by Sky Lee
“Well, what does it matter who goes! He’ll probably get a better deal.”
“Don’t talk like that!” His mother scowled at him as if he were a cute two-year-old who had just learned to swear. “If you did it, we could tell your father that this business deal was all your idea. Wouldn’t you become the apple of his eye! You know, I don’t have anything against A Ting, really. He’s a good enough worker for what we pay him. But people are bound to compare you two, being close in age, more or less. Naturally, Gwei Chang too. You being his only son, of course he’s interested in knowing how you do! But you know you can do better than Ting An if you spend less time with those rough-housers and more time with your own father. You’d think that those no-good chums of yours are family, and your own father an outsider. You don’t know but those snakes will lead you down a black road, and it’ll be too late by the time you find out. You listen to your mother talking!” She paused and glanced back along the counter to see if any ears were perked in their direction.
“Hai-le . . . O.K. Maah!”
“And don’t drink too much. Drinking is no good. And no smoking that shit—that goes without saying!”
“Hai-le, Maah.” Choy Fuk pushed himself away from the counter.
“Everything O.K. between you and A Fong Mei?”
“Fine. Fine. No problems.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can wait for some good news.” The woman was relentless.
“I better be getting back to work now.” He started inching away with his hands stuffed in his pant pockets.
“Come closer here!” His mother swept her hands inward. As though he didn’t have a will of his own, Choy Fuk climbed back onto the stool in front of her.
“Low-low sek-sek, just between you and me, son,” she began all over again, “you’ve been married over five years now. That’s too long not to see good results. Something has to be done again!”
“Please don’t trouble yourself, Maah!” Choy Fuk felt his feet go cold.
“If I don’t trouble myself, who’s going to trouble themselves, you dead boy!” she sputtered with indignation. “If I don’t do anything, nothing’ll be done!”
“There’s really nothing you can do, Maah!”
“I can stand up for the good name of our family. Let me tell you, people are already talking . . .” she imparted in a harsh whisper. “People over here delight in vicious two-faced gossip. They’re jealous of those who are more successful than they are. You don’t think I know what they say when they guzzle vinegar . . . ‘What good is all that Wong money when their family name can’t even be assured?’” she mimicked hatefully.
“In the village,” her voice rang crisp and clear, “the customs were clear. Life was brutal. A coldhearted mother-in-law would have thrown her out the door a long time ago.”
Completely taken aback, Choy Fuk’s hand flew to his cheek as though he had been slapped.
“Maah, that’s . . .” he gasped, “that’s just old-fashioned talk!”
“A Fuk-ah,” Mui Lan tapped his hands down, “I realize that we live in more lenient times. That is why I myself am willing to be flexible in dealing with this problem. I’m just trying to save her face, after all . . .”
“What are you up to, Maah?” Fuk looked somewhat unconvinced.
“I was just thinking . . .” she began, but glancing up, she spotted her daughter-in-law, Fong Mei, approaching.
The sudden way the conversation came to a halt convinced Fong Mei that her mother-in-law and husband had been talking about her.
“Dead ghosts!” The curse flashed angrily through her thoughts, but she squashed it just as quickly and seasoned her mouth with a guilty little smile instead. She forced herself to walk right up to them.
“A Maah, A Goh,” she greeted both of them sweetly, addressing her husband as “Big Brother.” But her husband ignored her and kept staring at his mother. Mui Lan masked her face and pretended to polish the till. She grunted back, but Fong couldn’t tell if it was actually an acknowledgement or if she was merely clearing her throat. She didn’t mind much because this was the way elders often greeted those who were younger, especially daughters-in-law. But surely Choy Fuk, her own husband, didn’t have to turn around and ask so coldly, “Don’t you have work to do in the storeroom?” He made her heart ache like ice in her breast.
MY GRANDMOTHER was a renowned beauty in Chinatown. I guess Wong money could buy the very best. I do know of her indirectly through my mother, who used to hug me all the tighter whenever she talked stories about her own mother to me. Everything about her seemed so good and beautiful, like a fairy goodmother. When I was young, I used to get her mixed up with my mother all the time.
