The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  My mother rarely talked about her younger sister. I was not aware that she had sent money at regular intervals and had no idea that these remittances actually allowed this woman and her family to eat and live. But then again, memory can be incomplete, and it is possible that whatever news my mother shared with me about her sister and her family never made an impression. Another side of my mother was beginning to reveal itself, one that perhaps my youthful self had chosen to ignore. Or one that she had long since put away.

  “What a shame it was that the two sisters never saw each other again,” my cousin said, shaking his head. “What a pity. What a pity.”

  From listening to Kung, it was clear that his family held my mother in awe. She was the one who had gone to that mythical land while they stayed behind, dependent on her good fortune to survive. In their eyes, she was the one who had been lucky.

  Later in the afternoon, Kung’s son, two daughters and infant grandson joined us. I had met the older daughter several years before, when she’d stayed in Canada with Ming Nee to study English at a local college. But when a woman who appeared to be in her sixties entered the apartment and was introduced as Kung’s older sister, my cousin, I was at a loss for words. I had been told about Kung, a male cousin, living in Macau. But a female cousin? Surely I had been told about her at some point? Or perhaps her name was so rarely mentioned that I never bothered to retain it. Sons are highly prized, even worshipped, in Chinese culture. But I was still surprised to have travelled halfway around the world to meet a male cousin, only to discover that he had a sister. As a Confucian daughter, I should not have been taken aback. But I was. I was from the West.

  Kung and his wife took us all to a restaurant for dinner. Michael and I had decided ahead of time that we would pay for the meal. But the moment we entered the lobby and were led to a table already covered with linen and place settings, we both realized that my cousin had made prior reservations in our honour. We started with a whole roast suckling pig. After we ate the crackling with mini pancakes and hoisin sauce, the meat was taken away and sliced before being returned for the next course. The seafood was fresh out of the ocean: prawns, steamed fish, scallops, squid and abalone, everything firm and tender. We had broccoli with a sauce made from shredded dried scallops, tripe soup, sweet bean soup, biscuits, coconut pudding, noodles, fried rice, oranges, watermelon. My cousin had spared no expense. And he had made sure that his daughter who spoke English sat next to Michael.

  All these relatives sat with me and my husband around the table. I had not known about any of them, except Kung and his daughter, of course, before this evening. I felt so happy, and yet despite the superb food, I found it hard to eat. There was a lump in my throat that would not go away. Throughout the evening, my newly discovered cousin, Lai Ming, Kung’s sister, told me several times: “You remind me of my mother. You don’t look like her. But there’s something … something in your manner. …” I so wished I could have met Little Aunt. I found myself thinking about how my mother talked about her life being like a table cut in half. I should have helped her bring those two pieces together. The Pacific Ocean had always seemed such a huge obstacle. I should not have let her frugality or the busy-ness of my own life stand in the way.

  Kung told me that he often visited his father’s ancestral village in Taishan, another of the Four Counties, bordering Kaiping. He had built a house there, and the next time we visited, we could stay there with him and Lin. He would also take me to the house where our mothers had spent their childhood. I had not yet left for Canada, and already I wanted to return to China.

  TWELVE

  Morning arrived with a bright blue sky, so unusual in a month that I always associated with low, grey clouds and damp, raw winds. Michael has always liked November, claiming that after being dazzled by the brilliant colours of autumn, the muted hues of brown and grey are almost a relief. Only after the leaves have fallen can you begin to appreciate the trees for their structure and the bark for its texture. It was Michael who introduced me to the diamond pattern in the bark of the ash, the flakiness of hornbeam, the craggy branches of the oak. My husband is a minimalist and to his mind there is nothing more beautiful than bare branches etched against a crystal blue sky.

