The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  The greatest pleasure of those early years in Acton was the Saturday afternoon movie at the Roxy Theatre on Mill Street. I went almost every weekend and sat inside the long auditorium with its curved ceiling, waiting for the lights to go off and for the screen at the front to light up. As the air thickened with the smell of cigarette smoke and buttered popcorn, I laughed at the zany antics of The Three Stooges, did chores on the farm with Ma and Pa Kettle and rode on horses through the Wild West with the Lone Ranger and Tonto. The movies taught me that families could be happy and that it was possible for two people to find contentment together. I learned that when a boy and girl were in love, they held hands, spoke softly and kissed gently. In fact, everything I needed to know about romance and true love I discovered at the Roxy Theatre. I was determined that I would be like the girls on that big screen, that one day I too would fall in love and get married. In my life there would be no room for a matchmaker. Under no circumstances would I be like my mother, betrothed at age three and married at age sixteen. I would not sit back and let someone else determine my future for me. I would have a boyfriend, go out on dates. I would laugh with my mouth wide open.

  Her father, my mother proudly declared, was a modern man. She knew of women from “old-fashioned” families, who were only a few years older than she and had had their feet bound. But her father didn’t believe in the custom; instead, he believed in making sure she had an education. My mother told me time and again that according to her father, a full belly was not enough, that his children must be able to read and write. But in spite of his modern ways, my grandfather still felt that it was his duty as a parent to find a suitable husband for her. My grandfather was an herbalist doctor with many rich clients, and he found a match from a particularly wealthy family for his daughter. The boy had been born, according to the local fortune teller, at a time when his stars were compatible with my mother’s. Not only that, he grew up to be tall, handsome and fair skinned.

  The world my mother had inhabited as a child, where marriages were arranged and a bride would not meet her husband until her wedding day, felt strange and foreign, but it captivated me. I could see her on the morning of her wedding day, trying to sit still through the hair-combing ceremony and trembling when she put on her red robe, intricately embroidered with a phoenix. I pictured her being helped into the sedan chair, head bent at a slight angle, eyes cast down, chest pounding and stomach queasy. As my mother was being carried away from her childhood home, what was she thinking? Was she hoping to live happily ever after? What if her husband was cruel? Did she weep, having to leave her family? When I was younger I used to think that if I had been in that position, I would have run away. But I now understand that like my sixteen-year-old mother, I too, would have been immobilized with fear. My mother said to me many times, “The moment I stepped out of the wedding sedan chair and peeked through my veil of red silk threads, I felt sick with dread.”

  “Why?” I asked each time, even when I knew the answer.

  “My husband,” she replied, “he had the eyes of a snake.”

  Her first husband was tall, handsome—and charming. But lurking behind his ready smile was something sinister. It didn’t take long for her to find out the truth about her young husband: that he was already in love. But not with another woman. He was in love with the white powder, with opium.

  “There were some people,” my mother said, “who could smoke the white powder for occasional pleasure, but that ho-um-ho loh, that very no-good man, he couldn’t live without it. Everything I brought in my dowry he took and sold.”

  In fear and desperation my mother hid her wedding gown, the last thing she owned of any value, at the bottom of the rice bin, but he found even that. I imagined my mother, a slender girl-bride, sobbing and begging her husband to stop his rampaging as he pushed and shoved furniture, searching for her gown until finally he kicked over the rice bin, shiny white grains spilling out like a river. I could hear her screaming NGOY GOH, NGOY GOH—That’s mine!—the moment he uncovered that swatch of bright red silk. I could see her snatching her hidden garment and pressing it to her chest while her husband bent down and pried it away from her fingers.

  “That’s how bad he was,” my mother said every time she told the story, her voice coated with disgust. “See what a very no-good person he was? What kind of a person would sell his own wife’s wedding gown?” My mother always paused and looked at me for agreement but never waited long enough for an answer. “It didn’t matter that I had all the right traditions. That for my hair-combing ceremony my father invited a good woman, someone who was prosperous and had lots of sons. It didn’t matter that she recited a good-luck poem:

  First brush makes your marriage strong,

  Second brush makes your lives together long,

  Third brush brings you wealth and many sons to carry on.

  It didn’t matter that my father did all those things. You see, the stars were wrong. There was nothing my father could do about it. The gods had already decided to be unkind, giving me that very no-good man.”

  At this point she always let loose with a rueful laugh, signalling the end of her story. Sometimes a shake of her head followed, with a few words muttered under her breath, as if there was more to tell, probably worse, which I would never hear. A part of me never liked these stories about my parents’ past lives. I didn’t like the fact that both of them had been married before and that I had half-siblings who were much older, some old enough to be my parents.

  When I was seven, I had a friend who told me that her mother was twenty-nine. One day we were playing at the sandbox in the park, and I saw a young, slim, dark-haired woman leaning against the corner of a picnic table. She was watching us. She was dressed in a sleeveless blouse, her long, tanned legs stretching out from a pair of short shorts. I can remember my astonishment when my friend looked up from our play and ran toward this young woman, calling her Mummy. It felt so unfair that she should have this mother who was so young, so pretty and feminine, while my mother seemed, well, so plain and old.