“Tell me about the little girls’ house you lived in, in China, Mummy!” The two lives flowed together, one into the other, so perfectly.
I knew my grandmother only briefly, when I was very young and she was very old; a woman who was not really there, sitting primly on her crocheted cushion, in a wheelchair, on the lawn of a respectable old folks home. She bent down and told me very solemnly that she was the only chinese there.
This I do imagine. She was once a woman with finely tuned instincts, like cat’s ears pointed in what I still believe were the right directions. She also had her own pure motives; at least mother-in-law and daughter-in-law shared that. In fact, I like to think of her in these terms: every rule has its own exception, right? Well, if Mui Lan was the overbearing rule, then Fong Mei would be her pretty exception.
Someone once wrote in my grade eight yearbook,
Your future can be read
like newly driven snow.
Be very careful how you tread,
’cause every step will show!
However, if integrity is what really counts in the end, Fong Mei got lost in the snowstorm.
HERMIA CHOW
1971
During my first year at the Peking Language Institute, I had a roommate, an overseas chinese from Switzerland named Hermia Chow. Today she is Dr. H.Y.L. Chow, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.C.P. (London). I still chuckle at the memory of our schooldays, when she used to sneak rich and sticky erotic chinese classics into our drab women’s dormitory. We used to hurriedly gulp down a belt of that earth-shattering Napoleon brandy, which she hid in her shampoo bottle and of course tasted soapy. Or we’d sneak up to the roof of the building to suck down a doobie of the imported thai that she carried around in her plastic pencil case. Then we’d push our army-issue bunkbeds together, jump in, and pull our thick quilts over our heads. There, like a heaving pile of dirty laundry, we’d snicker and crow with laughter, muffling our throats raw and hoarse, cramps in our overstretched faces. Giddy, amatory girls reading priceless, ancient sheaves of consummate poetry.
“Kae, you’re an artiste. You think like an artiste totally. Why are you barking at the wrong flea?” Hermia once pointed out to me when I told her that I would finish my economics degree. I was terribly young and brittle then. If there was anything at all to criticize, I was mostly the kind of person who would have hopped on like a flea. But I would have forgiven Hermia anything. I wasn’t the only one.
“Don’t be triste with me!” she’d say and be exonerated totally. When I first met her, I used to think that no one dared not to forgive Herm her trespasses because she was the daughter of a notoriously ruthless and powerful Hong Kong gangster. He was obviously very virile, too, because she used to say she had no idea how many half-brothers or sisters she had or would have. In fact, in order to see him, she had to make an appointment, then fly in from Geneva. “Daddy,” she had once said to him, “I’m afraid I’ve totalled my Porsche. Please, may I have another?” I marvelled at her situation.
As soon as I came to know her better, I realized that people responded positively to Hermia because she was simply being herself: charming, magnetic, an ingénue—artfully artless.
After all, I figured, when somebody beautiful (and she had to be beautiful) spills her soul out of her sleeves the very first
time you shake hands with her, you should make an effort to tread about softly at least for a while, or for as long as you can. Hermia gave you so much power over her, like a bare and naked newborn. I was much older before I realized that that was exactly her power.
I used to marvel at how carefree she was and wondered how anyone chinese could be that lighthearted. As for myself, how intoxicating to be given such total authority over another human being! I couldn’t have abused it! Could I?
“Kae, I see it in your eyes,” she said to me another time, “that drive to love and create. Why do you want to deny? Women’s strength is in the bonds they form with each other. Say that you’ll love me forever! The bond between true sisters can’t be broken by time or distance apart! Say that, Kae . . . tell me!”
I don’t remember what I answered. I don’t know why I couldn’t answer her simply. Why do women always want to dig beneath the surface, looking for the dirt and the smut? Are we not happy enough? Are we looking for more loyalty? More purity? Is that why I went to China? There, the traditional values had been turned inside-out in search of radical truths. And we believed that things were supposed to get better despite the mistakes of past generations.
