The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  So, at the beginning of each July during my early elementary school years, I would devote only a few reluctant hours to learning written Chinese. After several successive summers, my mother gave up on me and reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter would never know how to read or write her parents’ language. Instead, I would learn to embrace English, the language of the lo fons. I would read over and over again about Adam and Eve, Noah, Samson, Ruth and Naomi, Esther, David, Solomon, Cinderella, Snow White, Jack, Rapunzel, the Sleeping Beauty. My Chinese persisted as a language spoken by a child to her parents, a palette without nuance, restricted to primary colours, whereas, with English, I was beginning to discover endless subtleties. This language had claimed my soul. I was a willing captive.

  I didn’t give much thought to how my parents felt about this. What must it have been like to have a daughter whose mind was occupied by a culture that would remain to them forever alien and strange? But unbeknownst to them and to me, beneath my Western exterior I remained a dutiful Confucian daughter. Those age-old ideals had been a part of the very air in my father’s laundry.

  Several of my relatives had suggested visiting Kai Yuan Tower, built to commemorate scholars and specifically Confucius. Throughout my childhood my parents had emphasized the importance of learning. For her generation and class of Chinese women, my mother was considered well educated. My father had much less formal education but had nevertheless immersed himself in China’s classical literature. As an indirect way of honouring my parents, I went to Kai Yuan Tower before returning home. I had grown up in a culture that ranked athletes and movie stars at the apex of the cultural pyramid. The notion that a shrine had been erected simply to honour learning had therefore tweaked my curiosity and stirred my admiration.

  We went on a Sunday, a day off work for my niece Jeen and her husband, Bing; my nephew Lew and his wife, Wei. They would join us, along with Kim and Jook, on our final excursion in China. Because of the added passengers, Lew crouched between the back seat and the door of the van. Our driver took us through Kaiping City—along the riverbank road, where we saw many old, decrepit boats moored near the river’s edge, some with plants growing out of their hulls. That morning, we saw our first traffic accident. A car had hit a bicycle and bent its back wheel. No one had been hurt, and the police were already redirecting cars and pedestrians. As usual, the traffic was heavy, but it flowed in a miraculously organic movement. Even with no stop signs and with traffic lights only at major intersections, the drivers seemed to intuitively understand a road language spoken with beeping horns that allowed them to drive and to overtake other vehicles and pedestrians in frighteningly close quarters.

  Kai Yuan Tower was only a few kilometres outside the city. From the parking lot we had to walk up a steep hill, but no one in our party was panting for breath. Earlier, when I had commented on how fit they all seemed, they laughed and told me that they lived in apartment buildings without elevators and routinely walked up five or more flights of stairs several times a day. Once I reached the top of the hill, I could see factories, an expressway, smokestacks, communications towers, power lines, large buildings and bulldozed hillsides. The development looked recent and, like so much of the modernization in China, appeared to have happened without much planning. There was so much about this country that was beyond my ken. Little things. The hillside we had just climbed was strewn with trash, yet there were workers who were crouched over, weeding the grass, ignoring the plastic bags, straws, cellophane wrappers, wrinkled bits of paper and water bottles.

  The tall, pagoda-style temple was dark and quiet inside. A giant statue of Confucius in flowing, classical robes stood in the centre of the room. In front of him a large, brass urn had been jammed with sticks of incense, some still burning. I gazed for a long time at the serene face of this man, whose influence on Chinese culture dated back more than two thousand years. When I was a child not a single day would go by without my father invoking words from this scholar. He talked about the importance of obedience and order, of knowing one’s position in society and the family. As I grew older and more westernized, my connection to Confucian philosophy became tenuous. On the surface those assumptions of obedience and filial piety felt anachronistic and irrelevant to the culture I had adopted, one that promoted independence and challenged authority. My father’s emphasis on modesty appeared to be at odds with Western society and the value it placed on being assertive. And in our home, given the friction between my parents, the peaceful order my fathered longed for felt like an impossible goal.

