Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  She just kept nodding. She seemed to understand what I was getting at.

  I wanted to ask her about dealing with the guilt. And the question of how we could ever repay them.

  But instead I settled on this: “How do you know if you’re living up to the expectations?”

  The question didn’t seem to throw her. It seemed like something she’d thought about before.

  “These days,” she said, “it’s about making sure my parents are comfortable.” She’s offered to help put her brother through grad school if it will help her parents to retire sooner. She’s offered to help them financially too.

  Beyond that, she said, “You just don’t want to disappoint them.”

  I asked her what that meant—what she or her siblings could have done to disappoint them—but she shook her head.

  There weren’t specific expectations, she said. They weren’t told they had to become doctors and lawyers and accountants. (Even though initially, she did want to become a doctor. And her sister went on to become an accountant.) There wasn’t pressure to be any of that.

  “There was a very strong indicator that we should make money. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been encouraged to be a writer,” she said, looking up quickly at me.

  I laughed. I said I wasn’t pressured either. I’d had lots of friends who had struggled with that growing up, arguing with their parents over career directions and fighting over what they saw as their parents’ single-minded view of success. But I didn’t blame the immigrant parents who tried to force their kids into these careers either. Many did so out of fear. They wanted stability for their kids, and they saw in these labels and letters, MD or LLD or PhD, a kind of protection.

  For Stacey, her parents just wanted to make sure she’d be able to take care of herself. For years after she moved to Vancouver, and then later to Toronto, the questions her dad asked her during their phone calls were all the same: “Do you have enough to eat? Do you have enough money? Are you doing okay?”

  I thought back to all the conversations I’d had even over the past few months with my dad. All of the weekly phone calls with the both of them from Toronto.

  “Have you eaten?” they would ask. “How’s work?” To each of their questions, I would grunt a yes. That was more or less all that was ever said. Underlining those conversations was always a simple question: Are you okay? Even after all this time, they were still worried.

  But recently, Stacey said, she’d managed to get them to understand that she’s not just getting by, but doing well. The clinic she works at is a branch of one of the leading hospitals in all of North America. She’s paid well and lives comfortably. She has her own apartment in downtown Toronto and travels frequently. Now they can be at ease, she said.

  “Instead of, ‘Do you have enough?’ now he’s like, ‘You’ve got to take care of yourself, you’ve got to pace yourself,’” she said, laughing.

  “It’s interesting,” she said. “He recently asked me—and he’s never, ever asked me this question before.”

  I asked what it was.

  “He asked me if I was happy.”

  The espresso machine let out a loud hiss as I sat there, thinking about what she’d just said.

  He asked me if I was happy.

  She chuckled. She knew it was unusual, and the question had surprised even her.

  “So how did you respond?” I asked.

  “I was like, ‘All right, yeah. I’m happy,’” she said. She smiled as she said it. We were underground, underneath harsh lighting, but she glowed as she said it. And I believed her.

  Her mom had called recently, Stacey said. She’d said something that had stuck with Stacey. It echoed the words Ms. Huang had told me back in Fogo.

  “My mom said to me, ‘We can breathe now. You kids are okay. We can breathe now.’”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Burnaby, BC.

  March 2017

  The first message came on a Thursday evening.

  It was a text from Pansy. “Hey Ann. We met with the home nurse and Dad isn’t doing well at all,” it read. “They are taking Dad to the Burnaby Hospital right now. Amber and Mom are with Dad.”

  The messages kept getting worse.

  “Dad’s tumours have grown and spread.”

  “Palliative care.”

  On the phone, Pansy recited the long lists of procedures Dad had been through. They repeated the same jargon the doctors had used. “But what does that mean?” I would say, over and over. No one ever seemed to know.

  This, I had learned, was the language of cancer. People would ask how Dad was doing, and I’d stumble. I knew what they were really asking: Is he doing better or worse? How much longer does he have? But we didn’t have answers to these questions. So just like my sisters, I would recite the procedures and symptoms. I’d repeat, word-for-word, the latest updates from the doctors, knowing full well I wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear.

