The Year of Finding Memory (15 page)

“In English,” I explained, “there is only one word for all those things.” She smiled, an expression of mild disbelief on her face, then took my hand in hers.

Because Jook and Kim had spent their lives as farmers, they had no pension from work, and the government offered no state support during old age. Nonetheless, Jook felt secure. She said confidently that her five children provided her necessities. For Kim, though, circumstances were far less kind. Her husband had been forced into early retirement and received only a small pension. Her son had managed to find work as a junior cook and contributed a portion of his salary each month. Several years before, her daughter had immigrated to Canada in an arranged marriage and now sent her family regular remittances. Without this money, Kim explained, life
would have been impossible. She hoped that one day her son would be able to immigrate and that her daughter would eventually sponsor her and her husband to live with them in a suburb outside Ottawa. In spite of the economic improvements in China, North America was still the Gold Mountain. I wanted to tell my niece to think carefully about her desire to leave China. I wanted to tell her about the long, cold winters in Ottawa and the isolation she would no doubt endure, cut off from her community and people who spoke her own language. I had witnessed the full life that she was living in Kaiping and I wanted to warn her. But I had known her for less than a week. I decided to say nothing.

During her youth Kim had been persecuted by Red Guards and was sent for re-education through labour by working in rice paddies from early dawn to dusk. With a sad shrug of the shoulders, she said that by the time the Cultural Revolution was over, she was in her mid-twenties. The education system had been left in a state of disarray, and even if it hadn’t been, it was too late for an ordinary person like her to return to school. I kept to myself the fact that while she was toiling in the fields in southern China, I was attending high school and then university, listening to Beatles music, wearing miniskirts, getting upset if the hairdresser had cut my bangs too short. She didn’t need to hear about what for her would have been a life of privilege. When we were together, I was keenly aware that her fate could so easily have been mine. I could almost hear my parents whispering to me, their breath hot on the back of my neck, reminding me of my good fortune, of their
many sacrifices, of the terrible world
oy kai
, back home, had become. Even if
oy kai
was where they longed to be.

Kim felt a collection of watch towers at Majianglong village would interest Michael and me. It was much like the other villages we had encountered in that it had houses made of narrow, grey bricks, built on a grid of lanes and surrounded by tended fields and a stream flowing beside a paved forecourt outside the village. But what stood out and made it similar to Zili village was its prosperity. The homes were large and well maintained. In fact, this village was altogether well cared for apart from the angry red graffiti that had been smeared on the walls of the houses that stood on the perimeter of the village. I was shocked at the writing, outraged that someone would actually vandalize something so beautiful. The slogans, Kim explained, had been painted by the Red Guards. Here it was more than forty years after the Cultural Revolution, and even though I could not read the weather-worn Chinese characters, they still pulsed with obvious anger. The Revolutionary authorities would have persecuted the wealthy landowners who lived here, going so far as to execute many of them. It occurred to me that the poverty of my father’s village may have ultimately saved it from the Red Guards’ revolutionary zeal.

Michael and I decided to wander through the streets while Jook and Kim went to the far side of the village. As we were walking between the houses, a voice called out in English.
“Hello. Where you from?” We were both startled and turned toward the voice. A man in his seventies was standing outside a house, waving us toward him. He told us that he lived in Los Angeles and was visiting his family home in his ancestral village. After exchanging pleasantries, he invited us into his house. In some ways it was like my father’s in Ning Kai Lee, made of the same bricks with thin lines of mortar between each course, but larger and grander, with windows and a proper second floor. This man was very proud of his house and spoke with a confident and expansive manner. There was something refined about him, and in my mind I had already pegged him as a business man, perhaps exporting goods from China to North America. So I was surprised to learn that he had worked as a cook in Los Angeles. Had my father been like this when he returned to his village? Had he been like this modern Gold Mountain guest, full of confidence and good humour?

Jook and Kim came looking for Michael and me and beckoned to us, so we said goodbye to our new friend and followed my sister and her daughter to the edge of the village. There they led us into a grove of star fruit trees—thirty, maybe forty, of them, the size of mature maples with drooping branches, covered with leaves and laden with fruit. Scattered about the forest floor were benches that the villagers had made from massive slabs of stone. I sat down on one of them and looked at the sunlight filtering through the tangle of dark branches and rich, green leaves, relishing the stillness and silence of the warm afternoon.

