And so I was doomed, early on, to be a word-spreader. To tell these stories that the women of my family made me promise never to tell a soul. Perhaps they told me because they really
did
want the other camp to hear. Perhaps my word-spreading was the only way they could voice their grievances.
Or perhaps my word-spreading is also the only way to see that there was once flesh attached to these bones, that there was once something living and breathing, something that inhaled and exhaled; something that slept and woke up every morning with the past effaced, if only for a moment. That there was a good beginning, and in this good beginning the stories would come like slow trickles of truth, like blood coursing through the veins.
M
Y grandmother was possessed of healing powers, or so it was claimed by those who knew her back in Cambodia. Five sons, people exclaimed – seven children, all of them so bright! Of course, everyone chose to forget about the first two babies who died, because they were just girls. Back then, with the arrival of each child, she seemed to grow in stature, seemed to loom larger than before, unlike some mothers who turned into wispy-haired waifs after the birth of their third. Children were drawn to her. Wherever she walked, there was always a little one pulling at her trouser leg. “Ma! Ma!” they cried, and they followed her like lambs. She did not shake them off, so they sat at her side while she whirred away on her sewing machine, they crammed into her bed and drenched her clothes with their water-logged dreams. She never told them to piss off, because my grandmother never swore at her children, only at my grandpa.
“Healing powers my bum,” my grandpa had scoffed when she told him that because of her powers, she was now the mother of two new boys, one aged seven, the other four. “As if you do not have enough children of your own to look after!” When it came down to childrearing, they were
her
children, he had nothing to do with such prosaic things. Fathers were only there to plant the seeds, it was mothers who did the watering and the fertilising. Of course, the paternal influence would occasionally return to lop off a few leaves for good measure, and smirk for photographs in front of his prize garden, but he made sure to leave immediately afterwards in case the cumquats only glowed orange but were black inside. It was never the pa’s fault if the kids went bad.
“You don’t understand anything,” my grandmother told him, with a slow sad shake of her head. Least of all did he understand how lucky he was. Two streets down from my grandmother’s house, and close to the New Market, there was a mother whose two boys lay moaning in bed, drowning in hot and cold flushes. These boys were friends with my grandmother’s own boys. This mother came to visit my grandmother, bedraggled with grief. “My boys,” she cried, “my boys! Aiyoh, Sister, I need your help! My boys!” They were sick again, but they had always been sickly since they were small. Perhaps it was the air, or the inauspiciousness of their birthdates, but my grandfather suspected they were just spoilt. With every little sniffle attended to, no wonder they liked to slouch around feigning illness.
“Ah Gim, don’t worry,” reassured my grandmother, with a little pat on her friend’s hand. “They will get better, they always do.” But from the look in the woman’s eyes, she could sense that this time it was worse, this time there seemed to be no redemption.
“The sickness,” cried Ah Gim, “they both have the sickness!” The sickness was the smallpox epidemic, for which later every schoolchild had to have their skin scraped with the edge of a knife dipped in ointment. To this day, my mother still bears the scars of the operation on her arm, but Ah Gim’s two boys had caught the disease before the immunisation. “I need your help!” cried Ah Gim. “We need to trick the demons into not taking my sons! Aiihh, this is all my fault, for loving them too much and for making it so bleeding obvious!”
There were dour-faced demons everywhere, and these demons were bent on breaking the bond between mothers and their children. These demons were also gods that needed to be appeased – or deceived if that did not work. Oh, they were insatiable, and to deceive these demons, mothers would try to confuse them, forcing their own children to call them “Aunt” instead of “Ma”. “From now on, I am your auntie,” Ah Gim commanded, standing in front of her two boys. “From now on you must call me Aunt. Do you understand?”
Her poor pale-faced children blinked up at her from their beds. “Don’t give me that confused look, stupid squids, this is for your own good.” Then she turned her face with her chin thrust up high towards the firmament, or wherever she thought the demons were floating.
What, me tormented? You’ve got to be
kidding. I’m just the aunt, these are not my kids, take them if you
want, I don’t want them. In fact, if you take them, you’d be doing me
a favour, I’m sick of looking after these phlegmy princes anyhow.
