Tributes & Intimate Moments
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AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION,  by May Yee

'Mo Wan Fut'  (No Other Way)

"Nei wong ngoi du muet, ah?!" thunders my grandfather at me, as I stand helplessly by his hospital bed. 'What have you tied me up for'

I yell back, angry, reacting to his imperative patriarchal tone. Yelling also being the only way his ninety-seven-year-old ears can hear me. Childishly I tell him, in my childish Chinese, that it wasn't me who tied his hands to the bars of the bed. Then I shout that the doctor says his hands must be tied because he keeps pulling out the IV needle. He needs it to get better. Grandfather only argues back that the doctor does not know anything. Maybe he's right? Besides, he claims, no doctors have come to see him. I reply, "Of course they've come!"

I don't really know. I only know he's lost all short-term memory since the stroke a few years ago. I end by yelling, "Mo wan fut." - the only way I know of expressing resignation and acceptance in Chinese. 'No Other Way.'

Grandfather sinks back into the stiff hospital pillows, quiet again, eyes closed. I take a deep breath in the sudden silence, aware that the man in the next bed and his seated son have been listening to our incomprehensible (to them), angry shouting match. I want to close my eyes too. 

I don't want to see Grandfather's clenched red hands tied on either side of his struggling tense body. His chest heaving with his laboured breathing. This could be due to the pneumonia he is recovering from. Or is it his anger at being tied so ungraciously, anger at his helplessness?

From the next bed, the middle-aged Indian man speaks to me in the silence. Tells me that Grandfather pulled out the IV three 
times yesterday. 

"Is he your father's father?"   "No, my mother's father."

Asian languages. We have so many different words for different relatives. The exact nature of each relationship is readily apparent in the name itself. Yet, I also know I lack words in our language, Chinese, for the different feelings each relationship inspires. Ah Gong - (maternal, in Cantonese)) Grandfather...

"So..., how old is he?"   "Ninety-seven."

"That's old. He's an intelligent man. This morning I woke up at five o'clock and heard him singing. He sang for twenty minutes!"

"In Chinese?"   "Yes, Chinese," he nods.

"He used to know English, but ever since his stroke he can only speak Chinese. You know, he's been in Canada for over 
seventy years."

I wish I could thank the man in the next bed. A side of my grandfather I had never known. Lying in bed in the early hours of the morning, singing to himself. The man keeps talking.

"People tell me immigrants should learn Canadian ways. I think the only real Canadians are the native people. But I know they really mean white people, who came and conquered. Who wants to know their ways of killing people and stealing land?"
I tell him I agree. He seems honest and kind. 

My grandfather opens his eyes again and starts yelling his orders again to untie him. This goes on for the whole two hours of my visit. Down to every fifteen minutes or so in the last while. My anger also dissipates, and I begin to talk to him more calmly and patiently. Right in his ear for him to hear me. 

But Ah Gong gets cleverer. Argues with me: 

'What if there is a fire and I'm here with my hands tied?'

'What if I want to scratch myself?' 

My imagination can not come up with equally creative responses. Each time he counters my 'doctor's orders' with dismissive gestures and: 'What doctors?! I haven't seen any doctors!'

I wait for his dinner, which arrives late in its beige plastic tray, and I try to feed him. Surprisingly, he eats. As I lean over Ah Gong on the bed, I realise the sheets are damp, realise how hard he's been struggling against his confinement.

The man in the next bed - I learn by now he's from Kenya - orders his son to crank up Ah Gong's bed so he can eat sitting up.

I'm amazed how much Ah Gong eats. I guess the struggle gave him an appetite. He finishes all of the cream-of-something-green soup, all of the mashed white potatoes with gravy, spitting out the canned pink fish flakes I sneak onto the spoon. A few peas. Most of the little container of milk, and all of the canned peach halves which I chopped thinly with the spoon. He only interrupts the meal twice, with his angry entreaties to untie his hands. But I wonder if there is a not-so-hidden message in the fish and peas he spit out in my direction.

The Kenyan man asks me what I do, if I am a student. I tell him I work. Teaching English in garment factories. Helping to write a book about Chinese women here. Organizing for redress for the head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act. 

