China Dog (7 page)

May-Yen remembered thinking that cancer was a Western disease, but now Chinese people were getting it. The people who had been careless about eating all that
lo fon
food. Didn’t they know any better? We Chinese are raised on rice – rice that’s hot and soft and cushions the inside of your stomach, radiating a gentle source of heat. But the ice cream, the potato salad – so cold and heavy. You could tell by the way that it coated the inside of your mouth with a thick film that it was bad for you. Food should be clear and savoury and leave your mouth feeling cleansed but your stomach full and warm.

But now the doctors were saying that she had cancer. Three days earlier, May-Yen had been on the phone to tell her daughter what her doctor had told her – or at least what Kenny had told her the doctor had said. When May-Yen finished, Su insisted on speaking to Kenny. Between them they decided that May-Yen should go and stay with Su in Toronto. Of course it made sense. Kenny wouldn’t have time for all those doctor’s visits. He and his wife ran the Lucky Star by
themselves without hired help. It wasn’t that May-Yen wasn’t grateful to her children, especially to her daughter, who spoke English so well and who had a university education. She just couldn’t help thinking, I wasn’t even asked.

Su finished the packing, checked her watch, and went downstairs to the restaurant. She was anxious to leave her brother’s apartment. She found the low ceilings and lack of light depressing and oppressive. Her mother’s bedroom looked out at a brick wall only three feet away. Su returned with her husband, Harry, and their two young sons. The boys rushed to give their grandmother a hug. May-Yen absent-mindedly patted them on their shoulders while she watched her daughter and her son-in-law dismantle her fortress of worldly possessions, carrying everything down a long flight of wooden stairs.

Su’s fingers tapped out a quiet rhythm as she held the car door open for her mother. May-Yen slowly brought her legs around the back seat, and with her daughter’s help, edged her feet on to the sidewalk. She held Su’s arm and carefully walked up the path to the large red brick house. May-Yen was surprised to see yellow and red leaves scattered all over the lawn. There were no trees around the restaurant and she rarely stepped outside. Harry and her grandsons walked quickly past several times, each time carrying another package.

Su had cleared out a room next to the bathroom in anticipation of her mother’s arrival. May-Yen, exhausted from climbing the stairs, sat slumped in a chair. Su looked around in
disbelief at her mother’s belongings – a careless collection of cardboard boxes, suitcases, and bulging green garbage bags. A mingling of smells from her childhood, of camphor, spearmint, and mothballs was beginning to permeate the room.

May-Yen watched her daughter walk over to a stack of boxes and lift the lid off the top one. Inside, carefully folded, was a pink chiffon gown with a full skirt of many layers. Su took the dress out, shook it, and held it in front of her with arms extended, and looked at her mother in disbelief. “Mah, why are you keeping this? This thing is twenty years old. I wore it when I was the bridesmaid at Kenny’s wedding.”

May-Yen sat up straight. “
Eiyah!
That dress cost a lot of money. So what if I keep it?”

“But Mah, it’s never going to be in style again. Don’t you think this is a bit ridiculous?” Su opened another box and found a pair of sheepskin boots that she had bought for her mother many Christmases ago – never worn, still in the original package. She knew better than to say anything more. She knew that her mother was watching her, that her mother saved everything. And anything that was new stayed new – for those elusive “good” occasions.

In another box there were jars filled with water chestnut powder for diarrhoea, gnarled brown roots for tonic soups, square green envelopes of bitter tea for influenza, and vials of pink
Po Chai
pills for nausea – talismans against the effects of Western food. She sighed as she looked at her mother’s possessions, which now filled the room, providing May-Yen with protection and security like an invisible cloak. Her treasures
and her demons were stuffed into those boxes. As bitter as May-Yen’s memories might be, she was not about to part with them. Su shook her head and left to write Jason’s psychological assessment.

More than forty years earlier, Su arrived in Canada with her mother on a propeller-driven airplane. They were met at the airport by her aunt and uncle, since her father lived several hours from Toronto. The next day she met her father, Lum Mun Lek, for the first time. He nodded at May-Yen and patted their daughter on the head, saying her name, “Su Jing.” He was a small wizened man with large calloused hands and lines of suffering deeply engraved into his face.

Later that afternoon, Su and May-Yen followed Mun Lek aboard a Gray Coach bus that took them to his hand laundry in Sydney, a small town in Ontario. Su sat with her mother while her father sat across the aisle. Throughout the journey, her mother suffered from motion sickness. When she wasn’t vomiting into a brown paper bag, she sat with a look of desperation, squeezing Su’s hand until the knuckle joints popped against each other. Her father sat with the muscles in his face taut, his eyes bewildered, staring straight ahead, saying almost nothing.

After a four-hour ride, they arrived in Sydney. Mun Lek warned them about the snow and ice on the sidewalks. When May-Yen stepped off the bus, she slipped. The bus driver grabbed her by the arm, and she awkwardly steadied herself.
Mun Lek picked up the large tan leather suitcase and carried it to the laundry. Su and May-Yen struggled behind with the smaller bags.

The laundry was their home. May-Yen looked up and saw a tired building, the paint flaking and blistered on the wooden exterior like boils on a bad complexion. From the front door she could see the railway tracks. She stepped inside after her husband and saw a long, dim, silent place filled with ancient machinery – a large wooden-barrel washing machine with a motor attached, wooden laundry tubs for rinsing, and an old table tightly wrapped with years of worn sheets and blankets. In the middle of the table stood an upright iron, cold and still in an expanse of white. There was a slight depression in the floor in front of the table where Mun Lek always stood while ironing. It was late afternoon, and the narrow shadows cast by the equipment stretched long and thin across the floorboards like the bars of a prison. To the side was a small room with a double bed. Su would sleep in the middle, her parents lying rigid on either side of her.

