The Year of Finding Memory

by Judy Fong Bates

  At the edge of the village, a watch tower rose above the surrounding houses. I stood back and saw that a corner of the uppermost floor had broken off. Sections of the plaster had separated from the walls, leaving bare patches of concrete. One of the villagers told me that the first floor had been removed to prevent people from climbing to the top. Of all the villages in the area, Ning Kai Lee was the poorest. Compared to the other communities, it had very few sons who’d ventured to the Gold Mountain and thus had received very little money from abroad. Any money that had been sent from North America would have been meant for personal use—not enough to maintain a watch tower or install indoor plumbing. My father was one of the ones who went, who faithfully sent money back to the village, almost until he died.

  When we reached my father’s house, one of the villagers opened the two vertical halves of a weather-worn, wooden door. There were carvings of flowers across the top. Some of the panels were starting to separate, and the wooden hinges seemed loose. Everyone rushed into the first room. Against the wall was a wooden bed with a canopy and mosquito netting. Some clothes were hanging from a suspended rod, and a bicycle was parked in the corner. Someone lived here, yet no one paid any mind. I worried that we were invading this person’s privacy. Then I heard someone say that a squatter lived in my father’s house and that although my family still owned the house, no family member had lived there for thirty, perhaps forty, years.

  The villagers funnelled through a smaller door leading deeper into the house and packed themselves into the middle room, good-naturedly pushing up against each other. All the living would have happened here, with sleeping and storage in the loft and the two small rooms on either side. The only source of light was a gap in the roof, designed to allow rain to flow into a square, recessed concrete pit in the floor and then out to the gutters in the street. But Jen noticed daylight coming through another hole in the roof, where tiles had loosened and broken away. She told my brothers and me that once we were back home, we would have to send money back for its repair. The room smelled damp, and large patches of dark mildew stained its walls. A small hearth in the corner facing us would have been used for cooking and for heat in the cooler months. In the past there would have been a table with chairs, probably in the middle of the room.

  My father’s house provided only shelter. There was no evidence of electricity or running water, even now. The thought of having to spend a childhood in this house made me shudder. Michael, however, was intrigued. He examined the fine mortar precisely laid between the narrow bricks and noticed how the wooden beams in the ceiling met in a perfect peak. He pointed to an old wooden washstand and remarked on its elegant proportions. And as he inspected an old ladder leaning against the wall, he said, “Look how the rungs are so perfectly fitted into the uprights.” My husband asked question after question. Where did they get their fuel? Did they collect the rainwater? Where did they wash their clothes? My brothers were only too pleased to answer.

  People crowded around my brothers, identifying themselves and trying to establish a past connection. Doon held a hefty roll of red yuan notes and was handing one out to each villager who came up to him. A line had actually formed, and people were waiting their turn. The room hummed with excited voices. News must have travelled that Doon Uncle was passing out money! Was it like this when my father returned each time? Was he surrounded and hailed like a homecoming hero from across the ocean?

  A long sturdy beam rested on the floor next to the wall. Tightly wound twine lashed a rock securely underneath one end, and that rock sat inside a stone bowl recessed into the floor. I had never before seen anything like it. Jen must have seen the quizzical look on my face and explained that every house had such a contraption. When she was a child, she’d had to jump up and down at the opposite end of the beam from the stone, but before she was finished her explanation, Michael blurted out that it was a rice pestle. Jen didn’t know those specific English words, but she smiled, delighted that this man from the West should recognize an implement that she had thought was particular to China.

  On the wall above the rice pestle was something that resembled a giant fan made from a cluster of dried, broad leaves. I stood in front of it for several minutes, trying to figure out its purpose. My sister was standing behind me. “It’s a cape,” she said. “When we worked in the rice fields, planting and harvesting, we had to wear one just like this when it rained. Plus a wide-brimmed straw hat.” Kim then lifted the cape off the wall, draped it over her back and squatted on the floor, demonstrating the motion for cutting stalks of rice, her arm moving in a fluid sweep. “We worked, just like that,” my sister said, nodding and pointing at her daughter.

  My brothers and my sister started to reminisce about fetching water from the stream outside the village, about gathering twigs and stalks for cooking fires, about sleeping high up in the village watch tower on hot summer nights. I listened quietly, voicing the occasional comment that would interrupt the rhythm of their shared memories. My brothers and sister never seemed to mind my little intrusions and happily answered my queries, but the moment they were finished explaining, they would carry on as if I was not there.

  My father grew up with nine, or was it ten, brothers and sisters in this three-room house with two small lofts. Except for Second Uncle, who had gone with him to the Gold Mountain, I had heard very little about his other siblings. My mother had whispered something about an older sister who’d married into a nearby village and who had eventually hanged herself. Long before my father’s death, she had told me in a secretive tone that his mother had also ended her life this way. She added that people in the village had said his first wife had been ho tsu, foul tempered, and had made his mother’s life unbearable. What would I have done in such circumstances? Life in these surroundings would have been gruelling enough, never mind being bullied and hectored by a cruel daughter-in-law.

