by Li, Veronica
I slept fitfully in the strange bed that night. Every time I opened my eyes, I thought I was back in my homey apartment on La Salle Road. But as the outlines of the furniture registered in my muddled brain, the disappointment was overwhelming. I buried my face in the pillow and wailed in silence. This wasn’t a nightmare. I really had given up everything I cherished to come to this foreign place.
I dragged myself out of bed the next morning. Like it or not, there was plenty of work to be done. School was starting in a month, and my children didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. Hok-Ching had given me the name of a Mandarin teacher. I dialed the number and in my rusty Mandarin asked her to start instruction at my house the next day.
Enrolling the children also needed my urgent attention. I’d thought that Baba could refer them to the reputable schools, but when I approached him about it, he turned a stiff shoulder toward me and looked away. "Everyone has to get in by his own merit," he said.
I was miffed. I wasn’t begging him for favors, but having rushed over here at his insistence, his guidance would be useful. At the same time, I understood why he was so touchy. He’d suffered tremendous buffeting in his political career. Many years ago his enemies had blamed the failure of the gold yuan reform on him, putting the loss of the country to the communists squarely on his shoulders. Today, certain members of the Kuomintang were still angry that Chiang Kai-Shek should promote an independent before them. They would use any excuse to accuse Baba of wrongdoing. Considering his sensitive position, I was willing to overlook his coldness. Hok-Ching, however, was less forgiving, and I was once again the peacemaker between him and his father.
No thanks to Baba, I found out that the government had put out many incentives to lure huachiaos, or overseas Chinese, back to the motherland. One of them was to grant them admission privileges to the best public schools. Joe, fourteen, and Veronica, thirteen, had no difficulty enrolling in the Number One Boys’ Secondary and Number One Girls’ Secondary. Chris, seven, also got into a premier primary school. Agnes was admitted to the prestigious TaiwanUniversity. It turned out that as a huachiao, she was entitled to a place at the national university without so much as an exam. Even Baba didn’t know that.
The next thing was to prepare them physically for school. Aside from uniforms, students below the university level were required to wear their hair according to a strict code. The boys had to have their hair shaved to a military crew cut, and the girls had to have theirs chopped to exactly one centimeter above the ears. I was told that teachers went around with measuring sticks. Those who failed the one-centimeter test were punished. Sitting at the barbershop, I cringed as the barber snipped off Veronica’s silky hair and shaved the nape of her neck to a bluish black. When she got off the chair and turned around to face me, I was in shock. She looked like a prisoner. I could imagine a cell full of girls wearing the same ugly cropped hair, milling around like convicts. Whoever thought of this rule was out to debase the children. I’d been reluctant to come to Taiwan. Now, as I looked at the watery film in my daughter’s eyes, my misgivings were turning into revulsion.
I dreaded what school had in store for them. For Joe and Veronica, the day turned out to be long and cruel. Every morning I watched them leave home in the dark. Classes began at 9 am, but students had to report for janitorial duties two hours before. They had to wipe the desks, mop the floor, and even scrub the worm-infested latrines. At 8 am they assembled in the schoolyard, where they marched, sang patriotic songs, and listened to speeches about taking back the mainland. This was the absurd dream of old men, and they were brainwashing the children with it.
After a ten-hour day, Joe and Veronica returned for a quick dinner, then went straight into tutorial. I’d hired a top-ranking student at TaiwanUniversity to coach them. My heart ached to see them work so hard, but they needed the extra help to catch up. The standard of Chinese was much higher than what they were used to. Because Chinese was the medium of instruction for every subject, their handicap in this one area became a handicap in all.
Chris was having an easier time, being only in second grade. But a month into the school year, I caught her hitting her palm with a ruler. She began with a tentative pat, but with every strike she got bolder and bolder. I got alarmed when she raised the ruler over her head and brought it down with a thwack.
"What are you doing?" I cried.
She looked at me, unperturbed. "I want to numb my hand, so that when the teacher hits me I won’t feel anything."
