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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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She knows he is thinking of all the things he has heard her say, the bitter things that came out when she did not have the time to stop them. She has never asked for his help, so she supposes he must be forgiven for never thinking she wanted it.
He walks over to her chair and kneels down in front of her, his joints creaking. He holds her face in both his hands and leans his forehead against hers. They sit like this for a few minutes, taking turns breathing: one in, the other one in, one out, the other one out. She can feel how papery their skin is, how, even when pressed together, there is no oil left, just the dry outer layer, leached by wind and sun and age.
She gently pulls his hands away from her face and releases them so that they dangle from his arms, like mittens on a string. She cannot look him in the eyes anymore, cannot keep running along at this high emotional pitch where everything is at the surface. It’s just too much.
“I’m going to lie down in the bedroom,” she says, “where I can hear myself think.”
It has been many years since Shew Lin was a little girl, and it seems like it has been even longer since she came to Canada and tried to adjust to life here. The weather, with its incessant drizzle, the days of sunshine that hurt her because she knew they could never last. Cold blue mountains that blocked her in, a cold blue ocean that sparkled at her wickedly, strange children saying things to her she could not understand but knew were bad, a heavy sky seen from a foggy window.
She misses the dust and red clay mud.
The part of her that used to dream happily seems to have left her, and she feels disconnected, like a balloon that has been let go and is left to float above the treetops, going one way and then another.
When she tries to remember what she was like as a young girl, she sees nothing. She can remember helping her mother kill and pluck chickens, the coolness of the water from the well in the middle of summer, the ache of her bones at the end of a hard day as she tried to fall asleep. But she cannot picture her own face, the one that must have looked out at her from the little hand mirror she kept by her sleeping mat. And she cannot remember the things she must have thought.
It is a hard business, growing old.
Yet she cannot quite shake the feeling that it is not simply her old age that is obstructing her memory. Nor is it the distance between Canada and China. It is something more insidious and quiet. Something with a snake-like progress, slowly winding itself around her mind and chest, over and over again, squeezing the memories out through every orifice, squeezing her lungs
(how is
it that it became so hard to breathe?)
and wringing the air so that there is nothing left for her to inhale, even if she could.
Shew Lin is no fool, yet she ignores the slow disintegration of her body and mind, the slow leaching into the land she stands on. After all, she would rather die than ever admit that she has grown weak or is somehow less than she used to be.
It’s this place
, she finally remembers.
It’s here that is erasing my memory. It may as well kill me, then.
At first, nobody noticed anything. It was only Shew Lin who knew, who adjusted her walks so that she could avoid the big hills, who sat down at the kitchen table to chop her vegetables instead of standing like she used to.
But then, little by little, more things began to change. One day, Seid Quan found her in the washroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, her feet still in the now-cold bathwater. She smiled and brushed him off after he helped her up. “I just got so tired trying to get out that I needed a little rest. We are all getting old, aren’t we?” And she walked slowly to the bedroom, where she lay down, still damp, on top of the covers.
Pon Man became alarmed when she cancelled their weekly family dinner, the only chance she ever had these days to cook all the good things she prepared so well. When he asked her why, she sighed and laughed. “Oh, there was nothing good to buy at the markets today. No one values freshness anymore.”
And by then, she was fooling no one.
When Seid Quan begged her to see a doctor, she refused. Instead, she sent him to every herbalist in Chinatown with a list of her pains, then brewed the soup they gave him in a little clay pot, filling the air with the thick smell of reconstituted roots and ground plants. “No doctors,” she told him. “I’ve lived
almost eighty years without ever seeing one, and I’m not going to start now.”
Yesterday, Seid Quan slipped while carrying her to the bathroom. They both fell to the floor. Seid Quan bandaged the cut on Shew Lin’s head by himself before he called his son. In five minutes, everything was settled. They would go live with Pon Man and his family for the time being.
Slowly, Pon Man lifts his mother out of the car and carries her into his house. Her head rests on his shoulder, and the top of her knitted cap tickles the side of his neck. Seid Quan follows behind, carrying two suitcases. He looks at her feet dangling from his son’s left arm and whispers, “Like a doll made of cloth, stuffed with cotton.”
Shew Lin cranes her neck so that she can look at her husband over Pon Man’s shoulder. “You should know better than that. I was never a lady, so how could I be a doll?”
