The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  “But he doesn’t have a Chinese name,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, he does,” said my father. “His name is Mo Noh Suk, No-Brain Uncle. I wrote it on his ticket and inside the collars of his shirts.”

  My father may have loathed the lowly position that he occupied in the small towns where we lived, but he never forgot it. He was meek and fearful of authority. Any anger he felt about the treatment he received from his customers and townsfolk he kept to himself. The closest he came to an act of defiance was to bestow an unflattering name in a foreign language, which he would then inscribe in black ink with a fine-nibbed pen inside their clothes. The notion that someone like my tiny father could so much as threaten, let alone attack, a lo fon and lift him off the ground, is so preposterous the thought of it is almost funny.

  But there was, in fact, nothing funny about the way that people like my father were perceived by the lo fons of that time. The Chinese were considered to be undesirable, perhaps even subhuman. When I researched the records from the ship that brought my father to Vancouver, I found that passengers who were of European descent had specific destinations: cities like Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal; they were recognized as individuals, and as Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic. But the Chinese passengers were a monolithic yellow horde. Every one of them was listed as a Buddhist, and regardless of where the Chinaman stepped off the train, as far as these records were concerned, he was going to Montreal, Montreal being the train’s final stop.

  Along with hundreds of other Chinese, my father and his older brother had travelled in steerage for three weeks across the Pacific on the Empress of Russia. They and their fellow countrymen were greeted by an embrace of warm, spring air and the sight of snow-capped mountains meeting the sky. But directly in front of them loomed tall white men, shouting and herding them off the ship. I can picture my father: head bent, wearing a dark, quilted jacket, gripping a bamboo suitcase in one hand, the other arm swinging, as he disembarked with all those passengers from China, huddled together, moving in a group. What did these two brothers who were going to wash clothes in the town of Timmins expect from this place that we Chinese called Gam Sun, the Gold Mountain? Surely they had heard from those who had returned to China about mistreatment at the hands of the white men. Did knowing these stories blunt the sting of the lo fons’ disdain?

  My father often talked about how hard the Canadian government made it for the Chinese to immigrate. I could tell from his tone that he resented it, but at the same time, there was a sense of resignation, as if life offered no other solution. He understood his bottom-rung position in this new world and felt powerless to do anything about it. His days had become an endless cycle of laundry: sorting, washing, ironing. If there were times he might have felt rich, they were on the return journeys to his village in China, where he would have been welcomed as a Gam Sun huk, a Gold Mountain guest, whose few words of English spleen, spat out in exasperation in any restaurant, would have brought the most arrogant waiter running.

  It has only recently occurred to me that because my father returned to China five times, he would have seen that long stretch between Vancouver and Toronto eleven times. And yet I have no recollection of his speaking about the countryside. He never mentioned the Rockies, the Prairies or even the vastness of the land itself. I remember the first time I travelled across the country by car and my sense of awe as I discovered the immensity of this place I call home. How did the white passengers react to the group of brown-skinned men dressed in strange clothes, some of them with queues down their backs? Was there hostility, indifference or both? Did my father and his brother even look out the window of the train? Were they thinking of their homeland? Or were they already preoccupied with making themselves as unobtrusive as possible?

  I stood in the bright, June sunlight for a long time, contemplating Second Uncle’s small, plain stone. My husband trimmed the grass around its edge and finished planting the red geraniums. Their cheerfulness felt too forced next to the dull grey marker. In the past, whenever I had visited this grave, it had been out of deference to my brother. On that particular visit, I was overcome by my own sadness. The unending loneliness of those two men’s lives overwhelmed me. Michael put his arm around my shoulders.

  TWO

  My family made its journey from China to the Gold Mountain over a period of more than forty years. Whether my father had hoped to have his first wife and their children join him after the Great War, I do not know. The Exclusion Act of 1923 prevented him and other Chinese from sponsoring family for immigration. After the Second World War, in part because of the Chinese-Canadian contribution to the war effort, the government repealed this hateful act and allowed the Chinese to bring immediate family members across the Pacific and finally reunite.

  In 1947, my father travelled back to China to marry my mother, a woman twenty years his junior, planning to spend the rest of his life in his homeland, living in comfort, surrounded by family. He was confident that the Kuomintang would prevail and continue to govern China. After the end of the war, the Communists and the Kuomintang, now no longer united against the Japanese, resumed their struggle for control of the country. But even when a Communist victory in China appeared inevitable, my father prayed for their defeat. My mother recognized the need to leave while there was still the opportunity. At her insistence, my father left China on August 22, 1949, and returned to the Gold Mountain for the last time, leaving behind his family and my mother, who was pregnant with me. Four months later, when he was fifty-seven, his last child would be born under China’s new government. Ever since, my mother referred to me as a Child of the Revolution.

