by Ling Zhang
Yin Ling felt her eyes burn. She had to leave the table this instant or tears of disappointment would start to roll down her face. She put down her bowl and chopsticks and flew up the stairs to her room.
She turned on the bedside light, a twelve-watt bulb which threw a tiny circle of yellow light into the darkness of the room. To save on electricity, they used these dim bulbs in every room. Yin Ling sat down. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life in a house like this? she wondered to herself. How long was a lifetime? Was it as long as the Fraser River, or ten times longer? A hundred? Would a thousand do it?
Yin Ling felt utterly dejected.
Money, money, money. Everyone in the house was busy doing sums with her mother’s paycheque. Everyone kept their sums a closely guarded secret, but none of them included her in their calculations.
Yin Ling heard footsteps on the stairs. She hurriedly turned out the light, lay down and pulled the quilt over her head. She could not face anyone just now. Someone stumbled across the room, and then tripped and something crashed to the floor. She threw back the covers, turned on the lamp and saw her grandfather rubbing his knee and muttering.
He took something out of his pocket and put it on her table. “A good thing it didn’t break,” he said. It was a pottery pig with a big mouth and big ears and a small slit in its head, the kind of moneybox Chinese New Year lucky money was kept in.
Then he got a few dimes from his pocket, letting them drop into the belly of the pig with a tinkle. “I’ve given up smoking,” he said. “I’m saving up to get my granddaughter an overcoat. Today I’ve only saved enough for a button, but in a couple of days it’ll be enough for a sleeve.”
Yin Ling pulled a face and did not speak. Bitter words festered inside her, and they went something like this: “It’s no good. What’s the point? I can’t wait. By the time the piggy’s full up, the etiquette class will be over.”
I can’t dance the tango with Johnny wearing that coat, she thought.
I’ll get sick, that’s it, I’ll get sick. Dizziness, tummyache, a cold—any excuse will do!
She started to work out how to avoid Miss Watson’s class if the teacher paired her up with Johnny for the tango.
“You know, your mum’s job is hard on her,” said her grandfather.
Yin Ling was thinking she ought to get up and give his leg a rub for
him, but her body felt like a lead weight and she could not move. Even as she watched him hobble out of the room and downstairs, she still could not move.
Later, she heard the front door open and then click shut. Her mother must have gone out. That left just the two men in the room. They did not talk, and silence filled the house. Then gradually an acrid smell filtered from the room where they sat, through the cracks under the doors, into every room and up the stairs. She smelled it in her nostrils and it caught in her throat.
Her father and grandfather were smoking.
Give up smoking? Like hell! she said fiercely to herself.
Yin Ling tore a page from her school exercise book, sprawled on the bed and got ready to write a letter. She wrote the characters for “grandmother” in Chinese, then paused. It was not that she did not know what to say, it was that she did not know how to say it in Chinese. She spoke Cantonese at home with her family, but she still laboured under a handicap; she could neither read nor write Chinese.
In fact, when she started her third year in primary school, her grandfather had wanted to send her to classes at the Overseas Chinese School on East Pender Street. Yin Ling was always finding reasons not to go—it was too windy, it was raining, it was too hot or too cold. And of course she could always wheel out the excuse of a headache or a temperature. When she ran out of excuses and had to go, the only thing that she enjoyed was making paper cuts and dragon lanterns. Learning the strokes of Chinese characters bored her rigid. At the end of two years at the school, she could still only make out the characters in the lunar calendar.
Yin Ling wrote her first sentence.
The sentence should have had three words in it, but Yin Ling could not write the middle word. She left a big space between the “I” and the “you,” because the middle word should have been huge. She racked her brains but could not think how to write the character. Eventually, she stuck in an English word.
“I HATE you.”
