Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

  I don’t know how my mother emotionally survived during the years she and my father were apart. But I have proof that she was wretched. A photo of her taken in 1948 shows her unsmiling face looking thin and slack. She weighed seventy pounds. Did my mother receive letters from my father during their time apart? Did her husband intercept them? I wondered if my mother ever gave up hope that they would see each other again. Did she imagine he might fall in love with another woman who was unencumbered by husband, children, and scandal?

  In 1949, as the Communists were coming into power, the marriage laws changed. A man was no longer allowed to have multiple wives, only one. A woman could divorce. My mother seized the opportunity, and through a complicated ruse carried out with help from the rich man’s family, she forced her husband to answer publicly if his concubine, the woman standing next to him, was his wife. The concubine stared at him and he confirmed that the concubine was his wife. My mother presented him with a document and once he signed it, she was legally freed.

  In the last remaining days before the Communists took control of Shanghai, she sent a telegram to ask my father if he still wanted her. “Come immediately,” he answered. The concubine was eager to see her go and told her she should leave the children for now, until she was settled. My mother boarded the last boat to leave Shanghai and went to Hong Kong, along with many others who believed they would not fare well under the Communists. She applied for her student visa at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong and must have encountered incredulity that she would be studying for a master’s in American literature when her English skills were so poor. Lucky for her, the university sent a letter to the consulate stating that she would receive intensive English language refresher courses when she arrived, including “ear training” and the use of colloquial speech. A month later, she received her student visa. By then, she was impatient to reach her fate. She changed her mind about sailing to the United States, a trip that would have involved multiple stops before it reached San Francisco a month later. She bought a plane ticket for $700 on Philippine Airlines.

  When she arrived in San Francisco, she learned that my father had not enrolled at MIT, as planned. I imagine he had been agonizing over the role he had played in the demise of my mother’s marriage, in the criminal charges, the public scandal, and the loss of her children. He had been raised a Christian and followed the King James version of the Bible. In a written personal testimony, he said he felt he had become spiritually lost—like Saul in the desert—until he heard the calling from God to become a minister. He skipped MIT and enrolled in the Berkeley Baptist Divinity School.

  My mother was hardly religious. She likely had no idea what kind of life she was headed toward. At first, she accepted her penurious conditions, washing her own dishes, cleaning house, and raising children without the help of a nursemaid. She bowed her head and closed her eyes when they prayed at mealtimes. Over the years, however, love was not enough to stifle complaints about certain sacrifices. Why should he tithe 10 percent of a $200-a-month salary as the minister of a Chinese Baptist church? Why should they live in a place the church had furnished with leftover furniture nobody wanted? I read about her unhappiness in my father’s diaries—notations of arguments that lasted into the early morning. Before their third child was born, my mother’s arguments over money led my father to give up his job as a minister to take up his earlier occupation as a slightly less impoverished engineer. He worked overtime and my mother attended night school—not in American literature—but in vocational nursing. They continued to send money to my father’s brothers, who had fled Shanghai for Taiwan. My mother’s half brother, the son of her mother and the rich man, was also a refugee in Taiwan. He had been so shocked in going from a princeling in Shanghai to a pauper in Taiwan that he literally went blind. His wife sold pieces of jewelry so the family could eat. When they wrote my mother and father to say they were at the end of their money and hopes of surviving, she and my father sponsored them and their children to the United States. My mother said she willingly did this, not simply because they shared the same mother, but out of gratitude for what his father had done to help her. In 1957, eight years after my mother left China, the two families moved into a duplex on Fifty-First Street in Oakland. Our family lived on the first floor and my uncle and his family lived above us. That was the year my mother was finally able to afford a piano, a washing machine, and a TV set.

  San Francisco, 1949: The bride who suddenly arrived from Shanghai.

  I don’t know what my mother would have listed as her sacrifices to give us a better life. Some of what she gave up was material: beautiful dresses and fur coats. Some had to do with her former lifestyle—having a maid, a driver, and a cook. She also had to give up habits, like smoking. She certainly had to give up pride, a lot of it, when she was no longer perceived as an articulate witty woman whose speech and writing were refined. In the United States she could not speak easily to anyone. Her English was poor, and most of the Chinese people she met in the United States spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin or Shanghainese. She had to give up her weekly visits to hair salons. By her early forties, her hair was shot with white. On weekdays, she came home wearing a white nurse’s uniform and clunky white shoes. She would sit on the sofa and complain of “sour” legs. We did not know she once had a maid to massage her feet. In her forties, although she was still pretty, she became dowdy. She set her hair with curlers at night only before a social event, then dressed up in her silk satin Chinese dresses, sketched in her eyebrows, put on lipstick, and revived part of her former glamour.

