by Kat Chow
* * *
As the Communist Party established its hold over China, Gung Gung took Kau Fu from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. They boarded a boat to Macau, and they continued on to Hong Kong from there. A little while later, Yi Ma and some cousins, followed by Bo Mui and Po Po, traveled the same route to the Sham Shui Po neighborhood in Hong Kong. They reunited there, making a home with extended family in a small apartment. They had split their family this way because they had heard from friends that it might make their escape easier. It was as if they believed the Communist Party wouldn’t come for them if their family wasn’t complete.
* * *
Three years later, the entire family had arrived in Hong Kong. My mother was four when Yi Ma pulled her aside one day.
Our mother is dead, Yi Ma told her little sister. Po Po’s uterine cancer had returned. Yi Ma wondered if her mui mui understood. After all, for children, the idea of forever can feel like tomorrow, and tomorrow can feel like forever.
When somebody dies, Yi Ma explained, they go on to the afterlife. She told her sister that their mother loved them very much, and that maybe, maybe their mother would find her way back to them in another life.
There was always this: another chance, another realm.
As they said goodbye to Po Po, my mother clung to her father and siblings. They lit incense and prayed. The adults and Yi Ma stayed overnight at the funeral home to keep Po Po company until the morning, when they would send her to the afterlife. My mother and Kau Fu played together like it was a normal day. When dawn came, they traveled to the top of the Wo Hop Shek Public Cemetery to bury Po Po. Yi Ma, who was now a teenager, gathered my mother to her side and whispered into her ear.
I promised our mother that I would take care of you, Yi Ma said. You’re my daughter now.
I wonder if, at four, you were old enough to experience the tinge of panic-guilt that so many people feel when someone they love dies. Did you hear growing up that, had you not been born, your mother’s cancer might not have been as deadly? My gut says you must have; you were always sensitive, able to read people’s emotions, folding them into your own. I have a feeling that Yi Ma tried to shield you from the knowledge of how your birth was intertwined with your mother’s death. Perhaps this was not so difficult, since talking about the dead is bad luck.
* * *
Outside the apartment their extended family shared, Yi Ma spent her evenings after school putting off her homework so that she could corral her siblings. Their father ran a motel in Hong Kong that kept him away from the house from the early morning hours until late at night, and a relative stayed to watch over the children. Yi Ma sewed dolls for her sister and the neighborhood girls and shopped with her grandmother at the market for whatever they could afford, carrying back small bundles of vegetables. And when they returned, Yi Ma set to work preparing dinner. She often made, as ordered by her father, a special dish for the boys in the family, something with a little bit of meat to nurture their growing bodies. I imagine that it was a thin soup with pork bone, the remaining meat boiled until tender with pieces of daikon and carrots floating toward the top. She spent hours simmering the soup she and Bo Mui and the other girls in the family were never allowed to eat.
At dinner one night, Bo Mui noticed the difference in the dishes laid out before her and her brothers. She had no meat in front of her. Only a small bowl that was mostly rice with some vegetables.
Why? she asked. Her voice had a hard edge. Why can’t I have this too? Her father studied her as she began to wail, her cheeks red. He allowed her a few pieces of pork. She chewed with contentment, not understanding the weight of her victory.
* * *
For the remaining time they lived in Hong Kong, Yi Ma led her siblings up the hill at the cemetery to Po Po’s grave. She tells me that she did this a couple times a year, for holidays. That she only mentions her siblings and herself in these stories conjures an image without adults, of these young children parenting themselves. They toddle between the tombstones, ducklings in search of their mother.
For Ching Ming, Yi Ma showed her sister and brothers how to observe the day and sweep the dirt from their mother’s headstone until it gleamed. They ran their hands along their mother’s name and dug their fingers into the crevices to scrape away dust.
On Chung Yeung, Yi Ma explained to her siblings, their mother’s ghost, along with all the other spirits of the dead, were said to roam the earth in order to visit the living. They carried a whole boiled chicken, strips of uncut pork belly, apples, and oranges up the hill, and laid them on top of their mother’s grave as an offering.
