The Year of Finding Memory (35 page)

M
y father had finally sold the laundry in Acton and with the proceeds, my parents bought a shoebox of a house, a tiny row house on a short, secluded street in Toronto’s Chinatown, not far from Dundas Street. Like so many Chinese of their generation, they kept a room for themselves and rented out the rest. My mother was dividing her time between my father in Toronto and helping my brother at his restaurant an hour or so outside the city. She and my father were far from happy, but at least they seemed to have reached a truce. The terrible quarrels that used to consume them and terrify me as a child were now a thing of the past.

Shing had a steady job with Canada Post, and Doon owned a restaurant with a solid business. Ming Nee had married a university professor and was living a comfortable life in a large, suburban house. They all had children. I had a real job, having graduated from university the year before with a liberal arts degree. My parents had hoped I would enter one of the higher-level professions such as law or medicine, but I had neither the interest nor the academic inclination.
Nevertheless, I was the first person in my immediate family to finish university, and my parents were proud of that. On the day of my convocation, my parents were in the audience, and as I walked across the stage to receive my degree, I saw my father lift his peaked cap in recognition.

I remembered thinking that being an assistant at the Ontario College of Art library was a pretty special position to have landed. I was a small town girl, and the fact that they had chosen me above the other applicants had been a personal triumph. My parents were proud that I was financially independent at such an early age, and my mother bragged to her friends that I was sharing an apartment with some other girls and that her daughter had an annual salary of over five thousand dollars! “Not bad for a girl,” one of them said. My father told me many times how happy he was that I was making a living using my head and not my hands. Even with my modest income, I had comforts that my parents only dreamed about in their Gold Mountain life. I was on my way to living like a
lo fon.

In the short walk from the Ontario College of Art to my parents’ house, my clothes had become damp. We were in the middle of a July heat wave. Even breathing required effort. My mother had returned to the city the day before and had invited me to have lunch with her and my father.

The moment she opened the front door of their little row house, I knew she’d spent the morning cooking. Her
forehead was shiny with perspiration. I could smell garlic and the distinctive aroma of long-simmering soup. I saw the dishes on the kitchen table: four-flavour soup from pork bones, almond seeds, lily bulbs, lotus seeds and red dates; steamed fish; and stir-fried green beans with fermented tofu. My mother had gone to a lot of trouble; she was constantly worried about what I ate. I gave my parents each a hug and sat down, resigned to eating the hot food my mother had made with such love and concern, when all I wanted was a salad. My father appeared particularly haggard that day. He was wearing a thin, white T-shirt instead of his usual white button-up shirt with rolled-up sleeves. I thought his breathing seemed laboured. In spite of my lack of hunger, I ate a whole bowl of rice and drank a full bowl of soup. It was delicious. I was just about finished when my father reached across the table with his chopsticks and accidentally knocked over his soup.

“Eeiyah
, look how clumsy you are,” my mother scolded. “Can’t do anything right.”

My father sat there, defeated, unable to say a single word.

“Never mind, never mind,” I said, trying to smooth things over.

I helped her tidy the mess, and whatever friction there was between them seemed to dissipate. They both smiled and waved goodbye at the door. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though a certain equilibrium had been restored, I saw the exhaustion in my father’s face. His chest looked hollow under his shapeless T-shirt, and his mouth was slack. His breathing was so shallow I could almost feel the effort
behind it. All the way back to the college library, I kept seeing his face.

My mother had never before phoned me at work. But shortly after my return, when a co-worker handed me the telephone, I knew without even being told, that it was my mother. I knew she was calling about my father. My mother told me in a strangled voice that my father was dead. “Hurry. Come. Hurry. Come. Now,” she said between gasps of breath. I felt dizzy with fear.

I ran the few blocks that separated the College of Art from my parents’ house. The sun hurt my eyes; my shirt was sodden and stuck to my skin. My chest felt like a hollow cave, my heart pounding against the walls. When I arrived neighbours were crowded around an ambulance parked outside the house. The back doors were open, and a couple of paramedics were sliding in a stretcher with a body draped from head to toe in a white sheet. My mother was standing a little to the side with her hands pressed against her mouth. Her face was ashen. When I put my arms around her, she let out a long, painful moan. Her body crumpled and I could barely hold her up. At the same time her fingers dug into my shoulders. Everyone was watching us. Nobody said a word. This couldn’t be happening to us. That couldn’t really be my father on the stretcher. But it was. We stood clinging to each other, sobbing, afraid to let go.

Long after I’d led her back into the house, my mother continued crying, stopping only to catch her breath. Those last moments with my father emerged from her in reluctant fragments. But finally I was able to piece together what had
happened. After I had left to return to work, my father went into the basement while my mother stayed in the kitchen doing the dishes. She heard something clatter to the floor. For some reason she knew that things were not right and ran down the stairs, not even bothering to dry her hands. There was my father with a rope around his neck, dangling from a beam in the ceiling. She rushed over and wrapped her arms around his legs, pushing him up, trying to ease the pressure of the rope. He still felt warm, but it was too late.

