by Sky Lee
Oh, and behind her, carrying the heavy bundles, comes my other mother, Seto Chi. She is my mother’s housekeeper, also dreamkeeper and protectress; my mother’s barker. When Chi stands behind me, I am confident someone is always there to hold out a hand in case I falter.
Suddenly, my whole household is transformed. Peace and serenity descend. A feminine order takes charge; a hearth-like warmth alights. Magic. Chi sniffs around the crumbs and sticky rings in the kitchen. To the clatter of pots and pans, I go back to bed for a much-needed nap.
Chi, my old nanny, was the only one who could finally chase me into bed, relying on her folksy, peasant image to cut through the nonessentials. As a (trans)parent, she established an intractable reference point for power between the two of us right from the start. She had all, and I had none. Simple and also quite elegant, if you think about it.
“What! This late and still not in bed! What are you waiting for, you silly little chicken?” she used to scold. By age four, I should have realized that it wasn’t wise to argue with Bo Mo (the chinese name for nanny), but who is wise at four years old?
“I’m waiting for things to happen, Bo Mo!” I remember pleading with my big brown eyes, wide-set and winsome.
“Nothing’s going to happen!” She’d scoop me up in her big, strong arms and trundle me off to bed.
“Lots of things can happen. You know?” I was positive she did, clinging onto her neck, pressing my little face against her big pock-marked one. I knew she had a tender heart beneath the jagged edges, and sometimes these cloying techniques worked. Up close, I touched her enormous, thick lips, which she said made her face an unlucky one. They sagged heavily and dragged her face down when she relaxed. When she was incensed though, she could use these to good advantage, sneering with a good long snaky twist, meanly.
She’d plant me between the cool linen sheets, tucking me in like a tree sapling. There, I felt like an incubating egg, with a long time to go before I would hatch. Chi was very good at incubating, especially if she thought it was for the good of my moral fibre.
“Dream ghosts will come for you though,” she’d begin abruptly, with a hiss which could shrivel backbones until they snapped—the way all good incubus stories begin. “Especially when little farts like you are busy being naughty, like when they try to keep their tired eyes open instead of shutting them tight! Dream ghosts will creep up from behind, and quicker than a wink, they’ll grab hold of those eyeballs. Once they’ve dug into the fleshy parts, they’ll shake and pound and screech and never let go! That’s what people call a nightmare. People nightmare themselves! However, if you close your eyes peaceably and obediently, then they’ll only be able to get in as far as your nose. There, they just tickle like ginger ale bubbles.”
“How do you know this?” I’d ask, hoping to prolong the human contact before the dark gathered, the lonely night that seemed to yawn ominously and stretch forever.
“People from China just know!” She’d matter of factly close my bedroom door.
So I was very let down when I found out that Chi didn’t come from China any more than I did.
In a way, she wasn’t even pure chinese (as if that were important), and she had learned her chineseness from my mother, which added tremendously to my confusion. All my life I saw double. All I ever wanted was authenticity; meanwhile, the people around me wore two-faced masks, and they played their lifelong roles to artistic perfection. No wonder no one writes family sagas any more!
Although Chi was not very inclined to explain herself, I on the other hand was forever being asked to explain who she was, why she was. And out spewed this same story every time, a little too apologetically, a little too contemptuously.
SETO CHI
Chi was born in Malaya in 1927. Her father, the only son left alive of a decaying, dynastic, overseas chinese family with a floundering oil business. Chi was the first-born and perhaps such a disappointment that Chi’s mother immediately rushed to the nearest and dearest monkey temple. There, she sought out a fortune teller, who told her that first-born daughters bring bad luck and that this daughter in particular would only worsen her father’s poor finances. The fortune teller told Chi’s mother to give her baby away. The stupid woman, obviously a grasping villain, sold her instead.
Happily, Chi was adopted by a kind hindu diplomat and his good wife, who had five sons but not one daughter. They were middling well-off. The wife was a simple woman. And Chi grew up hindu, without any hardships.
