The Distant Land of My Father (43 page)

That afternoon I called my grandmother with my concerns, mostly for reassurance. My grandmother was the most down-to-earth, unsentimental person I knew. I thought I was getting anxious over nothing, another kind of side effect of pregnancy.

“I know,” my grandmother said when I described my mother at breakfast. “I’m worried about her. She doesn’t seem well, and I’ve been nagging her about it. Last week she finally promised she’d see Dr. O’Connor.” My grandmother paused, and then she said softly, “I think something’s wrong,” and for the first time in my life, I heard fear in her voice.

That was how my mother’s illness started: so gradually and unobtrusively that it was easy to ignore. She was so casual about the bruises and the fatigue and the sore throat that I shrugged it all off and chalked my uneasiness up to unnecessary worry, so much so that in September, when, after doctor’s appointments and tests and consultations and examinations, she was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, I was as shocked as if I’d never noticed anything wrong.

I found the name alone terrifying. A few days after her diagnosis, I went to the library to try to learn from medical books what was happening to her body. I had to steel myself to read about the uncontrolled growth of leucocytes, the white blood cells that defend the body against germs and viruses. I read about the damage caused by that frantic growth, the way that white blood cells flood the tissue and blood, and the way in which the bone marrow becomes unable to produce red blood cells, which leads to anemia. And because it was happening to my mother’s body, it all seemed unbearably violent.
Easy bleeding,
I read, and in my mind I saw my mother’s bruised arms,
enlarged spleen and lymph glands, weakness, fever, frequent infection
—the language of cancer.

The illness was classified according to the type of white blood cells it affected, and it was also classified as chronic or acute. Chronic leukemia was the “better” version, developing more slowly. A patient with chronic leukemia could live with the disease for many years. Acute leukemia—my mother’s variety—was the more aggressive and dangerous type. Without treatment, it could lead to death within a few months, usually as the result of bleeding or infection. What caused the disease was unknown, as was its cure.

When I’d read all I could, I left the library and went outside into the hot September day. The Santa Anas had kicked up, and the hot desert air had blown every trace of smog to the west, so that the purplish-brown San Gabriel mountains were so beautiful and clear and distinct that they seemed magnified. I blinked in the bright light and sat down on a stone bench just outside of the library and waited to feel like myself. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was weak, and I thought I should wait a minute before heading for home. It was Saturday and Jack had the car, so I had taken the bus there and would need to take it home.

I closed my eyes and let the sun beat down on me. I felt myself getting hot, and whatever energy I had dissipated. I thought I should get up, but I was too tired, and although a voice inside said,
Get up and walk to the bus,
a louder and seemingly more authoritative one said,
Just stay here,
and then I couldn’t and wouldn’t and didn’t get up, and I thought,
It’s all right, you’re falling asleep,
and I gave in.

I woke inside the library, and for a moment, I thought I’d just fallen asleep in there and that I’d only dreamed I’d gone outside. But my head hurt, and when I touched the place that seemed to produce the pain, someone said, “No, no, dear. It’s just a cut, but leave it alone,” and I looked up to find the librarian staring down at me. She wore a light blue blouse that looked like the sky, and her hair was a beautiful deep chestnut color.

“You fainted,” she said, “and you bumped your head on the bench, but it doesn’t look like anything to worry about. We’ve called your husband and he’s on his way. In the meantime, just rest.” Then she smiled kindly. “When is the baby due?”

I put my hand to my stomach, embarrassed. I’d only started showing a week or so earlier. “February,” I said, and a voice inside asked,
Will she still be alive?
“Yes,” I said out loud, and the beautiful librarian looked puzzled. “Yes, in February,” I said weakly.

When Jack arrived, the panic and alarm in his face were so startling that I thought something else had happened, something besides me. “What is it?”

He looked confused. “I was worried.”

I shrugged. “I was reading about”—I couldn’t say the word—”her. And then I went outside and got too hot and I hadn’t eaten and—” I stopped.

He put his arm around me to help me up. “You have to take better care of yourself,” he said gently. “She’ll be all right.” He wore a UCLA T-shirt that he’d had since he was a freshman, and he smelled of sweat and cut grass, and the sight of him made me feel better. He looked up and saw the librarian watching us, and he said again, “She’ll be all right,” and I nodded.

I rested that afternoon under Jack’s somewhat strict supervision. I ate a turkey sandwich and an orange and felt fine, but getting up was not allowed, and I realized I was under a kind of house arrest. I put up with it, figuring I could do so for an afternoon.

But my little fainting incident wasn’t forgotten. It got everyone paying attention to me—Jack, my grandmother, my mother, his parents when we saw them. They were all worried that my worry over my mother would affect my health, and I felt all their anxiety every time they looked at me. And despite the fact that there were pregnant women just about everywhere you looked in that fall of 1954, my family seemed to view my condition as unique and even precarious, and I was as closely watched as my mother. We two worried over each other while everyone around us worried over both of us.