Yi Ma and her younger siblings bowed three times, clutching their burning joss sticks.
Take care of yourself, they said to their mother, aunts, uncles, and others who had passed. Good luck. Take care of everyone else. If they were hungry, they sat by their mother’s grave and ate some of the offerings before hauling the rest home. Yi Ma and our family observed these holidays each year in Hong Kong, but once our family immigrates to the United States, we’re too isolated, the cemeteries are too far, and it is easier to forget than to engage with this grief. We let these traditions fade.
My yi ma mentions that whenever they climbed the cemetery hills to their mother, Bo Mui’s body contorted as though a spirit had entered her. She would retch, and then with an apologetic cry, vomit.
Yi Ma tries to explain my mother’s reaction: This part of Wo Hop Shek was so tall—almost a mountain, in her recollection. Maybe there was a slight altitude change. Or maybe it was all of that physical exertion. Bo Mui was just a child. When I hear this story now, it’s hard not to think that there was something about the cemetery that made her queasy. Like she sensed her mother’s spirit around her, and she couldn’t contain herself.
5.
When my mother finished high school in Hong Kong, she insisted to her father that she attend college in America. Yi Ma was already in the U.S., in a place called Bridgeport, Connecticut. Gung Gung had found her a husband, a man whose family had made the move from China to America some years before. The plan was that Yi Ma would sponsor the rest of the family to come to the U.S.: her father, her siblings, her cousins. To support this endeavor, Yi Ma’s husband worked at his parents’ restaurant, and eventually, she took a job in the stockroom of the JCPenney in the Trumbull mall.
Gung Gung relented to my mother’s wish to apply to college. But where she went, however, was another argument.
You want to go to the University of Wisconsin? her father asked.
He wasn’t familiar with the Midwest. He just knew that it was between a place called Connecticut, where Yi Ma lived, and another place called Vancouver, B.C., where Kau Fu had studied.
You can’t be so far from either of them, Gung Gung told my mother. Just go to a cheaper college near your sister.
Gung Gung also insisted that my mother pursue a degree in the medical field. It’s more stable, he said. You’ll have a better chance of getting a good job. My mother knew that this was probably because her father once wanted to be a doctor. He was smart, disciplined, and worthy of becoming one, his family thought. But he finished high school in the 1930s, when the Kuomintang and the Communists were at war, and the Japanese military’s invasion of China had made it more vulnerable. With the country and his family’s resources depleted, a formal education—especially one to become a doctor—was no longer an option.
And so, because Gung Gung was paying the bill—and because he was her father—my mother listened. She enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, studied hematology, and lived with Yi Ma and her family.
Between classes and hanging out at the restaurant that Yi Ma’s in-laws ran, my mother headed to study dates with classmates and let them take her to the movies. There were two boys from Hong Kong whom she liked. She was constantly flirting with them, teasing, always dressing carefully in an outfit—something patterned or floral that Yi Ma had made or brought home from JCPenney. The students were film producers and artistic
types and, as Yi Ma put it to me, very handsome.
Gung Gung, who had by now moved to the States and lived with his children, didn’t approve.
Don’t even think about it, he told my mother. They’re going to go back to Hong Kong, and then where does that leave you?
I imagine my mother spending time with them anyway. I wonder if, like her father, remaining in America was a given, if she understood it was now her future. Or, did she think, defiantly, about an alternate life where she grew old in Hong Kong?
* * *
My parents met at a tag sale in Manchester that a mutual friend organized. The friend was moving to California and needed to get rid of his belongings. The tag sale was not far from where my father had bought a house a couple of years earlier. He had a stable job that sponsored his green card, a healthy bank account, and, with home ownership, a commitment to stay in America. My mother rented a small apartment on Asylum Street in Hartford, close enough so that she could walk to the hospital where she worked as a medical technologist and drew blood. She was twenty-five. My father was thirty-one. Both spoke Cantonese, my father’s Taishanese accent slipping through. Meeting another immigrant who spoke the same Chinese dialect was rare for a suburb like Manchester, where the demographics in the 1980s skewed mostly white. I imagine the tag sale: a small driveway filled with tables of lamps and records and linens and scratched, mismatched furniture. Bo Mui and Wing Shek both wore large eyeglasses that swallowed their faces. My mother’s hair was loose and to her shoulders. My father was tan and wiry, all matter-of-fact smiles, a man who believed his future was great.