  My father once said during dinner that of all the women who had married into his village, my mother came from the family with the most prestige. He then quickly added that he would never be so crass as to make that boast in public. Instead, he would assign her the position of number two. He grinned at me, then at my mother, with a twinkle in his eye and said that no one would dare claim number one. My mother smiled in silent agreement. She was in a rare happy mood. After three long years of separation, Ming Nee had finally arrived. A few days earlier, our village uncle in Toronto had taken my mother and me to the airport to meet her. The moment my mother saw her daughter, she ran toward her and burst into tears as they clasped each other in their arms. In the few years since I had last seen her in Hong Kong, Ming Nee had changed from a girl into a young woman. Her hair was no longer straight and parted at the side. It had been permed into soft curls, framing her face. She towered above our mother; she was wearing nylons and other grown-up clothes. For my mother the years of worry and longing over this daughter had ended. I too was overjoyed that she was here. I thought she would be the answer to my mother’s unhappiness.

  And now my mother and sister were sitting beside each other at the kitchen table in my father’s laundry. It was a Sunday in the early spring and he had roasted a duck in the oven of the coal stove until the skin was crisp to perfection and the flesh inside was juicy and firm. Around the duck he had tucked slices of potatoes that would absorb the juices from the orange-peel-and-anise-flavoured marinade coating the bird. My mother had heaped Ming Nee’s bowl with the best pieces of meat. My father sat at the head of the table in a home that was at peace, and we listened while he talked about Confucius.

  I lifted my eyes once more and saw the wise, beatific face of the ancient philosopher. I planted several sticks of incense into the urn and lit them.

  Nan Tower stands at a bend in the Tan Jiang River, the main river flowing through Kaiping City. This unadorned, fortified structure was built with gun slits on each floor. From this location, for one week in 1945, a group of Chinese patriots held off a fierce attack from Japanese soldiers who had come up the river by boat. Those who were still alive once the enemy captured the tower were taken prisoner, tortured and executed. Nan Tower is now a national memorial, with a statue of the war heroes at its entrance. Walking around the meticulously maintained grounds, I felt a sombre, almost religious tone that I had not yet experienced in China. Inside, a narrow staircase led to a lookout station from which we would be able to see up and down the river. Despite the holes from Japanese shells, which had been preserved as reminders of the courage of the defenders and the brutality of the enemy, the tower was structurally sound. My relatives hustled us up the stairs, insisting that Michael and I see everything at this historic site because they were so proud of the Chinese war effort.

  Only Lew and Wei decided to accompany Michael and me to the top of the tower. They made a point of highlighting the damage inflicted by the Japanese. Although my nieces and nephews are all too young to have experienced the horrors of the invasion, they seem to have absorbed a collective historical memory of humiliation and defeat at the hands of China’s ancient enemy. They spoke about the barbarity of the Japanese as if they had experienced it personally. I recognized that this anger and hurt had been passed on for several generations and I was not without sympathy, though I was personally ambivalent. My relatives’ shared sense of belonging extended back many centuries, if not sever
al millennia, whereas I belonged to a country inhabited by people who had left their homelands in order to make a new start, old grievances supposedly set aside. All the same, I sometimes longed for this kind of connection, even if it did occasionally ring untrue.

  Kim and Jeen had gone ahead to order dinner at a restaurant down the road from the Nan Tower. When the rest of us arrived, we sat at a round table on the restaurant terrace, looking out over the Tian Jing River. The meal started with snail soup, a local specialty.

  Lew and Bing had lit cigarettes and leaned back in their chairs, watching the smoke rise in plumes above their heads. We had finished our first course, and the other dishes would soon start to arrive. I looked at each of my relatives around the table and felt so pleased to have spent these last few days with them, so glad that we’d had them to ourselves. When we’d had to share our time with my brothers and their families, everything had felt so hectic—and except for Kim and my sister, I had never been able to keep track of who was who. But during these last several days, personalities had emerged. My nephew Lew was always smartly dressed, and Wei, his wife, was a slim, attractive woman who moved with a natural grace. My niece Jeen was always telling jokes. Bing, her husband, who was only moderately plump but still nicknamed Foo Loh, Fat Man, had a thick head of wiry hair that was much admired by my husband.

