My Mother's Dresses
Madeleine Thien
August 16, 2008
In the city where I was born, there are many languages. From Chinatown to Little India, to the Portuguese enclave and Japantown, languages eddy and muddy the river. When I was young, my world was Vancouver. I was proud of the cracks in the sidewalk, proud of the way I needed no map, no instruction, no guide; the expanse of the city, its alleyways and side streets, resided in my memory, as firm and clear as my idea of myself.
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.
My friend, the Canadian novelist Rawi Hage, once said, "It is not only the rich who have many homes." So it was for my parents. They came trailing a ribbon of homes, memories of old apartments and family businesses, address books listing the loved ones left behind and the cities reduced to memory. For decades, in Vancouver, my parents, my siblings, and I lived a transient life. Poverty and bankruptcy pushed my parents from one home to another but in each new neighbourhood, no matter our circumstances, we arrived hopeful. The unfamiliar kitchen sink, the empty cupboards, the windows with their different vistas, each was romantic and mysterious. They offered all of us the hope of reinvention.
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.
In my mother's wedding trunk, I found dresses from her youth. I had never seen them before: pink and green Chinese dresses with mandarin collars, exquisite, dainty dresses. One by one, I slipped these qipao over my head, but each one was too small for my grain-fattened, milk-drinking Canadian body. These dresses had trailed behind her, from Hong Kong to Malaysia, they had journeyed across the Pacific Ocean and into every hope-filled apartment in which we had lived but she had never unfolded them and laid them before my dazzled eyes. I wondered sometimes if she, too, had forgotten of their existence.
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.
There is another kind of home, too, that I alluded to earlier, the home that I seek out through writing.
"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 came to my writing first and foremost through Vancouver, the city of my childhood, and through the literature of Canada. The books of home tell me not only about the world within the Canadian borders, but about the way individual experience leaps over and falls before these boundaries. The literature of home proved to me, again and again, that writing not only defies borders, but it brings the periphery to the centre. It draws our gaze to the crevices and the minute, the cracks in the epic, the multiples selves within the individual. It adds labyrinth upon labyrinth to our shared experience of the times in which we are now living.
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.
Literature cannot save us. It cannot change the governments that represent us, it cannot eradicate racism, poverty, ignorance or suffering. Literature is only the trillions of words, in the eddy of languages, that we have managed to grasp and hold for a brief moment in time. Literature is a cacophony and the great joy belongs to the reader, the people who walk through this world listening, the ones who hear and recognize a voice that is not their own.
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.
This disquiet is the country to which we writers belong. We are troubled by the world we see, or by the worlds we can no longer see. We are troubled by ourselves.
In his masterful novel, Never Let Me Go, 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."The writer holds many worlds and many homes and I think it is up to us to be stubborn, to be persistent, and to refuse to let them go.
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.