I thought that perhaps this had to do with her diagnosis, but with time her mood improved very little, even after the success of her surgery and radiation treatment. She spent her days alone, watching Chinese videos and reading the Chinese newspaper while the rest of us were either at work or at school. I was the only person in the house who spoke Chinese and who was able to converse with her, though I knew how badly my mother wanted to talk with her granddaughters. Every so often they would sit with her in her room, holding her hand and watching Chinese television. But they were adolescents, more interested in their peers than an old woman with whom they could not communicate. We lived in a bright, spacious home on a tree-lined street. But we were far from Chinatown and had no Chinese neighbours. It was in me that she would confide, telling me all her fears.
During the entire time that my mother lived with us, she never mentioned my father. Yet I knew she thought about him. The image of her in a state of near-collapse at his funeral, how she’d had to be helped out of the chapel after his service, her face contorted with pain, distraught with grief, had remained vivid in my memory after all these years.
I arrived home from work, and the moment I closed the front door, my mother called from the second floor, telling me to come quick. She’d been living with us for just over a year. I rushed up the stairs and found her sitting on the edge of her bed, wringing her hands in her lap, her forehead creased with worry lines. I knew she’d been watching the clock for my return. At moments like these, I felt heartsick about the days she spent alone in my house.
She patted the spot beside her, indicating that I should sit down. She pursed her lips together in a way that told me she was about to announce something important. She straightened her back and took a deep breath. Whatever she was about to impart had occupied her mind for a long time. And however minor it might seem to me, this concern would have mushroomed into something monumental.
We were the only people in the house, but she still held her hand to the side of her mouth and whispered that I had to get rid of the cleaning lady. She said that the cleaning lady was a thief and had stolen her underwear. I was shocked, but I also had difficulty suppressing a smile. My cleaning lady weighed at least twice as much as my mother and stood at least a head taller. At best she would have been able to fit one leg into my mother’s underpants, even if she’d wanted to steal them. When I stood up and opened her drawer and showed her the missing items, my mother quickly retorted that the cleaning lady had put them back because she knew I was coming home. No matter how much I argued, I could not persuade her that the cleaning lady was not a thief.
“You are too trusting. Your life has been too easy. But I know how a devious mind works,” my mother insisted. “Can’t you see? The lady doesn’t want them for herself. She wants to sell them.” Now it was really hard not to laugh. When my mother saw that I was unconvinced, she accused me of siding with the cleaning lady against her. I was ready to point out that her underwear was full of holes, that the cleaning lady would be more likely to use them for rags, when I thought better of it and decided to try another tactic. I said that if the cleaning lady wanted to steal her belongings, she would have taken the new pairs, the ones I’d bought years before, still unused and wrapped in tissue paper, the ones being saved for good.
“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I know that’s what she really wanted. Tsk!” My mother clucked her tongue and shook her head in exasperation, much in the way that an adult would at an uncomprehending child. “She could have made lots of money if she’d sold my brand-new things. But I saw through her and put them where she can’t find them. That’s why she took the ones I wear every day. But she’s so sneaky she put them back just before you came home.”
Finally, I gave up and just told her it was a good thing the undergarments were returned. I said not to worry because, even if all her clothing went missing, I had so much money I’d be able to buy her everything she needed.
My mother gave a sigh of relief. “Good thing you make so much money,” she said. “I’m so glad you have such a good job.” She hesitated for a moment; then her tone became stern. “Don’t ever quit your job. Lots of people want a good job like yours and would steal it if you left.” There was that word again. Nevertheless, I was quite pleased with myself for stumbling onto this clever diversion.
Then she suddenly perked up. She thrust her head forward, about to begin a mission. “Have you paid off your mortgage yet?” she demanded, wagging a finger. “That’s what’s most important. Forget nice clothes and holidays. What’s most important is good food and paying off your mortgage. Chinese people don’t like owing money and paying interest. Not like lo fons, chargee this, chargee that.” It served me right, bragging about imaginary wealth, even if it was just to put her at ease. When I tried to change the topic of conversation again, she became stubborn and fixated on whether I still had a mortgage. Finally, I capitulated and told her what she wanted to hear. I mumbled under my breath and said that we had paid off our house. A broad, satisfied grin broke across her face.
“Thank god. Now I can die without worry. And thank goodness you married a good lo fon. I suppose every group has good and bad. You could have just as easily married a bad Chinese, someone who smokes and gambles. You’re lucky. Michael looks after his family, and he knows how to fix everything, saves a lot of money. And he’s not like some people, chargee this, chargee that.”
All concerns about the cleaning lady had vanished, at least for now. I was happy to end our conversation with the topic of thrift and my marvellous husband. Michael chuckled whenever he heard reports of my mother’s boasting. She had been reluctant to accept him when we first met. While we were still an unmarried couple, she continued to tell me about “good” Chinese boys who were looking for a wife, with whom Matchmaker Auntie would be more than happy to organize a meeting. I never took my mother’s suggestions seriously. She grew frustrated with my dismissive attitude, and as a final resort she told me it wouldn’t hurt to meet one of these boys. It wasn’t as if it was going to cost anything. Matchmaking services were always paid for by the groom, she pointed out. But now she couldn’t stop extolling Michael’s virtues, to the point of fabrication. She had decided in her own mind that her son-in-law was a saver, someone who used only cash. Credit cards, as far as she was concerned, were for less worthy and less responsible lo fons. Chinese people never touched them. According to my mother.
