It is so easy sometimes to say the wrong thing, to open your mouth and ruin a perfect moment. Pon Man can almost feel the stillness on his skin. Outside, he hears the thump of the morning paper as it lands on their front step. The girls will be awake in an hour.
He kisses her, his lips held gently against hers. She giggles softly. Their feet touch under the blankets. We’ve been together so long, he thinks, and I can still make her laugh.
five
the garden
I walk out into the sunshine, blink hard at the transition from dark to light. I put my briefcase down to check that my resume is tucked safely away, unwrinkled. I adjust my suit jacket and stand up straight, trying to look like the sort of young woman who could cheerfully answer phones and photocopy memos. When I start to walk down our front path again, my skirt catches on a pile of thorny rose branches.
“Good morning.” My mother waves at me, her hands covered in thick gardening gloves, her head obscured by a wide-brimmed cotton hat. “Watch your step.”
I pull my skirt free and stand up straight as my eyes scan the front garden. She has trimmed the roses and planted delphiniums, peonies and pansies, filling up the narrow strip of dirt with a riot of spring blooms. She comes to stand beside me.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done any gardening,” she laughs. “Here I am, though, doing my best. The Italian lady next door helped me out.”
Without uttering a word, I walk around the side of the house to the back garden. Tomato plants sit on the side, waiting to be planted. The lattice for creeping beans has been dragged out of the garage, where it had been sitting for twelve years, ever since my father died. A pitchfork leans against the fence beside the tall weeds.
When I was a child, our garden was beautiful, a mass of green and red and yellow and orange. Flowers burst open every spring and summer morning, and the vegetables grew fat and glossy. I ran through the sprinkler while my father bent over his plants in his rubber boots.
By the time everything was all over and my father was dead, the garden had turned brown and weedy, its flowers and vegetables buried under the uninvited dandelions and thorny, invasive blackberries. My sisters, who had promised to keep everything growing, forgot (the garden was easy to ignore, surrounded by rocks and fencing; the browner it got, the more it blended into the house itself), and my mother, never a gardener to begin with, retreated into her dark, dusty hole on the couch.
When I return to the front, she is digging a place for the hydrangea bush sitting on the lawn. “Did you see the tomatoes? I’m going to plant those as soon as I’m finished out here. They might die, but it’s better to try, isn’t it?”
“It looks nice.” I pick up my case.
She straightens up. “Yes, it does. I’m very pleased.”
I shift my weight from foot to foot, feeling as if I should be saying something (I’m sorry or If I stay here, what will happen?), so I mutter, “I’d better go. I don’t want to be late for my interview.” I hurry to the bus stop, my nose filled with the smells of damp earth and freshly cut grass.
My father died. People had to be informed. A funeral needed planning. My sisters and I stared at one another for two whole days, and then we got to work.
Daisy flew back home, arriving in Vancouver just twenty-one hours after the doctor’s call (I answered and silently passed the phone to my mother, who cried out, tearing the air around us with the sound). Wendy drove to the funeral home, bringing with her the brand new suit she had bought for the body when we knew there couldn’t be any more time. Jackie gathered his belongings from the hospital room into paper shopping bags and carried them close to her chest as she moved them from room to car to house. Penny and I stayed home, heating up can after can of soup for our mother and frying bacon and eggs for our grandfather, who didn’t eat. He let his plate grow cold, his eyes cast down as if he was patiently waiting for the slow solidification of yolk and pork fat.
I remember my sisters talking bloodlessly about money. The life insurance could pay down the remainder of the mortgage, and Wendy and Jackie would support Penny and me while we were still in school. They would reinvest our father’s savings so that our mother would always have something to live on. Daisy decided to move back to Vancouver. Our mother was spared the details. Numbers were nothing more to her than figures on a piece of a paper, presided over by someone else. That someone else became my sisters and, later, me.
Aunt Susie stayed with my mother in her room, emerging only to collect food and tissues. We barely saw them.
