The Year of Finding Memory (11 page)

Michael and I had turned off the lights in our hotel room. I was exhausted from the day’s excitement and should have fallen asleep quickly. Yet I lay awake for a long time. In my mind I saw my father’s plain, grey-brick house, and I smelled the mould on the walls. I saw chickens pecking in the lanes and laundry hung between trees. I saw the faded shrine in my father’s house and heard the old woman with the thick, white hair telling me about my mother. I thought about my parents and the incredible distance between their past lives and the life I shared with them in that lonely hand laundry in Acton.

During my childhood, I too had lived two lives: one with my parents and one outside the laundry. We arrived in Acton from Allandale late at night on the train. It was winter, and the next day, when I went outside to play, a blue-eyed boy with yellow hair stood across the road from me and threw a chunk of ice that hit me on my mouth. I was so shocked I didn’t cry, even though I was bleeding. I just stared. He glared
back and called me a Chink. I burst into tears. I didn’t speak very much English, but I knew it was a bad word. I hated that word Chink, but whenever I was taunted again, I kept my feelings to myself. I never told my parents about these things. Through sheer force of will, I had a happy childhood. I played with my friends, I rode my bicycle, I joined Brownies, I went to Sunday school, I was teacher’s pet. Once I stepped outside my father’s laundry, I was on my own, for better or for worse.

SIX

C
heong Hong See is a market town surrounded by a cluster of villages, my ancestral village, Ning Kai Lee, being one of them. During one of my father’s return journeys from Canada, he purchased a corner lot in the town and built a row of three stores with an apartment on the second floor. In 1947, he and my mother opened a dry goods business in the middle space and rented out the other two. While I was growing up in Acton, I pestered my mother for stories of my early childhood, and she would tell me about how I played outside under the arcade, how I pretended to set up shop and how I filled a wicker basket with make-believe cakes before calling on Sek Lam Uncle, the tenant next door. Sek Lam Uncle and his wife had no children of their own, and they doted on me. He was a tailor, and his skills were well known throughout the area. He had a withered leg, and because of that, my mother said, tailoring was a good trade for him.

In fact, my mother often talked about this small market town. I had no memory of it and could picture it only
through her stories. It never sounded grand like Big Uncle’s home in Canton, but when she spoke about this place, her body would soften and contentment would fill her voice. She once told me those six years in Cheong Hong See were the best in her life, the only time she was truly happy.

“But what about when you lived in the mansion with your
thoh
and Big Uncle—all those servants and cars?” I once asked her while she was rinsing rice for our dinner.

My mother shook her head and for a moment said nothing. She poured off the cloudy water, then added more from the tap. She repeated this several times, then spread her fingers flat on top of the rice. She had taught me that if the water covered the fingers but not the top of the hand, you had the right amount. She put the pot on the burner of the hot plate and said to me, “You are young; you don’t understand. It wasn’t my wealth. It belonged to my brother and I was at the mercy of his good will. Yes, my
thoh
loved me, but the money belonged to my brother. The store in Cheong Hong See, though, was ours. Your father helped for a few years, and after he went back to Canada, he would send money. We were very comfortable. People from nearby villages used to stop at the store to buy things: fabric, thread, paper. But sometimes just to chat. Everyone wanted my advice, brought me letters to read and asked me to write letters for them. Not like here, where I’m good for nothing, always having to ask others for help.”

Three large vans pulled up in front of the Ever Joint Hotel, where we were waiting. Each vehicle was already partially filled with family members from China and with people who were coincidentally headed in the same direction and needing a lift. The previous day we had all managed to pile inside, with some of us sitting at odd angles. I glanced at our large group from Canada. Perhaps we should have arranged for another vehicle. But once the doors opened, several of my relatives hopped out, ordered everyone inside to move over and invited us to get in. No one was worried that there were more passengers than seats. Back home I would have said something; but this was China, where vans for eight routinely carried ten or eleven. The only concession my relatives made was to my tall husband, who got to sit in the front next to the driver. In regular circumstances two people would have occupied that single bucket seat. Everyone laughed when Michael Uncle buckled his seat belt. I could not help but notice that once the van was in motion, my husband’s back grew rigid and his hand gripped the door handle so tightly his knuckles blanched.

