The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  Until their deaths my parents held fast to the virtue of self-deprivation. For a short time after we first met, Michael thought my mother owned only one handmade, green cotton dress. I corrected this impression and explained that she owned several dresses that were the same, but with one variation: short sleeves for summer and long sleeves for winter. By fitting all the pattern pieces on the same bolt of cloth several times, she would use less material and thus save money. Every new item of clothing I bought for her she put away for the elusive good occasion. Whenever I bought something for my father, he told me to return it to the store. The only time he wore a new suit was at Ming Nee’s wedding, and it was purchased for him by his future son-in-law. I can still see him in that properly fitted dark grey suit, walking Ming Nee in her floor-length bridal gown down the church aisle.

  Otherwise, my father’s wardrobe consisted only of clothing that had been left unclaimed in the laundry—appropriated no sooner than five years after a parcel had been abandoned. Only then was he confident that the owner was unlikely to return. Once again, my mother found his honesty excessive, and this time I agreed. Unclaimed packages of laundry sat gathering dust on a corner shelf, and when my father opened them after his self-imposed period of grace, the shirts had often yellowed with age. Regardless, he would wash and iron them for himself. And if they were too large, he used expandable arm bands to hold up the sleeves, and he tucked shirttails that came below his thighs inside his pants.

  Every so often an aerogram or a letter written on onionskin paper arrived at the laundry from one of our relatives appealing for additional money. Below the foreign stamps was our address in awkwardly written English script, with smooth, flowing Chinese characters on the side. Since my parents continued to send money home despite my father’s paltry earnings, the requests for more made him cross. “They think money grows on trees over here. That I just have to go and pick it, like some kind of fruit,” I heard him say more than once. My parents talked about how the family in China never really understood the harshness of their lives in Canada. They had little sympathy toward each other, but when it came to the family back home, their feelings were united.

  One afternoon while I was still in high school, I came home to my parents complaining about yet another entreaty for more money. I was sick of hearing these complaints, over and over. In my know-it-all teenage voice, I blurted out, “Money, money, money. All they ever write about is money! You haven’t seen these people in years. Besides, you’ve given them so much. You don’t owe them anything. Why bother?”

  My mother stopped what she was doing and glared at me, her eyes shining with anger and disbelief. “Don’t ever say that,” she said in a low, steady voice. “These people are family. You don’t know how lucky you are. You’re the one who has more. No matter how little we have here, it’s more than what they have at home.” My mother’s words shamed me. In my foolishness I had overlooked how very real these people back in China were for them and had ignored the fact that perhaps their memories of China had more meaning than their lives here in Canada.

  A few days earlier, I’d been visiting the home of a friend after school, and while we sat at her kitchen table with our Cokes and potato chips, she brought out a shoe box of old family photos: pictures of herself as a baby, of her mother and aunt when they were small children, of her grandparents and other relatives. I looked at my friend and I could see her face in the pictures of her mother as a child, in her grandmother and a great-aunt. I picked up a photograph of her mother and her siblings, children with tidy hair and dressed in smooth, white, lacy smocks, smiling sweetly in front of the camera. I held this slightly curled, black-and-white picture in my hand and wondered what it would be like to know my family’s past, to recognize myself in someone who had lived long ago. My grandparents were all dead by the time I was born. It wasn’t until after my father had died that it occurred to me that I didn’t even know their names. I had never seen a picture of either of my parents as children. For that matter, there were no baby pictures of me or of any of my half-siblings. For me, life had started in Allandale. My relatives in China existed in a dark, meaningless past. At times it seemed as if there was a giant clothesline stretching across the Pacific, and my parents and my siblings were suspended at different points along the line. I was the only one who’d reached that distant shore, my feet firmly on the ground.

  NINE

  According to my mother, I used to peer out the window from the second floor of our store in Cheong Hong See and pray to Hin-ah-Gung, Old Heaven Uncle, to stop the rain. I was impatient to venture outside, to splash and wade in the puddles left behind. I have a faint memory of bending over with small, flat rectangles of wood in my hands and pushing away water that had gathered in the ruts on the road, then standing aside to watch the water rush back. In the shadow of that memory is another little girl, the two of us running through the sparkling, shallow pools and laughing. Was Kim the playmate I have so long remembered?

  Once again, Jook and Kim joined Michael and me in a hired van. As we travelled along the rural roads, Michael asked about the rice fields, which appeared to be in various stages of growth. I translated for him and pointed out a particular paddy to my sister. She smiled and said, “That field is almost ready for harvest. I spent so many years farming, I can tell at a glance about a field, when it needs to be cut, whether in three months, two months or now.” As I relayed these things to Michael, both women grinned, pleased that he was so interested in their experiences. “Everything you know is from books. Everything I know is from work. But some things you don’t know because you lived in Canada. Now that you are here, I will teach you.” My sister began with the different names for rice: voh while it’s growing in the field; guk, when it’s ready to be harvested; mi before it’s cooked; and fhun once it’s cooked. She made me teach Michael the different terms. When he repeated them, my sister and niece chuckled at his awkward pronunciations.

