Chapter 18 #2
When she walked to school in the mornings, she sometimes thought she could be walking side by side with her mother, the woman who was once a schoolgirl, who had never stopped being a schoolgirl really.
Bette wished so hard that she could hold her mother’s hand on those morning walks, the two physically bound instead of this ephemeral haunting.
They could be a pair, a unit of their own, not beholden to anyone else, yoked only to each other.
Her mother was her ghost, a sad imaginary friend. This was somehow comforting.
One windy morning, as leaves circled in tiny tornadoes in the street, she closed her eyes against the breeze to better feel the warm humidity blowing against her face.
She could smell the baos from the vendor down the street, the faint scent of mothballs through people’s open windows, the ozone of coming rain.
Something grasped her hand just then, a cool touch, but one that held on with a firm, unbreakable grip.
Bette gasped. It was the touch she could never forget, the one she felt in her dreams, or maybe they had never been dreams at all.
Here she was in daylight, out in public, on an honest-to-god street.
This was real. It had to be. It was her mother.
The grip grew tighter until Bette felt long sharp nails digging into her palm, nails that felt like claws sharpened on rocks or with teeth. What kind of creature had nails like this? Surely no mother ever would.
She was terrified and could not open her eyes.
If she did, she might see that her mother wasn’t there, that this hand holding hers was a demon’s, a horned devil’s, or, even worse, a figment of her imagination and loneliness.
So she didn’t. She stood still and let the grasp tighten and the claws cut deeper into her skin until her wrist tingled and the blood pooled in her hand.
Just when she thought she couldn’t take the pain anymore, the hand let go.
When she finally opened her eyes, she was alone on the street, Hong Kong swirling around her as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
the cruel thing about being small and quiet, about always doing what you’re told, about creeping through narrow hallways and dimly lit streets where no one can see you, is that, soon enough, you won’t remember if your invisibility was forced upon you or if you chose it for yourself, reasoning that it was the safest option.
What had Bette chosen? What had been chosen for her?
As she grew older, she no longer knew. The fate of her mother had consigned her to this place, but it was Bette, wasn’t it, who had decided to remain meek, because she thought she could control everything within the shadows and be in charge of all the small things no one ever wanted to take care of.
Soon enough, she began to hate the dishwashing, the mending, the daily dusting of the ancestor shrine.
She began to hate Wen and Mei and Bo. Sometimes she stepped on their feet on purpose, always sweetly apologizing when they cried out.
“I’m sorry. It was an accident. Shush, I said I was sorry.
” She began to hate school, where she was now head girl, the one in charge whenever the teacher left the room, whenever the little ones needed minding during an assembly.
Bette hated the other girls, none of whom had ever liked her or ever would.
She gazed at Auntie and Uncle in hatred as they fussed over Mei’s braids or implored Bo to eat more so he could grow big and strong.
No one had ever noticed how much Bette ate.
She may as well have eaten nothing at all.
It was in this way that Bette grew hard and sharp.
A stone with edges. A gem whose shine was swallowed by the surrounding darkness.
When she trimmed her own hair in the mirror (basic bob because what else could she cut), she could see the uncompromising lines growing around her jaw, angles she could measure if she wanted.
Her eyes were glacial rocks, warm brown iced over, flat.
What was kindness anyway? Something that exuded from girls who mattered and was extended to girls who were worth noticing.
Bette was neither. The unnamed space was where she would stay hidden, neither miserly nor generous, kind nor cruel.
Impenetrable. Immovable. A face like a cliff face. Unknowable.
one afternoon after school , Bette walked into the apartment to find Auntie waiting for her, a letter in her hand. “This is for you,” she said. The letter was thin, folded into a blue and white airmail envelope.
It was from a boy, a man really, who lived in Canada.
He wrote that his father had gone to school with Uncle in a small village in China and that his family had been in Canada for many years now, in a city beside the ocean called Vancouver.
His father told him that his friend had a niece who might need a husband.
He thought he might need a wife, too, in this country where there were so few Chinese girls.
Would she write him back? Would she send him a picture?
Folded inside the envelope was a small square photograph.
He sat on a pink floral sofa in a blue suit, his legs crossed as if he was watching a show, a smile on his smooth oval face.
His hair was brushed away from his forehead, and Bette imagined him running his hands through it while he was thinking.
Maybe he had been thinking about her, about a girl named Bette he had never seen, about a girl who could be pretty if she got a real haircut.
Auntie squinted. “He’s handsome,” she said. “This is a good opportunity, Bette. A chance to start a life in a new country.” She smoothed down the front of her wrinkled shirt with her hands. “If I was young still, I would go.”
That night, Bette lay in her bed under her thin blanket, listening to the children breathing, those deep, oblivious breaths that only come to people who have nothing to worry about, no future plans to make.
In the morning, she would have to wear her only nice dress, curl her hair, and pose for a photograph to send to this boy.
Perhaps she could convince Auntie and Uncle to take her to Victoria Harbour, where she could stand with the water behind her, as if she was ready to sail across that same ocean to its farthest side and begin a life she couldn’t yet imagine.
