The Year of Finding Memory (27 page)

It was the beginning of October, but the temperatures in southern China made it feel like July in southern Ontario. Once settled back into the Ever Joint Hotel, Michael and I decided to walk along the river toward the centre of the city.
Last year we were always shuttled by van from one place to another and I’d formed my impressions of this place through the window of a moving vehicle. I remembered Kaiping as rundown and grimy. This evening, for the first time, I saw the beauty of this city, built at the confluence of two large rivers. We walked along the tree-lined boulevard next to the river, then sat down on a bench under a thick canopy of branches and watched the light on the water change as the sun moved closer and closer to the horizon. Several antiquated-looking sampans were moored along the bank. There was something organic about their appearance; in the dimming light the little boats started to look more and more like sea creatures rising out of the river. The air was beginning to cool, and I smelled dampness in the descending dark.

I should not have been surprised. The next morning, the van that Kim had booked for us stopped in front of the hotel, jammed beyond capacity. It already held eleven people. Everyone was headed for Cheong Hong See, the town that I’d discovered, last year, was my actual place of birth. Afterwards, we would go to Ning Kai Lee. Through the van’s windows, I could see Kim and Jeen waving and smiling. Crammed in the back two rows were Kung, Lin, Jook and Lew’s wife, Wei. There were also a few people I recognized but could not name. Shaking my head, I glanced at my husband, who merely shrugged his shoulders. A grinning Bing hopped out of the front passenger seat and gestured for
Michael to sit down. Attitudes had not changed in the intervening year. Everyone cheerfully reorganized themselves while Bing and I squeezed inside. Except for my husband, no one wore a seatbelt. My relatives remembered this from last year and once again they joked about Michael Uncle’s concern for safety.

Michael has an uncanny sense of direction. Several years can pass before he returns to a destination he has driven to only once, and he always seems to know where to go without the assistance of a map. The moment we left the hotel, he knew which road to turn down and recalled landmarks that I had forgotten. Our driver this time was a heavy-set man who leaned on the horn incessantly, and like the driver the year before, insisted on passing everything in sight. But this driver was equally at home passing vehicles from either left or right. Once again, I noticed my husband’s rigid posture and his fist wrapped tightly around the door handle.

We were driving through a now-familiar landscape of rice, vegetables, bananas, sugar cane and papayas. My nieces and cousin Kung kept telling me stories about how remittance money from overseas relatives had made the townspeople in Taishan and Kaiping lazy and indifferent to employment. But this land outside Kaiping City was intensely cultivated and carefully maintained, evidence that at least the farmers continued to work hard. I was not surprised when Michael pointed out the approach to Cheong Hong See. At the entrance to the town, crouching workers were trimming poles by hand on the ground in a bamboo-processing yard, and water buffalo were grazing along the road.

During my childhood I heard certain place names over and over again. Ning Kai Lee was our ancestral village; Cheong Hong See was the location of my parents’ store. But my mother would often tell me that our store was in Chek Sui. I found this confusing, but this year, when I arrived in Cheong Hong See, Bing also referred to the store being in Chek Sui. He then explained to me that Cheong Hong See was simply a local name, given to our side of the river.

My father’s building was in somewhat better shape this year. The outside walls had recently been whitewashed and seemed less tired. But the inside was unchanged: the shelves were still a jumble of dusty boxes packed with old hardware, the tin ceiling shedding flakes of paint. I wondered if the store had sold anything since my previous visit. The proprietor and his wife sat in the very same spot behind the counter. I swore they hadn’t moved in a year.

Bing asked if I wanted to see the upstairs. I nodded, pleased that he’d anticipated my unspoken wish. The year before, when I’d inquired about seeing the second floor, someone had muttered that it was unsafe. And I remembered my sister’s bemused expression when I had asked to see a place that had been uninhabited for so long. It was the room where I’d been born, but it was worthless as far as she was concerned.

Bing led us back outside and unlocked a door beside the entrance to the store. I braced myself for a space that would
be small, confined and dark, yet another reminder of the meagre lives my parents had led. We followed Bing up a narrow set of stairs, which took a turn and opened into a wide staircase with elegant, hand-carved, wooden banisters and spindles. The room was large, with high, peaked ceilings and windows at both ends. It was airy and full of light—not at all what I had imagined. This shabby space had at one time been beautiful. I stood staring, almost breathless, stunned by what I saw. I wandered into each of the three bedrooms, some still containing old dusty furniture. Jeen pointed to an armoire and said it had been built for her parents’ wedding. At one time this cast-off cupboard had been exquisite, with colourful images of flowers and fruit painted on black lacquer.

