantonese. Gah. Trying to understand is just having the sound go through one ear and out the other.
Since this place is near the ocean/waterways, there's plenty of seafood such as mussels, clams, and fresh fish. The style is very Cantonese (fresh and lightly seasoned) with a splash of their own style (depending on the dish). There's a wide variety of vegetables and delicious fruits that seem to always be in season (albeit a bit smaller during some months). Tea is incredibly important here (as is most of China) and whenever we visited a family member or a family friend's place we would always be served the native tea (which is incredibly delicious) with a typical Chinese-style tea set. I swear over the course of the day the average person over 40 primarily uses tea as their main form of liquid.
I'm not at all close to my extended family. There are massive cultural and language barriers that prevent me from even having a casual conversation. If it wasn't for my father, I would probably never speak or visit. Visiting them and comparing their conditions to mine is bittersweet. Seeing their lives makes me feel very fortunate for mine. If my father hadn't worked hard and managed to get out of the village, I would have suffered the same fate as many of my cousins, uncles, and aunts. I'm not saying that how they live is terrible, but after seeing more to the world through education and traveling, I'm truthfully glad of my current circumstances. Maybe when I'm a bit older I'll come back to the village to reminisce, but for now all I can do is look forward.