She could trade one waterfront for another, outrun the whispers that she was unwanted, a girl destined to be a mad whore like her mother, a girl tortured by ghosts or monsters or just her own sad self.
She could step off that steamer onto a lush green land with tall ancient trees and no longer be the haunted girl who had chosen smallness and armour, who would rather be invisible than insulted.
She could be Brand New Bette, a woman with a fiancé, a woman whose future children would always sense her presence, would always reach for her in pain or celebration.
She could have all this. It could be easy.
It could be the right thing to do. Just before dawn, she finally fell asleep.
his name was william , something he had chosen for himself when he came to Canada as a teenager, so much easier than explaining how to say Wei Man, the name he never allowed anyone to use.
On their wedding night, he told her that he thought it sounded smart.
“Something a wealthy man would be named. Someone with time to read books, who buys horses for no reason.” Bette nodded, even though she had never once thought about what a rich man would be called or what he might do with his spare time.
She thought this must be fate, a divine kismet, for two Chinese people with Western names to meet and marry.
“William,” she said to him. “It’s perfect. ”
That night, they stayed at the Sylvia Hotel in English Bay, a place not unlike Victoria Harbour, with the barges anchored just past the beach.
But as she stood at the window, she could hear only the waves pushing against the stone wall.
At home, there was so much more noise: the ringing of bicycle bells, the horns of fishing boats as they jostled for moorage, the shouts of street vendors with their noodles and squid and curries, the squeal of taxi brakes echoing through the night.
This new, colder harbour was surrounded by a city, and yet she could hear no trace of another human, only William brushing his teeth in the small bathroom ten feet away.
When he climbed on top of her, his hair falling over his face, he did not tell her she was beautiful, not that Bette expected that he would.
She had done her best, tucking the veil and its comb into her new perm, dabbing her lips with a rose-coloured lipstick that seemed both demure and pretty.
But she had never been seen before, and she didn’t know how to act as if the objectification was voluntary, something she wanted with no reservations. She had done just fine, she thought.
He pushed into her and she was surprised that it did not hurt, that she could barely feel a thing.
This was, at least, a half relief. She was not suffering, though she thought she probably should be.
If anyone asked—Auntie maybe, when she wrote a letter—Bette would say it was the most pain she had ever been in, like she was being ripped in two.
But really, she lay still and silent, hard as stone, cool as a window in the shade. And it was fine.
their house was one storey with a basement, located only a block away from the cemetery at Fraser and 41st. Bette did not complain, but in her head she wondered why they had to live so close to a graveyard in a country where it seemed as if land was there for the taking.
Their lot, bordered by a fence made of cheap thin wood, was scrubby and littered with rocks.
No matter how far down she dug in the garden, she uncovered only jagged shards of light grey and medium grey and dark grey stones.
Some were uniform in colour, flat slate or near white.
Others were speckled with black, dotted with flecks that made Bette think of the mould that grew in Hong Kong, in every damp closet, on any piece of clothing left outside in the heavy humid air.
Yes, she did try to plant a garden, those first three springs.
After that, she gave up and allowed the hard dirt to stay hard and flat.
In the absence of seeds and topsoil and fertilizer, other things grew—burdock and dandelions and tansy and foxglove—and Bette, not for the first time, felt superfluous, a presence best tolerated when its work goes unseen.
The house was uninsulated, the glass in the windows so thin that Bette thought the volume of William’s angry shouts would surely break them from the inside out, a bursting outward when their little house couldn’t hold it all in.
He was angry that Bette got pregnant so quickly, angry when the baby cried at night, angry when he lost his job at the shipyard and they had almost nothing left in their bank account.
The house shook with his shouting, with the doubled sound of his voice and the baby’s wails.
There was nothing to muffle it all, and the walls reverberated with the echoes of cries and words until they ceased to be words.
But these were mundane problems, Bette thought, whenever she found herself crying in the bathroom, cold water running in the sink so he wouldn’t hear.
What would Gigi have done? Bette knew. Her mother would have survived, would have reasoned that the bruises and wounds were only superficial, not deep enough to break bones.
She would have found joy where she could, even if only in the silence in the middle of the night when her husband and son were asleep.
She would have closed her eyes and savoured the sensation of warm buttered toast on her tongue.
She would have held her child tight and breathed in the beautiful musk of his scalp.
Bette splashed the water—which always smelled of rust and underground dirt—on her puffy face, blinking until her eyes stopped burning from the cold.
When she looked at the mirrored medicine cabinet, she saw her own face, square and unremarkable.
But as she stared, she saw another face emerging behind her features, one that was pale and smooth with wide-set eyes and a painted red mouth.
Mama , she thought, and the other face smiled, and Bette felt her heart surge.
She had left Hong Kong thinking she never wanted to be haunted by the ghost of her mother again, but now she knew that she had never wanted to be separated from this presence; she had only wanted to escape the drudgery of her life.
It was useless to think she could outrun Gigi.
Her blood ran in her blood; her rage was Bette’s rage.
She had lived a truncated life, and now Bette was going to live for the both of them.
What a surprise , Bette thought and then laughed.
She should have known that nothing is ever so simple.