The Year of Finding Memory (32 page)

Mo vun fut. Mo vun fut.
What choice did I have? I can still hear my mother’s voice—sometimes a plea for sympathy, sometimes a bitter statement full of resentment. How terrible must it have been for her to have to go back to that very no-good man during the war. So this was why it would have been acceptable to be a second to my father’s illiterate first wife. At least my father was kind, decent and responsible.

During a visit to my mother’s nursing home, toward the end of her life, I found her lying in bed, facing the wall and wailing, “Wwwhy? Look at her! She’s
lum lum, huk huk
, blue, blue, black black. She’s dead! My daughter is dead. You’ve beaten and kicked her to death.” I called out to her, telling her that I was alive and standing next to her bed. My mother’s body stiffened and she slowly turned to look at me. Her face was frozen with shock and fear. I reached over and stroked her cheek. She took my hand in hers, her features softening with relief, her eyes welling with tears. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered. “Somebody told me that Michael had beaten you to death.” A wave of anger flooded through my body. How could she say this about her son-in-law, my
husband who had welcomed her into our home, who cooked her favourite meals, who was often a personal chauffeur, who had been generous and accommodating. But I said nothing except to reassure her that I was very much alive and well. I had to remind myself that my mother had dementia and not to take her mumblings seriously. But after hearing my cousin, I saw things from a new perspective: in her delusion it wasn’t me who was being beaten. It was my mother herself. Now I understood why she took the chances she did in that tiny village and why she deceived my father over a decade later when she wrote that fateful proposal of marriage. She was desperate to be rescued.

Whenever I think about these events, I see in my mind my mother, sobbing with grief, at my father’s funeral. I can remember my surprise at the depth of her emotional response to the death of a man she had never seemed to love. Perhaps I’d had it right when I was a child. Perhaps my mother and Ming Nee did greet my father with joy and jubilation when he got off the boat. And when they rode the sedan chair back to the village, their laughter filled the air, certain the stars had finally brought them together and placed before them a bright, happy future.

We were approaching the outskirts of Kaiping City. The day’s excursion had left everyone fatigued and me distracted. But my nieces insisted on stopping at their brother’s orange grove. Kim said it was not far from the main road and should take
us no more than an hour or so out of our way. I hesitated, but Michael reminded me that we were being offered an opportunity to see a side of the country that would not be available to the average tourist. He was right.

We had seen very little of my nephew Chong on this trip because he was busy with his orange grove. He lived in Kaiping City and rode his motorcycle to his farm every day. Kim directed our driver down another stony, deeply rutted trail, but it couldn’t get all the way into the orchard, so we left it parked and walked the rest of the way. Once we departed from the trail, the six of us continued single file down a winding dirt path until we arrived at a hillside covered with orange trees that were laden with plump, round fruit. We came to a small clearing and found my nephew with his workers, building a new dormitory. When he saw us, he left his workers and took us on a tour of his orchard.

Along the way, Kim showed us where she had cultivated plantings of ginger and
muk see
, a large, yam-like root. She went into a storage shed and returned with a hoe. Lifting the tool above her shoulder, she brought it down with a single, forceful chop. The
muk see
bush that had been over six feet tall, with several robust stalks, was now severed and lying on its side. My husband glanced at me, his eyes wide with admiration. Kim then loosened the earth around the
muk see
, and we all bent over and helped her harvest the crop.

The stems of the ginger plant were delicate and no more than eighteen inches long, and its leaves were narrow and grass-like. The roots, when dug from the earth, were pale and fat, so much more succulent than anything I’d ever seen
in a grocery store back home. I watched my nieces chatting and laughing as they worked, and I found myself wondering whether I would have been like them if my mother and I had stayed in China. It was hard not to admire these two women. They were both assured and capable. Although Kim’s formal education had been sabotaged, her life was rich, helping various family members, visiting with her brothers, haggling in the markets. Her cell phone rang frequently with calls from friends. I looked at Su and saw my mother. If she had been able to finish her studies in silkworm culture, she would have been like this, an independent woman with her own store. I could picture her unravelling bolts of gorgeous silk for interested customers, helping them decide which one to purchase.

Chong picked some of the ripest oranges from his trees and passed them around to all of us. Michael wanted to see the entire property, so my nephew led us on a walk along a path that I suspected would take us to the end of the grove. To my amazement, at the boundary of Chong’s farm, there was another hill with more cultivated fields, and just beyond that was a collection of old, tumbledown buildings, a tucked-in-the-corner hamlet. “This country is
so
old,” said Michael. “You get the sense that there’s no such thing as the
end of the trail.
You can go down the most obscure, overgrown path that should lead nowhere and suddenly you’re looking at something: a small holding, a cluster of buildings, an out-of-the-way village.”

The sky was thinly streaked with clouds, and the light was still warm and soft—on the cusp of darkness. We stood for
another few minutes, then started to retrace our footsteps. By the time we got back to the van, I could see the moon, like a giant orange itself, glowing against a darkening sky. It seemed so close I felt I could reach up and pluck it.

