The Year of Finding Memory (19 page)

My father turned over the soil in his garden every spring. In our backyard he had made a row of about a dozen small, oblong raised beds. Before planting he spent hours squatting next to the beds, making sure the sides were sloped at a particular angle. He raked the tops of those beds until the soil was broken and free of lumps, then randomly scattered seeds across the surface for vegetables grown by no one else in town.
From branches and scrap wood, he fashioned a trellis that supported his peas and tied the vines with strips of torn cloth. Every summer evening he scooped water from his rain barrel with a pail, then walked along the narrow paths between his beds. He would then dip a metal can, drilled with holes, into the pail, lift it out and gently shower his plants. I watched our neighbours tend their gardens and wished that my father would also organize his plants in tidy rows and water them with a rubber hose that sent an arc of spray high into the air.

Compared to our neighbours, my parents harvested crops that were not only exotic, but downright strange. It was just one more thing that made us different. I hated it when neighbours inquired about the things my father planted. Or when the lady next door smiled and said
how different, how interesting
… I wanted my father to grow
lo fon
vegetables—things like carrots, radishes, tomatoes and beets. Instead, we harvested bok choy; gai lan; large winter melons that resembled hoary green pumpkins; long, fuzzy melons; and bitter melons, whose warty skin made them look diseased. When we picked our peas, we never shelled them; we ate the pods, the seeds, everything.

All this was nothing compared to the humiliation I experienced at the end of the summer. My parents soaked their last crop of bok choy in a smelly brown salty brine and then hung the drooping vegetables on the backyard clotheslines to dry. Our laundry was on a corner lot, which allowed all the neighbours to see the limp, wrinkled greens draped over the lines. People asked me what they were for, how we cooked them. I cringed. Worst of all were the few adolescent boys
in our neighbourhood who would run through our backyard and shake the clotheslines and knock the stringy bok choy to the ground. When my father ran after them cursing, his old legs unable to keep up, the scrawny boys would turn around and laugh, taunting him with cries of
Chinky Chinky Chinaman.
But in the winter, when my mother made soup with pork bones, red dates, carrots and dried bok choy, the kitchen filled with a fragrant steam that reminded me of summer, and the moment I slurped the delicious broth from my spoon, I knew that
lo fon
food could never be this good.

Early in our travels through rural Kaiping, we were driving beside a river at the edge of Cheong Hong See, when I noticed gardens in the ochre-coloured silt of the flats along its banks. I called to the driver of our van and asked him to stop. My relatives exchanged glances with each other, some of them shaking their heads, as I rushed out of the vehicle and hurried down the embankment. Everything was so familiar: narrow paths dividing mounded beds crowded with bok choy, gai lan, snow peas, winter melon and fuzzy melon. I turned to Michael, who had followed me, and said, “These gardens are just like my father’s. This is what it was like behind the laundry.” But it hadn’t occurred to me then, not even while I crouched down and examined that hodgepodge arrangement of gardens, what now seemed so obvious. Each spring, by making those raised beds and planting vegetables, my father was trying to re-create home. And in doing so, he
found solace. But as I looked back, his efforts seemed futile. How could anyone duplicate that emerald paradise in this place of long, unforgiving winters, where the growing season lasted at most five months? On that cold November day, as I gazed at Michael’s garden, I began to fathom the depth of sorrow my parents must have felt over the loss of home.

It is true what people say: that you need to be away from your homeland to really understand its hold on you. As a child I had wanted so much to fit in. And to a degree I had succeeded. But I knew even then that no matter how hard I tried, complete acceptance was impossible. I was a Chinese girl living in a white world. We were poor, and my father washed other people’s clothes for a living. It didn’t matter that I was teacher’s pet or that I went to Sunday school and memorized verses from the Bible. At some point I would find myself with my nose pressed up against a window watching others. And yet, since the day that propeller airplane touched down on this soil, this country has been my home. What must it have been like for my parents not just to be homesick but to be marginalized decade after decade? I tapped the dark brown soil in our garden with the toe of my boot, feeling how it had hardened with the drop in temperature. In another six months or so, these beds would be sprouting tiny green shoots.

THIRTEEN

I
was sitting in the living room with my old red photo album, which I had found on a shelf between two larger albums. I had started filling it in grade nine but had not opened it in years. I flipped through the pages and saw a picture of me standing on my tricycle in the yard behind my father’s laundry, another of me in my Brownie uniform, photos of school friends, a photo of Ming Nee shortly after she’d arrived from Hong Kong. On the front page I’d placed a picture of my mother and one of my father, each dressed in a traditional Chinese jacket with a stand-up collar, buttoning below one shoulder and along the side. In between was a photograph of my mother and me, the earliest image I have of myself. I appear to be about two years old. My mother’s straight black hair is chin length, cut blunt and combed behind her ears. She is wearing no makeup. The photographer has tinted my lips and cheeks pink, yet I look like a boy with my hair cropped short, my ears exposed. My mother had always been a practical woman,
and in the photo, her daughter is dressed in overalls, with a haircut that required a minimum of fuss.