In one of the bedrooms, Michael noticed a Western-style wardrobe trunk, reinforced in the corners with brass fittings, a trunk similar to the ones his parents had used when they’d crossed the Atlantic from England. I smiled when Jook called it a Gold Mountain chest; it had belonged to our father and had crossed the Pacific many times. On his return journey to China in the late 1920s, he’d made a stopover in Hong Kong, where he filled the trunk with books of classical Chinese literature. After the death of First Wife, just after the start of the Second World War, First Brother sold all the books and used the money to satisfy his gambling addiction. I felt a rush of anger when I heard this story, but my sister spoke without rancour.

Above the travel trunk was a wooden picture frame crowded with photos. Kim was standing beside me and
pointed at one corner. “That’s you when you were just a girl. And look at this one of you and Michael Uncle with your daughters when they were babies. First Brother Uncle must have put these pictures together. He and his family lived here after your mother left for Hong Kong with you, your sister and Doon Uncle.” I had not expected this, not pictures of me with my husband and children. My mother had sent pictures here too, and even though the recipients had not met many of the people in the photos, they were put on display for others to see, for others to know that this family was blessed with a Gold Mountain benefactor.

As I looked around, I became keenly aware that this apartment had belonged to a well-off man. It stood in such stark contrast to the dark, cramped house in Ning Kai Lee. My father had intended that he and my mother would spend the rest of their lives in this spacious, comfortable home. Nothing in these surroundings matched what I knew about my parents. Was it possible that once my father returned to China and married my mother, they’d decided to build a life together here, perhaps without romance, but at least with maturity and mutual respect?

But then the Communists arrived, and my mother knew that the life she was enjoying with her young daughters and stepsons in the market town of Cheong Hong See was about to end. Everyone told her how lucky she was to have a husband in Gam Sun, someone who gave her the means to leave the country legally. People were fearful of the Communists, and my mother suspected that life under their regime would be harsh. Sooner or later they would have found out about
her connection to Big Uncle and our very survival would have been at risk.

Her preference would have been for only his sons to join him in Canada. She and her daughters would live in Hong Kong and receive remittances from my father. But the better schools were beyond his means, and Canada offered free education. The time had come to join him overseas.

My brother, Shing, once told me that our father did not want to return to Canada where he would have to
su lo fon hai.
I knew exactly what he meant, but it was one of those phrases for which I had no precise translation. The closest I could offer Michael was that our father dreaded a future where every breath he took was filled with the contempt of
lofons.
He no longer wanted to fill his lungs with that bitter, toxic air. In 1947, when he believed he was returning to China to stay, his feelings of joy and hope must have been euphoric. The war was over and he would finally be reunited with his children. He would marry a woman whom he respected. Together, they would put the anguish of those war years behind and build a new life in Cheong Hong See. A few short years later he made his no-choice journey back to the Gold Mountain, a man weighed down by anger and despair.

While I stood in my parents’ apartment in Cheong Hong See, Jook told me that in our village our father was
mung kah lah.
When I heard this I could have wept.
Mung kah lah
was how my mother described Big Uncle. Powerful. The image I
have of my father is of a small man with his head perpetually bent at a slight angle while he worked: sorting dirty laundry, ironing rumpled laundry, pulling wet laundry out of the washing machine. It was labour performed always with one’s head down, always looking at one’s hands. As I looked back I understood what I could not articulate as a child. My father was a man who carried the look of defeat. I saw it in his wilted mouth, the slump of his shoulders, in the way his feet barely left the ground when he walked. If my parents agreed on anything, it was that fate had never smiled upon them. In retrospect that brief window of happiness in Cheong Hong See seems almost cruel. Given that my father persisted all those years with eking out a living in sad hand laundries, driven by his all-consuming sense of duty, his efforts were nothing short of heroic.

My father managed to find one
lo fon
friend in the town of Allandale. I think for men like my father it wasn’t just the overt racism that weighed on their spirits; it was knowing that as far as the larger community was concerned, they didn’t exist. My father knew that as long as he did lowly, unthreatening work like washing clothes, the
lo fons
, by and large, would leave him alone. But not always. He sometimes talked about his early years in Canada when he had to dodge those
sei gwei doys
, those half-dead ghost boys, who were after his money. He used to pick up dirty laundry in a cloth sack, and after it had been washed, pressed and folded, he returned it wrapped in brown paper. On delivery days, he was always looking over his shoulder, watchful of the ghost
boys who might overtake him and rob him of the little money he had collected.

My father met Mr. Ward, the only name I’ve ever known him by, when he took a clock in for repair at Mr. Ward’s jewellery and watch repair shop. Later, when Mr. Ward brought the mended clock to the laundry, my father, struggling to make himself understood, pointed to the square outline on the dusty shelf where the clock had stood and shook his head. Mr. Ward looked at the round base and understood that he had delivered the wrong clock. Years later, when I heard the account from Mr. Ward’s son, he told it with a smile on his face. As a child I was baffled as to why the adults found this story funny.