Paper Sons and Daughters
Page 5
would make her a ‘bad’ wife. She had a bitter, abrasive relationship with
my gran, and there was something deliberately evil about playing up her
affection for my grandfather to hurt my gran. I resented my mother for
this as I grew up. As for how I felt about my grandparents, like my father,
there was no way to choose between two people I loved equally.
A gift my father bought once for my Ah Goung and Ah Por was a small
statue of an old Chinese couple, beaming, holding hands. He said he had
given it to them as a wish that they would grow older together happily:
bak tau dou lou is a common wish for couples; it is a blessing to grow
together until your hair is white. Like the blessing in the statue, I would
wish that they could love each other, even just a little.
One day, though, I stopped wishing. I grew into the truth of my
grandparents’ history, their life stories and the reality of fractures that are
made by a thousand disappointments and a thousand crushed dreams too
severe to be healed even by the desperate hopes of a child.
My granny, the fine-boned flower, was born into a decent, quite well-to-
do family in the 1920s. Her father was an official of some rank and was
sufficiently statured to marry numerous wives, even though polygamy was
not reserved for only the wealthy class in China. My great-grandfather was
sent to Vietnam along with his wives and it was there that my grandmother
was born along with several of her siblings and half-siblings. Her mother
did not survive beyond my grandmother’s first few years of life and she
probably did not see her father all that often between his many wives
and his official duties. When she was still a little girl, it was decided that
she should be sent back to China to be educated there to stay true to her
Chinese culture.
She was singled out for this important journey, but for my granny it
was a separation from her family and she also hated that she had to leave
the country of her birth, because it meant leaving her family.
She stayed with extended family in China and undertook to fulfil her
father’s wishes for her to be educated. Education was the basics of learning
to read and write and to be schooled in the teachings of what prepares
young girls to be good wives one day. That education was enough to be the
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lifelong treasure that no one could take from my granny. In later life she
could escape into books, she could write to family back in China without
having to find someone to dictate the letter to, and in this way she could
stay connected to the China of her memory when she had become a South
African citizen. I am not sure who she wrote to all those times, apart from
some of her extended family, but she did write and often she was asked
to help people pen a few words home and then to slip them into the very
important looking airmail envelopes. Education set her apart from many
of her peers, including her sisters, who were not as interested in learning
as she was, or were never given the same opportunity. And it set her apart
from my grandfather.
My grandad grew up to be handsome, honest and true, but he was from
a poorer family and he was uneducated as so many villagers in China were.
He had deft hands and would prove to be a talented amateur carpenter
and a man with fingers that could coax flowers from reluctant buds and
nurture vegetables to sprout with lush abandon.
But when he married my gran he was simply an uncertain teenager, like
she was, and with the invasion of the Japanese a brutal reality after 1931
he increasingly became an insipid consolation for her.
In the first months of their married lives, they were made to work in the
Japanese army barracks. They were put on shifts and when my grandmother
got up to go to work, my grandfather was trying to squeeze in some sleep.
When her long dreary shift finally ended, it was my grandfather’s turn to
work for the invaders.
Every day my gran lived in dread. She told me this when I had grown up
enough to understand. The beautiful young bride was in fact still a virgin
and was terrified that she would be raped by the Japanese or taken to be
one of their comfort women. My grandparents were awkward teenagers
exhausted from long shifts in the barracks of an enemy, and for many
months their marriage was not consummated. My grandfather’s distance
from my grandmother’s bed was the start of the slip of her respect for
him.
It was not what either of them had expected of married life. Maybe
when the match was made for them they let themselves believe that it
would be a good match. Maybe they hoped they would come to love their
chosen spouse and grow into the roles of husband and wife for each other.
I read someone’s personal account of arranged marriage once and she
said it was like opening a present every day as the stranger presented a
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bit more of himself. But this was not the story for my grandparents. Their
marriage turned out to be not just a disappointment, it brought about
heartbreak and defeat – an experience a million times worse than that
feeling you get when you know a glass is about to crash to the floor and
you will not save it and in the next few seconds there will be fragments
everywhere.
‘I was scared every day that I was going to be raped by those bloody
soldiers and I was a virgin,’ she said, of course expecting that the first time
she had sex with her husband had to be by his initiation and it was not a
fear that she could express to him.