  Eager to walk down the hill, I grabbed a jacket and scarf before leaving the house. The grass was frozen and crunched beneath my feet. Partway down the slope that led to the woods, I stopped and looked at the fields around me. Our tenant farmer had harvested his crop of wheat, and I noticed that in our adjacent pumpkin patch, a few frost-damaged fruit were still clinging to their vines. The air felt cool and thin. I took a deep breath and gazed at the landscape around me. Everything was so dormant and desolate, so very different from the fertile countryside of Kaiping County where I had been only a few days before, where the weather was still warm, the trees laden with oranges and bananas, the fields luxuriant and green with stalks of rice swaying in the breeze.

  I turned around and walked back up the hill to our vegetable garden and stood in front of our lifeless plants. They had been flattened by the frost, and Michael would spend the next few days pulling them out and preparing the beds for spring planting. A blue jay’s squawk broke the silence. The air that only a moment ago had felt invigorating, suddenly took on a damp chill, and I tightened the scarf around my neck. The sky in the west was starting to cloud.

  Michael comes from English and Irish stock. The men in his family are tall and fair. It would be difficult to imagine someone more physically unlike my small, dark father than my husband. And yet when I see Michael bent over and working in his garden, I think of my father. Whenever he turns the soil over with a shovel or weeds and thins his plants, his mouth is turned down at the corners, deep furrows gathered in his forehead. His facial expression, his total absorption in his rural oasis … I watch my husband, and I am suddenly transported to the backyard behind my father’s laundry.

  During our early years in Acton, milk was delivered throughout the town on a horse-drawn wagon. Whenever the horse stopped in front of our house and left a gift of road apples, my father would rush out with a pail and shovel, scooping up his treasure. He would then mix the manure with soil before spreading it in around his backyard crop of Chinese vegetables.

  My husband and I now live a couple of hours’ drive outside of Toronto in a stone house that is over 150 years old, on a hundred rolling acres with spectacular views of the countryside. It’s almost a quarter of a mile from the road to our house, this long lane giving us a priceless seclusion. In the few years that we’ve been here, Michael has added flowers and trees to our rural retreat. The property came with a large, rectangular vegetable garden, and in the first season, he grew rows of tomatoes, potatoes, squash, eggplant, peppers, lettuce and beans. Since then, he’s built new raised beds, reminiscent of the ones my father shaped, like the ones we saw in China. Every spring since we moved here three years ago, our tenant farmer has dropped off a truckload of cow manure next to Michael’s gardens, and for the rest of the day, my husband can’t stop grinning at his good fortune. When my father died in the summer of 1972, I had known Michael for only a short while, but I have often asked myself, if my father had lived, would these two very different men have become friends through their love of these simple pleasures.

  Since Acton was one of the last towns on his route back to Chinatown in Toronto, the Chinese travelling grocer usually pulled up in front of my father’s hand laundry late in the evening. In the winter he always finished his cigarette before coming inside, where he would sit for a few minutes by the coal stove and chat, sipping a cup of tea before taking our order. But during warm summer evenings, he and my parents would sit outside on our front lawn, my mother and father taking a rare break from their chores.

  The back of his truck was like a storeroom on wheels, the shelves inside piled high with pungent-smelling groceries. Anticipating his arrival, my parents would make a list of all the things we would need: rice, soya sauce, herbal medicine, tofu, salted fi
sh, Chinese sausage, pressed duck. For the first few years that we lived in Canada, until I discovered Halo shampoo, my mother used to buy an herbal mixture that she boiled in a pot of water. Once the dark brew had cooled, she poured it into a basin and used it to rinse our hair. Each week I was allowed to buy a box of my favourite preserved licorice plums, wrapped in crinkly, translucent paper.

  Every year in early December, the Chinese grocer sold my father bulbs called sui sin fah. After my father nestled them among smooth stones inside glass bowls filled with water, my parents would wait for them to sprout slender, green stalks, and when the buds blossomed into clusters of small, white, star-shaped flowers, their sweet perfume filling the room, they would smile with pleasure. Some years later I learned that they were paper whites—narcissus—and that sui sin fah meant “clear water flower.” I’ve continued this tradition in my own home. And I now find myself wondering if I do so not just because of the beauty of these delicate flowers, but also because of my memory of a rare moment of shared delight between two unhappy people.