  “In English,” I explained, “there is only one word for all those things.” She smiled, an expression of mild disbelief on her face, then took my hand in hers.

  Because Jook and Kim had spent their lives as farmers, they had no pension from work, and the government offered no state support during old age. Nonetheless, Jook felt secure. She said confidently that her five children provided her necessities. For Kim, though, circumstances were far less kind. Her husband had been forced into early retirement and received only a small pension. Her son had managed to find work as a junior cook and contributed a portion of his salary each month. Several years before, her daughter had immigrated to Canada in an arranged marriage and now sent her family regular remittances. Without this money, Kim explained, life would have been impossible. She hoped that one day her son would be able to immigrate and that her daughter would eventually sponsor her and her husband to live with them in a suburb outside Ottawa. In spite of the economic improvements in China, North America was still the Gold Mountain. I wanted to tell my niece to think carefully about her desire to leave China. I wanted to tell her about the long, cold winters in Ottawa and the isolation she would no doubt endure, cut off from her community and people who spoke her own language. I had witnessed the full life that she was living in Kaiping and I wanted to warn her. But I had known her for less than a week. I decided to say nothing.

  During her youth Kim had been persecuted by Red Guards and was sent for re-education through labour by working in rice paddies from early dawn to dusk. With a sad shrug of the shoulders, she said that by the time the Cultural Revolution was over, she was in her mid-twenties. The education system had been left in a state of disarray, and even if it hadn’t been, it was too late for an ordinary person like her to return to school. I kept to myself the fact that while she was toiling in the fields in southern China, I was attending high school and then university, listening to Beatles music, wearing miniskirts, getting upset if the hairdresser had cut my bangs too short. She didn’t need to hear about what for her would have been a life of pri
vilege. When we were together, I was keenly aware that her fate could so easily have been mine. I could almost hear my parents whispering to me, their breath hot on the back of my neck, reminding me of my good fortune, of their many sacrifices, of the terrible world oy kai, back home, had become. Even if oy kai was where they longed to be.

  Kim felt a collection of watch towers at Majianglong village would interest Michael and me. It was much like the other villages we had encountered in that it had houses made of narrow, grey bricks, built on a grid of lanes and surrounded by tended fields and a stream flowing beside a paved forecourt outside the village. But what stood out and made it similar to Zili village was its prosperity. The homes were large and well maintained. In fact, this village was altogether well cared for apart from the angry red graffiti that had been smeared on the walls of the houses that stood on the perimeter of the village. I was shocked at the writing, outraged that someone would actually vandalize something so beautiful. The slogans, Kim explained, had been painted by the Red Guards. Here it was more than forty years after the Cultural Revolution, and even though I could not read the weather-worn Chinese characters, they still pulsed with obvious anger. The Revolutionary authorities would have persecuted the wealthy landowners who lived here, going so far as to execute many of them. It occurred to me that the poverty of my father’s village may have ultimately saved it from the Red Guards’ revolutionary zeal.

  Michael and I decided to wander through the streets while Jook and Kim went to the far side of the village. As we were walking between the houses, a voice called out in English. “Hello. Where you from?” We were both startled and turned toward the voice. A man in his seventies was standing outside a house, waving us toward him. He told us that he lived in Los Angeles and was visiting his family home in his ancestral village. After exchanging pleasantries, he invited us into his house. In some ways it was like my father’s in Ning Kai Lee, made of the same bricks with thin lines of mortar between each course, but larger and grander, with windows and a proper second floor. This man was very proud of his house and spoke with a confident and expansive manner. There was something refined about him, and in my mind I had already pegged him as a business man, perhaps exporting goods from China to North America. So I was surprised to learn that he had worked as a cook in Los Angeles. Had my father been like this when he returned to his village? Had he been like this modern Gold Mountain guest, full of confidence and good humour?

  Jook and Kim came looking for Michael and me and beckoned to us, so we said goodbye to our new friend and followed my sister and her daughter to the edge of the village. There they led us into a grove of star fruit trees—thirty, maybe forty, of them, the size of mature maples with drooping branches, covered with leaves and laden with fruit. Scattered about the forest floor were benches that the villagers had made from massive slabs of stone. I sat down on one of them and looked at the sunlight filtering through the tangle of dark branches and rich, green leaves, relishing the stillness and silence of the warm afternoon.

  Kim then reached up and plucked a low-hanging star fruit. She grinned as she took a pocket knife out of her purse, cut up the fruit and offered a slice to her mother. They bit into their pieces at the same time, their faces puckering, then bursting into laughter. For these last few days I had been watching the ease that Kim and her mother had with each other. My sister was eighteen when her daughter was born. Yet they seemed more like sisters than Jook and I did, the way they walked, leaning into each other, whispering things, finishing each other’s sentences, giggling like girlfriends. I smiled at their small pleasure and felt a pang of envy.

