The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  As soon as the song was finished, the corners of his mouth turned down in grim determination. My father rushed between the machine and the wooden tubs where the soapy laundry was rinsed in one tub after another until the water was clear. Next, he fed the clothes piece by piece between the rollers of a hand-cranked mangle that squeezed out all the water. The wrung-out laundry fell from the mangle in graceful, undulating curves into a wicker basket. If the weather was fine, my father hung each wet item on lines outside. At the end of the day, there were baskets stuffed with dried shirts, sheets, towels, underwear and socks, everything stiff and smelling of the sun and fresh air.

  But on rainy days, and also during the winter, my father went into a room at the back of the building and packed coal into a cast-iron furnace that stood in the corner, heating the room to more than eighty degrees. He then took the wrung-out clothes and pegged everything on clotheslines strung just below the ceiling. When it was cold outside, I used to stand in that room, dressed only in panties and an undershirt, just to savour its moisture and warmth. Even on the coldest winter day, he had to open the back door, releasing clouds of billowing steam into the frosty air outside. On those rainy summer days, however, the hot furnace only added to already high temperatures. The laundry filled with humidity, and my father, dressed in dark trousers and a flimsy white singlet, dripped with perspiration.

  In the winter, except for Mondays and Thursdays, when laundry was being washed, my father put off burning coal in the cast-iron stove for as long as possible, and he bundled up with a peaked cap and a bulky, shawl-collared, woollen sweater fitted over many layers of clothing. Every Tuesday and Friday, he stood from morning until night in front of his ironing table. He ironed every single article by hand, except for bed sheets, which he later put through a press with rollers. By the time my mother and I joined him, he had bought himself an electric iron. But when he first worked in a laundry, he used heavy ones that had to be warmed on the top of a coal stove. You have to be careful., he often told me, because if the metal is too hot, you will scorch the shirt. He said the lo fons grew very angry when an item of clothing was ruined, even when he offered to reimburse them. I protested and answered that the lo fons were unfair. My father shook his head and said that these accidents no longer happened. He always remembered to test the electric iron first—on the cloth that was stretched over the padded surface of the table. And he pointed to a strip along the white sheet, where arrow-shaped burn marks overlapped one another.

  On ironing days, before I started school and got to know other children in the neighbourhood, I used to play in the space under my father’s ironing table and watch his trousered legs shuffle back and forth. It was a space that was mine, somewhere I could create a world of my own, my parents close yet far away. I drew on sheets of brown laundry paper, cut out shapes, listened to the hiss of steam and felt the thud-glide rhythm of my father’s iron pounding the padded wooden surface above my head.

  The moment we set foot inside my father’s hand laundry in Allandale, my mother started to complain. What was the matter with him that he chose to do business in such a godforsaken place? She could barely stand to touch the lo fons’ soiled belongings, and she cringed at the sour smell that permeated every fragment of their clothing. She used to stand next to the pot of boiling handkerchiefs, and as the green snot loosened and floated to the top, she shuddered and shielded her nose and mouth with one hand while she skimmed off the slime with a metal spoon. She grumbled about the lack of heat in winter and the chilblains that afflicted her hands and feet. But my father said this was nothing. She couldn’t possibly know how difficult life was during his first years in Canada—the nasty gwei doy, ghost boys, who waited in ambush to pelt him with stones in the summer and snowballs in the winter. If he was lucky when he ventured into the streets, he was assaulted only with hateful names. His days were long hours of relentless, monotonous work; his nights were short, spent on the hard surface of an ironing table.

  My mother scoffed. She had been through the War. The moment my mother brought up the War, I knew the quarrelling would soon crescendo. Next to the drama of the Japanese invasion of China, even my father’s endless years of grinding destitution and loneliness paled. But sometimes my father tried to mount a counterattack. He talked about how he would have considered the little bit of heat he allowed us to be luxurious, how he ate only a few fermented black beans and rice—all this to save money to send back to her, to his family. My mother looked at him in disgust and told him he knew nothing about true suffering. She was the one imprisoned in this loathsome place, her thlem gwon, her heart and liver, ripped to shreds, forced to leave her daughter behind in Hong Kong. If only she had known ahead of time how miserable her life in the Gold Mountain would be. My mother spat out the words Gam Sun as if they were poison, something she had been tricked into consuming. But now it was too late. She had already made this terrible mistake.

