by Sky Lee
“I’ll see you dead first. You’ll never marry him. You’re going into Greenwood, a prison for cheap sluts like you. I’ve already made all the arrangements. And that thing in you is a deformed monster, so I’m giving it over to the government to raise.”
I staggered back onto my bed; my heart lurched out of my chest. I kept thinking, this is what people call déjà vu. I’m reliving an old nightmare. But I still couldn’t bring myself to believe her.
Ngen Ngen was whimpering, “A Fong Mei, don’t do this! Don’t do this terrible thing!”
But my mother had become medusoid.
“Why, Mui Lan, you old bitch,” she hissed at my old granny, who wobbled as if against a great wind, “how good and kind and decent you’ve become suddenly. How blameless you can pretend to be, now that you’re near death!”
Shoving the old woman aside, she ordered, “Now get out of here. I’m locking the door.”
“Mother,” I asked quietly to disarm her, “are you in there, Mother?”
For a brief instant, the faintest flicker of recognition made her hesitate, but a shroud of pain descended over her face again. And the door clicked to a close.
BEFORE THEY would let me into the Greenwood Home for Wayward Girls, I had to see a house doctor for a checkup. She was a conscientiously stiff lady doctor who asked me blunt questions and looked concerned. By then, I had become a desolate nothing, locked in my room for days. I had been disintegrating. Although I didn’t know they had a real neat term for it—nervous breakdown. So, I was having a nervous breakdown, and the doctor was talking as though I wasn’t the only one. That perked me up; the idea was so compelling! So, when you willingly fling yourself towards death—at about a thousand miles per minute—it’s called a nervous breakdown. When you just sit there and pee on your chair, you are having a nervous breakdown. Some people don’t have nervous breakdowns; they just die early.
After the questions, Dr. Pastega gave me hope. That one look of concern on her plain round face was good medicine. Her crisp, confident tones made me feel human again.
“O.K., Miss Suzanne Wong, here’s the story. You’ve broken your bag of waters. That’s the bag of fluid that holds your baby. Not only that, I think you’re going through a bit of a nervous breakdown. I’m going to put you in the hospital right away, so we can keep an eye on you, sweetie.”
And then, to be transported down the tiled halls and gleaming corridors of a great institution to be saved! A whirlwind of white faces. White social worker face. White nurse face. White cleaner face. All of them gave me the illusion of hope. Please, please tell me, I only want to know one thing, I felt like asking them all, can I keep my baby? But, as the days passed, I began to worry afresh. The isolation cell might have changed, but the isolation had not.
Dr. Pastega didn’t mince words. “I’ve spoken with your mother. She doesn’t want you to keep the baby. Now, what’s your story, young lady?”
And after my story poured out.
“I see, hmmmm. I’m afraid I can’t answer that question. But Suzanne, you must think about what is best for you and your baby. You’re only sixteen, and you’ll want to start life anew. Finish school, get married eventually. You’ll soon forget about this bad mistake. No one need ever know about your past. Your baby can be adopted, and it need never know about its past.”
But that wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. I wanted my baby.
“You don’t understand; you don’t know my mother,” my voice shaking with desperation. Real fear seeping in, as the cracks deepened. My mother was still the one calling the shots.
Strike one, I thought, and the props came tumbling down. I knew as I felt my precious baby coming on that I had no way of protecting him. No way at all!
“Suzanne, now, I have some bad news to tell you. I think you’re in labour much too soon. This puts your . . . THE baby at risk.”
Strike two.
BEATRICE and Keeman
sitting on a fence,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Beatrice to Keeman: “Mom has a legal right to sign away Suzie’s baby?”
Keeman to Beatrice: “Don’t you think it’s for the better?”
“Do you?” Beatrice suddenly sprang out from under him.
“I don’t know.” His eyes dogged her.
Beatrice toyed with the fringe of some heavy drapes as she stared out the window.
“Keeman? I just figured something out. You know, it’s not you and I who are brother and sister. It’s Suzie and Morgan.”
