by Leigh Lyn
Niang’s face darkened. “A simplistic explanation for a philosophy dating back five thousand years, don’t you think?”
“Many hoaxes have persisted longer.”
“Which ones?” she snapped. “And why do you always contradict me?”
“How about the myth your stomach will explode if you eat Mung beans at the same time as dog meat?” I laughed.
Maxy, pausing from her online game, high-fived me.
“How do you know it’s not true?” Niang replied, between bites of crispy spring roll.
“This is what I meant by myth. They’re all based on pseudo-truths you can’t or don’t want to verify.”
“The problem with your generation is the cynicism. You don’t believe in anything.”
“The problem with your generation is the gullibility. You believe in everything,” I replied.
Wide-eyed, Mimi looked from me to Niang.
“Have you ever tried the Mentos trick with the coke bottle?” Maxy looked up from her game. “I saw someone on YouTube try it and it totally exploded.”
“At least that one is testable.” I grinned.
Niang squinted at me with narrowed eyes. “Girls, can you go to the buffet table and ask the waiter there for Mrs. Lee’s special order of Cordyceps? I placed the order with the captain by phone this morning.”
“Sure.” Mimi got up and nudged Maxy, who growled, “In a sec, dude.”
“Go!” Niang bellowed.
Startled, Maxy quickly followed Mimi, casting me a frightened glance.
Niang turned toward me once the two of them were beyond hearing distance, “So, what have you been writing?”
“Phew!” Tea had spilled back into my windpipe and I spewed it out of my mouth in a wide spray of tiny droplets.
“How do you mean, what have I been writing?” I asked between coughs, covering my mouth with a napkin.
“Well, the other day, I brought over some Chinese herbs for Maria to cook. It was half-past two already, so I needed to check how my stocks were doing. I used your computer, which was on—”
“Did you read my stuff?” I could feel the blood flow up to my face. “You always do this. Can’t you respect my privacy in my house?”
Niang shook her head. “You’re being preposterous! I can read anything you write about my family or me.”
“No, Niang,” I hissed. “You have no right.”
“What about you?” she exclaimed. “What gives you the right to write about us? And who is it for?”
“It’s for myself; it’s therapy.”
“I don’t like you to disclose our family matters to strangers. I won’t stand for it.” She pouted. “I burn incense every day to appease our ancestors. I will not let you agitate them.”
“Good God,” I snapped. “It’s for me; for therapy with Dr. Wen.”
“Why are you still seeing him? You are better, aren’t you?” Mother’s eyelids dropped, leaving a small gap through which she gazed at me.
“Niang, what is wrong with writing thoughts down?”
“Because thoughts can snowball into a complete debacle. And because I forbid you.”
“Why? Are there skeletons buried in the backyard?”
Hearing the word ‘skeletons,’ Niang’s face darkened. “I will not dignify that with an answer.”
“No one will ever read what I’m writing except for Dr. Wen. And he has agreed to it.”
“What does Dr. Wen know? He only knows his out-of-this-world, textbook cases and what you tell him.” Niang waved away a waiter, who approached our table. “And you, you’re too naïve to see the bigger picture. The past is finished, my dear. Over! Focus on the present.”
Niang’s logic was as fickle as candlelight in the wind.
“I need closure, Ma.”
“Forget closure, Lin, trust me on this one.” Niang grabbed my hand and leaned in. “Please?”
Shocked by Niang’s use of the magic word, I replied, “Only if you tell me the real reason.”
“I did already,” she said. “Don’t wake up the dead.”
Niang spent a disproportionate amount of time babbling about past trivia and superstitious things. Everything Mao wanted to eradicate seemed to have been reincarnated in Niang: old habits, old traditions, old demons and superstition. She’d hoarded everything in our backyard, turning it into a war zone ruled by real or fictional demons. But now I wanted to write about things that mattered, they were taboo? I shook my head. “I’m not.”