That was just the beginning. Yin Ling had many sentences queuing up to follow the first. Like “Granny and Auntie Kam Sau, why don’t you earn your own money? You’re always so well-dressed in your photographs, but I don’t even get a new overcoat because my mum sends all the leftover money to you every month.” Like “My classmates always tell jokes about ‘Chinks trying to make a dollar out of ten cents’ but in our family, every single cent has to make a dollar. And it’s all because of you.”
Yin Ling had been storing up all these resentments for years and now they were like a river in spate, crested waves tumbling by, one after another. But the pen point was only the thickness of a needle, and no matter how fierce her resentments, she could not force them through the eye.
Yin Ling’s temples began to throb as if praying mantises were battling inside her head, and her eyes bulged from their sockets. She crumpled her letter and threw it in the wastebasket. She lay down on the bed and stared hard at a dirty brown water stain on the ceiling until its edges blurred and she eventually fell asleep.
The crash that woke her up was the sound of the door slamming. Her mother had come home and her father, who had been waiting in the passage, shut it quickly behind her. In the silence of the night when even the alley cats were asleep in doorways, the sound echoed alarmingly up and down the road, making the doors and windows shake.
Yin Ling put her slippers on, shuffled to the door of her bedroom and opened it. Then she tiptoed to the top of the stairs. She could see her mother, a small leather bag in her hand, making straight for the kitchen. She dropped her bag on top of the stove and took a towel from the clothesline. Then she bent over the basin and began to wash her face.
Her father picked up her bag and weighed it in his hand. He lowered his voice: “How much did you lose?”
Her mother snatched back the bag, hung it over her shoulder and carried on washing her face. She was scrubbing it as if it was engrained with dirt and a whole river full of water would never wash it off. Finally her father lost patience. He grabbed her by the collar of her dress and hauled her back from the sink as if he was holding a chicken by the scruff of the neck.
“You haven’t got the money to buy Yin Ling a coat but you’ve got the money to throw away at mahjong.”
Her mother flung his hand away, rubbed at her eyes with a corner of the towel and, without looking up, retorted: “Buy her a coat? What’s a little squirt like that doing making eyes at the boys anyway? Are you trying to encourage her to behave like a slut? And, besides, you’re happy to give all that money to that bunch of lazybones and you try and stop me spending a cent of it on myself! That’s money I’ve earned, I’ll have you know!”
The “lazybones” her mother was referring to was the Chinese Benevolent Association. Her father spent a lot of time there during the day; he had no work to go to and Ah-Lai, the secretary, was a good friend of his. He knew its business inside out—in fact, he liked to get involved, so any money he had never stayed long in his pocket. Whether the Chinese School needed renovating, they were taking the government to court, raising money for disaster relief, or building a school or a hospital, her father only had to hear about it for the small change in his pocket to make its way into the Association coffers. It made her mother furious. She nagged him endlessly about not throwing money around as if he was a lord, but it was all water off a duck’s back as far as her father was concerned.
Now he retorted: “And who knows how you earn your money, eh?”
Cat Eyes’ face went scarlet, then white. She flushed and paled a few more times, then she lashed out at him with the towel and said furiously: “Just you tell me, Fong Kam Sh
an, how I earn that money!” The wet towel hit him on the cheek, raising a red welt, and drops of water trickled down his face. It seemed to Yin Ling as if her father’s hair was actually standing on end.
Kam Shan snatched the towel from Cat Eyes’ hand and flung it on the ground where it lay sodden and soft like a filleted fish.
“You think I didn’t see who brought you home that day?” he demanded.
Her mother sneered. “Oh, that’s what this is all about, is it? There was a snowstorm that day and I wanted you to come and fetch me, but could you be bothered?”
Her mother’s words stung, and her father fell silent. Fashionable folk in Vancouver all had cars nowadays and drove around town tooting their horns all the time. Not only had he no car, her father was lame and could not walk far either. It did not matter if it was blowing a blizzard, there was no way he could have fetched Cat Eyes home.