When the day of the funeral arrived, five days after his death, we were dry from crying, achy from effort and blank from thinking. People flew and drove in from everywhere, stayed in our house, tried to hold our hands. We pushed them off and poured them tea instead.
We sat on the sofa, all five of us wearing the thin black veils Aunt Susie gave us. I stared at the makeshift memorial my father’s sisters had erected on the fireplace. The smoke floated up from musky incense sticks and around my father’s picture. Relatives stood around us, silent. I felt as if they were watching us, waiting for one of us to slash her wrists, throw herself down on the carpet and writhe in overwhelming grief. But we simply sat there, our eyelashes flicking against our veils whenever we blinked to keep from crying or looked down at our black, sensible shoes.
The door to my mother’s bedroom opened, and she emerged, supported on one side by Aunt Susie and on the other by Aunt Yen Mei. Her head rolled from side to side. She carefully placed one foot in front of the other as if she had forgotten how to walk. I watched as the crowd of relatives swivelled their heads to witness her slow progress across the room.
She kneeled in front of my father’s picture. It revealed nothing, and we were the only ones who knew that it had been taken only six months before his death, that the look of displeasure on his face was actually one of pain, that the shoulder pads in his suit masked the thirty-five pounds he had already lost. My mother, who chose this particular photo, always preferred to remember misfortune.
She beat her head against the floor and cried, chanted, screamed. The old ladies who had come to help stood off to the side, murmuring what sounded like approval. I remember feeling as though I was in a ghastly imitation of a poorly acted opera, that my mother was the long-suffering soprano, the old ladies were the myopic crowd in the dress circle, and my sisters and I were the rarely noticed chorus, the ones who kept up the resentful and low background singing.
Later, at the funeral home, my mother was all business, arranging things with the funeral director, who bowed to us like a proper Chinese houseboy—stiff, obsequious. We were seated in a curtained area, separate from the rest of the mourners, presumably so that no one could see us grieving. But back here, my mother was preternaturally calm and spent the hour criticizing, in a loud whisper, the way the pastor was leading the service. I stared at her tear-stained face and listened to her complaints. I wanted to shove her, pull her hair until she acted like a normal person. Instead, I pulled at the tissue in my lap, shredding it into thin strips that floated off into the warm, recycled air when I breathed.
When the casket was lowered into the ground at the cemetery, Aunt Susie instructed us to turn our backs and whispered some dire prediction of what would happen to us if we watched. We all turned and stood there in a line, five black-veiled girls, straight-backed, in the late afternoon sunshine. I remember looking at one of Daisy’s friends, a tall and pretty girl with curly honey-coloured hair who was wearing a white dress that shone like a light in the middle of all the black. As the casket went down, I watched her hair float on the wind behind her and her white skirt drift like a ghost around and behind her ankles. She was like a dream within a nightmare.
“Okay,” says the eye doctor. “On a scale from one to ten, one being the clearest and ten being the blurriest, how badly is your mother seeing?”
I turn around and look at my mother in her small vinyl chair. She looks expectantly at me, waiting for me to translate what the o
ptometrist, who uses words she doesn’t know, has just said. The fluorescent lights flicker, and it is as if I am watching a movie and can see the transition from frame to frame. I open my mouth, knowing that some concepts just don’t translate.
I mumble something about numbers and blurriness, and my mother, frustrated, interrupts me in Chinese. “What are you talking about? One, ten, six? He didn’t really say that, did he?”
I turn again and say to the doctor, “Seven. She says her blurriness is at seven.”
“All right, then, let’s turn off these lights and have a look.” He spins on his stool and flips a switch, and the room is black except for a thin line of light coming in from the waiting area through the crack at the bottom of the door. I can hear clicking, a deep “Hmmmm” from the doctor and my mother tapping her feet on the floor.
He turns the lights back on. “Well, it looks like things are pretty good. No change from the last time, and if you’re careful, your eyes will be great until you’re a hundred.” He chuckles.