A few days after the cleaning lady incident, she went for a walk after supper and became lost. Michael hopped on his bicycle and searched out our neighbourhood. Once he found her, he raced home and got in the car. It was a warm summer evening, so I was not concerned with her falling or catching a chill. We both knew she walked so slowly that she would not be far from where he had originally found her. When she arrived home she was unaware that she had gone for a walk and thought her kind son-in-law had taken her for a summer evening’s drive.
Another night, not long afterwards, my family was seated around the kitchen table. I’d made spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner that night, one of my mother’s favourite meals, since after Chinese, Italian was her preferred cuisine. Right up until her death, she continued to love food and maintained a good appetite. We had almost finished eating, when my mother asked me if I had ever been to Miami. I shook my head, and she informed me that she had been many times. I stared at her, my fork held in mid-air. While she was living with Doon, she and a girlfriend had taken a bus tour of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once, she had even been to New York City with Ming Nee. But other than these two trips, she had travelled very little since leaving China. She had certainly never even been close to Florida.
My mother ignored my reaction and said that it was easy to get to beautiful Miami. Dumbfounded, I asked her, “How?”
“There’s a bridge from Hong Kong to Miami,” my mother said. “You can walk across it. Very easy.”
I almost choked on my pasta. I put down my fork, barely able to keep a straight face, and
said, “That’s not possible. There’s no bridge connecting the two cities.”
My mother turned her head in my direction, her eyes steady with confidence. “You don’t know everything. I’m the one who should know. I walked across that bridge.” I let the conversation drop, and my mother requested a second helping. I asked one of my daughters to get up and replenish her grandmother’s plate.
Every night our dinner table had two simultaneous conversations, one in Chinese between me and my mother and one in English for everyone else. There were times when I was expected to participate in both simultaneously, and I often lost track. But that night Michael and our daughters had stopped talking, suddenly drawn into an exchange they could not comprehend. My husband asked, “What’s your mother so worked up about?’ When I told my family, they smiled. But Michael’s eyes looked worried.
My daughter set the refilled plate in front of her grandmother and started to cut the pasta into shorter lengths. Before sitting down she gave her grandmother a quick hug. As I watched my mother and my daughter, I could no longer deny that my mother’s mind had become like a boat without moorings. The moment a conversation was finished, we could begin the same one again, and for her it was as if nothing had been said before. I remembered noticing that she could read the same article in a newspaper several times repeatedly without seeming to realize it. My amusement vanished, and I suddenly felt short of breath. The day before I had returned home and found a tap left running. Tomorrow, it might a pot left boiling on the stove.
The Chinese home for the aged in downtown Toronto had a space available for my mother. It was a good fit. The staff spoke a number of Chinese dialects, and they served only Chinese food. Each floor had a communal living room with comfortable chairs and a television. I could borrow a wheelchair and easily take her to Chinatown nearby for dinner or dim sum lunch. For the first year or so she responded well to her new surroundings. Her mind was still generally able to navigate between her past and her present. But there was no denying that the world in which she lived was fading from her consciousness. She constantly talked about her childhood. Little things triggered her memories: a favourite food, a flower in a bouquet, an item of clothing. She told me again and again about going to Sunday school with her younger sister in Taishan, where they grew up. She told me again how the missionaries there had taught her to knit, embroider and crochet. She would sing in Chinese, “Jesus Loves Me” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” her voice tuneful and sweet. But whenever she asked me, “Do you want to know the real reason I went to Sunday school?” I knew her reminiscences were about to end. My mother would beckon me to come closer. She would chuckle and whisper to me as if I were a fellow conspirator. “I went to Sunday school not because I believed. Although there’s nothing wrong with believing. My little sister and I went because the missionaries gave us biscuits and cakes to eat, free. Lots of children believed for the same reason.” After divulging this little secret, she always giggled and then disappeared once again into her childhood.
A few months after my mother moved to the nursing home, I visited her with a bag of fresh lychees. I found her in the communal living room, watching television. I peeled several of the fruit and put them on a plate I’d taken from her room. She was watching a war movie. On the screen terrified people were screaming and fleeing from random explosions. She pointed to the scene and said, “That’s what it was like. The bombs. They fell out of the sky, and you never knew where they would land. Somehow I managed to miss them, and I always managed to find safety for my daughter and me. I used to see children left by the side of road. They were crying and dirty, deserted by their parents. But I could never do that. I would rather die first.”
My mother once again reminded me how lucky I was, not to know any of the misfortune she had known. And when she asked me if I knew that she was sixteen when she was married, she didn’t wait for an answer. She proceeded once more to tell me the story of her terrible first marriage. Again, I half-listened. I had heard her account before, and without any help could probably repeat it, word for word.