  Below us the Tan Jiang ran slow and wide, the vegetation on either side green and abundant. The sun had almost met the horizon and was about to disappear behind the bushes growing in dark, knotted clumps on the far shore; the remaining daylight was gentle and golden. I watched fishermen in their wooden boats, the fluid movement of their arms as they cast their nets, a dance passed from father to son. I knew the China of my parents’ generation no longer existed. But just maybe, if I maintained my vigilance, I might string together these fleeting moments and capture some essence of it.

  The evening breeze from the water was cooling and the air felt soft against my skin. There was much laughter around the table. I felt as if I could spend the rest of my life in Kaiping. But tomorrow we would leave for Hong Kong.

  ELEVEN

  My mother had a photo of Big Uncle, taken as a young soldier in the Kuomintang army. The resemblance to my mother is remarkable—the same overbite, the same broad forehead and the same penetrating stare. My childhood memories of China have a womblike quality to them, free floating and seen through a watery lens. But not so of Big Uncle. Whenever photographs were sent to Acton of family gatherings in Hong Kong or Macau, I could always pick him out. If he had walked toward me on the street, I would have recognized him.

  Just before the Communist takeover of China at the end of 1949, he managed to escape to Macau, a Portuguese protectorate, across the harbour from Hong Kong. When I lived in Hong Kong with my mother and Ming Nee, he visited us frequently, always dressed in a crisp suit and tie, a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, his silver hair oiled and combed back from his high forehead. Without being told, I knew that this man with the elegant manners and impeccable grooming was no ordinary person. Each time he visited, he brought a gift from the bakery: sweets or a cake inside a box tied with red string. My mother said that it was a terrible risk for Big Uncle to travel on the ferry from Macau to Hong Kong. The Communists were on the prowl for people who had fought against them, and if they caught Big Uncle, they would definitely take him back to Mainland China, where he would be thrown in jail, most certainly tortured and likely executed. And yet it seemed to me that Big Uncle often made that perilous journey. I was sheltered by my mother’s love and too young to understand. But for her those years must have been an emotionally charged time. My mother and my uncle knew that once we left for Canada, they would never see each other again. The hurts they had nursed about each other had been put behind them.

  Big Uncle was the oldest child in their family and twenty years older than my mother, the second-youngest. Her childhood playmate was her younger sister, who was very close in age. They went to school together and even attended a Sunday school, where missionaries taught them how to knit and crochet. There was another sister, referred to as the Family Beauty, but she was much older and had been married when my mother was still a child.

  Beyond the fact that she had been my mother’s childhood playmate, I had grown up knowing almost nothing about my mother’s younger sister, Little Aunt. Before I left for China, I had learned that she’d died a year or two before my mother and that she had a son living in Macau. I had made plans to meet this cousin, if for no other reason than to honour my mother’s memory. Since our arrival in China, I had become even more eager to meet this cousin. Jook’s remarks about my mother “chasing” our father had been gnawing at me. I began to thirst for more information about my mother and wanted to hear whatever stories Little Aunt’s son might have to share.

  The moment Michael and I stepped off the ferry that had taken us from Hong Kong to Macau, a middle-aged man and woman pushed through the crowds toward us. In his hand my cousin held a printout of a picture of me that I had emailed to him, a beaming smile on his face. Kung is a stocky man, a year younger than I. It felt strange to have a cousin who was my age. I’d become so accustomed to having siblings and cousins who were old enough to be my parents.

