The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  In fact, my mother often talked about this small market town. I had no memory of it and could picture it only through her stories. It never sounded grand like Big Uncle’s home in Canton, but when she spoke about this place, her body would soften and contentment would fill her voice. She once told me those six years in Cheong Hong See were the best in her life, the only time she was truly happy.

  “But what about when you lived in the mansion with your thoh and Big Uncle—all those servants and cars?” I once asked her while she was rinsing rice for our dinner.

  My mother shook her head and for a moment said nothing. She poured off the cloudy water, then added more from the tap. She repeated this several times, then spread her fingers flat on top of the rice. She had taught me that if the water covered the fingers but not the top of the hand, you had the right amount. She put the pot on the burner of the hot plate and said to me, “You are young; you don’t understand. It wasn’t my wealth. It belonged to my brother and I was at the mercy of his good will. Yes, my thoh loved me, but the money belonged to my brother. The store in Cheong Hong See, though, was ours. Your father helped for a few years, and after he went back to Canada, he would send money. We were very comfortable. People from nearby villages used to stop at the store to buy things: fabric, thread, paper. But sometimes just to chat. Everyone wanted my advice, brought me letters to read and asked me to write letters for them. Not like here, where I’m good for nothing, always having to ask others for help.”

  Three large vans pulled up in front of the Ever Joint Hotel, where we were waiting. Each vehicle was already partially filled with family members from China and with people who were coincidentally headed in the same direction and needing a lift. The previous day we had all managed to pile inside, with some of us sitting at odd angles. I glanced at our large group from Canada. Perhaps we should have arranged for another vehicle. But once the doors opened, several of my relatives hopped out, ordered everyone inside to move over and invited us to get in. No one was worried that there were more passengers than seats. Back home I would have said something; but this was China, where vans for eight routinely carried ten or eleven. The only concession my relatives made was to my tall husband, who got to sit in the front next to the driver. In regular circumstances two people would have occupied that single bucket seat. Everyone laughed when Michael Uncle buckled his seat belt. I could not help but notice that once the van was in motion, my husband’s back grew rigid and his hand gripped the door handle so tightly his knuckles blanched.

  Cheong Hong See was about forty minutes outside Kaiping City. After driving some distance on the same highway that had taken us to Ning Kai Lee, we turned onto a two-lane road. Our driver leaned on the horn when passing everything from the occasional bicycle to large trucks and buses. He didn’t seem particularly concerned about traffic coming in the opposite direction and tailgated as a matter of habit. Fortunately, he didn’t drive very fast and the road was not too heavily travelled. The day before I’d been stuck in the middle of the van, surrounded by people and distracted by their questions and comments. I had completely missed the scenery. Today I made sure I had a window seat.

  For the final stretch of the journey, we drove on a secondary road lined with eucalyptus trees, hibiscus bushes and electrical transmission towers; low-voltage power lines set off in many directions. The fields along the roadside were almost all cultivated: rice, bananas, vegetables, sugar cane, trellises heavy with melons, bamboo, papayas. But the roadside was strewn with discarded plastic bags, bottles and cellophane packaging. It was disquieting to see this beautiful landscape blighted with garbage.

  Once we reached Cheong Hong See, the vans parked in front of a row of stores and everyone started to get out. My niece Kim took my hand and led me in a half walk, half run. I immediately likened the town to places I had seen in Mexico and Cuba: streets lined with decaying, two-storey buildings that had been grand in a distant past. Pillars supported a section of the second floors that projected over the sidewalks to form a shady arcade for pedestrians. Storefronts had grills and doors that rolled up to the ceiling so that no real separation existed between their interiors and the streets. People milled about, sharing the road with small motorcycles and bicycles and only a very few cars. They stopped chatting as we neared and watched this large contingent of visitors bustling through their town, so many of us unmistakably from afar. We passed a couple of men working on the motor of a tractor and, across from them, a fruit vendor sitting in the shade of an awning, her colourful produce displayed before her. The scorching temperatures had not relented since our arrival in China. The sun glowed white-hot in the sky. Holding pale blue umbrellas open above them, two women chatted as they cycled past, sunlight bouncing off the spokes of spinning wheels.