"Why did the teacher hit you? You ranked eighth on your last report card. You had very good grades in every subject." Chris was a bright child whose brain was a candle with a flammable wick. One match was all that was needed to light it. She’d adjusted to her new school without trying.
"I got ninety-five points in arithmetic. The teacher hit me five times."
"You missed five points out of a hundred, and you got punished? Was there anyone in the class who didn’t get beaten?"
Chris blurted out a name in Mandarin, the only one out of a class of forty-some. She went on to say, "We all stuck out our hands like this." Chris showed her palm, still red from the self-inflicted beating. "The teacher went down the row with a big stick and…." Whack, whack, whack, Chris demonstrated on herself. I tore the ruler from her hand and confiscated it.
I went back to my room, steaming. The principal would hear of this. The deputy prime minister would have to intervene. But in the back of my mind, I knew it was useless to complain. Baba would only say to me, "This is good discipline for your daughter. The teacher is only encouraging her to strive for perfection. That’s why Taiwanese standards are the highest in the world."
The last time I complained about Joe having to clean the latrines, Baba’s reply was: "Do you know what President Chiang does when he inspects army barracks? First of all, he asks to see the latrine. Once inside, he rolls up his sleeve…." Baba mimed with his own. "Then he puts his hand inside the bowl and swipes the side. If his fingers come out clean, he’ll say, Fine! But if there’s a smear on his fingers, he’ll order the soldiers to get on their knees and scrub it again." Baba didn’t have to go on. His message was clear: if the president of the country is willing to dirty his hands, what right do you have to complain? It was also clear from the bluntness in his eyes that I was slipping in his list of favorite daughters-in-law.
Agnes faced problems of the opposite kind. Her life was too comfortable. Afraid that her Chinese wasn’t good enough for the other departments, she picked English as her major. What a joke! She’d been studying English since nursery school, while her Taiwan-bred classmates had taken only several years of rudimentary English. Since kindergarten, Agnes’s teachers had been either British or American, and her best friend in primary school was an English girl who eventually moved back to England. Agnes’s English was so flawless that if you heard her over the phone, you would never have guessed that this was a Chinese girl speaking. She was miles ahead of her classmates. Nevertheless, when she entered an English speech competition, she captured only second prize. Afterward I overheard many in the audience say they thought she deserved to be first. Of course there was bias among the judges. After all, the first-prize winner was a homegrown woman with a homegrown accent that everyone could understand.
Everyone felt that Agnes appeared to be doing well, both academically and socially. She was popular among her classmates, and especially among several hopeful suitors. But every time I watched my eldest daughter prance in and out of the house, I shook my head in dismay. Her education had reached a dead end. Already her English was regressing. The local accent and the stilted expressions were rubbing off on her. TaiwanUniversity was the last place in the world to study English.
My children’s shaky future literally worried me sick. I was often in bed with a cold, flu, or diarrhea. Strange sensations also plagued my body. One moment I was dozing off comfortably in bed, the next minute I would be so unbearably hot that I had to throw off all the blankets. After a while, I would be col
d again and shivering in my sweat. The battle with the blanket often went on all night. I thought I was going crazy. Then I missed my period two months in a row. Pregnancy was impossible, so it had to be the other end of womanhood—menopause. I kept quiet about it, as it was a taboo subject in the same category as menstruation and childbirth. A woman just had to muddle through in silence.
To pull myself out of the doldrums, I joined the International Women’s Club, which was made up of women of many nationalities. We took cooking lessons together and practiced on each other by hosting parties in rotation. Cooking had never been my interest, but it was better than staying home and crying.
The days flowed by as slowly as molasses, but my money was gushing out like water from a wide-open tap. I’d sold some of my stocks and come to Taiwan with the sum of $100,000. It was plenty to tide us over, as Hok-Ching was supposed to receive his full salary in a month. But a month became two, and then three. Every time I asked him about the flour mill, he would say that the government had asked for another piece of paper. Just a "formality," he would growl, and I wouldn’t dare press him.