  Once my mother started to moan about her stranded daughter, my father grew silent. He was never able to contest this predicament. Except once. They were shouting at each other through the din of the washing machine. The fact that they could barely hear each other didn’t seem to matter. Their quarrelling had become a drama with predictable lines that they delivered again and again, with little variation. As my father was feeding wet clothes through the electric mangle, his fingers kept coming dangerously close to the spinning rollers, and I let out a barely audible gasp of relief whenever he pulled his hand back. My worry was needless; for my father, these tasks had become so automatic he could have performed them blindfolded. And just as well. At that moment all his energy was focused on the fight he was having with my mother; each new taunt was pushing their discord to another level. Without warning he deviated from the script. He turned off the motor, and in the sudden quiet of the room, said, “If you want to go back to Hong Kong, I’ll send you back. But you go alone. My daughter stays here. I will not jeopardize her future because of your stupidity.”

  “My stupidity? You’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

  “I said you could go back. That’s what you want.”

  “What kind of choice is that? I would never leave my daughter. I would throw the two of us in front of a train before I left her with you. What kind of man are you? My heart and my liver already ripped from my body.” My mother paused for a moment. She was standing at the kitchen table, chopping some ginger that she would later add to a stir-fry. “If I had known what it would be like here, I would never have left Hong Kong. At least there I had both my children with me.”

  “Do you think I love this country? You still don’t understand, do you? I’m not here for me. I suffer because of my family. OPEN YOUR EYES.”

  “You talk to me about suffering. I’m the one who knows suffering.” My mother was about to launch once more into her litany of wartime hardships.

  “I’m sick of the arguing, your complaining,” my father shouted, interrupting her. “I’m ready to cut out my tongue if you don’t stop!”

  My mother now had a cleaver in her hand and was about to slice some meat. Her face hardened; she rested the blade along the edge of the cutting board and glared at him, his words looming over them. My mother’s voice came out cold and flat. “Cut the dead thing out. See if I care.”

  The arguing stopped, my mother’s words suspended in the air. They each clamped their lips in silence. My father turned the motor back on, and my mother resumed her slicing. Whenever I think back on that scene between my parents, on the coincidence of my father threatening to remove his tongue while my mother stood at a chopping board with a knife in her hand, it’s hard not to smile. If only my parents had been a slight bit more happy, they might have seen the irony of the situation, and perhaps laughed. If only …

  My mother and I were with my father in Allandale for less than a year before we had to move. The landlord told my father that he was selling the building, and the new owner wanted us to leave and the machinery gone. It must have been an un
settling time for my mother. Although our home in Allandale was a grim sort of place, at least she had some contact in town with Chinese people. There was a Chinese restaurant down the street, where Doon had started working when he’d arrived a few months after my mother and me. The owner of a Chinese restaurant in Barrie visited us regularly with his wife, and they took me for drives in their large car. Once we went to a zoo, where I saw a peacock and clapped my hands with excitement when the bird fanned out its brilliant tail feathers.

  My father searched in the Chinese newspaper from Toronto and found a Chinese hand laundry, fully equipped, for sale in the small town of Acton. Years later my mother would complain to me about my father’s purchase. He had never consulted her about his decision to buy it. She said that if she had been in Canada for even two years at the time, she would have protested the move to Acton. She said my father should have bought a business in Toronto, where there was a Chinese community, where I would have had Chinese friends and could have gone to Chinese school. But she knew nothing about Canada. Here in this wretched country, she had become as capable as a lump of rice. Nothing at all like what she’d been in China. While we lived in Allandale and even several years after moving to Acton, she hardly ever left the laundry, never went anywhere on her own. Tasks as simple as going into a grocery store felt insurmountable.