Chapter 17
After staring at shadows crawl across the ceiling for hours, I gave up on sleep, and opened my laptop. It was two in the morning, and the black of the night was sprayed with red dots, turning it into a Milky Way of red-eyed spirits. When I first returned to my hometown after having lived abroad for decades, the sight of them perplexed me. Then, I realized they were red cabinet-sized shrines dedicated to the ancestors people worshipped like gods. This red Milky Way represented a gazillion lifetimes of ancestors, who, lurking in the dark sky-reaching apartments, watched the world.
To live amid those who believed dying endowed a great-great uncle or one’s deceased grandparents with divine powers to change one’s fate irked me. I guess for most it was more respect than faith. Tonight, these ancestral spirits seemed palpable. Niang’s vexations and Dr. Wen’s concern over why I shouldn’t write my journal had made the past imperative.
is a moment in everyone’s life when they begin to remember larger fragments of memories in a meaningful way. Disjointed chunks of sensory data begin to fall into a storyline, which is the basis of the narratives our young brains build on.
My “moment” was a few months before we left Hong Kong. Niang was pointing at a man with sagging cheeks and a bulging forehead on our black-and-white TV-set, saying, “After Mao, he is the most powerful man in the world.”
The year was 1972, when Nixon arrived in Beijing. With the limited perspective she had at the time, she would say that. And it would be much later I realized that and wondered what China would have become had Nixon saved the Chinese from Mao’s atrocities. By then, they discovered Nixon’s own misdeeds after which he couldn’t even save himself. Mao had declared the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1969, but it really lasted until 1971, when he had the plane of his right-hand man, Lin Biao, shot down. That was the year my parents decided to leave.
I remember getting off the plane in Amsterdam holding a pink stuffed toy dog in one hand and clutching my mother’s hand with the other. The first Dutch person who spoke to us was a man in a white uniform with a bushy mustache. He had eerie doll’s eyes with long curly eyelashes and smiled at me as he uttered a string of soft guttural sounds.
When we walked out in the quiet arrival hall, I was disappointed. Perhaps I had expected everything strange and new to parade in front of us as soon as we stepped off the plane. Looking around, it occurred to me there were few people scattered around at large distances from one another. It was odd how I could see their mouths move but could not hear what they were saying even though it was quiet. That first instant, I thought the Dutch were a people with missing voices.
Save for trees and buildings, the landscape Dad drove us through seemed to have been steamrolled till it was as thin as a crepe. He took us to a town called Haarlem where houses looked like the ones we kids drew. Built of warm-gray bricks, ours had a pitched roof with orange tiles. The eatery was on the ground floor while we lived on the upper floors. A balcony stretched along the full length of the back, facing a garden with a dark-green fence.
The day after we arrived, we discovered that the green door in the fence unlocked a new world for us city kids for whom the streets had been off-limits our entire lives. In hindsight, it was our first escape. It led to a deserted narrow alleyway lined with more green doors like ours. We peeked through the gaps in the slats and saw gardens filled with flowers, greenery, and trees instead of utilitarian yards with tubs of food. The most beautiful was the garden at the end of the alley. Flowers in ever
y color of the rainbow filled it from edge to edge. A skinny girl with golden hair lived there. She had a thin face unlike anyone I knew with watery blue eyes and a turned-up nose. And when she laughed, she revealed big bunny teeth.
Tineke was the first friend we made in Holland. We learned Dutch in no time. Our neighbors were friendly. Living rooms faced onto the street. Windows were huge with curtains that were never drawn so streets were under constant surveillance and safe for kids to roam. We felt like caged birds set free. We met droves of kids after Tineke, but my memories of us running around the small Dutch town are strung together in a delirious continuum uninterrupted by meals or sleep until it all came to an abrupt end.
It appeared we were illegal immigrants. It took forever for our residence applications to be processed, so it was decided we’d board the plane with tourist visas for three months. When they expired, our residence visas were still at bay, and we were hushed and shoveled upstairs before a visit from an immigration officer.