Beatrice was always Mom’s favourite. She talked to Beatrice a lot more than to me, but I find that being your mom’s favourite can work against you too. Beatrice used to have to listen.
In the face of Fong Mei’s determination, Beatrice felt very insignificant. Yet in the face of Beatrice’s cleverness, Fong Mei literally fell apart. An elegant course of tears, brushed aside; a geisha’s white powdery mask, washed away. A folded handkerchief pressed against a trembling mouth.
“Mother,” Bea’s voice trembling, her knees weak. “You can’t do that! I won’t let you.”
“Please, try and understand what it was like for me,” Fong Mei’s impassioned eyes pleading for mercy. “Believe me, you couldn’t know what I’ve been through because of that. But nobody can know. It’s too disgraceful. Just help me! Help your mother.” Beatrice hesitated, but Fong Mei pressed on, “What good will it do to let her keep it? She can never marry that boy. And our family will be destroyed, Bea. The baby is going to be a monster, don’t you see! Just let it go, and nobody will know. After that, Suzie can come to Hong Kong with us. She can marry someone else, have servants, more babies. We won’t ever come back to this town again. You can come with us. Keeman too. I was wrong about him. Please.”
Beatrice was shaking her head because she didn’t know what to do. She was very sick still. Her head in a thick cloud; unable to think things through. She didn’t want to let fly this shocking bit of news. Her first thought churning around and around: she’s our mother after all.
Fong Mei could see Bea weakening, so she doubled her efforts.
“We’ll all lose. Bea, we don’t have a choice.”
Bea felt ripped apart.
SUZIE IS ON THE VERGE of death again; her labour long and hard. Suzie is worn out, gasping for air; I got slurped in.
“I can’t take any more,” my dark, clammy moan. But Dr. Pastega is much smaller now. She doesn’t loom as confidently as before. There is another doctor in the delivery room, a little man with hard, glassed-in eyes that don’t really look at me. They bolt and duck.
The baby is struggling, pitching about inside of me. Oh, this pain! If I had a razor, I would slit my wrists right then and there. I can’t scream. Screaming won’t help! He has metal scoops in his bloody hands, he keeps shoving these into me again and again.
You’re hurting my baby! I don’t have a voice. Little legs pounding against me, little hands scratching to get out. My little deformed monster, what have they done to you?
“Knock her out! Why isn’t she knocked out yet?” screams the irate doctor.
I AM DRIFTING, drifting up high. There in the dark room, near the window, my body on a narrow bed. Oh, but it’s so white and shrivelled—no, not just shrivelled, flat as a leaf, flat as those sheets. In this dusky light, I see eternal peace in that blue-grey little face. Oh, but I feel free and light, like light, soft and shimmering white! Quiet . . . Shhh! I hear someone coming.
Why, it’s big Chi coming down the hall!
CHI LOOKS DETERMINED, but then she can get away with that. She always did look older than she was. People don’t readily cross Chi with an argument, just like they don’t readily look for trouble. Nurses point her down another darkened hall, their fingers pressed to their pursed lips for silence. Chi’s shoes are rubber soled. At the end of the hall, there is a special little nursery with bright lights that shine all night long, every night. Chi raps on the window. The youngest nurse comes out.
“May I see Suzanne
Wong’s baby?” asks Chi.
“The Wong baby? Well, I don’t know. Are you a relative?”
“No, a good friend.”
“Well, then I don’t know.” The nurse looks back into the nursery. The other nurses are working at the back.
“What do you mean?” demands Chi.
“Well, all right. But the baby’s very sick. It’s not expected to live. A Dr. Dean special! And you have to put on a gown. And if the nurse-in-charge asks you, say you’re related!”
Chi quickly dons her cover-up, muttering to herself to help ease her nervousness, “All chinese are.”
“Pardon me!”
“Nothing. What do you mean, a Dr. Dean special?”
“Nothing! Shhh. Come with me!”
Chi can’t hold back her tears when she finally looks into the incubator. Her shoulder collapses and starts to shake. The three nurses standing together, whispering, watch her with extreme sympathy. Finally, one breaks from the group and approaches Chi.
