End of East, The (23 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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“How does it feel when you eat?”
“It hurts my throat, and I’ve been throwing up.” If there was any way to lie, Pon Man would do it.
“I’m going to call an ambulance now. We’re taking you back to the hospital. I’m sorry, but you need more monitoring than this.” The doctor looks sadly at Pon Man’s thin face. “It will be better for your wife, you know—less work. And better for your daughters, too.”
Pon Man nods, knowing that this is true. He wonders what happened to the optimism his doctor once had. “Can’t we wait until tomorrow? I hate to leave so suddenly. I have phone calls I should make.”
The doctor shakes his head. “No, I think we’d better go now. I’d like to get you under observation as soon as possible.”
Siu Sang whispers to Jackie, who is standing in the doorway, and they immediately begin packing up Pon Man’s clothes, books and medications into recycled shopping bags.
“One more thing: I think we’re going to stop the chemotherapy injections. Honestly, they’re not doing you any good anymore—they only make you feel sick. We’ll keep up the painkillers to make you comfortable.”
So certain, this thing, this death
, he thinks.
One week later, he lies still in the hospital room, his breath moving deliberately in and out of his body. He feels as if he has been in this small room forever, that his home life is a blurry dream he cannot really remember. He moves his feet in circles, first the left, then the right. Their swelling has not stopped, and he knows that soon he will be unable to move them at all.
It is not often that he can think clearly anymore, and he takes this opportunity to look, really look, out the window. The sunlight is thin and the early morning clouds are strangely motionless. There is no wind today.
Pon Man has long given up worrying about what will happen to his wife and daughters. They are stronger than they appear, stronger even than him. A part of him knows that this, his illness and death, will become part of their mythology, an episode by which they will measure their growth. They will say, in years to come, that watching him die made them stronger, that grieving during those dark after-years only prepared them for newer things. He will become a flawless version of himself in their memories—a righteous man, a gentle victim of disease. He wonders if they will eventually forget the bulk of him, if he will one day be a memory no more substantial than a touching
anecdote. He sighs. There’s no point in thinking of things he can never control.
He thinks, perversely, of his father. The shaking hands that cut his hair until his treatments caused no more hair to grow. The way he over-salts his food. The care he takes in wearing his suit and fedora to simply drink coffee in the Hong Kong Café with his friends. How disappointed his mother was that they were never the close, whispering-in-ears family she had once imagined.
The way Pon Man never looks his father in the eye.
I’ve almost forgotten now
. Pon Man sifts through the layers in his mind, dusty from morphine and sickness. He knows there is something there, a hint as to why he could not talk to his father without a sneer, why he ignored him so persistently that his daughters learned to ignore their grandfather as well.
He breathes out.
And he wants to cry because his mind has become glue and sludge and because he knows he needs to be forgiven for something, but what? What will he ask for, and how can he when he can hardly speak anymore?
Siu Sang walks in holding a muffin and a cup of coffee. As soon as she approaches the bed, Pon Man grabs her arm. She drops the muffin on the floor.
“What is it? What did I forget?” He asks, pulling her to him so that she feels his hot breath, hears the rasping deep inside his throat. “Can’t you tell me?”
Siu Sang tries to pull herself upright, but Pon Man’s grip is strong, stronger than it has been in months. She carefully puts the coffee on the side table and looks straight into his eyes. Open wide, searching. Wild. She puts her free hand on his shoulder and tries to push him away. Pon Man grabs her hair.
“You know what it is. You just won’t tell me. I wish you were dead.” He shakes her and her glasses fall off, onto his chest. Siu Sang screams.
Three nurses run in. One of them pulls Siu Sang off, and the other two hold Pon Man while they tie his arms and legs down with white cotton straps. He struggles, his back arching and his head tilted back, like a baby bird demanding to be fed. Siu Sang slumps in the corner, pulls her cardigan over her shoulders and looks out the window.
