The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  for Alison and Katherine

  Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart. Confucius

  I know men in exile feed on dreams of hope. Aeschylus, from Agamemnon

  THE MAIN CHARACTERS

  FONG WAH YENT: my father and father of Hing, Shing, Jook and Doon

  FONG YET LAN: my mother and mother of Ming Nee

  FIRST WIFE: my father’s first wife, mother of Hing, Shing, Jook and Doon SECOND UNCLE: my father’s older brother, my uncle

  BIG UNCLE: my mother’s oldest brother, my uncle

  THOH: the Chinese title for both a sister and a daughter-in-law, the title my mother used for Big Uncle’s first wife

  LITTLE AUNT: my mother’s younger sister, my aunt

  FIRST BROTHER HING: my father’s oldest son, my half-brother

  SHING: my father’s middle son, my half-brother

  JOOK: my father’s oldest daughter, my half-sister

  DOON: my father’s youngest son, my half-brother

  MING NEE: my mother’s daughter from her first marriage, my half-sister

  JEN: Shing’s wife, my sister-in-law

  YENG: Doon’s wife, my sister-in-law

  KIM: Jook’s oldest daughter, my niece

  SU: Jook’s youngest daughter, my niece

  VEN: Su’s husband

  CHONG: Jook’s youngest son, my nephew

  LIANG: Jook’s middle son, my nephew

  LEW: First Brother Hing’s son, my nephew

  WEI: Lew’s wife

  JEEN: First Brother Hing’s daughter, my niece

  BING: Jeen’s husband

  KUNG: Little Aunt’s son, my cousin

  LIN: Kung’s wife

  MICHAEL: my husband

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This memoir is a work of creative nonfiction. The story of my parents changes according to the teller. This is my version.

  I have used the actual names of my parents and my husband. The names of many other people in this book have been changed out of respect for their privacy and, in some cases, their safety. I have also given some of the Chinese personal names new English transliterations, which I hope are closer to the Four Counties dialect.

  My family is from Kaiping County, one of the counties in the region known as Sze Yup, the Four Counties (Kaiping, Taishan, Xinhui and Enping) in Guangdong Province, southern China. Many of the Chinese who immigrated to North America in the first six decades or so of the twentieth century were from this region. My family speaks Sze Yup, or Taishanese, the Four Counties dialect that is still widely spoken in the region.

  Parts of this book take place in pre-Communist China. When referring to places in China during those times, I have used the spellings that were in usage then. However, when writing about current times, I have used the Pinyin, the official system used in China for writing Chinese in the Roman alphabet.

  PROLOGUE

  Not long after my father hanged himself in the summer of 1972, I found a small cardboard box tucked far beneath his bed. My mother and I were clearing out his bedroom, and all that remained was this one piece of furniture. The walls needed a coat of paint, and I could see silhouettes left from pictures of family weddings and my university graduation. I knelt on the bare, wooden-planked floor and reached under with a broom handle, pulling the box toward me. I wiped away a layer of dust, and as I lifted the lid, a stagnant smell of old ink and stale papers, of things sealed off for a long time from anything living, wafted up and caught in the back of my throat.

  Piled inside were several old documents, along with letters from China, written on aerograms and onion skin paper, folded and stored in airmail envelopes. I took out one of the letters and opened it, felt the thin, translucent paper between my fingers and stared at those columns of beautiful Chinese characters penned in black ink, a script that I was unable to read. What was in those letters? I wanted to know. I suddenly felt angry. In the months after my father’s death, it seemed that whatever equanimity I was able to achieve could shatter in an instant. Without warning I would be seething with rage, then overcome with grief. But why was I angry again? with myself, for never learning how to read and write Chinese? for having parents so unlike me and so difficult to understand? at my father and what he had done to himself, what he had done to us?