"Do you know about the head tax?"

He replies, "I know all about the sorts of laws they had, to stop us from coming here. Huh! They always talk about 'illegal aliens,’ when they were the ones who came here and committed unspeakable crimes. While the so-called illegals are just trying to make a life for themselves here. Did your grandfather pay the head tax?"

"Yes. He had to pay five hundred dollars when he came in 1917. He was only a teenager. He worked for years in a meatpacking plant in Toronto. Finally, he paid up his debts, saved enough money to open up a laundry in the forties. Then, after the Exclusion Act was repealed, he brought over my grandmother, Ah Po - his wife, and his children. My uncle sold the laundry just last year."

***

Oh, Ah Gong , what was life here like for you, when you first came to Gum Sahn - 'golden mountain?' Having left behind all family, including your new wife, in the village in China, did you discover this to then be a bleak and lonely landscape? Gum Sahn - what gold? Just the dark red of trickling blood, as you worked endlessly every day at Canada Packer's slaughterhouse. Still standing, still bleeding, after all these years. 

Ensconced patriarch, you sponsored many relatives, and finally our whole family of ten, with your hard-earned money, buying false papers, oiling well-placed palms. Founding father, paving the way with cold cash, so our mothers could plant the seeds of our lives here in this hostile soil. I am not completely thankless for finding myself rootless in this cracking white concrete. We now all, countless progeny, live in relative comfort, some wallowing in luxury and middle-class heaven. But I've come to see this gold - finally attained in Gum-Sahn - as fool's gold. 

I went back to China last year to find, what I have been really yearning for - was not white gold - but the gold in endless fields of deep brown earth: found a heartache green, so deep and bright, it's seared forever in my broken heart. Branded in pain, that will never allow me to forget, forget how to feel...

And, oh, Ah Gong, how I feel for you. How I would untie your bindings if I only could. Even though, a generation or two ago, you could have tied my little growing feet into life-time bindings. But I cannot. I cannot untie you. To save you or to save myself. We are tied, to live out our lives in these cracks in crumbling white concrete. Always with fists clenched. Always struggling to breathe in these narrow smothering spaces. Sometimes asking, 'What for?'Finding the only answer in a painful sigh: "Mo wan fut!" No other way?

Growing up here, I tried hard to find a way out. But my way out was in denial, trying to be what I could never be, denying my Chineseness, history, our collective memory and pain. The pain of my Grandmother, Ngen, trapped in the sterile white decay of death in a hospital bed - so far away from family, and the village and land she had lived her life in.

By refusing to comply to your angry orders to be untied, am I now denying your pain, Ah Gong, as you lay dying tied to a strange bed?
Or am I only reacting to your still omnipresent, patriarchal power to command?

To command within the empire you built of family, even while in the larger colony and white empire we lived in, you were voiceless, obeying their foreign commands, giving over your own sweat, then your money stained with yours and others' blood, you finally bought a small space here for what then felt like an overflowing kingdom of family, squeezed as we were....

And what was I in this world of men? - a little girl with tears in her wide eyes, as the Canadian immigration officials took our photos at the Hong Kong airport, before our harrowing passage over, by plane over sea, by train over the vast new land, we all threw up, unaccustomed to travel, to any of it, we threw up our past, and now stand here, unsettled, trying to digest thirty years of trying, for a future, for what? for this?

"Mo wan fut." I accept.

We are tied. To struggle, in sterile whiteness, to work in whatever work they grant us, or in the small spaces we are able to make for ourselves.We are tied. To our anger, our rage - to our pain we cannot yell outexcept in solitude

But we are also tied to our selves, tied to each other. And, although those bindings have sometimes been too unbearably close, in the end I would not untie them for anything. For it is those ties which save us, which hold us, each and every one together.

It is my tie to you, Ah Gong, to you, Ngen, to you all - Ma, Baba, sisters, brothers - and to the yellow earth and countless generations of faces like mine...It is that deep and tangled tie which holds me, to stay, in this our real unreal home. To stay, and struggle, struggle to break those chains here that try and break us, each and all apart.

