Lives of the Family (6 page)

See-fat had been arrested because of his position as the village’s financial administrator. Yet, he held that job at the behest of the villagers. In 1937, by order of the Nationalist government, the village lost its Kuomintang county administrators to the war effort against the Japanese. The people of the village asked See-fat’s father if he’d consider giving up his
son to the job, since he’d gone to a reputable military school and was the best-educated man in the village.

A week after his arrest, an aunt with contacts in the Communist Party brought dire news: See-fat was to be shot the next morning. She hastily added that she knew the route by which the police would lead See-fat out of the village. They could go there and watch for him to pass by, so that they could see each other’s faces one last time.

Hoi-sui, stricken, said she could not bear to go. She was four months along in her pregnancy and feared the anxiety of the moment would cause her to miscarry.

The aunt spoke solemnly to Lui-sang, giving instructions for the morning. Where to go, where to stand. “Hang on to your little brother with one hand, and your little sister with the other, and wait for your father to come.”

The next morning Lui-sang’s younger siblings, one six and the other three, could not understand why they stood at the roadside. Finally, she saw their father, walking with his hands bound together behind his back. “
Baba
!” she called out. His eyes met hers, then he said, “Listen to your mama and look after your little brother and sister.”

Back at home, Hoi-sui, who had remained behind with her youngest child, aged two, asked of Lui-sang, “You saw your father go away?” She nodded.

Yet no confirmation was ever delivered to Hoi-sui of her husband’s death.

Life under the Communists grew more dangerous. In the south, the Party, seeking to carry out Mao’s Land Reform campaign, classified households as rich households or poor households. The rich were labelled landlords and condemned
as capitalists who exploited the poor. As obvious as protruding nails, the “rich” were sojourners who’d gone to Gold Mountain, and spent what they’d earned there to build a house, two even three stories high, and to buy land. Once admired, they were now vilified.

The Communists labelled the absent See-fat Hum as a landlord, and confiscated his family’s farm and the store where they sold their farm products. “Where did you get the money?” they asked his wife. They answered the question themselves: “You took it from the People for yourselves!” Hoi-sui protested, telling them what they already knew—that their farming operation and their two-storey house were built with what See-fat’s father had saved in his decades abroad, working at his brother’s laundry in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cadres did not stop with the family’s business. A work team came to help themselves to the family’s furniture and farm implements. When they removed the garden tools that Hoi-sui used to tend the plot beside the house, she was defiant: “What? I’m supposed to hoe my garden by hand? And how shall I do that?” The leader answered by striking her on the side of the head with his rifle butt. Next, the Communists confiscated the house, and the family joined other evicted families crammed together in idle storage and animal sheds in the village.

The cruelty visited on a neighbour, a sojourner’s family like theirs but much wealthier, added to the family’s anguish about See-fat’s fate. They could more easily face the possibility of death by a bullet to the back of the head than a gruesome drawn-out death like that of their neighbour. The patriarch of that family, also surnamed Hum, presided over a large
household that included young children who were Lui-sang’s playmates. He’d fled ahead of the Communists back to Perth, Ontario. By the time the Communists had finished torturing his younger brother, his body was so broken and bloodied that his captors had to heave him into a basket and carry him on a shoulder pole to move him.

Three years passed before the well-connected aunt claimed to have found reliable information about the verdict in See-fat’s case. She reported that a struggle session had been held against five prisoners, See-fat among them. The packed audience divided itself in half: on one side sat the poorest from their village, who sprang to their feet to denounce, assail and humiliate each prisoner in turn. On the other were those less poor, who knew enough to shout slogans and look enthusiastic but otherwise to keep their mouths shut. When the judges called for a verdict in each case, cries erupted of “Shoot him!” The judges confirmed the death sentence, and guards took the condemned outside, to be shot immediately. Last to face the crowd was See-fat. Each speaker began by repeating the familiar litany of accusations; but curiously, their pronouncements only obfuscated See-fat’s crimes. Many spoke about how, as the village administrator, he had managed the community fish pond. The administrator’s responsibility was to levy and collect annual fees from each family to purchase hatchlings for the pond, and at season’s end, to decide the distribution of fish. But with the soaring inflation brought on by the war, families had seen their savings evaporate. Speaker after speaker, from both sides of the hall, rose to attest that See-fat never hesitated to ante up on behalf of the poor, and often delivered food parcels to them from his family’s farm.

“The poor people saved your husband’s life,” said the aunt. “As long as they could see daylight through the windows, they were going to keep talking, until they knew it would be too dark to take him out to be killed.”

See-fat received a sentence of life in prison.

THE ONLY
Mama
that Lai-sim had ever known told her the story of her adoption when she was a little girl. The story was embedded in her memory as if anchoring a beginning, so that life could continue, lovingly, in the middle.

“You were born in 1937, in the first year of the Resistance War. Your family, the Yees, were poor. They owned no land and had depended on money sent from a grandfather in Canada, a lifeline cut off by the war. Your mother, pregnant for the fourth time, gave birth to a boy. Within weeks, she and the baby had died of starvation. You were three at the time. Your father was widowed, so your grandmother was left to care for you, your brother, aged five, and your sister, aged six. But your grandmother suffered from failing eyesight and she worried about how she would care for all you children and keep you all fed. She decided to give one away. I gave your family a sack of rice and some sausages in return for you.”

Lai-sim had a replacement mother but no father—he had died of smallpox before the war—two older brothers, also adopted, and paternal grandparents. Grandfather had been a sojourner, working abroad in a mine in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He might have been there still had he not returned to mourn his son, only to end up trapped in China by the Resistance War.

