Finding the Village

The taxi driver stops the car and points out the window.
“Is this it?” I ask my cousin.
Semi trailers roar by, blaring their horns. The road slopes up a hill and then seemingly into nowhere.
“Niuhu?” my cousin asks, holding up characters written on a piece of paper. The driver bobs his head. He could be dropping us off anywhere, but we know we don’t have much a choice, deep in the outskirts of Shenzhen with the sunlight fading behind the smog on the horizon.
We head up the hill. A crowded street appears, clogged with cars and mopeds. Large tarps have been strung up against a fence for a makeshift marketplace. We pass medicine shops, caged chickens, and peanut stalls. Neon signs jut out of run down buildings, advertising hair salons and pool halls. Men smoke and spit on the street. A group of teenagers gaze at a television sitting outside of an electronics store.
“Let’s ask someone,” my cousin says. Ten years ago, he had come to the village for the first time and lit firecrackers at our ancestors’ graves. But the blank faces in response to his questions, and my English, are not because anyone is being rude, but because they are all renters, not from here. Finally, a security guard, wearing a badge that looks like it’s made out of plastic, lights up when we tell him our family name. He has tanned skin and talks slowly to my cousin in Mandarin.
“What is he saying?” I ask, anxious for a translation.
“He knows our family. He was supposed to leave with them, but then he couldn’t go for some reason.”
The guard looks down the road.
“He says no one came back.”
My cousin says goodbye, shakes hands with the man. I say “xiexie”, one of the only Chinese phrases I know.
We buy a paper bag of peanuts and try to find a taxi back to the city. I watch a grandma playing with a child, young girls chatting in tight tops and jeans. I wonder if I share blood or a name with them, and if they hold knowledge of a past that I might never understand.
We walk through a side street and the air changes, heavy with the smell of wet grass. I spot a small patch of farmland, bordered by rough looking shacks. There are no lights on the field and covered by darkness, the area looks abandoned. I realize that we may be standing over the last remnant of the old village.
“It’s just like the guard said,” I tell my cousin.
“What do you mean?”
I think of the way he had looked into the distance, down the road, like it was all said and done.
“No one came back. Except for us.”