Kim then reached up and plucked a low-hanging star fruit. She grinned as she took a pocket knife out of her purse, cut
up the fruit and offered a slice to her mother. They bit into their pieces at the same time, their faces puckering, then bursting into laughter. For these last few days I had been watching the ease that Kim and her mother had with each other. My sister was eighteen when her daughter was born. Yet they seemed more like sisters than Jook and I did, the way they walked, leaning into each other, whispering things, finishing each other’s sentences, giggling like girlfriends. I smiled at their small pleasure and felt a pang of envy.

After my father died my mother lived for another twenty-eight years. For several months after her death, I kept noticing couples who appeared to be mother and daughter. I could always pick them out—as if a spotlight had shone on them. And even though I knew it was impolite, I stared. Once, while I stood waiting for a friend in the foyer of a busy lunchtime restaurant in downtown Toronto, my eyes wandered past the rushing waiters to a row of booths along the wall, where two women were sitting at a table. It was apparent from their age difference and resemblance to each other that they were mother and daughter. I could feel the pleasure they took in each other’s company, the way they leaned against the table toward each other, perhaps sharing a joke. The daughter reached into her bag and gave her mother a gift, a book. The mother’s face lit into a smile, and the two women rose and extended their arms. The mother gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. I envied the relaxed intimacy
between these two women, but more than anything else I envied their friendship.

All my adult life I had yearned to know my mother in that way, to be friends, to discuss the merits of a novel we had both read, a movie we had both seen, to go together to an art gallery, for a walk in the woods, to chat in a casual manner. These things my mother and I were never able to share. We were united only by the blood in our veins. She spoke only Chinese and lived in a world that was governed by superstition and fear of authority and plagued by memories of loss, betrayal and helplessness. As far as she was concerned, her life had ended the day she set foot on Canadian soil.

I was still staring at the two women in the restaurant when the mother turned, and for a moment our eyes met. My cheeks suddenly felt hot and I looked away, embarrassed that she had seen the naked longing on my face.

I once confided my regret to a childhood friend that I never knew my mother as a friend, as an equal. And in her kindness she reminded me that my mother and I possessed something special and unique, and in the way of all mothers, she probably knew me better than I knew myself. I never did find out what that “something special and unique” was, but her words comforted me. Still, the desire to know my mother more completely has never left. Our relationship was never able to mature beyond that of a needy mother and a dependent child. Even though she relied on me to take her to the doctor, to look after her banking, to fill out government forms, to do anything involving the English-speaking world, it remained important for her to instruct me, to laugh and
point out to her friends that I didn’t know the specific merits of various Chinese herbal tonic soups, hadn’t mastered the intricacies of Chinese etiquette and had to ask for the title of a certain relative. In my mother’s eyes I was a perennial little girl. Her insecurity in this so-called Gold Mountain was so profound that it seemed as if an admission of my independence might mean that she would lose her hold on me or, worse still, lose me altogether. Life had been so unkind she was unable to trust even the love of her own daughter. Throughout my adult life, my mother spoke to me in the way that a mother speaks to a six-year-old. “Phone your sister and tell her that you want to come for a visit,” she once instructed me. “Don’t forget to buy some oranges and to put them in a bag.”

As if I would carry them loose, pressed against my body, and then hand them to Ming Nee one by one. Or worse, let them roll all over the floor. I knew I should have been a good daughter and simply agreed, but instead I shot back: “Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course, I’ll put them in a bag.” The moment the words left my lips, I regretted them.

A moment of silence passed between us. “You think you’re so smart,” she finally retorted. “Just because you have a university degree doesn’t make me stupid.”

I had so many conversations like that with my mother, my unwarranted rage held in check, never really escalating into an argument, never any real need for an apology, both of us backing down, a slightly sour taste left in my mouth.

Whenever I travelled to another country, my mother’s parting words were never to wish me a good time but rather
to warn me that she might die while I was away. “Go away and spend money on a holiday if you have to,” she said. “But remember, I might not be here when you get back.”

No one has ever loved me like my mother. But at times her protective wall of love grew so thick I never got to know the complex woman who lived on the other side.