  My father had departed with a heavy heart, realizing that a future under China’s new rulers was even less predictable than one in a cold, northern land, a place where he had known only hardship and the contempt of others. Given my mother’s middle-class background, her level of education and my father’s status as a land owner, we would have been severely persecuted under the Communist regime. My parents would have been tortured and possibly executed, and once I was a teenager, I would have been sent out to the countryside for re-education through forced labour.

  Shortly after his return to Canada my father became a Canadian citizen. He was then able to begin the arduous process of applying for permission to have eligible family members join him. According to the immigration laws of the time only spouses and single children under the age of twenty-one could be sponsored. Hing, my father’s oldest son was married and in his early thirties. Jook, his daughter, was under twenty-one, but married. Because of age and marital status the government classified them both as independent and ineligible, no longer my father’s responsibility. Shing, the second oldest, joined our father in 1951. My mother, Ming Nee, Doon and I fled our small market town in southern China in 1953. Between them my parents had six children. I was three years old and had no insight into the torment the adults in my family must have felt as they faced the likelihood that some of them would never see each other again. In the spring of 1955, after two years in Hong Kong, my mother and I arrived in Canada; Doon would follow a few months later. With Ming Nee’s arrival in 1958, our family exodus from China ended, leaving us to live the rest of our lives on opposite sides of the world, divided by geography and politics.

  For my parents, the letters that travelled back and forth across the Pacific were a lifeline connecting them to China. When they received news from home, they became excited and told me who had just married, who was ill, who had had a baby, how much everyone was suffering under the Communists. But I didn’t care about the Communists. The names soon lost their faces and became meaningless sounds, forgotten the moment they were uttered. My mind was brimming with names like Helen, Susie, Jimmy, Cathy and Bobby; with stories of Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk. My days were spent playing baseball, tag and hide-and-go-seek. Everything about China began to recede, cleaved from the person I was becoming.

  My parents never learned
to speak English. Shing and Doon both speak it poorly, and Ming Nee, who attended a few years of school in Canada, prefers to read the Chinese newspaper and to watch Chinese television, though she functions well in English. I am the only one of the family who speaks English without accent and with native-like fluency. Even though my siblings and I belong to the same family and generation, I find myself separated from them not only by our age difference, but also by education, culture, language and memory. They talk with vividness and clarity about life back in China and about our brother and sister who remained, letters linking their lives in Gam Sun to the homeland. I, however, remember almost nothing.

  Once my brothers and I had agreed to travel back to China together with our spouses, our next decision was the date. Spring was too wet and summer was too hot, even into the month of September. My brothers had strong memories of summers in southern China relentless with heat and oppressive humidity. So in my role as “obedient youngest sister,” who negotiated with the outside world, I booked us seats on a direct flight from Toronto to Hong Kong, leaving on Friday, October 6, 2006.

  The enormity of this return journey would soon have physical dimensions as well. By the time we left Toronto for China, our original party of six had expanded to include my niece Linda; my nephew Raymond; Lily, a friend of Shing’s wife, Jen; Jen’s aunt, Pearl; Pearl’s sister, Mai; and Mai’s husband, Kang—twelve people in all and more than thirty pieces of luggage, including one suitcase filled with North American ginseng and another with old clothes for our relatives back home.

  Until that point, whenever I travelled abroad, I had often taken maple syrup or candy, firm in the belief that this was a natural offering from Canada. Not so, according to my sister-in-law Jen, who found my ignorance amusing. “If you’re going back to China, take ginseng. That’s what this country is famous for. Maybe not worth as much as the kind from Korea, but still worth a lot of money.”

  My mother, Fong Yet Lan, once told me her life was like a table that had been sawn in two: one half had stayed in China, the other half had been sent to Canada. I was nine, perhaps ten, when she told me this. And ever since, I have remembered the image of those two collapsed pieces of table. In my child’s mind, I had imbued them with feelings; I pictured them like a Disney cartoon, both sad and comical, each failing miserably to stand upright. I yearned to bring those two stranded parts together.

  In the elementary school where I attended grade five, there was a roll-down map of the world hanging over a section of the blackboard. My teacher took a pencil and made a dot near the tip of Lake Ontario that jutted out over Lake Erie. That was where we lived. Acton, Ontario, she said. But my classmates weren’t paying attention; they were busy sneaking glances out the window at the falling snow. It was almost recess, and everyone was eager to put on their winter coats and boots and run outside to play. Everyone except me. While they got ready, I walked up to the map, mesmerized by this large, pink country and the tiny, black dot that represented our town. I put my finger on it, then traced up to the top of Lake Superior, across the Prairies, over the Rockies and then over the blue Pacific Ocean. I felt a knot of desperation tightening in the pit of my stomach; so much land, so much water separating our small town from the south of China, where, I had been told, it never snowed. The distance felt insurmountable. How would my mother ever bring the two halves of her table together?