  When I look back on my childhood, those bulbs seem like such an unlikely purchase—something that could not be eaten or worn, something without any practical use. Everything in our home was utilitarian. Our first kitchen table my father made by hammering together some scraps of wood. After we had been in Acton for a few years, a family in the neighbourhood gave us their unwanted red Arborite table. When we finally got a sofa, it was from the same family, who were replacing the old battered one that had sat for many years on their veranda. I don’t recall my parents spending so much as a penny on anything that might add beauty or comfort to our home. The closest thing we had to art was a Chinese movie star calendar given to us by the travelling grocer. I never gave those narcissus bulbs much thought when I was a child. But as I look back I cannot help but wonder if these dainty white flowers were purchased not just because they were a harbinger of spring, of warm days to come, but because they were a reminder of China.

  My father turned over the soil in his garden every spring. In our backyard he had made a row of about a dozen small, oblong raised beds. Before planting he spent hours squatting next to the beds, making sure the sides were sloped at a particular angle. He raked the tops of those beds until the soil was broken and free of lumps, then randomly scattered seeds across the surface for vegetables grown by no one else in town. From branches and scrap wood, he fashioned a trellis that supported his peas and tied the vines with strips of torn cloth. Every summer evening he scooped water from his rain barrel with a pail, then walked along the narrow paths between his beds. He would then dip a metal can, drilled with holes, into the pail, lift it out and gently shower his plants. I watched our neighbours tend their gardens and wished that my father would also organize his plants in tidy rows and water them with a rubber hose that sent an arc of spray high into the air.

  Compared to our neighbours, my parents harvested crops that were not only exotic, but downright strange. It was just one more thing that made us different. I hated it when neighbours inquired about the things my father planted. Or when the lady next door smiled and said how different, how interesting … I wanted my father to grow lo fon vegetables—things like carrots, radishes, tomatoes and beets. Instead, we harvested bok choy; gai lan; large winter melons that resembled hoary green pumpkins; long, fuzzy melons; and bitter melons, whose warty skin made them look diseased. When we picked our peas, we never shelled them; we ate the pods, the seeds, everything.

  All this was nothing compared to the humiliation I experienced at the end of the summer. My parents soaked their last crop of bok choy in a smelly brown salty brine and then hung the drooping vegetables on the backyard clotheslines to dry. Our laundry was on a corner lot, which allowed all the neighbours to see the limp, wrinkled greens draped over the lines. People asked me what they were for, how we cooked them. I cringed. Worst of all were the few adolescent boys in our neighbourhood who would run through our backyard and shake the clotheslines and knock the stringy bok choy to the ground. When my father ran after them cursing, his old legs unable to keep up, the scrawny boys would turn around and laugh, taunting him with cries of Chinky Chinky Chinaman. But in the winter, when my mother made soup with pork bones, red dates, carrots and dried bok choy, the kitchen filled with a fragrant steam that reminded me of summer, and the moment I slurped the delicious broth from my spoon, I knew that lo fon food could never be this good.

  Early in our travels through rural Kaiping, we were driving beside a river at the edge of Cheong Hong See, when I noticed gardens in the ochre-coloured silt of the flats along its banks. I called to the driver of our van and asked him to stop. My relatives exchanged glances with each other, some of them shaking their heads, as I rushed out of the vehicle and hurried down the embankment. Everything was so familiar: narrow paths dividing mounded beds crowded with bok choy, gai lan, snow peas, winter melon and fuzzy melon. I turned to Michael, who had followed me, and said, “These gardens are just like my father’s. This is what it was like behind the laundry.” But it hadn’t occurred to me then, not even while I crouched down and examined that hodgepodge arrangement of gardens, what now seemed so obvious. Each spring, by making those raised beds and planting vegetables, my father was trying to re-create home. And in doing so, he found solace. But as I looked back, his efforts seemed futile. How could anyone duplicate that emerald paradise in this place of long, unforgiving winters, where the growing season lasted at most five months? On that cold November day, as I gazed at Michael’s garden, I began to fathom the depth of sorrow my parents must have felt over the loss of home.

