Su put her hand up to her mouth and giggled. “Many people say that your father wanted to marry your mother soon after they met. Did you know that?” she asked. I immediately stopped looking at the scenery.
Kim rushed in. “I think your father must have liked your mother from the beginning. You see, there was no one else in the village like her. My grandmother, First Wife, was very jealous. My grandfather loved books and learning, and even though your mother was not as beautiful as First Wife, she was educated, someone he could talk to about history and Confucius. He was the one who hired her to teach in the village school. He met with her all the time after the students left. And don’t forget First Brother was in her class. He went to discuss business, but the meetings got longer and longer.”
My niece paused, as if to gauge my reaction. “Then he started inviting her to his house for dinner—something that First Wife didn’t like, but she put up with it. Then …” Kim took a breath. “Your father went to a fortune teller and the fortune teller told him he was destined to have two wives. Not only that, but the fortune teller said that the life of First Wife actually depended on his taking a second, that without a second wife in the house, she would die! When my grandfather heard this, he must have thought that First Wife would naturally go along. The gods had spoken. Who would dare go against them?” I had to stop myself from asking Kim to slow down; I didn’t want to break the spell. My mind was racing. Was Kim in fact talking about my parents?
“Well, my grandfather didn’t know First Wife as well as he thought he did. After he told her what the fortune teller prophesized, she grew very angry. She said she saw through him, that it was just an excuse to take that girl from the city as a second wife. Well, she didn’t care what the fortune teller said. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing. And what if he was just making everything up? She wasn’t falling for it. She wanted to be the only wife. She would never allow that woman to cross the threshold and become a part of her family. My mother said that people in the village gossiped about it for many years after. Well, you know what happened. My grandfather let First Wife have her way, and she died not long after he returned to Canada.”
“That was so terrible,” I replied, “those children left on their own.” I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to pinch myself. We were back at the van. The driver was leaning against the hood having a cigarette.
These events sounded like something out of a movie. And the notion that my parents actually enjoyed talking to each other seemed inconceivable. I remembered times of compatible conversation, but they were rare. Communication in our home seemed to take the form of either silence or quarrelling. At best, their marriage was a stalemate. And what an unhappy situation for First Wife. Even though she was tall and beautiful, she was no rival for my mother, the girl from the city who knew how to read and write and could discuss Confucius. I found it hard to blame First Wife for her bad temper.
Imagine that flirtatious girl in the sepia photograph that my cousin Kung kept in his Taishan house. My mother was a young, capable woman who had escaped from an untenable marriage. She found herself in a tiny, isolated village, where no one knew her, and she suddenly realized that this man, my father, was attracted to her. She must have seen this situation as an opening in a life of closing doors and knew that if she played her cards right, the Gold Mountain guest just might be the key to resolving her predicament. I pictured her sitting at the table in my father’s house while First Wife served dinner, my mother and father deep into a conversation about books, one that deliberately excluded First Wife. Poor First Wife, seething in the background. I didn’t like the way my mother appeared in this story—manipulative and calculating. But I’m not sure I would have behaved any better, given what was at stake.
After my father had his future told, did he share the fortune teller’s premonition with my mother right away? Did he tell her about their mutual destiny during one of his many after-school visits? In sharing a revelation from this higher power, he would have implicitly declared his affections for her, even if he had said nothing overt about love. How did my mother receive this news? No one in the village, including my father, would have known that she was married. A woman of her background should have been number one wife, but a secure future was in reach, and she was not about to lose the opportunity just because she was married to that very no-good man.
The villagers must have thought it odd that my mother would be willing to be a second. Perhaps they took it as just another indication of the status my father held as a Gold Mountain guest. I pondered my mother’s response. From her perspective, being number two to an illiterate woman was better than being forever tied to her first husband, better than being penniless and single, fates that she must have thought almost worse than death. While I was single, my mother worried about me incessantly. Her greatest fear was that I would be a lifetime spinster, that there would be no one to look after me. She never considered that I might be able to look after myself.
Perhaps I was being overly suspicious and unkind. It is possible that my parents had fallen in love and saw the fortune teller’s divination as a sign that they were preordained to be together. How much time did they spend discussing this situation, I wondered, before my father approached First Wife? Perhaps he naïvely thought that these two women would live happily together under a single roof. And my mother would have regarded anything as better than life with that very no-good man.
My father may have couched his plan in such a way that his marrying the young teacher would seem to be in the best interests of First Wife. Or he may have presented it as a pronouncement from above, an imperative to be obeyed. Whatever he said, First Wife unleashed her temper, and my father acquiesced to her demands. I found myself puzzled to hear that he wanted her permission, that he didn’t ignore her wishes and proceed as he had wanted. Perhaps he just didn’t want to deal with her rage. Maybe my father knew that if he returned to North America, he would be leaving my mother, a young woman, alone with an angry older one.
