At her funeral we burned spirit money, paper spirit clothing and furniture, so she would not be without in her afterlife. We burned incense so that her spirit would be at peace. And before the closing of the coffin, each of her children, along with other family members, tucked a blanket around her, ensuring her warmth and comfort. With my mother we had the satisfaction of saying goodbye.
FIFTEEN
Even if my mother’s thoh had lived, with Big Uncle’s fortunes in decline, she could not have offered refuge from the Japanese in an occupied city. And so my mother returned to the countryside and appealed for sanctuary to a man she hated, a man she had had little to do with for almost ten years. It is hard for me to imagine a more humbling situation than the one my mother faced. In June 1942, while she was living with this man, she gave birth to my half-sister Ming Nee. This period of relative security with her first husband was brief, for not long after the birth, my mother and her baby had to escape from the invading Japanese soldiers. I cannot imagine how terrible life with that very no-good man must have been to make her leave during such a dangerous time. She never explained to me why she chose to be on her own. I can only guess.
She and her baby daughter fled toward Hong Kong. For a while she found work in a telegraph office, interpreting incoming Morse code messages that warned of the Japanese advance. From listening to my mother, it seemed that there were periods of relative safety, but then she might awaken to find the Japanese invaders practically at her doorstep. She talked about bombs raining down from the sky. If she ran too fast or too slow, she risked being blown to shreds. During her periods of flight, she found safety in caves and abandoned buildings. She was so starved, she dug roots out of the ground to eat. While she was in hiding, she saw people herded together and bayoneted. She saw a soldier slice open a pregnant woman. She shielded her daughter’s eyes from these acts of horror, which left her mouth dry and her chest pounding, her body weak from fear and hunger. She watched and prayed that they would not be found. She lived in constant worry that her daughter might inadvertently cry out, but she never did. Even though Ming Nee was just a little over the age of two, she understood that their lives depended on being silent, that a tiny peep could result in death.
My mother never forgave the Japanese. We had some distant relatives in Toronto who were Canadian-born Chinese and who rented the second floor of their house to a Japanese family, also Canadian-born. On a few occasions when we visited, we crossed paths with members of this family, and my mother always turned away, her lips clamped shut, her anger locked inside. It didn’t matter that these people had had nothing to do with the Japanese soldiers who invaded China. As far as she was concerned, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Without them the Japanese would have permanently occupied and brutalized China. While I was single, she admonished me never to marry a Japanese man. She threatened never to speak to me again if I disobeyed her.
Her flight from the Japanese continued without destination. My mother had hoped to find refuge in Hong Kong with her older sister and her family. But once the Japanese occupied the city, they closed the borders and did not allow people from the Mainland to enter. My guess is that she arrived in Hong Kong only after the Japanese had been defeated. I don’t know how long she stayed with her older sister and her family. It may only have been a few months, yet that period of her life always seemed charmed. After living with danger for so long, she finally felt safe. And she was with people who loved her.
According to my mother, of the three sisters in her family, the oldest was the most beautiful and the youngest was the most gentle. In her next breath, she would proclaim without embarrassment that she, the middle one, was the most clever. She bragged that she was the smartest one in school and that she always learned new things faster than her younger sister. Nonetheless, the oldest, Family Beauty, enjoyed the most good fortune. Because of her looks she had attracted a husband who was not only a rich businessman from Hong Kong, but also a man with a kind and generous disposition. Even with their wealth and position, they and their five children had barely survived the Japanese occupation. It was in their home that my mother and her daughter found refuge after the war.
Although my mother felt at the mercy of Big Uncle’s goodwill, her thoh had made a place for her in his family. After Big Uncle married Foo Hoy, things changed, little by little, for the worse. “Oh, Foo Hoy had a nice tongue,” my mother said. “Foo Hoy said all the right things. But she never liked me. And with the Japanese, everything was hard and food was scarce. But every once in a while there would be something good to eat, maybe somebody managed to find and catch a stray chicken. You know what Foo Hoy would do? She’d wait until I was out of the house before she’d cook it. As if I couldn’t tell. As if the food had no smell. What did she think I was? A fool? But at my sister’s house, they shared everything. No matter how little they had.”
