Chapter 8 #2
Every year, new young families moved to the neighbourhood, and with them came artisan taco restaurants, organic grocery stores, bakeries with round sourdough loaves in the windows.
The discount Woolco store disappeared, and a thirty-storey glass tower was built in its place.
Alice’s favourite pho restaurant shut its doors, only to transform into a southern French bistro five weeks later.
Grant loved all the changes. Alice silently resented them and hated herself for enjoying the matcha latte at a fair-trade coffee shop on the corner.
She spent more and more time in her house, where the bones never changed, where she had never allowed Grant to knock down the kitchen wall and replace it with a waterfall island, where the garden stayed as jungle-like and untameable as her father had left it, down to the pile of mismatched rocks in the corner that marked the grave of a dead cat, which didn’t serve any purpose except to collect dead leaves and twigs.
She padded through the hallways as she had done as a little girl—silently, in thick socks, so no one would be disturbed.
This was just the way she liked it, slipping in and out easily, causing barely a ripple.
Alice extended her arm out the open passenger window. Pink petals stuck to her palm, their touch the softest caress Alice had felt in a long, long time. Judy turned her head and gave Alice an appraising look. “Dim sum, right?”
“I would die for a good har gow.”
Judy turned south on Fraser, not bothering to signal. “I know just the place.”
the dim sum restaurant was like every dim sum restaurant from Alice’s childhood.
Round tables topped with yellow tablecloths, lazy Susans, and bottles of soy, black vinegar, and chili oil.
Carts pushed by servers in black vests and pants, tonelessly repeating the contents of the bamboo steamers piled high.
Siu mai, har gow, lo bak go, cheung fun.
Judy pointed and shouted, never even asking what Alice wanted to eat. It didn’t matter. She knew anyway.
“Do you want ice water? Or just tea?”
“Tea is fine, Mom. Thanks.”
Judy picked up a scallop and chive dumpling and popped it in her mouth, never taking her eyes off Alice’s face. When she was done, she asked, “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, everything is fine. The kids are home for spring break, bored out of their minds. Luna is planning to audition for the school musical though.”
“Musical? Can she even dance?”
“Well, not really, but it never hurts to audition. She could learn.”
“Some things you can’t learn.” Judy brushed a hair out of her lip gloss. “Luna is a nice girl, but she isn’t built like a dancer.”
“Mom, you have to stop criticizing her body.”
“I’m not criticizing. Dancers are built one way. Luna is built the opposite way. Like a square.”
Alice sighed. She waited a minute before trying a different topic. “Hey, did you know that Luca is designing a security app for the science fair? With cameras and everything.”
Judy dipped a spring roll into the mustard. “That boy had better take care of you when you’re old.”
“I’m counting on it.”
A server placed a bowl of dan dan mein in the middle of the table. “Special order,” she said in Cantonese. “As Poh Poh requested.” Judy glared until the server turned her back and walked away.
“How dare she? She and I are the same age! She’s the Poh Poh, not me.”
“Chill. I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it.
” Alice patted her mother’s pale hand. “Everyone always says you look like my older sister.” No one had ever said this to Alice, but it was a small lie and Judy relaxed her shoulders as she took a bite of noodles.
“Actually, Mom, I asked you to lunch because I wanted to ask you something.”
“What? Do you need money? Is that ex-husband of yours cheating you out of child support? I always knew he was a cheap man in an expensive suit.”
Alice sighed. “No, Mom, it’s not that. The other day, when we talked on the phone, I could have sworn it sounded like you were in a doctor’s office. Are you feeling all right?”
“Me?” Judy blinked and stared at Alice. “There is no reason to ask about me.”
“I know you don’t like to admit it, but you are getting older and I worry.
When we lost Dad, it felt like it was so sudden and there was something we might have missed.
Maybe he should have gone to the doctor more often?
” Alice could see her mother sitting up straighter and straighter, and watching the giant television suspended on the wall as if the looping images of remote vacation spots were the most fascinating things she had ever seen.
“I don’t remember much of Dad’s death. Was there anything we could have done? ”
Judy turned her head and finally looked at Alice’s face. “No. There was nothing. You were both sick. He died. You are still here. End of story.”
“But Mom, the point is that if there is something going on with you, health-wise, I should know, so I can support you, watch for symptoms, or help you with appointments, all those things.”
“I should tell you: I am thinking about going back to visit Hong Kong.” Judy placed her chopsticks across her bowl and clasped her hands, elbows on the table.
“Why are you changing the subject?”
“Because this trip is the more important matter.”
“It’s not, but fine, whatever. You’re going to Hong Kong. When was the last time you were there? I don’t remember.”
“The time I went with you, when you were small, eight years old.”
Alice nodded. That trip had been an assault on her child senses—the heavy smell of mothballs at the street market, the hot steam from the food vendors, the thousands of stairs at the Chinese Christian Cemetery, where her great-grandmother was buried, her grave marked by an unremarkable grey stone, on a terrace high above Victoria Road.
“I drank warm Coke with lemon and almost threw up.”
“Yes, that. Such a Canadian girl.”
“Why do you want to go back?”
Judy leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know if I want to talk about it. Maybe you should know. Or maybe not.”
Alice sighed. Was her mother getting remarried? Was this trip a honeymoon? Was she actually sick and wanted to visit one more time before she died? “Just tell me, Mom. It’s fine.”