For the first time it occurred to me that this picture was taken while we were still living in Cheong Hong See. I thought about that junky store and the primitive house in Ning Kai Lee, where my father and his siblings had grown up. I thought about my father’s laundry in Acton, where our first soft chair had been a neighbour’s discard. And here I was, inside a renovated stone house from the nineteenth century sitting in a comfortable, plush armchair. I looked at the Indian carpet on my floor, the water colours and the pastels on my walls, my collection of glass vases in the bay window. The poverty of my past felt so far away, and yet so close.

I stared for a while at the photograph of my mother and started to think about another one of her I’d seen years before: a small, black-and-white close-up, taken when she was probably in her early twenties. Her hair was black, past her shoulders and parted at the side. Her hands were clasped together and held against her cheek, her head slightly tilted. But despite what the villager in Ning Kai Lee had said, my mother was not beautiful, given her prominent overbite and weak chin. And yet she possessed a compelling face with well-defined cheekbones and a broad forehead. Her dark, coquettish eyes
stared directly at the camera. I thought about the young woman in that photograph—her almost flirtatious expression—and wondered if that was the person Jook had recalled for me, the woman who
chased
her father. I had seen another picture of my mother in her twenties, taken in Nanking, where she was going to school. Dressed in dark trousers and a traditional, quilted Chinese jacket, she stood in what appeared to be newly fallen snow. Her arms looked stiff, her shoulders hunched up against the cold. But in this picture, I could not make out her face. These were the only two pictures I had ever seen of my mother as a young woman. As a child I was fascinated with them, I suppose in the way that all children are curious about who their parents were before they’d had children. But because the land of my mother’s youth was so far away and so unlike Canada, my fascination was even more accentuated. I often think of those photographs, but I haven’t seen either for many years. They were probably lost during one of our moves, or my mother may have tossed them out in anger after my father’s death.

My mother first met my father in 1930, when he hired her to teach in his village. The young woman I remembered in those photographs would not have looked much different than the person my father met. She was unlike anyone who had ever lived in, or possibly even visited, Ning Kai Lee. With her education and big city background, she bestowed status on this tiny, impoverished village. When my father first met my mother, he would have been a man of thirty-eight, back from the Gold Mountain, a man in his prime and with considerable status himself. In such circumstances, a prize catch.

The eventual marriage between a woman from an elevated background and an eloquent Gold Mountain guest, who spoke with authority about Confucius and Mencius, China’s two greatest philosophers, was for the local villagers whom I met the stuff of fairy tales. As I had listened to their reminiscences, I had been amused by and skeptical of their stories, the mythology that had grown up around my parents, amazed that even though they had not lived in the village for almost sixty years, people knew who they were. But my mother, a beautiful woman? It was hard not to smile. What would these people have told me next? That she walked on water? Sitting in my living room with my old photo album on my lap, I became ashamed of my suspicions. These villagers had seemed to be good people with a genuine interest in me and a fondness for my family. On the other hand, we must have seemed like millionaires returning from El Dorado, arriving in hired vans, hosting banquets, giving away money; perhaps they were just eager to please us.

Until very recently I had never really thought about the “mathematics” of my parents’ situation. After my mother left her teaching post in Ning Kai Lee, she would not see my father for about fifteen years and only after the death of his first wife. When she met him again after that long absence, it was to become his second wife. Was it possible that the man she decided to marry was no longer the man who had hired her to teach in the village school? She would have remembered someone still relatively youthful and upright, with a full head of black hair. When he returned to China in 1947, his new passport photograph showed a balding man
with a few lingering wisps of hair, and he would have been slightly bent from all the years of labour in the hand laundries. What did my mother think when she set eyes on this man whom she had not seen in a decade and a half but with whom she had chosen to spend the rest of her life? Was she focused only on the future, seeing my father as a means to provide for her and her daughter? Many times she said to me, “I had no choice but to marry your father. But if I hadn’t married him, I wouldn’t have you and you are my
thlem, gwon
, my heart and my liver.” My mother always smiled when she said this, but her words never made me happy.

My mother taught in my father’s village for only two or three years. She left because her
thoh
had convinced Big Uncle to send her to Nanking. There she would study silkworm culture and enter an apprenticeship. When she was finished, he would set her up in business and she would finally become financially independent. My mother made it clear to me that she had left the village of Ning Kai Lee not to teach somewhere else or to get married, but to go to school. And not just anywhere; Nanking was the capital of China under the Kuomintang government, a cultured and historic city, still surrounded by massive stone walls, with the Yangtze River to the west and the Purple Mountain to the east, a place of architectural splendours: royal palaces, majestic imperial tombs and grand museums. That someone who had taught in their lowly village had left to “learn from books” in the city of Nanking so dazzled the inhabitants of my father’s village that it became a piece of local lore they would never forget.