“The year that Shing was ten, I was nine and Doon was four, she took us to spend Chinese New Year with her brother. Mother was in a good mood. She was alive and healthy, proof that the fortune teller was wrong. She was right not to let that little button of a city girl into her house. So what if she couldn’t read and write; she was number one wife. There was no need for a second. That was what Mother said over and over. And with my father regularly sending money back, we were doing well.
“We were all looking forward to going back to Mother’s home village, and my uncle knew that his sister had a special fondness for dog meat stew. He had gone to a lot of trouble and had made the stew the night before. Everyone knows that the best dog stew is overnight dog stew. That way the meat has a chance to become more tender and to absorb the flavour of the other ingredients. Well, Mother must have found the dish really tasty because she ate too much and ended up with indigestion. When we went home, one of the villagers told her that the stew had too much yang and that she needed something to cool her body, something that was mostly yin. Mother made herself a sweet soup from yellow beans. But she didn’t know that dog meat and yellow beans were very bad together, that the juices from the meat would cause the beans to expand and explode. I sat up all night with her. Mother died in terrible pain. I can still see her writhing and hear her screams. So the fortune teller was right after all. Her prediction came true, and my father did end up with two wives. If only Mother had listened, then she might have lived and we would not have been orphaned.
“Those years after Mother died were terrible, and when the Japanese closed off the seaports, conditions got worse. When she was alive Father sent the money to her, of course, but after she died he sent the money to First Brother. He’d been married for just a few months and at first he looked after us, but then he started to gamble and we were left to starve. His bride was only seventeen, not at all ready to look after three children. And when she got pregnant later that year, she was so fed up that she went back to live with her mother. The three of us were left on our own.” My sister shook her head and wagged her finger at me. “Of all Father’s children, you are the luckiest.”
I nodded in silent agreement, not knowing what to say. I was seated between my niece, who was the same age as me, and my sister, who was old enough to be my mother. The gulf between us felt as wide as the Pacific.
Jook and I held each other for a long time. She was staying in Ong Sun, and Michael and I would leave Kaiping in another day. Little did I know that this would be the last time I would see my sister. She would die from a stroke the following year. My brothers would each send a large amount of money back to China for her hospital care and then for funeral expenses.
When I spoke to Shing about the money, he said that he and Doon wanted to honour Jook’s memory. He reminded me once again that after their mother had died, it was Jook who cared for them, who scavenged the food, cooked it and kept them alive. “She was our only sister,” Shing said to me. His statement startled me. I almost blurted out, What about me? I’m your sister. Don’t I count? But in that moment I understood that I had not been a part of their childhood. And so I didn’t play a role in their grief. My brother’s words revealed just how much the three of them had remained bound by those early experiences, the sadness of all those years apart adding to the depth of their loss.
“I’m so glad we all went back to China,” I said. It was all I could offer to comfort my grieving brother.
Kim, Michael and I hurried to catch the bus back to Kaiping City. A throng of motorcycle taxis had gathered at the bus stop and their drivers were offering to take us directly to our hotel. Our relatives all thought this would be a good idea because we’d save on the taxi fare from the bus station in Kaiping City. But Michael and I both declined without even consulting each other. The driving in China made me nervous even during the day, but to be a passenger on a motorcycle at night when drivers often didn’t bother to turn on their headlights wasn’t even a consideration.
Once the bus arrived, we weren’t allowed to board but were told to stand aside and wait until the inside was cleaned. We watched the female attendant sweep the debris from under the seats and the aisle onto the sidewalk, where it stayed.
There were no lights on the road back to Kaiping City. People flagged the bus down at random, and even though it was hard to distinguish landmarks in the night, passengers always seemed to know where to get off. In spite of these distractions, I couldn’t stop thinking about what my sister had told me. Only a few days before, I’d naïvely thought that I finally had all the facts about my parents’ lives here in China. But the story of First Wife’s death had changed all that. It lingered with me during the entire ride back.
From a Western perspective, there was something particularly horrible about dying from eating the flesh of a dog. The thought of it made my stomach churn. Was she in the loft of my father’s house or would they have brought her down to the family living area? First Brother and his wife would have been ministering to her. They would likely have asked for help from a woman in the village who was known for her healing abilities. In a tiny village like Ning Kai Lee, there wouldn’t have been a doctor. Perhaps other neighbours had gathered around her bedside. And what about the three children? I kept thinking about them and how frightened they must have been, watching their mother writhe in pain, listening to her piercing screams. Was she gripped with terror for her own children and what the future held for them? With their father stranded on the other side of the world, they were, in fact, orphaned.
Listening to my sister during this visit, as far as she was concerned, she might as well not have had a father. When he finally returned to China after the war, it was to marry my mother, and a few months later, Jook, being of marriageable age, would become the wife of a man she’d never met. One of my nieces whispered to me that the villagers gossiped about Jook’s dowry being somewhat modest, bearing in mind that her father was a Gold Mountain guest. People said it was my mother’s fault. If First Wife had been alive, she would have made sure that her daughter left home with a large dowry. No one seemed to blame my father. It was a woman’s responsibility, so they blamed my mother. I found this village gossip difficult to fathom; my mother’s generosity with these people had been legendary. She’d probably had no experience assembling a dowry and didn’t know how much to give. It was the only criticism I heard about my mother.