  I took a deep breath and lifted more letters out of the box. Underneath, I found my father’s blue, cloth-bound Chinese passport. I found his 1949 immunization certificates for smallpox and cholera and the stub of his airline ticket from the China National Aviation Corporation—departing Hong Kong on August 22, 1949, for Gam Sun, the Gold Mountain, a place to which he had thought he would never have to return. Toward the bottom of the box, on top of some Kuomintang government bonds, was his Canadian citizenship certificate, dated July 25, 1950. On the back it stated that Fong Wah Yent was fifty-seven years old, a laundryman, five feet two inches in height, eyes brown, hair black, complexion dark and colour yellow.

  I loosened a faded brown envelope from the stack of now worthless bonds. I opened it and found a green certificate with the words Dominion of Canada arranged in an arc of emphatic black type across the top. An ornate geometric pattern formed a border around the certificate’s edge. The paper felt thick and smooth. All these things declared the importance of this document. In the lower right-hand corner, I saw a photograph of a man, a small, black-and-white portrait, similar to those in passports, except this one was on a certificate dated April 7, 1914, that had cost its holder five hundred dollars. The man was young, twenty-one years old, a year younger than I was as I sat looking at his image. His hair was parted at the side and neatly combed; his cheekbones were pronounced and his ears stuck out. He wore a dark, loose-fitting Chinese jacket with a stand-up collar. He looked back at me with an expression that was impossible to read, perhaps because the task before him was so overwhelming that he was unable to communicate an emotion. The man in the photograph was my father, and the piece of paper was his head tax certificate. How did this youth become the old man my mother found hanging from a rope in the basement of their house, the man whose death had struck us like a sudden explosion of glass, hurling shards so small and fine they embedded themselves deep in our flesh, never to be removed.

  I turned this document over and saw the dates of my father’s entry and re-entries clearly stamped on the back. For thirty-three years while he travelled between China and Canada, his head tax certificate reminded him that he was unwanted in this country. Two deep creases showed where the certificate had been folded into thirds so it would fit inside an envelope. Other than these signs of wear, and a few tears along the edge, it was in pristine condition, considering that it had crossed the Pacific Ocean five times. But I should not have been surprised. My parents took exceptional care of their documents, not out of pride but fear—fear that if a certain paper was lost or mutilated, they would not be allowed to enter one country or depart from another, or they would be unable to sponsor the immigration of family. Their existence would be suddenly nullified. In clean, black ink at the bottom of the certificate, covering a portion of my father’s chest, was the signature of the comptroller of Chinese Immigration, Malcolm M. Reid.

  My father spoke to me many times about the head tax, his voice bitter. Only the Chinese had to pay this money. No one else, Five hundred dollars to get into this country. Five hundred dollars I had to borrow. But until I found the head tax certificate under his bed, I was not aware that it had remained in his possession. And now I was holding it in my hand, a worthless piece of paper, a priceless document, the cost of my happiness.

  I took a deep breath and continued to look at the man in this picture. The paper felt heavy and my hands were trembling. A lump grew in my throat and I strug
gled to swallow. For as long as I had known my father, he had been an old man. But here he was, a youth, staring at me across time itself. At that moment it seemed as if we both had our lives ahead of us. If only I could find a way into the past and warn him.

  ONE

  I would have preferred something a little more subtle, but the pink geraniums were past their prime, the leaves beginning to brown. The red ones, however, had leaves that were new and green, with clusters of buds yet to blossom. There was a limited selection of plants at the greengrocer’s, and I had walked up and down in front of the racks outside the store several times. I had contemplated other flowers this year, but for as long as I could remember, whenever my family visited the graves, they took geraniums. It was hard to know whether they had been chosen because of their low price or their symbolic value or because of superstition. Like so many rituals from my childhood, the longevity of the tradition had taken on a significance of its own, and to depart from an established way of doing things might pose a risk. We had always done it this way. And nothing bad had happened. So why change? Why risk the wrath of the gods? I picked the four best plants, and my husband put them in the back of our station wagon.

  Michael and I had just picked up my brother Shing from his suburban home north of Toronto for the annual visit to my parents’ graves at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. On that particular day in early June of 2006, the sky was cloudless and the air in the city felt thin. I noticed that every year, no matter which day we chose for the grave ceremony, the sun shone. I no longer bothered to check the weather forecast.