After the Second World War, Mun Lek had returned to China from Canada to look for a wife, someone to help in the laundry. His prospects were not good. He was over fifty, a widower with a family of two grown sons; he was considered past the prime of his life. He ran a hand laundry. Everyone knew that the restaurant business offered a more promising future. When May-Yen met Mun Lek, she was over thirty, also considered past her prime. She had lost her husband during the war and was living with her brother-in-law, who
considered her another mouth to feed. The meagre earnings she brought home from her job as a clerk in a government office were received with contempt. A marriage between May-Yen and Mun Lek provided the perfect solution for both.

Just before Su’s birth in Hong Kong, her father had returned to Canada. In the small town of Sydney, he’d opened another hand laundry where he worked alone. There were two Chinese establishments in the town – the hand laundry and a restaurant. May-Yen was the first Chinese woman in the town, and Su was the first Chinese child.

Work in the laundry started the day after their arrival. For the next fifteen years, until Mun Lek’s death, May-Yen worked by his side. Su watched her mother sort clothing, mend collars and cuffs, replace buttons, darn socks – the belongings of strangers, their acrid body odours lingering on their clothes. At times May-Yen wondered out loud, “My God! Same watery eyes, same big noses.
All-ah
same to me!”

On wash days, May-Yen helped her husband tame the wooden-barrel machine that agitated the clothes until they were clean. She pulled clothes out of wooden tubs of icy rinse water and cranked them by hand through wringers. In the summer, the clothes were hung outside on lines to dry. Her single vanity had been her finely pored, pale, ivory skin. Each summer she watched in silent surrender as her skin turned brown and the faint lines on her face grew deeper and deeper.

Every evening after supper, she fed sheets, tea towels, and tablecloths through ironing rollers, transforming limp, wrinkled bits of cloth into yards of smooth, sleek fabric that
looked like full-blown sails on a ship. She also produced three meals a day. Lunch and supper were unthinkable without hot homemade soup. Her husband rarely spoke, except to give orders. Their meals were eaten in silence.

May-Yen resigned herself to her new life. But sometimes she looked at her daughter, her eyes pools of unfathomable sadness. “There was a time, back in China, when I used to go to movies, maybe play
mah jong
in the evenings. There was a time when I had friends.”

Fifteen years later, when her husband died, May-Yen moved in with Mun Lek’s son, Kenny, and his family. After Mun Lek’s funeral, Su stayed at the laundry with her mother for a week. She helped her mother pack her belongings into the tan leather suitcase that May-Yen had brought from Hong Kong and into an assortment of brown cardboard boxes. At the end of the week Kenny drove down from Urquhart in his blue station wagon. Su caught a Toronto bus back to university.

There was no choice for May-Yen but to move in with Kenny and his family, into a small bedroom in the apartment above the Lucky Star. From the beginning, her bedroom was stacked to the ceiling with boxes full of ancient belongings. The bed was pushed flush to the wall and more boxes were crammed underneath.

When May-Yen walked through the wooden swinging door into the restaurant kitchen after her first night in her new home, her stepson pointed at a bushel of unpeeled potatoes.
Every day there were baskets of carrots, celery, and onions waiting to be peeled, washed, and chopped. Every day there were stacks of plates that needed scraping and pots that need scrubbing.

Two days after bringing her mother to Toronto, Su sat next to her in the oncologist’s waiting room at Toronto General Hospital. The receptionist had a look of impatience and amusement as she watched May-Yen fumble with her gnarled, arthritic fingers, trying to remove her hospital card from a clear plastic bag containing several identity cards, with each card again individually wrapped in another clear plastic bag and bundled with an elastic. She refused all help. Su remembered once suggesting to her mother that she buy a wallet with slots for her cards. May-Yen had indignantly responded, “What do I need a wallet for? You should be like me and sew pockets inside your jackets and pants. That way nobody can rob you. And you save money. See, no need for expensive wallets and purses!”

Su sighed. She couldn’t help thinking that although her mother had never been victimized by a pickpocket, a simple purchase required her to nearly undress in public.

After a short wait, Su led her mother into the brightly lit examination room. She helped May-Yen remove her multiple layers of clothing – a jacket, two sweaters, a blouse, and an undershirt. Then a young doctor entered the room. As Su translated the instructions, “Turn this way. Turn that way.
Lift your arm.” May-Yen curled her lips inward in that special way of hers. Not once did her eyes leave the floor.

When they were finished, Su led her mother to the elevator. They went up several levels, then down a long corridor. Su walked slowly while May-Yen worked hard to keep up. Her eyes, like those of a frightened bird, darted from side to side, trying to make sense of the different offices and waiting rooms.

They were taken into a sterile examination room by a gentle female technician. The giant mammogram machine, with its menacing, pivoting arm, loomed in front of May-Yen, who stood naked from the waist up. Under the fluorescent light her skin looked thin and parched with finely etched wrinkles like the scales of a fish. Her shoulders were hunched; her breasts hung empty. She stood shivering. Su carefully translated the instructions: “Face this wall. Place your breast flat on the shelf. Now place it vertically. Now face the other wall.”