Photo by Gaku Suyama
I remember the first days in Rome-sur-le-lac when we shared a medium-sized barge with two other families on the outskirts of the floating city. Our lone beaten-down door looked out the delta into the big wet of Lake Ontario, but most days, the future on the other shore was a little too far to see.
One of the other families was Hanish, but they spoke mainly Gwangdongnese and only picked out the odd phrase of Cidadan. I tried talking with them by mixing Cidadan with my poor, broken-up French, and we became great friends, mostly without understanding each other. They had a little more than us, and on days we couldn’t eat, they’d bring a couple of extra lotus leaves with sticky rice, a treat I missed badly from college days in Nandzing. My husband would proudly refuse, but end up shoveling down an extra wrap I snuck him a little later in private.
He also refused to learn one lone word of French; we were set – or he was set, which was the same – on moving out to the vast, empty American frontier, and he contented himself sitting pretty on his unnaturally good English. I told him once no soul outside America and a couple of other backwaters cared a lick about English. Maybe on Gaia, it’d be helpful, as one says, but not in this world or this life. He got mad, hollering about “frogs,” which I didn’t know was a rude English word that some Americans used for these neighbours to their north. He’d sometimes mix these obscure English things into his speech, which left me fumbling and confused. Lord knows how he’d picked them up in a little town in the flood lands of southern Hani, even though the army had sent him off to that nice international school, but somehow he had.
This wasn’t long after I’d had the baby, and lots of things were hard to bear still. I’d look down at his plump face with love and revulsion at all hours of day and night, this little creature I’d fled the center of the world to have. He would never go back there, never see the old, dull white teeth of the starships in Baydzing that had gathered the world’s oceans at our feet—ignorant child. The rocking of the placid waves in the evening could hardly lull him to sleep, and even then, it was just a couple of short hours. My older helped out as best he could when he wasn’t off at school, but he was only a child himself, not the kind of child-man I’d spied with jealousy in friends’ boats sometimes.
My exhaustion tore down deep into my belly; I lay bedridden for weeks, the baby sometimes with me and sometimes not. I had a dangerous infection in my head. The doctor said when she finally came, eat this and sleep lots. Merci beaucoup, ma’am, I’ll do just that. As I felt strong enough to return to my own two feet, I looked in anguish into the mirror one shiny winter morning and saw that the right half of my face was sagging, the muscles slack and loose.
Maybe it’ll be for always, the wife from the Gwangdongese couple told me, the way life, health, and love go sometimes. No way, no way, I can’t accept how it goes. In every spare moment between cooking and hushing and running after the men of the boat, I smacked, squeezed, rubbed every inch of flesh on the droopy side, doused it in the lake’s icy water, then again with water near fresh out the boiling kettle, then icy, scalding. By summer, I would look into the little infant’s eyes and see myself reflected symmetrically. I told him with feeling, “You better feel lucky I can take care of myself and you ’cause I know you’ll be worth it.”
Many years later, when my husband was working the door-engineering job, and we lived in that big house out over the empty plains on the far side of the great river, I heard about the truck that ran off the road—left or right? Either way, the symmetry was broken—and I remembered those words and that feeling with terror.
When we moved to our first place in America, just over the border straight, I found it hard to trust him. I could hardly feel my way around the English-speaking people in town, constantly getting confused with the scraps of French stuck in my tongue and teeth. I lived in the little community of a few Hanish families and felt almost normal. Still, some other women liked my husband too much, mainly because of his confident English and hard-earned study of American ways to survive and prosper independently. I was restrained at home alone, bound up by not understanding how to move around the world outside. I don’t know if anything ever happened. I don’t think it did. But it could be something I tell myself now that it’s far in the past.
I also tried hard to take some of those American ways for me in this barren new world. I started going nights to the classes in doronumerics at the blocky little technical college on the river’s edge, where I understood as much as or more than the teacher about the symbols he showed us on the big screen at the front of the room, but maybe every other word out his mouth. My husband asked me how I could ever work independently, with my trouble with English and the kids on top. At least the little one for ten more years since the older one was going off soon. And the little one was so special, strange and different, and took up so much of my head with worry and wonder.
I had no answer and couldn’t be without them, so for love, I accepted that American independence wasn’t mine to keep. On Gaia, maybe I was fiercer and lived a different life out in my American wilds, where my mind ran unburdened. Things are changed there, or supposed to be. But maybe not everything.
The older man was still a child but a child-man now, serious and untalkative like his father. But with the little one, he was devoted and so playful still, more of a father than his own, though I only made the mistake of saying that out loud once and getting the hollering back at me. When he came home to visit, he’d only ask about his little brother, spend hours in make-believe with him, babbling English words I couldn’t follow – half made-up, I think. Like his father, he didn’t know how to talk as seriously as much, but the little one wasn’t yet at the age when he needed to talk so much.
Not yet. Later, I wished I’d pushed them together more when he needed it. But I would’ve done more bad than good, then – they’d always gone against my push, had their hard heads easily filled up with spite like their father. They’ll learn the hard way that they need each other. They’re the only blood they’ve got left in the world, not separated by oceans and other stranger distances. We won’t always be here with them.
In the big, empty house now, I stay up with the glow of homely nights, even as they’ve gone. The wind whistles over vast fields of tall grass outside, and I feel the tension drain down my feet, into the soft cushions, and then into the dark.
Yiv Cui is a second-generation Chinese Canadian who was born in Toronto and has lived in many Canadian and American cities throughout his childhood. He owes his existence to his parents’ immigration due to the one-child policy.