by Sky Lee
“I’m a used-up woman, A Ting. Another man’s dirty cast-off! Old before my time! What good am I to you?” She added, as he opened his mouth to protest, “My life is finished.” “No,” Ting An interrupted, “it’s just finished with him! Start life over again with me!”
The urgency in his voice made her shudder in ecstasy. She, who’d been abandoned for so long; she clamped down on his hand, because she desperately needed his touch to release the pent-up intimacy within her.
“Help me then!” she cried. “Hold me!” She was about to enter into his arms. Ting An braced himself, ready to be seized by her feverish passion. That time in the wildflowers, by the side of the road, under Loongan’s munching mouth, Fong Mei tore into his body like a starved woman. Wave after frenzied wave of pure pleasure consumed her; she couldn’t stop until she felt him spent inside her. And afterwards, there was more hunger.
Like the ten courses at a wedding banquet, Ting An surrendered his whole being to her. In childlike delight, he exposed his most tender parts to her alone. And Fong Mei, perhaps already a woman of the flesh, supped and drank and utterly gorged. She could not stop because she was driven by need. And yet, in the end, she never did leave her husband for Ting An.
SEE THERE, another example of the unpredictable power of language! A glib sort of statement to sum up decades of suffering out of a man’s life. It especially sounds worse in reference to Ting An. On some people a few years of a bad love affair can look as dignified as a jade on their fourth finger. It enhances their appearance with a touch of luminous pathos. Unfortunately, Ting An being an orphan didn’t have a secure enough framework to cordially absorb rejection, filing it away under the you-can’t-win-’em-all category of his memoirs. He suffered disproportionately. Not that the unsatisfying affair left him despondent—nothing as melodramatic as all that. It merely left him without a leg to stand on, so to speak. No protection whatsoever, except for the true grit Ting An rubbed on like exterior paint, year after year. Only the two people who knew him intimately later on in life—his wife and his son—knew that his house was built on sand. He died in 1942—of drink, or so the rumour went.
Life is always tragic in the end. So I should give Ting An famous last words, like, “But what do I know of women?”
Well then, I should try to tell him. Ting An is my grandfather, after all. A poetic dirge for his soul’s repose, belated. That’s the advantage of fantasy that writers have at their disposal, plucked straight out of life itself. On the other hand, we also have some distinct drawbacks, like emotions shrinking and expanding between people and themselves, between people and others, between people and their stories. In writing, I feel like a drunk weaving all over the road. The air can be made wavy and warped, hot with tension, full of mirages. Or details can be made to distract extravagantly, cling possessively. Information can cringe from pain, or reply in a cold, detached manner. How many ways are there to tell stories? Let me count the ways! For example, love is a fragile subject matter, too easily corrupted, often beaten dead. Let’s take an opinion poll: the many and varied ways to destroy love! Oh, come on! We should all be very good at it. It’d be fun!
FEEDING THE DEAD
1986
I could begin with Suzanne (Wouldn’t you love to imagine her being interviewed on a wintry Vancouver street for the six o’clock news? Black-and-white TV. Nineteen-fifties dress. The most beautiful asian woman you’ve ever laid eyes on, especially knowing how invisible asians are in terms of the media.) saying: “Money.”
“What can I say? She sold out to a whole generation of vipers.” She might add, referring to Fong Mei, “Women who are never satisfied, who throw away happiness with both hands. And she especially had a choice of turning her back on it and going off into the sunset with the one guy she really could have learned to love. She turned her back on the wrong guy. She got scared of being with an orphan. She got scared of being another waitress. Yet, she pursued Ting An to the bitter end. I bet she never forgot him for a minute for the rest of her life. Just like how she kept on going back to her sister in China, she kept on coming back to him too. How else do you think that she could have had three of us over eight years?”
Myself: “I would say jealousy,” referring to Ting An. “Keep in mind he finally dumped her out of pain. I wonder how he felt having to watch her strut in and out of his life, looking more gorgeous each time. I bet, deep inside, he burned with many furies! The abandoned child, the chinaman, tied to women, not understanding women, feeling cheated.”