  My mother was right. We should have moved to Toronto’s Chinatown. But not for my sake. For hers.

  On our last day in Allandale, some men arrived to dismantle and remove the machinery. They were large and burly, smelling of sweat and unwashed clothes. My father had hired them, but he seemed so small and timid; I felt afraid. Partway through the morning, in an unwise gesture of friendship, my father gave those giant men a bottle of whiskey. It proved to be a grave mistake. The boss grinned and slapped my father on the back.

  By late afternoon, the workers had dismantled the washing machine and had carted away the main components, but the floor was littered with small, greasy, metal parts. All the men, except for one, climbed into the cab of the truck. The remaining one hoisted himself into the open back. As they drove away, the man in the back waved to us, his other arm wrapped around the bottle of whiskey, a lopsided grin on his face. Even as a five-year-old child, I found my father’s gift distressing. Like all children, I instinctively understood my inherent state of weakness and dependency. And because of this, even though I was not able to voice it, I realized my father’s act of ingratiation stemmed not from strength but from helplessness.

  The sun was low in the sky, and a long shaft of sunlight streamed through the window at the front of the laundry and streaked across the planked, wooden floor. In the semi-darkness of that room, I watched my parents, backs hunched over and movements laboured, as they picked up the scattered metal pieces and put them in cardboard boxes. They would not let me help. Every so often my mother would curse under her breath, but my father stayed silent. He didn’t seem angry, yet there was something about the way he stared straight ahead, focusing on nothing, that frightened me. I wanted to cry, but didn’t.

  Acton was only forty miles from Toronto, but in 1956 it felt far away and removed. In many ways our lives changed very little from our days at Allandale. We had no car, telephone, refrigerator or bathtub. The previous owner had left behind a two-burner hot plate on which my mother cooked all our meals. On Mondays and Thursdays my father continued to pack a cast-iron boiler with coal to heat water in preparation for the laundry. The washing machine that stood in the middle room of the first floor was like the one in Allandale. A row of wooden laundry tubs lined the wall behind it. Pushed up against the opposite wall was a kitchen table, where my mother would prepare our meals. At the back of the house was a room with clotheslines strung below the ceiling for drying clothes during inclement weather. In the parlour were the ironing tables and wooden shelves that held the finished, wrapped laundry.

  The only other Chinese people in Acton at that time were a father and his two grown sons, who operated the local restaurant. For the next few years, my mother would be the only Chinese woman in the town. And I would be the only Chinese child.

  We had been in Acton for over a year when my mother became friends with a woman whose husband operated a Chinese laundry in a small, nearby city. Her husband owned a car, and on Sundays the couple would drive for pleasure around the local countryside, often stopping in the little towns to visit at Chinese restaurants and laundries. My mother was pleased to finally meet someone close to her own age who was not only Chinese but also spoke our dialect. The two women liked each other, and the couple started to frequent our home. Every time they came, they encouraged us to visit them.

  My mother decided that she and I would call on our new friends on a Saturday when I had no school and, being a day for sorting laundry, my father would be able to manage on his own. On the chosen morning, we put on our winter coats and boots and waited outside the five-and-dime store where the Gray Coach stopped to pick up passengers.

  A half-hour later, when the bus drove into the station, I looked out the window and saw the woman’s husband waiting for us. The man had a round belly and a ready smile, and as soon as he saw us stepping off the bus, he rushed over, took my hand and led us to his car, where his wife was sitting in the front seat.

  The couple’s laundry was on a busy street corner. He held open a heavy, wooden door with a glass window, allowing us to step inside. The air was hot and damp in contrast to the cold, crisp outdoors. The work room was filled with shiny machines that clicked and clacked as they washed, dried, pressed and folded each item. Lo fon girls dressed in short-sleeved blouses and knee-length skirts stood in front of these machines, passing shirts from one station to the next until each one was folded into a rectangle with a smart, cardboard bow tie tucked between the tips of the collar before the whole garment was slipped inside a cellophane bag. I stood and listened to the push of buttons, the pull of presses and the hiss of steam, these staccato rhythms so different from the harsh grinding of my father’s prehistoric washing machine and the thud-glide rhythm of his iron on the pressing table. These modern machines turned out clean shirts, ready to wear, at a speed that would have been impossible for my father. He ironed almost everything by hand, then folded each smooth shirt and handkerchief so carefully, so neatly, before wrapping them up in brown paper parcels.

