The Opposite of Fate (11 page)

I finally thought to ask what Nyah-nyah meant.

“A Shanghainese nickname for ‘Grandmother,’ ” my oldest
sister replied. And then I remembered a story my mother had once told me, of her being four years old, delirious and near death as she called to her grandmother to stop the pain. My mother had been horribly injured when a pot of boiling soup fell across her neck. Nyah-nyah had sat by her bedside, day and night, telling her that her funeral clothes had already been made but were very plain because she had not lived long enough to deserve anything more elaborate.

She told the little girl that everyone would soon forget her because she had lived too short a time for them to remember much. That was how Nyah-nyah, who loved my mother very much, scared her back to life. Now my mother was calling for Nyah-nyah once again. This time I think Nyah-nyah was telling my mother that her funeral clothes had already been made, and not to worry, they were fancy beyond belief.

Shortly afterward, my mother fell into a coma. Ten to twenty family members were in her rooms, at all hours. We played poker and mah jong. We ate pizza and Chinese takeout. We watched videos of her favorite movies, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, including one she called “Southern Pacific.” I put on a CD of Chopin piano music and whispered in her ear: “That’s me playing. I’ve been practicing harder.”

For four days my mother’s breathing kept us in suspense. She would take three breaths, then nothing would follow for forty-five seconds, sometimes longer. It was like watching the tidal wash in anticipation of a tidal wave. At night I lay next to her, sleepless, staring at the pulse bobbing in the cove of her throat, my own heart pounding to this steady yet uncertain rhythm. Later I put a pearl in the hollow so I could more easily see this
proof of life. Though I dreaded that she would stop breathing, I was relieved that she would die of natural causes and not from suicide.

During the last hour of her life, as my mother’s skin turned gray, our family murmured that we loved her very much and were sad to see her go. We whispered to her all the things we would miss: her dumplings, her advice, her humor. To myself I mourned: Who else would worry about me so much? Who else would describe in explosive detail what might happen to parts of my body if I was careless? Who would be frank enough to warn that my husband might exchange me for a younger woman unless I forced him to buy me jewels so expensive it would be impossible for him to leave both me and the gems behind?

My mother did not speak during those last four days, but with her final breath, a long release of an exhalation, she uttered a faint sound, a single sustained note. I had to bend my ear to her mouth to hear. I was the only one who heard it, but I don’t think it was my imagination. It was as if our mother, this woman who had been so full of surprises until her final day, had just said, “Ah!” to signal that she had gone on to her next surprise.

After my mother died, I began to rewrite the novel I had been working on for the past five years. I wrote with the steadfastness of grief. My editor, Faith Sale, would have called that grief “finding the real heart of the story.” My mentor, Molly Giles, said the bones were there, and to repair them I had to dig them out, break them into pieces, then put them back together.

And so I threw away some pages, rewrote others. I wrote
of wrong birth dates, of secret marriages, of names that were nearly forgotten. I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone. With the help of my new ghostwriters by my side, I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.

My mother (center), around age eight, Hangzhou, China, circa 1924.

• my grandmother's choice •

I
n my writing room, on my desk, sits an old family photo in a plain black frame, depicting five women and a girl at a temple pavilion by a lake. When I first saw this photo as a child, I thought it was exotic and remote, of a faraway time and place, with people who had no connection to my American life. Look at their bound feet! Look at that funny lady with the plucked forehead!

The solemn little girl is, in fact, my mother. She looks to be around eight. And behind her, leaning against the rock, is my grandmother Jingmei. “She called me Baobei,” my mother told me. “It means ‘treasure.’ ”

The picture was taken in Hangzhou, in 1924 or so, my mother said, possibly spring or fall, to judge by the clothes. At first glance, it appears the women are on a pleasure outing.

But see the white bands on their skirts? The white shoes? They are in mourning for my mother’s grandmother Divong, known as the “replacement wife.” The women have come to this place, a Buddhist retreat, to perform yet another ceremony for her. Monks hired for the occasion have chanted the proper
words. And the women and little girl have walked in circles clutching smoky sticks of incense. They have knelt and prayed, then burned a huge pile of spirit money so that Divong might ascend to a higher position in her new world.

This is also a picture of secrets and tragedies, the reasons that warnings have been passed along in our family like heirlooms. Each of these women suffered a terrible fate, my mother said. And they were not peasant women but big-city people, very modern. They went to dance halls and wore stylish clothes. They were supposed to be the lucky ones.

Look at the pretty woman with her finger on her cheek. She is my mother’s second cousin Nunu Aiyi, “Precious Auntie.” You cannot see this, but Nunu Aiyi’s entire face was scarred from smallpox. Fortunately for her, a year or so after this picture was taken, she received marriage proposals from two families. She turned down a lawyer and married another man. Later she divorced her husband—a daring thing for a woman to do. But then, finding no means to support herself or her young daughter, Nunu Aiyi eventually accepted the lawyer’s second proposal—this time, to become his number-two concubine. “Where else could she go?” my mother said. “Some people said she was lucky the lawyer still wanted her.”

Now look at the small woman with the sour face. There’s a reason that Uncle’s Wife, Jyou Ma, has this expression. Her husband, my great-uncle, often complained aloud that his family had chosen an ugly woman for his wife. To show his displeasure, he insulted Jyou Ma’s cooking. During one of their raucous dinner arguments, the table was shoved and a pot of boiling soup tipped and spilled all over his niece’s neck, causing a burn that
nearly killed her. My mother was the little niece, and for the rest of her life she bore that scar on her neck. Great-Uncle’s family eventually arranged for a prettier woman to become his second wife. But the complaints about his first wife’s cooking did not stop. When she became ill with an easily treatable disease, she refused to take any medication. She swore she would rather die than live another unnecessary day. And soon after, she died.