The following few days were a blur. The same village uncle who had greeted my mother and me at the airport when we’d arrived in Canada almost twenty years earlier now accompanied me to one of the Chinese newspapers and wrote the obituary. Afterwards, he took me to a restaurant where we booked a post-funeral reception. My brother Shing and I went to the local funeral home and chose a coffin. We picked an oak casket that cost seven hundred dollars. I purchased a double plot at Mount Pleasant cemetery and helped my brother choose a pink granite headstone. My brother wrote in Chinese characters on a sheet of paper for the stone carver my father’s dates and that he was a native of Ning Kai Lee, Kaiping County, Guangdong Province, China.

At twenty-two years old, I was the youngest child in our family but not too young to supervise the arrangements at a funeral home in Chinatown where only English was spoken.

Shing, Doon, Ming Nee and their spouses and people who were distantly related through our ancestral village
were at the funeral. A friend I had known since high school was there with her aunt. Michael sat with them. So much of that day remains a blur, except for my mother and how inconsolable she was. Even now, when I think about the lack of affection in their marriage, the depth of her sorrow seems out of proportion. It didn’t seem to matter whether she was standing or sitting; her body was crippled with grief. Every time I glanced at her, she was bent over, unable to straighten herself. All the mourners voiced their shock in a constant refrain. His children were all doing so well. He had so much to be proud of. He was an old man already. Why did he end his life like that?

I stayed with my mother for a couple of weeks after my father’s death. She’d already decided she wouldn’t continue to live in the row house. Within a week of my father’s death, all the tenants had moved, our home tainted by suicide. She decided that she’d no longer let out rooms but would rent the entire house to a non-Chinese family instead. I was expected to find the tenants, to collect the rent and look after her house. She would now live with Doon’s family in the apartment above his restaurant.

At one point I asked if she was afraid to sleep in the house, and she replied that there was nothing to fear. “Your father died a terrible death. But your father was a good man,” she said to me. “He would never do harm to you, me or anyone. You must never forget that.”

I felt my mother’s strength returning in her words, and yet a few days later, the calm evaporated. I returned from work one evening to find that she’d thrown away all of my father’s possessions. Her forehead was beaded with perspiration. She shook with anger, spitting out her words between gasps of breath. She insisted that she’d had to get rid of everything. After he died I remembered seeing the hand-sewn books made from sheets of brown paper, filled with his poetry. I had made a mental note to save them. I had told myself that in time I would find someone to translate the words into English. These books represented a side of my father that had been inaccessible, but I had dreamed that one day it would be revealed to me. Now they were gone, taken away with the trash.

As I looked around the rooms, my jaw went slack and I glared at her. Her feelings about her dead husband swung from grief and despair to uncontrollable rage. I could picture her tearing through his few possessions, throwing them into a green garbage bag. My mother even tossed out his gold watch and fob. For a man who lived without luxury, these were the only things he’d ever owned that were beautiful and hinted at personal indulgence. He’d bought them on his last journey to China and had tucked them inside his waistcoat when coming back to Canada. He used to let me hold the watch, its surface hard and smooth against my fingers. And when I snapped open the small, round door, it revealed a clock face with tiny black numbers. One day it will be yours, he said. The only thing I found that had missed my mother’s frenzy was an abacus. I can still see my
father sitting at the ironing table, late into the night, adding up the money that he had taken in and subtracting the cost of supplies. I can see his hand poised over the rungs, hear the click-clack of the beads as his fingers pushed them up and down.

I continued to glare at my mother in this half-empty room.
How dare you? How dare you toss out these things? The decisions are not yours alone to make. These things belonged to my father and as his daughter I had a right to them.
I felt rage deep in my gut, surging and rising, filling my lungs. I wanted to open my mouth and scream. Instead, I swallowed and forced everything back, deep inside my belly. It would have been spiteful of me to say anything. But as hard as I tried to keep that anger suppressed, in the years that followed my father’s death, every so often it would find a crack in the armour that I had fitted around my resentment, and when it seeped through, the results were hurtful and unsettling. I lashed out over inconsequential things that made me feel mean and ungenerous. The real issue I kept buried, unable to look it in the face. The memory of my mother’s shame mingled with anger and sadness will always be with me.

My father’s suicide left us, his children and grandchildren, a bitter legacy. More than thirty-five years have passed, and even though we are living good lives, his death haunts us like a dark shadow. Until now I have been unable to speak openly about it. If asked how my father died, I had a ready response.
He was eighty years old, I would say, worn out from all those years of hard work. It was an acceptable reply, one that invited no further queries, one that allowed me to once again bury the dull ache rising in my chest.