Disappearing Moon Cafe

by Sky Lee

  Bea, I don’t know how we got out of control. Maybe we never were in control, but we just didn’t realize it. When I try to explain, it gets all distorted like the reflection from a shattered mirror. Maybe I felt too pure, too naked; like a fresh petal, too easily bruised. We finally crushed each other with this desperate need to be one. When Morgan and I met, it was like we had each finally found the piece that had been missing all our lives.

  Oh this hunger, Bea! It was terrible. My dearest, honestly, we didn’t know the beast was there, straining at its leash, furious in a strangled silence. I don’t know why we were like that. But you do see how I couldn’t have gone back to that limbo any more, not after the freedom I had taken from him? Do you know what I mean, Bea? Do you? I’m sorry, Bea Bea, I’m sorry!

  KAE

  1968

  “Was it the wind?” I asked Chi.

  “What?”

  “That moaning.”

  Chi was looking relaxed. Her thick lips puckered over a salted melon seed. The big house on the hill had been empty for a long time before it was finally sold in 1968, which was not exactly in accordance with my grandmother’s will. Haunting sounds still echoed off the long, dingy halls. Chi and I had come to look it over one last time.

  The silence behind my grandmother’s death was breathtaking. At that time, 1962, I was old enough to sense the numbing effect her death had on my mother. I remember visiting Poh Poh when I was very young, and even then I could feel how trapped she was as an old woman. She kept filling my mouth with sweet, sticky preserved plums, until my mother led me away. After that one glimpse, my mother never again took me along when she went to visit her.

  “Maybe it’s a ghost,” Chi said. “They say that houses have a way of absorbing turmoil. My God, I guess this one has had enough of that.” She spoke hypnotically as always, the dough of her stories ever rising slowly, tantalizingly yeasty.

  It was late summer, but a grey, cold day. University in less than a week! And I could finally talk to someone about what had happened in New York. From the second-floor window, I looked down onto a few straggling raspberry canes, which had come back again through a greener patch of more recent grass. I wondered about that, about the sobbing echoes of words that should have been spoken a long time ago, but had not.

  Chi said of Morgan, “So I’m not surprised that the bottle-boy is drinking himself to death!” She picked her teeth behind cupped hands. “’Cause he never really knew what hit him. They never do, I guess. All you need to do is look at his father.” She paused.

  I gazed out the window. Chi stared at the room.

  “And then his father’s father,” she added.

  If hate is wounded love, then I hated Morgan for sure. And I would have nothing to do with his stories. His stories reached for his forebears, but never went beyond himself wallowing in self-pity. I thought, why should I be his tragic heroine? I could be my own consummate tragic heroine, in my own way. I could find my way in my own stories about Suzie.

  I said to Chi, “Tell me about Suzie.”

  Chi never could pass up an opportunity like that.

  “Your aunt Suzie?” sighed Chi. “Where can I begin? I guess she was desperate to break out. But this is easy to say after the fact. At the time, nobody realized how desperate she was. How can one say for sure? On one hand, she ran around with a crowd of mixed-up rich kids. Four years after the war, everything was exploding—money, population, attitudes. Maybe she had these dreams about rebel romance, and the hell with everybody else! Hollywood movies were full of that crap. You know—restless, wild and lost! Maybe Morgan was the wild rebel, and she was the only one who could love him, and their only home was in each other’s arms.”

  Chi lined up split and sacked melon seed shells, one after another, along the window ledge.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on her?” I had to take the side of rebel romance.

  “Maybe,” admitted Chi. “Maybe she wanted to get pregnant, to get married, to get out. To this day, I’ll never forget the way she waltzed into my place looking for an audience, and the breezy way she talked when she told us that she was pregnant by Morgan. I was living in a rooming house on Odlum Street, and your mom visited there with me a lot. Suzie had come straight from Candy Leung’s birthday party, for chrissake! You know, the south Chinatown-in-Kerrisdale social event of the year! She was probably four or five months pregnant by then, all dressed up in taffeta bows and crinolines. It looked funny, the little miss in a tenement building that her mommy owned, pregnant. And big and obvious too! She was radiant though, like she didn’t have a care in the world.”

