The Year of Finding Memory (12 page)

My husband stood in the middle of the road talking to my Canadian niece and nephew, the only two people besides me who could converse with him in English. I smiled to myself, seeing how much he stood out from everyone around him. His towering height, those large limbs and broad shoulders, his pale complexion, his face with its heavy brow and prominent Caucasian nose, his deep-set blue eyes, the light brown hair. In Acton everyone in the town knew who I was—“the little Chinese girl.” When I was in grade four, a Chinese family with two school-aged children moved into the town. On the daughter’s first day of school, the smiling principal brought her into my classroom. I remember how strange her straight black hair, dark, narrow eyes and brown skin seemed in a class full of faces with light hair and pale skin. I felt a flush of heat in my face and I wanted to hide behind a book. But now I was looking at my
lo fon
husband in this small market town in China, surrounded by people who had faces like mine. My
lo fon
husband, who looked happy and relaxed, without so much as a hint of discomfort. And yet I knew that I did not belong in China or in Cheong Hong See, where I had apparently been born. When my father returned, he had been a Gold Mountain guest who had come home; whereas I was a guest in China and my home was the Gold Mountain.

I stepped into the street and Doon pointed to a window on the second floor, where he had once had a bedroom. I
asked Jook if it was possible to visit the apartment. She hesitated for a moment, one eyebrow rising. “Why would you go there? Nothing good to look at, just old furniture and junk,” she said. As it turned out no one in the family had thought we would want to see the second floor, so no one had bothered to bring the key. Besides, I was the only one making a request. It made no sense to the others that I would travel halfway around the world to look at an unoccupied apartment in a state of disrepair. We had already made an offering at the ancestral home.

Again I noticed people staring at my husband, who was taking pictures of everything in sight. He suddenly stopped and gestured to me to come and look through the telephoto lens of his camera. I held the camera to my eye and saw a plaster frieze of flowers and leaves under the roofline of my father’s building, much of the relief eroded but still lovely. Doon approached us. Apart from deteriorating because of neglect, the actual building hadn’t changed that much, he said. I wished I’d seen it when it was newly built. After my mother married our father, Doon and Shing had left Ning Kai Lee with them and moved into this town. My brother pointed to the buildings across the road and said that when we’d lived here, those lots had been vacant. You could see from our corner straight to the river, where he used to fish and catch frogs, which my mother would later steam over rice.

During summer evenings in Acton, my mother often used to make a late-night soup from water, rock sugar, almonds, red dates and hard-boiled eggs. The white of the eggs would soak up the flavours from the sugar and the nuts. It was my
favourite snack. But according to my mother, the best late-night treat could be had only in China: fresh frog cooked on top of rice. “Once you lifted the lid of the pot and breathed in the aroma of the steam rising from the combination of frog meat, ginger and garlic, your mouth would start to water. It’s too bad you’ve never tasted these things. There is nothing this tasty in Canada.”

I went back inside the store and tried to imagine my parents running this business together. Did they sit behind that finely crafted counter? Did my mother show customers bolts of fabric or perhaps spools of thread, buttons, sheets of writing paper? Jook came and stood beside me. “Your mother was very popular in the town. The store was very busy, and people were always stopping by to talk.” Her eyes darted around, and she lowered her voice: “When our parents were here, everything was very nice, not like it is now. Your mother liked to organize things just so. She was very kind to everyone. People liked her. She was a big city girl, not like the people from around here, who never went anywhere. They were sad to see her go.” My sister leaned close to me. “Your mother liked my father from the very beginning, even though he was married. People say that she chased him.”

I raised my hand over my mouth in shock and stared at Jook. How could she possibly know whether my mother chased
her
father? She would have been an infant when my mother taught in the village, and when my mother left in the early thirties, Jook might have been a child of two, three at most.

“People still say that,” Jook said in answer to the look of skepticism on my face. I then recalled the white-haired
woman back in Ning Kai Lee, telling me that she remembered my mother, a beautiful woman, the best schoolteacher the village had ever had. I politely nodded, but secretly dismissed her comment, suspecting the woman of trying to ingratiate herself to me.

Somewhere between my suspicion and my amusement, my throat itched to correct these rumours about my parents. If only these people knew what I knew. During my childhood it seemed that
doo sut
was a sickening fact of life for the Chinese community. I had clear memories of my parents whispering to each other
doo sut, doo sut.
Such and such, you know the fellow who worked in the restaurant in that small town just north of us? He took his own life, had been found dangling from the end of a rope. It was the first time I’d heard my father refer to a
gow meng
, a dog life. I didn’t know then precisely what he meant, but I knew from his bitter tone that it was something worthless, not good. Years later I remembered hearing about a cook from a Chinese restaurant in one of the nearby towns leaping off the roof of his two-storey building. Just a few weeks earlier, I had been sitting next to him at a wedding banquet in Toronto.

Jook and my other relatives in China had no inkling of what life in Gold Mountain had been like for people like her father. No idea of the deprivation, the loneliness, the racism, the homesickness. The terrible price our father paid, the permanent tangle of shame, anger, guilt and grief that he left behind for those of us in Canada. Jook and the others never saw my mother at my father’s funeral, so devastated and inconsolable that she could barely walk. They assumed my parents
had enjoyed a life dripping with wealth because they had sent money even to people who weren’t related to them.