My mother must have been devastated by First Wife’s opposition. And her opinion of my father must have suffered when she saw that he could not stand up to his wife. Or perhaps my father never confessed his feelings to my mother and sought a fortune teller without her ever knowing. I doubt it, though. There’s only one thing certain: my father cared for my mother. If he hadn’t, he would not have gone to a fortune teller or bothered to raise the topic of taking a second wife with First Wife. And my mother, unless she was blind, would have been aware of his attraction to her. Whether his emotions were ever reciprocated or whether my mother manipulated them to her advantage is something I will never know.
My mother always told me that she left my father’s village to go to school in Nanking. She was almost boasting, as if to say that life as a teacher in that forsaken village was never a serious consideration. I now see that her words conveyed another partial truth. What had the villagers been whispering about my parents? I would hear this story about my father’s visit to the fortune teller and his prophecy several more times from other family members before my stay in Kaiping was over. More than seventy years later they were still talking about my parents. Even if their affair had not been consummated, my mother would have been perceived as the other woman, angling to become my father’s second wife. She must have known that she would be the subject of gossip. But my mother was willing to take a chance that those rumours would be quelled once my father gave her a legitimate position in his family. She had cast a spell over this man, but she had also underestimated First Wife.
Whenever my mother whispered about my father’s first wife, her voice betrayed a grudge. I can still hear her words in my ear, hushed and confidential. “Yes, she was nice looking and tall, but she was nasty, with a quick temper. Anyone can see why your father was afraid of her.”
Jook was right. My mother did chase her father.
A few days earlier, Jook had reminded me not for the first time that she was tall because of
her mother. She then turned to me with an ever-so-pitying smile on her face and told me that I, sadly, was small because both my parents were short. This time, I could not help smiling myself. But Jook quickly added, as if to cushion the blow but not necessarily diminish her loyalty to her dead mother, “You are lucky that you look like our father. Your mother was smart but not very good looking.” This “love triangle” had happened many years ago, but it was still influencing the way my sister behaved toward me.
Once my mother accepted that her plans had failed, she would also have soon concluded that living in the village as a single woman under a cloud of such suspicion would not have been an option. She had to leave the village and must have written to her thoh. But would she have told her sister-in-law the real story or would she have contrived another? It now seems to me that the decision to study in Nanking was not a decision, but rather a manoeuvre that would rescue her from another untenable situation. Small wonder that my mother felt so indebted to her thoh.
My entire childhood had been spent in dark, tight quarters, where people sniped at each other while placing all their ambitions on me, the one who was able to go to school, to university, to one day live like the lo fons, the one who would eventually justify their sacrifices. I thought again about the apartment above the store in Cheong Hong See—that wide staircase and those airy, light-filled, spacious rooms. Never before had I associated my parents with anything beautiful. When my father returned to China in 1947, he’d had no intention of leaving. He was living out what the gods had intended, not just marrying for a second time, but marrying the woman he had fallen in love with many years before. My father must have felt he had finally arrived, that fortune, after so many years of turning away from him, had at last decided to smile in his direction. Were there moments of tenderness in that apartment? It was heartbreaking to contemplate it but just as hard to know what the future held.
My mother’s decision to write a letter proposing marriage was a bold, calculated move, one with much potential for failure and humiliation. I had grown up with a certain admiration for this woman who’d looked at her circumstances with steady, dispassionate eyes and arrived at a strategy that would benefit both parties. But in a single afternoon my perception of my parents had changed. When my mother wrote that critical letter proposing marriage, I believe it would have been with the conviction that my father had at one time cared about her and had planned to make her a part of his family. For so long I had seen my mother as a brave, steely woman: her letter, a business proposition written to a man with whom she had once had a professional relationship. But I now realized that she was also an opportunist. She was a woman writing from a position of strength to a man who she knew would not refuse her. And what about her words? Would they have been straightforward or honeyed? In her letter would she have recalled their mutual love of books and history? Would she have reminded him about the fortune teller’s prophecy? As my father read her words, he must have thought back with fondness on the times spent with this well-spoken girl who had bestowed so much status on his tiny village and with whom he’d been able to share a love of poetry and philosophy. He must also have been flattered. In all likelihood my father would have felt that there was only one possible course of action. All practical matters aside, marriage to my mother would simply be living out their destiny.
I was quiet on the ride back toward Kaiping City. The scenery that had left me breathless in the morning barely made an impression. The shadows were lengthening, and I knew that it would soon be dusk. I started thinking about a story my cousin Kung had told me during my visit to his home in Taishan. After my mother and her first husband were married, his parents had set them up in a store for selling the produce grown on their farm. They were a family of landowners and successful farmers; my mother should have had a decent life. On one particular occasion, she was away for the day and came back to find the store stripped. Her husband had sold everything: the tables, chairs, cupboards, even the window blinds. He needed the money for white powder. My cousin hesitated for a moment, then said that my mother’s first husband had also beaten her. I stared at Kung in disbelief. He looked away and muttered under his breath as if he shouldn’t have shared this information with me, as if he had somehow shamed the memory of my mother. “I don’t know for sure … but that’s what my mother told me,” my cousin mumbled.
