Inch-Tall Grass
(work in progress)

 ofThe title of my memoir is taken from Meng Jiao’s famous poem that every Chinese child grows up with. Here it is:

        遊子吟       孟郊

慈母手中線，遊子身上衣。

臨行密密縫，意恐遲遲歸。

誰言寸草心，報得三春暉。

Mother’s loving hands have sewn

these clothes I wear far from home:

stitch into stitch on the eve of parting,

hope against hope I’ll soon come home.

Tell me if an inch-tall grass can ever repay

the gift of sunshine in the months of spring?

“The Wanderer’s Chant,”

            By Meng Jiao (751-814)

Chapter I: Mahmi and Me

        I did not attend my mother’s funeral, I’ll explain later, but she is on my mind almost every day, the way she has always been, ever since I started to read classical Chinese poetry, not the first time around, when I was a child, but after I had left her and the Hong Kong colony where I had grown up, where she had “sung” to me the poetry she had learned from her father, the strict Confucian schoolmaster who became a Buddhist. He must have lived with her all her life, the way she is living with me now, through the poetry, and the stories, the books, the teachings from our roots in China. Mother, to me, is China. Her favorite book, the seventeenth century collection of strange tales called the Liaozhai Zhiyi 聊齋志異, Liaozhai for short, which she turned to for solace and consultation, was her China. This book was her close companion from when she was just learning to read, “picking out the tiny characters one by one with a toothpick,” as she put it, pretty much up to the day she died. I was not surprised to find a well-thumbed copy of it sitting on her bedside table at the nursing home, when I went to tidy up and collect her things, years later in Canada.

             We, my siblings and I, called her Mahmi, a name more English sounding than Chinese. A Hong Kong sort of name, hybrid, like me. And like the foxes and ghosts in the Liaozhai, Mahmi has always felt to me part tame and part wild, part mother, part child. There is something vague about her I have yet to pin down. When people outside of the family were about, she appeared like an adult, observing social etiquette, behaving as she was expected to behave, but she was somehow more fluid, more vulnerable, more volatile when we were by ourselves, just the two of us when no one outside of the family was around. I suppose you might say she was freer, more herself, behaving as she would if she were allowed, or if she allowed herself. I am making my observations all these years later, trying to understand who she was, and to understand, at least in part, who I am.

         Anyone outside of the family would have known her as a soft-spoken, kind-hearted,  occasionally, witty, and very occasionally, sharp-tongued woman. She was steeped in the classical Chinese tradition and this fact would be quite apparent to those who recognized such references in her conversations. If you had met this social-Mahmi, you would have been surprised or even alarmed by the one in conversation with me when we were alone. I think she

often forgot how young I was, and often, it felt like she was not really talking to me. Even in those early days when she herself was still quite young, in her thirties. She had always, it would seem, had the habit of talking out loud to herself, and not just talking, but having conversations; sometimes I could even make out questions and answers, debates she had with another, invisible, Mahmi.

         My most vivid memory of her was formed in those years, when we spent entire days together, when she was almost unknown to me as a separate person. She was to me a raw almondy smell, and a voice, a sort of toasty voice, sometimes gentle and comforting, other times harsh and argumentative. Most of all, she was a feel, flesh of my flesh, breath of my breath. It was the physical intimacy between mother and child of course, but because of the circumstances of our history, our intimacy was especially intense and prolonged, so much so that even now, after all these years beyond her death, I still feel her presence, detect a whiff of that almondy aroma as the shadow of her flits about me. She is always with me, as if she cannot rest until I have told her story. She is constantly teasing, taunting, reassuring, even chastising me, sometimes closer, sometimes from far away.

         My father’s name was Won Duk Yun if you say it in Cantonese, and this is what we will call him in these pages. On official documents, it was Vun Tak Yin (in Hakka, his native dialect), later changed to Wan Tak Yan, probably when they arrived in Hong Kong. These days, in China, his name would have been romanized as Wen Deren. This is why my eldest brother’s last name is Vun, whereas my second brother, my sister and I have the last name of Wan. I am sure this phenomenon of name changes is not unfamiliar to other families who have migrated to other countries. Because he flew for a living, he was absent more than he was at home; he was a navigator in those pre-computer days when navigators were still necessary in the cockpit. My father was an orphan and was almost closer in age to my grandmother than to Mahmi. Because he had to be away so much and housing was scarce in Shanghai, they lived with Mahmi’s family. In those days, women married early and therefore had much longer childbearing years, Paupau’s youngest children were about the same age as Mahmi’s three. Paupau, which means maternal grandmother in Cantonese is what we called my grandmother. When they all lived together in Shanghai, Paupau continued to run the household with my father chipping in to support his own brood. Thus, for the early part of her married life, my mother had few adult responsibilities. As she put it, she was still living “a girl’s life.” Indeed, Mahmi’s own relationship to her children was not much different from her relationship to her own siblings, of which she was the third of eight. Mahmi was, after all, only seventeen when she became a mother herself.