“He says your eyes look good, Mom.”
She looks at him and then quickly looks at me. “Is he sure? What about the spots, those black spots I keep seeing?”
I ask the doctor, and he says, “Everyone sees spots, Mrs. Chan, even me. It’s nothing to be concerned about.”
As I repeat this to my mother, her face changes to fear. If she’s perfectly healthy, what will everyone expect of her? Will she have to learn better English or how to file her own tax returns? She brings her hands up to her eyes, touches her lids with her fingertips. I reach out to her and place my hand on her shoulder. I had always thought of her as surrounded by a thin but unbreakable layer of glass that my sisters and I couldn’t penetrate, even when we wanted to. Right now, however, touching her, feeling her blood and pulse underneath her skin, I see that it can all be simple, but only if I make it so.
The optometrist says to me, “She’s lucky to have you.” This I don’t bother to translate; after all, she never believes what he says anyway.
That afternoon, after my mother has gone to bed for a nap, I wander around the house, touching furniture and Hong Kong magazines, tissue boxes and shoes. I pull my grandfather’s old cigarette tin from my closet and sit down to look through the photographs again, but the air is so still that I leave the tin on the bed and begin to walk, stirring up old smells and older dust. I run downstairs, open the front door and step out into the yard.
The flowers my mother planted three days ago are already growing. Big round peony buds. Pansies that creep along the dirt, filling up space that was once empty. I pick up a stray branch of the clematis that my mother has been trying to train over the low brick fence. I loop it around a post, tucking the tendrils into the crumbly grout. I notice that the grass is growing in on the flower garden, so, on my knees, I begin to rip off the uneven blades.
Weeds have started to come back. The topsoil is lumpy. Aphids have begun to eat through the leaves of the new plants. I walk to the garage for gloves, a spade, shears and a bottle of pesticide. In the back, I pause to run my hands over the sprouting beans. “Even if we wanted to stop them from growing, we couldn’t,” I say to myself.
The soil feels like warm flesh in my hands, as if I am freeing a long-lost, living person from years and layers of dirt. I pull out buttercups from around the base of the daffodils my father once planted, which have, somehow, survived years of neglect to return every spring, their blossoms bobbing in the wind, perennially cheerful even in rain or fog.
When I finish, I lie down on the lawn. Muddy water seeps through my jeans and sweater, but it doesn’t matter. I squint into the sky, watch clouds floating in from the north. My eyes close and I fall asleep, the spade in my hands.
In my grandfather’s old cigarette tin full of photographs, I find one in which my grandmother is standing beside a low bush covered in snow in their front yard. She is wearing a scarf over her hair and a thick, light-coloured coat. She has taken off her glasses for this picture and is smiling shyly, coyly at the person behind the camera. The date is January 1957.
My grandfather, looking through his camera (and at the photo itself, years later, perhaps every day, perhaps to help him forget the loneliness of living in a bedroom in a house full of people who never wanted him in the first place), saw the same thing I am seeing: a middle-aged woman who has become vain in his presence, who has, suddenly, it seems, begun to care about the curl of her hair and the proportions of her smile.
“Perhaps,” she might have said, “I love you after all.”
In later pictures, they are always close together, shoulders and hands touching, their bodies finally, I think, talking. “We are no longer beautiful,” she might be saying, “but we are something else in a different place now, and it is better.”
I imagine that my grandfather, so long untouched, cries.
return
Crumpled into his brown brocade chair (once his wife’s, with his wife’s scent, but after all these years, it is only himself he smells), he cries into his hands, not caring that he will soon have to accompany his daughters and granddaughters to his son’s funeral and look dignified and stately, not caring that his suit may be wet, not caring that he has never cried in his life, only now.
How could it be that it is the year 1988 and I am still alive? Seid Quan pounds his own head with his fists. I should have died a long time ago.