“It’s important that you three are still and quiet now,” Niang said, as she signaled for us to crawl under the bed.
“Don’t move, don’t cough, don’t sneeze and don’t come out until we tell you to.”
We didn’t know what was at stake, although we sensed that we’d been sucked back into the Mad Hatter’s burrow. For what to our budding minds seemed like an eternity, we scanned every detail of the wooden floor while casting each other frightened glances. Fluff and dust filled our noses until my dad came upstairs to tell us it was alright to come out.
I don’t remember our parents ever explaining the situation to us. Maybe they thought we were too young to understand or that it would frighten us, but all they told us was that we could no longer play outside and that everything depended on it. Thus, we devised games to play inside the house with the uncurbed imagination of kids.
The balcony was, strictly speaking, part of the house, and we used the handrail on the balustrade like a balance bar to walk back and forth to test our poise. Once we learned how to step past the division walls between the balconies we continued all the way to the house at the end of the row, which was Tineke’s.
A concerned neighbor called my dad, and I imagined the conversation went something like, “I would give your kids a piece of my mind if it wouldn’t have made them fall and crush my award-winning tulips.”
“My sincere apologies, Meneer De Boer. Drop by later; a roasted pig will be on the house.”
It ended that game for good. Another game we played was robber, or rovertje in Dutch. One kid, usually little Fly, would be the catcher who had to protect objects while we tried to steal it and to catch us if any of our body parts made contact with the ground. Tempting fate with great courage, we leaped from the bed to my mother’s dressing table to pinch the treasures. We jumped over the threshold, scurrying across the living room ahead of little Fly. We climbed onto the dining table and, from there, we hopped onto a shelf. Stevie reckoned he could jump onto the mantelpiece. It was taller than he was, but he clutched on and pulled himself up. Shifting foot by foot, he moved to the far side of the mantelpiece to jump onto my parents’ bed, but his other foot swung back, and the huge mirror on the mantelpiece fell on the wooden floor between our living quarters and the eatery below.
The noise was audible at the far end of the universe. A thousand mirrors scattered across the floor, casting a thousand flickering lights on the ceiling of our young consciousness. The timing was unfortunate as it was dinner time and the eatery was chock-full. No one moved or said a word above or below the floor as we all perked up our ears and listened intensely. The silence played our tender eardrums as the likes of Ginger Baker and John Bonham played their instruments. Blood drained from our faces as I expected a divine hand to appear in the bizarre setting that my parents’ bedroom had become, then pick Stevie up by the skin of his neck like a kitten and vanish forever. How relieved I was when I saw my dad appear in the doorway instead of God’s hand or the immigration officer, who I imagined to be some sort of dog-catcher, the predecessor of all spies, assassins, and ghosts in my future.
With an expression like he’d just swallowed a dead rodent, my dad told us to sit on the bed while he cleared away the myriad pieces of mirrors to make sure we didn’t cut ourselves to pieces. Before he disappeared to handle his customers downstairs, he said, “Pack your stuff. I’m letting you go.”
Up to that moment, we didn’t realize kids could be let go, but it appeared we were. Being the oldest, at seven, Stevie was used to taking the bulk of my Dad’s rebukes. With the calm of a natural leader, he ushered us around with our piggy banks and counted our money. Despite his limited grasp on the cost of traveling, he assured us we had enough to buy train tickets to go to Uncle Hua, who lived an hour away.
“We’ll be alright,” Stevie said. “He’s much nicer anyway.”
When my dad appeared in the door opening later that evening, Stevie affirmed with a solemn face. “We’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” My dad tilted his head.
“To leave.” Stevie pointed his little finger at the plastic bags we packed and piled next to the open door. My dad looked at our grave un-crying faces and, kneeling down to our height, said, “Of course, if you promise never to do it again, I’ll consider keeping you here. I mean, just this once.”
