Chapter Five
The next years were difficult. Not only was our farm destroyed, the vegetable gardens scorched and the orchard razed, but soon after came a severe drought.
For too long, we continued to eat roots and yams. No meat, no eggs, no milk.
Rice became a treat that made me choke up with joy, and I could count on one hand how many times we had bread.
Mama grew worried that the lack of food would stunt my brothers’ growth.
At night, while I pretended to be asleep, she stole out of her bedroom, collecting beetles from under the rocks in the garden.
At breakfast, we had a grainy black “congee.” No one dared grumble, not even Ah Ma. But no one asked for seconds.
Come winter, the plum blossoms bloomed and the rains came and went. Life went on.
My brothers shot up in height. Their bones stretched long and lanky, and their throats bobbed when they spoke.
One day Dai Gor came home sporting the first whiskers of a mustache and carrying a bucket of artillery shells he and his friend had dug up.
That was the day he announced he wanted to enlist in the National Revolutionary Army.
“You’re too young,” Mama said. “The army won’t take you.”
Ah Ma agreed. “Utter such nonsense again and I’ll break your legs.”
Dai Gor simmered in discontent. In a silent rebellion, he came home late every night afterward, and sometimes not at all. Mama didn’t rebuke him. His absence became a splinter in the family that she pretended didn’t exist. But she did pray more.
Twice a week she busied herself by writing simple letters for our neighbors.
Her characters were heavy-handed and inelegant, and most of the missives carried no address aside from vague references to this refugee camp or that, but trying to help others locate their missing relatives gave Mama a sense of purpose.
I sensed she needed hope just as much as our neighbors did.
While Mama increasingly spent more time away, I took care of the house.
I cooked, I gardened, I patched the broken stones in the walls and fished scraps of aluminum out of the gutters.
Callouses roughened my fingers, new muscles tautened my arms and calves, and my face grew pretty.
Ah Ma was the one who started remarking on my looks.
“Come closer, ah Ying. Let me look at you.”
She squinted as though she couldn’t believe what she saw.
“No longer a death by sight, are you? I thought you were like your mother, best seen in the dark. Turns out you’ve got some Ha blood after all!
” She pinched my cheeks, then clucked her tongue at Mama.
“Keep her hands soft, Yuk Fong, and she’ll marry rich one day. ”
Ah Ma became nicer to me, but not kinder.
She began asking me to sing after our meals.
At first I thought it was because she enjoyed my music, but then she’d stop me mid-verse and tell me to smile more flirtatiously.
Soon I caught on. When she offered me an extra serving at dinner, it was to make my cheeks plumper, my face healthier.
When she forbade Mama from cutting my split ends, it was to keep my hair longer and more feminine.
She began to bemoan that binding feet was no longer in fashion, so she measured my waist and the width of my forehead instead, recording the numbers in a book.
That was when she remembered that I couldn’t read.
“A high-class man will want a wife who can read,” said Ah Ma with a frown. “It won’t do for you to end up barely literate like your mother.”
“Will you teach me?” I asked.
“I’m a lady, not a tutor.” Ah Ma grimaced, as she did when she was thinking hard. “I’ll write to your father. There are schools in Hong Kong that can straighten out girls even like you. We’ll see about you joining him there.”
My heart leapt. “Really?”
Ah Ma nodded, more to herself than for me. “I know someone in Shenzhen who’s been smuggling people across the border.”
“Don’t bother.” Mama’s face darkened. “The Japanese will be in Hong Kong soon. It’ll be years before the war is over.”
For the first time, I felt a frisson of animosity toward my mother. Did she always have to be so gloomy? “The British won’t let Hong Kong fall.”
Mama’s lips thinned. “What do you know about such matters? You’ll go if I say you can go.”
I turned to Ah Ma for help. For so long, I’d yearned to go to school, and to finally be given this chance was like a taste of cake after months of watery gruel.
“Aiya, Yuk Fong, what kind of mother are you?” said my grandmother. “It’s for ah Ying’s future!”
Mama wouldn’t budge. The two bickered the rest of the evening, but for once, my mother won. The remainder of the week, Ah Ma pretended I didn’t exist.
I couldn’t understand why Mama would hold me back. Was she jealous that I might be reunited with Baba?