         So, when I came along, the year she turned thirty and life had restarted after the wars – the Sino-Japanese, which became the Second World War, and the Chinese Civil War or Revolution, depending on which side you were on – and my dad had moved her and their three children to Hong Kong, not only had her life been through a sea change, but she had the full weight of adult responsibilities thrown at her all at once. Married to a semi-foreign man who brought her to this semi-foreign place, as Hong Kong was a British colony, she had to grow up fast. I am calling my father semi-foreign because he grew up in British North Borneo brought up by Anglican priests in an orphanage and what little Chinese he spoke was not even our family dialect. He spoke Hakka and we spoke Cantonese. Chinese dialects can be very different from each other, almost like different languages, and none of us understood Hakka. And he continued to fly. Their marriage must have involved a great deal of guesswork and the gulf between them deeper and wider than most spousal relationships. It was certainly not a marriage built on verbal affinity.

            Thus, for the first few years of my existence, she held me close, as if the weight of me reassured her that she could manage this new reality all by herself in this new place called Hong Kong. Some lonely children have invisible friends to whom they tell their secret fears and share their most intimate thoughts. Mahmi had me, alongside that invisible Mahmi. The invisible Mahmi was mostly hidden, however, whereas I was not. She loved to show me off, and even made up a five-character six-line ditty about me that went something like this:

            Her hair is a tuft of rice sapling on top of her head.

                     Her two chubby arms stick out like stuffed sausages.

                     When her little tummy’s full, everyone is a friend.

                     When she’s hungry, a tiger’s growl is all you’ll get.

                     In the daytime, anyone can ask for a cuddle, but

                     Mahmi’s the only one for her when it’s time for bed.

I don’t have a clear recollection of much of my childhood, and what I do remember may well have been conjured up by what I have been told. In contrast to my siblings who were born in war-torn Shanghai, before photography became affordable and popular, I had many photos taken of me, at every stage of my young life. So much so that when we were all grown up and had flown away, my mother found enough pictures of me, from birth to puberty, to fill a whole album.

         The summers in Hong Kong are hot and humid, and we did not have air-conditioning. At night, we slept on woven bamboo mats to keep the bedding cool. Mahmi said it was great cuddling with me in the winter, as I was like a little oven, but it was a trial to coax me to sleep in the summer. Poot, park, poot, park all night long – poot is to fan and park is to pat – that was the ritual she had to perform every night until I finally stopped fidgeting and fell asleep. I didn’t cry much during the day, but if she stopped fanning at night, I would throw a fit. Mosquitoes made things worse, and they called my poor little legs, “ripe bananas studded with plum blossoms” because of  the bite marks left, and sometimes the itch was so bad that I would scratch myself so hard that I would bleed, after which little scabs would form, appearing, to put it nicely, like little plum blossoms. Of course I cried. I also cried at the Cantonese melodramas she took me to see. Mahmi would buy one ticket and sneak my sister in with us. I would be sitting on her lap, and my sister, a diminutive eight or nine-year-old by then, would sort of crouch, half of her sitting on the one seat we shared. Mahmi was fond of telling her friends how I could cry baby tears at the movies even before I turned two. I think it was more a case of monkey see, monkey do; I was crying because she was crying. In the dark of the theater, watching other people live their lives, were the rare moments when I saw my mother cry.

               Sometimes, when she went out to a friend’s house to play mahjong late into the night and I had fallen asleep, she would carry me home. This continued until I was four or five, and I was, by all accounts, still chubby, which was why they often called me “Fat Ning Ning.” Later, she gave me the nickname, “Little Ball,” as I was not only round like a ball, but amenable to doing things for others, helping out around the house, running errands, and like her, willing to try new things. “Where did I find the strength to carry you, and even in the days after we moved to Nathan Road, where we lived on the fifth floor in that building with no elevators. My, my, what a ‘wild heart’ I was,” she would marvel, years later, as she recollected her prowess. (‘Wild heart’ is my take on the Chinese expression, yeh sing, meaning ‘untamed nature.’) “Of course, in those days, there was ‘no king in the land where I lived’ (mo wong goon), your Deh was still flying and my parents both stayed in China, so there was no one to rule over me.” Deh was what we called my father. Even as a grown woman and mistress of her own household, Mahmi still looked to her parents and Deh as authority figures in her life.