December came around. I forced myself to set aside my troubles and pulled out the box of Christmas ornaments. The pedicab driver took me to a nursery to buy a tree. I carefully selected the one with the fullest foliage and most perfect pyramid. This was going to be a special Christmas, for Patrick was coming home.
My eldest son looked thinner, his eyes deeper-set, and the report card he brought seemed headed in the wrong direction. But I wasn’t going to nag—we had such a short time together. I made sure the cook served dishes he liked—chicken was his favorite meat—and spent time asking him about his life with his foster family. He told me he was getting along well with Dr. Huang’s daughters, and that the monthly allowance I’d been sending was enough. But the more he assured me, the more dread I felt. Dr. Huang’s daughters were clustered around Patrick in age. When you have a teenage boy cohabiting with three teenage girls, it spells trouble. Also, the generous allowance I’d been sending him should be more than just enough. The fact that he didn’t have savings meant that he’d been squandering money on his friends again. I knew my son well. Taking friends to restaurants was his way of getting rid of the burden of money in his pocket. Was I spoiling him by giving him too much? Yet I didn’t want him to suffer for lack of anything.
The two weeks flew by and I was staring at another long separation from my son. A sixteen-year-old was too young to be left to his own devices, yet I couldn’t think of a better solution. The night before his departure, I gathered the family together. We knelt in front of a statue of Mother Mary and said a rosary. With all my heart I begged Mother Mary to look after my son. Even Hok-Ching, who had to be dragged to church on Sundays, closed his eyes in fervent prayer. It was no mystery what he was praying for—approval of the flour mill.
*
Chinese New Year came and went, while the miserably wet, cold winter of Taipei lingered on. The cold I could take, but the constant patter of rain on the roof made my bones feel damp and moldy. Everything was rotting away—the wood in my Japanese-style house, my life, my family, my savings. I didn’t dare look at my bank statement.
By then, I’d figured out the politics of the flour mill. Baba could have signed off on the application from day one. He didn’t, because he was afraid that his enemies’ tongues would start wagging again. Instead of handling the matter himself, he shadowboxed and deflected it to Prime Minister Yen. Yen wasn’t going to get his hands dirty either. If he gave the green light, the industry would cry foul. There were enough flour mills already—why add another to increase competition? At the same time, Yen felt he couldn’t reject the application outright, knowing full well that his deputy’s son was the manager. He had to find a solution that placated everyone—which was, in effect, to do nothing. The application dragged on for one invented reason after another.
Lying awake night after night, I took thorough stock of my situation. I could keep on waiting, but the time would come when it would be too late to change course. Already the children were going to be one school year out of the Hong Kong education system. If I waited much longer, they would be away too long to return. If I waited much longer, Patrick’s ailment would be incurable. The report card he’d mailed me was alarming. It was certain he was going to fail his grade again. The lack of supervision, plus the distraction of Dr. Huang’s pretty daughters, was too much for a boy to handle. If I waited much longer, all my savings would be gone, and I wouldn’t have the money to resettle in Hong Kong. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in this wretched place plunged me into the coldest, darkest depths of despair. No, I couldn’t go on like this. I had to take matters into my own hands. My mind was set—I was moving back to Hong Kong with my children.
The dilemma was how to tell Hok-Ching. A direct confrontation would only bring out the mad dog in him. If I took him on in that state, blood would spill. One or both of us would end up in the hospital. Such violence was counter-productive; there were other means to my end.
One night, after the children had gone to bed and Hok-Ching had bolted the bedroom door, I said to him, "Have you heard anything about the mill?"
His body tensed, his fingers twitched. "Baba says the approval can come anytime now." His voice trailed off. I deliberately let the hollowness of his words echo about the room. When the silence became unbearable, he filled it with a mutter, "I’m going over tomorrow…see what he has to say."
"You can yell at him again, but do you think that will do any good?"
Hok-Ching gave me a stinging stare, annoyed and surprised that I knew about their shouting matches. Just because the door was closed didn’t mean that I couldn’t hear. I could have told my husband not to waste his breath. Baba cared only for his reputation. He would sacrifice anything and anyone for it.
