The Year of Finding Memory (14 page)

Time and weather have bestowed upon these towers a certain patina and faded elegance. And in spite of their apparently strange architectural mix, they now possess an eerie beauty that feels distinctively Chinese. But as I took in the sight of these towers, I realized that they must also have been embodiments of hope. I gazed at the green paradise in the distance. My father did not share the success of the men who had left this display, though his dreams had been the same as theirs.

Doon, a self-made man with numerous properties in Canada and now comfortably retired, had once mused out loud about why our father persisted in the hand laundry, why he never modernized or opened a more lucrative business, such as a restaurant. Most of the Chinese were going to large centres such as Vancouver and Toronto. Before moving to Allandale, my father had operated laundries in impossibly isolated communities like Timmins, Pembroke and Trois-Rivières, places where the winters were long and hard, lumber and mining towns with sizable populations of single men
who needed to have their clothes washed. A task normally relegated to women, laundry was emasculating work that ensured these men from the other side of the world faded into the social background, never threatening the status quo. With Chinese restaurants still relatively uncommon, my father was often the only Chinaman in town. When I think about his choices after he arrived in Canada, it becomes evident that getting rich was never a real possibility for him. He had no talent for making money. He only understood hard and gruelling work. Whatever “riches” he might have taken back to China were the result of savings squeezed from a life stripped to the bone. One light bulb on at a time; a steady diet of fermented black beans, pickled greens and rice; lighting the coal stove only when the temperature went below freezing; never a penny spent on personal pleasure.

As I stood on this opulent balcony above Zili village, I thought about the crumbling watch tower in Ning Kai Lee. I had walked around it several times, then stood back and taken it in. It had no ornamentation, nothing that manifested a foreign influence. That tower in my father’s village was so small, so insignificant. If these watch towers in fact represented the goals of those who had travelled overseas, I couldn’t help but think that the meagre tower symbolized my father’s ambitions in Gam Sun. All those years depriving himself, those long, laborious hours, faithfully sending money back to China, never taking a holiday. It was as if my father was some kind of anachronism, belonging to the group of Chinese who had built the railway across Canada, not someone who had lived into the late twentieth century.
Sadness gripped my heart. Could it be that for our father, the inspiration to be bold and to dream big was never there in the first place?

In the teahouse where he had worked as a boy, my father must have overheard patrons tell enticing stories of riches waiting to be made in that land across the sea. He would also surely have heard about the destitution, the harsh climate and the callous
lo fons.
But what could be more difficult than the life he was already suffering in China? My grandfather had been a poorly paid schoolteacher and could not support his large family. The stories of want from my father’s childhood became mantras in mine: his first pair of shoes at age nine, his first taste of sausage at age fourteen, always dressed in rags. The village had no running water or electricity. At age five his older sister took him into the fields to gather dried cow patties for fuel.

He started work in that teahouse when he was twelve years old. His days there were an endless round of scraping ashes from the hearth, scrubbing floors, dumping slop. A particularly vicious head cook scolded and often struck him without cause. Several times a day he walked back and forth from the well, balancing a yoke so heavy from the weight of the water buckets that blisters and weeping sores erupted on his shoulders. He felt fortunate if he managed four hours of sleep at night, before one of the cooks kicked him awake while it was still dark. If he stayed in China he would face only misery.
The Gold Mountain might at least provide him with a fighting chance for a better life.

When I was growing up, my parents frequently talked about the fact that my father had returned to China so many times. Because I heard the tale so often, it became one of those family facts that grew tedious and failed to have any real significance for me. “Your father poured a lot of money into fares going back and forth. All that money would have made him rich, even if he never made another cent over here,” my mother used to remind me.

Whenever I asked my parents why he returned so many times, the answer was always the same: the most important thing in life is family, the most important thing is to
goo gah
, to protect your family. That refrain was drilled into me almost every day of my childhood. I can still hear my father’s voice.
You must be frugal with yourself, so you can be generous with family and friends.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that I began to appreciate the magnitude of his actions, the fact that he chose to return so often when many of his peers remained overseas. Most of the
lo wah kew
, the old timers, made the journey home only once. They lingered a few years, got married and fathered a couple of children before taking a ship back to North America, separated from their families until the immigration laws relaxed after the war. Many of these men lived in Chinatowns in large cities. In spite of the racism around them, their community provided support and a sense of belonging. But my father didn’t live in a city until he was an old man.

