When Dad first had the studio, I was sixteen and sleeping on a mattress in his friend’s attic while Dad employed me as his helper making art for a high-rise development – my pay being the occasional ticket to a movie or rock concert. His project was to cast whole pictures in polyester resin the same way he used to cast letters for signs, a process he invented himself and was proud of – no one else had ever made pictures in plastic by reversing the image, painting what you see first, layering in background scenes, then hardening a stout layer of plastic behind it so that a durable, easily cleaned panel came out of the mould. The trouble was that air pockets could get trapped on the picture surface, or a chip of the picture could stick to the mould, or he could forget to stencil in a background tree or colour. Each layer of the picture had to be set before the next one was added; days passed before we could find out whether one of these disasters had happened, and when they did he lost more days cursing and smashing the failed work, hurling moulds into the trash, cursing his own clueless stupidity, his hopeless, useless bungling. I would slip out of the studio and walk along the tracks, wondering why it had to be so difficult – why couldn’t he paint as he did in his watercolours – the brush conjuring up in minutes with a squiggle, a swoop, a dash and a dot – trees, lakes, reflections, fishermen, cottages, farms.
I dreaded unmoulding, but some days the pieces came out well and we added them to the pile of good ones that were to go opposite the elevator doors in the new high-rise. One night, in a celebratory mood, he took me through rain-soaked streets past darkened windows of the Chinese Times and the shops that sold incense, bamboo fans, tea, and golden roaring lions, shops of mannequins wearing silk sheaths of sapphire, turquoise, scarlet, and pearl embroidered with dragons or plum blossoms or paisley teardrops, high-collared dresses that hugged hips and bust, had slits up the thighs, and a row of frog buttons closing the placket over the right breast. We stopped to look at the exotic beauty of the dresses, and a few months later he would give me one and thank me for being his helper, and then insist that I put it on, wear lipstick, and do my hair up while he set up floodlights and tripod to photograph me with my great legs in a pair of his girlfriend’s heels. I let the satiny skin turn my hips and breasts into a woman people would whistle at on the street, a chic stranger filled with mystique that he knew but I didn’t, though she’d always hovered around me, like the possibility of becoming a movie star if only I could be in the right place at the right time. For a moment I would try it out like an audition for an uncomfortable part, then I’d go back to being the jeans kid I’d always been.
Aren’t those cheongsams something, he said as we stood in front of the dress shop. After that, we carried on for a bit before ducking into an alley, where we walked by trash cans and barred, sooty windows to an orange door that’d been kicked and pried a few times. What were we doing? He’d promised Chinese food. Why didn’t we go into the restaurant by the front entrance? Maybe they handed out leftovers here; he didn’t mind getting things on the cheap, like that construction job he had where he stuffed his pockets with extra chops from the camp lunch and brought them home for dinner. Beyond the orange door, we stepped into a steamy, overheated room packed with men sitting at tables and standing at stoves along one wall. The stove men flipped and tossed things in huge woks, sending out volleys of shouts and chatter, as they dished up platters to the men on the other side of the room, who were not, as I first thought, a team of kitchen helpers for a vast restaurant in the front of the building, but actually the customers. By pointing and gesturing, Dad got us a couple of vegetable platters and chopsticks and some rice and soup from vats on the stove, and we crammed in with the men seated at the tables. This is where you get the real Chinese food, he said, where the working people eat.
When I was six, he wedged a chopstick between his middle finger and crotch of thumb and showed me how to wiggle another stick above it. We practised picking up rows of peas, not running the length of the sticks but pinched in a stack perpendicular to them. I didn’t realize then that most people’s dads didn’t cook anything, let alone Chinese dishes. Out would come the bamboo steamer, the wok, the wire noodle scoop, and the rice bowls and china spoons painted with dragons or kimonoed women or patterned with rice grains. Dried mushrooms would be soaked, garlic and ginger finely chopped, bok choy and scallions prepared, tins of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts opened, chicken chopped into bite-size chunks, noodles deep fried, broth made for egg-drop soup, shrimp deveined and minced with pork and sherry for wontons, ribs red-cooked with star anise for sweet and sour, salty preserved plums made into plum sauce. Mom, who was a professional dietitian and very good cook, became sous-chef and deferred completely to all his commands in the kitchen. Long after their last miserable argument, long after they’d broken up for the last time, she told me it was a friend boasting about his Chinese cooking that had originally brought them together. He’d learned sometime in the forties – how, where, why she didn’t know or didn’t remember.