  Eventually Amber said the words I’d been dreading: “You should get here as soon as possible.”

  It was nighttime when I arrived at the hospital from the airport. No one had told him that I’d be coming. They weren’t sure when I’d arrive and worried I wouldn’t make it in time. They didn’t want to get his hopes up.

  The hallways were flooded with fluorescent light. My heels clicked noisily as I made my way toward palliative care. As I neared the room, I realized that I was terrified. The last time I’d seen my dad, he’d acted like everything was fine. He was walking slower and taking more naps, but we’d still been able to pretend like everything was normal. Now, I didn’t know what to expect.

  “He’s here,” Pansy said quietly, gesturing toward his room. It was a room in the corner, across from the nurse’s station.

  Inside, Dad was lying in the bed, his eyes closed. He looked thinner and was wearing a hospital gown. I don’t know why that surprised me. But I thought, Oh, he’s wearing a hospital gown.

  I must have made a sound, because he stirred in the bed. His eyes rested on me. He nodded but didn’t speak. I walked over and put my hand in his. He clasped back tightly.

  I hugged him gingerly, afraid of jostling the tubes in his arms. Normally when I hugged him—each time I said goodbye at the airport—his entire body would stiffen. Hugging wasn’t natural for either of us, and he never quite knew what to do.

  But on this day, he submitted. I pulled away, and he grabbed a tissue to dab at his eyes. I’d never seen him cry before, and I wondered what that meant. Was he happy to see me? Was it grief? Did he see in me some sort of a grim reaper—that my arrival was a sign that his own end was very near?

  On TV and in the movies, death seems dramatic. There’s always a flurry of activity. A beeping noise that suddenly becomes insistent. A vital signs monitor goes flat. We’re fooled into thinking that dying is linear and definitive. That most of all, it’s quick.

  In reality, those days at the hospital were mostly dull. They were slow. Day after day, we waited. At times, Dad was awake and alert, eager to flip through old family photo albums or tap on his iPad. Visitors would come and go. Sometimes he would sit up to talk with them.

  Other times, he would lie there with his eyes closed, only letting out a chuckle every once in a while to let us know he was still there and listening. On those days, I sat and stared. He would sleep and I would watch. My mind would drift, and I’d find myself noticing the smallest details. His skin stretching across his arms—forming parallel lines, like bar codes. In my memories, my dad’s arms were dark and muscular. Now they were thin and pale. Other moments, I would simply sit and stare at the bed linens. I would get angry, then try to understand why. Angry at the bed sheets. Angry at the machine that beeped every time Dad moved his arm even a little. Angry at the nurses for taking so long to come by to readjust the tubes.

  Yet he never seemed angry. He told me so, over and over again.

  On his good days, we talked about some of the stories he’d recounted for me in the past
few months. About growing up in China. About coming to Canada. About the restaurants he’d opened. About Ye Ye. About the mountains he’d faced.

  “I have no regrets. I lived a full life,” he told me.

  In the quiet moments, I remembered my conversation with Stacey. About her parents and what she owed them. What brought them comfort.

  “We’re okay,” I tried to tell him. That he’d given us everything we needed. “All of us are okay.” Anthony and I in Toronto. My sisters. Our mom.

  “We’re going to be okay,” I said, over and over.

  * * *

  It happened several weeks later. He got a little bit better, and then a little bit sicker. And then we lost him.

  I was back in Toronto that day, so the news came from my sisters. “It happened this morning,” Amber told me over the phone.

  The week after that passed like a blur. Another flight. My sisters picking me up from the terminal. The Taiwanese beef noodle shop we stopped at on the way back from the airport. Phone calls with the funeral home. Tracking down documents. Putting things in boxes.

  He had been dying for over a year and a half. In that time, I had been grieving every single day. While I stood in line for coffee. When I sat down in front of my computer. On the bus home from work. It had been there during our phone calls, and during those visits home. In every conversation we had, and in every question I asked. Even as he sat there, living, I had been grieving.

