Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

  In 1949, when she was accepted to Lincoln University in San Francisco to obtain a master’s degree in American literature, she confessed by letter to the college registrar that her English had become a little “rusty.” The registrar wrote back: “Yours is a common difficulty with Chinese students who have had their studies interrupted.” Presumably, the registrar was referring to World War II, which began in China in 1937, when my mother was twenty-one. Or maybe she meant the more recent civil war, which ran from 1945 to 1949, a period of personal turmoil for my mother, when she fell in love with my father, left her husband, and was jailed for infidelity.

  San Francisco, 1989: My mother translates a letter to us written by my half sister Lijun.

  “Do not let this dismay you,” the registrar wrote on July 26, 1949. “It is a problem easily solved.” As soon as she arrived in the United States, the registrar explained, she would be enrolled in intensive courses in oral English, ear training, and idiomatic speech. Once she was proficient, she could begin her coursework. The registrar simultaneously wrote a letter to the American consul general in Hong Kong, where my mother went to apply for a student visa. She presented the letter, which attested that the university had accepted her and that “any language insufficiency would be promptly corrected, including problems in grammatical construction.” She arrived in the United States on August 27, 1949, and two weeks later, instead of starting instruction to improve her English, she married my father. Within a month, she was pregnant with my brother Peter. She never set foot in that university with the helpful registrar. She never took the brush-up courses to remove the rust until two years after my father died, when I was away at college and she had no one to write letters for her. She took an ESL class. I was impressed by how well she expressed herself. Her sentence constructions, while hardly perfect, were much improved. What struck me most was the feeling she expressed about her exile in the United States.

  It was long time since I came to this country. The last I can remember that I was on the last ship sneaky out from the out-port of Shanghai while the fighting was on between the Communist and the Chang Kai Tze Government. That was in May 1949, and two weeks later after I arrived in Hong Kong, Shanghai was lost to the Communist Government. To the people, the war was merely between the two governments and the most of people thought it was just a short period of changing, everyone would go back to their home sweet home. But those people had just the dream.

  She never got rid of the rust in her speech. If anything, her English continued to rust and flake over the next fifty years. And she never read any American literature until she read my first book, and only the first. When my second novel was published, she was already ill with Alzheimer’s disease and had difficulty keeping track of the story in The Kitchen God’s Wife, which included many incidents from her life. “I don’t need to be read it,” she told me. “That’s my story and I know what happened.”

  LINGUISTIC CHANGE

  After my mother developed Alzheimer’s disease, she lost her languages in the reverse order of acquisition. First to go was the language she spoke with me, her customized form of English. Our language together then became Mandarin, which I understood fairly easily but could speak only within the limits of a five-year-old child. It was perfectly adequate for communicating with my mother, whose mind and emotions had retreated to childhood. Over time, she transitioned to speaking to me in a blend of Mandarin and Shanghainese, and before long, her expressive deficiencies and mine were about equal, leaving me to resort to pointing to guess what she was saying. You want to go there—to the bathroom? Toward the end of her life, her verbal communication consisted mostly of garbled Shanghainese, gestures, grunts, and a few odd surprises. I understood everything she was saying, because by then it was always the same: she simply wanted me to be there.