After the nurses check her for injuries, Pon Man whispers, “Please let me go. Untie me, please.” He can feel sleep dragging him down; he knows he has to fight it if he has any chance of remembering anything. He cries out one last time before he falls, dreaming.
The early morning sunshine casts a pale yellow light on everything—the sheets, the pillows, his wife’s hair. Six o’clock and the house is quiet, for once. Pon Man watches his wife’s back as she sleeps, the ripple in her muscles as she breathes. He smells her hair, that familiar scent of musk and soap. She turns over, opens her eyes. Smiles.
It is so easy sometimes to say the wrong thing, to open your mouth and ruin a perfect moment. Pon Man can almost feel the stillness on his skin. Outside, he hears the thump of the morning paper as it lands on their front step. The girls will be awake in an hour.
He kisses her, his lips held gently against hers. She giggles softly. Their feet touch under the blankets.
We’ve been together so long
, he thinks,
and I can still make her laugh
.
I walk out into the sunshine, blink hard at the transition from dark to light. I put my briefcase down to check that my resume is tucked safely away, unwrinkled. I adjust my suit jacket and stand up straight, trying to look like the sort of young woman who could cheerfully answer phones and photocopy memos. When I start to walk down our front path again, my skirt catches on a pile of thorny rose branches.
“Good morning.” My mother waves at me, her hands covered in thick gardening gloves, her head obscured by a wide-brimmed cotton hat. “Watch your step.”
I pull my skirt free and stand up straight as my eyes scan the front garden. She has trimmed the roses and planted delphiniums, peonies and pansies, filling up the narrow strip of dirt with a riot of spring blooms. She comes to stand beside me.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done any gardening,” she laughs. “Here I am, though, doing my best. The Italian lady next door helped me out.”
Without uttering a word, I walk around the side of the house to the back garden. Tomato plants sit on the side, waiting to be planted. The lattice for creeping beans has been dragged out of the garage, where it had been sitting for twelve years, ever since my father died. A pitchfork leans against the fence beside the tall weeds.
When I was a child, our garden was beautiful, a mass of green and red and yellow and orange. Flowers burst open every spring and summer morning, and the vegetables grew fat and glossy. I ran through the sprinkler while my father bent over his plants in his rubber boots.
By the time everything was all over and my father was dead, the garden had turned brown and weedy, its flowers and vegetables buried under the uninvited dandelions and thorny, invasive blackberries. My sisters, who had promised to keep everything growing, forgot (the garden was easy to ignore, surrounded by rocks and fencing; the browner it got, the more it blended into the house itself), and my mother, never a gardener to begin with, retreated into her dark, dusty hole on the couch.
When I return to the front, she is digging a place for the hydrangea bush sitting on the lawn. “Did you see the tomatoes? I’m going to plant those as soon as I’m finished out here. They might die, but it’s better to try, isn’t it?”
“It looks nice.” I pick up my case.
She straightens up. “Yes, it does. I’m very pleased.”
I shift my weight from foot to foot, feeling as if I should be saying something (
I’m sorry
or
If I stay here, what will happen?
), so I mutter, “I’d better go. I don’t want to be late for my interview.” I hurry to the bus stop, my nose filled with the smells of damp earth and freshly cut grass.
My father died. People had to be informed. A funeral needed planning. My sisters and I stared at one another for two whole days, and then we got to work.
Daisy flew back home, arriving in Vancouver just twenty-one hours after the doctor’s call (I answered and silently passed the phone to my mother, who cried out, tearing the air around us with the sound). Wendy drove to the funeral home, bringing with her the brand new suit she had bought for the body when we knew there couldn’t be any more time. Jackie gathered his belongings from the hospital room into paper shopping bags and carried them close to her chest as she moved them from room to car to house. Penny and I stayed home, heating up can after can of soup for our mother and frying bacon and eggs for our grandfather, who didn’t eat. He let his plate grow cold, his eyes cast down as if he was patiently waiting for the slow solidification of yolk and pork fat.