We were back in our hotel room, drinking tea and writing in our journals. I told Michael again about First Wife’s unhappy end at the hand of the gods. He put down his pen and shrugged. “It’s all very sad. But it probably had nothing to do with the gods,” said my agnostic husband. “My hunch is that it was either appendicitis or food poisoning. I’d say appendicitis. If it had been food poisoning, more people would have been sick. The mix of dog meat and yellow beans had nothing to do with it. Just makes for a good story.”
I agreed with my husband. He was being rational and so very Western. And yet, when my sister told me about the death of her mother, my spine tingled. To her and to some other members of my family, it was as fate had intended. Once her wilful mother had chosen to defy the gods, she was doomed. Her father was preordained to have two wives, and if First Wife would not cooperate, the gods themselves had no choice but to engineer her death, thus making way for wife number two. If it was indeed predetermined, the gods impressed me as being especially cruel and merciless. I felt sorry for this peasant woman, whose only crime was not wanting to share her husband with another wife. As these thoughts drifted through my mind, I found myself contemplating the real reason why my mother returned to our ancestral home before leaving for Hong Kong and then the Gold Mountain. Once again, I could see the wheels of the pedicab spinning over a bumpy path and I remembered the softness of my mother’s body as she held me on her lap. I have no doubt that she was returning to request the blessing of our ancestors, but perhaps even more important, she was surely attempting to make peace with the spirit of First Wife.
TWENTY-THREE
My father had finally sold the laundry in Acton and with the proceeds, my parents bought a shoebox of a house, a tiny row house on a short, secluded street in Toronto’s Chinatown, not far from Dundas Street. Like so many Chinese of their generation, they kept a room for themselves and rented out the rest. My mother was dividing her time between my father in Toronto and helping my brother at his restaurant an hour or so outside the city. She and my father were far from happy, but at least they seemed to have reached a truce. The terrible quarrels that used to consume them and terrify me as a child were now a thing of the past.
Shing had a steady job with Canada Post, and Doon owned a restaurant with a solid business. Ming Nee had married a university professor and was living a comfortable life in a large, suburban house. They all had children. I had a real job, having graduated from university the year before with a liberal arts degree. My parents had hoped I would enter one of the higher-level professions such as law or medicine, but I had neither the interest nor the academic inclination. Nevertheless, I was the first person in my immediate family to finish university, and my parents were proud of that. On the day of my convocation, my parents were in the audience, and as I walked across the stage to receive my degree, I saw my father lift his peaked cap in recognition.
I remembered thinking that being an assistant at the Ontario College of Art library was a pretty special position to have landed. I was a small town girl, and the fact that they had chosen me above the other applicants had been a personal triumph. My parents were proud that I was financially independent at such an early age, and my mother bragged to her friends that I was sharing an apartment with some other girls and that her daughter had an annual salary of over five thousand dollars! “Not bad for a girl,” one of them said. My father told me many times how happy he was that I was making a living using my head and not my hands. Even with my modest income, I had comforts that my parents only dreamed about in their Gold Mountain life. I was on my way to living like a lo fon.
In the short walk from the Ontario College of Art to my parents’ house, my clothes had become damp. We were in the middle of a July heat wave. Even breathing required effort. My mother had returned to the city the day before and had invited me to have lunch with her and my father.
The moment she opened the front door of their little row house, I knew she’d spent the morning cooking. Her forehead was shiny with perspiration. I could smell garlic and the distinctive aroma of long-simmering soup. I saw the dishes on the kitchen table: four-flavour soup from pork bones, almond seeds, lily bulbs, lotus seeds and red dates; steamed fish; and stir-fried green beans with fermented tofu. My mother had gone to a lot of trouble; she was constantly worried about what I ate. I gave my parents each a hug and sat down, resigned to eating the hot food my mother had made with such love and concern, when all I wanted was a salad. My father appeared particularly haggard that day. He was wearing a thin, white T-shirt instead of his usual white button-up shirt with rolled-up sleeves. I thought his breathing seemed laboured. In spite of my lack of hunger, I ate a whole bowl of rice and drank a full bowl of soup. It was delicious. I was just about finished when my father reached across the table with his chopsticks and accidentally knocked over his soup.
“Eeiyah, look how clumsy you are,” my mother scolded. “Can’t do anything right.”
My father sat there, defeated, unable to say a single word.
“Never mind, never mind,” I said, trying to smooth things over.
I helped her tidy the mess, and whatever friction there was between them seemed to dissipate. They both smiled and waved goodbye at the door. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though a certain equilibrium had been restored, I saw the exhaustion in my father’s face. His chest looked hollow under his shapeless T-shirt, and his mouth was slack. His breathing was so shallow I could almost feel the effort behind it. All the way back to the college library, I kept seeing his face.