But the children could not be orphans, either, because to be an orphan was to be the saddest kind of soul in the world, for without a beginning, the ending was bound to be swift. So this is how my grandmother came to be standing by the foot of their mattress on the floor, looking down at the two boys. They looked terrible.
“Look here, you two. You remember Auntie Huyen Thai?” demanded Ah Gim. The boys stared up at my grandmother, wide-eyed from their illness. Their faces were splotched with angry pink.
“If you don’t remember Auntie Thai, then you’d better remember her now, because she is now your mother and you have to call her Ma. Not me. Do you understand?”
The youngest boy’s eyes flickered open in panic. Poor kid, my grandmother thought. His sick mind wasn’t up to these genealogical gymnastics.
“Call her Ma,” commanded their real ma. “She has special powers and will make you better.”
My grandmother wanted to open her mouth and protest, but then she saw the look in the other woman’s eyes and remained silent.
“She has five sons, born one after the other, and all of them healthy and good …” Ah Gim choked a little on the end of this sentence, because she was looking at her own two boys, “and I have you two sick worms! Sick and useless and causing me nothing but a constricted heart!” She clutched her chest with closed fists, as if trying to hold her ribcage together, and her face twisted up.
“Sister, oh, sister, don’t cry,” said my grandmother, “it will all be alright. You will see. Your boys will get better. You will see.”
Ah Gim’s shoulders heaved. Her two boys looked up at her, and then at my grandmother. They didn’t know what was going on, and their heads lolled from side to side. “Ma, ma ma ma,” they bleated in every direction, like little goats, and their bleats drowned out the sound of their mother’s weeping.
So that was how my grandmother came to be in possession of two extra sons, although they lived at the house around the corner. Their “auntie” took such good care of them that my grandmother only had to pay occasional visits. Eventually, the boys did recover from their illness, and although convalescence was slow and their faces were to be permanently cratered, their mother declared it a miracle. She dressed them in their best white shirts and trousers ironed so neatly that the creases in the middle could cut fingers, and she sent them to my grandmother’s house. “But we don’t want to go, Auntie,” they protested.
“Must go,” demanded their mother.
“But Auntie …”
“Must.” She turned her face away from the boys as a smile crept onto her face. She thought that she had put one over the gods.
“Our auntie sent us here to call you Ma,” said the seven-year-old boy tentatively, standing in the living room of my grandmother’s house. My grandmother sat in her brown wooden chair, looked closely at the two spotty-faced boys, and beamed. “So good to see that you boys are all better now!” she cried. “Oh, I am so happy!”
My grandfather, who was sitting opposite, did not say anything. Ah Gim stood behind her boys, her hand so heavy on each one’s shoulder that they appeared lopsided. “Your wife is so clever!” she burbled. “She sure knows how to bring up children, doesn’t she? Ah, look at your boys, so good and clever! I only hope that they can be a good influence on these two useless ones.”
Not knowing how to answer, my grandfather decided to resort to his repertoire of grunts and hmmmpphhs, from which it was impossible to tell whether he concurred or was contemptuous. He scarcely glanced at the two boys and their overzealous aunt. He bore the agony of this visit only by reading a thin volume of Mao Ze Dong poems. Finally, it was time for them to leave.
“You must bring your sons over to play one day!”
“Of course! Of course!” said my grandmother. She was standing up, ruffling the hair of the two boys as they walked towards the door.
“Now say goodbye to your ma!”
The two boys dutifully bleated their farewells.
*
When my grandmother returned to the room, my grandfather was still reading. “Two new sons, now,” said my grandfather, as he slowly turned a page, “two new sons. Are you planning to adopt any more? Perhaps a few more daughters from the village. Yes, a few more girls from the village and perhaps a little goat too hah?”
“What is the matter with you?” demanded my grandmother.
“Oh, nothing, nothing.”
“You should be happy. The more children the merrier.”
“Hmmmpphhh,” muttered my grandfather, “they’re not my children.”
“Ah! So that’s what it is, is it?”
