The Year of Finding Memory (9 page)

Acton was only forty miles from Toronto, but in 1956 it felt far away and removed. In many ways our lives changed very little from our days at Allandale. We had no car, telephone,
refrigerator or bathtub. The previous owner had left behind a two-burner hot plate on which my mother cooked all our meals. On Mondays and Thursdays my father continued to pack a cast-iron boiler with coal to heat water in preparation for the laundry. The washing machine that stood in the middle room of the first floor was like the one in Allandale. A row of wooden laundry tubs lined the wall behind it. Pushed up against the opposite wall was a kitchen table, where my mother would prepare our meals. At the back of the house was a room with clotheslines strung below the ceiling for drying clothes during inclement weather. In the parlour were the ironing tables and wooden shelves that held the finished, wrapped laundry.

The only other Chinese people in Acton at that time were a father and his two grown sons, who operated the local restaurant. For the next few years, my mother would be the only Chinese woman in the town. And I would be the only Chinese child.

We had been in Acton for over a year when my mother became friends with a woman whose husband operated a Chinese laundry in a small, nearby city. Her husband owned a car, and on Sundays the couple would drive for pleasure around the local countryside, often stopping in the little towns to visit at Chinese restaurants and laundries. My mother was pleased to finally meet someone close to her own age who was not only Chinese but also spoke our dialect. The two women liked each other, and the couple started to frequent our home. Every time they came, they encouraged us to visit them.

My mother decided that she and I would call on our new friends on a Saturday when I had no school and, being a day for sorting laundry, my father would be able to manage on his own. On the chosen morning, we put on our winter coats and boots and waited outside the five-and-dime store where the Gray Coach stopped to pick up passengers.

A half-hour later, when the bus drove into the station, I looked out the window and saw the woman’s husband waiting for us. The man had a round belly and a ready smile, and as soon as he saw us stepping off the bus, he rushed over, took my hand and led us to his car, where his wife was sitting in the front seat.

The couple’s laundry was on a busy street corner. He held open a heavy, wooden door with a glass window, allowing us to step inside. The air was hot and damp in contrast to the cold, crisp outdoors. The work room was filled with shiny machines that clicked and clacked as they washed, dried, pressed and folded each item.
Lo fon
girls dressed in short-sleeved blouses and knee-length skirts stood in front of these machines, passing shirts from one station to the next until each one was folded into a rectangle with a smart, cardboard bow tie tucked between the tips of the collar before the whole garment was slipped inside a cellophane bag. I stood and listened to the push of buttons, the pull of presses and the hiss of steam, these staccato rhythms so different from the harsh grinding of my father’s prehistoric washing machine and the thud-glide rhythm of his iron on the pressing table. These modern machines turned out clean shirts, ready to wear, at a speed that would have been impossible for my
father. He ironed almost everything by hand, then folded each smooth shirt and handkerchief so carefully, so neatly, before wrapping them up in brown paper parcels.

As the proud owner of this brand-new enterprise talked about the need to modernize and to change with the times if you wanted to make money, my mother listened with a tight-lipped smile. When he finished explaining, she sighed and nodded in agreement. She said that our family would never be rich, that we only knew the old way of doing things. Later that day the man and his wife drove us home. When this smiling, well-fed Chinese man, who also spoke proper English to his customers, stepped with us inside our laundry, I took a deep breath. The air felt colder, the rooms seemed darker, the machines more worn and my father even smaller.

My family’s poverty aside, I liked our home in Acton. Our bedroom was no longer on the same floor as the laundry equipment. The stairs leading to the second floor opened onto a large, square room, where my mother declared Ming Nee would sleep once she arrived. Even though an ocean and a continent separated us from my mother’s daughter, it was as if she already lived with us. A pot-bellied, coal-burning stove sat in the corner of the room. Further along the wall was an empty space. My mother pointed to it and said it would be a good spot for a homework table, a place for Ming Nee to keep her books and to study. Ming Nee this, Ming Nee that. It seemed all my mother ever thought about was
Ming Nee. I was too young to understand her constant worry. I didn’t know that we would wait almost another three years for her daughter to arrive. These concerns my mother never shared with me.

I was in grade one when I started to help my mother prepare for her Canadian citizenship interview.
Louis St. Laurent
, I said, enunciating clearly.
Loo-ee So Lo Lo
, my mother said, trying to mimic my sounds. Again I would repeat the name, and again I would try to correct her. It was the same process for the provinces and each capital city. I lost patience trying to teach her these Canadian facts. I was sick of having to say
British Columbia
over and over. No matter how slowly I uttered each word, it was never slow enough. And I knew she would never, not even in a million years, be able to pronounce Louis St. Laurent, the prime minister’s name. I found it so easy. It frustrated me that she was unable to wrap her lips around the
lo fon
syllables. It was hopeless. But my mother was desperate to become a Canadian. Only then would she be eligible to sponsor her daughter for immigration and end their painful separation.