These days, when I press my father for details about how he met my mother, rephrasing the same question in a half-dozen different ways, he just repeats: We were at a tag sale. I wonder if he really has no other memories to share, or if it’s too painful. He only shrugs, his way of saying I don’t know.
But what happened?
I don’t know.
Was it summer or spring or fall?
I don’t know.
Morning, when the tag sale was just beginning, or late afternoon, when it was wrapping up?
I don’t know.
How did you know it was love? Was it love, do you think?
I don’t know.
Do you know what love is?
I don’t know.
Did you imagine it would end like this?
I don’t know.
* * *
My mother knew how to make an impression, and this talent makes my father’s inability to recall their introduction more stark.
Many years later, I still laugh and am amazed when I recall when my mother met Steven, the man whom Steph would later marry. My mother only referred to him as “Stephen King,” a nickname that Caroline and I still occasionally invoke, long after her passing.
How long is a Chinaman? she said to Stephen King. I was in middle school, and Steph was nearing the end of college. My mother stood in the kitchen slicing vegetables. Out of nowhere, she broke into the gag, and then she fell silent, her lips curled and her teeth exposed.
How long is a Chinaman? she asked again, slowly, emphasizing each word. Stephen King scanned the room, unsure if this was a riddle; if she was making a joke about sex; if she was being a little racist. No doubt, he wondered if he should be offended since his parents were from China, and he was also a man. The punch line: The question is actually a statement. Howe Long is a Chinaman.
I stood next to my mother in the kitchen, and I smirked and chanted her question at Stephen King. How long is a Chinaman! How long is a Chinaman! How! Long! Is! A! Chinaman!
When I am new to D.C. and in my early twenties, one of my housemates throws a party. I linger by the dining table and stack slices of cheddar and pepper jack onto crackers. A roommate’s girlfriend pulls me aside to chat with one of her friends from college.
This is C.J., she says, gesturing to a guy in a button-up with his sleeves rolled up his arms. He has a generous smile and a calmness about him. He laughs easily, and in minutes I can tell he will not be one of those people who says, troubled, that they can’t tell if I’m being serious when I crack deadpan jokes. We spend the rest of the night at the party, then a bar nearby, gently teasing each other, poking fun at ourselves, our bodies constantly touching.
Months later, when C.J. and my father meet, there are no jokes, but I contain a laugh for much of the visit:
So where is your family from? my father will ask. I appreciate that this is not a question directed at me.
Minnesota, C.J. says.
Minnesota, my father repeats.
And then: Lots of Scandinavians there.
And then: Is your family Scandinavian?
When C.J. says his family has distant Swedish, Norwegian, and Irish roots, my father presses on: Do you eat a lot of Scandinavian food?
I have eaten Scandinavian food, yes. C.J. takes this in stride, trying to answer as truthfully as he can.
What food?
Oh, C.J. says, pausing, blushing. Lutefisk. Dried fish.
I let out a cackle, amused by this discomfort, perhaps not unlike how my mother would have regarded this.
I wonder what my mother would think of C.J., if she would have preferred for her youngest to be with someone whose family was Chinese. My guess is that she would have found him endearing; she would have appreciated his patience, his wryness, his ability to draw out my softer sides. She would have enjoyed seeing him squirm.
* * *
When my parents began dating, my father had recently finished graduate school at MIT and worked as an engineer at a large company in the area. He was ambitious and handsome and smart. And, by all accounts, he knew it.
I graduated from MIT, he said frequently and stood taller as he spoke. It’s one of the best universities in the world.
My mother’s cousins rolled their eyes each time he bragged. But my mother never seemed to notice.