  “Ugh, ugh . . . uh hem!” Chi, clearing her throat of a stray bit of the nut, had to add one more thing. “Poor kid, maybe she was crazier than a bedbug by then.”

  “REMEMBER YOUR TRIP to San Francisco?” Suzie looked into her big sister’s open mouth and gushed. “That was when. And it was so beautiful, Bea! Our love made everything else so trivial. School, Mom and Dad, and Granny’s dumb China rules! All crud! None of that’s really as important as they say. They just want to con you into the same crap they got conned into. Money, money, money! That’s what they’re really after. That’s all they ever think about. Look at Mom! I don’t want to land up like her—dried up and hateful.”

  “My God, Suzie, do you know what you’ve done?” Beatrice, horrified, yelled at Suzie’s belly. “You’re going to have a real live baby!”

  Suzie ignored her and went on. “We had the house all to ourselves. You know, I don’t ever remember being alone in that house! Mummy and Daddy sail away often enough, but Granny’s always home. Anyway, when we first walked in, the house was so cosy and warm, and do you want to know what I thought?”

  “It’s going to be illegitimate . . .” Beatrice aghast.

  “Well, I thought gee whiz, I’ve been going steady with this guy for more than six months and not once have we been alone together in a warm place. Sure, in the library or at a party it’d be warm, but there were people around. All the rest of the time, we’d be freezing in some park or out pounding the pavement just to keep warm. I said to him, ‘We don’t have to be out in the cold any more.’”

  Suddenly, Beatrice broke down. Great, heaving sobs, and Suzie sat there plucking at the ruffles on her lap.

  “Bea Bea, don’t cry! We’re going to get married.” She looked almost desperate for a second, but her face quickly spread into a grin. “It was like playing house for a while,” she mused. “It was funny. I asked Morgan, ‘Have you tried instant coffee yet? Do you want some?’ And he said, ‘Is that a little like instant intimacy?’ Then I asked, ‘So what about a slice of chocolate cake, darling?’ And he quipped back, ‘A slice of the good life, of course, my sweet!’ Cute eh? We were both a little nervous, I guess.”

  Suzie was still chortling to herself when Beatrice flew at her and grabbed her by her shoulders.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” she shouted at her. “You’ve ruined your life! How can you marry him? He’s only seventeen.”

  Suzie twisted away, and her little cashmere wrap fell off. She rubbed the finger marks on her skin as she backed into the nearest corner. Then she started to scream too.

  “You’re not listening to me! You never listen to me. Do you want to know what Morgan said about our house? He’s really on the ball, you know! Look at me, Big Sister.” She came back and clipped her fingers under Beatrice’s chin, yanking it brusquely over to face her. “He looked at the stupid knickknacks all over the place and said that we were too many females climbing all over each other, all suffocating each other. I hate it, do you hear? I hate all of you!”

  Beatrice looked thunderstruck. Suzie broke down into tears.

  “I want out! Out! For God’s sake, let me out!” Suzie still hollering, while Beatrice held her down and hugged her the best she could. Suzie’s face buried in the hollow of Beatrice’s neck; both of them collapsed into a huge heap of taffeta, crinoline and gabardine plaid.

 
CHI SAID, “They clung to each other on my cracked linoleum floor, rocking, trying to keep each other from drowning. After a while, Suzie tried to whimper something. Everyone was too shaken up to even think. I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say. But Beatrice knew right away. Beatrice turned to me, and I realized too. I was sure she said, ‘Help me, Bea! You’re the only one who can help me.’”

