The Year of Finding Memory (24 page)

In my child’s mind I had always imagined a jubilant reunion. In 1947, when my father’s ship from Canada arrived in Hong Kong, my mother and her daughter were there to meet him. I could see my mother and father waving the moment they caught sight of each other, then pushing through the crowds and finally embracing. Together, they took a boat to Kaiping City. From there they hired a sedan chair to my father’s village. I pictured my father helping my mother and her daughter into the chair. I saw my father tweaking Ming Nee’s round cheek, the three of them laughing and joking all the way back to Ning Kai Lee. I had wanted them to be in love, and in my desperation had created a wistful past full of joy. I now see that after a separation of almost fifteen years, they would more likely have greeted each other and their forthcoming marriage with guarded hopes and wary eyes.

SIXTEEN

Y
our mother chased my father.
As I was leaning into the flower bed in front of our house, cutting dead blossoms off our day lilies, I could have sworn that I heard my sister’s hoarse voice. I stood up with the sensation that if I turned around, I would see her standing behind me, a sly grin on her face, her whisperings provocative. There were times when I felt that Jook had sneaked on the plane with us and was now living in my home. For months her words had resonated in my head, rushing over me unbidden while I was occupied with some mundane chore—hanging laundry, raking leaves, weeding the garden.

What could
you
possibly know? How could
you
possibly know the truth? That was how each imaginary conversation with my sister started. You were a child of, what, maybe six, when our father left for Canada
and
you were married within a year after he returned in 1947. You barely knew him. You would have known him and my mother as a couple for only those few short years before he had to leave for Canada again.
Well,
I’m
the one who lived with them in that wretched laundry on the other side of the Pacific.
You
didn’t hear the fighting, feel the bitterness, the anger, the loneliness that seeped into every crevice of their lives.
You
don’t even know how our father died. I do.
I
was there.
I
was the one who held my quivering mother as we watched his body, draped in a white sheet, being taken away in an ambulance.

Whenever I found myself longing for a moment of grace, of shared happiness in my parents’ lives, hoping that perhaps there was some shred of truth in the fairytale I heard back in China, I would hear my mother’s voice, mimicking Big Uncle’s contempt and disbelief the first time he met my father. “
You married him?
That’s what Big Uncle said to me when we were alone. I felt nothing but shame,” my mother said. “What could I do? Either marry this small man from Ning Kai Lee or starve. When I was a girl, I had no idea that my life would be so terrible. First that very no-good man, then a man who washed other people’s clothes. My father was a doctor and my brother had passed the Imperial Examinations.”

It was the middle of August. We’d already booked our plane tickets for China, leaving at the end of September, almost exactly a year since our first trip. But this journey would be different from the one I’d taken with my brothers. Michael and I were going on our own. I wanted time to savour the
county my parents had known as young people. I would try to discover more about them and in doing so, dispel the mythology that had grown around them. My parents were decent, hard-working people, whose lives deserved to be honoured in a truthful way, not tainted with fabrications. No one in my Canadian family spoke openly about my father’s death. No one ever uttered the word
suicide.
The closest anyone came to that forbidden word was
the way he died.
In fact, he was rarely mentioned. After the funeral we returned to the business of living—of getting up each morning, going to work, making dinner, going to bed—as if he had never been a part of it. This man to whom so many in my family owed their current prosperity had been erased. Our lives in Canada were agreeable and middle-class. We had done our best to bury the shame, anger, guilt, hurt and humiliation that had washed over us after his suicide. But privately, his death still haunted me. This diligent and selfless man, whose life had ended with tragedy, made me uncomfortable. Here it was more than thirty years later. And still, whenever I thought about my father’s suicide, something inside my chest would start to constrict. I wanted to open a window; I wanted to feel a rush of clean air; I wanted to take a deep breath and exhale.

In another few weeks, Michael and I would split any perennials that had grown too large, replanting half in the mature bed and the other in a newly dug flower bed. A few days before leaving for China, we would trim them all back. By then our vegetables would have been harvested, some frozen,
most given away, and the soil would have been turned over in preparation for next year’s planting. My husband would have finished cutting, splitting and stacking firewood for the winter. We would then close up our house, have a last visit with our daughters, son-in-law and granddaughter. We would be gone for six weeks.

SEVENTEEN

T
he way my mother told it, she, Big Uncle and her
thoh
were the stars in their family story, much of which took place in the mansion in Canton and ended with her marriage to my father. The very no-good man made only a cameo appearance. Little Aunt barely deserved a mention. The impression I had gleaned from my mother’s recollections was that only she, of all her siblings, had lived there with Big Uncle and his family. But after chatting with Kung last year and hearing that his mother had also lived in the Canton mansion, I began to question my mother’s version of life with Big Uncle and her
thoh.

Before leaving for China this second time, I visited with Shing, and he told me that when Little Aunt was a teenager, she had won a local beauty contest. I left my brother’s house puzzled about why my mother had kept this from me. Little Aunt’s victory was no major accomplishment like Big Uncle’s passing the Imperial Examinations, but would
it not have been the sort of happy memory an older sister would share with her family?

After my father bought that old television, I watched it whenever I had time. My parents hardly watched at all. They had few spare moments, and Chinese programming was not yet available. My mother, however, made an exception when it came to watching beauty pageants. Every year she and I looked forward to Miss World, Miss Universe and Miss America. We tried to guess the winner and often disagreed with the judges’ selection of finalists. The year that Miss Thailand was crowned Miss Universe, we were both thrilled that an Asian had won. All my life I had assumed that my mother had enjoyed these shows because they could be appreciated without understanding English. She never told me that her own sister had won a beauty contest. She had acknowledged that Little Aunt was pretty but was always quick to add that people preferred
her
company, found
her
more interesting and easy to talk to.

The dark side of my heart asks what emotions besides love lurked behind my mother’s generosity toward her younger sister. Was there envy and resentment? Had she spent her childhood in the shadow of this pretty girl? Once she was living in Gam Sun, were her gifts of money and the carefully chosen pictures of our life in the Gold Mountain intended to remind her sister that she, Yet Lan, was the “lucky” one, living in a land of limitless good fortune? I find it hard not to be impressed that my mother sent money and pictures not just for a few years, but for several decades. And yet that impression is tainted when I consider that she might have done so
out of prolonged envy or even just habit. I remember a particular visit with my mother in her nursing home toward the end of her life. I found her looking lost in the chair beside her bed. I put my arm around her; she seemed so vulnerable, like a child who had been crying. She then told me that her little sister had just left. She told me how much she missed her. I smiled. Perhaps in the end love did prevail.