Pon Man laughs, and Seid Quan says, “You’ll never lose your hearing, at least.”
Pon Man gently lays Shew Lin down on a bed in his small spare bedroom. He draws the blankets up to her chin and begins to tuck her in, but Seid Quan steps forward, puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and says, “I’ll do that.” Pon Man nods and steps backward, out of the room and into the hall.
Seid Quan sits on the bed beside her, not touching her, not moving. “All that work, and now dying,” he murmurs.
Shew Lin opens her watery, red eyes; she likes to keep them closed because the air hitting her eyeballs stings, like water on a wound. “You shouldn’t whisper like that and think you can get away with it.” She sighs. “Too old to learn new tricks.”
She closes her eyes again, lets the familiar smell of her husband fill her head, displace the unfamiliar scent of her daughter-in-law’s
detergents and perfumes. Six months ago, she would have preferred to sleep in the streets rather than in this house, but there isn’t much point in thinking such things now. Shew Lin can even think kind thoughts about Siu Sang, who, at thirty-eight, is pregnant once again, likely for the last time. Shew Lin allows herself to feel optimistic about the chances of Siu Sang having a boy.
The last one
, she thinks.
The lucky one, the one who takes care of the old. If it is not a boy, then it will be a different sort of daughter.
She smiles at the thought and falls asleep, her head cushioned on Seid Quan’s hand.
Shew Lin has been dreaming again. Before she came to Canada, her dreams were merely extensions of her daily life. Cooking, cleaning, writing letters, braiding her daughters’ hair—a mirror held up to the events of her day.
Since then, as the nights wore on through the rain and fog, her dreams have started to build like the movies from Hong Kong her son and his wife go to see. Tragedy, vengeance, a noble death both inevitable and surprising.
Last night, she stood over her dead son, his body pinned underneath a city bus. She could see nothing but his face and that undeniable look of death—eyes and mouth open, a stiff jaw, grey skin. He looked small again, the way he looked when he left for Canada, except that, in this dream, he was terribly, terribly thin, the way beggars in Guangzhou looked after the war.
Through crooked dream logic, she knew that his death was his wife’s fault, and she went looking for her. Shew Lin travelled the world searching for this spoiled girl on the run. She beat back a cobra in the jungle, flew a helicopter through the
Grand Canyon, escaped a fire in a Thai whorehouse. And yet the girl still eluded her.
Finally, she returned to the narrow house she used to live in with her husband and son, her body drooping with defeat, her knees sore from running. The tall house creaked as she walked up the front steps and through the door.
And there she was, calmly sitting on the living-room sofa. She was wearing a black silk dress (extravagant, even in mourning), and a thin veil covered her face, although Shew Lin could still see that her eyes glittered darkly in that poor, dusky light.
“We waited so long, but finally we had to bury him without you. What were you doing? Having fun?”
In a single, glorious movement, Shew Lin reached for her sword and cut off Siu Sang’s head, not even wincing as the girl’s head fell to the floor.
And in the end, she poured gasoline all over the house, set it on fire and sat in the kitchen, waiting for the hot, hot flames to lick her face. She had finally saved this family, allowed it to start all over again, cleanly.
A perfect, white silence. Then a rumbling, slow at first, then gaining speed.
Shew Lin’s body has started to shake uncontrollably. Her eyes are tightly closed, and she can feel them starting to roll back in their sockets. She tries to grab the sheets, the side of the bed, anything, but her fingers are immovable, heavy. She hears her husband calling for their son, can feel his hands holding her down by the shoulders. Pon Man runs in, holds her ankles, one in each hand. The sheets are damp with her sweat.
Suddenly, she opens her eyes and stares at her husband and son, their heads close together, both of their foreheads lined in
concern. Above them, the bedroom light shines weakly.
Only forty watts,
she thinks,
how typical.
The shaking subsides, and Shew Lin turns her head to the side, her mouth open in exhaustion. She can tell that it’s sunset from the light coming in through the window. The walls are pink and orange, the colours shifting, there and not there. She doesn’t move, feels light as a snowflake bouncing through the air in the night. White on black.
She hears Pon Man and Seid Quan whispering, about her, of course.
So
, she thinks,
it really doesn’t matter, does it? Because they love each other but have travelled in parallel lines, same speed, same places, but never meeting. Maybe after this, without me, they’ll do better.