Beatrice (if she was willing to talk, I’m sure would respond in a brief, essential way): “Love is the most fundamental and at the same time the most exalted purpose we have in this life. You”—probably meaning Mui Lan—“can’t ignore that noble principle, to breed men and women like they were cattle or pigs.” Then she’d go back to her grand piano. “In fact, it’s dangerous,” she might add.
Chi: “Since when has that ever stopped anyone?”
I bet Chi’s answer would, as a matter of fact, be very uncharacteristic of her. “Have you ever stopped to think that love is actually impossible? Maybe it’s just something which people have invented to torture themselves with. Love is elusive, doesn’t translate well into reality. When you have two people in so-called love, what do you really have but two people busily trying to enslave each other? The more in love they are, the more compulsively they strip each other of dignity, self-respect, identity, until there is nothing left.”
Poor, pathetic Morgan: “What are you trying to get at? You’re trying to blame me! She just ups one day and slits her veins open. And it’s my fault? Well, let me tell you,” he screamed, “you don’t know fucking shit! They drove her to it! With their filthy lies! They wouldn’t let me near her,” sobbing drunk. “They did it! Not me!”
ONE COLD, DREARY DAY in Peking, I came back to the dorm and found Hermia had packed my bag. She announced that we were both spending chinese New Year ’72 in Hong Kong. New Year is the one and only annual holiday in Asia. One of the eeriest experiences in my life, seeing one of the most energetic cities in the world almost deserted and emptied of its infestation of antlike people, because in H.K. everyone with funds either joins the exodus back home to pay obeisance or goes as far away as they can get to shirk the ridiculous family rituals. We met Hermia’s latest stepmother with her father at the door, on their way out “to Singapore for the holidays.” I remember the shock of being confronted by a tight, gold lamé jumpsuit, platform shoes, and Cleopatra make-up under tiers of stiff black ringlets after the cultural austerity of the really chinese chinese. Hermia’s father was short, stout and bald—a stereotypic sugar daddy!
“Think of love as something free of remorse and restraints,” advised Hermia after they left. “No ulterior motives. Try harder, Kae! Imagine, nothing to explain; no need to justify! Genitalia coming together because it feels good. If you think real hard about it, how could something that quintessential have gotten so screwed up in people’s minds?” I loved the way her brows knitted together. “I think the world’s drying up!” Such an angelic face floating wet and free in her daddy’s swimming pool!
“Anyway, I’m telling you this for your own good, sweetie. So you won’t go on and on about it. I’d hate for people to think you’re boring.”
I gulp, but I’m afraid I still feel obliged to give Fong Mei the last word. (She is the dark, shrouded lady who has been lurking in the corner of a twilit room for years. My mother, myself, Chi, Sue, Hermia, my other grandmother, my two great-grandmothers—all the women wailing around a timeless circular table; we sense her presence long before she deigns to speak. She is resentful that her worldly deeds have been misunderstood. But Grandmother, aren’t we all misunderstood in this life?)
Finally, Fong Mei speaks: “I was too inexperienced when these deeds were done, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain them then because I didn’t understand them myself. But I am speaking to you from beyond the grave. And I have had plenty of time to dwell on thes
e matters since.”
(I want a classic scenario of wailing women huddled together to “feed the dead.” Lots of eerie mist. I want to make them weep from their own time periods and, at the same time, in harmony with each other.)
They all chant:
Mui Lan lived a lie, so Fong Mei got sly.
Suzie slipped away; Beatrice made to stay,
Kae to tell the story,
all that’s left of
vainglory.
