The Year of Finding Memory (22 page)

The Chinese home for the aged in downtown Toronto had a space available for my mother. It was a good fit. The staff spoke a number of Chinese dialects, and they served only Chinese food. Each floor had a communal living room with comfortable chairs and a television. I could borrow a wheelchair and easily take her to Chinatown nearby for dinner or dim sum lunch. For the first year or so she responded well to her new surroundings. Her mind was still generally able to navigate between her past and her present. But there was no denying that the world in which she lived was fading from her consciousness. She constantly talked about her childhood. Little things triggered her memories: a favourite food, a flower in a bouquet, an item of clothing. She told me again and again about going to Sunday school with her younger sister in Taishan, where they grew up. She told me again how the missionaries there had taught her to knit, embroider and crochet. She would sing in Chinese, “Jesus Loves Me” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” her voice tuneful and sweet. But whenever she asked me, “Do you want to know the real reason I went to Sunday school?” I knew her reminiscences were about to end. My mother would beckon me to come closer. She would chuckle and whisper to me as if I were a fellow conspirator. “I went to Sunday school not because I believed. Although there’s
nothing wrong with believing. My little sister and I went because the missionaries gave us biscuits and cakes to eat, free. Lots of children believed for the same reason.” After divulging this little secret, she always giggled and then disappeared once again into her childhood.

A few months after my mother moved to the nursing home, I visited her with a bag of fresh lychees. I found her in the communal living room, watching television. I peeled several of the fruit and put them on a plate I’d taken from her room. She was watching a war movie. On the screen terrified people were screaming and fleeing from random explosions. She pointed to the scene and said, “That’s what it was like. The bombs. They fell out of the sky, and you never knew where they would land. Somehow I managed to miss them, and I always managed to find safety for my daughter and me. I used to see children left by the side of road. They were crying and dirty, deserted by their parents. But I could never do that. I would rather die first.”

My mother once again reminded me how lucky I was, not to know any of the misfortune she had known. And when she asked me if I knew that she was sixteen when she was married, she didn’t wait for an answer. She proceeded once more to tell me the story of her terrible first marriage. Again, I half-listened. I had heard her account before, and without any help could probably repeat it, word for word.

I had known for a long time that after the death of her
thoh
, sometime around the Japanese invasion of Canton, my mother had returned to her first husband. Big Uncle’s fortunes had fallen, and there was the matter of his marriage to Foo Hoy, Fat Lady, the woman my mother never liked. There must also have been a general sense of chaos in the city and an “every man for himself” sort of mentality. She felt her only choice was to seek refuge with this man whom she despised, to whom she was still married.

I thought I knew this story inside out. But this time as I listened, it occurred to me that she could have gone back to her father. Her mother had died when she was a child, but surely her own father would have given her a home. When I interrupted and asked, she said, “My father was dead. He had died even before I was married, when I was twelve or thirteen. I’m not sure anymore. It was a long time ago. My father was murdered.”

Murdered?

My mother picked up one of the lychees and ate it, then put the pit on the plate. She looked at me and shook her head. “My father was a very sociable person. He loved people. That’s why he was such a good doctor. After a house call on that particular day, instead of coming straight home, he went to a teahouse to chat with some friends. Some soldiers saw him go in. My sister and I, when we saw soldiers roaming the streets we were afraid. There were always stories about how they often didn’t get paid, sometimes not even fed. So they stole to survive. When they saw my father’s doctor’s bag, they must have thought it was full of money. Anyway, when
he came out, they followed him and they clubbed him to death. They were probably angry that he didn’t have any money, at least not what they expected. I became an orphan at an early age. Now do you see why my
thoh
was so important to me? She was really the only mother I ever had. That’s why her death was so terrible. I wasn’t lucky like you, living in Canada with a mother who worries about you. In another few years I won’t be here, and then you’ll see. You don’t know how lucky you are to have a mother who worries about you. After my
thoh
died, nobody worried about me. What else could I do but return to that very no-good man?”

I stared back at her, my mouth a gaping hole.
Murdered!
Her tone was so casual; she could just as easily have been talking about the weather. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder. Reeling from this revelation about my grandfather whom I had never met, his bloody, violent death, I was ashamed that I was a middle-aged woman before I had even asked how he had died. Sitting beside my mother, I felt a world apart from her, to think that my parents had spent their childhoods in a place where an event as terrible as her father’s murder was not unusual.

I walked my mother to her table in the dining room and waited for her to sit down. The food at this home was exceptional. Everything was cooked from scratch, and the residents routinely ate fresh seafood. Every evening meal started with a long-simmered soup. I bent over and kissed her goodbye.