Pon Man leans down and puts his head beside hers so that they are touching, ear on ear.
“The baby came this morning, Mother. The girls have named her Samantha. Sammy for short, like a boy.” He laughs quietly.
Shew Lin reaches out and holds his hand. “Sammy. Does she look like you?”
“Just like, actually. The only one.”
She sighs. “Yes, that’s the right thing. She will do just as well. You must hold her as I would, as I held you.”
Seid Quan looks at his wife’s face. “What was that, my dear? Did you say something?”
Shew Lin shakes her head, knowing that neither of them will understand the myriad things that go into keeping a family intact, the things that are both inevitable and illogical. But Shew Lin knows that the illogical sometimes makes the most sense.
She closes her eyes, feels the light on her face. Someone slips a hand, warm and dry, into hers. She drifts off, dreaming
of a gentle ocean, her son’s face when it was unlined and untroubled, a warm rain and a long-ago wedding.
She balks at the smell of his skin, the smell of sweat and burning wood, the same smells she spent hours scrubbing from her body. He does not look at her directly but smiles shyly at her feet. He has not yet lifted her wedding veil.
Is he clean?
They sit side by side on a low, hard bed, and Shew Lin thinks that the silence will render her deaf; it fills her head and swirls slowly around the room—viscous and heavy. Under the bottom edge of her veil, all she sees is a thin rug covering a hard-packed dirt floor and her own feet, large and clumsy, ironically encased in delicate silk slippers. Absent-mindedly, she begins to pick at a callus on the palm of her hand with her thumb.
Seid Quan turns toward her slowly, his body moving inch by inch. He takes her hand and holds it to his face. He finds her callus and touches it lightly.
“So much hard work,” he says and gently places her hand back on her lap.
She is shocked that this boy, so peasant-smelling, has touched her so quietly. She expected a man wild from his years in Canada, a man with white habits and brutal manners. She can still feel the pressure from his hand, and her face grows hot.
“Give it to her, big brother! Give us some action!”
There is shuffling in the hall outside their bedroom door, and Shew Lin hears a crowd of boys giggling and making cat noises. Seid Quan has made no move.
Tired and cranky, she turns and pulls the veil from her face in one long rip.
On the way to the hospital, my mother starts to pray.
As far as I know, my mother never went to any kind of church, never said anything about God. But here, in the back seat of a taxi, with my head on her lap, her eyes are closed and she’s muttering something in Chinese to someone about me, about how she can’t lose another person, about how I’m the last one, the child of her old age, and the most precious of all her daughters. She whispers that she will try harder and be a different kind of mother. Her hand on the side of my head is warm and dry, like a warm quilt by the fire during a rainstorm.
As we drive through the city, I watch the sun come up, turning the buildings pink and then yellow. The streets are empty, no homeless people, not even a street cleaner. The concrete looks more human at dawn, and the city makes me want to cry.
I push my head into my mother’s stomach, feel the softness of her belly skin (grown large and then small, stretched and then
contracted so many times). I’m hurting her. This is hurting her.
“Mom?”
“Yes? Is it getting worse?”
“No, I just want to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Will you promise not to tell Wendy or Daisy or anyone else? I just don’t want them to worry, I guess.”
“Whatever you want, Sammy. Just close your eyes. We’ll be there soon.”
The waiting room at the hospital is strangely empty. Except for the nurses and one bored-looking security guard, we are the only ones here. They assign me a bed right away, and my mother stays in the waiting room, sitting in the corner in a plastic bucket chair, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap. I wave at her as they lead me into the back, and she smiles, her mouth tight at the corners. She’s still wearing her pyjamas. I half-expect her to wail, to fling herself at me and weep as if I am being led to the electric chair, but she only sits and nods to me reassuringly.
When, I
think
, did my mother become so stoic?
A thin curtain separates me from an old man who calls for something in a language I don’t recognize. The nurse asks me a few questions, mentions that if something happened that I didn’t consent to, it’s perfectly safe to tell her. I shake my head and turn to the wall. There are many things I could talk to her about (how my body is so angry with me I feel as if my skin is burning from the inside out, how I know this has to be the last time, but I’m scared that it won’t be), but I don’t, because that would mean opening my mouth, and if I do that, there might be no stopping the flood of words that pours out. I put my finger in a tiny hole in the concrete and scratch at the mint-green paint. It flakes away and falls to the floor like dry skin,
feathery. In this fluorescent light, you can see every little flaw in every surface.
