Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng

Author:Fae Myenne Ng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2023-04-20T16:07:41+00:00

13

In China, when Grandmah negotiated her daughter’s marriage contract, she wanted the groom to sign a promissory note.

“I give you my daughter. Give me your word that you’ll reunite mother and daughter in America.”

Dad refused to sign. “What I say, I do.” His belief was to create—he had a word for it but I can’t remember clearly, but I still understood its meaning and intent—a togetherness of feeling, a skill at getting along, a willingness to build one heart with many rooms of sympathy. That was the business of love.

In America, he kept his word. He entered the Chinese Confession Program and swore that his name, You Thin Toy, was fictitious. His citizenship was revoked. His bride did not consider his humiliation. He swore injustice and their marriage soured. He accused her of using him. She forbade him to continue. “Wanting my mother with me is no betrayal.”

Dad went to sea and Mom managed the store alone. She put my sister into the baby carriage, and we walked to Chong’s Supplies, which was at the far edge of Chinatown. I helped her stack supplies into the back of the stroller and I carried a pack of napkins, sometimes a stack of paper bags.

There were many late nights when she cried. Our neighbors, Luday and her husband, spent many evenings consoling Mom. From my eavesdropping and finding their letters, I’ve pieced a story together. Great-Grandfather was old; my sister and I were too young to help. She wanted him to stop going to sea, to find work on land.

Recently I found a letter she wrote to my father in English. Her penmanship shows she has not started to learn the language. Her letters are unbalanced, the top and bottom of each alphabet stiff, as if she wanted to add more strokes, as if a kingdom lies in wait behind each letter, ready for an uprising.

Finding this note meant my father kept it and brought it home from Yokohama.

Four English words: Baby Sick Come Home.

Each word is capitalized as if they were singular characters, almost like soldiers each sent out to do a job. I knew this letter was quickly cobbled by Luday’s husband, a Chinatown waiter. The letter wasn’t written for Dad but for the captain who had the power to let our father come home. I know there was a more intimate letter in Chinese, but I haven’t found it. Perhaps I stopped looking after I found the aerogramme where Mom tells of her first pregnancy: “My body has happiness.”

* *

Four years after the Summer of Love, after Mom studied, learned, and then forgot her naturalization English, Grandmah arrived. Mom was a seventeen-year-old bride when she left her mother and now she was forty-three and had given birth to four children.

The reunion at the airport was pained. I watched my mother’s anxious eyes fall on each passenger who departed the customs door. When Grandmah came through, I saw an old woman with a harshly threaded widow’s hairline, in dark tunic and trousers.

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