  I didn’t want parents who washed other people’s clothes. I wanted ones who were young, with bright, sparkling smiles, who lived in a house with a flower garden and a swing set, drove a car. I wanted a father who wore a suit and worked at the office, a mother who stayed home and baked cookies. I wanted parents who spoke English. My parents were outsiders, people without status. Although my embarrassment shamed me, I saw how hard my father and my mother worked and how little they had. I felt their helplessness in the marrow of my bones and I hated it.

  For as long as I could remember, my mother had told me how much she loved me, that I was her thlem gwon, her heart and her liver. Yet in the same breath, she would tell me, as if my love didn’t count, that the only person who had ever loved her was her thoh, her sister-in-law, the one married to her oldest brother, the man I called Big Uncle. My mother was only a child of six when he’d brought this woman home as his wife. By then her own mother was dead, and it was this thoh who raised her. In my mother’s hometown of Taishan, Big Uncle was a much celebrated man. Before he was married he had been to school in Peking, where he had passed the Imperial Examinations. For his homecoming the entire street was festooned with red and gold banners, and the air echoed with the sound of exploding firecrackers and the smell of scorched paper. Banquets were held in his honour, and baskets of delicious cakes and biscuits were given out to neighbours. Because of that single accomplishment, many doors opened for Big Uncle. He became a high-ranking official in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and afterwards a man of exceptional wealth. According to my mother, Big Uncle was mung kah lah, powerful.

  I listened with rapt attention to the stories about life in Canton, living in Big Uncle’s five-storey mansion, surrounded by manicured gardens and a high, wrought-iron fence, its imposing entrance guarded by a gatekeeper. Big Uncle had a staff of twelve, including servants, cooks and chauffeurs. He had built a private screening room for watching movies and a rooftop gard
en, where he, his family and guests would spend summer evenings sitting around a marble dining table, looking up at a star-studded sky, while servants brought out one mouth-watering course after another. The aroma of the food mingled with the fragrance of flowers redolent in the moist, night air. I could see it in my mind: the women slender and fine-boned, in their fitted silk cheongsams, fingernails painted, hair coiled into perfect French rolls, the men elegant in their smart, Western suits, the conversation witty, the laughter silky. Just like the movies.

  It’s still difficult for me to fathom the extent of Big Uncle’s wealth, and my mother never told me how he made his money. As a child I never asked. But when I became an adult and aware of the corruption that was so much a part of Chinese society before the war, I grew suspicious about the source of his riches. No matter how those scenes of opulence came about, they were so beyond my experience they felt like make-believe. I was growing up in a home with no luxuries and still remember the day my father bought a television. I was eleven years old and standing beside him in the local furniture store. There were sofas, armchairs, coffee tables, china cabinets, record players and TVs, all shiny and new, carefully staged inside the showroom. In this life of mine, where I fraternized with lo fons and spoke only English, I had become familiar with all these things. Whenever I visited a friend from school at her house, I sat on a sofa with soft cushions. When I was invited for dinner, we sometimes ate in a dining room at a polished, wooden table. I knew to keep my elbows at my sides and how to use a knife and a fork. I looked around the store at all the new furnishings and knew that they had no effect on my father. They were so far beyond his sphere of expectation, they might as well have not been there.

  The store owner smiled at us, and I told him we were looking for a television, an inexpensive one. Everyone in Acton knew who we were, and they could most likely guess our financial circumstances. The proprietor immediately took us to the back of the store. In his kindness he never offered us what we could not afford. I could tell that he was embarrassed, but there was no need for him to be apologetic. It made no difference to my father that we were taken to a back corner and shown an unwanted television with wood veneer that had turned a strange colour at best resembling blond. It made no difference that there was something wrong with the picture tube. My father cared only about the low price; the fact that no one else in town wanted it suited him just fine. When I finished translating, my father carefully counted out each necessary bill, and I booked a date for delivery.

  Despite our TV’s imperfect condition, I was excited and I loved it. From then on I spent much of my spare time staring at movies and programs on that black-and-white set. The picture was compressed into the bottom third of the screen, with the result that outdoor scenes always had a lot of sky, people had short legs and long torsos and every close-up revealed a face with a spectacular forehead that rose high above the squashed eyes, nose and lips. At school recesses I could finally join the discussions about the latest episode of My Three Sons or The Real McCoys. On the weekends I watched Fred Astaire dance, Judy Garland sing and Tarzan leap from branch to branch in the African jungle. It used to amuse my mother to see the Tarzan movies because she had seen them before the war at Big Uncle’s house. She told me about her young nephews and how they pretended to be the ape-man, calling out while swinging on imaginary vines. Although she told me this more than once, each time it surprised me. It amazed me that this short, plump woman with permed, greying curls in a hairnet, who lived upstairs from a hand laundry, once lived in a home with servants and knew about Tarzan—something out of Hollywood, so Western, so un-Chinese. When my mother spoke about her past life, she grew aloof, and the woman I knew became mysterious and unrecognizable.

