Meanwhile, my mother distracted herself by trying to find my father’s family, wherever they might be, to tell them that their long-lost son or brother or uncle no longer survived in this world. She began searching for Ba’s adoptive father, a man who had once lived in Shanghai and had been known as “the Professor.” He was the only family Ba had ever mentioned. The search for information was slow and painstaking; there was no e-mail or internet back then and so it was easy for Ma to send a letter but difficult to obtain a true answer. My father had left China a long time ago and if the Professor were still alive, he would be a supremely old man.
The Beijing we saw on television, with mortuaries and grieving families, with tanks stationed at the intersections, bristling with rifles, was a world away from the Beijing my father had known. And yet, I sometimes think, not so different after all.
—
It was a few months later, in March 1990, that my mother showed me the Book of Records. That night, Ma was seated at her usual place at the dining table, reading. The notebook in her hand was tall and narrow, the dimensions of a miniature door. It had a loose binding of walnut-coloured cotton string.
Long past my bedtime, Ma suddenly noticed me.
“What’s wrong with you!” she said. And then, confused by her own question: “Have you finished your homework? What time is it?”
I had finished ages ago and had been watching a horror movie on mute. I still remember: a man had just been killed with an ice pick. “It’s midnight,” I said, disturbed, because the man had been soft as dough.
My mother extended a hand and I went to her. She closed one arm around my waist and squeezed. “Do you want to see what I’m reading?”
I leaned over the notebook and stared at the gathering of words. Chinese characters tracked down the page like animal prints in the snow.
“It’s a story,” Ma said.
“Oh. What kind of story?”
“I think it’s a novel. There’s an adventurer named Da-wei who sets sail to America and a heroine named May Fourth who walks across the Gobi Desert…”
I stared harder but the words remained unreadable.
“There was a time when people copied out entire books by hand,” Ma said. “The Russians called it samizdat, the Chinese called it…well, I don’t think we have a name. Look how dirty this notebook is, there’s even bits of grass on it. Goodness knows how many people carried it all over the place….it’s decades older than you, Li-ling.”
I wondered: What wasn’t? I asked if this notebook had been copied by Ba.
My mother shook her head. She said the handwriting was beautiful, the work of a refined calligrapher, while my father’s writing was only so-so. “This notebook is one chapter from something longer. Here it says: Number 17. It doesn’t say who the author is, but look, here’s a title, the Book of Records.”
She set the notebook down. On the dining table, my father’s papers had the appearance of whitecaps, surging forward, about to crest off the surface and explode onto the carpet. All our mail was here, too. Since the New Year, Ma had begun receiving letters from Beijing, condolences from musicians in the Central Philharmonic who had only lately learned of my father’s death. Ma read these letters with a dictionary at hand because the letters were written in simplified Chinese, which she had never learned. Educated in Hong Kong, my mother had studied the traditional Chinese script. But on the mainland, in the 1950s, a new, simpler script had become law in Communist China. Thousands of words had changed; for instance, “to write” (xiě) went from 寫 to 写, and “to know” (shí) went from to 识. Even “Communist Party” (gòng chǎn dǎng) went from 共 產 黨 to 共 产 党. Sometimes Ma could see the word’s former self, other times she guessed at meanings. She said it was like reading a letter from the future, or talking to someone who had turned their back on her. All this was complicated by the fact that she rarely read in Chinese anymore, and expressed most of her thoughts in English. She didn’t like my speaking Cantonese because, as she said, “Your accent is completely crooked.”
“It’s cold in here,” I whispered. “Let’s put on our pyjamas and go to bed.”
Ma stared at the notebook, not even half-listening.
“Mother will be tired in the morning,” I persisted. “Mother will hit snooze twenty times.”
She smiled but her eyes beneath her glasses tightened against something. “Go to bed,” she said. “Don’t wait up for Mother.”
I kissed her soft cheek. She said, “What did the Buddhist say to the pizza maker?”
“What?”
“Make me one with everything.”
I laughed and groaned and laughed again, then shivered, thinking of the victim on the television, his doughy skin. Smiling, she nudged me firmly away.
—
Lying in bed, I considered several facts.
First, that in my grade five class, I was an entirely different person. I was so good-natured and well-adjusted there, so high-achieving, I wondered if my brain and soul were separating.
Second, that in poorer countries, people like Ma and me would not be so lonely. On television, poor countries were crowded places, overloaded elevators trying to rise to the sky. People slept six to a bed, a dozen to a room. There you could always speak your thoughts out loud, assured that someone would hear you even if they didn’t want to. In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.
Third, and this was not a fact but a question: Why had our love meant so little to Ba?
I must have slept because I woke abruptly to see Ma leaning over me. Her fingertips wiped my face. I never cried in the daytime, only at night.
“Don’t be like this, Li-ling,” she said. She was mumbling a lot of things. She said, “If you’re trapped in a room and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It’s obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn’t help a person live.”
“My name is Marie,” I shouted. “Marie!”
She smiled. “Who are you?”
“I’m Li-ling!”
“You’re Girl.” She used my father’s pet name for me, because the word 女 meant both girl and daughter. He liked to joke that, where he came from, the poor didn’t bother to name their daughters. Ma would smack his shoulder and say, in Cantonese, “Don’t fill her head like a garbage can.”
Protected in her arms, I curled once more towards sleep.
Later I woke to the sound of Ma mumbling run-on thoughts and she was cackling. These winter mornings were so lightless, but Ma’s unexpected laugh cut through the room like buzzing from the electric heater. Her skin had the fragrance of clean pillows, of the sweet osmanthus cream that she used.
When I whispered her name, she mumbled, “Heh.” And then, “Heh heh.”
I asked her, “Are you walking on land or in the sea?”
Very distinctly, she said, “He’s here.”
“Who?” I tried to see into the darkness of the room. I truly believed that he was here.
“Adoptive man. That hmmm. That…Professor.”
I held tight to her fingers. On the other side of the curtains, the sky was changing colour. I wanted to follow her into my father’s past, and yet I didn’t trust it. People could walk away towards illusions, they might see something so entrancing they would neglect to turn around. I feared that, like my father, she would no longer remember the reasons for coming home.
—
Life outside–the start of a new school year, the regularity of tests, the pleasures of math camp–continued as if it would never cease, driven forward by the circular world of seasons. My father’s summer and winter coats still waited beside the door, beneath his hats and above his shoes.