In October, as I entered my sixth month, my obstetrician expressed concern over my blood pressure, which he considered a little high, most likely due to stress, he said, for he knew of my mother’s illness. I was told to take it easy, and since I’d planned on leaving my job at the Huntington Library in only two more months anyway, I quit then, which left me with more time than I knew what to do with. My mother was in a similar position, and though her reasons were different, the fact was that we were both tired and unable to do the things we usually did. So we began to spend a lot of time together, as if on a strange sort of vacation. We went to matinees, we played cards and Monopoly and Scrabble, we did puzzles, we read piles of books from the library and exchanged the ones we liked. On warm days, we sat outside in the sun, sometimes in her overgrown garden, other times our postage-stamp backyard. We were like best friends, and we quickly fell into a routine. In the morning she watched
The Today Show,
her one guilty pleasure, she said, and I knew not to call until it was over. Sometime after nine one of us would call the other and ask, “What are your plans for the day?” and be asked in turn, “What have you got in mind?”

During those fall and winter days of 1954, I watched my mother transform herself yet again. Since that first time we’d left Shanghai when I was seven, I’d come to understand that she was someone who changed with her environment and the circumstances of her life, so I shouldn’t have been surprised at this latest transformation. But I was. She grew more open and talkative than I’d ever known her to be. Conversation seemed to soothe and relax her and, later, to make it easier for her to fall asleep. I gave up trying to follow her train of thought. One minute she might be asking what it was like for Jack to teach at a private school, and after I talked a bit about Flintridge and the boys in Jack’s classes and the way he met a group of seventh-grade boys every morning to tell them a stupid joke, she’d describe a certain dress shop she’d loved in Shanghai, a place I’d never heard her mention before. In fact, Shanghai was one of her favorite topics. She mentioned my father only in passing, when it was impossible not to, but she talked with obvious affection about our home in Hungjao, and the Bund and the Old City and Chu Shih and Mei Wah and that foreign life we’d lived so long ago.

At the start, her talkativeness confused me; she had never been so forthcoming. But the transformation in her body was far more dramatic than any changes in her personality. She tired after very little exertion, she needed transfusions more and more often, and she appeared more frail each day. I didn’t even ask how much weight she’d lost. By Thanksgiving I understood: in those long conversations, in the give-and-take of our thoughts and feelings and pasts, she was telling me good-bye.

On an unexpectedly warm afternoon during the first week of December, my mother and I sat outside with my grandmother on her patio. It had not changed since I’d seen it when we first arrived from Shanghai. Although it was December, everything was still green, and a few narcissus bloomed near the brick walk. My mother was lying on a chaise lounge in the afternoon sun, a glass of water on the table next to her. She had aged ten years in six months. Her disease was aggressive, to say the least, and it seemed that each day there was less energy, less strength, less
her.

My grandmother and I were on either side of her. I was just starting
The Morning Watch
by James Agee. My grandmother was reading the afternoon
Pasadena Star News
and commenting on what she read. The day before, the Senate had voted 67 to 22 to condemn Senator Joseph McCarthy on two counts of abusing the Senate, news that pleased my grandmother, but her relief was overshadowed by her concern for Pope Pius XII, who had collapsed and fallen into a coma the night before. He was seventy-eight years old and suffering from a perforated ulcer, and he had been fed artificially for the last four days. His physician had spent the night at his bedside, and the Pope had received the sacrament of Extreme Unction. And although my grandmother did not usually hold him dear, the fact was that he had traveled to the United States and become an acquaintance of President Roosevelt, whom she did hold dear, and so she said diplomatically, “We’ll pray for a happy death for our Holy Father.”

Illness was not something I wanted to think about, so I said nothing, waiting for a chance to change the subject, which I did by asking my grandmother what she wanted for Christmas.

“A new pair of gardening gloves,” she said quickly. “And nothing more. You spend too much as it is. You’ll need to save your money this year.”

“We are,” I said, already tired of such dull advice. “What about you?” I turned to my mother.

She had drifted off during my grandmother’s detailing of the Pope’s illness, and she stirred slightly. “I want to see the baby,” she said softly.

I laughed. “Not till February, with any luck.”

“I want to see the baby,” she said again, and she looked me in the eye. Her eyes were strangely bright, her face so pale that she looked otherworldly. Her hair was in a chignon, and she looked beautiful and fragile, and I understood that it was not a Christmas wish she was expressing. She was hoping to live until February.

My grandmother and I exchanged looks, and my mood changed in an instant. “You will,” I said quickly, my chest tight.

And then she said something I did not understand.
“Yu ping c’ai chih chien shih hsien,”
she said softly, and I stared at her for a moment. She smiled and said, “Something Chu Shih used to say. ‘Health is not valued until illness comes.’”

I nodded and asked her to repeat it in Mandarin, for it had been familiar, and when she did, I could hear Chu Shih’s voice and see his large frame in his small room more distinctly than I had since I was a child.

“Do you remember Chu Shih very well?”

“Yes.”

My mother looked pleased. “That’s good. He loved you dearly.”

We were quiet for a few minutes, and I was thinking about the taste of the tea that Chu Shih made me when I was sick. I remembered its sweetness, and the taste of oranges.

Then my mother said, “I want your promise about something, Anna.”

Something tightened inside me, partly in anticipation of what she might ask, and partly because of what her asking meant. “All right.”