Judy shook her head. “It’s nothing. I am just getting older, that’s all.
” Alice started to talk, but Judy waved her hands in the air to stop her.
“The point is, I want to go back to Hong Kong. I want to see the place my mother was born, the place my grandmother spent most of her life. It’s an old house, a very famous house. ”
Alice slumped forward in her chair, as if her body had expelled all the air it had ever held.
Her mother was being purposely evasive and changing the subject.
Or was it all the same subject? The past, old stories, the aging you don’t feel until it crashes over you.
“Okay, a house. You’ve never told me about any house.
Why didn’t we go see it when we were there before? ”
“It would have been too hard to explain to you then. You were only eight. Anyway, we were busy. You were obsessed with the horses at Happy Valley.”
Alice thought about her perfectly organized house, the orders that were picked up by the courier that morning. Luna was looking after Luca. She had hours.
“Tell me now, Mom. Tell me everything. I want to know.” Alice folded her hands in her lap and waited for her mother to speak.
“Your great-grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a comfort woman during World War Two, raped by Japanese soldiers in an old, famous mansion.
And then she gave birth to my mother just before she died.
The house is still there, still famous, except now people think it is haunted by the ghosts of the women who were kept there.
You can google Nam Koo Terrace and learn everything I know about it. ”
The dumplings had gone cold, and Alice stared at the dough, which she could see was now stiff and chewy.
They had stopped eating and there was food left in every dish and bamboo steamer tray.
Alice hated waste and picked up a piece of beef tendon with her chopsticks, but then she placed it gently in her bowl and looked back at her mother.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Judy was sitting very still, her hands in her lap. She wore so many rings that her fingers seemed to glow against the dark sheen of her pants.
“When is a good time to tell your daughter that your family has been cursed?”
“Cursed? Wait. Mom, a bad, traumatic thing happened, but that’s not a curse.”
Judy sighed and looked Alice directly in the eye. “Maybe cursed isn’t the right word. Maybe we are angry. Maybe we are haunted.”
This, Alice thought, was easier to believe.
As a little girl, the death of her father played like a soundtrack in the background of her life.
She could barely remember him as a living, breathing person, but the hole he left behind—shaped like he was shaped, long and slightly bent over—followed her everywhere.
To school. To ballet lessons. To the corner store to buy cola gummies and a Beanie Baby.
If there was such a thing as a haunting through grief and absence, then she had been haunted her entire life.
“When did you hear about Nam Koo? Did Poh Poh tell you?”
“My mother told me many stories. Some were real; some were made up. But this story, about my grandmother, this was real. Poh Poh told me about her all the time, from before I can even remember.” A waitress walked toward them, saw Judy’s expression, and then hurried away.
“Do you feel haunted?”
“All the time. My whole life.”
Me too , Alice wanted to say but didn’t. “Are you angry? Angry that your grandmother was hurt like that? Angry that Poh Poh never knew her own mother?”
Judy laughed then. “What stupid questions. Of course I am. You should know that better than anyone.”
A weight turned in Alice’s stomach, and she sighed a tiny exhale of relief.
Her mother was Judy Chow. She could spend twelve hours a day in towering heels, draft a house offer at midnight, and still wake up at six to ride her Peloton in the sunroom of her downtown condo.
She had raised Alice alone. She had built her real estate empire on her own.
She never aged. Of course, she was angry. Rage was what she ate for breakfast.
“Maybe there is nothing to find in Hong Kong, even if I do go back. Everything changes there all the time. New buildings, new roads. Who knows?” Judy threw down a credit card and stared down a server who was standing against the bar.
“I read that Nam Koo Terrace has been bought by a hotel chain. Maybe it will be demolished by the end of the year.”
Alice closed her eyes and imagined a bulldozer churning up the bodies of women long buried in the dirt, the cries of their ghostly voices. What happens when ghosts are forgotten and displaced? Where do they go? Where do they direct their rage?
“I suppose you don’t want to be paid,” Judy shouted at the server, who was still standing by the bar. He rolled his eyes and walked over, in no hurry.
On the drive home, Alice looked over at her mother, at her sleek bob that did not move even in the breeze from the open window.
An hour ago, when she was talking about her grandmother, about the war, the abuses that were enacted on her body, Alice understood that Judy was hard for a reason.
The core of her, the soft vulnerable inside, was too scarred, criss-crossed with intergenerational traumas that were too easily triggered to be left unprotected.
It was an inherited vulnerability that was impossible to avoid, even though Alice had not known this history until now.
Alice considered the wounds, the hunger for survival that is passed down, repeated, and then passed down again, and wondered what she had already given to Luna without even knowing it.
She wondered what trauma lay dormant in her body, what she had never felt because she didn’t know what to look for.
Alice wanted to ask Judy about her own mother, about what kind of person she was, about how she learned to be a parent when she had never had one.
As Alice looked at Judy now, her glossy lips pressed together as she manoeuvred through the Friday-afternoon traffic, she thought that the child Judy must have been sad, not that she had ever told Alice what her childhood had been like.
But then again, Alice had never asked. They had been far too busy framing photographs of her father, picking at every memory for a shred of past happiness they could carry with them into the future.
Alice reached out and patted her mother’s hand.
“What? What’s going on?” Judy asked, not taking her eyes off the cars ahead of them.
“Nothing, Mom. Just keep driving.”