The first time my mother’s family met my father, they remarked that Taishanese people talked like peasants. I could imagine her relatives listening to him say a few words—not much, since he was shy and did not speak often in large groups—and then, they would throw a slew of jokes between them, a good-natured ribbing that would only make my father feel lonelier.
They frequently made comments like this—We can barely understand your country accent!—which I overheard rehashed in the car or at the dinner table. My father’s laughter, which I would describe in my diary in high school as sardonic, rings out clearly in these passing memories. These jokes: Did my mother nod in agreement? Did my father flush deeper with humiliation?
* * *
I saw few moments of affection between my parents. Instead, I recall the two of them in our kitchen standing over me. They were bickering. Maybe laughing; some delirious hilarity caught between them. I usually couldn’t tell the difference. My mother might have complained about how my father hadn’t done anything around the house in weeks, how his mess was everywhere, how he couldn’t keep a good job or earn money despite being so well educated, and how she was always coming home from work to have to cook and clean and take care of three children. He did what? He shouted back?
One of them lunged at the other.
Saat sei lei, my mother said, threatening my father’s life. Ngo sei lei. They swerved around one another in the kitchen.
This didn’t faze me. I wanted to believe that they were flirting and that this was what people who cared about each other said to one another. I told myself that their shouting meant they were emphatically in love.
Later, after Steph reads this, she corrects my Cantonese. I don’t know if she said, ‘I’ll starve you to death,’ she says. My Cantonese has always been poor; before I was born, my mother worried that speaking Chinese at home would interfere with my sisters’ English, and so English became our default language. The three of us sisters would eventually try to improve our Cantonese, with varying degrees of success. I think Mommy might have been saying ‘Ngau sei lei,’ Steph s
ays. That she was going to bite Daddy to death. Like a joke. She would’ve thought that was funny. Steph and I chuckle at this. Our mother and her edges. Razor teeth, humor.
* * *
When I ask some of my mother’s relatives about the early days of my parents’ relationship, they launch into something like this: Your gung gung didn’t like him. Every time he came to visit, he never talked. Just said ‘hi’ and then was quiet the whole time.
When my relatives say the word hi, they draw their voices into a small bark, and they pin their arms to their sides so their bodies mimic my father’s affectations. I wince. It’s not lost on me that their movements are not so different from the Ginger Ghost that my mother conjured, wooden, inhuman.
She always say, ‘When Katelin goes to college, I will live in the condo next to you,’ Yi Ma tells me. She describes a fantasy my mother harbored, where she and her sister saw each other every day and she had no husband. I nod along, and a new memory surfaces for the first time in years. When I was a child, my mother mentioned often to me how she was going to divorce my father as soon as I finished high school. Each time, I froze, anxious and guilty that I now knew this secret and was conspiring against my father. Still, I wondered then what my mother’s life could be like. The word unburdened comes to mind, now.
I bring this up to my father.
Did you ever hear of this? I describe my mother’s fantasy of leaving him.
Mm, he says. Yes.
We sit in his living room in Wethersfield. This is the cleanest spot, now storage for my father’s mail from years before, a broken chair, garden shears, a stereo set, and other discarded belongings he gathered from buildings in Hartford that he’s owned for the past few decades. When my mother was alive, this was the most elegant room in our home. My sisters and I jumped on top of the cream couches with black and maroon flowers embroidered into their cushions, and I tucked myself into a side table’s cabinet when we played hide-and-seek. My mother had lined a shelf with rosewood carvings of the family’s zodiac symbols—a rat for my father, a goat for my mother, a dog for Steph, a pig for Caroline, a horse for me. A baby grand piano stood in a corner. My mother had always wanted one, so she bought this on credit, the balance ballooning with interest. I recently found the receipts from the piano company; it took my mother three years and forty-eight payments to pay the piano’s nearly $11,000 balance. At the time of this purchase, Lotus Garden, the restaurant that my parents had opened in the 1980s, was hurting, and my parents’ bank accounts were tight. My mother asked her father for help. If he lent them money, my parents wouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy. Gung Gung refused.
