The countryside of Canton was silent. It was a deep, heavy silence that swallowed us whole every time we stopped to let a herd of cows cross from one field to another. I put my head out the window at each stop and listened to the emptiness around us. The cows seemed to move across the road noiselessly; the clang of their bells lasted less than an instant before being sucked into the same enormous vacuum that silenced us, our breathing, our every move.
      Uncle Moon balanced on his motorcycle with the tip of his left foot as he let a large herd pass, followed by a man flicking his thin switch against their rumps. We passed rice and sugarcane fields, orchards drooping with almonds and pears. Lonely houses appeared now and then among all the tame, trimmed wilderness.
      A scene through my window: three men bending over a row of new seeds, maybe squash or spinach, each wearing a white shirt and wide bamboo hat. They all rise at the same time to turn and look at our caravan of rusty chicken trucks piled with luggage, trailing after a motorcycle. They all lean against their wooden hoes and draw a free hand up to shade their eyes. We watch each other, these three men and I, until the kicked-up dust and distance becomes too much for us to press our gazes through any longer.
      The village came upon us suddenly, after nearly an hour of driving. First a fence, then a single, slouching outhouse were the only signs of people out there in the dense, infinite farmland. Then we were surrounded: gray cement houses standing close together, chicken coops, barns, fields of goats, and people everywhere. Children running, elders squatting around mah-jong boards, men on bicycles, women wrangling animals. People stopped and stared, then encircled us. There was, all at once and out of nowhere, chaos around us. All of it was happening in a language I hardly knew.
      My mother gave out every last shirt and pair of socks to the children looking up at her with their dusty, sunburned faces. I stood there as they fingered my jeans and prodded my sneakers, calling me Auntie and Miss. I tried to talk to them in my hesitant Cantonese but could only form broken questions about their names and ages. As we were turning to leave I said, because I was unsure of how to say goodbye correctly, See you tomorrow.
      My mother sighed at the group of children as we turned to leave them.
     “Such a poor country. No money for nothing, not even socks. Nothing clean for them. Hard to live like this when you are young.”
      Our bags on our backs, we began walking in a line behind Uncle Moon. We kept walking even after the road disappeared, ducking under low branches, following a road no wider than a bicycle tire. I heard Uncle Moon’s voice come from the front of the line, almost in a chant. Straining to catch his words, I realized he was calling out the names of the families whose homes we were passing. Chang Farm; Old Lum Farm; Old Lady Bo’s House: a gray, square building; a two-story, white house with worn shutters; a shack with a red tarp over the doorway. My mother had been quiet during the drive and still hadn’t said anything more to her brother than his name at the station.