I had known for a long time that after the death of her thoh, sometime around the Japanese invasion of Canton, my mother had returned to her first husband. Big Uncle’s fortunes had fallen, and there was the matter of his marriage to Foo Hoy, Fat Lady, the woman my mother never liked. There must also have been a general sense of chaos in the city and an “every man for himself” sort of mentality. She felt her only choice was to seek refuge with this man whom she despised, to whom she was still married.
I thought I knew this story inside out. But this time as I listened, it occurred to me that she could have gone back to her father. Her mother had died when she was a child, but surely her own father would have given her a home. When I interrupted and asked, she said, “My father was dead. He had died even before I was married, when I was twelve or thirteen. I’m not sure anymore. It was a long time ago. My father was murdered.”
Murdered?
My mother picked up one of the lychees and ate it, then put the pit on the plate. She looked at me and shook her head. “My father was a very sociable person. He loved people. That’s why he was such a good doctor. After a house call on that particular day, instead of coming straight home, he went to a teahouse to chat with some friends. Some soldiers saw him go in. My sister and I, when we saw soldiers roaming the streets we were afraid. There were always stories about how they often didn’t get paid, sometimes not even fed. So they stole to survive. When they saw my father’s doctor’s bag, they must have thought it was full of money. Anyway, when he came out, they followed him and they clubbed him to death. They were probably angry that he didn’t have any money, at least not what they expected. I became an orphan at an early age. Now do you see why my thoh was so important to me? She was really the only mother I ever had. That’s why her death was so terrible. I wasn’t lucky like you, living in Canada with a mother who worries about you. In another few years I won’t be here, and then you’ll see. You don’t know how lucky you are to have a mother who worries about you. After my thoh died, nobody worried about me. What else could I do but return to that very no-good man?”
I stared back at her, my mouth a gaping hole. Murdered! Her tone was so casual; she could just as easily have been talking about the weather. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder. Reeling from this revelation about my grandfather whom I had never met, his bloody, violent death, I was ashamed that I was a middle-aged woman before I had even asked how he had died. Sitting beside my mother, I felt a world apart from her, to think that my parents had spent their childhoods in a place where an event as terrible as her father’s murder was not unusual.
I walked my mother to her table in the dining room and waited for her to sit down. The food at this home was exceptional. Everything was cooked from scratch, and the residents routinely ate fresh seafood. Every evening meal started with a long-simmered soup. I bent over and kissed her goodbye.
I decided to walk the several blocks north before catching the streetcar. The chestnut trees were covered with cone-shaped clusters of white blossoms. Front yard gardens were sprouting bok choy, gai lan and other Chinese greens. I passed a few people on this quiet, residential street. Most people were already home from work, and I caught the occasional whiff of garlic frying in oil. The streetcar was full when I got on. I pushed my way to the back, where there was space to stand, annoyed that people were crowding the front and blocking the entrance.
My mother had lived in Canada for more than forty years, yet she continued to be burdened by her past, still suspicious of life in the Gold Mountain. If my family left for a holiday, I had faith that when we returned, our home would still be standing and our furniture would be undisturbed. My irritations felt petty; my decisions felt almost frivolous: what university to attend, where to vacation, which house to buy, what to serve at a particular dinner party, what outfit to wear. When I arrived home, Michael and I would eat last night’s leftovers on matching dishes. After dinner I
would load the dirty dishes inside my fancy dishwasher. I would spend the rest of the evening relaxing, perhaps watching the news on TV before going to bed. My husband and I both had secure jobs; the girls were both at university. What had I done in my past life to deserve living on my safe, tidy planet?
I should be grateful. I was grateful. But resentment lurked under my skin. I hated it when she told me how lucky I was to have a mother who worried about me. On some level I was not the good Chinese daughter that she wanted. I was too Western, too independent. My devotion to her was no match for hers to me. My mother never missed an opportunity to warn me how sorry I’d be once she was gone. And how right she has turned out to be.
In the last year of my mother’s life, her delusions became steadily worse and more frequent. Many times I would arrive in her room and find her alone, talking or singing songs with an imaginary friend from her youth. Often, it was her younger sister. A few months before she died, my mother had to be hospitalized for some internal bleeding. When I entered her hospital room, a young, black nurse was sitting beside her and holding her hand. My mother was having a one-sided conversation with her in Chinese. The woman nodded and smiled. As soon as my mother saw me, she told me to hurry over. She introduced me to her new friend, giving her a Chinese name. She told me that the “young girl” was from a neighbouring village and had walked a long way just to visit her. I was pleased to see my mother in this rare, buoyant mood, but at the same time my heart sank. Though she still recognized me and knew my name, I felt her slipping away.
Michael and I took our daughters to visit their grandmother in the nursing home on a Saturday. Ming Nee saw her on Sunday. The following afternoon the nursing home called me to let me know that she had died. My mother was eighty-eight years old. She had recently seen the people who meant the most to her. It was her time to go. She felt no need to give us warning.
The Year of Finding Memory Page 13
