Dulwich OnView

by Yang-May Ooi

As part of The Lion and and The Dragon Exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Dulwich OnView is inviting submissions around the theme of China and all things Chinese – please see “The Lion and The Dragon: Share your stories about China and all things Chinese” above for more details about this open invitation.

To kick off this project, co-editor Yang-May Ooi writes about her great-great-grandfather who ran away from China to Malaya at the end of the 19th century. You can also hear a podcast of her grandfather telling the story.

THE GRAVE

When I was a child, I remember being told that his grave was in an ancient Chinese cemtery up on a hill in the jungle outside Taiping, Malaysia. He had died in Malaya, never seeing China, his homeland, since he ran away from the bandits who had captured him. Only a few men in the family knew how to find the grave in the jungle. No women could go and visit the grave because the jungle was too dangerous – and certainly I would not be allowed to go as a little girl. The location was handed down to my second cousins, however, father to son, man to boy.

THE RAID

One night, a hundred and fifty years ago, in Southern China, bandits raided my great-great-grandfather’s village. He was a boy and somehow, escaped the carnage. Some versions of the story in my family say the chief bandit felt pity for him and took him away with the bandit gant. Another version says that the gang rounded up the boys of the village to be their boot boys or to sell as slaves.

THE BANDITS

The boy spends many years with the bandits until he becomes a grown man. Some say the bandit chief took him as a son and groomed him to be his successor. Others say the boy never forgot the night of the raid and the murder of his family – he silently vowed vengeance and bided his time. Yet another sotry goes that the boy had been a prince and one day, somehow, he discovers his true identity while part of the bandit gang.

ESCAPE

In any event, when he was a grown man, he ran away from the bandit gant and made his way to a port on the coast. There, he boarded a junk to Malaya, paying his passage as an indentured labourer. One story says that he made his escape on his eighteenth birthday. Another says he killed the bandit chief to honour his vow of vengeance – even though he had come to love the chief as his father. And, well, the prince version is just to silly to even continue… Whatever the trigger, at any rate, he had to escape the country for fear of his life or to forever forget the tragedies of his past.

THE LEGACY

When I look at the generations of the family that came after this boy, the descendants of this bandit heir apparent, I do not see fighting men or thieves or murderers or soulds tortured by dark memories. My family are all responsible, sensible, law-abiding and well, rather boring citizens.

When I was thirteen, I interviewed my grandfather, the grandson of the Runaway Boy, and he told the story into my tape recorder*. His version is straightforward, without the glamourous embellishment. My grandfather died the next year and the tape is our only recording of his voice. I had had the intention at that time to write a book about the family. There is a handwritten exercise book with my childish version of the story, full of pawing horses and flames and screaming villagers. There is also another version, written in my twenties, that I abandoned just before writing The Flame Tree - fifteen years had passed and this version was still full of thundering horses hooves and a boy scooped up while running to hide in the fields.

The manuscript is still unfinished after thirty years. People tell me I should finish writing that book – Chinese family sagas have been all the rage; here’s my chance to launch my Wild Swans out into the world. But I think I like the myth – or the many myths – too much to bring myself to write the definitive story. The myths make us dark and glamourous – the lawyers and accountants and doctors and teachers that this boy’s DNA came to create. It’s cool to know, in my modern, city-bound life that if armageddon came I have inside me the genes to swash and buckle my way to survival and escape, bandit-style…

At any rate, whatever truth or otherwise lurks in those myths, they do tell us one true thing about my great-great-grandfather – whether he had really been a bandit or a prince or a murderer, he was certainly a heck of a storyteller.

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*You can listen to the recording of my grandfather telling his version of the bandit story below. The family gathered round one evening just before Christmas 1976 and I taped the story that my grandfather told. This is the last and only recording we have of his voice as he died a year later so it is a recording that is treasured in our family. I have transferred it to digital format without any expert or fancy technology so the sound quality is not perfect. However, I hope that you can still enjoy the story he tells…

Click on the link below and the podcast will download as an mp3 file.

A Voice from the Past

(This article and the podcast first appeared on Yang-May’s blog FusionView.co.uk)

Photo: thanks to Maurice Koop from flickr.com (CCL)