Outside his bedroom door, he can hear the wailing from his daughter-in-law, who is now, finally, able to weep and scream publicly His daughters have flown in, Min Lai from Toronto and Yun Wo from Guangzhou. He can feel them hovering in the hall, waiting to hold him up should he collapse. Waiting to surround him and protect his ninety-three-year-old ears from the assault that is Siu Sang’s grieving.
When a man has lived long enough to need protection, then he has lived too long.
He stands up, brushes the wrinkles out of his grey wool pants. He will stand as straight as he can, walk like a soldier to keep himself from stumbling blindly. His friends—the ones who are still alive—and their sons will be waiting for him. They will tell him how sorry they are and place their hands on his shoulder in sympathy. They will not be comfortable with an old, weeping man, and Seid Quan hasn’t disappointed anyone yet.
He eats dinner with his son’s family and does not speak to anyone, not even to his five granddaughters, who, one week after the funeral, are all still staying with their mother. They speak rapidly in English about money and the mortgage, and ignore Siu Sang, who chews slowly, placing one grain of rice in her mouth at a time. He steals a glance at her (sneakily, for, in his experience, direct eye contact does not end well), sees her blank eyes as she eats. Strangely, he misses the rage and fear he had once been so used to. This emptiness, he thinks as he pushes the food around in his bowl, is much worse. He wonders if he could help her—perhaps they could remember Pon Man together, maybe even Shew Lin as well. But as soon as the thought enters his head, he dismisses it. She hates me, and I can be no comfort to her. Afterward, Seid Quan carries his dishes to the sink and walks slowly back to his room, his eyes fixed on the orange-gold of the carpet so that he will not see Siu Sang picking up his plate as if she expects cockroaches to erupt from its surface.
He looks out his window and sees the wall of the house next door, his bedside light reflected as a perfect square of yellow on the white stucco. He turns back to the piles that surround him on his bed, pulls out a thin brown envelope, the address written in thick pencil. A letter from his son when he was still a child living in the village.
Seid Quan finds that he can only let his eyes float over the contents (he is afraid that he will cry again, and he is not sure his body can take it). Phrases jump out, appear like lighted matches before they vanish.
“The others say I look like a girl.”
“Mother made dumplings.”
“I am sticky from the heat.”
“Do you miss us?”
He asked his son, six years ago, why he never ta
lked, why he never looked him in the face. Pon Man turned red and said nothing, choosing, instead, to walk away from his father and leaving him with his questions and an image of his son retreating.
He wonders now if he could have returned permanently to the village, if he would have been a conquering hero or simply a finished man, one whose useful days were irrevocably over. The village, Seid Quan thinks. It took me seven years, working day and night, to pay back the village. He thinks of the word slave, then dismisses it from his mind. I can’t be that way, always a victim, always the one being put upon.
He pushes the letter back into its envelope and drops it on the floor, where it settles into the carpet delicately, deliberately. He gathers up all the rest and carries them to an apple crate in his closet. Carefully, he stuffs the letters into spots that are seemingly too small for the papers that fill his arms, but Seid Quan is a patient man and, after a while, he has packed the crate so tightly that the lid almost doesn’t fit. He pushes down until he hears that click—the click that means the parts of his past he can no longer look at are contained again. He does not remember what the crate hides anymore, can only guess at the contents that could be seventy years old. He is not quite sure if this pleases him or not, only that the hiding is necessary because he has lived this long and could live even longer.
Seid Quan stands up and walks to the kitchen, where his daughter-in-law is washing the dishes. He places the kettle on the stove, murmurs something about making tea and stands there, watching her hands move quickly through the soapy water.
As he opens his mouth to say something, she turns around and says, “Is there something you need? Because I’ll just get it for you and then you can sit down and be out of my way.”
He looks at her angry face, the tenseness of her neck and takes a step backwards. “Well,” he says, “if you could just bring me that tea when it’s ready.” And he turns around and heads back to his bedroom, tripping on a stray shoe lying carelessly in the hall. He closes the door and leans against it, relieved.
End of East, The Page 20
