The Year of Finding Memory (34 page)

Liang’s wife closed the album and Jook said, “When I got married, I was only seventeen and I hadn’t even met my
husband. On my wedding day, I wore a veil so thick I couldn’t see through it. At the end of the day, when it was lifted, I saw three men in the room and I didn’t even know which one I’d married!” Everyone giggled. My sister sighed and shook her head,
“Tsk
, how could I possibly know? We’d never laid eyes on each other. Then somebody, probably my mother-in-law, led us both into a bedroom. We were both still children, didn’t know anything. We were so frightened. I spent the night on the bed, and he slept on the floor.” My sister sighed.

“Of all my brothers and sisters, my life has been the worst. You can’t imagine how many tears I’ve shed. If only my mother hadn’t been so stubborn. If she’d allowed Father to marry your mother, she might have lived.”

“You think she should have listened to the fortune teller?” I said.

My sister shook her head. “You haven’t heard everything. You spent your life in the Gold Mountain. Lucky.” My sister paused. Just as Michael had said, in China there was no such thing as the end of a trail.

“Mother had a terrible temper. After Father told her about the fortune teller saying he was fated to have two wives and that her life depended on a second wife coming into the family, she threw a tantrum. Father could not convince her to allow a second. In the end he gave in, but he shouldn’t have. Your mother was in the village for only two or three years, and then she left for Nanking to go to school. I think Mother was really relieved to see her go. Father went back to Canada in 1937. When he left I was only six years old, and when he came back, I was seventeen, and within a few months
I was married. I barely knew him. But then I have no real memory of Mother. Father was gone for not even three years and she was dead. When I look back, as far as Mother was concerned, the fortune teller was wrong. Here it was years after the prediction and she was still alive. Her life didn’t depend on a second wife.”

I’d heard this story already. How many more times would I have to listen to it before leaving China? I was about to say something but then decided against it. Jook was my older sister, and it would have been disrespectful of me to interrupt.

“The year that Shing was ten, I was nine and Doon was four, she took us to spend Chinese New Year with her brother. Mother was in a good mood. She was alive and healthy, proof that the fortune teller was wrong. She was right not to let that little button of a city girl into her house. So what if she couldn’t read and write; she was number one wife. There was no need for a second. That was what Mother said over and over. And with my father regularly sending money back, we were doing well.

“We were all looking forward to going back to Mother’s home village, and my uncle knew that his sister had a special fondness for dog meat stew. He had gone to a lot of trouble and had made the stew the night before. Everyone knows that the best dog stew is overnight dog stew. That way the meat has a chance to become more tender and to absorb the flavour of the other ingredients. Well, Mother must have found the dish really tasty because she ate too much and ended up with indigestion. When we went home, one of the villagers told her that the stew had too much yang and that she needed
something to cool her body, something that was mostly yin. Mother made herself a sweet soup from yellow beans. But she didn’t know that dog meat and yellow beans were very bad together, that the juices from the meat would cause the beans to expand and explode. I sat up all night with her. Mother died in terrible pain. I can still see her writhing and hear her screams. So the fortune teller was right after all. Her prediction came true, and my father did end up with two wives. If only Mother had listened, then she might have lived and we would not have been orphaned.

“Those years after Mother died were terrible, and when the Japanese closed off the seaports, conditions got worse. When she was alive Father sent the money to her, of course, but after she died he sent the money to First Brother. He’d been married for just a few months and at first he looked after us, but then he started to gamble and we were left to starve. His bride was only seventeen, not at all ready to look after three children. And when she got pregnant later that year, she was so fed up that she went back to live with her mother. The three of us were left on our own.” My sister shook her head and wagged her finger at me. “Of all Father’s children, you are the luckiest.”

I nodded in silent agreement, not knowing what to say. I was seated between my niece, who was the same age as me, and my sister, who was old enough to be my mother. The gulf between us felt as wide as the Pacific.

Jook and I held each other for a long time. She was staying in Ong Sun, and Michael and I would leave Kaiping in another day. Little did I know that this would be the last time I would see my sister. She would die from a stroke the following year. My brothers would each send a large amount of money back to China for her hospital care and then for funeral expenses.