Unhappily, because middle-echelon government officials are always the most vulnerable in political upheavals, when Malaysia started to give way to the japanese invasion, these wonderful people lost everything. The father died a grievous death; the rest of the family were just lucky enough to escape with their lives, managing to emigrate to Canada with what was left of their diplomatic impunity.
The family tearfully split up to find employment where they could. Chi came to Vancouver with one brother. The mother and two brothers moved out to Saskatchewan, where they operated a Texaco garage on a long lonely stretch of the TransCanada for years.
Chi has apparently always been a little at odds with her environment. My mother, Beatrice, and her brother, John, first met her at high school—a big-boned, poorly dressed girl with an oxlike head, a flat moonlike face and a very large mouth. Her features seemed unmistakably chinese, but she had a long, well-oiled single braid down her back, she smelled of curry, and she barely spoke english at all except with a thick tamil accent. Her toes stuck out of a pair of torn sandals although it was October, albeit a warm October.
Of course, she was the object of much scorn and derision. East Vancouver wartime youths not being the most big-hearted and open-minded about the cultural diversity they called “chinks, japs, wops, and hindoos!” Uncle John wasn’t much better. He called her the ugliest toad he had ever seen.
Chi probably wouldn’t have stayed even one day longer in that high school if it hadn’t been for my mom, who stepped up to her in the schoolyard and looked her up and down very carefully. In those days, ladies’ fashions were subdued with what they called WW II utilities. Bea, a senior and always immaculately dressed, wore a simple princess-line frock with white appliqués and harebell buttons, fluffy white bobby sox and saddleshoes. Her hair tightly permed and pulled back with a big ribbon. Pinned to her chest, a mandatory button which shouted “China” (vs. jap) to the satisfaction of current social exigencies.
Finally, after some hesitation, Bea asked Chi, “Would you like to use some of my new perfume?”
Although they didn’t have a thing in common, Chi and Bea became inseparable after that. Chi was a rare oddity and seemed profoundly happy to stay umbilically attached to my mother. Like a hatchling, Chi must have had to imprint immediately lest she get misplaced again—maybe permanently. Following an instinct for survival in a hostile situation, she had to assume an identity, preferably one which would nurture her back.
It wasn’t as though Chi didn’t have a mind of her own. In fact, she had an iron-strong will. It was just that, from the moment they laid eyes on each other, Chi existed totally for my mother. In the Pinocchio movie I dragged her to when I was five, the fairy touched the wooden boy with her glitter, and he sprang to life, ready to serve. Yet, even that wooden boy eventually got enough street-smarts to look after number one, didn’t he? As for Chi, she has always been there to turn the pages as my mother played on and on.
Chi never married or thought to have children of her own body. She always treated me like a pet poodle, making sure I didn’t clash with my mother’s outfits. And she must have thought of my father as a kind of medicine which Beatrice had to take, even though some men are poison.
In my more reflective moods, I’d imagine that, for Chi, my mother was an unmet commitment that haunted her from a past life; but maybe it’s simply that every Tonto has to have his Lone Ranger. Or even better, every Lone Ranger, his Tonto!
STRONG STRING is threaded through the tiny pierced ears of a little ce
ramic urn to tie down its cover. As it simmers in the middle of a pot of boiling water on my gas range, the peculiar aroma of a herbal wine and beef concoction, intended to build up my blood, wafts over to me as I raise my head off my pillow.
Chi is standing over me. She is scowling with supreme disapproval, the soiled quilt that I had tried to hide in the closet in her crooked old hands.
“This is no way to treat an expensive gift,” she hisses at me. “A fine punch in the gut for the guy who so nicely went out and paid good money for this. It’s ruined, eh!”
“I know . . . I’m sorry,” I say unconvincingly. “Where’s Mom?” I ask, hoping to change the subject.
“Still in the sunroom with the baby,” replies Chi. “Now, I don’t know if I should let you stomp all over me and wash this by hand. Or should I just leave it for you to lug to the dry cleaners . . . my hands being what they are! Look, stiff as a corpse . . . and ache like the devil!”