Ah Gong, I am tryingto break those chains for all of us. You may not understand, or agree with, the ways which I have learned to struggle and live here. But, it is only because I recognize and hold dear most of all, our ties to each other. We are tied in love, in pain,in the love which is named in pain, and the pain which comes out of love.

Try as I did, I could not stop the cries, which were wrenched out so deep within me, after I left you lying in the hospital bed. But, Ah Gong, I could not untie you from your imperious anger.
I leave you bound, the IV feeding colourless life into your veins.I leave you bound, because here it is. This is our lives, after all.

Mo wan fut.  No other way - but to live out our lives, to try, to remain, to struggle...  Ah Gong.

When I finally tell my grandfather I am going home, he makes his final demands for me to untie him, but with less force. Then,
as I say good-bye, he closes his eyes in resignation, refusing to look at me or respond. I hold his arm, try to caress his face,
but he turns it away. I say good-bye again. But I don't turn to go, just stand there and wait in the silence, looking down at the closed, turned-away face.

I waited. For what?

I suddenly wished that I could say more.

I never got to hear Ah Gong sing; and he never got to hear all the questions I have for him.

I wanted to tell my grandfather that I'm sorry. But my forked tongue did not know the words to say that in Chinese. Something my parents never told me...

Well, Ah Gong, I am sorry, for us all. I'm so sorry.

Yet, I'm not.....

(Toronto, February 1989)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ah Po - Looking for my Grandmother’s Village

Let me tell you what I know about Ah Po, my maternal grandmother, 97 years old - then you will get some idea of how little I sadly know of her and our past. It won't take long, I think.

Born before the turn of the century, in 1898 in rural southern China, in the county of Hoiping, Guangdong. I don't know her village or even her original surname - just that she married my grandfather, Ah Gong, who worked as a servant before climbing aboard a big ship to try his luck in "Gum Sahn" (gold mountain) or Canada in 1917. After marriage (arranged by their families, as was the custom then), she moved to live with her in-laws in the Chong village, called "Num An Lai" ("village of southern peace").

I know Ah Po grew up very poor, because my mother had told me so, long ago - and also because of a story my grandmother herself told me when I visited her at the Chinatown seniors' residence a month ago. 

My mother and I were visiting her one afternoon after a dimsum lunch with my father in the usual Dundas Street restaurant two blocks away from Mon Sheong Senior's Residence. That day she recognized both her daughters and called them by name (one time she visibly upset them both when she got their names mixed up - my mother is over 10 years older than my aunt, that being the gap of years between my grandfather's two trips back home to China from Canada). 

But when it came to me, Ah Po did what she often has this past year, after I was away for almost two years in Asia (when her health had deteriorated) - she peered up at me, wrinkling her cataract-clouded eyes further, and said she recognized me but couldn't remember my name. This time, when we reminded her, she nodded in recognition and said I was very smart, going to Beijing to study Chinese. 

Then Ah Po, sitting in the chair by her bed, started complaining - “Ai ya!” - about her sore arthritic shoulder. She started making loud moans of complaint, rubbing her right shoulder. Her two daughters, my Ma, the eldest, and my Aunt Ann (or "Ayi", as we call her) did not respond; they were busy talking with each other about their mother while standing over her (having long gotten used to Ah Po not being able to hear unless you spoke right into her ear, and even then she sometimes didn't understand). 

Ma visited every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, while Ayi, having a car, was there most days. For over five years, five winters, the two daughters had carried out their duty unfailingly - except when they or their husbands were sick, or my aunt’s occasional holiday. There was always an unspoken shame, that Ah Po was not at home with family (the only son, my uncle, having sold the laundry and house after Grandfather’s death). But at least Monsheong was staffed completely by Chinese-speaking doctors, nurses and attendants.

I went up to Ah Po, trying to be the dutiful granddaughter (and to make up for my sporadic visits, despite living close to Chinatown).
I stroked her shoulder, and speaking into her ear, asked Ah Po in Chinese what was wrong. She said her "feng seep" (arthritis, literally "wind seeping in") was really bothering her. Then she said, that when she was a little girl, she used to pull their ox with this arm,
which has been bothering her ever since.

