Suzanne Ma Online

By PETER ENG
HONG KONG — She’s an immigrant of the most traditional, stubborn sort, my mother, who recently turned 86 . Although she arrived in the United States from Hong Kong more than 40 years ago, Lai Wau Chiu Eng still speaks little English. Like my father, she had little interest in learning except for the few pidgin phrases they needed to run their “Chinese hand laundry” in New York.

To her, only Chinese mattered; the Americans were the gweilo, the “foreign devils.” Other than Chinatown, the only places she knew in the city were the supermarket and the Chinese take-out places near her apartment. She’s now in an assisted-living home for Asians in Seattle.

Despite our parents’ efforts, I and my six brothers went on a much different path. All I wanted was to fit in with my classmates and not be slotted as “that Chinese boy.” I had to help out in the laundry after school, but I hated it. I had to go to Cantonese school on Sundays, but I hated it. By my teenage years, I had lost most of my native language.

My mother grew up in a little village in Guangdong Province, in southeastern China. I’ve visited those dark, stifling warrens, still without electricity or running water.

Several years ago, my mother went back for the first time. She didn’t talk much about it then. But such things remain in the recesses of the heart and mind, where we preserve, amid all the wanderings of a lifetime, our sense of who we really are. And they surface when we start counting our days.

When my father was dying in a New York hospital in 1977, he told us that he wanted to go back to Hong Kong. A few years ago, my mother had a stroke that left her homebound. Recently over dinner she mentioned that village in Guangdong. “Wai,” she said, as always calling me by my Chinese name, “do you think it would be a good idea for me to go back to live there? I could go back and fix it up.”

Mainland China feels foreign to me, but in Hong Kong I do share a common identity with my mother. My parents fled to Hong Kong in the early 1950’s after the Communists won the civil war. They tended chickens in the New Territories for a living before migrating to the United States so that their children could get a good education.

I visited Red Water Bridge again recently, as I often feel compelled to. The row of family shops on the main road has been razed, replaced by a sanitized central market compound. The government has moved residents to public housing blocks up north so it can redevelop the village. Just off the main road, down a narrow path that snakes along a sewerage canal, our house still stands. It is a one-story, ramshackle structure. The water well, where as a boy I saw big drowned rats, is still there out front.

In my pidgin Cantonese, I spoke with Mrs. Wong, a family friend who ran a tailor shop on the main road when I was growing up. I found the old woman on the 24th floor of the public housing block. She asked how my mother was doing in retirement. “Your mother always worked so hard, tending to the chickens. It was a lot of hardship for her. Oh, your mother…,” Mrs. Wong said, her voice giving way to admiration and pity.

Shame filled me and tears came. I now know that in hating the narrow-mindedness of my parents, I myself was narrow-minded.

I know our old house will be knocked down soon. So I stand before the high metal fence silent and still, preserving sight, sound and smell. In that house I see how simple people struggle, and succeed, in breaking the bonds of their history. I see how far I have come, and what my parents sacrificed to see me through this journey.

Civil war raged in China when my mother was born in 1923. She grew up poor and illiterate, and she hardly knew her own mother, who had gone abroad to find work. (“I was only 15 when she went to Malaysia,” my mother says. “Since then I’ve only seen her in my dreams.”) Then my mother toiled in two lands of exile, Hong Kong and America. But always she thought only of seeing to it that her sons were healthy and successful, with no need to toil as she did.