The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  My mother first met my father in 1930, when he hired her to teach in his village. The young woman I remembered in those photographs would not have looked much different than the person my father met. She was unlike anyone who had ever lived in, or possibly even visited, Ning Kai Lee. With her education and big city background, she bestowed status on this tiny, impoverished village. When my father first met my mother, he would have been a man of thirty-eight, back from the Gold Mountain, a man in his prime and with considerable status himself. In such circumstances, a prize catch.

  The eventual marriage between a woman from an elevated background and an eloquent Gold Mountain guest, who spoke with authority about Confucius and Mencius, China’s two greatest philosophers, was for the local villagers whom I met the stuff of fairy tales. As I had listened to their reminiscences, I had been amused by and skeptical of their stories, the mythology that had grown up around my parents, amazed that even though they had not lived in the village for almost sixty years, people knew who they were. But my mother, a beautiful woman? It was hard not to smile. What would these people have told me next? That she walked on water? Sitting in my living room with my old photo album on my lap, I became ashamed of my suspicions. These villagers had seemed to be good people with a genuine interest in me and a fondness for my family. On the other hand, we must have seemed like millionaires returning from El Dorado, arriving in hired vans, hosting banquets, giving away money; perhaps they were just eager to please us.

  Until very recently I had never really thought about the “mathematics” of my parents’ situation. After my mother left her teaching post in Ning Kai Lee, she would not see my father for about fifteen years and only after the death of his first wife. When she met him again after that long absence, it was to become his second wife. Was it possible that the man she decided to marry was no longer the man who had hired her to teach in the village school? She would have remembered someone still relatively youthful and upright, with a full head of black hair. When he returned to China in 1947, his new passport photograph showed a balding man with a few lingering wisps of hair, and he would have been slightly bent from all the years of labour in the hand laundries. What did my mother think when she set eyes on this man whom she had not seen in a decade and a half but with whom she had chosen to spend the rest of her life? Was she focused only on the future, seeing my father as a means to provide for her and her daughter? Many times she said to me, “I had no choice but to marry your father. But if I hadn’t married him, I wouldn’t have you and you are my thlem, gwon, my heart and my liver.” My mother always smiled when she said this, but her words never made me happy.

  My mother taught in my father’s village for only two or three years. She left because her thoh had convinced Big Uncle to send her to Nanking. There she would study silkworm culture and enter an apprenticeship. When she was finished, he would set her up in business and she would finally become financially independent. My mother made it clear to me that she had left the village of Ning Kai Lee not to teach somewhere else or to get married, but to go to school. And not just anywhere; Nanking was the capital of China under the Kuomintang government, a cultured and historic city, still surrounded by massive stone walls, with the Yangtze River to the west and the Purple Mountain to the east, a place of architectural splendours: royal palaces, majestic imperial tombs and grand museums. That someone who had taught in their lowly village had left to “learn from books” in the city of Nanking so dazzled the inhabitants of my father’s village that it became a piece of local lore they would never forget.

  Growing up in a country where everyone attended school and where I had always assumed I would attend university, I never fully appreciated the significance of my mother’s schooling. She carried the memory of those years like a badge of honour. Throughout my childhood I met women who were about the same age as my mother, many of whom came from small farming villages in the south of China. Most of them were illiterate, and they treated my mother with a certain deference. They were impressed not just because my mother could read and write, but because she could read and write so well. No wonder she reminded me, when I was entering university, that she too had gone on to higher education and in no less a place than the city of Nanking.

  The year before I started university, I showed my mother a brochure with a picture of the campus I hoped to attend. We were sitting at the kitchen table, only a few feet from the barrel-shaped washing machine. My father was in the adjoining room, finishing up the week’s ironing. My mother turned to me and smiled. “Your school looks very nice,” she said. “It’s too bad that you will never see Nanking, where I was a student. It was a magnificent city with lovely gardens for strolling. The roses and peonies were like none I have seen since. My favourite place though, was Sai Woo, West Lake, in the city of Hangzhou. The lake is in the middle of the city, with hills in the distance. I used to watch the light change on the water, depending on where the sun was in the sky. I walked along those shores many times. It’s one of China’s most famous sites. I’ve seen lots of China—Nanking, Shanghai, Canton, the gardens in Suzhou. Not like your father—never been anywhere except his little village. Only passing through cities like Hong Kong and Canton.”

  “One day when I have lots of money, I will take you back to China,” I said in response to her yearning.

  My mother’s mood suddenly changed. “Don’t think about going anywhere,” she said sternly. “Just think about school and working hard. Save your money.”

  She folded my university brochure and handed it back to me. I then placed my red photo album in front of her. I’d added some recent pictures of high school friends and wanted to show them to her. As she turned the pages she said that she too had once kept an album with photographs of her schoolmates in Nanking. She told me about a girl with whom she’d become close and how they’d vowed they would always be friends, her voice choking with regret and sadness. My mother hesitated for a moment and said, “I wasn’t always like this, the way I am here. Useless, depending on others to help me. People used to come and ask for my advice, for me to help them. I know you don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll look after you.”