To add to her anxiety, my grandfather’s family had been asking about
grandchildren. A boy child, especially, was missing from the union and
my grandmother was quickly being mocked as a failed wife as the months
ticked by.
Maybe it was too much for my gran to share with me. Chinese people
of my grandparents’ generation preferred to take their pain with them to
their graves. They would rather remain silent, with an unvoiced acceptance
of their disappointments, because life was just what it was, the roll of a
dice; surviving and raising the next generation was more important than
dwelling too much on personal injury.
But I am happy she did and I am glad she did not think that I was too
young to know. I was a teenager and I was old enough to understand
the dread of rape and the weighty load of not being able to please the
interfering aunties with their accusatory spite.
My grandmother told me about the consummation, too. When it did
eventually happen, it was inelegant and clumsy. There was not the intimacy
she must have hoped for or the release of her anxiety both in her body and
her heart. The act should have removed some of her fear and it should
have settled the couple into marital domesticity. But by the time she told
her stories to me, my gran did not have any more patience for remembering
the pleasant ordinariness of life as my grandfather’s wife. The ordinariness
that would have at least resembled a marriage that was
tolerable.
The consummation and what must have followed were, however,
enough for my gran to conceive. There must have been delight for her
in those months as her belly grew with the promise of silencing the cruel
aunties. She was maybe pampered a bit more, told to be off her feet, bought
some or other specially prepared broth to balance her system and nurture
the growing foetus.
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The nine months went by and my gran gave birth. But it was not the
desperately wanted boy child. This was a betrayal for my granny, because
the pregnancy yielded a girl child who could not carry the family name.
That girl child was my mother.
Later I would find out that there was also a boy child born to my
grandmother a few years after my mother, but he survived only a few days.
He did not even make it past his first full moon, the first month of life,
which is the primary milestone of a newborn’s life.
‘He would have survived if only your grandfather had agreed to let
him go to see the modern doctors, I know that, I know that ...’ gran
would say, pleading even after all those years. There were doctors who
had started to move away from the remedy of old wives’ tales and the hit-
and-miss of homemade brews and potions. My granny probably trusted
these remedies for most of her life, but when the child was lost, his death
could be blamed on the one thing that was never tried – the one thing my
grandfather never tried.
My grandfather must have had his own pain to bear when his son
died. He never mentioned that child to us. My mom did not remember
this brother who only had a fleeting presence in her toddler life. She
remembered playing around the altar that my Por Por had erected for
her dead son shortly after his death. And she remembered being scolded
severely by my gran for fooling around the altar and disturbing the spirit
of her dead brother. My granny was probably angrier than she should
have been. But how could my mother understand that the anger was not
for her but was directed at my grandfather? Anger also at the gods and the
ancestors who had cursed her by taking her son away, and with him a part
of her heart. For my mother, though, the incident was enough for her to
hold on to her child’s resentment for a brother she never knew.
My gran loved her only child and my mother was never like a consolation
prize, but maybe my mother felt like that every time she clashed with my
granny. My mother remembered the presence of the dead brother even
years after he had died. The altar remained in the home, an eerie spectre
stronger than the loss. Her dead brother took on a kind of phantom
presence.
When my mom was in her late teens, she was struck by a period of
illness and none of the healing concoctions my gran came up with made
her better. My gran visited medicine men and women and followed their
instructions for brews and poultices to the letter. She prayed to the gods, the
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ancestors and consulted with the elders as she always did when there was
disquiet in her heart and her home. My mom did not get better. Then came
a revelation, and one that made most sense. Her dead son was unhappy
in the underworld and was causing ructions among his living relatives. He
was lonely and in need of a bride.
I have heard of the macabre and spooky rituals of ghost brides, where
a live person is said to be killed in a sacrificial murder so her spirit can be
joined with the spirit of a dead man who cannot rest. In a spirit marriage,
a man and a woman can be joined and the living relatives will be blessed
for having fulfilled their obligations to the deceased. Fortunately, my
gran opted for a symbolic ritual. Instead of sacrificing a live person, she
consulted with her family and they made inquiries to the neighbouring
villages. Eventually, they learnt of a young woman who had recently died
and the two families arranged for a spirit marriage.