Thus, Fong Mei is encouraged to recant: “When the Wong family snubbed me, I should have farted in their faces. But I was a coward and wasn’t willing to give up their money and position. There I was in Chinatown, a lovely young female with a body that hungered beyond my control, surrounded by this restless ocean of male virility lapping at my fertile shores. I could have gone swimming, but instead I felt so ashamed, guarding my body so stiffly that the muscles shrivelled and ached. How I hated my woman’s body; encasing it in so much disgust, I went around blind, deaf, senseless, unable to touch or feel. That was how the old lady got the better of me.”
Mui Lan sighs: “A rather minor tragedy made major!” But her role in this domestic melodrama has long since faded.
Fong Mei continues: “Imagine, I could have run away with any one of those lonely Gold Mountain men, all without mothers-in-law. This was a land of fresh starts; I could have lived in the mountains like an indian woman legend. If men didn’t make me happy enough, then I could have moved on. Imagine, I could have had children all over me—on my shoulders, in my arms, at my breasts, in my belly. I was good at childbirth. And in turn, they could have chosen whomever and how many times they fancied, and I would have had hundreds of pretty grandchildren. I wouldn’t have died of loneliness.”
Kae asks Hermia: “Is this what they call a forward kind of identity?”
Hermia asks Kae: “Do you mean that individuals must gather their identity from all the generations that touch them—past and future, no matter how slightly? Do you mean that an individual is not an individual at all, but a series of individuals—some of whom come before her, some after her? Do you mean that this story isn’t a story of several generations, but of one individual thinking collectively?”
(The ghost signals for silence. She wants to go on.) Fong Mei: “What if I had refused to have children for men and their namesake? Then my daughters would have been free to have children for their own pleasure as well, and then how free we all would have been! What little inkling I had of this at that crucial time; I threw myself totally into the same malicious meddling that oppressed women excelled in. And for what?
What is this Wong male lineage that had to be upheld at such a human toll? I once thought it was funny that I could take my revenge on the old bitch and her turtle son. Another man’s children to inherit the precious Wong name, all their money and power. I forgot that they were my children! I forgot that I didn’t need to align them with male authority, as if they would be lesser human beings without it.
“Women, whose beauty and truth were bartered away, could only be mirrored, hand-held by husbands and men; they don’t even like to think that they can claim their children to be totally their own. I was given the rare opportunity to claim them for myself, but I sold them, each and everyone, for property and respectability. I tainted their innocence with fraud. Even more contemptible, in order to do that, I had to corrupt the one chance at true love I ever had.”
(Suzie suddenly breaks down into tears. She wants to run away. Everyone else strokes her as she screams. We all hold her back, knowing her spirit is the most restless, most at risk.) “Knot after knot after knot!” Sue cries. “All this bondage we volunteer on ourselves! Untie them! Untie me! Don’t tie any more!”
(However, there is more.) Fong Mei says: “Even after this list of my crimes, I still have not told you of the worst of my cowardice. The worst was when I willingly gave up the love of my woman’s body to the poisonous oppression of woman-haters. I can see clearly now that I was put into this life to be tested. At every turn, I failed miserably. I can see now that it didn’t matter that the ignorant, brutal men around me leered and had a dozen different ways to threaten and beat down women. In the end, their impotent violence was nothing in the face of love.”
(Silence follows. As the ghost recedes, she seems to want to say that she wouldn’t love any of us less if we lost the same fight and went with her; we all cower at this except Suzie, who knew it was all rhetoric after all. She never could be detracted from what she knew she must do.)
KAE
1986
“You know, you look just like Suzie! Has anyone ever told you that?” asked Morgan at that fatal cocktail party long ago. I looked up at him and almost peed my pants, he was so handsome. And I wanted to look so grown-up with a drink in my hand.
“No,” I breathed at him, “who’s Suzie?”
I still want to know. Who is Suzie? Chi told me she was the most uncompromising person she had ever known. She said, “Suzie was one of those types who couldn’t be contained.”
I don’t know why I remember that description of her over all the others. Probably because it was, as per Chi usual, the most direct and elegant. I realize now that I was impressed by this statement because it is one of the most satisfactory explanations of why she killed herself. Maybe we’ll never know who she really was. At seventeen, when she died, she probably didn’t know who she really was; we are all too busy testing our limits at that age, either going splat all over the ground too close, or going too far beyond; rarely anywhere near the mark.