After a long pause, he opened his mouth again and the words that came out had been stored up so long, they nearly burned his throat:
“If you’re so keen on cars, you’d have been better off staying in the Spring Garden instead of following me home.”
Yin Ling did not know what the Spring Garden was but she saw the effect on her mother. Cat Eyes began to shrivel away like a slug from salt. Then, she suddenly reached a hand out, grabbed the tea mug from the table and hurled it at the wall. A few moments passed before Yin Ling realized that it was not the wall which had exploded, but the mug. Her mother was squatting amid the fragments, her face buried in her hands.
“I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,” she wept shrilly.
This was not the first time Yin Ling had seen her mother and father fight, nor was it the first time she had seen her mother cry. But she had never seen her cry like this. The sound set her teeth on edge and gave her goose pimples all over.
“I’m not hearing this, I’m not hearing it,” Yin Ling whispered to herself over and over, jamming her hands against her ears.
She knew that someone in the room just next door would have heard the quarrel too, and was also silently pressing his hands over his ears.
Her grandfather.
I’m not staying a minute longer in this house.
Despair settled on Yin Ling like darkness.
2004
Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China
Around noon, Mr. Auyung Wan On took Amy Smith to the nursing home to visit Tse Ah-Yuen.
Amy had changed her travel plans twice. She had planned to stay for one day, sign the documents entrusting the diulau to the local government and return to Vancouver via Hong Kong.
When she arrived, places such as Canton and Hoi Ping, a diulau called Tak Yin House and an old man called Tse Ah-Yuen had meant little to Amy. The only reason she had come was to fulfill a promise made to her mother.
But somehow, one day had turned into two, and two into three. Before she knew it, she had been in Hoi Ping for five days. Mr. Auyung had doggedly worked away at her imagination until he had finally sparked her interest. She wondered if she should change her return ticket yet again and stay a whole week. The university term was over, so she did not need to rush back to teach classes. But she did need to talk to Mark about whether they should postpone their Alaska trip.
Mark was Amy’s boyfriend, though she found it faintly comical to refer to him by that term. A boyfriend should be someone in his twenties. For a woman of nearly fifty to use the word about a man approaching sixty was as inappropriate as a wrinkly old lady donning a crotch-revealing miniskirt. But for the time being, Amy could think of no better word to use. She loathed the alternatives “lover,” “partner” or “co-habitee.”
Mark was a professor at the same university as Amy. She taught sociology and he taught philosophy—different departments but both within the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Humanities. There was quite a large number of professors in the faculty, however, and at first they were only on nodding terms. Then the head of the faculty retired and there was a big farewell party. Amy carried her martini over to Mark and they had their first conversation. Amy took the initiative that evening, flirting shamelessly with Mark on the pretext of being tipsy. She had just split up with her previous boyfriend and urgently needed to fill the gap in her life.
She had not picked him out at random. As she approached him, she noticed the white circular indentation at the base of the ring finger of his left hand. There had been a wedding ring there until recently. But that did not matter. The important thing was that he had taken it off.
She succeeded brilliantly in her flirting and, after three martinis, Mark was lying in the bed in her flat. He stayed all weekend. But they did not start to live together immediately. In fact, they remained weekend lovers for some time, meeting alternately at her flat and Mark’s. This rigidly impartial arrangement carried on for a year until Mark suggested they move in together. Amy agreed because, after a year observing him, she realized that he had no desire to marry her. She was relieved.
They shared an antipathy for the marriage certificate, but for different reasons. Mark was making extortionate alimony payments to a previous wife, which consumed almost half his monthly salary. The remainder was only enough to allow him a simple bachelor lifestyle. If that half had to be split in half again, he would find himself sleeping on a park bench. As for Amy, she had never been married for reasons which, to use her own words, went back to the dim and distant past.
