The Year of Finding Memory (18 page)

Later in the afternoon, Kung’s son, two daughters and infant grandson joined us. I had met the older daughter several years before, when she’d stayed in Canada with Ming Nee to study English at a local college. But when a woman who appeared to be in her sixties entered the apartment and was introduced as Kung’s older sister, my cousin, I was at a loss for words. I had been told about Kung, a male cousin, living in Macau.
But a female cousin? Surely I had been told about her at some point? Or perhaps her name was so rarely mentioned that I never bothered to retain it. Sons are highly prized, even worshipped, in Chinese culture. But I was still surprised to have travelled halfway around the world to meet a male cousin, only to discover that he had a sister. As a Confucian daughter, I should not have been taken aback. But I was. I was from the West.

Kung and his wife took us all to a restaurant for dinner. Michael and I had decided ahead of time that we would pay for the meal. But the moment we entered the lobby and were led to a table already covered with linen and place settings, we both realized that my cousin had made prior reservations in our honour. We started with a whole roast suckling pig. After we ate the crackling with mini pancakes and hoisin sauce, the meat was taken away and sliced before being returned for the next course. The seafood was fresh out of the ocean: prawns, steamed fish, scallops, squid and abalone, everything firm and tender. We had broccoli with a sauce made from shredded dried scallops, tripe soup, sweet bean soup, biscuits, coconut pudding, noodles, fried rice, oranges, watermelon. My cousin had spared no expense. And he had made sure that his daughter who spoke English sat next to Michael.

All these relatives sat with me and my husband around the table. I had not known about any of them, except Kung and his daughter, of course, before this evening. I felt so happy, and yet despite the superb food, I found it hard to eat. There was a lump in my throat that would not go away. Throughout the evening, my newly discovered cousin, Lai Ming, Kung’s
sister, told me several times: “You remind me of my mother. You don’t look like her. But there’s something … something in your manner. …” I so wished I could have met Little Aunt. I found myself thinking about how my mother talked about her life being like a table cut in half. I should have helped her bring those two pieces together. The Pacific Ocean had always seemed such a huge obstacle. I should not have let her frugality or the busy-ness of my own life stand in the way.

Kung told me that he often visited his father’s ancestral village in Taishan, another of the Four Counties, bordering Kaiping. He had built a house there, and the next time we visited, we could stay there with him and Lin. He would also take me to the house where our mothers had spent their childhood. I had not yet left for Canada, and already I wanted to return to China.

TWELVE

M
orning arrived with a bright blue sky, so unusual in a month that I always associated with low, grey clouds and damp, raw winds. Michael has always liked November, claiming that after being dazzled by the brilliant colours of autumn, the muted hues of brown and grey are almost a relief. Only after the leaves have fallen can you begin to appreciate the trees for their structure and the bark for its texture. It was Michael who introduced me to the diamond pattern in the bark of the ash, the flakiness of hornbeam, the craggy branches of the oak. My husband is a minimalist and to his mind there is nothing more beautiful than bare branches etched against a crystal blue sky.

Eager to walk down the hill, I grabbed a jacket and scarf before leaving the house. The grass was frozen and crunched beneath my feet. Partway down the slope that led to the woods, I stopped and looked at the fields around me. Our tenant farmer had harvested his crop of wheat, and I noticed that in our adjacent pumpkin patch, a few frost-damaged
fruit were still clinging to their vines. The air felt cool and thin. I took a deep breath and gazed at the landscape around me. Everything was so dormant and desolate, so very different from the fertile countryside of Kaiping County where I had been only a few days before, where the weather was still warm, the trees laden with oranges and bananas, the fields luxuriant and green with stalks of rice swaying in the breeze.

I turned around and walked back up the hill to our vegetable garden and stood in front of our lifeless plants. They had been flattened by the frost, and Michael would spend the next few days pulling them out and preparing the beds for spring planting. A blue jay’s squawk broke the silence. The air that only a moment ago had felt invigorating, suddenly took on a damp chill, and I tightened the scarf around my neck. The sky in the west was starting to cloud.