I remember my sisters talking bloodlessly about money. The life insurance could pay down the remainder of the mortgage, and Wendy and Jackie would support Penny and me while we were still in school. They would reinvest our father’s savings so that our mother would always have something to live on. Daisy decided to move back to Vancouver. Our mother was spared the details. Numbers were nothing more to her than figures on a piece of a paper, presided over by someone else. That someone else became my sisters and, later, me.
Aunt Susie stayed with my mother in her room, emerging only to collect food and tissues. We barely saw them.
When the day of the funeral arrived, five days after his death, we were dry from crying, achy from effort and blank from thinking. People flew and drove in from everywhere,
stayed in our house, tried to hold our hands. We pushed them off and poured them tea instead.
We sat on the sofa, all five of us wearing the thin black veils Aunt Susie gave us. I stared at the makeshift memorial my father’s sisters had erected on the fireplace. The smoke floated up from musky incense sticks and around my father’s picture. Relatives stood around us, silent. I felt as if they were watching us, waiting for one of us to slash her wrists, throw herself down on the carpet and writhe in overwhelming grief. But we simply sat there, our eyelashes flicking against our veils whenever we blinked to keep from crying or looked down at our black, sensible shoes.
The door to my mother’s bedroom opened, and she emerged, supported on one side by Aunt Susie and on the other by Aunt Yen Mei. Her head rolled from side to side. She carefully placed one foot in front of the other as if she had forgotten how to walk. I watched as the crowd of relatives swivelled their heads to witness her slow progress across the room.
She kneeled in front of my father’s picture. It revealed nothing, and we were the only ones who knew that it had been taken only six months before his death, that the look of displeasure on his face was actually one of pain, that the shoulder pads in his suit masked the thirty-five pounds he had already lost. My mother, who chose this particular photo, always preferred to remember misfortune.
She beat her head against the floor and cried, chanted, screamed. The old ladies who had come to help stood off to the side, murmuring what sounded like approval. I remember feeling as though I was in a ghastly imitation of a poorly acted opera, that my mother was the long-suffering soprano, the old ladies were the myopic crowd in the dress circle, and my
sisters and I were the rarely noticed chorus, the ones who kept up the resentful and low background singing.
Later, at the funeral home, my mother was all business, arranging things with the funeral director, who bowed to us like a proper Chinese houseboy—stiff, obsequious. We were seated in a curtained area, separate from the rest of the mourners, presumably so that no one could see us grieving. But back here, my mother was preternaturally calm and spent the hour criticizing, in a loud whisper, the way the pastor was leading the service. I stared at her tear-stained face and listened to her complaints. I wanted to shove her, pull her hair until she acted like a normal person. Instead, I pulled at the tissue in my lap, shredding it into thin strips that floated off into the warm, recycled air when I breathed.
When the casket was lowered into the ground at the cemetery, Aunt Susie instructed us to turn our backs and whispered some dire prediction of what would happen to us if we watched. We all turned and stood there in a line, five black-veiled girls, straight-backed, in the late afternoon sunshine. I remember looking at one of Daisy’s friends, a tall and pretty girl with curly honey-coloured hair who was wearing a white dress that shone like a light in the middle of all the black. As the casket went down, I watched her hair float on the wind behind her and her white skirt drift like a ghost around and behind her ankles. She was like a dream within a nightmare.
“Okay,” says the eye doctor. “On a scale from one to ten, one being the clearest and ten being the blurriest, how badly is your mother seeing?”
I turn around and look at my mother in her small vinyl chair. She looks expectantly at me, waiting for me to translate
what the optometrist, who uses words she doesn’t know, has just said. The fluorescent lights flicker, and it is as if I am watching a movie and can see the transition from frame to frame. I open my mouth, knowing that some concepts just don’t translate.
I mumble something about numbers and blurriness, and my mother, frustrated, interrupts me in Chinese. “What are you talking about? One, ten, six? He didn’t really say that, did he?”