The doctor apologizes three times while he examines me and keeps asking if this hurts. Of course it does, but I don’t say anything. Perhaps if he thinks I don’t speak English, this will go faster.
“Well, you’ve stopped bleeding now, so we won’t have to keep you or give you a transfusion. I’ll send a blood sample to the lab, just to make sure everything’s okay. I think it would be all right if you went home.”
I look up at his face. He’s very young. “Why was I bleeding?”
He frowns. “The abrasions in your vagina and on your cervix are pretty superficial. Sometimes women bleed a lot once and it never happens again. Sometimes it means something serious, sometimes it doesn’t. There isn’t any point in keeping you here any longer if you feel better. If something out of the ordinary happens or you start bleeding again like this, come back and we’ll do some more tests. But let me ask you: are you sure this was, you know, consensual? Because if it wasn’t, that would explain a lot.”
To him and to the nurse, this is no more complicated than a girl lying because her mother is in the next room. “Yes, of course it was consensual.” I sigh and try not to think. There really doesn’t seem to be any point.
When I walk out to meet my mother, she looks scared to ask me anything. I tell her what the doctor said and leave out the sex part, hoping that the explanation that’s not really an explanation will satisfy her. She doesn’t say much, just guides me out the door to wait for a taxi.
The afternoon light in the vegetable garden is pink and orange. My father bends over his cucumbers, making sure they aren’t too wet or too dry. I sit on the fence, my legs swinging as I nibble on a carrot he has just unearthed for me.
My mother steps out onto the porch wearing her fancy clothes. “All right,” she says, “I’m going to the banquet now. Make sure you feed her something healthy.” She disappears inside again, and I can hear the clicking of her heels as she walks through the kitchen and living room and slams the front door. The smell of hairspray wafts out on the warm summer air.
My father stands up, eyes twinkling. “What do you think? Dairy Queen or McDonald’s?”
The sun is sinking as we drive home. My body is turned sideways so that I can look straight out the passenger window, my face still sticky from the Peanut Buster Parfait. My hair whips around my face as we drive down Main Street, and the sunset turns everything a goldy-yellow, like the colour of the giant squash that grows in the garden at home. I wish that we could just drive like this forever, watching the dry cleaners and discount furniture stores flicker past like scenes in a movie.
“We’re almost home, Shrimp. Better roll up your window.” I look over at my father. A flap of skin on his neck
(Had I ever seen that before? Where did it come from?)
sways in the wind, making him look like a rooster. He frowns, and the lines on either side of his mouth are deep and scary. I shiver.
“Cold?” he asks me, but he doesn’t even look.
When we arrive home, I run to the garden and peek to see if anything has grown since we left. My father stands beside me. “These plants just keep growing and growing,” he says, his hand resting on the top of my head. “Even if we wanted to stop it, we couldn’t.” He bends over the zucchini and points
at the orange blossom. “See that? It just grows that itself. No one tells the plant what to do; it just does it. Perfect, isn’t it?”
“I guess. I like the eating part best.”
He laughs. “You’re all stomach, Sammy Shrimp. I’d better run a bath for you—you’re covered in chocolate.”
As he walks into the house, I stay outside, run my hands over the creeping string beans, bend down to smell the onion scent wafting up from the chives. I kick at a big kabocha squash and watch two earthworms wriggle their way up from underneath. I imagine them blinking in the fading daylight—their wormy eyes heavy-lidded and wrinkled—as they reluctantly pull their long, stretchy bodies out into the open, forced, as it were, to come to life.
“Sammy,” my father says to me, “you’re like your grandmother: saying all the wrong things, meaning something else.” He coughs and reaches into the sheets for a tissue.
I shift in my seat, trying to act like I don’t notice that he’s sick, that his face and odour spell out
I have been in this hospital for so long I am part of it.
Through the open door to the hallway, an orderly piles white towels soiled with old blood and food onto a rolling cart. I turn back to my father and nod.
“You’re not listening.” He turns onto his side, rolling on top of the tubes that snake from his arm to somewhere I can’t see under the sheets. “Your grandmother, all she wanted was to see us all succeed. We always had to be together. If we were apart, she thought bad things would happen.” He laughs. “I only ever wanted to run away.”