  We languished in Hong Kong for only two years, but in my hazy remembrance the time feels longer, another lifetime belonging to someone else. I have no memory of Doon living with us, and yet I know he did. He was in his late teens and spent his days exploring the city on his own and with other young relatives who were waiting to emigrate. That period of my life has left me with a vague but persistent impression of that city’s excitement, a memory of constantly turning my head and looking, my mother holding me by the wrist while we walked along congested sidewalks and through outdoor markets swarming with people. Often, by the end of the day, I was a sullen child. My legs ached as I dragged my feet and followed my mother from temple to temple, walking among massive stone statues of gods, staring up at their silent faces, the air smoky and fragrant with incense, my mother making offerings, her hands clasped in prayer.

  My mother clenched my hand inside hers while I struggled to keep up as we pushed our way through another noisy market until she reached a particular fortune teller. Ming Nee and I stood on either side of our mother and watched the man toss sticks into the air. He then read them after they landed on a smooth, wooden table. Once he was finished, we rushed to another clairvoyant, who released a small, white bird to choose a tiny square of folded paper with black writing on it. The writing would be interpreted by the clairvoyant, who then told my mother its meaning. I waited, holding my breath with anticipation, but hoping for what? Both times my mother handed over money, never smiling, the worry lines cutting deep furrows across her forehead. She grabbed my hand and pushed her way back through the crowds, Ming Nee following behind. Whatever it was my mother was told that day she never shared with me.

  Not long after our arrival, we started to visit a family with four daughters who seemed about the same age as Ming Nee. They were from our home village and we called the mother Auntie. After my mother and I left Hong Kong, Ming Nee would live with them. She was not my father’s daughter and would have to endure another three long years for our mother to attain Canadian citizenship in order to sponsor her immigration.

  Then one day my mother purchased a large, hard-sided suitcase with metal clasps, and without being told, I knew that our life in Hong Kong was about to end. I watched as she filled it with dried herbal medicines; a warm, brown woollen blanket with a shiny satin binding; new clothes for me, yards of fabric; and skeins of wool. She had heard that Canada was a cold country, where the people were large, and that it would be hard for her to find clothes to fit her small frame. My mother consulted a tailor and had a navy-blue travel suit made, and she went to a beauty salon, where someone permed her hair into a nest of tight curls. All these things my mother did in preparation for our journey across the Pacific. She approached her chores methodically and without complaint. But she never smiled. On the day we left Hong Kong, she wore her new suit and a gold necklace with a heart-shaped pendant that had the word HAPPY embossed on it. I wore a gold bracelet with the letters L-U-C-K-Y linked in a chain. At the time they were only a collection of lo fon ABCs.

  When we left for the airport in Hong Kong, my mother wept, not letting go of Ming Nee until we had to board the airplane. A tall lo fon stewardess ushered us into line; my mother held my hand the entire time, but her head was turned away from me. She was staring at her oldest daughter, who remained on the other side of the gate, tears streaming down her face, shoulders heaving. We stood to the side for a few moments, allowing other passengers to embark. Auntie, who had been waiting beside Ming Nee, finally led her away, and my mother and I walked through the portal. I looked up and saw my mother’s face all twisted. She gripped my hand even tighter. It wasn’t until I was an adult with children of my own that I began to have a real understanding of the anguish my mother must have been feeling; she was leaving behind her thirteen-year-old daughter.

  My mother never touched any of the food the flight attendants brought. But for me it was an adventure, and when I first tasted tiny cubes of soft fruit floating in a small bowl of clear, sugary syrup, I thought it was delicious. There were other Chinese women on the airplane, some of whom seemed to be about my mother’s age. And, like my mother, they were about to join husbands from whom they had been separated for many years. But there was one woman who I could tell was younger. Her complexion was smooth, and there was a nervousness about her. She reminded me of Ming Nee and was probably not much older. My mother said she was a mail-order bride, that she would marry her husband once she arrived. I noticed that all the women, even the mail-order bride, had their hair permed into curls, just like my mother, and that every one of them was wearing gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings. />
  It was night when the airplane landed in Vancouver. I remember only bright-coloured lights against a dark sky. A smiling Chinese man took a group of us on a bus, first to a hotel and then to a restaurant, where my mother ate almost nothing. The next day, we boarded another flight. This time there were fewer Chinese people on the airplane. Everybody was going to a big city, my mother told me. We were the only ones bound for a hand laundry in a small town.

  The Cathay Pacific airbus was crowded with overseas Chinese. My brothers and their wives sat together in the middle aisle. The four of them had brought out their U-shaped foam supports and adjusted them around their necks in preparation for the long flight. Doon’s voice kept rising with excitement, and every so often his wife, Yeng, would give him a gentle jab, telling him to lower his voice. Though it was past midnight when the airplane lifted off, the laughing and chattering did not subside for at least another hour. I was excited, but my anticipation paled next to their jubilant mood. As I sat next to my husband, I could not stop thinking about that long-ago journey in the propeller-driven plane that had taken my mother and me over the Pacific all the way from Hong Kong. I thought about the many times my father had crossed the ocean, how much my parents must have yearned for that place, both of them destined to die in a land that was never home. And for my mother, the exile was permanent, for once she left China, she never returned.