One of my strongest childhood memories is of my mother sleeping. Whenever there was a break from work, she chose to lie down. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized the obvious: she was depressed. My relatives in China saw my parents almost as mythic characters. I so wished I could share their point of view, but to me they were testaments to self-denial and endurance. Other families produced heroes who performed fantastic feats, prevailing against all odds. With my parents there were no fantastic feats. With them it was never what they gave me; it was what they gave up. I could not brag about lessons, tuition for camp, an airline ticket or help with a down payment for a home. When I try to describe their gifts, words fail me.

The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry. I cannot connect this charming, much-admired and respected woman to my
sharp-tongued mother, consumed by bitterness. I cannot connect this confident man with high standing in his community to the diminished man whom I knew as my father, to the man who ended his life at the end of a rope. My parents were unhappy exiles in the Gold Mountain, shadows of their former selves. I am left aching to know the man and the woman who knew each other before I was born. Whatever truth I now hold feels insignificant and false.

TWENTY-TWO

M
y sister Jook lived with her son Liang and his family in the village of Ong Sun, where Su also had her herbal pharmacy. The morning after our trip to Ai Sah and Yellow Olive, we met Kim at the Kaiping bus station and boarded the 10 a.m. bus to Ong Sun for a last visit with my sister. We would also see Liang and his farm, which was on the outskirts of the village. In another few days, we’d be leaving for Shanghai.

As we headed out of town, the bus stopped every few blocks to let on other riders, each paying with a handful of soiled-looking bills. But before arriving at Ong Sun, Kim wanted to stop and show us her husband’s ancestral village, which was on the same road. As it turned out, it was only a few hundred yards from Ning Kai Lee. This made sense. Kim’s married name was Fong, and the cluster of villages in this area was all inhabited by Fongs. The village resembled my father’s, but it was in much worse shape. At one time it had been home to forty households with a population of
about two hundred people. Now, only four households with about twenty people still lived there. Kim led us to her husband’s ancestral house and unlocked the door. The air was stale, and I could smell the dampness in the bricks. Black mildew was growing on some of the surfaces. It had not been occupied for almost fifteen years. In one room I saw sheets of paper glued to the wall. It was hard to tell what was on them because they were discoloured and wrinkled with moisture. But on closer inspection, I could see that the pictures were of glamorous young women dressed in fashionable clothes, pictures of Chinese movie and singing stars, clipped from magazines. Kim smiled and told me that her daughter, who now lived in Ottawa, had pasted them there when she was a teenager.

Several weeks before coming to China, Michael and I had driven to Ottawa and met Kim’s daughter for the first time. While we were there, Michael took dozens of pictures of her, her husband, her baby and their new, suburban house. When I gave these photos to Kim, there was pleasure and longing on her face, and she poured out questions about her daughter and grandchild. I felt both pleased and guilty. It was unfair that she was unable to visit her daughter and granddaughter while I had the resources to hop on a plane to China for a holiday. I looked at the posters of those women in typical movie star poses, hair coiffed and smiles perfect, eyes flirting with the camera. Kim’s daughter, in some ways, had been like her great-grandfather, my father—fantasizing about the Gold Mountain.

A few days before, Kim and I had sat together in the garden across the road from the Ever Joint Hotel. We’d been shopping in downtown Kaiping and decided to rest for a while before I returned to my room. She told me once again that she and her husband wanted to emigrate and join their daughter overseas. Her daughter was in the process of sponsoring them, and they hoped to go in another two years. She was worried, though, about passing the interview with the immigration officers. She had heard rumours about a trained cook who’d given the wrong answer for preparing a fish and was subsequently refused entry. I said this was unlikely, since Canada had a point system and that if the applicant was refused, it was most likely because he didn’t have a high enough score. Kim nodded politely. I could tell she doubted my response.

As my niece spoke about her desire to live overseas, I thought about my mother and how she never adjusted to her new country. She’d arrived in her early forties, and if Kim were to immigrate she would be doing so in her sixties. The last time my niece spoke to me about her desire to emigrate, I’d kept my opinion to myself. But now I wanted to tell her that although she’d be living with her daughter in a comfortable house in the suburbs, homes in Canada were not like homes in southern China—friendly to the outdoors, welcoming to friends dropping by. I wanted to tell her that she’d have to depend on others for transportation, that she’d be far away from Chinatown, that she wouldn’t be able to talk to friends on her cell phone, that she wouldn’t be able to haggle in the markets, that she would no longer harvest fresh ginger
from her brother’s farm or help at her sister’s tidy herbal pharmacy. I wanted to warn her that winters in Ottawa were cold beyond her comprehension. I knew how much Kim missed her daughter and longed to see her granddaughter, and I suppose she also longed for what she saw as my wealth and comfortable lifestyle. But Canada was my home, and English was my language.