  “Anyway,” sighed Chi in the end, “that’s also the story of how your mom and dad finally got up enough nerve to register at city hall. Your mom, trying to be as cool as a cucumber, had this strange idea that she had to protect Suzie from her mother. So they got a cheap, ugly apartment in Fairview Heights, which was a white, working-class neighbourhood, as far away from Chinatown as they could manage. Then they bought an old clunker, a beat-up Nash or something. Ten years after the start of that goddamned war, and good secondhand cars were hard to come by. Anyway, without your mom’s grand piano, they were all moved in a day—pregnant little sister included.”

  “You know, I bet anything, Bea must have been surprised to find out just how easy it was to get married and finally make a stand against that mother of hers. After four years of procrastinating, nothing to it really. The hardest part was probably piling Suzie, Keeman and herself all back into that old jalopy to go back to her mother’s to explain.”

  VI

  THE WRITER

  KAE

  1986

  To see one woman disintegrate is tragic, but to watch an entire house fall—that has the makings of a great chinese tragedy. I know I’ve had to turn my face away many times. In front of me, there is nothing to speak of except torpid text and a throbbing cursor on a black-and-white computer screen—electric shadows—but even this is too evocative of the old pain. I am afraid to look intently. I might turn to stone, petrified by the accumulated weight and unrelenting pressure of so many generations of rage. But in front of my mother, I could imagine there was something more immediate—her mother’s ravaged face, manicured fingers trembling as they crept over her pencilled brow.

  I could ask my father how it happened, because he was there, faithfully standing beside my mother. Was it a cold day? Which room were they in? Was my great-grandmother still snivelling in her room? And my grandmother! Was she happily dusting off empty suitcases, getting ready to blow the scene, when they all walked in to shatter her handiwork?

  I could create another scenario, with handfuls of hair torn out by their roots, with brutal language to roil the blood, but these points of reference no longer count. And that which should be included in the final reckoning is deeply buried within my mother. She will not speak of it. Chi will speak, Morgan is all too willing to tell his version, even my father will say a few words if I ask it of him; but even after so many years, my mother still needs that margin of silence from the guilt and the pain.

  Like my mother, I will speak of other times only if they were happy ones. Yes, yes, Hermia agreed wholeheartedly with me, only happy mentionables for the family record; another unspoken chinese edict among so many.

  I wonder. Maybe this is a chinese-in-Canada trait, a part of the great wall of silence and invisibility we have built around us. I have a misgiving that the telling of our history is forbidden. I have violated a secret code. There is power in silence, as this is the way we have always maintained strict control against the more disturbing aspects in our human nature. But what about speaking out for a change, despite its unpredictable impact! The power of language is that it can be manipulated beyond our control, towards misunderstanding. But then again, the power of language is also in its simple honesty.

  Oh Mother, Mother, tell me the truth! What did you feel when you brought your own mother to her knees? If you had to do it over again, would you? Could you have saved your sister from your mother? Or your mother from your sister! Which one, Mom?

  You must have had to remind yourself over and over again that you knew this woman. She was your mother who was devoted to you, who had clung to you. Beneath her mask, you’d seen her raw desperation. And you’d even wondered what it was that drove her so relentlessly. You spoke quickly, didn’t you, brusquely getting all the information out before the tears that you knew would come, came. Your timid heart shrivelling with guilt. You knew your mother could talk circles around you, so you gave her very little to hold onto. Then there was Keeman, whom you held out in front of you like a protective talisman on a chain.

  I imagine that my grandmother in her cold rage might have stared right past Beatrice like she was absolutely nothing to her. I can also imagine her oh-so-calculated reply.

  “Well, I only wanted the best for you . . . I worked so hard, sacrificed so much for . . . the both of you.” Fong Mei glancing a blow first at Beatrice, then staring hard at Suzie. But her indignation would have gotten the better of her. She would have struck out in pain.

  “But you had to sell yourself short, didn’t you!” meaning Keeman.

  “And that one,” meaning Suzie, “she had to make herself a piece of garbage in some white devil’s pig-sty bed! Who was it, you stinky slut!”

  Even if Suzie had had enough guts to stammer out a name, her mother would have been too overwrought to hear. From her winged chair, in her mind, she had already conjured up a big, red-furred caucasiatic rapist. Who else would dare offend the Wong name? Sooner or later, Fong Mei would have shrieked at Suzie again.