  My cousin lives with his family in a spacious high-rise condominium in a residential area of Macau. And unlike the apartments in Kaiping, this building has an elevator. We walked through a large, open-air foyer to reach his door, locked behind a metal security grill. Inside, the cool, marble floors provided quick relief from the heat and humidity outside. Amidst comfortable, Western-style furniture, a table in one corner held a number of pictures. I stepped closer, and Kung explained that these were photographs of his parents and his in-laws. There was one of a small woman who looked vaguely familiar and another, which needed no explanation, of Big Uncle as a young man in his soldier’s uniform. In front of these sat a bowl of fruit and some sticks of incense. My cousin had set up a shrine for his ancestors. I felt a small pang of guilt and remembered all the stories I’d heard about the old timers in the first half of the century who had died overseas and had planned for their bones to be returned to their homeland for burial. Only then could they be worshipped as ancestors. I could not help but worry about the spirits of my parents. Were they in a state of limbo on the other side of the world, struggling to reach home?

  Michael and I sat beside each other on the sofa. Lin, my cousin’s wife, a plump, friendly woman, brought us oolong tea and a large plate of sliced fruit. I pointed to the picture of Big Uncle and mentioned that my mother used to have the same photograph.

  My cousin smiled and said, “I owe everything to Big Uncle. If it were not for him, I would still be on the Mainland.” In 1979, after the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, China’s attitude toward the outside world had relaxed somewhat and Big Uncle was able to sponsor Kung’s immigration to Macau. Even though Kung was married with an infant daughter, he decided to leave on his own. When he first arrived in Macau, he worked at odd jobs day and night. Eventually, he bought a vending cart and started to sell food on the street. In less than two years, he had saved enough money to purchase a variety store with a small apartment for his family on the second floor. He then arranged for his wife and daughter to join him. He and Lin worked long hours every day of the year, and once they were old enough, his children also helped in the store. In time, Kung bought even more property, and he eventually broug ht his parents from the Mainland to live with his family. I was never certain how much Macau real estate my cousin owned, but through sheer industry, he was able to retire at age fifty-seven. I looked around at Kung’s agreeable surroundings, pleased that he was finally able to reap the reward of all those years of hard work.

  Kung left the living room for a moment and returned with several photo albums. He stacked them on the coffee table in front of me. I took the first one and opened it. To my astonishment I saw pictures of my family’s life in Canada: me at age seven, nine, twelve; my f
ather’s seventieth birthday celebration; my sister’s wedding; my brothers’ weddings; my graduation from university; my mother’s seventieth birthday. But there was one black-and-white photograph I kept turning back to. It was a picture of me and my parents when I was about eight, taken by Shing on one of his visits to Acton. In the background was a flowering shrub and behind that, just out of view, a stone house. At the time I hadn’t understood why my mother insisted we pose on a property that didn’t belong to us. I felt uneasy, and I worried that the neighbour would come into her yard and confront us. She was an old lady who used a cane, and I was suddenly glad that she rarely ventured out of her house. She was a kind person and would not have objected to our being in her yard; I just didn’t want her to come across us unexpectedly. I was the only one who spoke English, and I wouldn’t have known what to say. Once more, I examined the photo and saw a smiling, well-dressed family. I was beginning to see why my relatives had no real concept of my parents’ hardships. My mother’s careful chronicle of our lives in the West, although not an outright lie, had not been completely truthful.

  These people knew so much about me, yet I had never even seen a photograph of any of them—or if I had, I had not bothered to take any interest. I opened a second album, this one had pictures of my cousin’s family. I saw several groups of people I didn’t recognize, but in one of them I picked out Big Uncle. Next to the other men in the photograph, he seemed to be of average size, something I had never discerned in the pictures that were sent to us in Acton. I’d always remembered my uncle as a tall man. His military bearing and quiet dignity had probably made him seem larger than he really was. In another photograph I noticed a small woman seated next to Kung, and I immediately recognized that this was the same familiar-looking woman whose photograph was on the shrine. It was Little Aunt. The resemblance to my mother was unmistakable. I looked up at my cousin and saw that his eyes had become moist, as had mine. “As long as she was able, your mother sent money to my mother,” Kung said. “During the times of famine in China, had it not been for the overseas money, we would have starved. Every year my mother prayed for her older sister to return home. She had always wanted to see her sister before she died. She used to read your mother’s letters over and over again. When they were children, they were very close.”