  As it turned out she never completed her studies in Nanking. Everything had started out with such promise. My mother was a good student; she was popular with the teachers. If it hadn’t been for the Japanese, she would say, those hateful Japanese. Because of them her ambitions had turned to ashes.

  After capturing Peking in July of 1937, the Japanese started a series of air raids on Shanghai and Nanking. The residents of these cities were ordered to build bomb shelters and to paint the red roofs and white walls of their houses black. The Japanese bombed everything: factories, government buildings, schools, even hospitals. The streets were filled with rubble. Whenever the sirens screamed their warnings, my mother would start to tremble. People would flee the streets, searching for safety. That summer in Nanking was so hot and humid, it was like living in a furnace, she told me. And the Japanese only made it worse.

  Big Uncle and her thoh sent a telegram, telling her to leave as soon as possible. But she would have left anyway. The bombing raids were becoming more frequent, and she was afraid of being trapped in Nanking. Everywhere around her people were departing in droves; she had to escape while she still could.

  The night before my mother fled Nanking, she sewed a secret cloth pouch inside her underpants. The next morning, she packed only a small bag with personal belongings and tucked her money into the pouch next to her belly. Even with a ticket already in hand when she went to the station, it was almost impossible to board the train. People were pushing, shoving, shouting, eyes wide with desperation. Their faces were dripping with sweat from the searing heat. The air had a sour odour that my mother had never encountered before, and she asked herself if this was the smell of fear. As she elbowed her way through the clamouring mob, the press of bodies was so close, she nearly suffocated. But she somehow fought her way onto th
e train. When she found her seat she was panting, and her clothes were damp against her skin. She heard stories about people climbing on top of the cars and of people tying themselves underneath the train, so desperate to leave the city they were willing to risk death. Some people, especially the poor, had no recourse; they had to remain. Others, who had the means to leave, decided to stay. Why? my mother would ask. To see what might happen? As far as she was concerned, they were even more foolish than the ones who tied themselves to the bottom of the train.

  My mother made it to Shanghai just in time to catch the last boat south to Canton. A few days later Japanese soldiers would invade Shanghai and then march on to ravage Nanking. She had left her album of class photos in Nanking and would never see her best friend again. She was lucky just to get out alive, she told me. Her gratitude would quickly evaporate, however. In the next breath, she would say how unlucky she was to have survived the war, to have witnessed the atrocities that she would eventually see.

  Exhausted and relieved, my mother arrived at Big Uncle’s mansion in Canton late in the night, after everyone had gone to sleep. One of the servants took her to her old room. The next morning, her thoh wept when she saw her and told her she loved her more than anyone else in the world, even more than her own children. With the Japanese now so far away, my mother could finally feel safe.

  In her excitement she did not immediately notice the change in her thoh. But as my mother looked across the breakfast table, she saw a wraith, a shell of the radiant woman she had left behind a few years before. She stared at her beloved thoh and remembered that the previous night, she had heard a raw and incessant cough that seemed to come from the floor above. But she had been bone-tired, and the sound had been muffled by the thick walls of Big Uncle’s mansion. In the morning, her worst fears were confirmed.

  Throughout my childhood, the disease fuh loh was spoken of in hushed, secretive tones. It had a dreaded mystery about it, like leprosy in the Bible, and if you spoke its name too loudly, you might give it life. People who were not ill, buttested positive for the disease, were stranded in China, not allowed to immigrate. My mother once told me about a distant cousin who had been betrothed and, in spite of being healthy, had tested positive for the illness. When the prospective groom’s family found out, the marriage was cancelled. The girl was crushed and wept for weeks. Fuh loh could ruin your chances at happiness. What did it matter, my mother asked, that this sad girl was born in Canada, well-educated and from a wealthy family? When she finally married in her late thirties, people whispered that it was only because of her father’s money. Why else would someone take “tainted goods”?

  Fuh loh was tuberculosis, and my mother’s thoh was very sick with it. Not long after my mother’s return to Canton, her thoh died.

  My mother closed my photo album and picked up a skein of wool from a basket on the floor. She loosened the skein, fitted it over the back of a chair and started to coil the yarn into balls for knitting. When I picked up another skein to fit over another chair, she asked if I had finished my homework. Yes, yes, I answered, bristling with impatience over what I felt to be excessive concern. My father was still at the ironing table, now bent over his abacus, tallying the cost of laundry supplies. I could hear the gentle clicking of beads as he slid them up and down on the rungs.

