The Year of Finding Memory (8 page)

As soon as the song was finished, the corners of his mouth turned down in grim determination. My father rushed between the machine and the wooden tubs where the soapy laundry was rinsed in one tub after another until the water was clear. Next, he fed the clothes piece by piece between the rollers of a hand-cranked mangle that squeezed out all the water. The wrung-out laundry fell from the mangle in graceful, undulating curves into a wicker basket. If the weather was fine, my father hung each wet item on lines outside. At the end of the day, there were baskets stuffed with dried shirts, sheets, towels, underwear and socks, everything stiff and smelling of the sun and fresh air.

But on rainy days, and also during the winter, my father went into a room at the back of the building and packed coal into a cast-iron furnace that stood in the corner, heating the room to more than eighty degrees. He then took the wrung-out clothes and pegged everything on clotheslines strung just below the ceiling. When it was cold outside, I used to stand in that room, dressed only in panties and an undershirt, just
to savour its moisture and warmth. Even on the coldest winter day, he had to open the back door, releasing clouds of billowing steam into the frosty air outside. On those rainy summer days, however, the hot furnace only added to already high temperatures. The laundry filled with humidity, and my father, dressed in dark trousers and a flimsy white singlet, dripped with perspiration.

In the winter, except for Mondays and Thursdays, when laundry was being washed, my father put off burning coal in the cast-iron stove for as long as possible, and he bundled up with a peaked cap and a bulky, shawl-collared, woollen sweater fitted over many layers of clothing. Every Tuesday and Friday, he stood from morning until night in front of his ironing table. He ironed every single article by hand, except for bed sheets, which he later put through a press with rollers. By the time my mother and I joined him, he had bought himself an electric iron. But when he first worked in a laundry, he used heavy ones that had to be warmed on the top of a coal stove.
You have to be careful.
, he often told me,
because if the metal is too hot, you will scorch the shirt.
He said the
lo fons
grew very angry when an item of clothing was ruined, even when he offered to reimburse them. I protested and answered that the
lo fons
were unfair. My father shook his head and said that these accidents no longer happened. He always remembered to test the electric iron first—on the cloth that was stretched over the padded surface of the table. And he pointed to a strip along the white sheet, where arrow-shaped burn marks overlapped one another.

On ironing days, before I started school and got to know other children in the neighbourhood, I used to play in the
space under my father’s ironing table and watch his trousered legs shuffle back and forth. It was a space that was mine, somewhere I could create a world of my own, my parents close yet far away. I drew on sheets of brown laundry paper, cut out shapes, listened to the hiss of steam and felt the thud-glide rhythm of my father’s iron pounding the padded wooden surface above my head.

The moment we set foot inside my father’s hand laundry in Allandale, my mother started to complain. What was the matter with him that he chose to do business in such a godforsaken place? She could barely stand to touch the
lo fons’
soiled belongings, and she cringed at the sour smell that permeated every fragment of their clothing. She used to stand next to the pot of boiling handkerchiefs, and as the green snot loosened and floated to the top, she shuddered and shielded her nose and mouth with one hand while she skimmed off the slime with a metal spoon. She grumbled about the lack of heat in winter and the chilblains that afflicted her hands and feet. But my father said this was nothing. She couldn’t possibly know how difficult life was during his first years in Canada—the nasty
gwei doy
, ghost boys, who waited in ambush to pelt him with stones in the summer and snowballs in the winter. If he was lucky when he ventured into the streets, he was assaulted only with hateful names. His days were long hours of relentless, monotonous work; his nights were short, spent on the hard surface of an ironing table.

My mother scoffed. She had been through
the War.
The moment my mother brought up the War, I knew the
quarrelling would soon crescendo. Next to the drama of the Japanese invasion of China, even my father’s endless years of grinding destitution and loneliness paled. But sometimes my father tried to mount a counterattack. He talked about how he would have considered the little bit of heat he allowed us to be luxurious, how he ate only a few fermented black beans and rice—all this to save money to send back to her, to his family. My mother looked at him in disgust and told him he knew nothing about true suffering. She was the one imprisoned in this loathsome place, her
thlem gwon
, her heart and liver, ripped to shreds, forced to leave her daughter behind in Hong Kong. If only she had known ahead of time how miserable her life in the Gold Mountain would be. My mother spat out the words
Gam Sun
as if they were poison, something she had been tricked into consuming. But now it was too late. She had already made this terrible mistake.

