Zhou Guorong

Zhou Guorong was born on December 5, 1967, in the low, flat part of Changhua County where rice fields and drainage ditches ran beside narrow roads. Taiwan was under the Republic of China government and martial law. His family spoke Mandarin at the table and Taiwanese Hokkien in the lanes. They burned incense without much talk about doctrine: Mazu for safe travel, Guandi for steadiness, the kitchen god before the new year, and the family’s own dead at the grave.

He was the fourth and last child in a poor family. His father, Zhou Shoude, left before dawn for hired farm work, paid by the day in cash that was already spoken for. His mother, Lin Xiuying, worked fields too when she could, and when she stayed home she kept the cooking fire going and the children fed. His father’s parents lived with them. His grandfather, Zhou A-cai, repaired tools and fences, spoke little, and kept the yard in order. His grandmother, Zhou Liuying, watched Guorong in the mornings while she shelled peanuts, folded joss paper, and kept one eye on the road. Guorong grew tall fast; by primary school he stood out among the other boys, and adults commented on it as if height were a kind of luck.

The older children had already formed their roles. Zhou Meifen, born in 1959, carried water and watched the younger ones. She scolded him for muddy feet and later slipped him sweet bread when she earned a little money. Zhou Guoliang, born in 1961, wanted order and praise. Zhou Guoming, born in 1963, stayed close to Guorong when they were small, pulling him along to catch small fish in the irrigation canal with a jar. Guorong remembered the three of them as a line ahead of him, each with a path, while he was the one who arrived late to everything.

His father’s discipline landed hard. When Shoude drank, his voice rose and his hand was quick; the children learned to go quiet and let the night pass. Guorong didn’t cry much. He shut down and stared, and when it was over he went back to eating rice and pickled vegetables as if nothing had happened. His grandmother stepped between them more than once, shifting Guorong behind her body and telling Shoude to stop shaming himself. Guorong learned early that stubborn silence could outlast shouting.

School brought Mandarin textbooks, dictation drills, and propaganda slogans, but also small freedoms: the walk there, the mess of voices, the chance to be away from the house. He could read enough to follow street signs and fill a form, but he never treated homework as a promise. He forgot it, lost it, lied about it without a flicker. Teachers noticed he understood things fast when he listened. They also noticed he stopped listening. He dropped out after junior high school and started looking for work.

In 1978 his grandfather, Zhou A-cai, died. The old man’s funeral drew relatives and neighbors, white mourning cloth, and paper offerings burned in a metal drum. Guorong watched the flames and the ash. Afterward, money tightened further, and the older siblings brought home more of their own wages. When his grandmother died in 1986, the house felt less protected. Her altar photo sat above a small cup for tea, and Guorong lit incense on festival days because it was expected, not because he could explain what he felt.

When martial law ended in 1987, television changed and people spoke more freely, but Guorong stayed on the edges of talk. He wanted wages, not arguments. By then he had already followed men from his village into factories near Changhua City and the Taichung fringe. He learned to run machines by watching, then by putting his hands on the controls and seeing what happened. He liked the clear rules of metal: jam, stop; heat, cool; bolt, tighten. The foremen liked that he could hear a machine’s wrong rhythm and point to the part that needed attention. They disliked that he arrived late after nights out.

By his early twenties, drinking settled into his routine. After a shift he met coworkers at a small shop that sold beer, cigarettes, and betel nut. He chewed betel nut until his mouth felt raw and kept drinking because the others did. He spoke little until he had two bottles in him, then he laughed hard at simple jokes and slapped shoulders as if he belonged to the loud men he usually avoided. One of them, Li Shengde, a coworker with quick hands and a quick temper, became his regular companion. They played cards for small money and argued over rules. Guorong lost often, then insisted the deal had been wrong. Sometimes he pocketed a few small factory items—scrap metal, a tool that “no one used”—and shrugged when someone challenged him.

He met Chen Suhua in 1992 through a chain of introductions that began with a coworker’s cousin. She worked and kept accounts in her head. She was not impressed by stories. She looked at his height, his pay, his family, and his habits, then set terms plainly: a home that ran on schedules, not moods. He agreed, and for a while he tried. They rented a modest place near his factory route. They stayed childless, and neighbors stopped asking after a few years.