Until their deaths my parents held fast to the virtue of self-deprivation. For a short time after we first met, Michael thought my mother owned only one handmade, green cotton dress. I corrected this impression and explained that she owned several dresses that were the same, but with one variation: short sleeves for summer and long sleeves for winter. By fitting all the pattern pieces on the same bolt of cloth several times, she would use less material and thus save money. Every new item of clothing I bought for her she put away for the elusive
good
occasion. Whenever I bought something for my father, he told me to return it to the store. The only time he wore a new suit was at Ming Nee’s wedding, and it was purchased for him by his future son-in-law. I can still see him in that properly fitted dark grey suit, walking Ming Nee in her floor-length bridal gown down the church aisle.

Otherwise, my father’s wardrobe consisted only of clothing that had been left unclaimed in the laundry—appropriated no sooner than five years after a parcel had been abandoned. Only then was he confident that the owner was unlikely to return. Once again, my mother found his honesty excessive, and this time I agreed. Unclaimed packages of laundry sat gathering dust on a corner shelf, and when my father opened them after his self-imposed period of grace, the shirts had often yellowed with age. Regardless, he would wash and iron them for himself. And if they were too large, he used expandable arm bands to hold up the
sleeves, and he tucked shirttails that came below his thighs inside his pants.

Every so often an aerogram or a letter written on onionskin paper arrived at the laundry from one of our relatives appealing for additional money. Below the foreign stamps was our address in awkwardly written English script, with smooth, flowing Chinese characters on the side. Since my parents continued to send money home despite my father’s paltry earnings, the requests for more made him cross. “They think money grows on trees over here. That I just have to go and pick it, like some kind of fruit,” I heard him say more than once. My parents talked about how the family in China never really understood the harshness of their lives in Canada. They had little sympathy toward each other, but when it came to the family back home, their feelings were united.

One afternoon while I was still in high school, I came home to my parents complaining about yet another entreaty for more money. I was sick of hearing these complaints, over and over. In my know-it-all teenage voice, I blurted out, “Money, money, money. All they ever write about is money! You haven’t seen these people in years. Besides, you’ve given them so much. You don’t owe them anything. Why bother?”

My mother stopped what she was doing and glared at me, her eyes shining with anger and disbelief. “Don’t ever say that,” she said in a low, steady voice. “These people are family. You don’t know how lucky you are. You’re the one who has more. No matter how little we have here, it’s more than what they have at home.” My mother’s words shamed me. In my foolishness I had overlooked how very real these people back
in China were for them and had ignored the fact that perhaps their memories of China had more meaning than their lives here in Canada.

A few days earlier, I’d been visiting the home of a friend after school, and while we sat at her kitchen table with our Cokes and potato chips, she brought out a shoe box of old family photos: pictures of herself as a baby, of her mother and aunt when they were small children, of her grandparents and other relatives. I looked at my friend and I could see her face in the pictures of her mother as a child, in her grandmother and a great-aunt. I picked up a photograph of her mother and her siblings, children with tidy hair and dressed in smooth, white, lacy smocks, smiling sweetly in front of the camera. I held this slightly curled, black-and-white picture in my hand and wondered what it would be like to know my family’s past, to recognize myself in someone who had lived long ago. My grandparents were all dead by the time I was born. It wasn’t until after my father had died that it occurred to me that I didn’t even know their names. I had never seen a picture of either of my parents as children. For that matter, there were no baby pictures of me or of any of my half-siblings. For me, life had started in Allandale. My relatives in China existed in a dark, meaningless past. At times it seemed as if there was a giant clothesline stretching across the Pacific, and my parents and my siblings were suspended at different points along the line. I was the only one who’d reached that distant shore, my feet firmly on the ground.

NINE

A
ccording to my mother, I used to peer out the window from the second floor of our store in Cheong Hong See and pray to Hin-ah-Gung, Old Heaven Uncle, to stop the rain. I was impatient to venture outside, to splash and wade in the puddles left behind. I have a faint memory of bending over with small, flat rectangles of wood in my hands and pushing away water that had gathered in the ruts on the road, then standing aside to watch the water rush back. In the shadow of that memory is another little girl, the two of us running through the sparkling, shallow pools and laughing. Was Kim the playmate I have so long remembered?

Once again, Jook and Kim joined Michael and me in a hired van. As we travelled along the rural roads, Michael asked about the rice fields, which appeared to be in various stages of growth. I translated for him and pointed out a particular paddy to my sister. She smiled and said, “That field is almost ready for harvest. I spent so many years farming, I
can tell at a glance about a field, when it needs to be cut, whether in three months, two months or now.” As I relayed these things to Michael, both women grinned, pleased that he was so interested in their experiences. “Everything you know is from books. Everything I know is from work. But some things you don’t know because you lived in Canada. Now that you are here, I will teach you.” My sister began with the different names for rice:
voh
while it’s growing in the field; guk, when it’s ready to be harvested;
mi
before it’s cooked; and
fhun
once it’s cooked. She made me teach Michael the different terms. When he repeated them, my sister and niece chuckled at his awkward pronunciations.