As everybody did during the war, they lived with the ache of hunger, some days worse than others. Lai-sim saw that, but for a twist of fate, she could have been one of the girls that she and
Mama
would pass by on the way to market, an hour’s walk away. Abandoned by their families, her age and younger, they wandered aimlessly, clothed in rags, dirty and barefoot. Some she saw fall, and she knew death was hovering. When the war ended eight years later, Grandfather, his savings long gone, wanted to use his head tax certificate to go to Canada to find work again, but on account of his advanced years Grandmother and
Mama
had refused to let him go.

The routine of Lai-sim’s household remained unchanged. By day, the family gathered at her grandparents’. By night, as was common for a family short of space, its members slept separately. The house could accommodate only the two elders, as one corner was given over to the sow—the family’s most important source of income—and another to chickens, kept in cages stacked high, behind walls that went halfway up to the peaked roof.
Mama
bunked in with adult relatives; the children slept together elsewhere, girls in one bed, boys in another.

Lai-sim had no thought that their household was in desperate straits. They had a small plot of land and a water buffalo to work it. However, she did know of relatives on
Mama
’s side poorer than them. When the twice-yearly rice crop came in, those relatives, who lived some distance away in another village, would show up to accept rice from
Mama
. They never lingered; Grandmother would yell at them: “Go home! You go home!” Afterward, she and
Mama
always had a vicious argument.

But once a year, on the day the sow’s eight-week-old piglets were sold at market, such worry and strife were forgotten.

On one particular market day, Lai-sim awoke excited to meet
Mama
at her grandparents’ house. She climbed out of bed and went outside to check the skies. Had it been raining, she would have been sorely disappointed. Market days were the first, fifth and tenth days of the month; if the weather today was bad, few people would bother to go. But the sun was out and
Mama
wouldn’t have missed this chance to sell the piglets. This year, the pregnant sow had grown so fat that she and
Mama
had been certain it would have a large litter. Usually it bore as few as two; this year, it bore five. They would have made
Mama
a nice profit and to celebrate, as always, she would have bought Lai-sim a new dress.

Lai-sim skipped her way to fetch water from the well, her chore to perform at the beginning and end of every day. She then continued home to await her mother’s arrival.

At the house, she found only her grandmother sitting quietly. “Isn’t
Mama
here yet?”

“I don’t know what’s happening.” Grandmother gestured toward the room that held the chickens. “Your mother has locked the door.” She went to fetch a ladder, leaned it against the wall, looked over and yelled out: “
Ai-ya!
She did that!”

Lai-sim waited, perplexed, while Grandmother sent for a man in the village known for his strength. He was the local gravedigger and one of the few villagers who was never without work. He easily forced the door open.

Lai-sim peered through the doorway.

Her mother hung from a beam.

That afternoon, the gravedigger had her in the ground.

The next morning, Lai-sim, her face blotchy and swollen from crying, shrank into a corner of her grandparents’ house as a noisy crowd of her mother’s poor relations came to confront her grandmother. Why had there been no funeral? Why had the old lady buried the body so soon?

Grandmother stood Lai-sim and her two brothers in front of her. She jabbed a finger in the backs of the boys, so hard that they lurched forward. “Talk to them. You talk to them.” Lai-sim began to sob hysterically.

“Don’t hide behind the children!”

Sinister accusations rained down. The relatives had come in certainty that Grandmother had dispatched a warm body to the grave.

“She was still alive when you took her down!”

“Why did you let her die? You should have called a doctor!”

Grandmother stared down the crowd. “Get out of here. Go home.”

For three years, Lai-sim endured the teasing of village boys. Like other children whose families had a water buffalo, she minded the beast to and from the meadow, ready to goad it with a stick or pull heavily on the rope around its neck if it strayed off the path into the rice paddy or bent to nibble at the tender new rice shoots along the way. At the point in the route at the base of a scrubby hill where tall sugar cane grasses waved in the breeze, the boys would yell out, “Lai-sim, there’s your Mama!” Lai-sim never dared look, afraid she’d see her mother’s restless spirit.

Mama
’s death, like a scuttling black cloud, heralded bad luck. The sow died. Then the chickens. Then came Liberation, when the Communists, in the name of Revolution, persecuted average families and impoverished them. Grandmother
died. Lai-sim’s brothers married, and Lai-sim and her aged grandfather were left to scrounge for whatever grew in the wild, the taste of rice only a memory.

THREE YEARS AFTER LIBERATION
, a stranger showed up in the village looking for Lai-sim and her grandfather. The woman told them she had come to smuggle the fifteen-year-old girl to the border of the mainland with Hong Kong. Waiting for her on the other side, she said, would be a man named Kim Yee—her birth father.

“How will I know it is him?” Lai-sim asked the woman.

“He will be calling out your name.”

After her mother’s suicide, Lai-sim had been bothered by the thought that Grandmother had remained dry-eyed over the death. Perhaps her grandmother knew what was happening behind the wall of the chicken coop. She wondered, had her mother been terribly ill, maybe dying? She seemed to remember her feeling unwell—and that both women knew they could not afford the expense of a doctor.

The stranger’s arrival in Lai-sim’s life enticed out of her memory her mother’s last words to her, spoken when the two bid good night before going off to separate relatives’. Lai-sim had put it out of mind; how could her mother’s chatter compete with the anticipation of a new dress the next day?

“You have a grandmother and a father in Hong Kong,”
Mama
had told her. “Someday, you will go to see them.” Now, Lai-sim believed that on the eve of her death,
Mama
had been preparing her for a future without her, but not without family.