  Kim and I were ahead of everyone else. Suddenly, she stopped at an intersection. Jook, who was right behind us, pointed at one of the corner buildings. “That’s where you were born. There, on the second floor,” my sister said.

  I immediately turned to face this woman whom I had met only a few days before. What did she mean I was born here? My Canadian citizenship certificate clearly stated that I’d been born in the village of Ning Kai Lee. I wanted to correct her and told her what my certificate said. That was what our father had written. My sister made a tsk sound with her tongue and shook her head in exasperation. “Heeeyah! He’s wrong. And how would he know? He was in Canada. Listen. I know. I was there.”

  For just a fleeting second, I saw my father’s expression in my sister’s face. She brushed away my protest with a few waves of her hand. There was something in her impatient gesture, in the rush of her words. I could have sworn my father was speaking from the grave. I didn’t say anything for what must have seemed to Jook like a conspicuously long moment. There was no point in arguing about who was right. I took a deep breath and muttered something innocuous like “Oh, really.” I had thought that we, the visitors from the Gold Mountain, were the ones with secrets. I felt a hairline crack in my certainty.

  “There, up there on the second floor,” Jook insisted. “Through that window.” I glanced at Kim, and she shrugged her shoulders. I took a step back and surveyed this rundown, two-storey structure covered in old, flaking plaster. The rest of our party had caught up, and Jook led me by the hand into the store where my parents had managed their business. I nodded at the young couple who now rented the space from my nephew Lew, the son of First Brother Hing, who had died a few years before. Numerous shelves cluttered with cardboard boxes full of nuts and bolts, nails, keys, rivets and locks crowded the interior. Nothing was new; everything was used. Along one wall was a glass counter with a wooden frame that at one time must have been a fine piece of cabinetry. It seemed incongruous in this room so full of dusty metal sundries. Could it have belonged to my parents? I looked up and saw that the ceiling had once been decorated with a relief but was now grimy and peeling. I walked between the tight aisles several more times. What was I expecting? To see a store with thoughtfully stocked shelves and cabinets filled with carefully chosen things, a store like the one I had created in my imagination from my mother’s words?

  I had smiled to myself when friends in Canada said that this journey to my homeland would be a revelation. I had read about people returning to the land of their ancestors and feeling an almost mystical bond. But it seemed naïve to assume that I’d have an epiphany about myself, fill a void I didn’t even know existed. My father’s house in Ning Kai Lee was fascinating to explore, but the conditions in that home were medieval—so removed from my modern life, it was hard to make a connection. And this dark, junk-filled shop had nothing to do with me or who I was. If anything, I felt even more like an outsider. So why did I feel this sudden shift in the ground beneath my feet?

  My husband stood in the middle of the road talking to my Canadian niece and nephew, the only two people besides me who could converse with him in English. I smiled to myself, seeing how much he stood out from everyone around him. His towering height, t
hose large limbs and broad shoulders, his pale complexion, his face with its heavy brow and prominent Caucasian nose, his deep-set blue eyes, the light brown hair. In Acton everyone in the town knew who I was—“the little Chinese girl.” When I was in grade four, a Chinese family with two school-aged children moved into the town. On the daughter’s first day of school, the smiling principal brought her into my classroom. I remember how strange her straight black hair, dark, narrow eyes and brown skin seemed in a class full of faces with light hair and pale skin. I felt a flush of heat in my face and I wanted to hide behind a book. But now I was looking at my lo fon husband in this small market town in China, surrounded by people who had faces like mine. My lo fon husband, who looked happy and relaxed, without so much as a hint of discomfort. And yet I knew that I did not belong in China or in Cheong Hong See, where I had apparently been born. When my father returned, he had been a Gold Mountain guest who had come home; whereas I was a guest in China and my home was the Gold Mountain.