The few years between the birth of Ming Nee and my mother’s marriage to my father are vague. But at some point, in spite of the friction between my mother and Foo Hoy, Big Uncle must have encouraged her to return to his home in Canton. Her arrival created an untenable situation for him, placing him uncomfortably between his wife and a favourite sister. But my mother was unable to empathize with her brother’s dilemma, as she never forgave him for his second marriage. I’m only beginning to perceive the love my uncle must have felt for his sister, though, and the weight of his responsibility as head of the family.
Mo tin mo meung, no money, no life, was a mantra that my mother repeated to me many times while I was growing up. So many of her decisions were underpinned by this single belief. Indeed, after the war was over, my mother found herself with no money and no means of support. People were beginning to rebuild their lives, and even though she could rely on relatives for food and housing, she knew that with a young daughter who would have to go to school, she needed money that neither Big Uncle nor Family Beauty could any longer afford. Sometime after returning to Canton, she found out, by coincidence or by her own inquiries, that my father had been stranded in Canada for the entire war and that his wife had died, leaving his children essentially orphaned. His oldest son, Hing, was married, but with a young family of his own, he was in no position to care for his three growing siblings, Jook, Shing and Doon.
My mother assessed the possibilities. She approached securing a future for herself and her daughter as pragmatically as if it were a business transaction, accepting that this would be a decision without sentiment. I’ve often wondered, if I had been in the same position, whether I would have been able to act with the same decisiveness. Even though her actions make me wince, at the same time I can’t help but admire this woman who took such resolute control of her life.
One day, not long after the war ended, my father received a notice at the laundry that a registered letter was waiting for him at the post office. Knowing my father, he would not have rushed off. Whatever he was doing, whether hanging a load of laundry or ironing a shirt, he would have completed his task. He would also have worried that the letter might be something from the government, telling him he had to leave the country or that he owed money. For my parents, fear of authority was never far away, and my father was only too aware of his lowly status in Canadian society. He told me many times how foreigners occupying one of the concessions in Shanghai had infamously posted a sign outside Huangpu Park that read, “No dogs or Chinese allowed.” This, he declared, was just another example of the humiliation the Chinese tolerated at the hands of foreign powers. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered this sign had been posted in the 1830s, more than fifty years before my father was born. As far as he was concerned, lo fon authorities still had no use for the Chinese.
I can almost see the relief on my father’s face that particular day in 1945 when he signed for the registered letter and saw that it wasn’t from the government. A registered letter from China might bring bad news, but once he saw my mother’s name above the return address, those con
cerns would have vanished, leaving only curiosity. My father was not an impulsive man, so he would have brought the letter back to his laundry, to the privacy of his home, before opening it. Once the door was closed behind him, would he have opened it right away or did he lay it on the ironing table’s smooth, white surface and gaze for many minutes at the airmail envelope with the once-familiar handwriting, handwriting that he would not have seen for almost fifteen years? He could only have guessed what this woman wanted from him. My father would eventually have taken a pair of scissors, carefully snipped a hairline strip along the short end of the envelope, removed and unfolded the onion skin paper and read the rows of characters written in black ink.
When my father travelled to Canada in 1936, he had planned to go back to China in another few years, but in 1937 the Japanese invaded, and then his wife died not long after the outbreak of the war in Europe. My father was stranded in Canada. First Brother Hing, and his teenaged bride of only a few months were now responsible for Hing’s three young siblings. Shing, the oldest of the younger children, wrote letters to his father in a script that was clumsy and immature, yet he managed to communicate that food was scarce and that sometimes the money that was sent home was gambled away by First Brother. As my father read these letters from his young son, he must have been overwhelmed by helplessness, his tears smudging the ink.