“Come, Comrade Kae,” Hermia once said, when she showed me where she got her exquisite books. “I want you to meet an old slave of my grandfather’s.” She enjoyed teasing my brittle idealism.
She took me for a frosty stroll in a bustling inner city park. We walked, linking arms and snuggling tightly against each other as chinese girls who are friends do. We looked like stuffed blue cotton teddy bears, stopping near the edge of a pond to enjoy the wintry vista of a moon bridge perfectly mirrored in the frozen water. Beside us, an equally well-padded, old chinese peasant type squatted on a chilly stone bench and stared at us the way all the old chinese sit and stare at passers-by. With a graceful tilt of her knees and a delicate tug on my arms, Hermia suddenly swooped up the man’s discarded newspaper. He lit a cigarette.
Back in our rooms, she unfolded the People’s Daily to reveal another yellowing, rice-papery pamphlet; a part of an elaborate tome, tied with bright satin strings; a remnant of Hermia’s immensely cultured heritage, not that long ago abandoned. It had survived the Great Cultural Revolution to be smuggled out of China, and would probably end up in the hands of an elitist New York connoisseur who would continue to hide it away and protect it, as it had been hidden away and cherished like an illicit mistress for over two hundred years.
Hermia grinned at me, one of those high-flown smiles of hers that made me feel like peeling her off our crumbling ceiling, and said, “Epatante . . . n’est-ce pas, chérie?”
I, on the other hand, didn’t have anything as elegant to show Hermia, but after the summer vacation of 1972, I had the letters from my grandmother, (Wong) Chan Fong Mei, to her sister, my great aunt, (Mok) Chan Fong Bo. I had visited the latter, still alive and very mindful at seventy-two, in the southern cantonese village of O Saan, in Hoy Saan district, where she had pulled them out of a pungent mothball-smelling cardboard “MacGregor’s Men’s Plaid Socks” box. One of my family’s old stores used to carry MacGregor’s plaid socks.
In her carefully constructed schoolgirl calligraphy, my grandmother poured out all of her feelings but only some of her secrets to her older, married sister. At the time, Fong Mei was not quite seventeen, and her sister barely nineteen. They were very close to each other. I used to hear much about the huge fortune Poh Poh spent travelling back to see her, and the big risks she took, first with canadian immigration, then with chinese communists, trying to get her sister out. Then one died and the other got too old, didn’t want to leave the village.
When I deciphered the letters with the help of Hermia’s advanced chinese, they made me wish many times over that I too had a sister as my grandmother did. My eyes flickered over Hermia’s bent neck as she examined the old letters. I wondered what it was like to be the misplaced bastard daughter of a gangster and his moll—no matter how moneyed. I would be afraid of an identity like that. Why was she in China? Not to learn the language surely. I imagined she was guilty of something, but what? Less than righteous family connections?
What a coward I was! I was afraid of risks, and I had to cling to the ground, pebbly and jagged. I wallowed in petty detail and ignored the essence. Legitimate, traditional and conventional were the adjectives to wear in those days, especially when I suspected my own identity might be as defective.
Worse still, I thought that they were the ones illegitimatizing Hermia; not I.
LETTERS
1919
In her earliest letter, dated March 27, 1919, Fong Mei wrote:
“To beloved and honoured Elder Sister; I hope this missive finds all in your family to be in good health and prosperous. I hope your little sons are growing big and strong, showing adequate signs of talent and capability. May I also inquire after the health of Father and Mother? As well, I hope that the early planting season has gone well for you, and good weather will soon yield a good crop. Everyone’s health here is fine.
“There is so much to tell you, but as they say, ‘When there are too many bright flowers, the eye knows not where to look.’ My new life here in the Gold Mountains has been very exciting. My new parents are even more prosperous than we could have imagined. And my husband Choy Fuk has been so extremely kind and gentle. Everything here is so ‘ultramodern.’ You don’t know what that means, but everyone here likes that ghost word. It means the best and the newest. Nye Nye and Lo Yeh have a refrigerator to cool their food. I hear say that it cost $47.95, canadian currency. That’s more than enough to buy rice for your family for several years in China. It may sound incredible to you, but people are like that here.