There was a time when I too was too young—specifically after I came back from New York, when I was ready and willing and as a matter of fact anxious to spit out blame and frustration for what I thought were silly intrigues and conspiracies but were really my own hurt feelings. I almost yelled at my mother, “Why didn’t you tell me! What’s the big secret? Look at the identity crisis you left me with!”
However, I would have had to get past Chi first. She towered over me even though she was no taller than I, blocked my way with what I thought was infallible wisdom and barked, “Identity crisis! Pah! What’s your real problem? What have you got to complain about? Being overprotected, over-cherished, or just spoilt? It was your own ignorance, so what if you didn’t ever think to ask until now!”
My mouth pressed against the side of a fishbowl, opening and closing, little helpless bubbles of protest floating up to the surface. Who could argue with logic like that?
I should have known that would happen when the clock struck the Suzie hour. Where my deceased auntie was concerned, I was entirely on my own. No one to tell me the truth; plenty of unresolved grief to speculate upon; lots of interpretations, but so what? I can interpret well enough for myself. I can sift through the embossed family albums and get a sense of a sad smile, attribute motives to a twisted necktie. I bet I could write an entire novel about a hand flung carelessly over a woman’s shoulder. Remember, a great work of art is supposedly prepared within the silence of the heart! Or is that what they said about the act of suicide?
My favourite photograph of Suzanne is not specifically of the black-and-white portraiture variety which has decorated many a plant stand and coffee table. The subject perfectly posed, dressed up in layers of cloudlike tulle, heavily powdered shoulders; a perfectly lovely exposure by stark, white stage lights, but a total fake as well. Nothing there to sink your teeth into!
Instead, it’s my unwholesome curiosity surrounding her demise that leads me to examine a group photograph, which had been neatly slotted away in my father’s mental filing cabinet, “chinese-canadian veteran’s fundraising—1951,” scrawled on the back. Suzie is but a barely discernible face-dot among many smiling ones, including Keeman and Beatrice and their usual circle of good old buddies whom I’d readily recognize, even today. Back then, all the faces shone like freshly washed porcelain, but if you look really closely, you’ll see that Suzie’s face is crumbling, chipped stoneware. It was the year she
died. I used to half-heartedly wonder if this photograph had been taken before, during or after all the horrendous events of that year, but I guess the important point is that a lot happened in that one year, not the least of which was my birth.
VII
THE SUICIDE
SUZIE
1950
My feet felt heavy and stuck, as if they were melting, shoes and all, over her hardwood floors; my eyes riveted onto my mother’s face. There was insanity there. Without one speck of doubt in my mind, I could see it as clear as day. It looked eerie, like the last rays of sunlight snuffed out by bleak clouds gathering on her face. She must have felt them too, because her hands reached up and swept over her brow. It surprised all of us when she just turned and staggered out of the room. None of us would have thought that our news would have an impact like that.
I turned and looked to Beatrice to know what to do. She stared down the hallway at Mom’s receding silhouette. Bea’s white poreless complexion, her mouth hanging open. She was just as puzzled by this sudden change of events as I.
“There’s something terribly wrong here,” I heard her whisper to Keeman, so that I wouldn’t hear. But I heard everything, especially anything that Beatrice had to say. We were listening attentively to our mother; her high-heeled shoes toiling up the carpeted stairs as if she carried a ball and chain. Each step crushing one pink plush rose after another all the way up the stairs. The gaudy scent of her rosewater wafting back at us.
“Yeah, there’s more than meets the eye here,” Keeman whispered into Bea’s ear. Thank you, Keeman! You can sit down now! Those two little smarty-pants were beginning to get on my nerves. I thought they were awfully stupid for having a few more years of so-called life experience than Morgan and me. I should have come with him and declared ourselves, like real adults. Not this timid snivelling.