Marriage turned his days into a loop: factory, meals, sleep, temple on big festivals. Suhua handled the money better than he did. He brought pay home, but he also hid part of it and spent it on drink and cards. When she confronted him, he stayed calm and said he’d earned it. He didn’t throw things or weep; he sat and stared until her voice tired, then went out for air. He liked simple pleasures: salty soy-braised pork over rice, strong tea from a thermos, and sitting on a low stool outside the temple after burning incense, watching people pass without speaking to them.

In 2001, a jam on the factory line changed his body. He reached in to clear stuck material and the machine caught his right hand and forearm. Blood spread fast. Shengde was the first to reach him, yelling for someone to cut the power. At the hospital he answered questions in short sentences and watched the nurse wrap gauze around him. Surgery fixed the fracture and closed the lacerations, but rehab took months. He returned to light duty, cleaning and monitoring instead of heavy handling. The injury left his grip weak and his temper shorter; he cursed at dropped tools and slammed cabinet doors when things didn’t fit. At night he drank more during the months he stayed home, then reduced it when he had to wake early again.

The export cycles hit his factory in the late 1990s and again in 2008. Overtime vanished, then returned. When there was money he bought better food and treated his siblings’ families at a noodle shop. When money tightened he borrowed and avoided repayment until someone confronted him. Guoliang sent advice more than help. Meifen brought groceries and complained about the smell of alcohol on his breath. Guoming, still the closest, joked with him and called him “the tall useless one” in Hokkien, grinning to soften it.

In 2013 Guoming died at fifty. The funeral filled a temple courtyard, incense smoke hanging over the crowd. After the burial, Guorong and Suhua took in Guoming’s teenager, Zhou Yuting. Guoming’s ex-wife had remarried and lived far away, and no one else in the family had room. Yuting arrived with a bag of clothes and a phone, angry and quiet. Guorong set rules badly—strict one day, absent the next—yet he made sure school fees were paid. He ate dinner with Yuting in silence and then, without warning, offered a piece of fruit or a small joke about homework, trying to pull a response. Sometimes it worked.

In 2014, Suhua went to the hospital about stomach pain and weight loss she had been hiding for months. The tests in Taichung came back as liver cancer. Guorong drove her to appointments, waited with plastic bags of medication, and listened to the nurse, Lin, explain schedules as if speaking to a child. He kept the papers in a folder that grew thick. At home he learned to cook bland food and clean up vomit. On days when he stayed sober, he moved through tasks without complaint and without much tenderness, doing what needed doing and nothing more. On days he drank, Suhua’s face hardened and Yuting stayed in the bedroom.

Suhua died in 2016. After the funeral rites, Guorong stopped attending most gatherings. He still went to the local temple and placed oranges and a small cup of rice wine before Guandi, then bowed and left. Yuting finished high school and moved out soon after, calling him “Uncle” in Mandarin, not “Dad,” but sending messages on holidays.

In 2019 his father began falling and forgetting. Meifen lived in the north. Guoliang sent money but did not come. Guoming was dead. Guorong had no children, no wife, and lived twenty minutes away, so he became the one who showed up. He helped Shoude to the toilet, cleaned him, argued with him over medicine, then did it again. After Shoude died in 2021, his mother’s health declined quickly. Guorong took her to clinics, kept her meals soft, and learned the sequence of hospital counters and stamps. His siblings contributed money, but they didn’t sit through the long waiting hours. During COVID-19 restrictions, he stood outside hospital entrances with a mask and a folder of documents, waiting for permission to go in. Lin Xiuying died in 2024, and Guorong arranged the funeral and the offerings.

Late in 2025, Guorong lives in central Taiwan in a modest place near the old factory belt. He rises early, buys soy milk and youtiao from a street stall, and drinks tea while looking at the day’s light. He still lights incense on festival days, and he keeps his mother’s photo near his grandmother’s on a small shelf. He works when work is available, avoids long conversations, and answers calls from his sister about family matters with short replies. Some evenings he sits outside the temple after making an offering, watching scooters pass, waiting until it feels like time to go home.