              Then, I grew up. The smell, sound, and feel of her remained with me, but my separate development intruded into our world. I began to ask questions of her when she talked to me. Gradually, we grew apart, and our relationship became more complex. After school, when I came home, she still took me everywhere she went, to the marketplace, to stores to buy things, to Chinese movies and Cantonese operas, and to friends’ houses to play mahjong. She was not one to sit still and do nothing. Even when we were at home, she would be cooking or sewing or attending to other chores, though she did not treat the first two duties as chores, as she loved trying out new dishes and making clothes for my sister and me and things for the house. She also loved to tell us stories, stories about herself and stories she heard from others as well as those she read about in books or the newspaper. Everything was a story to her, things that happened to other people or to herself, things that happened in books or movies or in real life, and often, one story conflated with another until you could hardly tell them apart. As my siblings grew older and became more and more engrossed in their own lives, I often became her sole audience. Then, I, too, left home, first to Japan on a high school exchange, then to America, under more complicated circumstances. It was not until I had become a grown woman, almost the same age as she was when she bore me that I began to get to know her anew, mostly from afar, and in retrospect.

************

(As I tell my mother’s story, which inevitably involves telling the family’s stories, I intersperse stories from the aforementioned Liaozhai Zhiyi because of its immense influence on her. Here is an example which comes at the end of the second chapter where I explain the concept of “Bo Ying”):

Bo Ying

Bo Ying means, basically, what you do to others will in turn be done to you, if not immediately, perhaps not even in this lifetime, but eventually. There is always a debt or price to be paid for one’s deeds. The two Chinese words, bo 報, means “to report or announce” and “reckoning” as in retribution or recompence, so the return can be either good or bad. It’s a boomerang effect. The second word, ying 應, means “in answer to,” as if what one does has been reported to a higher authority, so that proper reward or penalty can be meted out. The concept has its origins in Buddhism. Although Mahmi is not a Buddhist herself, or at least not declared herself as one, she definitely believes in this doctrine of cause and effect. What I find most intriguing about this concept is its precision, especially as it appears in the Liaozhai. Unsurprisingly the story of “Huo Sheng” was one of her favorites, given her curiosity about sexual matters and the precise punishment dealt the perpetrator of rumor in this instance. Huo is the name of this perpetrator and Sheng means scholar or young man. As this tells us little in English, I have given the story a title and called it “No Kidding.” If Confucius teachings alone were not enough to keep her on the straight and narrow, these Liaozhai tales certainly did the trick.

No Kidding

[Huo Sheng Huo Scholar]

Note on Names: Huo = last name, the word means hasty, abrupt; Yen = last name, the word means too stern, strict.

The two young men, Huo and Yen of Wendeng, were close friends and rivals ever since childhood, always trying to outwit and one-up each other. Huo had a neighbor, an old midwife, who had helped Yen’s wife when she was in labor and delivered their baby. This old woman was chatting with Huo’s wife one day and told her that Yen’s wife had a couple of fleshy growths, like cysts, on her labia, which Huo’s wife then repeated to her husband. With that knowledge, Huo and some friends decided to play a trick on Yen. They lay in wait for Yen, and when he came within hearing distance, Huo deliberately said in a loud whisper, “His wife and I are intimate you know,” to which the others responded in disbelief; Huo then made up some spurious details and ended up by saying, “if you don’t believe me, ask him if she doesn’t have a couple of cysts in her labia.” Yen, listening outside the window, was stunned. Without going in to his friends, he turned round, went home, and interrogated his wife. When he could not get a confession out of her, he thrashed her to an inch of her life. That night, his wife, knowing he would not accept her denial, hung herself. Huo was certainly sorry when he heard about this, but he dared not tell Yen that he had maligned her.

         After her death, she came back to haunt the Yen family with relentless weeping every night. Soon afterwards, Yen went into convulsions and died. At the same time, Huo’s wife had a dream, where a woman with long, wild hair came at her, screaming: “I died for no good reason, if you two think you can live happily ever after, think again!” When she woke up, she fell ill and, several days later, she also died. After that, Huo had a dream of the maligned woman, who came cursing and pointing her finger at him. He woke up with a start just as she slapped him on the mouth. He felt a tingling, painful sensation around his lips, and when he put his hand up to touch it, it started swelling. Three days later, two cysts emerged between his lips. He could no more laugh than cry or talk; the pain was unbearable when he tried to open his mouth.

Mr. Historian of the Strange Remarks: Ghosts haunt because they have been wronged. By putting her very private cysts on his very public mouth, the trick she played on him is certainly a fitting revenge for the trick he played on her!