Journey Across the Four Seas (33 page)

Everyone felt that Agnes appeared to be doing well, both academically and socially. She was popular among her classmates, and especially among several hopeful suitors. But every time I watched my eldest daughter prance in and out of the house, I shook my head in dismay. Her education had reached a dead end. Already her English was regressing. The local accent and the stilted expressions were rubbing off on her.
Taiwan
University
was the last place in the world to study English.

My children’s shaky future literally worried me sick. I was often in bed with a cold, flu, or diarrhea. Strange sensations also plagued my body. One moment I was dozing off comfortably in bed, the next minute I would be so unbearably hot that I had to throw off all the blankets. After a while, I would be cold again and shivering in my sweat. The battle with the blanket often went on all night. I thought I was going crazy. Then I missed my period two months in a row. Pregnancy was impossible, so it had to be the other end of womanhood—menopause. I kept quiet about it, as it was a taboo subject in the same category as menstruation and childbirth. A woman just had to muddle through in silence.

To pull myself out of the doldrums, I joined the International Women’s Club, which was made up of women of many nationalities. We took cooking lessons together and practiced on each other by hosting parties in rotation. Cooking had never been my interest, but it was better than staying home and crying.

The days flowed by as slowly as molasses, but my money was gushing out like water from a wide-open tap. I’d sold some of my stocks and come to
Taiwan
with the sum of $100,000. It was plenty to tide us over, as Hok-Ching was supposed to receive his full salary in a month. But a month became two, and then three. Every time I asked him about the flour mill, he would say that the government had asked for another piece of paper. Just a "formality," he would growl, and I wouldn’t dare press him.

December came around. I forced myself to set aside my troubles and pulled out the box of Christmas ornaments. The pedicab driver took me to a nursery to buy a tree. I carefully selected the one with the fullest foliage and most perfect pyramid. This was going to be a special Christmas, for Patrick was coming home.

My eldest son looked thinner, his eyes deeper-set, and the report card he brought seemed headed in the wrong direction. But I wasn’t going to nag—we had such a short time together. I made sure the cook served dishes he liked—chicken was his favorite meat—and spent time asking him about his life with his foster family. He told me he was getting along well with Dr. Huang’s daughters, and that the monthly allowance I’d been sending was enough. But the more he assured me, the more dread I felt. Dr. Huang’s daughters were clustered around Patrick in age. When you have a teenage boy cohabiting with three teenage girls, it spells trouble. Also, the generous allowance I’d been sending him should be more than just enough. The fact that he didn’t have savings meant that he’d been squandering money on his friends again. I knew my son well. Taking friends to restaurants was his way of getting rid of the burden of money in his pocket. Was I spoiling him by giving him too much? Yet I didn’t want him to suffer for lack of anything.

The two weeks flew by and I was staring at another long separation from my son. A sixteen-year-old was too young to be left to his own devices, yet I couldn’t think of a better solution. The night before his departure, I gathered the family together. We knelt in front of a statue of Mother Mary and said a rosary. With all my heart I begged Mother Mary to look after my son. Even Hok-Ching, who had to be dragged to church on Sundays, closed his eyes in fervent prayer. It was no mystery what he was praying for—approval of the flour mill.

*

Chinese New Year came and went, while the miserably wet, cold winter of
Taipei
lingered on. The cold I could take, but the constant patter of rain on the roof made my bones feel damp and moldy. Everything was rotting away—the wood in my Japanese-style house, my life, my family, my savings. I didn’t dare look at my bank statement.

By then, I’d figured out the politics of the flour mill. Baba could have signed off on the application from day one. He didn’t, because he was afraid that his enemies’ tongues would start wagging again. Instead of handling the matter himself, he shadowboxed and deflected it to Prime Minister Yen. Yen wasn’t going to get his hands dirty either. If he gave the green light, the industry would cry foul. There were enough flour mills already—why add another to increase competition? At the same time, Yen felt he couldn’t reject the application outright, knowing full well that his deputy’s son was the manager. He had to find a solution that placated everyone—which was, in effect, to do nothing. The application dragged on for one invented reason after another.