Early on in their marriage, in 1956, they gave the smallest room of our two-bedroom Toronto apartment to Foo Kong. My sister and I had the larger room, while they slept in the living room. Foo Kong came from somewhere on the other side of the planet called Formosa; he was working on a Thesis, which sounded very important and also sounded like something six-year-olds were not meant to have. Unlike Dad, who wore paint-spattered trousers and worn-out shirts, and worked in a sign-making shop, Foo Kong wore black trousers, jacket and tie with crisp white shirts, and went to the University, where I was pretty sure people spent a lot of time writing like Foo Kong did in his room, where he spent hours with his wicker-handled pot of green tea and his tiny tea bowl. I had a feeling that everyone in Formosa wore black, that it meant something serious and dangerous about the place and about being Foo Kong – serious and powerful like Chiang Kai-shek, which to me was mainly a word that was fun to say because Dad said it.
Fun like his laughing Buddha statuette carved of reddish wood, hands over his head, enormous belly bulging from his draped robes. Why wasn’t this laughing man in the Buddhist church Dad took me to where all the men wore black except Dad, in sport shirt and green trousers, and where you had to Meditate, which meant Be Quiet! and Sit Still! like another place he took me to on Sunday – the Quaker meeting – except that in Quaker meeting you could talk if you really felt like it, though not if you were only six.
Dad’s family were all English, yet being Chinese seemed important to him, just as writing his thesis seemed important to Foo Kong. I reasoned that to be important to Dad or Foo Kong I would have to either become Chinese or become a thesis. Or I would have to eliminate my competition. In bed at night I carefully adjusted my eyelids so that they would slant, and during the day I pulled up the outer corners so I would look like the women painted on Foo Kong’s tea bowl.
Foo Kong was often out and his door shut, but even when he was in, it was shut because he was working in there writing on the piles of paper stacked along one wall, on shelves that almost blocked out the tiny window. I drove my trike past the closed door up and down the long hall from the living room to the kitchen waiting for the door to open, and if it did I would leap onto Foo Kong’s cot and kibitz and roughhouse with him like I did with Dad. Foo Kong would gently chuckle and lift me back out the door, and I noticed he was much smaller and thinner than Dad. When I laid out some of his thesis and drove my trike over it, the trike was confiscated and I was strictly forbidden from going near Foo Kong and his room. Yet he remained as intriguing as the promise in a Christmas present under the tree, which you want to shake and poke and rattle and peer under the wrappings of.
My father was even more intriguing, and with him I could pinch and poke as much as I liked. I could get him to take me to the St. Lawrence Market, where we might buy some pumpernickel, salami, olives, halvah or pickled herring, or a braided loaf of egg bread. Or we’d go to the park and feed peanuts to squirrels. I’d watch him pee behind a tree when no one was looking, then try to pe
e like he did standing up, but I guessed it was something I’d have to learn when I was older. Sometimes he’d take me to his sign shop where I built forts out of packing cases and nests out of shredded wood called excelsior. I could watch him stir buckets of white fuzzy fluff into vats of syrupy resin, or turn the clear stuff white and pour it into moulds of letters held together in their backward shapes by nuts and bolts. I could stir and bolt things myself till he told me to buzz off and not let Fred catch me in here. It was Fred’s shop and buzz off was part of the father language Fred spoke with Dad, whom he called Gord, not his full name, Gordon. A language of half-sentences and grunts. Yep. Dunno. Shit. Chrissakes. Haveta cast again. By tomorrow, okay?