“Leave it, Bo Mo!” I say too abruptly. “I can do it myself.”
“Oh, you can, can you?” She throws me one of her most spiteful faces. “At least your mother is honest about being totally useless. She was openly bred to be a princess! So were you, except I guess it’s fashionable these days to conceal it!”
I glare at her with all my might, as indignant as a four-year-old, all the more offended knowing that her words are true. Oh, but what’s the sense of staying angry at your mother? It’s soon puffed out like a disagreeable bout of gas. Besides, I of all people should know better than to hide my mistakes in the closet. Everything, especially the mistakes, it seems, will come right back to you.
“Hey Bo Mo . . . guess what!” I sit bolt upright in bed and pull her down. “Mother finally told me the whole story.”
“When?” She fakes a hurt indifference, holding up the quilt to survey the stained landscape.
“In the hospital, the same day Bobby was born. She cried a lot.”
My mind slips back to the memory of my mother in the hospital, sitting on the edge of a plastic chair like a scrunched-up piece of paper. Her face crinkled with tears, shoulders knotted together. Telling a lousy story that should have been thrown into the wastepaper basket a long time ago.
“It seems,” she began, “that both your father and I come from rather dubious parentage . . .”
One born out of infidelity, the other of mercenary intrigue; as for myself, I was tainted with incest. And listen, I got away easy! I prefer Chi’s version of the story. With Chi, there is no discussion; reality is what it is. Very imperfect, like our perception of it.
“Does she still cry about it?” Chi sighs, full of worried concern. “Lots of old wounds there.”
“Chi, I want to know the real truth!” I announce, each word highlighted against the fluorescent daylight.
“No you don’t,” Chi whips back, “you want to hear about smut, and the guilt. And who is to blame for the little lost babies . . .”
In mid-sentence, Chi stops because the same idea occurs to both of us at the same time. Lost babies grow up, whether in this lifetime or the next, and perhaps they find themselves. And when they do, they come back with those little-gotten-big baby urges, looking for those who had lost them to begin with.
Two babies were born in 1926. With them sprang new hope and fresh beginnings, as symbolized by the red tissue wrapped around coins, which were then eagerly pressed into their blankets, or the red-dyed eggs lovingly rolled all over the infants’ heads. And the women at the first-month celebrations somehow chanted in a peculiar destiny for them too. This destiny would watch over them and make them my mother and father against much odds.
BABIES
1926
The waitress had a beautiful baby boy in Lillooet, British Columbia, delivered in an isolated cabin by a white midwife who was pleased with the ease of the delivery. And the mother who bore her pain with silence and stoicism confirmed the midwife’s prejudice that chinese are a capital breed. She had plenty of energy left over to be complimentary and solicitous, grinning from ear to ear at the tall, dark man whom she naturally thought was the father. Like most new fathers, his face drooped with humility and awe when she tenderly placed the baby into his arms. She’d seen it so many times before. Then perhaps a tiny hand, on its furtive way to the mouth, would break loose from the blankets, to create an effect of exquisite wonder on the whole paternal being.
“A Song-ah,” asked the father in a muted voice, “maybe we should keep him ourselves?” The midwife was blissfully unaware of the conversation. She folded her hands together, a graceful gesture that indicated her work was finally done, now that she had delivered the infant safely into the proper hands.
“Pay her first! We can talk after she leaves,” said the waitress. She was nervous of outsiders, afraid they might witness the storm that had been gathering clouds on the edge of their domestic calm, as if Mui Lan might blow through the door at any given moment.
About four months later, Fong Mei had a premature but robust baby girl, delivered by a qualified midwife and physician team in the unheard-of luxury of a lying-in hospital. It turned out to be a good thing that Mui Lan had had several unlucky dreams about the baby “being born not quite right” as she put it, because she then convinced everyone that a western doctor standing by would be worth the extra expense. So when it did become a long, trying labour and Fong Mei had to be transferred to the Immaculate Sisters of Grace Hospital, at least everyone was able to nervously reassure each other that mother and precious baby were in capable hands.