  Shing is actually my half-brother, a son from my father’s first marriage. He is a gentle man who possesses a quiet dignity. When he left China for Hong Kong in 1950, he was twenty years old. A year later, when he arrived in Toronto, a village uncle who owned a restaurant gave him a job as a waiter. Eventually he found a position at the post office sorting mail. He regards himself as fortunate to have a government pension that has given him and his wife a modest retirement. I have a photograph of him taken in the early fifties. Dressed in a pale summer suit, he is leaning against a shiny, black car, a beaming smile on his face. I once asked him if the car belonged to him or a friend. He laughed and said he had no idea who owned the car.

  My parents’ plot is marked by a pink granite headstone, with their names boldly engraved in English and Chinese. Unlike the older, established part of Mount Pleasant, where the graceful canopies of tall, elegant trees provide shade and refuge, the area where my parents are buried is like a suburb on the edge of town, with sun-baked expanses of lawn, trees and shrubs not yet mature. The graves have names like Wong, Lee, Choy, Seto and Fong.

  Shing and I had filled our watering cans at the nearby tap. Michael was crouching in front of the stone, digging two holes with a trowel. As soon as he finished, he poured water into the holes and waited for it to soak in. He then removed the two geraniums from their pots and planted them. He rinsed the gravestone with the leftover water, and with a small twig he cleaned out any moss that had grown inside the engraved characters. Lastly, he pruned the conical cedar bushes on either side of the grave. Every year my husband performed this custodial role for the graves of people who weren’t his parents while their children watched. Once Michael completed the tidying, my brother and I arranged the offering of oranges, dumplings and cups of tea on the grass. I had never been able to do this without thinking of it as a picnic for the dead. Shing then handed me a sheaf of spirit money, which he had purchased in Chinatown. Every colourful bill was printed with denominations in the millions and billions, money needed for bribing evil spirits in order to ensure safe passage into the afterlife. I stuffed the paper inside a large coffee tin while Shing made up three bundles of incense sticks. Michael struck a match, lit the sticks, then tossed the match into the can, igniting all those bills.

  I am not a religious woman. Nevertheless, as a good Chinese daughter, I have performed these rituals every year since my father’s death—but I have never left with a sense of peace, unable to escape the fact that unhappiness permeated my parents’ marriage. No contented sighs over lives that had been filled with challenges but were ultimately well lived. It was impossible not to think about their loneliness and about my father’s sad end. After all these years, I still tasted a residue of shame in my mouth. As I watched Shing bow three times in front of the headstone, with the incense sticks still in his hands, I wondered if he was thinking the same thing. The memories that no one in my family dared to voice. I watched Shing as he jammed the smouldering incense into the earth next to the flowers. Was he also haunted by our father’s death? Or was he thinking ahead to China, a land we had not seen for more than fifty years?

  Earlier in the year, my half-sister Ming Nee, my mother’s daughter from her first marriage, had proposed a family trip back to China that would include her, our brothers Shing and Doon—another son from my father’s first marriage—and me. Her husband was a university professor, and through his work they had travelled frequently over the years to the Far East. She had been back to visit our family in China several times. Although Ming Nee had initiated this journey home, it turned out that she would be unable to accompany us, as our needs and her husband’s schedule were incompatible. Nevertheless, her suggestion had planted an idea that my brothers and I could not ignore: we knew that the time had come for us to return. I wanted to be with my brothers for this homecoming, and the trip would also include Michael and Shing’s wife, Jen, and Doon’s wife, Yeng.

  When Shing and Doon had left China, they were young men looking to the future. How vivid were those memories of growing up across the ocean? My brothers had left behind in China a sister in her early twenties and an older brother in his early thirties, each married with young children. The brother was now dead and the sister was seventy-six and widowed. The last time we saw each other, I was three. It was shocking how little I knew about these half-siblings. If my sister had passed me on the street, I would not have recognized her.