The laundry’s previous owners had left behind a single bed and a bunk bed shoved into a small room off the larger one my mother had reserved for Ming Nee. My father and I shared the bunk, with him sleeping on the bottom bed and me on the top. A wooden bureau with three rows of drawers had also been left behind. My father used one drawer for himself; my mother and I shared the rest. The room was so tiny that I had to crouch on my father’s mattress to fully open any of the drawers.

I liked the fact that we now lived on the corner of a tree-lined, residential street and that we had a backyard. And because my parents were unconcerned about the condition of our grass, it often became an after-dinner gathering spot in the summer for neighbourhood children. The year we moved to Acton, our stretch of the block was home to twenty-two children between the ages of four and nine. And at age six, I was smack in the middle.

During the warm weather, when I came out after supper, I would find several children chasing each other on our sparse, patchy lawn. I could hear the neighbours’ lawn mowers in the background and smell the fresh-cut grass. Our evenings evolved into games of tag and hide-and-go-seek. For the latter we fanned out across the entire neighbourhood, leaning against trees, sneaking inside garages, crouching behind rain barrels, then making that final mad dash, screaming
home free.
I absorbed English so quickly that by the end of the first summer, I could no longer remember a time when I didn’t speak this language. I became one of the gang, united by our grass-stained clothes and sweaty bodies, breathless from chasing, shouting and laughing, the world of grown-ups far away. As the evening sun dropped, one by one my friends would start to leave,
their mothers hollering their names from doorsteps. I never wanted the games to end; I always wanted to play even after the crickets had started to sing, long past dusk, deep into the dark.

The greatest pleasure of those early years in Acton was the Saturday afternoon movie at the Roxy Theatre on Mill Street. I went almost every weekend and sat inside the long auditorium with its curved ceiling, waiting for the lights to go off and for the screen at the front to light up. As the air thickened with the smell of cigarette smoke and buttered popcorn, I laughed at the zany antics of The Three Stooges, did chores on the farm with Ma and Pa Kettle and rode on horses through the Wild West with the Lone Ranger and Tonto. The movies taught me that families could be happy and that it was possible for two people to find contentment together. I learned that when a boy and girl were in love, they held hands, spoke softly and kissed gently. In fact, everything I needed to know about romance and true love I discovered at the Roxy Theatre. I was determined that I would be like the girls on that big screen, that one day I too would fall in love and get married. In my life there would be no room for a matchmaker. Under no circumstances would I be like my mother, betrothed at age three and married at age sixteen. I would not sit back and let someone else determine my future for me. I would have a boyfriend, go out on dates. I would laugh with my mouth wide open.

Her father, my mother proudly declared, was a modern man. She knew of women from “old-fashioned” families, who were only a few years older than she and had had their feet bound. But
her
father didn’t believe in the custom; instead, he believed in making sure she had an education. My mother told me time and again that according to her father, a full belly was not enough, that his children must be able to read and write. But in spite of his modern ways, my grandfather still felt that it was his duty as a parent to find a suitable husband for her. My grandfather was an herbalist doctor with many rich clients, and he found a match from a particularly wealthy family for his daughter. The boy had been born, according to the local fortune teller, at a time when his stars were compatible with my mother’s. Not only that, he grew up to be tall, handsome and fair skinned.

The world my mother had inhabited as a child, where marriages were arranged and a bride would not meet her husband until her wedding day, felt strange and foreign, but it captivated me. I could see her on the morning of her wedding day, trying to sit still through the hair-combing ceremony and trembling when she put on her red robe, intricately embroidered with a phoenix. I pictured her being helped into the sedan chair, head bent at a slight angle, eyes cast down, chest pounding and stomach queasy. As my mother was being carried away from her childhood home, what was she thinking? Was she hoping to live happily ever after? What if her husband was cruel? Did she weep, having to leave her family? When I was younger I used to think that if I had been in that position, I would have run away. But I now understand that
like my sixteen-year-old mother, I too, would have been immobilized with fear. My mother said to me many times, “The moment I stepped out of the wedding sedan chair and peeked through my veil of red silk threads, I felt sick with dread.”

“Why?” I asked each time, even when I knew the answer.

“My husband,” she replied, “he had the eyes of a snake.”

Her first husband was tall, handsome—and charming. But lurking behind his ready smile was something sinister. It didn’t take long for her to find out the truth about her young husband: that he was already in love. But not with another woman. He was in love with the white powder, with opium.