  After my father died my mother lived for another twenty-eight years. For several months after her death, I kept noticing couples who appeared to be mother and daughter. I could always pick them out—as if a spotlight had shone on them. And even though I knew it was impolite, I stared. Once, while I stood waiting for a friend in the foyer of a busy lunchtime restaurant in downtown Toronto, my eyes wandered past the rushing waiters to a row of booths along the wall, where two women were sitting at a table. It was apparent from their age difference and resemblance to each other that they were mother and daughter. I could feel the pleasure they took in each other’s company, the way they leaned against the table toward each other, perhaps sharing a joke. The daughter reached into her bag and gave her mother a gift, a book. The mother’s face lit into a smile, and the two women rose and extended their arms. The mother gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. I envied the relaxed intimacy between these two women, but more than anything else I envied their friendship.

  All my adult life I had yearned to know my mother in that way, to be friends, to discuss the merits of a novel we had both read, a movie we had both seen, to go together to an art gallery, for a walk in the woods, to chat in a casual manner. These things my mother and I were never able to share. We were united only by the blood in our veins. She spoke only Chinese and lived in a world that was governed by superstition and fear of authority and plagued by memories of loss, betrayal and helplessness. As far as she was concerned, her life had ended the day she set foot on Canadian soil.

  I was still staring at the two women in the restaurant when the mother turned, and for a moment our eyes met. My cheeks suddenly felt hot and I looked away, embarrassed that she had seen the naked longing on my face.

  I once confided my regret to a childhood friend that I never knew my mother as a friend, as an equal. And in her kindness she reminded me that my mother and I possessed something special and unique, and in the way of all mothers, she probably knew me better than I knew myself. I never did find out what that “something special and unique” was, but her words comforted me. Still, the desire to know my mother more completely has never left. Our relationship was never able to mature beyond that of a needy mother and a dependent child. Even though she relied on me to take her to the doctor, to look after her banking, to fill out government forms, to do anything involving the English-speaking world, it remained important for her to instruct me, to laugh and point out to her friends that I didn’t know the specific merits of various Chinese herbal tonic soups, hadn’t mastered the intricacies of Chinese etiquette and had to ask for the title of a certain relative. In my mother’s eyes I was a perennial little girl. Her insecurity in this so-called Gold Mountain was so profound that it seemed as if an admission of my independence might mean that she would lose her hold on me or, worse still, lose me altogether. Life had been so unkind she was unable to trust even the love of her own daughter. Throughout my adult life, my mother spoke to me in the way that a mother speaks to a six-year-old. “Phone your sister and tell her that you want to come for a visit,” she once instructed me. “Don’t forget to buy some oranges and to put them in a bag.”

  As if I would carry them loose, pressed against my body, and then hand them to Ming Nee one by one. Or worse, let them roll all over the floor. I knew I should have been a good daughter and simply agreed, but instead I shot back: “Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course, I’ll put them in a bag.” The moment the words left my lips, I regretted them.

  A moment of silence passed between us. “You think you’re so smart,” she finally retorted. “Just because you have a university degree doesn’t make me stupid.”

  I had so many conversations like that with my mother, my unwarranted rage held in check, never really escalating into an argument, never any real need for an apology, both of us backing down, a slightly sour taste left in my mouth.

  Whenever I travelled to another country, my mother’s parting words were never to wish me a good time but rather to warn me that she might die while I was away. “Go away and spend money on a holiday if you have to,” she said. “But remember, I might not be here when you get back.”

  No one has ever loved me like my mother. But at times her protective wall of love grew so thick I never got to know the complex woman who lived on the other side.

  I lifted my face toward the canopy of black branches and overlapping leaves
that were etched against the bright blue sky above me. I was so far from home. I thought I had forgotten about that mother and daughter in the restaurant. But here they were, charging into my thoughts like uninvited guests. I smiled at Kim and Jook, their faces still puckered from the star fruit’s astringency. Kim handed Michael and me a little wedge each. I took a small bite and grimaced. They burst into laughter.

  TEN

  Early one morning my mother laid a series of books out on a wooden table. Beside them she had set a cube of dried ink inside a small, blue china dish, wetted with a few drops of water to make a dark paste. She showed me how to grip the calligraphy brush with just four fingers, then place its tip into the watery paste, carefully wiping it along the porcelain lip, to remove any excess ink. She pointed to the one- and two-stroke characters in the book and demonstrated how to sweep the tip of the brush over the strokes. The volumes laid out on the table were beginning readers and calligraphy books my mother had bought from the travelling Chinese grocer who stopped once a week at our laundry in Acton. I had finished grade one, and with the summer holidays beginning, she wanted to teach me how to read and write Chinese. In an effort to please her, I completed a few pages, but I was an uncooperative student and my mother was not a strict taskmaster. It was warm outside, and I wanted to be with my friends, running, skipping rope, just being outdoors. The thought of spending sunny mornings on the stuffy second floor of the laundry, practising a calligraphy that could be read only by my parents and the three men who owned the local Chinese restaurant felt pointless.