The women in Amy’s family seemed destined to remain unmarried. Her mother’s mother, a woman with no name, whose nickname became her only name, had lived with her man, Amy’s maternal grandfather, for lifetime without being officially married. Although the headstone on her grave read “Mrs. Chow, wife of Fong Kam Shan,” these words were inscribed at the old man’s whim. Amy had never met the woman they called “Cat Eyes” because her mother, Fong Yin Ling, had left home young. By the time Yin Ling made up her mind to go home, her mother had died.
Amy’s mother, Yin Ling, had also never married. She just went from one man to the next. At first, she had stayed with each of them for a year or two. As time passed, each “grand amour” followed ever closer on the heels of the one before. The shortest lasted two days from start to finish. Amy happened along as a result of one of these fleeting encounters, and she still did not know who her birth father really was. Judging by the colour of her hair and eyes, the man, who never visited her mother again, must have been white. Yin Ling had no intention of giving her daughter a Chinese surname, so she chose the commonest English surname, Smith, when she registered her birth.
Maybe it’s in our genes, Amy thought.
At least, that was how she explained her view of marriage to Mark.
From passive acceptance in Cat Eyes’ case to active choice in Amy’s, the three generations of Fong women had all stayed away from marriage, though each for a different reason.
Mark listened to Amy in silence. He put his arms around her and gave a small sigh. Amy had expected Mark to breathe a sigh of relief but seemed to her there was almost a trace of pity in it. Amy was surprised.
Amy had arranged with Mark that they would set off for Alaska as soon as the term was over. It would be a holiday but also a chance to study Inuit culture. She had not expected to have to take a trip to China before Alaska, nor had she expected complications to arise. Alaska would have to be postponed.
When Mark took her to the airport, he had said to a sour-faced Amy: “This is your chance to find your roots.” Amy gave a bleak smile: “When you’re someone like me with a zero for a father and a zero-point-five of a mother”—she paused—“and the roots you’ve got are in half an inch of poor soil on a rock, there’s nothing much to see. What’s the point of looking for more roots?” But since the day she sat at the foot of the stairs in Tak Yin House with a stack of letters in her hands, she had felt something changing inside her. The photo of her grandmother smiling at the camera, holding a baby in her arms by the No-Name River, caught Amy off-guard. She did have r
oots, after all.
Every discovery Amy had made in Hoi Ping she wrote about in her emails to Mark. Mark was lazy when it came to writing anything other than academic research, and was even less keen on phoning for a chat. Amy wrote to Mark because she needed to get all this off her chest. She did not expect him to reply to her messages, so she was surprised when he did.
I get it.
What next?
Be patient. It takes time to get at the truth.
Unbelievable.
Dig a bit deeper.
“Why not?”
As she discovered more about the Fongs, Amy’s excitement rose to fever pitch. Now she found herself moved by Mark’s comments. In the three years they had lived together, this was the first time that Amy had seen a chink in his armour of nonchalance. Where she was concerned, he was obviously genuinely interested.
On the way to the nursing home Mr. Auyung reminded Amy how Tse Ah-Yuen was related to her.
“He was the husband of your great-aunt. After she died, he never married again,” he said.
Amy found it hard to understand these strange words for family relationships, but this was not because her Chinese was inadequate. Her Chinese was, in fact, very good. She made the occasional mistake, but not often. For her doctorate at Berkeley, she had had to choose a foreign language. She had wavered between Swahili and Chinese, the former because her thesis was on the evolution of social communities in Africa, the latter because she had a head start which would make it that much easier to fulfill her academic requirements. She finally plumped for Chinese.
That head start in Chinese did not come from her mother, who had only ever spoken to her in English. She picked up a bit at the Chinese restaurants she worked in during the summer holidays.
The real reason why Amy did not understand the term for “husband of a great-aunt” was that the relationship section of her personal vocabulary was almost non-existent. It consisted of two words, “mother” and “maternal grandfather.” She had no father, so she did not have any relatives from her father’s family. And her mother was an only child, so she had almost no experience of kinship either.