According to Shing, 1943 was the worst year of the war because of the famine. Several families in the village died. There were rumours of cannibalism. For days on end, he, Jook and Doon ate nothing but a watery gruel made from a few grains of rice. Doon once stole a meal of scraps from a cat. He became so thin that the bones in his shoulders protruded and his skin stretched so tightly over his ribs they looked like ridges on a scrub board. But Shing became bloated, his stomach like a taut balloon, his eyes sunken in a hollow face. Neighbours occasionally took in and fed four-year-old Doon. At age nine, Jook helped out in people’s kitchens, and whatever food she managed to scrounge she would share with her brothers. According to my father, Shing had the most difficult time of all his children. He was ten years old and no longer cute like Doon. People looked at Shing and saw only another mouth to feed. Yet he was still a child, not old enough to do a man’s work. Shing never forgot Jook’s loyalty, and when he came to Canada, he continued to send her money in memory of her kindness.
An older cousin in the village, to whom our father had at one time sent money so that he could complete high school, became alarmed when he saw the three starving children. He gave them a weekly allowance and told my sister not to give the money to First Brother for fear that he might lose it gambling. He instructed the three children to use the cash to buy food and to wait until First Brother and his family had finished eating before cooking for themselves. This cousin kept a tally of the money and told the children that their father could pay him back once the war was over. The cousin is no longer alive and whether my father repaid him or was even told about the money none of my siblings claim to know. My intuition tells me that he never did keep an account, but pretended to, so my family would save face.
When my mother’s letter arrived, my father must already have been planning to return to China to reunite with his children. As he looked down one column after another, reading the polite salutations and inquiries about his health, all written in my mother’s distinctive hand, he would have become ever more curious as to why she was writing him. As he came to the end of her missive, he would have received his answer. My mother was proposing marriage.
I have always wondered how she couched her proposal. Did she flatter my father? He never expanded on the simple fact that my mother had written and asked him to marry her. My mother never told me about the letter at all—only that his children needed someone to look after them and she needed someone to provide her and her daughter with a future. The union she offered could prove mutually beneficial.
I was perhaps nine or ten when my father told me about the letter. They had just had another terrible quarrel. It was almost as if he was saying to me that he wasn’t entirely to blame for her unhappy situation. When he married my mother, he continued, she had concealed the fact that her first husband was still alive and that she was still married to him. My father shook his head and said that discovering this had been a terrible situation for him, a loss of face. I felt sorry for my father, but I was also beginning to appreciate how desperate my mother must have felt, her need to survive trumping any residual shred of pride.
I can only speculate as to whether she at some point after they married informed my father that she was still married or whether her first husband arrived, declared himself and possibly demanded compensation. But my father did sort the matter through, and my mother did, in fact, divorce that very no-good man. When my father finished his story, I didn’t know what to say. Throughout my childhood my parents whispered secrets to me about each other. These confidences always started with: Don’t tell your … but did you know that. … By confiding in me I felt that my father was staking a territorial claim on my affections, inviting me to look inside a box that held unflattering secrets about my mother—stories my mother would not have wanted me to hear. But of course my father never knew about the things my mother told me about him. I was already aware of her reluctance to come to Canada and that it was not just because of having to leave Ming Nee in Hong Kong.
Not long after my father’s return to China in 1947, my mother introduced her new husband to Big Uncle at an expensive restaurant in Canton, where they had a dim sum lunch. I can see my father’s ingratiating smile, eager to please this man of high rank. But Big Uncle was not impressed with my father’s status as a Gold Mountain guest. Afterwards, when Big Uncle and my mother were alone, he told her that she had made a bad decision, marrying well beneath their family. Her confession to me always ended with Mo vun fut. I had no choice. I had no choice.
At these times she just assumed that I had taken her side. But I hated hearing these confessions and wanted to hurl blame at her. You’re the one who asked him to marry you! And so I became a reluctant receptacle for my parents’ mutual contempt. When I looked at them I could feel these secrets, alive inside me, hissing at each other like angry snakes. I wanted to release them and be rid of them. Instead, I carved my heart into deep compartments, a place for each secret, never allowing one to touch the other.