I turn again and say to the doctor, “Seven. She says her blurriness is at seven.”
“All right, then, let’s turn off these lights and have a look.” He spins on his stool and flips a switch, and the room is black except for a thin line of light coming in from the waiting area through the crack at the bottom of the door. I can hear clicking, a deep “Hmmmm” from the doctor and my mother tapping her feet on the floor.
He turns the lights back on. “Well, it looks like things are pretty good. No change from the last time, and if you’re careful, your eyes will be great until you’re a hundred.” He chuckles.
“He says your eyes look good, Mom.”
She looks at him and then quickly looks at me. “Is he sure? What about the spots, those black spots I keep seeing?”
I ask the doctor, and he says, “Everyone sees spots, Mrs. Chan, even me. It’s nothing to be concerned about.”
As I repeat this to my mother, her face changes to fear. If she’s perfectly healthy, what will everyone expect of her? Will she have to learn better English or how to file her own tax returns? She brings her hands up to her eyes, touches her lids with her fingertips. I reach out to her and place my hand on her shoulder. I had always thought of her as surrounded by a thin but unbreakable layer of glass that my sisters and I couldn’t
penetrate, even when we wanted to. Right now, however, touching her, feeling her blood and pulse underneath her skin, I see that it can all be simple, but only if I make it so.
The optometrist says to me, “She’s lucky to have you.” This I don’t bother to translate; after all, she never believes what he says anyway.
That afternoon, after my mother has gone to bed for a nap, I wander around the house, touching furniture and Hong Kong magazines, tissue boxes and shoes. I pull my grandfather’s old cigarette tin from my closet and sit down to look through the photographs again, but the air is so still that I leave the tin on the bed and begin to walk, stirring up old smells and older dust. I run downstairs, open the front door and step out into the yard.
The flowers my mother planted three days ago are already growing. Big round peony buds. Pansies that creep along the dirt, filling up space that was once empty. I pick up a stray branch of the clematis that my mother has been trying to train over the low brick fence. I loop it around a post, tucking the tendrils into the crumbly grout. I notice that the grass is growing in on the flower garden, so, on my knees, I begin to rip off the uneven blades.
Weeds have started to come back. The topsoil is lumpy. Aphids have begun to eat through the leaves of the new plants. I walk to the garage for gloves, a spade, shears and a bottle of pesticide. In the back, I pause to run my hands over the sprouting beans. “Even if we wanted to stop them from growing, we couldn’t,” I say to myself.
The soil feels like warm flesh in my hands, as if I am freeing a long-lost, living person from years and layers of
dirt. I pull out buttercups from around the base of the daffodils my father once planted, which have, somehow, survived years of neglect to return every spring, their blossoms bobbing in the wind, perennially cheerful even in rain or fog.
When I finish, I lie down on the lawn. Muddy water seeps through my jeans and sweater, but it doesn’t matter. I squint into the sky, watch clouds floating in from the north. My eyes close and I fall asleep, the spade in my hands.
In my grandfather’s old cigarette tin full of photographs, I find one in which my grandmother is standing beside a low bush covered in snow in their front yard. She is wearing a scarf over her hair and a thick, light-coloured coat. She has taken off her glasses for this picture and is smiling shyly, coyly at the person behind the camera. The date is January 1957.
My grandfather, looking through his camera (and at the photo itself, years later, perhaps every day, perhaps to help him forget the loneliness of living in a bedroom in a house full of people who never wanted him in the first place), saw the same thing I am seeing: a middle-aged woman who has become vain in his presence, who has, suddenly, it seems, begun to care about the curl of her hair and the proportions of her smile.
“Perhaps,” she might have said, “I love you after all.”
In later pictures, they are always close together, shoulders and hands touching, their bodies finally, I think, talking. “We are no longer beautiful,” she might be saying, “but we are something else in a different place now, and it is better.”

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