The Year of Finding Memory (16 page)

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

E
arly 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.

So, at the beginning of each July during my early elementary school years, I would devote only a few reluctant hours to learning written Chinese. After several successive summers, my mother gave up on me and reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter would never know how to read or write her parents’ language. Instead, I would learn to embrace English, the language of the
lo fons.
I would read over and over again about Adam and Eve, Noah, Samson, Ruth and Naomi, Esther, David, Solomon, Cinderella, Snow White, Jack, Rapunzel, the Sleeping Beauty. My Chinese persisted as a language spoken by a child to her parents, a palette without nuance, restricted to primary colours, whereas, with English, I was beginning to discover endless subtleties. This language had claimed my soul. I was a willing captive.

I didn’t give much thought to how my parents felt about this. What must it have been like to have a daughter whose mind was occupied by a culture that would remain to them forever alien and strange? But unbeknownst to them and to me, beneath my Western exterior I remained a dutiful Confucian daughter. Those age-old ideals had been a part of the very air in my father’s laundry.

Several of my relatives had suggested visiting Kai Yuan Tower, built to commemorate scholars and specifically Confucius. Throughout my childhood my parents had emphasized the
importance of learning. For her generation and class of Chinese women, my mother was considered well educated. My father had much less formal education but had nevertheless immersed himself in China’s classical literature. As an indirect way of honouring my parents, I went to Kai Yuan Tower before returning home. I had grown up in a culture that ranked athletes and movie stars at the apex of the cultural pyramid. The notion that a shrine had been erected simply to honour learning had therefore tweaked my curiosity and stirred my admiration.

We went on a Sunday, a day off work for my niece Jeen and her husband, Bing; my nephew Lew and his wife, Wei. They would join us, along with Kim and Jook, on our final excursion in China. Because of the added passengers, Lew crouched between the back seat and the door of the van. Our driver took us through Kaiping City—along the riverbank road, where we saw many old, decrepit boats moored near the river’s edge, some with plants growing out of their hulls. That morning, we saw our first traffic accident. A car had hit a bicycle and bent its back wheel. No one had been hurt, and the police were already redirecting cars and pedestrians. As usual, the traffic was heavy, but it flowed in a miraculously organic movement. Even with no stop signs and with traffic lights only at major intersections, the drivers seemed to intuitively understand a road language spoken with beeping horns that allowed them to drive and to overtake other vehicles and pedestrians in frighteningly close quarters.

Kai Yuan Tower was only a few kilometres outside the city. From the parking lot we had to walk up a steep hill, but no
one in our party was panting for breath. Earlier, when I had commented on how fit they all seemed, they laughed and told me that they lived in apartment buildings without elevators and routinely walked up five or more flights of stairs several times a day. Once I reached the top of the hill, I could see factories, an expressway, smokestacks, communications towers, power lines, large buildings and bulldozed hillsides. The development looked recent and, like so much of the modernization in China, appeared to have happened without much planning. There was so much about this country that was beyond my ken. Little things. The hillside we had just climbed was strewn with trash, yet there were workers who were crouched over, weeding the grass, ignoring the plastic bags, straws, cellophane wrappers, wrinkled bits of paper and water bottles.

The tall, pagoda-style temple was dark and quiet inside. A giant statue of Confucius in flowing, classical robes stood in the centre of the room. In front of him a large, brass urn had been jammed with sticks of incense, some still burning. I gazed for a long time at the serene face of this man, whose influence on Chinese culture dated back more than two thousand years. When I was a child not a single day would go by without my father invoking words from this scholar. He talked about the importance of obedience and order, of knowing one’s position in society and the family. As I grew older and more westernized, my connection to Confucian philosophy became tenuous. On the surface those assumptions of obedience and filial piety felt anachronistic and irrelevant to the culture I had adopted, one that promoted
independence and challenged authority. My father’s emphasis on modesty appeared to be at odds with Western society and the value it placed on being assertive. And in our home, given the friction between my parents, the peaceful order my fathered longed for felt like an impossible goal.

My father once said during dinner that of all the women who had married into his village, my mother came from the family with the most prestige. He then quickly added that he would never be so crass as to make that boast in public. Instead, he would assign her the position of number two. He grinned at me, then at my mother, with a twinkle in his eye and said that no one would dare claim number one. My mother smiled in silent agreement. She was in a rare happy mood. After three long years of separation, Ming Nee had finally arrived. A few days earlier, our village uncle in Toronto had taken my mother and me to the airport to meet her. The moment my mother saw her daughter, she ran toward her and burst into tears as they clasped each other in their arms. In the few years since I had last seen her in Hong Kong, Ming Nee had changed from a girl into a young woman. Her hair was no longer straight and parted at the side. It had been permed into soft curls, framing her face. She towered above our mother; she was wearing nylons and other grown-up clothes. For my mother the years of worry and longing over this daughter had ended. I too was overjoyed that she was here. I thought she would be the answer to my mother’s unhappiness.

And now my mother and sister were sitting beside each other at the kitchen table in my father’s laundry. It was a Sunday in the early spring and he had roasted a duck in the oven of the coal stove until the skin was crisp to perfection and the flesh inside was juicy and firm. Around the duck he had tucked slices of potatoes that would absorb the juices from the orange-peel-and-anise-flavoured marinade coating the bird. My mother had heaped Ming Nee’s bowl with the best pieces of meat. My father sat at the head of the table in a home that was at peace, and we listened while he talked about Confucius.

I lifted my eyes once more and saw the wise, beatific face of the ancient philosopher. I planted several sticks of incense into the urn and lit them.

Nan Tower stands at a bend in the Tan Jiang River, the main river flowing through Kaiping City. This unadorned, fortified structure was built with gun slits on each floor. From this location, for one week in 1945, a group of Chinese patriots held off a fierce attack from Japanese soldiers who had come up the river by boat. Those who were still alive once the enemy captured the tower were taken prisoner, tortured and executed. Nan Tower is now a national memorial, with a statue of the war heroes at its entrance. Walking around the meticulously maintained grounds, I felt a sombre, almost religious tone that I had not yet experienced in China. Inside, a narrow staircase led to a lookout station from which we would be able to see
up and down the river. Despite the holes from Japanese shells, which had been preserved as reminders of the courage of the defenders and the brutality of the enemy, the tower was structurally sound. My relatives hustled us up the stairs, insisting that Michael and I see everything at this historic site because they were so proud of the Chinese war effort.

Only Lew and Wei decided to accompany Michael and me to the top of the tower. They made a point of highlighting the damage inflicted by the Japanese. Although my nieces and nephews are all too young to have experienced the horrors of the invasion, they seem to have absorbed a collective historical memory of humiliation and defeat at the hands of China’s ancient enemy. They spoke about the barbarity of the Japanese as if they had experienced it personally. I recognized that this anger and hurt had been passed on for several generations and I was not without sympathy, though I was personally ambivalent. My relatives’ shared sense of belonging extended back many centuries, if not several millennia, whereas I belonged to a country inhabited by people who had left their homelands in order to make a new start, old grievances supposedly set aside. All the same, I sometimes longed for this kind of connection, even if it did occasionally ring untrue.