  Now that it was over, all we had were boxes. Bags. Unopened crates of crystal tableware. Kitchen equipment that hadn’t been touched for decades. Bottles and bottles of Johnnie Walker and Courvoisier XO—gifts he’d received and saved over the years. The blanket wrapped in plastic. Rooms full of things he had spent decades storing away. Remnants of a life spent saving.

  Dad didn’t want a funeral. He’d spent enough time sitting through ceremonies and sermons. He knew we’d spent enough time grieving. He wanted a celebration.

  So at the very end of the week, we all gathered—Mom, my sisters, Aunts Janice and Jennie, Sook Gong and all of our cousins. All of the closest family and friends who had come together in Dad’s last days. We met for dim sum at Dad’s favourite restaurant. From his cellar, Amber and I had picked the nicest bottle of cognac. We poured it into teacups, passing it around the tables.

  We told them that it was from one of the bottles Dad had been saving. And then we all raised our glasses to toast.

  * * *

  The most lasting memory I have of my dad—before the hospitals, before the wheelchair and the IVs and medical tubes—was from a December day we decided to drive back to Abbotsford.

  It had been years since Mom and I had been in Abbotsford. When I was growing up, we would all take annual trips back around Christmas to visit their old friends. But those visits tapered off over the years. Eventually, Dad was the only one who still made the trip, checking up on their rental properties and collecting rent from tenants. But shortly after Dad got sick, he’d sold the Abbotsford houses. And now he hadn’t been for over a year either.

  I myself was curious to visit. Now that I knew more about their Abbotsford lives, I wanted to see the streets with those stories in mind. I wanted to see their apartment on Pauline Street, the Park Inn and the Legion.

  So that morning, we jumped into the car. Dad insisted on driving. But as he switched on the windshield wipers to clear away the snow, something caught his eye. One of the wipers was broken—the top had snapped off from the bottom. I turned and looked at him, as if to say, What now?

  Without a word, Dad opened the car door and walked back toward the house. I turned around and looked at Mom, sitting in the back seat. She looked back at me and shrugged. A few moments later, Dad emerged from the house. He had a roll of packing tape in his hand.

  With one hand, he held the two pieces of the wiper together. With the other, he secured the two pieces together with an elastic band. Then he took the packing tape, wrapping it around and around and around until the wipers held together. He got back into the car, and I tried to maintain a straight face.

  “Um, Dad. Do you think that’s safe?”

  He turned to me and nodded with complete confidence. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not even snowing anymore.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  He interrupted, lifting his hand in a dismissive wave. “I’ll go to the garage later,” he said. “This is just for now. To get to Abbotsford.”

  It was typical Dad. He’d find ways to fix just about anything using whatever he had on hand. Sometimes it was a coat hanger. Other times it was packing tape. Relatives jokingly nicknamed him MacGyver. He was the master of making the best of what he had.

  On the highway, Dad pointed to the landmarks that he remembered.

  “On this side,” he said, pointing at a forested spot like any other lining the highway, “is where the people digging gold would go to sell.” We were in Fort Langley, near the site of one of the first Fraser Valley gold discoveries in the 1850s. In that time, over thirty thousand men poured into the area in search of gold.

  As we continued on Highway 1, I eyed the speedometer nervously. Over the past decade, Dad’s driving had grown slower, more cautious, to the point where I’d sometimes have to remind him, gently, “Dad, you’re driving thirty on a fifty road.” If it was one of us behind the wheel, he’d clutch the handle above the passenger side window nervously, shooting us disapproving looks. But today, as he sped farther and farther away from Vancouver, I watched the speedometer teeter near 120—fast enough to blow past dirt-encrusted trucks on the road.

  I wondered if it was muscle memory, from all those days and nights when he’d race back and forth between the cities. All of those Sunday nights over the years, speeding back after a visit with Po Po or Ah Ngeen, with two exhausted toddlers in the back seat.