My sister was still nodding her head, convinced that her stories about my parents were true. In the end I swallowed the growing desire to set the record straight, and I kept my mouth shut. What was the point of divulging the truth about these people they had idealized? What would be gained by disturbing happy memories?

SEVEN

O
f all his children, my father loved me the most.
A few days before, when I first heard Jen, Shing’s wife, make this announcement, I was astounded. It reminded me of my mother telling me that her
thoh
loved her more than she loved her own children. I could not imagine someone from a Western culture making this statement. As parents, as teachers, we are so careful not to indicate favouritism. Nor would a son or daughter proclaim such a thing except to cause strife. But within my sister-in-law’s family, this was perceived as fact and accepted by her siblings without resentment. Jen had told me several times that her father had suffered from high blood pressure. She was sure that if he had been able to immigrate to Canada earlier and had had the benefit of Western medicine, he would still be alive. When I booked our flights to China, I did not know that my sister-in-law’s village was close to Ning Kai Lee and that she would take this opportunity to visit and make an offering at her father’s grave. Jen’s siblings in Canada had also
pooled their money so that after a ceremony at their father’s burial site, she would be able to hold a banquet for their entire ancestral village.

My sister-in-law is from the village of So Gong Sun, which translates, literally, into Broomstick Mountain. Because Jook and my many nieces and nephews and their families had not been invited on this excursion, the vans were less crowded. Nevertheless, there were passengers I did not recognize, who, as on most of our trips, were either distant relatives or people who just needed a ride to the next village.

After leaving the same highway that took us to Ning Kai Lee and Cheong Hong See, we travelled over an ever-narrowing concrete road that wound through cultivated fields and bamboo groves until we ended up on a rutted dirt trail, both sides so overgrown with trees that the branches met in a cathederal-like arch over the road. The path widened as we neared the village and came to a stop on a paved forecourt, much like the one in Ning Kai Lee. There was even a pond by the village entrance and, as in Ning Kai Lee, the grey brick houses were arranged in a grid with narrow paths in between. We parked underneath two stately banyan trees with massive trunks and drooping branches from which aerial roots descended, some as fine as hair. I was surprised to see an ornate watch tower, several stories tall, in this village, which seemed even more isolated than Ning Kai Lee. As I looked around, I realized that So Gong Sun was larger and likely more prosperous than my father’s village. Perhaps it had benefitted from the generosity of sons who had gone to the Gold Mountain. Michael and I walked to the base of the tower
and peered through the bars of a window. It had long since fallen into a state of disrepair; all its flooring and joists had been removed. The ground floor of this once-impressive building now served as a stable for water buffalo.

The graves were far from the village; yet all the inhabitants followed us, forming a long procession down the narrow footpath. Jen had hired some men to carry several stretchers, one with a whole roast pig, the others with roasted chickens and ducks and other foods that would be presented at the offering. A smiling woman approached me as we walked and said that she had gone to school with my sister. She knew my sister lived in Canada and was married to a wealthy university professor. Several times, she mentioned that she and Ming Nee had been good friends and that she visited us at the store in Cheong Hong See, that she’d sometimes purchased thread and buttons from our store and that my mother had often given her candy as a treat. She repeated over and over how everyone in the village still remembered and respected my mother. All afternoon she walked beside me and held her umbrella over my head to shield me from the sun. The woman would have been the same age as Ming Nee, but she looked so much older. Her hair was grey and her face was deeply lined. I was embarrassed by her excessive attention. Why was she being
so
nice to me? What did she want? I was perturbed but also ashamed of my suspicions.

We walked past many fields, and Michael became fascinated with the water buffalo that were wallowing in nearby mud holes. My brothers watched in amusement whenever he stopped to take pictures. We found the unmarked graves on
a small rise overlooking rice fields and groves of trees in the distance. As I gazed at the countryside around me, I wondered how many generations of people had walked on that same beaten path. I was standing in the middle of a landscape that had not changed for hundreds of years.

The hired men first took the food to her father’s burial plot, then a few feet behind to her grandmother’s. Jen, Shing and their daughter Linda made offerings at each grave by burning incense and spirit money. Once the ceremony was complete, the roast pig, chickens and ducks were chopped into chunks, then portioned and wrapped in newspaper before being put inside red plastic bags for the villagers. A large, steamed cake was also cut into slices and added to the bags. The undisturbed green field that had greeted us upon arrival was now littered with newspaper, plastic water bottles and plastic bags. There was no thought given to tidying the trash, and the villagers were amused when my Canadian niece and nephew collected all the plastic. The newspaper was left to blow away.

Back in So Gong Sun we convened in the meeting hall, which, like the watch tower, had been built by overseas money. Caterers had already set up banquet tables for the feast. Again, people came up one after another, trying to establish kinship, this time with my sister-in-law. One woman kept returning, telling her that they had been classmates. But Jen insisted that she had no memory of her. She had already distributed a great deal of cash, and I suppose that word of free money had circulated. It seemed that every man, woman and child in the vicinity was at this eleven-course dinner. Jen and her
siblings had provided magnificently: bowls of ginseng soup; plates of chicken, duck, whole fish, shrimp, pork; bottles of rice wine. The food seemed endless. People were laughing and talking. Toward the end of the meal, some men hung a string of red firecrackers from the second-floor balcony to the ground below. Within seconds the air was vibrating with deafening explosions. Once the noise ended, Michael noticed a man filling the gas tank for a generator only a foot or so away from the fireworks. Smoke was still rising from their charred paper remnants.