I decided to walk the several blocks north before catching the streetcar. The chestnut trees were covered with cone-shaped clusters of white blossoms. Front yard gardens were
sprouting bok choy, gai lan and other Chinese greens. I passed a few people on this quiet, residential street. Most people were already home from work, and I caught the occasional whiff of garlic frying in oil. The streetcar was full when I got on. I pushed my way to the back, where there was space to stand, annoyed that people were crowding the front and blocking the entrance.

My mother had lived in Canada for more than forty years, yet she continued to be burdened by her past, still suspicious of life in the Gold Mountain. If my family left for a holiday, I had faith that when we returned, our home would still be standing and our furniture would be undisturbed. My irritations felt petty; my decisions felt almost frivolous: what university to attend, where to vacation, which house to buy, what to serve at a particular dinner party, what outfit to wear. When I arrived home, Michael and I would eat last night’s leftovers on matching dishes. After dinner I would load the dirty dishes inside my fancy dishwasher. I would spend the rest of the evening relaxing, perhaps watching the news on TV before going to bed. My husband and I both had secure jobs; the girls were both at university. What had I done in my past life to deserve living on my safe, tidy planet?

I should be grateful. I was grateful. But resentment lurked under my skin. I hated it when she told me how lucky I was to have a mother who worried about me. On some level I was not the good Chinese daughter that she wanted. I was too Western, too independent. My devotion to her was no match for hers to me. My mother never
missed an opportunity to warn me how sorry I’d be once she was gone. And how right she has turned out to be.

In the last year of my mother’s life, her delusions became steadily worse and more frequent. Many times I would arrive in her room and find her alone, talking or singing songs with an imaginary friend from her youth. Often, it was her younger sister. A few months before she died, my mother had to be hospitalized for some internal bleeding. When I entered her hospital room, a young, black nurse was sitting beside her and holding her hand. My mother was having a one-sided conversation with her in Chinese. The woman nodded and smiled. As soon as my mother saw me, she told me to hurry over. She introduced me to her new friend, giving her a Chinese name. She told me that the “young girl” was from a neighbouring village and had walked a long way just to visit her. I was pleased to see my mother in this rare, buoyant mood, but at the same time my heart sank. Though she still recognized me and knew my name, I felt her slipping away.

Michael and I took our daughters to visit their grandmother in the nursing home on a Saturday. Ming Nee saw her on Sunday. The following afternoon the nursing home called me to let me know that she had died. My mother was eighty-eight years old. She had recently seen the people who meant the most to her. It was her time to go. She felt no need to give us warning.

At her funeral we burned spirit money, paper spirit clothing and furniture, so she would not be without in her afterlife.
We burned incense so that her spirit would be at peace. And before the closing of the coffin, each of her children, along with other family members, tucked a blanket around her, ensuring her warmth and comfort. With my mother we had the satisfaction of saying goodbye.

FIFTEEN

E
ven if my mother’s
thoh
had lived, with Big Uncle’s fortunes in decline, she could not have offered refuge from the Japanese in an occupied city. And so my mother returned to the countryside and appealed for sanctuary to a man she hated, a man she had had little to do with for almost ten years. It is hard for me to imagine a more humbling situation than the one my mother faced. In June 1942, while she was living with this man, she gave birth to my half-sister Ming Nee. This period of relative security with her first husband was brief, for not long after the birth, my mother and her baby had to escape from the invading Japanese soldiers. I cannot imagine how terrible life with that very no-good man must have been to make her leave during such a dangerous time. She never explained to me why she chose to be on her own. I can only guess.

She and her baby daughter fled toward Hong Kong. For a while she found work in a telegraph office, interpreting incoming Morse code messages that warned of the Japanese
advance. From listening to my mother, it seemed that there were periods of relative safety, but then she might awaken to find the Japanese invaders practically at her doorstep. She talked about bombs raining down from the sky. If she ran too fast or too slow, she risked being blown to shreds. During her periods of flight, she found safety in caves and abandoned buildings. She was so starved, she dug roots out of the ground to eat. While she was in hiding, she saw people herded together and bayoneted. She saw a soldier slice open a pregnant woman. She shielded her daughter’s eyes from these acts of horror, which left her mouth dry and her chest pounding, her body weak from fear and hunger. She watched and prayed that they would not be found. She lived in constant worry that her daughter might inadvertently cry out, but she never did. Even though Ming Nee was just a little over the age of two, she understood that their lives depended on being silent, that a tiny peep could result in death.

My mother never forgave the Japanese. We had some distant relatives in Toronto who were Canadian-born Chinese and who rented the second floor of their house to a Japanese family, also Canadian-born. On a few occasions when we visited, we crossed paths with members of this family, and my mother always turned away, her lips clamped shut, her anger locked inside. It didn’t matter that these people had had nothing to do with the Japanese soldiers who invaded China. As far as she was concerned, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Without them the Japanese would have permanently occupied and brutalized China. While I was single, she admonished me never to
marry a Japanese man. She threatened never to speak to me again if I disobeyed her.