Of course, the new baby consumed Fong Mei, and she liked the idea of a sanitary western hospital at first, because she knew the baby would be out of Mui Lan’s ever-grasping reach. But soon the austere rules of a foreign hospital came between her and her baby as well. She had felt less a prisoner when she was detained at the immigration station. After two weeks of confinement, she came home a very nervous, high-strung woman, so any spark at all could have sent her into a fiery rage. Yet fierceness, whether she was conscious of it or not, was exactly the artillery she needed to do battle with her mother-in-law in order to usurp the throne.
And Fong Mei certainly would upset the order of this house; her rage demanded it. From now on, things would be done her way. Never, never again would Mui Lan bring her to her knees.
Little things had become intolerable even before the child was born. Fong Mei had begun to brazenly disobey. More and more hostilities had erupted. One day the exaggerated belligerence with which Fong Mei was cleaning and gutting a wriggling fish on the chopping block offended her mother-in-law, who might have had some buddhist superstitions.
“Knock it over the head first,” Mui Lan commanded, “right between the eyes!”
Fong Mei ignored her and took another vicious swipe at the fish, its juices splattering the walls and counter.
“Why don’t you do as I say!” she insisted out of hurt pride.
“It’ll be juicier my way!” Fong Mei sneered back.
“Black-hearted bitch!” muttered the elder woman, who stomped out of the kitchen and headed straight for her son.
“I tell you she enjoyed it! Watch yourself in bed with her!” she complained to him. Choy Fuk said nothing.
Fong Mei produced only a girl, who, tiny as she was, gave her mother enough armnipotence to vie for power and launch a full-fledged mutiny (as one can do only from deep within the ranks). First, Fong Mei learned to drive a car; next, she took her share in the family business and turned it into the most lucrative one of all—real estate. Then there was still that matter of Choy Fuk’s son out in the swamp somewhere. Fong Mei didn’t say so in actual words—but she gave strong indicators to her mother-in-law that she would tear her to bits if she ever dared to bring that baby home.
Not that Mui Lan ever had a chance either. When she showed up at the cabin in Lillooet to claim the waitress’s baby, she found the waitress and her son nervously agreeing with each other that the baby boy should stay with his nursing mother yet a little wh
ile longer, until Fong Mei Sow was able to take care of another child, Fong Mei Sow’s constitution being feverish and weak then. What could Mui Lan say to that? She was also surprised and a little disturbed that the baby had already been named Keeman without consulting her. But what could she do about that?
Fong Mei also spent much of her time chastising her mother-in-law to her husband, with a mouth as bitter as bitter melon. “And another thing, you’re already the laughingstock of Chinatown. Let your slut keep her little bastard! If that old bag makes any more fuss, you’ll both have to answer to Lo Yeh personally. That baby doesn’t belong to her, just like she doesn’t deserve my daughter either. Because of all the trouble you’ve both caused, the Wong name is shit—you savvy that!”
Fong Mei drove this point home again and again, if only to shift blame away from herself.
Mui Lan fought back via her son. “How can she say that! I was right to do what I did! Every family has to have its offspring. But two together, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!” She was genuinely bewildered. Not having foreseen this twist of events, she could only assume that the waitress had uncorked her son’s juices somehow. “Isn’t that the way of the gods though. Five years without a sprout, then this year doublefold good fortune!”
Throughout the years, whenever the issue popped up, Mui Lan came back with the same counterattack. “You’re a selfish and black-hearted bitch; it was right that you should have taken it in! He’s Lo Yeh’s grandson, Choy Fuk’s son, and therefore your son too. You don’t care about this family’s name. All you care about is yourself!” But she was no longer a formidable opponent—not even a force to consider.
Fong Mei had two more children, including the coveted boy, my uncle John, but his appearance was just a formality. He wasn’t my grandmother’s favourite, not because of all that he symbolized to her. She just preferred the girls, not that he lacked affection. He was called, and I still like to call him, “the golden boy.” Maybe it was a hard name to live with, but we all know how chinese love their descriptives.