  I stepped into the street and Doon pointed to a window on the second floor, where he had once had a bedroom. I asked Jook if it was possible to visit the apartment. She hesitated for a moment, one eyebrow rising. “Why would you go there? Nothing good to look at, just old furniture and junk,” she said. As it turned out no one in the family had thought we would want to see the second floor, so no one had bothered to bring the key. Besides, I was the only one making a request. It made no sense to the others that I would travel halfway around the world to look at an unoccupied apartment in a state of disrepair. We had already made an offering at the ancestral home.

  Again I noticed people staring at my husband, who was taking pictures of everything in sight. He suddenly stopped and gestured to me to come and look through the telephoto lens of his camera. I held the camera to my eye and saw a plaster frieze of flowers and leaves under the roofline of my father’s building, much of the relief eroded but still lovely. Doon approached us. Apart from deteriorating because of neglect, the actual building hadn’t changed that much, he said. I wished I’d seen it when it was newly built. After my mother married our father, Doon and Shing had left Ning Kai Lee with them and moved into this town. My brother pointed to the buildings across the road and said that when we’d lived here, those lots had been vacant. You could see from our corner straight to the river, where he used to fish and catch frogs, which my mother would later steam over rice.

  During summer evenings in Acton, my mother often used to make a late-night soup from water, rock sugar, almonds, red dates and hard-boiled eggs. The white of the eggs would soak up the flavours from the sugar and the nuts. It was my favourite snack. But according to my mother, the best late-night treat could be had only in China: fresh frog cooked on top of rice. “Once you lifted the lid of the pot and breathed in the aroma of the steam rising from the combination of frog meat, ginger and garlic, your mouth would start to water. It’s too bad you’ve never tasted these things. There is nothing this tasty in Canada.”

  I went back inside the store and tried to imagine my parents running this business together. Did they sit behind that finely crafted counter? Did my mother show customers bolts of fabric or perhaps spools of thread, buttons, sheets of writing paper? Jook came and stood beside me. “Your mother was very popular in the town. The store was very busy, and people were always stopping by to talk.” Her eyes darted around, and she lowered her voice: “When our parents were here, everything was very nice, not like it is now. Your mother liked to organize things just so. She was very kind to everyone. People liked her. She was a big city girl, not like the people from around here, who never went anywhere. They were sad to see her go.” My sister leaned close to me. “Your mother liked my father from the very beginning, even though he was married. People say that she chased him.”

  I raised my hand over my mouth in shock and stared at Jook. How could she possibly know whether my mother chased her father? She would have been an infant when my mother taught in the village, and when my mother left in the early thirties, Jook might have been a child of two, three at most.

  “People still say that,” Jook said in answer to the look of skepticism on my face. I then recalled the white-haired woman back in Ning Kai Lee, telling me that she remembered my mother, a beautiful woman, the best schoolteacher the village had ever had. I politely nodded, but secretly dismissed her comment, suspecting the woman of trying to ingratiate herself to me.

  Somewhere between my suspicion and my amusement, my throat itched to correct these rumours about my parents. If only these people knew what I knew. During my childhood it seemed that doo sut was a sickening fact of life for the Chinese community. I had clear memories of my parents whispering to each other doo sut, doo sut. Such and such, you know the fellow who worked in the restaurant in that small town just north of us? He took his own life, had been found dangling from the end of a rope. It was the first time I’d heard my father refer to a gow meng, a dog life. I didn’t know then precisely what he meant, but I knew from his bitter tone that it was something worthless, not good. Years later I remembered hearing about a cook from a Chinese restaurant in one of the nearby towns leaping off the roof of his two-storey building. Just a few weeks earlier, I had been sitting next to him at a wedding banquet in Toronto.