  Even in the last months of her life, she recognized me as soon as I walked through the door of her apartment in the assisted living center. Sometimes she called out a good representation of my name, a two-syllable nasalized vowel. By then, her lips barely moved and her whimpers sounded like someone had put a gag in her mouth. Her face was expressionless—a common development among those in the late stages of the disease. But I knew my mother was not emotionless. Her excitement was obvious by her fluttering hands to have me reach her as soon as possible. She mumbled the occasional word, made comprehensible by context and gestures—to get her favorite sweater or to show me a scrap of paper that held a mysterious meaning I could not decipher—and it did not matter which language we used, English or Mandarin, or a combination, as long as I was by her side, soothing her with words she wanted to hear. I would tell her she was so beautiful she made other women jealous. I would tell her she was smart and noticed things other people could not see. I told her that everyone loved her and that they would be waiting for her at her favorite restaurant where she would be the guest of honor. I named in Mandarin the foods she loved: shrimp and scallops, sea bass and jellyfish, pea greens and dumplings, and hot soup—very, very hot, the way she liked it. Our primary language was emotion, the touch of my hand on hers and her hand on mine. It was the tone of our voices, our gestures, and the degree of animation of our limbs. It was my facial expressions and my interpretation of what hers would have been had she been able to smile or frown or look puzzled. “Are you laughing at me?” I would ask, feigning shock and I would interpret out loud any sounds and mouth movements she made as an affirmative answer. She loved the teasing attention. Even toward the end of her conscious life, she understood all those things conveyed through only intonation and tone of voice, the expressions of love, assurance, and happiness. Take out the words, and the meaning was still there. Say it in any language and the meaning was the same. This was our shared language of emotions. It bypassed the part of the brain where syntax, semantics, and phonological rules operate. It was processed in the area where long-term emotional memories are stored, beginning with the morning words she must have heard her mother say when she was a baby: “Don’t cry. I’m going to feed you,” the shapes of sounds that meant comfort and trust. She used them with me.

  I expressed alarm to her one day when I returned from a trip to New York and saw that she had lost a great deal of weight over the two weeks I had been absent. A few months before, she had begun her dwindling course—from a high of eighty pounds on her four-foot-nine-inch frame to seventy-two. Now she was barely sixty-five pounds. Soon it became sixty. The day arrived when she refused to eat. She repeatedly whimpered and pushed away the spoon I held before her mouth. When I persisted, she started bawling like a baby. I had come to that point where I could no longer deny she would actually die. My mother had made me promise years ago that I would never put her on a feeding tube. The most agonizing decision she had been forced to make, she told me, was agreeing with the doctors to remove the feeding tube from my comatose brother. “Don’t start, don’t have to stop,” I remember her saying. “No use, anyway.”

  Four years of mental and emotional preparation had not lessened my shock in realizing she would not last much longer, a month or less, her doctor said. My mother had never shied away from talking about death. In fact, she had desired it too often, especially if she had discovered you had kept a secret from her or talked about her behind her back. She would go into a suicidal rage. Whether she understood me, I decided I would respect what she would have wanted me to do. So I sat down beside her. I lifted one of her sticklike arms and gently said in English, “Look how thin you are.”

  She stared at her arm for a while then mumbled, “Still pretty good.” She had spoken actual words and they were in English. It was an automatic expression she once used for all kinds of situations. “Still pretty good” was how she had described an old sofa she wanted to give to her daughter Lijun. “Still pretty good” was how she had described her ability to play a Chopin étude. “Still pretty good” was status quo and holding.

  I stroked her arm and said: “You’re so thin. Do you think you’re going to die?”
r />   She looked at her arm again, stared at it for a long time, as if it were changing before her eyes, then said, “Maybe I die.”

  She had not simply repeated the last few words of my question, going to die, she had formed her own: maybe I die, words she had used in healthier days to spout a suicidal threat. I did not know what she understood, but I told her in a soothing tone that I would do everything to make her comfortable and that she had nothing to worry about. She would be happy.

  “Okay,” she said. It was in the tone of a child who believed whatever her mother said: We can go to the park as soon as you put on your sweater. Okay. After I left her, I broke down and cried in the car.

  When the hospice nurse arrived to assess her condition and needs, my mother put her index finger on the woman’s badge. “Kaiser Permanente Hospital,” my mother said slowly. This was another surprise. She recognized the logo of the hospital where she had worked for many years as an allergy technician, and where she now received her medical care. She had pronounced those words more intelligibly than anything she had said in months. She continued staring at the name tag. And then she ran her finger over the next line and said aloud the nurse’s name. She could read. How was it possible that her dying brain still enabled her to read and speak?

