The Year of Finding Memory (21 page)

Or so my mother had thought. Less than a year after her
thoh’s
death, in October of 1938, the Japanese marched into Canton and occupied the city. She told me that everyone fled Big Uncle’s house, and that’s when my mother realized that the safest place for her to be was back with her husband, that very no-good man. He lived in the countryside, away from the city.

My mother picked up her knitting needles and started to cast on stitches for a sweater. She said nothing more. I could tell from the way she was concentrating on her hands without ever looking up that her thoughts were still in the past.

FOURTEEN

I
n 1992 my mother turned eighty. For several years, she’d been living with Michael, our two daughters and me in our Toronto home. After my father’s death, she’d been with Doon and his family in a small Ontario city, where he operated a Chinese restaurant. They all lived in the apartment above it, and every day my mother would help out in the restaurant kitchen and dining room. My brother relied on her to scrape the dirty dishes, fill the sugar dispensers, chop vegetables, cook the rice, tidy the tables after the customers left. Even though she was getting too old to be working so much, she left the restaurant with mixed emotions, for there she had maintained a sense of purpose. She’d had no specific role, but she’d been willing to fill the invisible spaces, the gaps between jobs so necessary to make a restaurant run smoothly. But after her doctor diagnosed her with breast cancer, she moved in with us.

She did not smile on the day she left the restaurant and said only a few words during the hour’s drive with us to
Toronto. It pained her greatly to know that her days of helping out with my brother’s business were over.

I knew that at this stage of my mother’s life, she belonged in my home, yet I was not without reservations. I was a dutiful daughter who advocated without hesitation on her behalf, and yet my mother and I did not have an easy relationship. Since my father’s death, I’d developed an irrational anger toward her. I’d managed to keep it suppressed, but on rare occasions it would find an opening and unleash itself on her, usually over something petty like the purchase of cheap, sugary cereal for my young daughters, or more ugly plastic dishes, which she had found on sale and which I had neither wanted or needed. My bursts of temper left me feeling ashamed and unkind.

I helped my mother up the stairs to her new bedroom, which was near the washroom. We had bought a new mattress for her single bed, and Michael had painted and wallpapered the room for her. I told her I’d do all the cooking and her laundry, that she would be comfortable and had nothing to worry about. She patted me on the arm and said in a small, flat voice, “I know, I know. You take care of everything.” She then added that she was waiting to die.

I thought that perhaps this had to do with her diagnosis, but with time her mood improved very little, even after the success of her surgery and radiation treatment. She spent her days alone, watching Chinese videos and reading the Chinese newspaper while the rest of us were either at work or at school. I was the only person in the house who spoke Chinese and who was able to converse with her, though I knew how
badly my mother wanted to talk with her granddaughters. Every so often they would sit with her in her room, holding her hand and watching Chinese television. But they were adolescents, more interested in their peers than an old woman with whom they could not communicate. We lived in a bright, spacious home on a tree-lined street. But we were far from Chinatown and had no Chinese neighbours. It was in me that she would confide, telling me all her fears.

During the entire time that my mother lived with us, she never mentioned my father. Yet I knew she thought about him. The image of her in a state of near-collapse at his funeral, how she’d had to be helped out of the chapel after his service, her face contorted with pain, distraught with grief, had remained vivid in my memory after all these years.

I arrived home from work, and the moment I closed the front door, my mother called from the second floor, telling me to come quick. She’d been living with us for just over a year. I rushed up the stairs and found her sitting on the edge of her bed, wringing her hands in her lap, her forehead creased with worry lines. I knew she’d been watching the clock for my return. At moments like these, I felt heartsick about the days she spent alone in my house.

She patted the spot beside her, indicating that I should sit down. She pursed her lips together in a way that told me she was about to announce something important. She straightened her back and took a deep breath. Whatever she was
about to impart had occupied her mind for a long time. And however minor it might seem to me, this concern would have mushroomed into something monumental.

We were the only people in the house, but she still held her hand to the side of her mouth and whispered that I had to get rid of the cleaning lady. She said that the cleaning lady was a thief and had stolen her underwear. I was shocked, but I also had difficulty suppressing a smile. My cleaning lady weighed at least twice as much as my mother and stood at least a head taller. At best she would have been able to fit one leg into my mother’s underpants, even if she’d wanted to steal them. When I stood up and opened her drawer and showed her the missing items, my mother quickly retorted that the cleaning lady had put them back because she knew I was coming home. No matter how much I argued, I could not persuade her that the cleaning lady was not a thief.

“You are too trusting. Your life has been too easy. But I know how a devious mind works,” my mother insisted. “Can’t you see? The lady doesn’t want them for herself. She wants to sell them.” Now it was really hard not to laugh. When my mother saw that I was unconvinced, she accused me of siding with the cleaning lady against her. I was ready to point out that her underwear was full of holes, that the cleaning lady would be more likely to use them for rags, when I thought better of it and decided to try another tactic. I said that if the cleaning lady wanted to steal her belongings, she would have taken the new pairs, the ones I’d bought years before, still unused and wrapped in tissue paper, the ones being saved for
good.