Out of their moulds, the letters leapt up off their sheet-metal plateau like little fortresses. Making them is what fathers did, making signs. To be important to fathers you had to be a letter, or a sign for the Royal Bank of Canada.
Perhaps that’s why he wrote so much himself, using the new ballpoint pens on yellow newsprint that fountain pens would have blotched and blotted – after he no longer worked for Fred, or for the Catholic mission, or in the government art-therapy program, or on the dam construction, or the high-rise development. Filling up sheet after sheet of yellow copy paper in loose cursive script – sheets filed in folders, folders of yellow sheets stored in filing cabinets, boxes of folders of yellow sheets under beds or collecting mildew in the basement. Line after line of handwriting from one side of the page to the other. About ignorant bosses and government corruption; about his failed lawsuit against the Catholic mission; about his need for affirmation and Maslow’s theories of self-actualization; about his mother’s dominance that’d twisted him; about women trying to be men and men who were pansies; about Mom’s bourgeois attitudes; about capitalist exploitation of workers; about the manipulators and frauds chiselling him out of an investment deal he’d been the one to think of. While Mom went to work and bought the house and clothes and groceries and financed his travels. Because in the father language that was what women were meant to do, so that fathers could get on with the important business of fathering.
When I was thirty, I no longer wanted to be a sign in that father language, or even a letter. I stopped speaking to him, stopped sending him birthday cards and Christmas presents, stopped inviting him for dinner, didn’t invite him to my wedding. I never forgave him for treating Mom like she was a neurotic, incompetent child. He telephoned once and said he took the blame for what happened. We don’t speak the same language, I said, Nothing we can share without that. He died in my silence. And it is here that I write of almond cakes.
When Dad brought his girlfriend home for the weekend, Mom told him to move out. She quit weeping, quit going without dinner, quit hiding in the spare room. Like fourteenth-century Christine de Pizan, Mom stopped cowering like a beaten dog. She got on with being the man she already was, the man for whom there was no word in the father language, the pretend man instead of the real woman the real man wanted her to be.
She took charge of her life, she transformed, she became human. Human and exile. Human and bitch. Human and refugee. I wish Mom had read then of Christine de Pizan. Read how de Pizan, alone with three children, grew muscles on her arms and legs while her voice dropped and her heart turned bold and hard. She repaired the wrecked ship of her life and took the helm. She became a true man, and after thirteen years as one, she planned never again to be lodged in a woman’s body.
She built a desk in her bedroom, mixed ink from oak apples, green vitriol and gum, sharpened her quills. She kept a sandbox and a mirror at hand and turned to Boethius, Boccaccio, and Dante. She wrote ballads and rondeaux de faisant étrange. I, Christine, she wrote, in the way of letters from court, monarch of her own speaking. She wrote a biography of Charles V, and books of political philosophy to save France from the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. She wrote for women, of women.
If men forever tell us, de Pizan wrote, that we’re nothing but quarrelsome nags, nothing but cruel and shrewish; that we’re mere gossips, slanderers, and lechers, filled with so much lust it would put any man’s to shame; that we’re lazy, evil, wicked, and foolish; that our sting has more venom than a snake; that we’re monsters, we start wars, and we’re the root of all evil and madness; that on Judgment Day, since our souls cannot be saved and our sex is full of venom, the whole of it and us will disappear into nothingness; if to love us is merely a game of deceit to capture shameless whores; if in business and law courts we’re not welcome and just fair game for cheating, then we must build our own city where we can love each other. Oh, my ladies, she wrote, make liars of them all. Remember how they call you frail, unserious, and easily influenced but yet try hard to trick you, just as they lay traps for wild animals. Oh, my ladies, flee, flee, flee the foolish love they urge on you. Learn finance, estate management, and law.
Learn to skin a sheep, peeling back the woolly casing of belly, flanks, ribs till you hold a collapsed, eyeless body sack. Soak it in lime till it lets go the wool, then stretch it, scrape it, pare it, dust it with chalk and rub it with pumice. Dip your pen and write.