  Her young husband’s gambling and addiction to opium consumed his life. What else could I do but leave? my mother said. I wanted more details. Intuition told me that she was holding back something dark and terrible. But I was always afraid to ask. Once, though, I inquired about his parents. Why didn’t they do something? I wanted to know. She said that his parents spoiled him and that she was just a daughter-in-law. Why should they care about her? It wasn’t as if she had borne him a son. She said that the only good thing about her life was her thoh, who loved her and took her into the home that she and Big Uncle shared. My mother was only eighteen and newly separated from her husband. In 1930 China was still a patriarchal society and almost feudal in its attitude toward women. But my mother was determined and resourceful. And unlike many women of her generation, she knew how to read and write. It has been many years since her death, yet I still grapple with the fact that this woman, who defied the strict conventions of the time, took possession of her own future and sought shelter with the one person who truly loved her, was my mother.

  While she was living with her thoh and Big Uncle in Canton, my mother noticed in a newspaper that a village in Kaiping County was looking for a schoolteacher, someone with a high school education. My mother applied for the position, and that is how she arrived in Ning Kai Lee.

  My father had returned from Canada for the fourth time. He was a well-respected Gold Mountain guest with a reputation as a man of learning. The village made him the head of the local school’s hiring committee.

  My mother was a well-spoken young woman from the big city, whose brother had passed the Imperial Examinations and was now a high-ranking Kuomintang official. Her father had been an herbalist doctor; she had been schooled by the missionaries. My mother told my father all these things. That he was able to hire a woman with these qualities to teach in his humble village further elevated his status. When I was a teenager, my mother confided in me that she had never even finished high school. I asked her how she got the teaching job in the village, and she replied with a gleam in her eye, giving me a rare glimpse of her former self, “I lied.” What else did she lie about? Did my father and the villagers know that she had left a husband? It seems odd that they never questioned why a woman from the city with my mother’s education and social standing would want to teach in such a remote place. Did it ever occur to them that she might be concealing something?

  For my mother, who had been living in a modern mansion with a host of servants in the bustling city of Canton, the village of Ning Kai Lee, with its small, simple houses could have been a painful exile. Yet whenever she spoke about this period of her life, she did so with satisfaction. She worked hard in Ning Kai Lee, but her efforts were appreciated and she felt respect.

  When my father and his committee hired my mother, he would have been a man of thirty-eight who was married with three children. At this point it would be easy for me to fabricate something, to imagine that in spite of their age difference, my parents recognized each other as soul mates and fell in love, only to have to wait many years before their love could be consummated. But I don’t know what that old woman I met in my father’s house was thinking when she said that people in the village were not surprised that my father came back to marry my mother. The sad truth of the matter was that their eventual marriage had nothing to do with love and everything to do with survival.

  Michael and I had turned off the lights in our hotel room. I was exhausted from the day’s excitement and should have fallen asleep quickly. Yet I lay awake for a long time. In my mind I saw my father’s plain, grey-brick house, and I smelled the mould on the walls. I saw chickens pecking in the lanes and laundry hung between trees. I saw the faded shrine in my father’s house and heard the old woman with the thick, white hair telling me about my mother. I thought about my parents and the incredible distance between their past lives and the life I shared with them in that lonely hand laundry in Acton.

  During my childhood, I too had lived two lives: one with my parents and one outside the laundry. We arrived in Acton from Allandale late at night on the train. It was winter, and the next day, when I went outside to play, a blue-eyed boy with yellow hair stood across the road from me and threw a chunk of ice that hit me on my mouth. I was so shocked I didn’t
cry, even though I was bleeding. I just stared. He glared back and called me a Chink. I burst into tears. I didn’t speak very much English, but I knew it was a bad word. I hated that word Chink, but whenever I was taunted again, I kept my feelings to myself. I never told my parents about these things. Through sheer force of will, I had a happy childhood. I played with my friends, I rode my bicycle, I joined Brownies, I went to Sunday school, I was teacher’s pet. Once I stepped outside my father’s laundry, I was on my own, for better or for worse.

  SIX

  Cheong Hong See is a market town surrounded by a cluster of villages, my ancestral village, Ning Kai Lee, being one of them. During one of my father’s return journeys from Canada, he purchased a corner lot in the town and built a row of three stores with an apartment on the second floor. In 1947, he and my mother opened a dry goods business in the middle space and rented out the other two. While I was growing up in Acton, I pestered my mother for stories of my early childhood, and she would tell me about how I played outside under the arcade, how I pretended to set up shop and how I filled a wicker basket with make-believe cakes before calling on Sek Lam Uncle, the tenant next door. Sek Lam Uncle and his wife had no children of their own, and they doted on me. He was a tailor, and his skills were well known throughout the area. He had a withered leg, and because of that, my mother said, tailoring was a good trade for him.