Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [41]
It was a good thing he took some money, because when the train south reached Guangzhou, Fang Lijun had to stay there a week, waiting to join in the quota for Hong Kong passengers. In Shenzhen, he had to wait two more days before entering Hong Kong. Without a passport or an identity card, carrying only a transit pass, Fang Lijun finally went through customs at Luo Wu station, where they took his pass and allowed him to enter Hong Kong.
When Fang Lijun went to the American consulate in Hong Kong to apply for a visa, he ran into a technical problem: he had not entered Hong Kong illegally, but he had left China only on a transit pass, therefore he was not eligible to be a political refugee, and the Americans could not immediately issue him with a visa. He would have to apply formally for a visa on the grounds of family reunification, with his father.
Fang Lijun found temporary lodgings in a cheap guesthouse in the Chunking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui. He stayed there the better part of a year while the American visa process dragged on. While living in that guesthouse he certainly broadened his horizons. He met backpackers and small-business operators from as many as fifty different countries. There was an American hippie who was tired after spending several years in Goa and was now going back to America to join a hippie commune and continue to live his carefree, self-reliant life. Fang Lijun was extremely envious of him.
Eventually Fang Lijun went to Los Angeles and met his now quite elderly father whom he hadn’t seen since he was a small child. When Fang Lijun’s father had run with Sheng Shicai and the Nationalist Party, he had harmed quite a few people. He was very afraid that someone would take revenge on him, and so he hid at home in Monterrey Park most of the time. He built a high wall around his house and even installed an iron door to his bedroom. The father had remarried, and Fang Lijun lived with them less than a month. Then he took his father’s advice and moved to Texas, to the Houston Chinatown, to seek help from one of his father’s former subordinates. He worked as an accountant on the second floor of this man’s furniture and antiques store. There was a teenage daughter, and the two families fondly hoped that Fang Lijun would marry her. She, however, was completely Americanized, and when she got wind of what her parents were up to, she refused even to eat with Fang Lijun at the same table. He took his meals alone in the shop’s storage room. This certainly was not the kind of American Chinatown life he had imagined.
A few months later, Fang Lijun made contact with his hippie friend and left Houston for New Mexico to join the commune. It was located on a large piece of agricultural land where the members cultivated fresh organic vegetables. They also made their own clothes, raised bees, and made jam and candles. They felt like they were self-sufficient, but their seeds, raw materials, tools, and other everyday high-tech items, and their medicines, like Fang Lijun’s corticosteroids for his asthma, were all purchased in the city.
Living on a farm, they could not escape hard physical labor. Those hippies were all from middle-class urban families and they found it pretty tough going. But Fang Lijun was used to hard work in China and he was good at it, and could fix just about anything without a lot of talk. Because of all that, he was very well liked on the commune and he spent many happy years living there.
Unfortunately, in time