My mother had never before phoned me at work. But shortly after my return, when a co-worker handed me the telephone, I knew without even being told, that it was my mother. I knew she was calling about my father. My mother told me in a strangled voice that my father was dead. “Hurry. Come. Hurry. Come. Now,” she said between gasps of breath. I felt dizzy with fear.
I ran the few blocks that separated the College of Art from my parents’ house. The sun hurt my eyes; my shirt was sodden and stuck to my skin. My chest felt like a hollow cave, my heart pounding against the walls. When I arrived neighbours were crowded around an ambulance parked outside the house. The back doors were open, and a couple of paramedics were sliding in a stretcher with a body draped from head to toe in a white sheet. My mother was standing a little to the side with her hands pressed against her mouth. Her face was ashen. When I put my arms around her, she let out a long, painful moan. Her body crumpled and I could barely hold her up. At the same time her fingers dug into my shoulders. Everyone was watching us. Nobody said a word. This couldn’t be happening to us. That couldn’t really be my father on the stretcher. But it was. We stood clinging to each other, sobbing, afraid to let go.
Long after I’d led her back into the house, my mother continued crying, stopping only to catch her breath. Those last moments with my father emerged from her in reluctant fragments. But finally I was able to piece together what had happened. After I had left to return to work, my father went into the basement while my mother stayed in the kitchen doing the dishes. She heard something clatter to the floor. For some reason she knew that things were not right and ran down the stairs, not even bothering to dry her hands. There was my father with a rope around his neck, dangling from a beam in the ceiling. She rushed over and wrapped her arms around his legs, pushing him up, trying to ease the pressure of the rope. He still felt warm, but it was too late.
The following few days were a blur. The same village uncle who had greeted my mother and me at the airport when we’d arrived in Canada almost twenty years earlier now accompanied me to one of the Chinese newspapers and wrote the obituary. Afterwards, he took me to a restaurant where we booked a post-funeral reception. My brother Shing and I went to the local funeral home and chose a coffin. We picked an oak casket that cost seven hundred dollars. I purchased a double plot at Mount Pleasant cemetery and helped my brother choose a pink granite headstone. My brother wrote in Chinese characters on a sheet of paper for the stone carver my father’s dates and that he was a native of Ning Kai Lee, Kaiping County, Guangdong Province, China.
At twenty-two years old, I was the youngest child in our family but not too young to supervise the arrangements at a funeral home in Chinatown where only English was spoken.
Shing, Doon, Ming Nee and their spouses and people who were distantly related through our ancestral village were at the funeral. A friend I had known since high school was there with her aunt. Michael sat with them. So much of that day remains a blur, except for my mother and how inconsolable she was. Even now, when I think about the lack of affection in their marriage, the depth of her sorrow seems out of proportion. It didn’t seem to matter whether she was standing or sitting; her body was crippled with grief. Every time I glanced at her, she was bent over, unable to straighten herself. All the mourners voiced their shock in a constant refrain. His children were all doing so well. He had so much to be proud of. He was an old man already. Why did he end his life like that?
I stayed with my mother for a couple of weeks after my father’s death. She’d already decided she wouldn’t continue to live in the row house. Within a week of my father’s death, all the tenants had moved, our home tainted by suicide. She decided that she’d no longer let out rooms but would rent the entire house to a non-Chinese family instead. I was expected to find the tenants, to collect the rent and look after her house. She would now live with Doon’s family in the apartment above his restaurant.
At one point I asked if she was afraid to sleep in the house, and she replied that there was nothing to fear. “Your father die
d a terrible death. But your father was a good man,” she said to me. “He would never do harm to you, me or anyone. You must never forget that.”
I felt my mother’s strength returning in her words, and yet a few days later, the calm evaporated. I returned from work one evening to find that she’d thrown away all of my father’s possessions. Her forehead was beaded with perspiration. She shook with anger, spitting out her words between gasps of breath. She insisted that she’d had to get rid of everything. After he died I remembered seeing the hand-sewn books made from sheets of brown paper, filled with his poetry. I had made a mental note to save them. I had told myself that in time I would find someone to translate the words into English. These books represented a side of my father that had been inaccessible, but I had dreamed that one day it would be revealed to me. Now they were gone, taken away with the trash.
As I looked around the rooms, my jaw went slack and I glared at her. Her feelings about her dead husband swung from grief and despair to uncontrollable rage. I could picture her tearing through his few possessions, throwing them into a green garbage bag. My mother even tossed out his gold watch and fob. For a man who lived without luxury, these were the only things he’d ever owned that were beautiful and hinted at personal indulgence. He’d bought them on his last journey to China and had tucked them inside his waistcoat when coming back to Canada. He used to let me hold the watch, its surface hard and smooth against my fingers. And when I snapped open the small, round door, it revealed a clock face with tiny black numbers. One day it will be yours, he said. The only thing I found that had missed my mother’s frenzy was an abacus. I can still see my father sitting at the ironing table, late into the night, adding up the money that he had taken in and subtracting the cost of supplies. I can see his hand poised over the rungs, hear the click-clack of the beads as his fingers pushed them up and down.
The Year of Finding Memory Page 21