I look my father in the eyes for the first time in months. They are watery and slightly glazed, but still, he holds my gaze. “I try to remember things to tell you girls, but sometimes the
memories come when no one is here and then they disappear. Now that you’re sitting with me, I want to tell you everything that’s in my head right now, even if the stories make no sense.” He grins. “I’m sorry to bore you.”
How does he always know what I’m thinking?
“What did grandmother say that was all wrong?”
“Oh, so many things. She was hard on your mother, but only because she wanted the best for me. She wanted me to have a perfect wife and, you know, no one’s perfect.” He shakes his head. “She always said what was on her mind, especially if it was something mean. Like you.”
“I don’t do that!”
“Sure you do. Remember when you called Penny your Pig Sister?”
I frown. “She eats all the chips. And her clothes smell bad.”
“You see? Just like your grandmother.” He sighs. “I miss her soup sometimes.”
After a few minutes, my father falls asleep, still on his side. I pull the blankets over his shoulders and sit on the windowsill, waiting for Jackie to return from the cafeteria. A nurse comes in and pulls the tubes out from under his sleeping body. She smiles at me.
“Aren’t you a good girl to be sitting with your dad like this? It’s nice to see kids who value their families.”
I look out the window, wishing that what this nurse seems to think of me was true. I could be a good daughter, filled with compassion and sympathy and kind thoughts, instead of the raging, sullen, hard girl I really am. I could run and run, but even I doubt that I could ever escape myself.
Jackie walks in, holding two muffins and a coffee. I am so relieved that I stand up immediately to give her my chair. In
the hallway, I breathe deeply and eat my muffin while sitting on the floor.
Bleach. Vomit. The smell of the hospital clings to me; I know from experience that it is almost impossible to wash off (I remember scrubbing my skin raw after every visit to my father’s room, but it was never any use). I step out of the taxi and onto our front lawn, glad, for once, that I am coming home.
After changing my sheets and wiping down the floor in my bedroom, my mother sits on the edge of my bed while I drink the hot soup she’s made. It’s like dishwater, and just bland enough to make me feel better. She hands me a little packet of crackers, which she probably stole the last time she ordered soup at a restaurant.
“Are you sure you’re feeling better?” She puts her hand on my stomach.
“I’m okay. The doctor gave me some pills for the cramps.”
She looks out the window, and I can see the reflection of the trees outside in her glasses. She blinks, and the miniature trees sway. She looks back at me, and now it’s only her eyes I see.
“Are you sure you’re telling me everything the doctor said? There’s nothing else?”
I don’t know what she suspects. I become sweaty.
“Did that white boy do this to you? The redheaded one, from the wedding? Or is there another one? Your Aunt Susie is always telling me that the boys are worse these days, expecting things from their girlfriends.”
I look at her hair, her nose, her mouth, anywhere but her eyes. “There is no white boy, Mom. Not anymore. I’ve told you everything.”
I know she doesn’t believe me, but she stops asking. She gives me a hot water bottle and stays with me until I close my eyes. In my sleep, I can feel her moving around the house, the unmistakable noises of her presence (shuffling slippers, throaty coughs). Instead of waking me, they lull me into a deeper sleep, where I lie dreamless, caught in a world where I don’t hear or see or feel. When I wake up hours later, I can hear her singing in the kitchen; the bang of her pots and pans accompanies her in a wild, rhythmless way.
“Que sera, sera
,” she sings, doing her best Doris Day impression. Somehow, not knowing what will be is a comforting thought.
I sit up, rub my eyes and walk to the kitchen, following the sound of my mother’s voice. She stands in the middle of the room, holding a Bundt pan with her oven mitts. She nods at me, smiling. “You want some? It’s still warm.”
She slices me a piece of apple cake, the first apple cake I remember her baking for twelve years. She smiles widely at me, passes me a plate and sits down, watching as I eat.
“It’s good, Mom.”
“Isn’t it? Do you know, your Aunt Susie gave me this recipe in 1964.”
She leans back in her chair, places her hands over her stomach. I look at her, suddenly aware that she sits like a mouse, all bones and skin and nerves. Where has her stomach gone, her fearsome bulk? I blink and look again. In the living room, the curtains are open, and music is playing from the radio.

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