In my child’s mind I had always imagined a jubilant reunion. In 1947, when my father’s ship from Canada arrived in Hong Kong, my mother and her daughter were there to meet him. I could see my mother and father waving the moment they caught sight of each other, then pushing through the crowds and finally embracing. Together, they took a boat to Kaiping City. From there they hired a sedan chair to my father’s village. I pictured my father helping my mother and her daughter into the chair. I saw my father tweaking Ming Nee’s round cheek, the three of them laughing and joking all the way back to Ning Kai Lee. I had wanted them to be in love, and in my desperation had created a wistful past full of joy. I now see that after a separation of almost fifteen years, they would more likely have greeted each other and their forthcoming marriage with guarded hopes and wary eyes.
SIXTEEN
Your mother chased my father. As I was leaning into the flower bed in front of our house, cutting dead blossoms off our day lilies, I could have sworn that I heard my sister’s hoarse voice. I stood up with the sensation that if I turned around, I would see her standing behind me, a sly grin on her face, her whisperings provocative. There were times when I felt that Jook had sneaked on the plane with us and was now living in my home. For months her words had resonated in my head, rushing over me unbidden while I was occupied with some mundane chore—hanging laundry, raking leaves, weeding the garden.
What could you possibly know? How could you possibly know the truth? That was how each imaginary conversation with my sister started. You were a child of, what, maybe six, when our father left for Canada and you were married within a year after he returned in 1947. You barel
y knew him. You would have known him and my mother as a couple for only those few short years before he had to leave for Canada again. Well, I’m the one who lived with them in that wretched laundry on the other side of the Pacific. You didn’t hear the fighting, feel the bitterness, the anger, the loneliness that seeped into every crevice of their lives. You don’t even know how our father died. I do. I was there. I was the one who held my quivering mother as we watched his body, draped in a white sheet, being taken away in an ambulance.
Whenever I found myself longing for a moment of grace, of shared happiness in my parents’ lives, hoping that perhaps there was some shred of truth in the fairytale I heard back in China, I would hear my mother’s voice, mimicking Big Uncle’s contempt and disbelief the first time he met my father. “You married him? That’s what Big Uncle said to me when we were alone. I felt nothing but shame,” my mother said. “What could I do? Either marry this small man from Ning Kai Lee or starve. When I was a girl, I had no idea that my life would be so terrible. First that very no-good man, then a man who washed other people’s clothes. My father was a doctor and my brother had passed the Imperial Examinations.”
It was the middle of August. We’d already booked our plane tickets for China, leaving at the end of September, almost exactly a year since our first trip. But this journey would be different from the one I’d taken with my brothers. Michael and I were going on our own. I wanted time to savour the county my parents had known as young people. I would try to discover more about them and in doing so, dispel the mythology that had grown around them. My parents were decent, hard-working people, whose lives deserved to be honoured in a truthful way, not tainted with fabrications. No one in my Canadian family spoke openly about my father’s death. No one ever uttered the word suicide. The closest anyone came to that forbidden word was the way he died. In fact, he was rarely mentioned. After the funeral we returned to the business of living—of getting up each morning, going to work, making dinner, going to bed—as if he had never been a part of it. This man to whom so many in my family owed their current prosperity had been erased. Our lives in Canada were agreeable and middle-class. We had done our best to bury the shame, anger, guilt, hurt and humiliation that had washed over us after his suicide. But privately, his death still haunted me. This diligent and selfless man, whose life had ended with tragedy, made me uncomfortable. Here it was more than thirty years later. And still, whenever I thought about my father’s suicide, something inside my chest would start to constrict. I wanted to open a window; I wanted to feel a rush of clean air; I wanted to take a deep breath and exhale.
The Year of Finding Memory Page 14