Michael comes from English and Irish stock. The men in his family are tall and fair. It would be difficult to imagine someone more physically unlike my small, dark father than my husband. And yet when I see Michael bent over and working in his garden, I think of my father. Whenever he turns the soil over with a shovel or weeds and thins his plants, his mouth is turned down at the corners, deep furrows gathered in his forehead. His facial expression, his total absorption in his rural oasis … I watch my husband, and I am suddenly transported to the backyard behind my father’s laundry.

During our early years in Acton, milk was delivered throughout the town on a horse-drawn wagon. Whenever the horse stopped in front of our house and left a gift of
road apples
, my father would rush out with a pail and shovel, scooping up his treasure. He would then mix the manure with soil before spreading it in around his backyard crop of Chinese vegetables.

My husband and I now live a couple of hours’ drive outside of Toronto in a stone house that is over 150 years old, on a hundred rolling acres with spectacular views of the countryside. It’s almost a quarter of a mile from the road to our house, this long lane giving us a priceless seclusion. In the few years that we’ve been here, Michael has added flowers and trees to our rural retreat. The property came with a large, rectangular vegetable garden, and in the first season, he grew rows of tomatoes, potatoes, squash, eggplant, peppers, lettuce and beans. Since then, he’s built new raised beds, reminiscent of the ones my father shaped, like the ones we saw in China. Every spring since we moved here three years ago, our tenant farmer has dropped off a truckload of cow manure next to Michael’s gardens, and for the rest of the day, my husband can’t stop grinning at his good fortune. When my father died in the summer of 1972, I had known Michael for only a short while, but I have often asked myself, if my father had lived, would these two very different men have become friends through their love of these simple pleasures.

Since Acton was one of the last towns on his route back to Chinatown in Toronto, the Chinese travelling grocer usually pulled up in front of my father’s hand laundry late in the evening. In the winter he always finished his cigarette before coming inside, where he would sit for a few minutes by the coal stove and chat, sipping a cup of tea before taking our order. But during warm summer evenings, he and my parents would sit outside on our front lawn, my mother and father taking a rare break from their chores.

The back of his truck was like a storeroom on wheels, the shelves inside piled high with pungent-smelling groceries. Anticipating his arrival, my parents would make a list of all the things we would need: rice, soya sauce, herbal medicine, tofu, salted fish, Chinese sausage, pressed duck. For the first few years that we lived in Canada, until I discovered Halo shampoo, my mother used to buy an herbal mixture that she boiled in a pot of water. Once the dark brew had cooled, she poured it into a basin and used it to rinse our hair. Each week I was allowed to buy a box of my favourite preserved licorice plums, wrapped in crinkly, translucent paper.

Every year in early December, the Chinese grocer sold my father bulbs called
sui sin fah.
After my father nestled them among smooth stones inside glass bowls filled with water, my parents would wait for them to sprout slender, green stalks, and when the buds blossomed into clusters of small, white, star-shaped flowers, their sweet perfume filling the room, they would smile with pleasure. Some years later I learned that they were paper whites—narcissus—and that
sui sin fah
meant “clear water flower.” I’ve continued this tradition in my own
home. And I now find myself wondering if I do so not just because of the beauty of these delicate flowers, but also because of my memory of a rare moment of shared delight between two unhappy people.

When I look back on my childhood, those bulbs seem like such an unlikely purchase—something that could not be eaten or worn, something without any practical use. Everything in our home was utilitarian. Our first kitchen table my father made by hammering together some scraps of wood. After we had been in Acton for a few years, a family in the neighbourhood gave us their unwanted red Arborite table. When we finally got a sofa, it was from the same family, who were replacing the old battered one that had sat for many years on their veranda. I don’t recall my parents spending so much as a penny on anything that might add beauty or comfort to our home. The closest thing we had to art was a Chinese movie star calendar given to us by the travelling grocer. I never gave those narcissus bulbs much thought when I was a child. But as I look back I cannot help but wonder if these dainty white flowers were purchased not just because they were a harbinger of spring, of warm days to come, but because they were a reminder of China.