  My father had been born in this village over a hundred years before. He’d lived in this house with his first wife and the children from that marriage: First Brother Hing, Shing, Jook and Doon. And almost sixty years after my father’s birth, I too had been born here. The line between my current prosperity and the unrelenting poverty of my past felt tenuous and fragile. I found myself thinking about my mother coming here more than seventy years before, to teach in the local school. If it felt this isolated to me in 2006, how remote would it have felt in 1930 to a woman who had been living with her brother in the bustling city of Canton, in a mansion staffed with servants and furnished with modern comforts? My mother would have arrived in a sedan chair, carried over well-worn paths of yellow, sandy soil, not the paved, two-lane road that had brought me here. The villagers would have gathered and gawked at her, just as they had at us—an exotic creature from a distant star. But she was a young woman with a past, and perhaps this tiny, secluded community provided her with the perfect place to hide.

  Partway up the largest wall of the main room in my father’s house, an intricately carved wooden shrine sat on a long, wooden shelf. I looked closely and saw faint traces of gold leaf. Even a family as needy as my father’s invested whatever little wealth it had into appeasing the gods. In this unadorned home, the shrine looked out of place. The remaining space on the shelf was meant for pictures of parents and grandparents. But there were no pictures, and other than the shrine, the shelf was empty.

  In anticipation of our arrival, my sister had asked one of the villagers to set up a low table underneath the shrine. My niece Kim laid out an offering for the ancestors: a cooked chicken, a piece of roast pork, some oranges and several cups of tea, a few candles and sticks of incense in a vase. A villager led Shing by the arm toward the offerings and gave him several incense sticks. After lighting them, Shing stepped before the shrine and bowed three times.

  As I stood waiting for my turn, a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She was thin and bent, with a head of thick, white hair. She seemed frail, yet her voice was loud and sharp. “The last time you were here you were nee
t ei gwoy, teeny tiny. I remember. You came with your mother and her daughter—the one who’s married to a university professor. Your mother brought you here before leaving for Hong Kong. You wouldn’t remember. You were still little. But I remember you, your mother and your sister.”

  “Y … you remember my mother?” I stammered. “It was so long ago.”

  “Everyone in the village knows about your family. Your father was a Gold Mountain guest and he hired your mother to teach at the school. She was the best teacher this village ever had. Even though she was here for only a few years, everyone still talks about her. And your father was a special man. They were both very smart people. By the time the war was over, his first wife was dead. People were not surprised when he came back and married your mother.”

  I stared in disbelief at this stranger who knew these private details from my parents’ life. She smiled politely. Her words were opening a door. I had a persistent memory of my mother and me being taken somewhere by bicycle when I was a child. It was one of those vignettes from the past that lives on as a free-floating fragment. In my child’s mind I had understood that the journey was an important one, but I did not know why. As I listened to the old woman, the scene came into focus. It wasn’t a bicycle after all. I saw myself, a young child sitting on my mother’s lap, with Ming Nee beside us, inside a pedicab. We were travelling from the market town where my parents had opened a store after the war. Yes, of course! We were returning here, to our ancestral home in this village, to where I now stood. Once again, I could see a blur of silvery spokes inside wheels turning on the dirt road. Once more, I felt the security of my mother’s arms around me, the warmth and softness of her body pressed against my back, the rush of wind against my face.

  Everything now made sense. My mother would not leave China without making an offering to our ancestors. She had no grasp of what life in the New World held for her. She knew, even then, that her oldest daughter would soon be left behind, while she and I would cross the Pacific to join my father. She needed all the good fortune that fate had to offer. A blessing from the ancestors was something she could not risk ignoring. I watched Shing, then Doon, as they each finished bowing before the family shrine.

  When it was my turn, I carefully lit my sticks of incense and slowly bowed three times before placing them in the vase. I watched the smoke rise. On this very spot, more than fifty years ago, my mother would have stood, filled with dread, her hands clasped in prayer, appealing for the protection of our ancestors. I thought of my own life, blessed with good fortune. How wise it had been of my mother to pay her respects to the ancestors. How lucky for me.

  FIVE

  Although our spacious room in the five-star Ever Joint had a floor-to-ceiling window, plush carpeting and plump, upholstered chairs, the mattress, even with its thin, quilted cover, was the hardest bed my husband had ever slept on. He had difficulty adjusting to the rigid surface, but for me it brought back early childhood memories of hot summer nights in the back room of the hand laundry, lying on a low, wooden table spread with a bamboo mat. My father would sometimes sit beside me, and I listened while he told stories, some historical, others mythological, but always transporting me to a place that was far away and shrouded in mystery.

  Michael was sitting at the desk, bent over, writing furiously in his black Moleskine. He was determined to keep a written record of our journey, believing photographs to be too objective, without the nuance of words. I kept a diary as well and had just finished writing about the meeting with the old woman in my ancestral village. I hadn’t thought much about what she said until I saw her words written on the page.

  “That old lady, in the village, she said people weren’t surprised when my father came back from Canada to marry my mother. What do you think she meant by that?” I asked Michael.

  “Probably nothing,” he said and put down his pen. “Why?”