“What happened to this baby?” asks Chi. The nurse gazes in at the tiny face concentrating on its great pain. The little chest panting arduously. The beaten-up head has ballooned into a massive medicine-ball bruise. Its eyes press out against their bluish lids as if there isn’t any room for them in their rightful places. The baby can’t completely close its eyes.
“The baby’s head is hemorrhaging.”
“What do you mean?” Chi repeats.
“Well, it was a very difficult delivery.” By now all three of the white-winged angelic forms have drawn near. They look at each other meaningfully when the nurse-in-charge says, “I mean, what happened was that the baby was facing the wrong way, so it would have been difficult to deliver. The doctor tried to turn the baby’s head with forceps. In order to do that, he had to lift the baby’s head out of its stubborn position. But I guess he punched it a bit too . . . much.” The midwives shoot each other warning glances, and her voice trails off.
“Listen, who did you say you were again?” the nurse asks, nervously trying to reassert herself.
“Somebody who cares a lot,” answers Chi, and the nurse blinks.
“Poor little lamb!” she sighs, busying herself with an easier thought. “Wouldn’t you know it though?”
“What do you mean?” Chi sounds bone-tired.
“That this would have to happen to a baby that nobody wanted. Like it was an act of God or something. The mother’s an unwed teen-ager. We don’t see many of those from your people . . . I mean, people of your race.”
Chi can’t decide to say yes or no, so she says nothing.
And I. I flit back to Suzie’s drugged sleep. I hover over her limp form for a while, and then whisper into her ear, “Strike three, you’re out!”
KAE
1986
“Chi,” I am ecstatic. “I’ve got the perfect title . . . House Hexed by Woe. What do you think?”
“Get serious!” Chi chopping chives.
“I am serious. I’ve never been more serious in my entire life.” I am standing at the counter beside her, staring hard into the woodgrain of my mother’s cabinets, trying to imagine an enticing movie poster with a title like Temple of Wonged Women, in romantic script: “They were full of ornament, devoid of truth!”
After many months of pondering, I’ve finally made a decision. And it’s a good one. I’ve just finished a letter to the Howe Institute, regretting that I am unable to accept their position.
“Look at my horizon, Chi. Not a cloud in sight. The sky’s the limit. I am free. Isn’t that how the prophecy goes? After three generations of struggle, the daughters are free!”
“What prophecy?” asks Chi.
“The prophecy you once told me,” I reply.
“Oh brother, that was just a story.”
“Chi,” say I, feeling protected and confident, “in the end, entire lives are nothing but stories.”
There is a terrible, earth-shattering crash behind us. Chi and I both spin around and look. There is my sweet little Bobby on the floor, into the pots and pans. He is pleased, and he also turns to us, looking for approval.
“He just discovered your pots and pans,” I warn her.
“Lucky none of them clipped his precious little fingers,” she coos at him. The thought of how easily his pink little tadpole fingers can be crushed makes us both walk over to check out the possibility.
“Oh my gosh, Chi,” I exclaim, “I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“That means that I am the resolution to this story.”
“What do you mean?” We listen to Bobby, who is exuberantly celebrating the idea of pot lids as cymbals.
“It means that I have to give this story some sense of purpose.”
“So? You knew that all along, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t. I just realized now.”
“Huh?” Chi is one of those people who has actually become more attractive with age. With features which were too exaggerated in youth, she has designed a dignified and beautifully intelligent face for herself in her sixties.
“Don’t you see?” I gesticulate emphatically. “I’m the fourth generation. My actual life, and what I do in it, is the real resolution to this story. The onus is entirely on me. Yipes, what do I do now?”
“Aren’t you taking this a little too seriously?”
“Chi,” I say patiently, with half a dozen or so superior tones to my voice, “you should know better than to ask a question like that in this family.”
“O.K., O.K., so it’s a neverending story! So, big deal!” she clucks pugnaciously at me. I feel undermined by her. But never mind, that is precisely how I got as wily as I am.