I tried to picture Ah Po as a girl back in China. Having been back with my parents to visit my father's village Wen An Lai (Forever Peace Village), and briefly my mother's - meaning Ah Gong’s, not Ah Po's, village - I could picture the lush rolling green hills and shiny rice paddies, and on the raised ridge between fields, Ah Po as a small girl in simple peasant cottons and barefoot, pulling on the thick rope that was attached to the strong, horned gray water buffalo, probably taller than her. There are no photos of Ah Po as a girl, so I pictured her looking like me as a girl, but with braids and dressed like I saw young girls still dressed in the Chinese countryside.

"Teck thlay la!" she exclaimed (hurts to death!) She said she had to pull the ox along every day - it was her job. Then she started talking about journeying to the doctor to see about her arm. This is when the story got hard to follow. She said the doctor told her she had to have her arm chopped off! At this, her daughters started paying attention. But Ma said scoffingly, "Mo gum sai lei, na?!" (it couldn't have been that extreme!) But Ah Po kept repeating it, but saying the doctor's name, "Liu Kong" - who was our family doctor here in Chinatown in Toronto. So, this got both my mother and aunt laughing uncontrollably, and making comments between outbursts like, "Nau luan thlay la!" (literally: "the brain all mixed up to death!")

Poor Ah Po...

****

Two days after I wrote the above, Ah Po, suffering from unexplained hemorrhaging, went into the hospital. The next afternoon I went
to visit her. Early the following morning Ah Po died, right after my mother made it to the hospital in response to a call by the nurses.

Ma said Uncle (Ah-Kew) and cousins were already there, but Ayi was still flying back from the States on a business trip with her husband. As soon as she got there, Ma stroked her mother's forehead, above the oxygen mask, and spoke into her ear, telling her, "Ah-Ma, ngoi hai Ah-Jin, nei goi nui, ngoi lai au la" (Ma, I'm Jin, your daughter, I've come). Ah Po gave a loud gasp in response.
As they were all saying how Ah Po seemed to have heard Ma and answered her, my aunt, Ah-Kim, suddenly noticed that her mother-in-law had stopped breathing. So everyone says that Ah Po waited to see my mother, her first born, before leaving. It's supposed to be good luck, a good sign - or, as Doreen, my friend from Six Nations who is still grieving the loss of her mother, would say, "She's taken the good road."

Ah Po, you walked a long and often difficult road these past 97 years. And as the Chinese saying goes, death is a road we all have walk some day. Well, I'm happy you're at peace now, as my mother kept saying, especially since your last few years couldn't have been too happy, living away from your family, losing your mobility, and your memory, always worrying about little things you were afraid had been forgotten or misplaced (when maybe it was your self you were worried over having been forgotten and misplaced...)

Ah Po, you are on the good road now - what I'm saddest about over your death at 97 and a half is how I knew so very little of the road you had walked most of your life in China. But, here I am, maybe too late, trying to hold a memory that was never properly passed on, to keep a fire burning which has almost gone out, to retrace the path back when I am maybe already too lost...

She was the last of my grandparents, the last of a generation. Now there is only my parents' generation left, between us, the "lost generation," and the hope of tracing our way back. My mother only speaks of the past on rare occasions, usually when I'm asking
about some relative now here, while I'm helping her clean up after dinner, most of her day's work to feed our large family finally done
- sudden stories: 

how this "auntie" helped her when she was pregnant again, about running holding my eldest sister who was still a baby, fleeing the village to the hills, to hide from the threat of Japanese bombs and soldiers, my father away teaching at the county school, how my father would bike back home monthly, a trip that took a day, how she and women like Ngen, her mother-in-law, worked in the fields, the tiring toil of it - and then, suddenly we're back in the kitchen again, Ma rinses the dishes and brushes aside my questions, telling me to wipe the table and countertops, saying that those days were long ago... 

I guess it's painful for her to talk about those memories. But they are there, so many of them - years of children, waiting, uncertainty, war, hunger, fear - bitter fruits I have never tasted, despite our cramped childhood here, when I always was realizing how poor and
"un-modern" we were compared to most of the other kids we grew up with. 