  “My thoh was a lucky woman, even though she died in her thirties,” my mother said to me. My photo album was still triggering memories, ones that I had heard many times before. “She died before the hateful Japanese invaded. She never knew anything but comfort and wealth. Not like me, always unlucky. Born under the wrong signs. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how hard you work. The things I’ve seen … Life was never the same without my thoh. When Big Uncle brought her back to the family home as his bride, I was three or four years old. I was six when my own mother died. So you see, it was really my thoh who raised me and Little Aunt. And after she died my brother became very cold. I knew I wasn’t wanted. But it wasn’t all my brother’s fault. It was because of Foy Hoo”—-fat woman.

  “You never liked Foy Hoo, did you?” I said.

  “Nobody liked Foy Hoo,” answered my mother without missing a beat. “She had designs on my brother as soon as she started working for him. She was just a servant girl, no one special. You wouldn’t think a man who’d passed the Imperial Examinations could be so easily manipulated, would you? Foy Hoo tried to make things look accidental. Running into my brother in the hall, those tight dresses she wore. But I saw through her. That’s why she didn’t like me. She knew my thoh was dying. She was such a schemer. I saw those secret glances between my brother and her. I once caught them together in an embrace, but they didn’t see me. I never told my thoh; I didn’t have to. Even though she was sick, she knew what was happening.

  “Once she walked into the kitchen and saw Foy Hoo sitting at the table, sharing tea with my brother. The two of them were laughing and talking, their heads close together, fingertips touching. My thoh was so angry that she picked up a pair of chopsticks and hurled them, knocking over a cup. That woman got up right away and fetched a cloth to mop up the spill. ‘Look at her,’ my thoh said, ‘instincts like a low-class servant.’ A low-class servant, that’s what my thoh called her.”

  My mother finished coiling her skein into a ball and threw it in a basket with the others before loosening another one. I was taken aback at the force of her toss. After all these years, she was still angry with her brother for his betrayal.

  “You couldn’t fool my thoh. She saw the look that woman exchanged with her husband. And Big Uncle pretending he was baffled by his wife’s anger. He was just having a cup of tea. What was wrong with that? But my thoh knew better. She saw through that Foy Hoo.

  “My thoh turned out to be right. Not long after she died, Big Uncle took Foy Hoo as a wife. How could he so soon after his first wife’s death? Tseee! I was more faithful to her memory than he. Can you imagine, I cared more than her husband? And Foy Hoo, that lifeless woman, a mere servant in the house! Unlike my thoh, smart and educated. To be replaced by a servant girl. Foy Hoo never liked me, but I didn’t care. It was still somewhere to live.”

  Or so my mother had thought. Less than a year after her thoh’s death, in October of 1938, the Japanese marched into Canton and occupied the city. She told me that everyone fled Big Uncle’s house, and that’s when my mother realized that the safest place for her to be was back with her husband, that very no-good man. He lived in the countryside, away from the city.

  My mother picked up her knitting needles and started to cast on stitches for a sweater. She said nothing more. I could tell from the way she was concentrating on her hands without ever looking up that her thoughts were still in the past.

  FOURTEEN

  In 1992 my mother turned eighty. For several years, she’d been living with Michael, our two daughters and me in our Toronto home. After my father’s death, she’d been with Doon and his family in a small Ontario city, where he operated a Chinese restaurant. They all lived in the apartment above it, and every day my mother would help out in the restaurant kitchen and dining room. My brother relied on her to scrape the dirty dishes, fill the sugar dispensers, chop vegetables, cook the rice, tidy the tables after the customers left. Even though she was getting too old to be working so much, she left the restaurant with mixed emotions, for there she had maintained a sense of purpose. She’d had no specific role, but she’d been willing to fill the invisible spaces, the gaps between jobs so necessary to make a restaurant run smoothly. But after her doctor diagnosed her with breast cancer, she moved in with us.

  She did not smile on the day she left the restaurant and said only a few words during the hour’s drive with us to Toronto. It pained her greatly to know that her days of helping out with my brother’s business were over.

  I knew that at this stage of my mother’s life, she belonged in my home, yet I was not without reservations. I was a dutiful daughter who advocated without hesitation on her behalf, and yet my
mother and I did not have an easy relationship. Since my father’s death, I’d developed an irrational anger toward her. I’d managed to keep it suppressed, but on rare occasions it would find an opening and unleash itself on her, usually over something petty like the purchase of cheap, sugary cereal for my young daughters, or more ugly plastic dishes, which she had found on sale and which I had neither wanted or needed. My bursts of temper left me feeling ashamed and unkind.

  I helped my mother up the stairs to her new bedroom, which was near the washroom. We had bought a new mattress for her single bed, and Michael had painted and wallpapered the room for her. I told her I’d do all the cooking and her laundry, that she would be comfortable and had nothing to worry about. She patted me on the arm and said in a small, flat voice, “I know, I know. You take care of everything.” She then added that she was waiting to die.