  Shing and Doon, though, sent money to the family in China every year. They were close in age to this sister and had grown up with her in a village I had never seen. They watched out for each other after their mother died during the Second World War and their father was stranded on the other side of the world. I knew that my role in this return journey would be peripheral. They were returning to a homeland; I would be exploring a foreign country, a place of great curiosity but no real emotional attachment. My home was here. I was a happily married woman, with a teaching career that had lasted more than twenty years and had achieved some professional success as a writer. I had raised two healthy, independent daughters, the oldest married and expecting her first child. I owned my own home. I had survived my parents’ unhappy marriage and my father’s tragic death. In China I would be more like my Anglo-Canadian husband—a tourist, sitting on the sidelines, watching someone else’s momentous occasion.

  Shing finished paying his respects and indicated to Michael and me that it was our turn to pray. I bowed three times, but I was no longer thinking about my parents. I was thinking of the deep anticipation that my brother must have felt when he first decided to make the journey to China. It was an anticipation I would never know. A twinge of envy pricked at my heart.

  The food that we had set in front of the gravestone was packed away in a cooler and stored inside the station wagon, ready to take back to Shing’s house. We climbed into the car and drove across the cemetery to where Second Uncle was buried. His grave is marked by a tiny, rectangular grey stone, chiselled with just his name and date of death in Chinese characters. This area has only small, flat memorial markers, and like my uncle’s the inscriptions are all in Chinese. Every year we needed to wander for several minutes to find his marker because it was always overgrown with grass. But this year we found it quickly; Michael had remembered that there was a yew tree nearby, with a distinctive shape. Second Uncle had brought no children to the Gold Mountain, no son or daughter to honour his grave. Other than the
fact that he was an older brother who had come to Canada with my father in the early part of the twentieth century, as a child I knew almost nothing about him, not even his name—and by the time my mother joined my father in Canada, this man had been dead for several years.

  But every year Shing reminded me to buy flowers to plant for Second Uncle. I stood looking at his gravestone and thought about my parents’ resting place—their upright, shining, granite headstone proudly proclaiming their status in Canada. And yet it was Second Uncle’s humble marker that spoke the truth. I was only too aware of how sad and difficult my parents’ lives had been in this country that remained foreign to them until they died.

  On April 6, 1914, the day my father and his older brother arrived in Canada, a Vancouver newspaper, the Daily News Advertiser, forecast fair and warm weather. Further down the front page, the mayor of Vancouver expressed concern about the large number of Chinese who were entering the country. He emphasized the uncontrollable temper of Orientals, proof of their unpredictability, making them unsuitable candidates for immigration. On the same day, the Vancouver Daily World carried a story from a canning mill about a Chinese worker who, after being criticized by his white foreman, picked up his superior and in a fit of anger tried to throw him into a boiling cauldron. However, the Chinaman—or “Celestial” as he was called—was restrained and disaster was averted. Compared to the white Canadians, my father and the Chinese men of his generation were small. When I discovered these stories in the Vancouver newspaper archives, it was hard for me to reconcile this portrayal of a violent, impulsive Chinese man with my docile father and others like him whom I had seen over the years whenever I visited Chinatown in Toronto.

  I distinctly recall from my early childhood one particular customer who came into my father’s hand laundry, a giant, red-faced man who stomped through the door, stood in front of the wooden counter and banged its surface with a clenched fist until my father appeared. Waving his hand dismissively, the man leaned against the counter and boomed, “I know. No tickee, no laundree. You find, Charlie. You find.” My father untied and folded back the brown paper from package after package of cleaned and pressed garments until the man recognized his clothes. He never apologized for the extra work he put my father through. And my father never protested. Instead, he nodded his head up and down, a stiff smile plastered across his face. I peeked from behind the curtain that hung over the doorway, separating the service from the washing areas. Blood rushed to my cheeks. But the next time this man came into our laundry with his sack of dirty clothes, my father wrote a name in Chinese characters on each half of the ticket before giving the man’s portion to him. When the man returned for his finished laundry a few days later, again without his half of the slip, my father had to unwrap only one package. The man was speechless and managed to mutter no more than thank you as he left the laundry. My father later told me that he’d written the man’s name on his half of the ticket.