When I read people like Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee or Amy Tan, full of old stories that their mothers told them as they were growing up, I identified but also felt further deprived, because the few stories I have, I learned only when I finally started asking questions when I was much older, curiosity having replaced earlier shame. Oh Ma, how do I tell you how much I now crave, need those stories, those memories to fill this gaping hole inside me? And now it must come from you, the last link, now that all the grandparents are gone...

Ah Po, Ah Gong, Ngen, Ye... Grandmother, Grandfather, Grandmother, Grandfather... The last one, my father's father, I never knew,
died in the village ten years before I was born. You were a generation of sacrifice, of toil, of war and turmoil in your own beloved land, the generation of soil, working the land for food, sometimes no food, but loyal to the Motherland. But the first three I grew up with,
Ah Po, Ah Gong, Ngen, you all eventually left that beautiful land of yours, of ours, at different times, uprooted and came here. 

Here, where we grandchildren have grown for years rootless - cut off not only from the wet rice paddies and rolling hills of forever-southern-peace villages, but cut off from you, who sacrificed so much for us, cut off by language, cut off by a completely different way of life, ways of seeing - that possibly insurmountable distance between this white concrete, sky-scrapered, shopping-malled city, and that small village where the eye can see only intense green to all horizons. Worlds away... So now, here I stand, feet on concrete, feeling separated by a gaping hole of unknown pain and memories not passed on. But we also never asked in time, so maybe you never knew our need...

And it breaks my heart that you could never really understand our lives, the emptiness - that the only thing that could make you proud of us here in this land of “devils” (kwei) was if we achieved professions and wealth (and then you still couldn't really understand - why only families of one or two children? or even no families? alone?) 

One of the few times I remember Ah Gong speaking to me directly about my life: we were in a car going somewhere, and he suddenly asked me if I wanted to become a doctor (among the 21 grandchildren there is lawyer, professor, architect, fashion designer, engineers, teachers, dentist, but no doctor). I tried, but am sure I failed miserably with my limited Chinese, to explain why I wasn't interested.
I don't know, but does `writer’ - which I still hesitate to call myself - qualify to them as a 'profession?

But I guess you saw - honing in on certain essential truths about this land that still always remained foreign to you - that wealth was the only way to have families here (family being the most important thing of all to you), the only way to afford "homes." Security always having to be paid for in a money-based society - mortgaged to be exact.

And I, the rebel one, will have no house. But how do I have you understand that that is because I am searching for our real home.
And in this search, it seems I am never home to stay. Always going home to China for some time, always coming back home to Toronto. Back and forth, back and forth..., across the world, across worlds...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Why so far away?

When I first told my mother in 1987 I was going to Beijing to study Chinese, she only said, “Mai geng koi yuan?” - why so far away? 

Eight years before that, it had not been welcomed but accepted, when I decided to go to university in Ottawa after graduating from high school (as usual, because I had older sisters that paved the way for me, fighting earlier battles against traditions like staying home till you're married). This was my way of leaving home, being able to live alone (if I had gone to University of Toronto as expected, I would have had to live at home).

Two years after returning to Toronto from Ottawa (by then I was able to get my own apartment), I suddenly had this offer of a full scholarship to study in China. The year before I had turned down scholarships for graduate studies in Toronto, deciding not to get caught in “academia” but to try and work in the "real world" instead. But now China, that was different - a world to (re)discover,
the unknown familiar, the "awkei"/back home I'd always heard talked about but never been to, the unseen home. But all Mother
could say was, but it's so far away. Well, yes, Ma, we did come from a long ways away, half way across the world, a world away
- that far away it was...

Before I left, my mother only had one final thing to say about my going away to China (besides, of course, the usual admonitions and reminders to dress warmly and eat a lot). The day before I left, as I was packing, she came into the room, sat on the bed and said, maybe I would meet a nice Chinese man and get married. I immediately spoke up in self defense - Ma, that's not the reason I'm going, I'm going to study. Her laconic response went something like, I know, but since you'll be there...

Half a billion, 500 million men to choose from, all of whom my parents would initially approve of, for the mere fact of being Chinese...

I never did find myself a husband in China, I just found - a vast complex country yet our old home, a new home? so much so old yet
so very new, still don’t know…

(the many ways I am Chinese, and the more ways I am not, so much more and so very much less…) 

yet I did find my self, and then some....

by May Yee