  So those were some of her sacrifices. They had nothing to do with us. We did not exist then. She made those sacrifices for love, to belong to someone. That need to be loved was so enormous that she did indeed make a terrible sacrifice: her daughters, ages four, seven, and thirteen. By leaving China, she had no way to retrieve them unless she returned on a one-way ticket and demanded her husband give her custody. She would have had no means to support them, but, in any case, he would have refused, out of spite, and not because he loved being a father. He was a monster; in later years, he would be convicted and sentenced to fifteen years of prison for raping schoolgirls, the friends of his daughters. My mother could not have known how far his mistreatment would go. She had no knowledge that her daughters were also being abused by the stepmother, the concubine. The woman had a son she loved, but she resented raising my mother’s children. She put them in closets. She pinched Jindo’s inner cheek so hard her fingernail nearly cut all the way through the cheek. She forced Lijun to sit on a spittoon as a child’s toilet and did not allow her to get off and when she finally did her bottom was infected from having been bitten by insects. She did not feed them adequate food, which led to Lijun developing rickets.

  When the United States cut off relations with the Communist government, my mother would hear news of her daughters only occasionally via mail forwarded by those friends who lived in countries that still had diplomatic ties to China. The other day, I found a photo of Jindo in her early twenties, looking quite similar to my mother when she was young. The back was inscribed in neatly written Chinese: “For my dearest mother. I dream of you day and night.” Did the message cause my mother anguish and guilt? I never heard my mother express remorse. She expressed resignation in various ways: “could not be help,” “no choice,” “cannot prevent it.” It could not be prevented in other families as well—among friends and family. Those were the exigencies of being refugees. My mother’s own brother and his wife left their newborn daughter with a poor farmer during the war, so that a crying baby would not alert the Japanese to the whereabouts of their group of young Communist revolutionaries. My uncle and aunt reunited with their daughter after seven or eight years. My mother did not reunite with her daughters until thirty years had passed, by which time they were older than she had been when she left them.

  My mother and father did not tell their new friends in the United States about her prior marriage and the children still in China
. My father did not confide in his mentors at the divinity school, although the reasons he joined the ministry probably had much to do with his sin for loving another man’s wife. And they did not tell Peter and me, their American-born children, who were sick and tired of hearing our mother talk about a bunch of unknown sacrifices she made just so we could enjoy music.

  At the piano, our mother had fast magical fingers. She sat erect and we stood on the sides watching. My father wore a love-struck look as he watched her play. What a talented wife! Her favorite pieces were Chopin etudes, polonaises, and, especially, the waltzes, which always roused my father to take my mother’s hand and lead her to dance. She and my father were stylish dancers, the best on many a wedding dance floor, where they moved sinuously together, my mother turning up her heel when they paused on the upswing, my father dipping her backward as a finale. At home, he would sometimes take her in his arms and twirl her around the living room and down the narrow hallway, humming a tune like “The Skater’s Waltz.” At the end, he would lift her, all eighty pounds, and kiss her on the lips. She would always protest when she saw that her children were watching.

  Every night, my brothers and I changed into our matching pajamas and joined our mother and father around the piano. She would play the old Christian standards my father loved so much: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “I Come to the Garden Alone,” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” My father would sing in the forceful voice of a Baptist minister. Peter, who was seven at the time, had already learned to read proficiently and knew many words in the hymns. I would draw my finger across the page, as if I could read, too, although I imagine now that the only words I recognized, if any, were those that were often repeated: God, Jesus Christ, Holy, Lord, Amen. The piano made my mother happy, or at least less prone to sudden storms of anger and unpredictable spells of brooding. That made us think the piano was a very good thing. But then my parents found a piano teacher. Our piano teacher, Miss Towler, was a white-haired gentle lady with a soft voice and old-fashioned manners. She lived with her mother, who liked to sit smiling in a wicker chair in the sunroom upstairs, where I waited when Peter had his lesson.

  My mother promised we would love the piano as much as she did. “The more you practice, the faster you love.” At first, we believed her. The lessons, we were told, were very expensive, five dollars a week each for Peter and me. This was yet another sacrifice they were making on our behalf. Our father had to work extra hours to pay for those lessons. And in return, we had to practice an hour a day. Only a terribly selfish child would not agree to do that—one hour a day, hardly anything. To adults, an hour may fly by before you know it. But for a child in kindergarten, that was the golden hour of after-school playtime, when you could finally shake off the restlessness that had accumulated during the school day then shriek and laugh as much as you liked. The afternoons were also when the greatest entertainment in the world came on the TV: The Mickey Mouse Club. We could not turn on the TV for the two hours when Peter and I were practicing. For one hour a day, 365 days a year, I sat on that expensive hard piano bench, moving my fingers and straining my eyes to read the sheet music.

  Those lessons changed how my parents saw me. I became a lazy girl because I dawdled as long as possible before sitting down on the bench. I was a bad girl for lying about how long I had practiced. I was a careless girl because I made many mistakes and did not bother to conquer them. I was ungrateful when I did not smile and thank my parents for all they had sacrificed so I could enjoy music. There were many afternoons when I sat idly at the piano and stared out the window, watching my cousins run past, shrieking as they circled the house in a game of tag-you’re-dead. I was a lump of self-pity on that piano bench.