No matter how much learning a man might have, she wrote, he could not fully describe what I would wish to write – a work to embrace the infinite variety of Fortune’s blows, her myriad forces of change.
Ovid, too, had written of changes to bodies: Echo shrivelling to nothing for Narcissus. Io seeing her jaws and horns in a stream, unable to pray, only moo to her sisters, then at last, free of cow skin, able to feel again her fingers and toes and her speaking tongue. Daphne who would rather be a tree than give in to Apollo; Arethusa choosing to be a stream, saved from Alpheus. The daughters of Thebes, preferring Athena and their looms to Bacchus and drunkenness, turned into bats, their tales of Thisbe and Leucothoe become tiny squeaks.
Cyane blocked Pluto, who should have asked not taken Proserpina, then dissolved into her raped pool. Arachne, daring to tell how gods cheat mortal girls, saw her nose and ears fall off, her body shrink to a belly with fingers for legs. To stop a war, Scylla swore herself and fatherland to Minos, but he scorned her love and she cursed him with the Minotaur before her father tore her to shreds and she flew off as Ciris, the shearer. This is no time for tears Procne told her sister Philomela; Tereus had dragged her to a lonely hut, raped her, cut out her tongue, chained her there. They roasted his son, made him a feast for the rapist. When he called for the boy, Philomela spoke the only way she could, throwing his bloody head into the rapist’s lap. They flew off – a swallow and a nightingale chased by Tereus the hoopoe, his sword beak always jutting ahead of him.
Christine de Pizan built a city of women. No longer would girls be killed as Ligdus had ordered Telethusa to do with her daughters. She disobeyed, raising Iphis as a boy. Ligdus, who clearly never changed diapers, engaged Iphis to Ianthe; and Iphis loved her madly, girl for girl, but dreaded the wedding. Her mother and the goddess loved them both even more, and Iphis’s steps grew longer, her face less shiny and more angled, her hair shorter. She married her love and rejoiced.
How to Write
If I noiselessly …
and out of the blue or even pink or yellow, a magazine asked her to write a manifesto – a well-known, highly regarded magazine in which she had always wanted to be printed. She was more than a little dubious of the certainty of manifestos, which could end with -toes – this little piggy went to market and this little piggy cried all the way home. Manifestations en français waving placards. Boxifications of thought she’d rather seep and leak, divide into streamlets or runnels, soak out to unthought swirls at hard little word edges. The space between spoken and heard her showing toes would evoke, engage, enact.
She launched into forging worlds, what unshows itself – the manifesto of erasure and abeyance. The impulsive manifesto shoots rapid fire the least thought – the least considered – tips from her mind’s dumpster: bedsprings, televisions, one-eyed Eeyores, toaster ovens, hockey sticks. To dither the puck. Say and unsay. I want it
all, she thought, shilly-shallying. A chord instead of a note. A symphony instead of a chord. A universe instead of a symphony. Closing it down in a word: universe. Or or a – it made no difference. It wasn’t a pause button, a light switch, a phone hook. A column of battalions from several empires waited. Would it be the onion or the peppermint? The shark or Mack the Knife?
Had manifestos become a bourgeois project? Was she jaded? To dither. To angst. Would it be the lion throttling a doe? Or the president shooting students? A woman stoned to death, or a woman suckling her child? Down another alley in the maze, why not a manifesto of the sentence? Crossbreed every kind with every other kind – twist and turn the thought shapes – so many butterfly nets. Une manifestation of clamouring motifs. Unsentencing the sentence. Smashing the piñata of complete thought to clouds of recombining viruses.
She paused on the trail and took a breath. Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Don’t look up at the fire tower on top of the mountain where she’d scattered the ashes of her mother – reaching her hand into the plastic bag inside the pottery urn Mom had kept on her shelf. Scooping up in her fingers grey dust and small pieces of bone. To fling out over the heads of fireweed and lupine and daisies as Mom had said she wanted, not feeling, when she said it, this nothingness of self as dust – the dust that had been her mother clinging to her jeans and boots. Breathing the dust that had been her, had made her.
How to write
I, Bartleby Page 4