Mo vun fut. Mo vun fut. What choice did I have? I can still hear my mother’s voice—sometimes a plea for sympathy, sometimes a bitter statement full of resentment. How terrible must it have been for her to have to go back to that very no-good man during the war. So this was why it would have been acceptable to be a second to my father’s illiterate first wife. At least my father was kind, decent and responsible.
During a visit to my mother’s nursing home, toward the end of her life, I found her lying in bed, facing the wall and wailing, “Wwwhy? Look at her! She’s lum lum, huk huk, blue, blue, black black. She’s dead! My daughter is dead. You’ve beaten and kicked her to death.” I called out to her, telling her that I was alive and standing next to her bed. My mother’s body stiffened and she slowly turned to look at me. Her face was frozen with shock and fear. I reached over and stroked her cheek. She took my hand in hers, her features softening with relief, her eyes welling with tears. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered. “Somebody told me that Michael had beaten you to death.” A wave of anger flooded through my body. How could she say this about her son-in-law, my husband who had welcomed her into our home, who cooked her favourite meals, who was often a personal chauffeur, who had been generous and accommodating. But I said nothing except to reassure her that I was very much alive and well. I had to remind myself that my mother had dementia and not to take her mumblings seriously. But after hearing my cousin, I saw things from a new perspective: in her delusion it wasn’t me who was being beaten. It was my mother herself. Now I understood why she took the chances she did in that tiny village and why she deceived my father over a decade later when she wrote that fateful proposal of marriage. She was desperate to be rescued.
Whenever I think about these events, I see in my mind my mother, sobbing with grief, at my father’s funeral. I can remember my surprise at the depth of her emotional response to the death of a man she had never seemed to love. Perhaps I’d had it right when I was a child. Perhaps my mother and Ming Nee did greet my father with joy and jubilation when he got off the boat. And when they rode the sedan chair back to the village, their laughter filled the air, certain the stars had finally brought them together and placed before them a bright, happy future.
We were approaching the outskirts of Kaiping City. The day’s excursion had left everyone fatigued and me distracted. But my nieces insisted on stopping at their brother’s orange grove. Kim said it was not far from the main road and should take us no more than an hour or so out of our way. I hesitated, but Michael reminded me that we were being offered an opportunity to see a side of the country that would not be available to the average tourist. He was right.
We had seen very little of my nephew Chong on this trip because he was busy with his orange grove. He lived in Kaiping City and rode his motorcycle to his farm every day. Kim directed our driver down another stony, deeply rutted trail, but it couldn’t get all the way into the orchard, so we left it parked and walked the rest of the way. Once we departed from the trail, the six of us continued single file down a winding dirt path until we arrived at a hillside covered with orange trees that were laden with plump, round fruit. We came to a small clearing and found my nephew with his workers, building a new dormitory. When he saw us, he left his workers and took us on a tour of his orchard.
Along the way, Kim showed us where she had cultivated plantings of ginger and muk see, a large, yam-like root. She went into a storage shed and returned with a hoe. Lifting the tool above her shoulder, she brought it down with a single, forceful chop. The muk see bush that had been over six feet tall, with several robust stalks, was now severed and lying on its s
ide. My husband glanced at me, his eyes wide with admiration. Kim then loosened the earth around the muk see, and we all bent over and helped her harvest the crop.
The stems of the ginger plant were delicate and no more than eighteen inches long, and its leaves were narrow and grass-like. The roots, when dug from the earth, were pale and fat, so much more succulent than anything I’d ever seen in a grocery store back home. I watched my nieces chatting and laughing as they worked, and I found myself wondering whether I would have been like them if my mother and I had stayed in China. It was hard not to admire these two women. They were both assured and capable. Although Kim’s formal education had been sabotaged, her life was rich, helping various family members, visiting with her brothers, haggling in the markets. Her cell phone rang frequently with calls from friends. I looked at Su and saw my mother. If she had been able to finish her studies in silkworm culture, she would have been like this, an independent woman with her own store. I could picture her unravelling bolts of gorgeous silk for interested customers, helping them decide which one to purchase.
Chong picked some of the ripest oranges from his trees and passed them around to all of us. Michael wanted to see the entire property, so my nephew led us on a walk along a path that I suspected would take us to the end of the grove. To my amazement, at the boundary of Chong’s farm, there was another hill with more cultivated fields, and just beyond that was a collection of old, tumbledown buildings, a tucked-in-the-corner hamlet. “This country is so old,” said Michael. “You get the sense that there’s no such thing as the end of the trail. You can go down the most obscure, overgrown path that should lead nowhere and suddenly you’re looking at something: a small holding, a cluster of buildings, an out-of-the-way village.”
The Year of Finding Memory Page 19