  “Who is the father of that bastard swelling your stomach?”

  Sooner or later, she would have heard Suzie speak up, with Beatrice close behind.

  “His name is Morgan Wong, Mummy. We’re going to get married right away.” Suzie thought this would surely placate her.

  “His chinese name is Wong Keung Chi, Mother. His father is chinese, and his mother is french,” Beatrice added on Suzie’s behalf.

  Fong Mei closed her eyes. There was an exaggerated silence. Both sisters watched in fascination as she staggered under the weight of their words.

  What a mean writer’s trick, to drag Fong Mei kicking and fighting back again, this time to face the day she had sworn everlasting love to Ting An. Especially now, when she thought she had gotten far enough away from her own days of torrid passion that they should have never caught up with her. She was young then, and she still thought she had that promise of purity to life. It wasn’t until later, when the love affair ran aground and she callously abandoned ship like a sinking rat, that she stopped looking at what she had become! She often swore that he would never touch her again—in any way. When she heard of his death, she allowed herself no feelings, no thoughts other than the hope that he had not tainted her children with his obvious tendency for short life.

  FONG MEI

  1925

  It was an isolated day of warmth in spring, during that period when her life was so bleak that her whole body ached for days on end. Fong Mei cringed on the far edge of the hard bench in Ting An’s wagon as it rattled over every pothole and mud puddle on the road to the warehouse, her bones already crushed by Mui Lan’s constant criticism. She felt too faint to go on.

  Ting An felt a slight touch on the sleeve of his coat. He looked over at Fong Mei’s drawn face, and understood right away. He drew back on the reins. She jumped down even before the wagon came to a full stop and headed towards an old tree in the middle of an empty patch of land. There were a few houses not far away; their roof tops and attic windows peeked at them from over the overgrown bushes. As Loongan edged over to the new green shoots beside the road, Ting An checked over the muddied wheels of his wagon. He was hauling a full load, and the road was unfamiliar and bad. He had to concentrate on his driving, but he knew there was another reason for his silence. Out of the corner of his eye, he had watched the young woman sink into her own silent desolation, even as she now sank onto her haunches under the shade of the tree.

  When she lifted her head off the crook of her elbow and opened her eyes, she saw Ting An standing over her. He looked so humble, not quite daring to face her; his eyes wandered off in eve
ry direction except hers.

  “I . . . I’m a bit tired,” she lied, a little embarrassed by her lack of restraint. “This beautiful old tree suddenly reminded me of the ancient banyan tree back home. Do you know of banyan trees?”

  Ting An shrugged.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t know. How could you?” When she lifted her eyes to look up at the branches, her silky hair cascaded back. Tears trickled along the thick hairline, which refused to absorb them, and into her ears. “I don’t know why. They don’t look at all alike, actually. What is this one called again?”

  “Oak,” said Ting An in english.

  “Ook, ook,” her voice trembled, “what a painful sound! Like weeping!”

  Her sobbing sent waves of delicious pity coursing through his body. He leaned against the tree and immediately felt its strength, its shelter from the downpour. She need not be stranded as long as she rested in its bower, he thought.

  He patiently waited until she finally cried herself out, then he solemnly asked her, “A Fong Mei, what do you need to make you whole again?”

  Her reply was very solid, “A child . . .” as though she had answered this question many times, “a little family to . . . take care of.”

  Fong Mei felt him creep close by her side. Then he reached out for her hand; his palm flat against her palm, he lifted it up as if he were reading a precious book. A light caress; not once did his fingers close over hers.

  “Then be my wife, Fong Mei,” he whispered into her ear, his breath like hot mist brushing against her cold creamy skin, “because I love you and I will give you anything you want.”

  She closed her eyes to let herself float upwards into sun-drenched waters. Her whole body tingling at the sudden sensation of warmth; the rush of blood overwhelming. But even as she basked, her shame pulled her back down.