Cheong Hong See was about forty minutes outside Kaiping City. After driving some distance on the same highway that had taken us to Ning Kai Lee, we turned onto a two-lane road. Our driver leaned on the horn when passing everything from the occasional bicycle to large trucks and buses. He didn’t seem particularly concerned about traffic coming in the opposite direction and tailgated as a matter of habit. Fortunately, he didn’t drive very fast and the road was not too heavily travelled. The day before I’d been stuck in the
middle of the van, surrounded by people and distracted by their questions and comments. I had completely missed the scenery. Today I made sure I had a window seat.

For the final stretch of the journey, we drove on a secondary road lined with eucalyptus trees, hibiscus bushes and electrical transmission towers; low-voltage power lines set off in many directions. The fields along the roadside were almost all cultivated: rice, bananas, vegetables, sugar cane, trellises heavy with melons, bamboo, papayas. But the roadside was strewn with discarded plastic bags, bottles and cellophane packaging. It was disquieting to see this beautiful landscape blighted with garbage.

Once we reached Cheong Hong See, the vans parked in front of a row of stores and everyone started to get out. My niece Kim took my hand and led me in a half walk, half run. I immediately likened the town to places I had seen in Mexico and Cuba: streets lined with decaying, two-storey buildings that had been grand in a distant past. Pillars supported a section of the second floors that projected over the sidewalks to form a shady arcade for pedestrians. Storefronts had grills and doors that rolled up to the ceiling so that no real separation existed between their interiors and the streets. People milled about, sharing the road with small motorcycles and bicycles and only a very few cars. They stopped chatting as we neared and watched this large contingent of visitors bustling through their town, so many of us unmistakably from afar. We passed a couple of men working on the motor of a tractor and, across from them, a fruit vendor sitting in the shade of an awning, her colourful produce displayed
before her. The scorching temperatures had not relented since our arrival in China. The sun glowed white-hot in the sky. Holding pale blue umbrellas open above them, two women chatted as they cycled past, sunlight bouncing off the spokes of spinning wheels.

Kim and I were ahead of everyone else. Suddenly, she stopped at an intersection. Jook, who was right behind us, pointed at one of the corner buildings. “That’s where you were born. There, on the second floor,” my sister said.

I immediately turned to face this woman whom I had met only a few days before. What did she mean I was born here? My Canadian citizenship certificate clearly stated that I’d been born in the village of Ning Kai Lee. I wanted to correct her and told her what my certificate said. That was what our father had written. My sister made a
tsk
sound with her tongue and shook her head in exasperation.
“Heeeyah!
He’s wrong. And how would he know? He was in Canada. Listen. I know. I was there.”

For just a fleeting second, I saw my father’s expression in my sister’s face. She brushed away my protest with a few waves of her hand. There was something in her impatient gesture, in the rush of her words. I could have sworn my father was speaking from the grave. I didn’t say anything for what must have seemed to Jook like a conspicuously long moment. There was no point in arguing about who was right. I took a deep breath and muttered something innocuous like “Oh, really.” I had thought that we, the visitors from the Gold Mountain, were the ones with secrets. I felt a hairline crack in my certainty.

“There, up there on the second floor,” Jook insisted. “Through that window.” I glanced at Kim, and she shrugged her shoulders. I took a step back and surveyed this rundown, two-storey structure covered in old, flaking plaster. The rest of our party had caught up, and Jook led me by the hand into the store where my parents had managed their business. I nodded at the young couple who now rented the space from my nephew Lew, the son of First Brother Hing, who had died a few years before. Numerous shelves cluttered with cardboard boxes full of nuts and bolts, nails, keys, rivets and locks crowded the interior. Nothing was new; everything was used. Along one wall was a glass counter with a wooden frame that at one time must have been a fine piece of cabinetry. It seemed incongruous in this room so full of dusty metal sundries. Could it have belonged to my parents? I looked up and saw that the ceiling had once been decorated with a relief but was now grimy and peeling. I walked between the tight aisles several more times. What was I expecting? To see a store with thoughtfully stocked shelves and cabinets filled with carefully chosen things, a store like the one I had created in my imagination from my mother’s words?

I had smiled to myself when friends in Canada said that this journey to my homeland would be a revelation. I had read about people returning to the land of their ancestors and feeling an almost mystical bond. But it seemed naïve to assume that I’d have an epiphany about myself, fill a void I didn’t even know existed. My father’s house in Ning Kai Lee was fascinating to explore, but the conditions in that home were medieval—so removed from my modern life, it was hard
to make a connection. And this dark, junk-filled shop had nothing to do with me or who I was. If anything, I felt even more like an outsider. So why did I feel this sudden shift in the ground beneath my feet?