Dooma, “Big Mother,” is the regal-looking woman with the plucked forehead who sits on a rock. The dark-jacketed woman next to her is a servant, remembered by my mother only as someone who cleaned but did not cook. Dooma was my mother’s aunt, the daughter of her grandfather and his “original wife,” Nu-pei. But Divong, the replacement wife, my mother’s grandmother, shunned Dooma, her stepdaughter, for being “too strong,” while her own daughter, my grandmother, loved Dooma. She did not care that Dooma’s first daughter was born with a hunchback—a sign, some said, of Dooma’s own crooked nature. She did not stop seeing Dooma after Dooma remarried, disobeying her family’s orders to remain a widow forever. Later Dooma killed herself, using some mysterious means that made her die slowly over three days. “Dooma died the same way she lived,” my mother said, “strong, suffering lots.”

Jingmei, my own grandmother, lived only a year or two after this picture was taken. She was the widow of a poor scholar, a man who had the misfortune of dying from influenza shortly after he was appointed vice-magistrate in a small county. I only assume it was influenza, since his death in 1918 was sudden, as were the millions of other deaths during the great pandemic. Family lore, however, reports that the ghost of a man on whom
he had passed a judgment for execution returned from hell and killed him.

Around the time this photo was taken, during another lakeside outing, a rich man who liked to collect pretty women spotted my widowed grandmother and had one of his wives invite her to the house for a few days to play mah jong. One night he raped her, making her an outcast. My grandmother became a concubine to the rich man, and took her young daughter to live on an island near Shanghai. She left her son behind, to save his face. After she gave birth to a baby boy, the rich man’s first son, she killed herself by swallowing raw opium buried in the New Year’s rice cakes. “Don’t follow my footsteps,” she told her young daughter, who wept at her deathbed.

At my grandmother’s funeral, monks tied chains to my mother’s ankles so she would not fly away with her mother’s ghost. “I tried to take them off,” my mother told me. “I was her treasure. I was her life.” She also tried to follow her mother’s footsteps. Since that time she was a small girl, she often talked of killing herself. She never stopped feeling the urge.

My mother could never talk about the shame of being a concubine’s daughter, even with her closest friends. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said once to me. “People don’t understand. A concubine was like some kind of prostitute. My mother was a good woman, high-class. She had no choice.”

I told her I understood.

“How can you understand?” she blurted. “You did not live in China then. You do not know what it’s like to have no position in life. I was her daughter. We had no face! We belonged to nobody! This is a shame I can never push off my back.” By the end of this outburst, she was crying.

On a trip with my mother to Beijing, I learned that my uncle had found a way to push the shame off his back. He was the son my grandmother had left behind. In 1936 he joined the Communist Party—in large part, he told me, to overthrow the society that had forced his mother into concubinage. He published a story about his mother. I told him I was writing about my grandmother in a book of fiction. We agreed that my grandmother was the source of strength running through our family. My mother cried to hear this.

I look at that photo often, and it’s safe to guess that my grandmother never envisioned that she would one day have a granddaughter who lives in a house she co-owns with a husband she loves, and a dog and a cat she spoils (no children by choice, not bad luck), and that this granddaughter would have her own money, be able to shop—fifty percent off, full price, doesn’t matter, she never has to ask anyone’s permission—because she makes her own living, doing what is important to her, which is to tell stories, many of them about her grandmother, a woman who believed death was the only way to change her life.

A relative once scolded my mother, “Why do you tell your daughter these useless stories? She can’t change the past.” And my mother replied, “It
can
be changed. I tell her, so she can tell everyone, tell the whole world so they know what my mother suffered. That’s how it
can
be changed.”

I think about what my mother said. Isn’t the past what people remember—who did what, how and why? And what people remember, isn’t that mostly what they’ve already chosen to believe? For so many years, my family believed my grandmother was a victim of society, who, sadly, took her own life, no more, no less.

In my writing room, I go back into the past, to that moment when my grandmother told my mother not to follow her footsteps. My grandmother and I are walking side by side, imagining the past differently, remembering it another way. Together we come upon a tomb of memories. We open it and release what has been buried for too long—the terrible despair, the destructive rage. We hurt, we grieve, we cry. And then we see what remains: the hopes, broken to bits but still there.

I look at the photograph of my grandmother. Together we write stories of things that were and shouldn’t have been, or could have been, or might still be. We know the past can be changed. We can choose what we should believe. We can choose what we should remember. That is what frees us, this choice, frees us to hope that we can redeem these same memories for the little girl who became my mother.

• thinly disguised memoir •

T
hrough the miracle of publishing, I have had three of my childhood fantasies fulfilled.

First of all, the six-year-old in me was astonished to find that I had been encapsulated in the humor section of
Reader’s Digest.
More precisely, several excerpts from my books have been used in the “Quotable Quotes” section.

You have to realize that
Reader’s Digest
was the only magazine to which my parents subscribed, and that was because it contained “Word Power.” This feature elevated the value of the magazine from frivolous entertainment to valuable education. With “Word Power” as our passport, our family had access to better opportunities. We could replace weak, monosyllabic words with inflated polysyllabic ones and thus rise like helium balloons above the masses.