 
Lying awake night after night, I took thorough stock of my situation. I could keep on waiting, but the time would come when it would be too late to change course. Already the children were going to be one school year out of the
Hong Kong
education system. If I waited much longer, they would be away too long to return. If I waited much longer, Patrick’s ailment would be incurable. The report card he’d mailed me was alarming. It was certain he was going to fail his grade again. The lack of supervision, plus the distraction of Dr. Huang’s pretty daughters, was too much for a boy to handle. If I waited much longer, all my savings would be gone, and I wouldn’t have the money to resettle in
Hong Kong
. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in this wretched place plunged me into the coldest, darkest depths of despair. No, I couldn’t go on like this. I had to take matters into my own hands. My mind was set—I was moving back to
Hong Kong
with my children.

The dilemma was how to tell Hok-Ching. A direct confrontation would only bring out the mad dog in him. If I took him on in that state, blood would spill. One or both of us would end up in the hospital. Such violence was counter-productive; there were other means to my end.

One night, after the children had gone to bed and Hok-Ching had bolted the bedroom door, I said to him, "Have you heard anything about the mill?"

His body tensed, his fingers twitched. "Baba says the approval can come anytime now." His voice trailed off. I deliberately let the hollowness of his words echo about the room. When the silence became unbearable, he filled it with a mutter, "I’m going over tomorrow…see what he has to say."

"You can yell at him again, but do you think that will do any good?"

Hok-Ching gave me a stinging stare, annoyed and surprised that I knew about their shouting matches. Just because the door was closed didn’t mean that I couldn’t hear. I could have told my husband not to waste his breath. Baba cared only for his reputation. He would sacrifice anything and anyone for it.

"We’ve been here six months now," I went on. "If the mill is approved in the next few months, then fine; we’ll live out our days in
Taiwan
. But if we have to wait much longer, we might as well hold hands with our children and jump off a building." The picture I painted was as bleak as could be—the family in bankruptcy, our children having to go out to look for menial jobs, their future ended before it began. Having slept with my husband so many nights, how could I not know the stuff his nightmares were made of? Hok-Ching slumped on the edge of the bed, a teardrop hanging on the corner of his eye. The iron was red and ready for striking.

"Why don’t I do this? I’ll go back to
Hong Kong
to scout out our options. We can’t wait till the house is on fire. I don’t care if I burn to death, but my heart breaks to think of the children…."

"You do whatever you want," Hok-Ching said and left the room. He would be up most of the night pacing the corridor again.

I got into bed, my heart at peace for the first time since coming to
Taiwan
. Tomorrow, I would ask the pedicab driver to take me to China Airlines.

*

In April I flew to
Hong Kong
by myself. The first people I called on were the principals of Maryknoll and Wah Yan. They looked at my children’s records and instantly agreed to take them back without penalty.

Next I went looking for a job. Returning to Southeast Asia Trading was out of the question. Uncle Ben had gone bankrupt, and his company had been merged with another rice importer. The new owners had retained every single member of the original crew. Had Hok-Ching stayed, he would have made out all right too.

The only other profession I knew was teaching. My teacher friends were eager to help. One lead resulted in a job offer, but it was at a primary school where the salary was $600 a month. It wasn’t enough to cover rent. A secondary school would pay much more. I thought of New Method, where I’d taught English to thirteen-year-olds many years ago. The only problem was that the principal and I had parted on rather unfriendly terms. To go back to him would run counter to the Chinese saying, "A good horse doesn’t go back to eat grass that it has passed." However, the saying probably doesn’t apply to a hungry horse.