“As you see in this photograph that I have sent to you, Lo Yeh and Nye Nye’s house is very large and stately, made of wood. It has three storeys and a large porch in front and back. It also has an indoor toilet. There’s so much land here, without any use for it; however, at the back of the house, there are some fruit trees. Before I came, only three people lived in that whole house. This is what Gold Mountain houses look like. White people live next door to Lo Yeh’s house, and our house is even bigger than theirs.
“Can you see my Lo Yeh sitting on the bamboo chair on the porch? People’s ways here are so casual. He’s a good man though. His eyes are never homeward, but he is a soft-spoken man to me. I hardly dare look at him, but I know he is never cross with me. And I know the old lady has no power over him.
“That is my husband, Choy Fuk. As you can see, he is very nice looking, tall and big. He was trying to make me hold hands with him, according to ultramodern western tradition, but I just couldn’t hold still long enough for his good friend, Elder Brother Ting An, who works for Lo Yeh as well, to make this photograph. We tang people are not flamboyant like that. I’m just not used to these new ways.
“I know as surely as if I were sitting right next to you on your bed, that you’ll say I’ve lost a bit of weight when you examine me more carefully in this photograph. I often think I know exactly what you would say, and even how you would say it. In fact, you’re all I dream about day and night, Elder Sister, and how I wish I could be home again with you! Yes, I have been a little ill. All I needed was rest to recover from the dizziness and vomiting of the long ocean voyage, but from the moment I set foot onto this strange land, I’ve needed the strength and endurance of ten men.
“First of all, I along with my travelling companions were detained in prison for days. We were interrogated by white-devil immigration officers. I was terrorized. They looked so hateful and cunning. And everyone warned me of their devious trickery. I answered them very carefully, so I wouldn’t be ensnared into their traps, but I was ten-parts nervous. Who knew whether they would be satisfied with my answers to their absurd, senseless questions?
“At night, I was too afraid to sleep in their ‘pigpens.’ I was told horrible stories about other hapless women, who were actually dragged off during the night; and whe
n they were returned, they had become like petrified stone with bruises, their clothes torn, Elder Sister! This is true! Many kind aunties who had been there longer than me verified this story, and others too. They warned me to be especially careful because I was young and alone and so pretty, they said. They hid me at night. After the ghosts put out the lights, different aunties would switch bunks with me, so that any evildoer would find that he’d dragged off a wrinkled, toothless granny for his lecherous troubles. I thought they were so brave to risk themselves for me—a stranger not even from the same village, after all. Yet, here in this hostile environment, we are all like family. Too bad they were headed towards other places like Victoria; one to a farm by Lillooet. We giggled a lot. Some of us used to sit up all night, talking about our homes and our families. Then we’d become all teary and homesick.
“I was reminded of our happy, happy days as youngsters in the ‘little girls’ house.’ Do you remember, Big Sister, all those good times? In Cousin Chan’s abandoned house right in the middle of our neighbourhood, a dozen or so girls living together, cooking together, working the fields, laughing and gossiping the entire day. Lucky for us, it was such a large house. The elders used to say, ‘So many girls in this generation! Some will surely need to be married far away from home.’
“Well, dear sister, I guess I’m the first to be married far from home. And everyone thought I was so lucky. I was the first to leave the ‘pigpen’ too, perhaps due to the Wong family’s money under the table. Now, come to think of it, I didn’t know when I had it good. You used to be so proud of my betrothal to a rich Gum Saan Hock, you got me excited too. Yet, what did I know of the world beyond the village? Our clansmen were the only people I knew. Now, to have travelled so far!
“Remember, Big Sister, our schooldays, and our teacher, Master Chui, who took us to that western moving picture show in Toy Saan City! We were so thrilled we couldn’t sleep all night long. Here in the Gold Mountains, we go often to the picture shows which let chinese in, but no matter how hard I try, I just can’t recapture that same wonderful feeling as before. Our life together in our beloved village was like that. Everything came straight from the heart. But now it’s gone, no more than an astonishing dream to me. I can’t believe that I left barely two months ago.