  As the proud owner of this brand-new enterprise talked about the need to modernize and to change with the times if you wanted to make money, my mother listened with a tight-lipped smile. When he finished explaining, she sighed and nodded in agreement. She said that our family would never be rich, that we only knew the old way of doing things. Later that day the man and his wife drove us home. When this smiling, well-fed Chinese man, who also spoke proper English to his customers, stepped with us inside our laundry, I took a deep breath. The air felt colder, the rooms seemed darker, the machines more worn and my father even smaller.

  My family’s poverty aside, I liked our home in Acton. Our bedroom was no longer on the same floor as the laundry equipment. The stairs leading to the second floor opened onto a large, square room, where my mother declared Ming Nee would sleep once she arrived. Even though an ocean and a continent separated us from my mother’s daughter, it was as if she already lived with us. A pot-bellied, coal-burning stove sat in the corner of the room. Further along the wall was an empty space. My mother pointed to it and said it would be a good spot for a homework table, a place for Ming Nee to keep her books and to study. Ming Nee this, Ming Nee that. It seemed all my mother ever thought about was Ming Nee. I was too young to understand her constant worry. I didn’t know that we would wait almost another three years for her daughter to arrive. These concerns my mother never shared with me.

  I was in grade one when I started to help my mother prepare for her Canadian citizenship interview. Louis St. Laurent, I said, enunciating clearly. Loo-ee So Lo Lo, my mother said, trying to mimic my sounds. Again I would repeat the name, and again I would try to correct her.
It was the same process for the provinces and each capital city. I lost patience trying to teach her these Canadian facts. I was sick of having to say British Columbia over and over. No matter how slowly I uttered each word, it was never slow enough. And I knew she would never, not even in a million years, be able to pronounce Louis St. Laurent, the prime minister’s name. I found it so easy. It frustrated me that she was unable to wrap her lips around the lo fon syllables. It was hopeless. But my mother was desperate to become a Canadian. Only then would she be eligible to sponsor her daughter for immigration and end their painful separation.

  The laundry’s previous owners had left behind a single bed and a bunk bed shoved into a small room off the larger one my mother had reserved for Ming Nee. My father and I shared the bunk, with him sleeping on the bottom bed and me on the top. A wooden bureau with three rows of drawers had also been left behind. My father used one drawer for himself; my mother and I shared the rest. The room was so tiny that I had to crouch on my father’s mattress to fully open any of the drawers.

  I liked the fact that we now lived on the corner of a tree-lined, residential street and that we had a backyard. And because my parents were unconcerned about the condition of our grass, it often became an after-dinner gathering spot in the summer for neighbourhood children. The year we moved to Acton, our stretch of the block was home to twenty-two children between the ages of four and nine. And at age six, I was smack in the middle.

  During the warm weather, when I came out after supper, I would find several children chasing each other on our sparse, patchy lawn. I could hear the neighbours’ lawn mowers in the background and smell the fresh-cut grass. Our evenings evolved into games of tag and hide-and-go-seek. For the latter we fanned out across the entire neighbourhood, leaning against trees, sneaking inside garages, crouching behind rain barrels, then making that final mad dash, screaming home free. I absorbed English so quickly that by the end of the first summer, I could no longer remember a time when I didn’t speak this language. I became one of the gang, united by our grass-stained clothes and sweaty bodies, breathless from chasing, shouting and laughing, the world of grown-ups far away. As the evening sun dropped, one by one my friends would start to leave, their mothers hollering their names from doorsteps. I never wanted the games to end; I always wanted to play even after the crickets had started to sing, long past dusk, deep into the dark.