After all the times I’d defended her from my brothers, from Ah Ma, this was a betrayal.
I’d hold the grudge against her for a long time, even though Mama ended up being right about everything. Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, and over the course of their occupation, a million Hong Kong Chinese would leave for the mainland.
It would be four long years before the war was over and I heard from Baba.
It was 1945, late summer in Tunglam. The biggest news in town was that one of the old stone bridges had finally been fixed. Yi Gor and I were chasing ducks, trying to catch one for dinner, when firecrackers abruptly roared and the ducks scattered in terror.
Yi Gor and I exchanged a fearful look and ran for home. All along the streets, the townspeople were shouting, “It’s over! The war is over!”
We found Mama with our neighbors, crowded around the radio, listening to the news that Emperor Hirohito had surrendered unconditionally. There was more, about the United States dropping catastrophic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I couldn’t hear over the flurry of everyone’s excitement.
“It’s over,” Yi Gor whispered. “They lost.”
I couldn’t cheer or weep with relief as others were doing.
Instead of joy, I felt numb. The war had devoured my childhood, and my memories of life before were faint, almost as distant as my memories of living with my father.
Now, it was over. Things would go back to the way they were. But what did that even mean?
The change happened quickly. A few weeks later, the Japanese left China. They were like locusts, here one day then gone the next. The mess they left would take years to clean up.
At eleven, I was a slip of a girl, teetering on the precipice of womanhood.
I wore a white undershirt to hide the two soft mounds forming below my collarbones, and with my nails I plucked at the tiny hairs sprouting under my armpits.
As a child, my voice had been high and sweet, delicate like the popular singers I heard on the radio.
Now it was lower, deeper. I sounded like a stranger in my own head and I hated it.
Nonetheless, I didn’t stop singing. I needed music.
I loved it the way Ah Ma loved the house.
Music restored my faith that there was still wonder in this world, still beauty.
Every chance I got I listened to the radio.
I memorized every song on air and sang them constantly, so immersed in my daydreams of becoming a famous singer that I forgot to pay mind to my chores.
“Ying!” Mama would whack my arm with the rice paddle. “The cabbage is burning! What’s the matter with you?”
She’d seen how when I went outside, the boys who used to come by to see Yi Gor now dallied to flirt with me. Mama blamed my negligence on such attentions. She thought I was in love.
I’d get another whack, then she’d go on and on about the foolishness of young romance.
The lectures went in one ear and out the other.
Pretending to listen was better than telling her about my dream of becoming a famous singer.
I knew what Mama would say: that singers were scarcely better than prostitutes.
She was teaching me to become a wife and mother.
I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t want her life. I didn’t want to marry a man I’d never met and end up caged in a house of strangers.
Then came the letter from Baba.
I was in the kitchen frying rice when Mama appeared at the door. Never one to ease into a difficult conversation, she said, “Your father has invited you and Yi Gor to Hong Kong.”
Startled, I dropped my paddle into the wok. “What?”
“Ah Ma wrote to your father as soon as Hong Kong was liberated,” said Mama, taking my place at the charcoal stove. “She asked him to take you in.”
At this point, my father was more a list of memories than a person, tucked into a drawer far in the back of my mind.
I recalled that his hair smelled like shoe polish, and he kept a comb in his back pocket to tame every strand that dared fall out of place.
His face was a clock with too many hands: thick eyebrows pointing at two and ten, the ends of his mustache at four and eight.
He always had a pipe in his mouth or a cigarette between his fingers, and his cheeks turned red when he drank too much wine. He liked to eat salted fish.
I had missed him at first, but that longing had long since curdled into resentment. He had written us only one letter, simply to say that he’d arrived in Hong Kong. Mama had tucked it away in a biscuit tin that stored her needles and buttons and never mentioned it again.
“Will Dai Gor come too?” I asked.
“No,” Mama replied. “He will work for eldest uncle in Guangzhou come the spring.”
“When will we leave?”
She turned to the rice, stirring it vigorously. “I won’t be going.”
“What?” It was as though I’d been struck. “But—”
“Your father remarried,” she interrupted without looking at me. “He took another wife before the war, and she lives with him in your aunt’s house.”
“Baba remarried,” I repeated stupidly.
“You’ll call her Sai Ma, understand?”
Little mother. Or, second mother.