  It is true what people say: that you need to be away from your homeland to really understand its hold on you. As a child I had wanted so much to fit in. And to a degree I had succeeded. But I knew even then that no matter how hard I tried, complete acceptance was impossible. I was a Chinese girl living in a white world. We were poor, and my father washed other people’s clothes for a living. It didn’t matter that I was teacher’s pet or that I went to Sunday school and memorized verses from the Bible. At some point I would find myself with my nose pressed up against a window watching others. And yet, since the day that propeller airplane touched down on this soil, this country has been my home. What must it have been like for my parents not just to be homesick but to be marginalized decade after decade? I tapped the dark brown soil in our garden with the toe of my boot, feeling how it had hardened with the drop in temperature. In another six months or so, these beds would be sprouting tiny green shoots.

  THIRTEEN

  I was sitting in the living room with my old red photo album, which I had found on a shelf between two larger albums. I had started filling it in grade nine but had not opened it in years. I flipped through the pages and saw a picture of me standing on my tricycle in the yard behind my father’s laundry, another of me in my Brownie uniform, photos of school friends, a photo of Ming Nee shortly after she’d arrived from Hong Kong. On the front page I’d placed a picture of my mother and one of my father, each dressed in a traditional Chinese jacket with a stand-up collar, buttoning below one shoulder and along the side. In between was a photograph of my mother and me, the earliest image I have of myself. I appear to be about two years old. My mother’s straight black hair is chin length, cut blunt and combed behind her ears. She is wearing no makeup. The photographer has tinted my lips and cheeks pink, yet I look like a boy with my hair cropped short, my ears exposed. My mother had always been a practical woman, and in the photo, her daughter is dressed in overalls, with a haircut that required a minimum of fuss.

  For the first time it occurred to me that this picture was taken while we were still living in Cheong Hong See. I thought about that junky store and the primitive house in Ning Kai Lee, where my father and his siblings had grown up. I thought about my father’s laundry in Acton, where our first soft chair had been a neighbour’s discard. And here I was, inside a renovated stone house from the nineteenth century sitting in a comfortable, plush armchair.
I looked at the Indian carpet on my floor, the water colours and the pastels on my walls, my collection of glass vases in the bay window. The poverty of my past felt so far away, and yet so close.

  I stared for a while at the photograph of my mother and started to think about another one of her I’d seen years before: a small, black-and-white close-up, taken when she was probably in her early twenties. Her hair was black, past her shoulders and parted at the side. Her hands were clasped together and held against her cheek, her head slightly tilted. But despite what the villager in Ning Kai Lee had said, my mother was not beautiful, given her prominent overbite and weak chin. And yet she possessed a compelling face with well-defined cheekbones and a broad forehead. Her dark, coquettish eyes stared directly at the camera. I thought about the young woman in that photograph—her almost flirtatious expression—and wondered if that was the person Jook had recalled for me, the woman who chased her father. I had seen another picture of my mother in her twenties, taken in Nanking, where she was going to school. Dressed in dark trousers and a traditional, quilted Chinese jacket, she stood in what appeared to be newly fallen snow. Her arms looked stiff, her shoulders hunched up against the cold. But in this picture, I could not make out her face. These were the only two pictures I had ever seen of my mother as a young woman. As a child I was fascinated with them, I suppose in the way that all children are curious about who their parents were before they’d had children. But because the land of my mother’s youth was so far away and so unlike Canada, my fascination was even more accentuated. I often think of those photographs, but I haven’t seen either for many years. They were probably lost during one of our moves, or my mother may have tossed them out in anger after my father’s death.