  My mother had never ceased to surprise me with revelations over the years: The secret truth of her mother’s second marriage. The secret of her mother’s suicide. The secret of her own first marriage to an abusive man. The secret of the three daughters she left in China. Her acceptance, without anger, that I had stopped taking piano lessons. Her acceptance without anger that I was living with my Caucasian boyfriend. Her defense of me when my future in-laws disapproved of their son’s choice. Her announcement she was marrying a grocer in Fresno, a man who spoke Cantonese, which she could not speak. Her announcement over the phone that she was divorcing the grocer and wanted me to pick her up that same day.

  And then there was her announcement a few years later that she had an eighty-five-year-old Shanghainese boyfriend who would come with us on my book tour in Japan. We had to scramble to get him an airline ticket, but we were happy she would be occupied full-time with a man she loved. They did not marry but it was my assignment to tell my uncle in Beijing, her brother, that they had and would be with us as part of their honeymoon—meaning, they would share a bedroom. Halfway through the tour, she and her boyfriend had a fight and she announced she wanted to go home that day. That was not a surprise.

  And now, in her final few weeks of life, she had revealed she could still read English, a skill I thought she had lost three years before. I quickly found a piece of paper and printed stacked words in large letters: Eyes Nose Mouth Ears Stomach. I asked her to read the first word. “Eye,” she enunciated slowly like a schoolgirl learning English. I asked her, “Where is your eye?” She pointed to her eye. We went through the list and she correctly identified them all. How strange. Something must have shifted in her brain. Fugitive language had bypassed the barriers and traveled to less damaged areas of the brain. She could read, speak, and understand the words—in English. I then asked her if she felt pain in any part of her body? Does your stomach hurt? She looked at me blankly. So there were limitations. It was still gratifying that we were communicating through reading. She was showing me that she recognized what I was saying. We were connected once again by written language, that this word means love and that word means you. It took me back to a time many years before when we had been separated by both distance and understanding, and to bridge the gap, we had written letters to one another.

  “You can read,” I said. “All this time you were hiding this from me.” I teased her, I praised her, I exulted. Her response sounded like she was saying, “Ha-ha.” I praised her in all the ways I could think of so she could simply hear the tone of my excitement. “You’re a sneaky little girl. You fooled me. You’re so clever, the smartest girl there is.” By the movement of her head, arms and legs, I knew she was pleased that she had made me happy.

  That was the only time we read those printed words together. Once she stopped eating, she quickly became weaker, listless. Our family came for the vigil, my brother, a half sister from El Cerrito, another from Wisconsin, cousins and nephews, and her longtime friends. She dozed often, and in her conscious state, she appeared dazed and was motionless. She soon weighed less than fifty pounds. One day, while lying back in the palm of a recliner piled with pillows, she woke and was more active than she had been since her downward spiral. She mumbled and raised a thin arm, gesturing toward the ceiling. Nnn-yeh! Nnn-yeh! she said. It was the Shanghainese word for “Mama.” She was calling to her mother, who she had not seen since she was a weeping girl of nine, when she stood for three days at the bedside of her mother, who slowly succumbed to an overdose of raw opium. My mother’s voice was now jittery, her teeth were chattering. I imagined my grandmother dressed in the Chinese jacket and skirt she wore for her last photo, now smiling, with both arms outstretched to sweep her daughter into her arms and take her home. My mother flapped one hand at me. She uttered a garble of words with the same intonation of exasperation she once used for issuing orders when company arrived: Don’t just stand there. Quick! Invite her to sit down. I gestured for my grandmother to take a seat on the sofa. My mother pointed to something on the other side of the room and made impatient sounds. I guessed at what she wanted: photo, TV remote, tea, chair, water. Finally, I hit upon the right answer: her mink coat, which I had bought her when she hinted she wanted one. She pointed to the sofa. Quick! Quick! She wanted me to give the coat to her mother. I draped it over the sofa where I imagined my grandmother might be sitting. My mother was now babbling to the ceiling. Apparently other invisible guests had arrived. By the intonation of her mumbles, she appeared to be answering them: I’m happy to see you, too. Yes, I’m going home soon. She did not order me to invite them to sit down. Maybe there were too many of them. Later that evening, when the air cooled, I put the mink coat over my dozing mother. When she woke, she became agitated, pushing at the coat as if it were on fire. She gestured frantically to the sofa where I had invited her mother to sit. How strange. I had forgotten we had given her mother the coat. She had not. She was in a different kind of consciousness.