  Jook and my other relatives in China had no inkling of what life in Gold Mountain had been like for people like her father. No idea of the deprivation, the loneliness, the racism, the homesickness. The terrible price our father paid, the permanent tangle of shame, anger, guilt and grief that he left behind for those of us in Canada. Jook and the others never saw my mother at my father’s funeral, so devastated and inconsolable that she could barely walk. They assumed my parents had enjoyed a life dripping with wealth because they had sent money even to people who weren’t related to them.

  My sister was still nodding her head, convinced that her stories about my parents were true. In the end I swallowed the growing desire to set the record straight, and I kept my mouth shut. What was the point of divulging the truth about these people they had idealized? What would be gained by disturbing happy memories?

  SEVEN

  Of all his children, my father loved me the most. A few days before, when I first heard Jen, Shing’s wife, make this announcement, I was astounded. It reminded me of my mother telling me that her thoh loved her more than she loved her own children. I could not imagine someone from a Western culture making this statement. As parents, as teachers, we are so careful not to indicate favouritism. Nor would a son or daughter proclaim such a thing except to cause strife. But within my sister-in-law’s family, this was perceived as fact and accepted by her siblings without resentment. Jen had told me several times that her father had suffered from high blood pressure. She was sure that if he had been able to immigrate to Canada earlier and had had the benefit of Western medicine, he would still be alive. When I booked our flights to China, I did not know that my sister-in-law’s village was close to Ning Kai Lee and that she would take this opportunity to visit and make an offering at her father’s grave. Jen’s siblings in Canada had also pooled their money so that after a ceremony at their father’s burial site, she would be able to hold a banquet for their entire ancestral village.

  My sister-in-law is from the village of So Gong Sun, which translates, literally, into Broomstick Mountain. Because Jook and my many nieces and nephews and their families had not been invited on this excursion, the vans were less crowded. Nevertheless, there were passengers I did not recognize, who, as on most of our trips, were either distant relatives or people who just needed a ride to the next village.

  After leaving the same highway that took us to Ning Kai Lee and Cheong Hong See, we travelled over an ever-narrowing concrete road that wound through cultivated fields and bamboo groves until we ended up on a rutted dirt trail, both sides so overgrown with trees that the branches met in a cathederal-like arch over the road. The path widened as we neared the village and came to a stop on a paved forecourt, much like the one
in Ning Kai Lee. There was even a pond by the village entrance and, as in Ning Kai Lee, the grey brick houses were arranged in a grid with narrow paths in between. We parked underneath two stately banyan trees with massive trunks and drooping branches from which aerial roots descended, some as fine as hair. I was surprised to see an ornate watch tower, several stories tall, in this village, which seemed even more isolated than Ning Kai Lee. As I looked around, I realized that So Gong Sun was larger and likely more prosperous than my father’s village. Perhaps it had benefitted from the generosity of sons who had gone to the Gold Mountain. Michael and I walked to the base of the tower and peered through the bars of a window. It had long since fallen into a state of disrepair; all its flooring and joists had been removed. The ground floor of this once-impressive building now served as a stable for water buffalo.

  The graves were far from the village; yet all the inhabitants followed us, forming a long procession down the narrow footpath. Jen had hired some men to carry several stretchers, one with a whole roast pig, the others with roasted chickens and ducks and other foods that would be presented at the offering. A smiling woman approached me as we walked and said that she had gone to school with my sister. She knew my sister lived in Canada and was married to a wealthy university professor. Several times, she mentioned that she and Ming Nee had been good friends and that she visited us at the store in Cheong Hong See, that she’d sometimes purchased thread and buttons from our store and that my mother had often given her candy as a treat. She repeated over and over how everyone in the village still remembered and respected my mother. All afternoon she walked beside me and held her umbrella over my head to shield me from the sun. The woman would have been the same age as Ming Nee, but she looked so much older. Her hair was grey and her face was deeply lined. I was embarrassed by her excessive attention. Why was she being so nice to me? What did she want? I was perturbed but also ashamed of my suspicions.