  Learning to play the piano was not as easy for me as it had been for five-year-old Mozart. Consider all I had to keep in mind. Count out the time and pay attention to the tempo. A whole note has a big hole in the middle—tap it out with your foot: one, two, three, four. Black notes that are linked by ropes move along more quickly. I banged out scales, imagining my fingers were tiny soldiers marching in circles. My piano teacher had taught me that each finger had an assigned number, one to five, the thumb being number one, and the pinkie being five. If I did not pay attention to the fingering, I might run out of fingers before I did notes. My fingers ran through the drills—up and down one octave and back, then two octaves and back, then three. Eventually, the octaves took on sharps or flats, and my fingers had to do gymnastic feats, twisting under or over each other to play the notes with even pressure and in time with the rhythm imposed by the tyrannical beat of a wooden metronome. My fingers always ached and I would bend them backward and pull on them, thinking I could stretch them to a length that would enable me to span the big chords without as much pain. How could I ever love something that stole my playtimes, tired my eyes, cramped my fingers, and made my parents yell at me for being a selfish, lazy child? You’re smart, my parents said. It should be easy for you. All you have to do is try harder. If Peter can do it, so can you.

  Even today, I find it mind-boggling that I was supposed to make sense of tiny notes on a sheet of music before I could even read words. My eyes had to dart between clumps of black spots on a page and convert them into finely tuned neuromuscular movements of the right and left hands. I marvel that very young children can play with both hands. Can they write different words simultaneously with their right and left hands? If they were forced to do so for an hour a day, would two-handed writing become a common teachable skill? How is it that very young children can moderate the loudness of their playing according to notations for mezzo piano and piano, mezzo forte and forte? I seldom see kids who can moderate the loudness of their voices at weddings and funerals. And what kid, barely out of toddlerhood, has had sufficient ceremonial and emotional experiences to play in the mood of a stately largo?

  Training for our future profession began early. Peter and I were designated as entertainers at family dinners. Whenever guests came to our house, we would hear these dreaded words: “Show Uncle and Auntie what you learned.” When we visited family friends who also had a piano, we would be pitted against their piano-playing children. Our family friends were Chinese, most of them U.S.-born and with strong ties to the Chinese community. If they spoke Chinese, it was Cantonese, which my father spoke, but not my mother. Many of those friends were members of an investment group they called The Joy Luck Club. They bought shares in stocks each month based on sound analysis, and if all went as planned, they would one day be wealthy. In a similar sense, piano lessons for their kids were an investment for future returns. Our five-dollar piano lessons would enable us to go from plinkity-plunk family night torture to concert performances at Carnegie. Aim high. Over time, models of success came along and we were told to practice harder so we could be like them. One was Van Cliburn, who beat the Russian pianist and won the cold war, so went the media hype. Aim high. Later we had to contend with the little Chinese prodigy Ginny Tiu, who regularly appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, grinning and winking at the camera as she played impossibly fast tunes. See how she loves to play, my mother would say. Why don’t you love it, too?

  On piano nights with family friends, all the parents would busk for praise by giving the standard apology: “He just started and is not very good,” or, “She doesn’t practice hard enough,” which we kids were supposed to prove to be completely false but failed to do so—all except a boy I will call Charles. He was older than most of us; I would now guess, ten or eleven. I recall that his head was shaped like a giant inverted pear, which made his facial features appear comparatively small and pinched. He did not wear a downcast face when seated on the piano bench. He appeared calm, even pleased to be asked to play. He needed no sheet music. His fingers simply burst into action and rippled across the keyboard. His body swayed naturally with the music and he made no mistakes, finishing with his hands suspended in midair as the last notes faded and were replaced by enthusiastic applause. We were doomed. After our mediocre perform
ances, our parents would say, “Be like Charles. Practice hard!” Some adults would give Charles the standard exaggerated words of praise: “Another Mozart.” Charles caused turmoil in many families.

  We were all unwilling would-be prodigies, who endured being judged on a sliding scale of better or worse than others, depending on which kids came to these social dinners. I learned the emotions of competition—dread and despair, embarrassment and humiliation, shame and guilt, resentment, even hate, and the complex schadenfreude—joy over the discordant failures of others, followed by Christian fear that God knew I was mean in my heart. I hated expectations, the false praise of my parents’ friends when I did badly, and I had a hard time accepting even genuine praise from my parents. Praise made me anxious. It was only temporary relief and it could be snatched away with the next song. At age six, the world was sorting itself into kids who were winners or losers, smarter or dumber, liked a lot or not at all. Where did I belong? My position was constantly in flux, and there were more ways to fail. Life had become serious, full of worries and feelings of self-pity that I was not allowed to express.