My Mothers Dresses
My parents landed in Vancouver in 1974, coming by way of Malaysia and Hong Kong. They came with their own languages: Cantonese, Hakka, Malay but all these gave way to the ocean of English. Their memories, too, contained maps. Maps of Kowloon, of Sandakan and Tawau, of Melbourne, maps of the alleyways and side streets that once housed the labyrinth of their childhoods. All that seems very long ago. In 2002, when my mother died, I wandered in circles around her empty house. By this time, my parents had been separated for many years and my mother lived alone, in the nearby suburbs. After her funeral, I stood in her closet and leaned against her clothes, breathing in the lingering scent of her. I recognized dresses she had worn decades before, blouses that I had fallen asleep against, shoes that I had played in.qipao In my mother's house, I also found the books of her childhood, these heavy, elegant tomes of Chinese stories. Because I cannot read the language, I do not know what the books say, nor what stories they hold. I cannot enter into their world, into the imaginative space that my mother once inhabited. I can only carry them with me, dresses that I cannot fit into, complex, alluring scripts that contain the lacework of things I cannot know. Perhaps that is why I find myself so hungry for literature in translation from China and from Southeast Asia. I imagine that books can lead me where my mother no longer can, that they offer secret entryway into a house that is otherwise closed to me.
In my life now, I leap back and forth between Asia and Canada. Each year, the ribbon of homes that I leave suspended behind me, lengthens. Home is Canada and it is also an open box within myself, a fixed structure to which I can bring all the treasures I have collected, all the beauty from away. It is the place where all things sit, sometimes peaceably, sometimes uncomfortably, shoulder to shoulder. "Literature," wrote the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, "is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books." I come from a family that was bereft of storytelling. Indeed, the stories that mattered were the ones least likely to be told. My world was a secretive one and my parents--always complex, always unfathomable--were harried and melancholy and distant. We shared so few confidences. To ease the loneliness and to find my own way forward, I filled my mind with stories, great stacks of books that I hoarded from the library and resisted returning. Writers, I learned, were the bearers of secrets: imaginary ones, real ones. They gathered the detritus of our slipshod world. To make life cohere was, itself, a kind of magic. It was a kind of love affair. I count myself lucky to be among these readers, and to have found a home not only in Canada but in the world of books: in this country, the landscapes are infinite, there are rooms to which I can return again and again, trailing behind me my treasures and my discontent. Literature cannot save us but what it offers is more worthy and more perilous, for within it we find a space in which to question, to reveal, to despair and to hope. It offers a house for the imagination, a house filled with the detritus of this real and shifting world, a house of disquiet. In his masterful novel, , the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro write: "I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing. I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten." My truth is, I belong to many places. I have a history in China and in Malaysia, and I have a home in Canada. The truth is, I have found common ground with those whose homes are vastly different from mine, and whose beliefs challenge the ideas I have taken for granted. Literature is the stadium, the sparring ground, the theatre and the meeting hall. Without it we are multiple solitudes, trapped in our own homes; without literature, I fear to make my home into a prison. Words have always been my way out, a rope to climb to different vantage points, away from myself and towards the other; a means, as Hannah Arendt wrote, "to humanize the wilderness of experience." It is the home that forces me, innocent and knowing, like a child into the world.