When I spoke to Shing about the money, he said that he and Doon wanted to honour Jook’s memory. He reminded me once again that after their mother had died, it was Jook who cared for them, who scavenged the food, cooked it and kept them alive. “She was our only sister,” Shing said to me. His statement startled me. I almost blurted out,
What about me? I’m your sister. Don’t I count?
But in that moment I understood that I had not been a part of their childhood. And so I didn’t play a role in their grief. My brother’s words revealed just how much the three of them had remained bound by those early experiences, the sadness of all those years apart adding to the depth of their loss.

“I’m so glad we all went back to China,” I said. It was all I could offer to comfort my grieving brother.

Kim, Michael and I hurried to catch the bus back to Kaiping City. A throng of motorcycle taxis had gathered at the bus stop and their drivers were offering to take us directly to our hotel. Our relatives all thought this would be a good idea because we’d save on the taxi fare from the bus station in
Kaiping City. But Michael and I both declined without even consulting each other. The driving in China made me nervous even during the day, but to be a passenger on a motorcycle at night when drivers often didn’t bother to turn on their headlights wasn’t even a consideration.

Once the bus arrived, we weren’t allowed to board but were told to stand aside and wait until the inside was cleaned. We watched the female attendant sweep the debris from under the seats and the aisle onto the sidewalk, where it stayed.

There were no lights on the road back to Kaiping City. People flagged the bus down at random, and even though it was hard to distinguish landmarks in the night, passengers always seemed to know where to get off. In spite of these distractions, I couldn’t stop thinking about what my sister had told me. Only a few days before, I’d naïvely thought that I finally had all the facts about my parents’ lives here in China. But the story of First Wife’s death had changed all that. It lingered with me during the entire ride back.

From a Western perspective, there was something particularly horrible about dying from eating the flesh of a dog. The thought of it made my stomach churn. Was she in the loft of my father’s house or would they have brought her down to the family living area? First Brother and his wife would have been ministering to her. They would likely have asked for help from a woman in the village who was known for her healing abilities. In a tiny village like Ning Kai Lee, there wouldn’t have been a doctor. Perhaps other neighbours had gathered around her bedside. And what about the three children? I kept thinking about them and how frightened they
must have been, watching their mother writhe in pain, listening to her piercing screams. Was she gripped with terror for her own children and what the future held for them? With their father stranded on the other side of the world, they were, in fact, orphaned.

Listening to my sister during this visit, as far as she was concerned, she might as well not have had a father. When he finally returned to China after the war, it was to marry my mother, and a few months later, Jook, being of marriageable age, would become the wife of a man she’d never met. One of my nieces whispered to me that the villagers gossiped about Jook’s dowry being somewhat modest, bearing in mind that her father was a Gold Mountain guest. People said it was my mother’s fault. If First Wife had been alive, she would have made sure that her daughter left home with a large dowry. No one seemed to blame my father. It was a woman’s responsibility, so they blamed my mother. I found this village gossip difficult to fathom; my mother’s generosity with these people had been legendary. She’d probably had no experience assembling a dowry and didn’t know how much to give. It was the only criticism I heard about my mother.

We were back in our hotel room, drinking tea and writing in our journals. I told Michael again about First Wife’s unhappy end at the hand of the gods. He put down his pen and shrugged. “It’s all very sad. But it probably had nothing to do with the gods,” said my agnostic husband. “My hunch
is that it was either appendicitis or food poisoning. I’d say appendicitis. If it had been food poisoning, more people would have been sick. The mix of dog meat and yellow beans had nothing to do with it. Just makes for a good story.”

I agreed with my husband. He was being rational and so very Western. And yet, when my sister told me about the death of her mother, my spine tingled. To her and to some other members of my family, it was as fate had intended. Once her wilful mother had chosen to defy the gods, she was doomed. Her father was preordained to have two wives, and if First Wife would not cooperate, the gods themselves had no choice but to engineer her death, thus making way for wife number two. If it was indeed predetermined, the gods impressed me as being especially cruel and merciless. I felt sorry for this peasant woman, whose only crime was not wanting to share her husband with another wife. As these thoughts drifted through my mind, I found myself contemplating the real reason why my mother returned to our ancestral home before leaving for Hong Kong and then the Gold Mountain. Once again, I could see the wheels of the pedicab spinning over a bumpy path and I remembered the softness of my mother’s body as she held me on her lap. I have no doubt that she was returning to request the blessing of our ancestors, but perhaps even more important, she was surely attempting to make peace with the spirit of First Wife.

TWENTY-THREE