My grandfather remained silent.
“Not my fault that children like me,” said my grandmother.
Finally my grandfather erupted. “Sure, children like you, even pockmarked poor excuses like that. But let me tell you one thing. I think you should take care of your own children before your fingers begin to itch for anyone else’s.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
“And what have you said, old man? Stop talking in circles and tell me what you’re getting at.”
“Well,” began my grandfather deliberately, “I thought you had no interest in sons, considering what you were trying to do with our fourth boy.”
“Fourth boy was the past!” cried my grandmother. “How could you still go on and on about that, reciting past wrongs like a Buddhist mantra!”
“Indeed,” scoffed my grandfather, “bundling up our baby like that and setting off to sell him for a useless daughter!”
My grandmother sighed. “Ah, when will you ever forget that?”
“Never! You tried to swap our son for someone else’s daughter! I should have given you a thrashing! Trying to get rid of a healthy boy!”
The entire story was true, my grandmother was ashamed to admit, but it was also true that she pined for daughters above all else. “I did it for the money,” she had cried when my grandfather found out. “After all, daughters are easier to feed!”
“Such shame on our family if anyone were to find out what crazy things my wife does!” railed my grandfather, wishing my grandmother was an uneducated country girl instead of this strong-jawed communist.
“Well, I got him back!”
“After making me lose so much face you might as well paint a new pair of eyes on my neck!”
*
My grandfather had stopped living with my grandmother after the birth of the fourth son. He had two wives, and returned to his first. The first wife was a marriage arranged by his father. Marrying for love was a luxury, yet when he met my grandmother he could afford few luxuries in his life, being a teacher with two daughters to support. But he did it anyway. And now he wondered whether he had any regrets, whether what he did was a wise thing, considering the crazy things this second wife did. Yet he did not doubt that any child my grandmother took on as her own ended up being obedient to her, filled with such filial piety and respect that they became members of her little army. His sons obeyed him because they were afraid of him, but they followed her because she commanded them. The children seemed no longer theirs, but hers alone, for she alone held power over them.
He did not like this.
My grandfather saw that after her third son was born, people began to look at my grandmother with more respect. After her fourth, with admiration. After her fifth, with awe. “So blessed Huyen Thai is!” Then, when it came to her sixth, it was too much. She bore too much luck and success. The five sons were making her powerful beyond the understanding of my grandfather. She controlled these five little boys who were going to grow into men, and it made my grandfather anxious. They did exactly as she told them. She taught them songs about the homeland, China of course, the communist homeland. The Motherland. “One day I will send you all back,” she vowed, “to become Chinese. This barbarian land is crazy. We have a moonfaced maniac prince who stars in his own movies while there is a civil war going on!”
So when my grandmother was pregnant with her sixth son, my grandfather made a plan to recruit his own army. She was getting too powerful, this woman, with too many people calling her “Ma” this and “Ma” that.
“Tell us a story, Ma!” cried my three-year-old father, “tell us a story!” And tell them stories she did, with each character coming to life as she stretched her face and contorted her mouth, furrowed her brow and brought to life people she liked and people she loathed to battle it out between the heaven and the earth. My grandfather suspected that she made him into one of the characters, perhaps the main one, the main foe with the ferocious face and the ability to startle little children into peeing on the bed.
Back in his first house things were not so interesting. His first wife could not tell stories, at night she went to bed early, and she slept with her mouth dry and open. His two daughters were dull things, they were good and obedient and took in sewing work at home, but they lived to see themselves married where their obedience and goodness would be better appreciated. It was more peaceful in this house than in the house of his second wife, if peace could be defined as absence of ammunition. Of course, there were short sporadic bouts of open fire, when the thought of the second wife was too much for first wife to bear, but my grandfather had a simple and effective way to silence these remonstrations: “If you could give me sons, then I wouldn’t need to go over there!” In the end, he thought of a way to put a stop to all his problems, an ingenious way to shut up first wife and make that supercilious second wife learn a little humility. Of course, like all his plans, whether they came into fruition ultimately depended on my grandmother, and this irritated him no end, but there was nothing else for it.