Once my mother started to moan about her stranded daughter, my father grew silent. He was never able to contest this predicament. Except once. They were shouting at each other through the din of the washing machine. The fact that they could barely hear each other didn’t seem to matter. Their quarrelling had become a drama with predictable lines that they delivered again and again, with little variation. As my father was feeding wet clothes through the electric mangle, his fingers kept coming dangerously close to the spinning rollers, and I let out a barely audible gasp of relief whenever he pulled his hand back. My worry was needless; for my father, these tasks had become so automatic he could have performed them blindfolded. And just as well. At that
moment all his energy was focused on the fight he was having with my mother; each new taunt was pushing their discord to another level. Without warning he deviated from the script. He turned off the motor, and in the sudden quiet of the room, said, “If you want to go back to Hong Kong, I’ll send you back. But you go alone. My daughter stays here. I will not jeopardize her future because of your stupidity.”

“My stupidity? You’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

“I said you could go back. That’s what you want.”

“What kind of choice is that? I would never leave my daughter. I would throw the two of us in front of a train before I left her with you. What kind of man are you? My heart and my liver already ripped from my body.” My mother paused for a moment. She was standing at the kitchen table, chopping some ginger that she would later add to a stir-fry. “If I had known what it would be like here, I would never have left Hong Kong. At least there I had both my children with me.”

“Do you think I love this country? You still don’t understand, do you? I’m not here for me. I suffer because of my family. OPEN YOUR EYES.”

“You talk to me about suffering.
I’m
the one who knows suffering.” My mother was about to launch once more into her litany of wartime hardships.

“I’m sick of the arguing, your complaining,” my father shouted, interrupting her. “I’m ready to cut out my tongue if you don’t stop!”

My mother now had a cleaver in her hand and was about to slice some meat. Her face hardened; she rested the blade
along the edge of the cutting board and glared at him, his words looming over them. My mother’s voice came out cold and flat. “Cut the dead thing out. See if I care.”

The arguing stopped, my mother’s words suspended in the air. They each clamped their lips in silence. My father turned the motor back on, and my mother resumed her slicing. Whenever I think back on that scene between my parents, on the coincidence of my father threatening to remove his tongue while my mother stood at a chopping board with a knife in her hand, it’s hard not to smile. If only my parents had been a slight bit more happy, they might have seen the irony of the situation, and perhaps laughed. If only …

My mother and I were with my father in Allandale for less than a year before we had to move. The landlord told my father that he was selling the building, and the new owner wanted us to leave and the machinery gone. It must have been an unsettling time for my mother. Although our home in Allandale was a grim sort of place, at least she had some contact in town with Chinese people. There was a Chinese restaurant down the street, where Doon had started working when he’d arrived a few months after my mother and me. The owner of a Chinese restaurant in Barrie visited us regularly with his wife, and they took me for drives in their large car. Once we went to a zoo, where I saw a peacock and clapped my hands with excitement when the bird fanned out its brilliant tail feathers.

My father searched in the Chinese newspaper from Toronto and found a Chinese hand laundry, fully equipped, for sale in the small town of Acton. Years later my mother would complain to me about my father’s purchase. He had never consulted her about his decision to buy it. She said that if she had been in Canada for even two years at the time, she would have protested the move to Acton. She said my father should have bought a business in Toronto, where there was a Chinese community, where I would have had Chinese friends and could have gone to Chinese school. But she knew nothing about Canada. Here in this wretched country, she had become as capable as a lump of rice. Nothing at all like what she’d been in China. While we lived in Allandale and even several years after moving to Acton, she hardly ever left the laundry, never went anywhere on her own. Tasks as simple as going into a grocery store felt insurmountable.

My mother was right. We should have moved to Toronto’s Chinatown. But not for my sake. For hers.

On our last day in Allandale, some men arrived to dismantle and remove the machinery. They were large and burly, smelling of sweat and unwashed clothes. My father had hired them, but he seemed so small and timid; I felt afraid. Partway through the morning, in an unwise gesture of friendship, my father gave those giant men a bottle of whiskey. It proved to be a grave mistake. The boss grinned and slapped my father on the back.

By late afternoon, the workers had dismantled the washing machine and had carted away the main components, but the floor was littered with small, greasy, metal parts. All the men, except for one, climbed into the cab of the truck. The remaining one hoisted himself into the open back. As they drove away, the man in the back waved to us, his other arm wrapped around the bottle of whiskey, a lopsided grin on his face. Even as a five-year-old child, I found my father’s gift distressing. Like all children, I instinctively understood my inherent state of weakness and dependency. And because of this, even though I was not able to voice it, I realized my father’s act of ingratiation stemmed not from strength but from helplessness.

The sun was low in the sky, and a long shaft of sunlight streamed through the window at the front of the laundry and streaked across the planked, wooden floor. In the semi-darkness of that room, I watched my parents, backs hunched over and movements laboured, as they picked up the scattered metal pieces and put them in cardboard boxes. They would not let me help. Every so often my mother would curse under her breath, but my father stayed silent. He didn’t seem angry, yet there was something about the way he stared straight ahead, focusing on nothing, that frightened me. I wanted to cry, but didn’t.