"We’ve been here six months now," I went on. "If the mill is approved in the next few months, then fine; we’ll live out our days in Taiwan. But if we have to wait much longer, we might as well hold hands with our children and jump off a building." The picture I painted was as bleak as could be—the family in bankruptcy, our children having to go out to look for menial jobs, their future ended before it began. Having slept with my husband so many nights, how could I not know the stuff his nightmares were made of? Hok-Ching slumped on the edge of the bed, a teardrop hanging on the corner of his eye. The iron was red and ready for striking.
"Why don’t I do this? I’ll go back to Hong Kong to scout out our options. We can’t wait till the house is on fire. I don’t care if I burn to death, but my heart breaks to think of the children…."
"You do whatever you want," Hok-Ching said and left the room. He would be up most of the night pacing the corridor again.
I got into bed, my heart at peace for the first time since coming to Taiwan. Tomorrow, I would ask the pedicab driver to take me to China Airlines.
*
In April I flew to Hong Kong by myself. The first people I called on were the principals of Maryknoll and Wah Yan. They looked at my children’s records and instantly agreed to take them back without penalty.
Next I went looking for a job. Returning to Southeast Asia Trading was out of the question. Uncle Ben had gone bankrupt, and his company had been merged with another rice importer. The new owners had retained every single member of the original crew. Had Hok-Ching stayed, he would have made out all right too.
The only other profession I knew was teaching. My teacher friends were eager to help. One lead resulted in a job offer, but it was at a primary school where the salary was $600 a month. It wasn’t enough to cover rent. A secondary school would pay much more. I thought of New Method, where I’d taught English to thirteen-year-olds many years ago. The only problem was that the principal and I had parted on rather unfriendly terms. To go back to him would run counter to the Chinese saying, "A good horse doesn’t go back to eat grass that it has passed." However, the saying probably doesn’t apply to a hungry horse.
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br /> I swallowed my pride and went to see the principal of New Method. He fixed his small, shrewd eyes on me, his whole attitude hinting of disdain. It was all right, though, for my facial skin had grown tough from the slaps of misfortune. To assure him of my commitment, I held back nothing of my current circumstances. Before, I was a housewife looking to supplement my income; now I needed the job to feed the family. If he hired me, I was going to stay and give him a satisfactory return on his investment.
He let me do all the talking for a long time. I was hoping that I wasn’t debasing myself for nothing. If he didn’t have an opening, he should have said so from the start. According to my teacher friends, he was a principal who liked to shake up his staff on a regular basis. English teachers, who were a dime a dozen, were most vulnerable. While he coddled his science teachers, he had a pattern of persecuting his English teachers once they reached a certain salary level. The objective was to make them leave on their own so that he could hire somebody else at the beginning salary. He didn’t sound like a nice man to work for, but a hungry horse couldn’t be picky.
When he finally opened his mouth, it was to offer me a beginning salary of $1,000 a month. I was happy to accept, at the same time feeling sorry for the higher-grade English teacher who’d been bumped off the payroll.
The last thing was to look for an apartment, which was done by word of mouth or vacancy signs mounted on buildings. I started by searching in our old neighborhood of Kowloon Tong, but was soon forced to arrive at the painful conclusion that the flats there were no longer within my means. A less expensive neighborhood such as Homantin, where Wah Yan was located, would be more affordable. I flagged down a taxi and told the driver what I was looking for. Luckily for me, he was an older man, not one of those rude young cabbies who would yell at me if I didn’t close the door fast enough. He thought for a while and took me to a back street where he remembered seeing a vacancy notice. The apartment building was twelve stories high, one in a block of many. I went in to inquire and found a pleasant three-bedroom unit for $800. The rooms were small, but at least the boys could have one and the girls the other. The location was perfect, right across from Wah Yan. Most importantly, the price was as low as I could hope to find. I put down a deposit at once. That same day, I went to a furniture store and ordered the basic furnishings to make the place a home.