I swallowed my pride and went to see the principal of New Method. He fixed his small, shrewd eyes on me, his whole attitude hinting of disdain. It was all right, though, for my facial skin had grown tough from the slaps of misfortune. To assure him of my commitment, I held back nothing of my current circumstances. Before, I was a housewife looking to supplement my income; now I needed the job to feed the family. If he hired me, I was going to stay and give him a satisfactory return on his investment.

He let me do all the talking for a long time. I was hoping that I wasn’t debasing myself for nothing. If he didn’t have an opening, he should have said so from the start. According to my teacher friends, he was a principal who liked to shake up his staff on a regular basis. English teachers, who were a dime a dozen, were most vulnerable. While he coddled his science teachers, he had a pattern of persecuting his English teachers once they reached a certain salary level. The objective was to make them leave on their own so that he could hire somebody else at the beginning salary. He didn’t sound like a nice man to work for, but a hungry horse couldn’t be picky.

When he finally opened his mouth, it was to offer me a beginning salary of $1,000 a month. I was happy to accept, at the same time feeling sorry for the higher-grade English teacher who’d been bumped off the payroll.

The last thing was to look for an apartment, which was done by word of mouth or vacancy signs mounted on buildings. I started by searching in our old neighborhood of Kowloon Tong, but was soon forced to arrive at the painful conclusion that the flats there were no longer within my means. A less expensive neighborhood such as Homantin, where Wah Yan was located, would be more affordable. I flagged down a taxi and told the driver what I was looking for. Luckily for me, he was an older man, not one of those rude young cabbies who would yell at me if I didn’t close the door fast enough. He thought for a while and took me to a back street where he remembered seeing a vacancy notice. The apartment building was twelve stories high, one in a block of many. I went in to inquire and found a pleasant three-bedroom unit for $800. The rooms were small, but at least the boys could have one and the girls the other. The location was perfect, right across from Wah Yan. Most importantly, the price was as low as I could hope to find. I put down a deposit at once. That same day, I went to a furniture store and ordered the basic furnishings to make the place a home.

In less than a month, I’d wrapped up the details of our resettlement—school, housing, a job, and even a servant. Number Five was willing to take a pay cut to come back to work for me. Not that I was proud of moving around so much, but I daresay few people had as much experience as I in this respect. From Hong Kong to Chengtu to Chungking to Nanking to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Bangkok and back to Hong Kong—each time I’d packed up my belongings in search of a better home.

*

Back in
Taipei
, I presented Hok-Ching with my fait accompli. I told him point-blank that I was taking the children back to
Hong Kong
in July. He took it all in silence, for I gave him no room for objection. My unspoken words were louder than the spoken ones: I was prepared to separate from him.

While the schooling of four of my children had been taken care of, one question remained—what to do with Agnes? Having missed the
Hong Kong
matriculation exam, she had nothing to go back to. Staying on at
Taiwan
University
would stunt her growth. I decided the best option was to send her to the
U.S.
She applied to a number of colleges. They all accepted her, but the only one that offered a scholarship was the College of Notre Dame, a private women’s college in the
San Francisco
Bay
area. It was also close to where Hok-Jit and Wai-Jing were living. They were doing quite well, after having taken our opportunity to go to
America
eighteen years ago. If Hok-Ching had agreed to leave Agnes behind, we could have slaved away in
America
and bought a house and two cars too. On the other hand, we would have worried to death about our baby when
Nanking
fell to the communists. We would also have missed many years of her development. Everything considered, it was just as well that we didn’t go then.

Armed with the admission letter from Notre Dame, I took Agnes to the
U.S.
embassy to apply for a student visa. The consul interviewed us. He was young and friendly, and chatted with us as if we were meeting at a dinner party. After Agnes uttered the right answer, "I will return to
Taiwan
after I finish my studies in the
U.S.
," he shook our hands and assured us everything would be, as Americans like to say, okay. I thought the visa was as good as issued. Thus when Agnes received a notification for another interview, I suspected that something was wrong.