Chapter 18
Over time, we learned to be quiet. Stevie showed a talent for telling stories. When little Fly and I were bored, he would tell us tales of the Monkey King, a demigod, who traveled the Silk Road on a pilgrimage with a Buddhist monk. Stevie made it up as he went along, inspired by the Monkey King’s capacity for mischief. Inevitably, the monk would become infuriated. He would point his special finger at the iron ring around the Monkey King’s skull, causing it to shrink until he was writhing on the ground and vowed to never do it again.
We could listen to Stevie’s improvisations for hours sitting in front of the fireplace. Another favorite tale of mine was of the white-haired maiden, Baimaonu. It was about a young Chinese girl who fell victim to the exploitation and ills of society. She ran away and lived in a cave. After years of reclusion, her hair turned snow white. Stevie’s version had her chained to a mill. Sadness poured out of her eyes as she pushed the wooden bar that speared the round millstone and watched the light fade until it was too dark to see. When she emerged from the little shed years later, her face was rotten and scarred. Every time I requested the story, Stevie piled more mutilations on to her until she was a human pile of deformities, carving horrific images into my memory. But I loved her. Baimaonu, with her long white hair, became my accomplice. An imaginary friend who took up permanent residence in my mind, she became the voice in my head that reminded me to save her.
In fear of being discovered, we no longer roamed the streets, but that was not enough. My parents felt it was too dangerous to stay. Getting caught meant being deported. Our residence applications would be voided, and we would have been separated from my dad who had by then invested all we owned in the eatery. Once again, we had to flee.
My mother packed up, and my dad drove us through pitch-black forest roads to a small camping village in the middle of the woods where Uncle Hua lived. No one spoke during the entire trip, and we arrived after midnight. We were ushered up the stairs and put in strange beds while the grown-ups gathered in the room next to ours where they talked for hours with rapid, hushed voices.
Uncle Hua’s restaurant was on the ground floor of a detached house facing the road at the front. At the back was a large back garden flanked by two long rows of tall elm trees. It was here where we played the next day and many months thereafter. Grass grew uninhibited were it not for a white goat who had a brown patch on his back, suggesting a saddle from a distance. He was tied to the last elm tree and guarded the far end of the garden, which was open to a road without a fence. Tempted though we were by the goat’s saddle, his grumpy stare and sharp horns warned everyone to stay at bay. The year we were there, we didn’t go out or
to school, nor did we see anyone except Uncle Hua, family, and staff. The garden was our only playing field, and it was uneventful except for our discovery that there were four of us.
“Come say hello,” Niang said, the morning after we arrived. Pointing at a tiny girl in a pink coat sitting on her knees, she said, “This is your baby sister.”
Stevie’s jaw dropped as his neck craned forward. Little Fly blinked fast and hard behind his gigantic glasses. We gazed from Niang to the toddler and back. The statement hit me like a train. I didn’t know how babies came about, but I knew no one was born a toddler. Yet, there she was.
The story goes that a decade after moving to Holland, Uncle Hua and his wife were still childless and decided to adopt.
The grand matriarch of the family—my grandmother—forbade it. “Our neighbor did the same, got a boy via an orphanage, but it turned out he was snatched from his real parents. He had to be returned! There must be another way!”
The next thing Niang knew, Uncle Hua, who’d flown back to Hong Kong, pulled her aside to discuss the matter. A year later, he returned with his wife. I remember we visited him and saw this tiny little pink baby with the nicest smelling skin lying on the bed. Before the day was over, they and the baby were gone. No one told us anything until we saw her two years later on her lap.
Niang never told me how she had felt parting with her baby but, as a note of interest, it was something they’d done before. My dad told me that, when I was born, I was taken care of by others at an overnight crèche. He did not give a reason other than a lack of space. I stayed there for several months before my parents took me back to live with them. Meanwhile, Fly was born.