“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I know that’s what she really wanted.
Tsk!”
My mother clucked her tongue and shook her head in exasperation, much in the way that an adult would at an uncomprehending child. “She could have made lots of money if she’d sold my brand-new things. But I saw through her and put them where she can’t find them. That’s why she took the ones I wear every day. But she’s so sneaky she put them back just before you came home.”

Finally, I gave up and just told her it was a good thing the undergarments were returned. I said not to worry because, even if all her clothing went missing, I had so much money I’d be able to buy her everything she needed.

My mother gave a sigh of relief. “Good thing you make so much money,” she said. “I’m so glad you have such a good job.” She hesitated for a moment; then her tone became stern. “Don’t ever quit your job. Lots of people want a good job like yours and would steal it if you left.” There was that word again. Nevertheless, I was quite pleased with myself for stumbling onto this clever diversion.

Then she suddenly perked up. She thrust her head forward, about to begin a mission. “Have you paid off your mortgage yet?” she demanded, wagging a finger. “That’s what’s most important. Forget nice clothes and holidays. What’s most important is good food and paying off your mortgage. Chinese people don’t like owing money and paying interest. Not like
lo fons, chargee
this,
chargee
that.” It served me right, bragging about imaginary wealth, even if it was just to put her at ease. When I tried to change the topic of conversation again, she became stubborn and fixated on whether I still had a mortgage. Finally,
I capitulated and told her what she wanted to hear. I mumbled under my breath and said that we had paid off our house. A broad, satisfied grin broke across her face.

“Thank god. Now I can die without worry. And thank goodness you married a good
lo fon.
I suppose every group has good and bad. You could have just as easily married a bad Chinese, someone who smokes and gambles. You’re lucky. Michael looks after his family, and he knows how to fix everything, saves a lot of money. And he’s not like some people,
chargee
this,
chargee
that.”

All concerns about the cleaning lady had vanished, at least for now. I was happy to end our conversation with the topic of thrift and my
marvellous
husband. Michael chuckled whenever he heard reports of my mother’s boasting. She had been reluctant to accept him when we first met. While we were still an unmarried couple, she continued to tell me about “good” Chinese boys who were looking for a wife, with whom Matchmaker Auntie would be more than happy to organize a meeting. I never took my mother’s suggestions seriously. She grew frustrated with my dismissive attitude, and as a final resort she told me it wouldn’t
hurt
to meet one of these boys. It wasn’t as if it was going to cost anything. Matchmaking services were always paid for by the groom, she pointed out. But now she couldn’t stop extolling Michael’s virtues, to the point of fabrication. She had decided in her own mind that her son-in-law was a saver, someone who used only cash. Credit cards, as far as she was concerned, were for less worthy and less responsible
lo fons.
Chinese people never touched them. According to my mother.

A few days after the cleaning lady incident, she went for a walk after supper and became lost. Michael hopped on his bicycle and searched out our neighbourhood. Once he found her, he raced home and got in the car. It was a warm summer evening, so I was not concerned with her falling or catching a chill. We both knew she walked so slowly that she would not be far from where he had originally found her. When she arrived home she was unaware that she had gone for a walk and thought her kind son-in-law had taken her for a summer evening’s drive.

Another night, not long afterwards, my family was seated around the kitchen table. I’d made spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner that night, one of my mother’s favourite meals, since after Chinese, Italian was her preferred cuisine. Right up until her death, she continued to love food and maintained a good appetite. We had almost finished eating, when my mother asked me if I had ever been to Miami. I shook my head, and she informed me that she had been many times. I stared at her, my fork held in mid-air. While she was living with Doon, she and a girlfriend had taken a bus tour of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once, she had even been to New York City with Ming Nee. But other than these two trips, she had travelled very little since leaving China. She had certainly never even been close to Florida.

My mother ignored my reaction and said that it was easy to get to beautiful Miami. Dumbfounded, I asked her, “How?”

“There’s a bridge from Hong Kong to Miami,” my mother said. “You can walk across it. Very easy.”

I almost choked on my pasta. I put down my fork, barely able to keep a straight face, and said, “That’s not possible. There’s no bridge connecting the two cities.”

My mother turned her head in my direction, her eyes steady with confidence. “You don’t know everything. I’m the one who should know. I walked across that bridge.” I let the conversation drop, and my mother requested a second helping. I asked one of my daughters to get up and replenish her grandmother’s plate.

Every night our dinner table had two simultaneous conversations, one in Chinese between me and my mother and one in English for everyone else. There were times when I was expected to participate in both simultaneously, and I often lost track. But that night Michael and our daughters had stopped talking, suddenly drawn into an exchange they could not comprehend. My husband asked, “What’s your mother so worked up about?’ When I told my family, they smiled. But Michael’s eyes looked worried.

My daughter set the refilled plate in front of her grandmother and started to cut the pasta into shorter lengths. Before sitting down she gave her grandmother a quick hug. As I watched my mother and my daughter, I could no longer deny that my mother’s mind had become like a boat without moorings. The moment a conversation was finished, we could begin the same one again, and for her it was as if nothing had been said before. I remembered noticing that she could read the same article in a newspaper several times repeatedly without seeming to realize it. My amusement vanished, and I suddenly felt short of breath. The day
before I had returned home and found a tap left running. Tomorrow, it might a pot left boiling on the stove.