  The next day, she slept without waking. She continued to breathe, but some part of her had already left. The hospice nurse gave us a booklet on what to expect when someone is dying. Hearing is the last sense to go, it said. So we threw my mother a noisy party to let her know she was still the center of our world, the most important person. We knew she would love the attention. Twenty friends and relatives played mahjong and poker from morning to night. We ordered pizza and Chinese takeout. We watched her favorite movies and listened to Chopin études. After two days, we realized she would never leave her own party, so we wound things down, and all but a few went home. I slept next to her, where I watched her breathe, three quick inhalations and a long held one. These were the last sounds she would ever make. I watched for signs that she had already left with her mother.

  COMMON EXPRESSIONS

  My parents did not force me to learn Mandarin, because of a widespread belief at the time that kids who learned their parents’ language would never fully master English. It was as if our brains had the capacity to hold only one language at a time, and by learning two, we could only half master each. Fortunately, I did manage to absorb enough Mandarin through what I overheard or what was directed to me during daily routines, or what my mother shouted when she was emotionally overwrought.

  Those experiences were evidently enough for the innate language structures of my brain to hold a permanent place for Mandarin, along with the Spanish I learned in school and the French I picked up through misadventure in Switzerland and, more recently, through self-study. While I can read and write in Spanish and French, I am completely illiterate in Chinese. Yet I understand conversational Mandarin without doing the extra linguistic step I need with Spanish and English of translating in my head what the
words mean and which conjugation is being used. When I am with my sisters and we exchange gossip and opinions, we speak Mandarin, and my latent ability to express myself temporarily returns. I am stymied because of my child-level vocabulary, but they know how to automatically adjust downward or give more context. That place we went to the other day. The reason they are taking blood from my arm. I have numerous Caucasian friends who speak far better Mandarin than I can. They studied it diligently. They can read Chinese menus and do elaborate ordering, conduct business meetings, and hold their own in just about any situation. But I have intuitions in Mandarin they will never have, and it is those aspects of language that would never be taught in language school. They have to do with expressions that come through the daily life of a child raised by Chinese parents. I am fluent in emotional nuance, intent, and subtext of words said in anger, with worry, or with tenderness.

  Take the well-used expression: wo qì le (woh CHEE-suh-luh), which transliterates to “I am mad to death.” An English translation would be “I’m angry as hell,” but it really pales in comparison to what my mother might have meant when she said those Chinese words. Hell and death are not equal in terms of fear. The phrase has gradations of meaning, which depend on how emphatically you say the two words qì and , and whether you include the word wo, “I.” Muttered quickly—qì le—might have conveyed the irritation she felt in finding she had pulled slippers for two left feet off a store shelf, paid for them, and realized what she had done only when she had returned home. In that case, qì le simply means, “I’m so mad at myself” and would be suitably accompanied by a slap to the forehead. If it was the salesman who had boxed up shoes for two left feet and the shoes were expensive and the store far away, the first word qì would be said with such emphasis that a puff of air might follow, suggesting that skin-peeling steam was coming out of her mouth. If she said the word in a low growly tone with a lot of sibilant emphasis, that conveyed the onomatopoeic sound of a knife slitting the throat.