  So I didn’t say anything. Dad was energized, more excited than I’d seen in months. He was talking faster, his head swivelling back and forth as he drove. We passed sprawling farmland, abandoned trailers. I asked him what he thought of this place when he first saw it in the 1970s. After all, he had only just arrived a few years earlier in Vancouver, eager to adopt the city and all of its cosmopolitan amenities.

  But Dad shrugged. “I spent a lot of time on farms growing up,” he said, “I was used to it. Dirt ground. Growing stuff. I was used to it.”

  But did coming out to Abbotsford feel like taking a step back?

  “No,” he said. “I knew we wouldn’t be here for long.” He figured they’d stay for ten years, tops. It reminded me of what Ms. Li in Boissevain had said to me—about life being made up of many decades.

  “It was just what we had to do,” Dad said.

  We were getting closer. Abbotsford was twenty-two kilometres away, a sign read. Not long after, another sign: “Abbotsford: City in the Country.”

  Dad pointed to a sprawling suburban-style development looking out of place amid the farmland. “That’s new,” he said. From the back seat, Mom gawked at a giant new shopping complex on our left, with a Cineplex theatre and an H&M store. “None of this was here before,” she said. “It was just hills.”

  We veered off at the exit, past warehouses selling farm equipment and seeds, and drove beneath a billboard advertising the Abbotsford Agrifair.

  “You see that liquor store?” Dad asked a few minutes later, as we drove down one downtown street. “That’s where the other Chinese restaurant, the Fraser Valley Inn, was.” He was talking about another Chinese restaurant that later opened up in Abbotsford.

  We drove toward Astoria Crescent—the street where we lived in Abbotsford. He pointed to a stretch of highway. “There used to be more trees here,” he said. “The deer would be running back and forth.” He pointed to an ice rink. “That’s where we used to take you guys skating—we bought you skates here,” he said.

  Then he turned onto a quiet suburban street. He slowed to a stop next to a white split-level with dark blue trim. This was the house where they’d lived whe
n I was born. I had no recollection of it. “They took out my siding,” Dad said, rolling down the window to take a closer look. The ice-cold air hit our faces, jolting us awake after the long drive. He nodded in approval. A set of white icicle lights hung from the trim and a dark Pontiac sedan sat parked in the driveway.

  I tried to remember living in this house. This was where I would have spent the first year of my life. All I could come up with were the images from our photo albums. The picture of Pansy and Amber building a snowman on the front lawn, using navel oranges on his belly in place of buttons. The picture of me taking my first wobbly steps on the carpet, my chubby knees peeping out beneath a polka-dotted dress.

  With a sigh, Dad rolled up the window. He was ready to move on. He turned the car around, heading back toward old downtown.

  After turning off McCallum Road at McDougall Avenue, he took a sudden left onto Pauline Street. Near the corner was a grey stone building designed to look like a medieval castle. The windows were shaded by green-and-white striped awnings. “Dragon Fort,” the sign said in bright red lettering. It was a giant, new-looking Chinese restaurant. Dad all but ignored it, instead pointing to the empty lot next to it. It wasn’t clear if it was a parking lot or just vacant. The lot was mostly paved over, with just a few small patches of grass sprouting up here and there. A dumpster was placed in the centre.

  “This is where our first apartment was,” he said.

  We continued down the same street. He slowed to a park outside a grey-brick Travelodge.

  He squinted at the sign on the side of the building. “Yok—yuk yuk?” he said.

  “Yuk Yuk’s,” I said. “It’s a comedy club.”

  But he’d stopped listening. He’d already opened his driver’s side door and was halfway out, barrelling toward the Travelodge. I followed, confused. Mom trailed us both, a few steps behind. I still wasn’t sure why we had parked here, why Dad was so intent on being here. Suddenly Dad stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Pointing at one side of the hotel, which was now being used as a liquor store, he turned and looked at me. “That’s where the restaurant was.”