  “It was her tone, intimating that there was something between my parents before they were married.”

  “Well, maybe there was.”

  “You don’t get it,” I said. My voice started to rise. “My parents didn’t like each other. They married each other for practical reasons. It was like a business transaction.” I suddenly felt exasperated, the words coming out sharper than I had intended. I was being unfair, of course, expecting my husband to read my thoughts. “Never mind …,” I muttered in a weak attempt at an apology.

  The woman’s words had attached themselves to my brain, and I couldn’t shake them. My parents, as far as I could see, were the most unlikely couple on the face of this earth, without so much as a hint of romance between them. But if that old woman’s words were true, I would have to believe that at one time my mother and father had been attracted to each other, might even have liked each other. “Impossible,” I said to myself.

  I met my father for the first time on a warm day in May. He was the oldest person I had ever seen. Fong Wah Yent had a deeply wrinkled face; the skin around his neck was lined and loose; a few wispy, white hairs grew on the top of his shiny, bald head; a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He was a slight man, not much taller than my mother, who was less than five feet. He wore a suit that had obviously belonged to someone larger. The sleeves had been altered to fit his arm length, but the shoulders and the body of the jacket overwhelmed him.

  My mother and I had arrived in Toronto the day before. An aunt and uncle from our village met us at the airport, and we spent the night with them at their house on Gerrard Street. The next day, my father came to the city by bus to take us back with him to the small town where he operated his hand laundry.

  My parents had not seen each other for more than five years, and now my mother and I were in a strange country, inside a strange house, her hand holding mine in a firm grip. When my father entered the room, she stood up from the sofa where we were sitting beside each other. My parents spoke each other’s names, but they did not touch. My father turned to me and said in a quiet, gentle voice, “A nui, a sai nui, my daughter, my little daughter.” His eyes were wet. I looked down, afraid to meet the gaze of this strange man. He reached over and rested his hand on my cheek. His calloused palm felt rough against my face.

  Later that afternoon he wrestled with our massive suitcase while we followed him onto a bus that would take us to Allandale, now a part of Barrie, Ontario. I sat between the window and my mother; my father sat across the aisle from us. My mother had her arm hooked through the handle of her purse. The bus drove past cows, horses and barns, but when I pointed them out to her, she wasn’t interested. Every so often I heard her sigh. When I glanced over, she was biting her lower lip and twisting a handkerchief in her lap.

  My father unlocked the door to his hand laundry, which occupied the first floor of a rundown building near a set of railroad tracks. The inside was dark. He reached up and pulled a string, turning on a bare light bulb attached to the ceiling. My mother and I would live with my father less than a year in this laundry, yet in my mind’s eye I see it as plainly as if I was still there.

  Just inside the front door, to separate the customers from the work area, was a handmade, wooden counter with a hinged top. My father lifted it and folded it back so my mother and I could walk through. We passed shelves of neatly stacked, finished laundry wrapped in brown paper, tied with string. My mother held my hand as we followed my father and the suitcase into a long, dark, narrow work space. A row of wooden laundry tubs was mounted against one wall. Long tables with layers of cloth pulled tightly over them stood in front of the opposite wall. Off to the side a door led into the windowless bedroom that I was to share with my parents. But standing in the centre of the floor was a massive machine in the shape of a barrel, encased in galvanized steel. This vessel stood horizontally on four legs inside a large metal pan, which, I later learned, would collect the water that spewed from a hose that looked to me like a tail. At the other end of the machine’s round body, instead of a head, there was a wooden frame enclosing several rows of w
ringers that rose toward the ceiling. That first evening in my father’s laundry, the shadows fell in such a way that the machine looked like a monster from a prehistoric past. I imagined this strange, mechanical creature coming alive and swallowing me into its belly.

  I leaned in even closer to my mother.

  My father’s routine from one week to the next never varied, and my mother fell quickly into the rhythm of his work. On Saturdays and Wednesdays, my parents each sat on a wooden stool and sorted dirty clothes according to light and dark. They turned all the socks inside out and inspected underwear for stains.

  On Mondays and Thursdays, my father started the morning by lighting the small, coal-burning furnace at the base of the boiler. Within an hour hot water flowed from the taps. On other days we heated water in a large pot on the cast-iron stove. Whatever amount we ladled out for washing our faces and for dishes had to be immediately replaced.

  Wash days were especially busy, my parents hurrying from one chore to another. Sorted piles of dirty clothes sat on the floor at one end of the room. Giant wicker baskets waited for wet laundry at the other. And off in a corner, pails of starch for the collars and cuffs of well-made shirts, stood ready.

  My father opened the metal and wooden doors to the barrel-shaped receptacle and stuffed it with soiled laundry. When he turned on the electric motor, the grinding of gears and the sloshing of water were so loud it was almost impossible to speak and be heard. On these days I crouched by the edge of the metal pan and watched the water as it gushed from the tail-like hose, swirling around the drain. Then, without warning, I heard my father singing long, mournful notes from some Chinese opera, his voice rising above the dreadful cacophony. But the lyrics were in classical Chinese, unlike the language we spoke in our home. For me the words were incomprehensible.