My mother only remembers her brother’s seat in the altar was moved
to a higher rung, symbolising that as a ‘married man’ he had taken on a
higher position in the realm of the afterlife. My granny remembers that
my mother started to feel much better and to emerge from her illness after
that.
By the time I was old enough to talk freely to Ah Por, it seemed like
much of her life had concertinaed into a few memories, so many of them
painful and raw with every new mention of them. The misery and bitterness
haunted her all her life. Towards the end of her life, they managed to chase
her down, leaving her defeated and spent.
Even my Por Por’s black mutt, the only dog she ever owned, fell into
this bleak recollection. He had to be killed or her entire village would have
had to forfeit their rations during the Japanese occupation. The villagers
decided to slaughter and eat her dog. Chinese people do not eat dogs
ordinarily, but meat in lean times was a delicacy and her dog’s flesh could
not go to waste.
‘I could not eat my dog when they bought me back a piece of meat. But
I cooked it for your mother, who was too little to really know the dog.
That dog was so loyal. When we women went to help the neighbouring
villages with their harvests, we would be gone for days and my dog would
not eat until I came home. He would always come running to the edge of
the village to greet me, when he finally saw us returning.’
I tried to separate those haunting memories from the images of the
granny who would moan about our bad diets as teenagers but would then
tell us where to find her stash of potato crisps, which she would have
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spent her pension money on to spoil us. My gran knew when there was a
four or five rand increase in her telephone bill but she spent her pension
money on these extras for us. She also saved up little pieces of meat for
our two small dogs, Mozart and Snoopy, which we would bring along on
our weekly visits to her retirement complex when we were older. She could
not say the English names we had given them and she would shout that the
dogs were not really allowed into the complex and that she could get into
trouble, but then she would produce the neatly wrapped-up morsels she
had saved during the week and let the dogs gobble them up on the small
area partitioned as a kitchen in her cottage.
I tried to remember also the granny who told us stories as children with
so much animation and vigour that we never tired of hearing the tales
over and over again, and how we would gasp for air trying to breathe in
between laughing so hard.
There were stories of old Chinese myths and legends. Like the two
young lovers forbidden to love in life who in death would meet as two
stars joined together only on one night a year, on the night of the mid-
autumn festival. It is a full moon festival that falls on the 15th of the eighth
month on the lunar calendar. On that one night a year, Ah Por would tell
us we should gaze up at the celestia
l magnificence of the moon, and if we
looked carefully we would be able to make out two stars that seemed to
be moving closer to each other. They would appear to touch for a few
magical moments, then separate as the night sky surrendered to day.
Another of my favourite stories was of an enchanted princess who
washed up into a young man’s life when he picked up a beautiful, odd-
looking shell that was actually the princess’s home. Bringing the shell
home, he placed it on a table and went to sleep. The next day as he left
to tend to the fields, he was unaware that the princess emerged from the
shell while he was away. She cooked dinner and tidied up for the young
man, then, satisfied with her task, she returned to her shell before he came
back. The grateful but confused man decided one day to sneak back from
the fields to find out who had been cooking him the delicious meals and he
witnessed the magical princess climbing out of her shell. I do not remember
the details of the ending well, but I am sure it led to a happy-ever-after as
only magical tales can do.
There was also a less romantic tale about a man who was embarrassed
by his farting and decided to carry a bottle with him every day into which
he could let his fart escape safely. His idea, my granny said, was to store
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up his farts so he would not be red-faced every time he let rip. The sound
effects in my granny’s story kept us breathless with laughter and we would
ask her to repeat the story over and over again, especially the parts with
the farts. Even now I remember the laughing better than the storyline.
Unlike Por Por, my grandfather, Ah Goung, never spoke too much to us
about the past. Maybe he felt history was for those who had shared it or
maybe we were always grandchildren in his eyes, even when we were old
enough to drive him around in his battered, tomato-red Mazda or were
the ones to sort out some official-looking bank letter. As his grandchildren,
we did not need to be bothered with stories from a time before we were
born. Maybe he simply chose quiet surrender to his rose bushes as the
years rolled on.
Somewhere among the velvety blooms he could look beyond a failed
marriage, failure to have a male heir, failure to amass the fortune that
would have been the mark of success for a man who had swopped the land