“Oh, big deal eh?” I shoot back. “And when was the last time you were called upon to give meaning to three generations of life-and-death struggles?”
BY NOW I know I’m ready to make another journey.
I last saw Hermia in Hong Kong. She was living in a tiny makeshift suite of two rooms with a hotplate, on top of her “Healthy Women” medical clinic on Nathan Road in Kowloon. We were waiting for the bathroom; there was only one, downstairs in the clinic which was open for service eighteen hours a day, most days.
Hermia had changed, although I was quick to note she still had the same way of arching her neck when she was under strain. I leaned forward and pressed a long kiss against the thin nape of her neck.
Herm’s face blossomed into a million smiles. Her eyes met mine, and we held each other. There was happiness as our hearts opened, then there was a quiet understanding as I read her face, and she read mine. We basked in the first few minutes we’d had alone together in years. My hands sneaked up behind her shoulders to start a massage. She leaned back for more contact. I complained that she had cut her hair too short, leaving me less to play with.
“You definitely have a bit of a dual personality,” I said to her.
“Kae, maybe all free women do,” she replied with cheek.
I laughed at her. “Are you free?” I teased her.
“As free as my bathroom, ma chère!” she always quick of wit.
SUZIE
1951
There was a peculiar sort of sunlight streaming down on the kittens. They tumbled and frolicked all over each other, batting one another with mitts of fluff. They rolled over and stretched out their soft underbellies to its warmth. That light attracted me as well; I too imagined myself rolling around on that section of the floor, exposed to light, not cold. I started towards them, but I found out too late that my feet could not feel, could not move, could not hold me. I found myself hurtling down. The startled kittens scattered.
Sprawled face down on the floor, I was disappointed to find that section as bleak and cold as stone. The mother cat prowled the shadowy edges and suffered my intrusion with stoic dignity. Her eyes gleamed at me with absolute clarity.
I rolled over and checked my nose. Snubbed but not bleeding. Make-up intact. Dress not ripped. Nylons? It was then I realized th
at I had neglected to put on stockings. I sat bolt upright, furious with myself for forgetting my nylons. It’s details like that which give you away, you know! Disguise, I thought, is an act of war.
I figured it must be midday. The dust in the air was making the light gleam at me like that. So strangely. Last night, I got up, staring at the phosphorous green hands of my alarm clock at twenty-three minutes after two o’clock. So far, it had taken me approximately ten hours to get up, wash and dress—without my nylons—for Keeman and Beatrice’s big veterans’ affair tonight. I had another eight hours yet. Well, five, maybe five and a half, before Beatrice and Keeman came checking up on me. John might come home too. I had been careful to leave dried coffee rings in the bottoms of cups, bread crumbs on plates, potato chip shards on the counter, because no one must suspect that I can’t eat any more. I did eat a bowl of rice sprinkled with soya sauce three days ago, in front of Keeman and Beatrice, to keep them happy.
I had no sense of time any more, so I relied heavily on that round Little Ben face, but it was getting very hard to remember to keep it going. All the rest of the clocks in the house had already died peacefully, which was more than I could say about Granny. I had a vision of her lying in her coffin, black and unsettled and buried—very much as when she was alive. I almost giggled, but that would have been profane. And I was still afraid that she might yet find a voice for herself. I didn’t go to her funeral, but then neither did my mother. So, who was the more likely to get spooked? I shivered.
Being alone felt good. Solitude gave me different senses about this old house. The dust muted its gaudy colours, the unwatered plants turned brown, the cold silenced me. I would sit down to rest, not because I felt tired—my mind kept journeying on and on, prodding up a squalid hillside—but my body felt limp, drained of feeling. So I would just sit on the sofa, and the light would change subtly around me. Every day. Living had gotten to be a big problem, harder and harder to cover up.
Footsteps. I immediately plastered a smile on my mouth, just in time as Keeman and Bea strolled into the parlour. Evening so soon! Poor Bea, she looked worried. I knew it was hard for her to leave her new baby every day just to look in on me.