The Year of Finding Memory by Judy Fong Bates

Author:Judy Fong Bates
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307374288
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2010-10-19T21:00:00+00:00

I stared for a while at the photograph of my mother and started to think about another one of her I’d seen years before: a small, black-and-white close-up, taken when she was probably in her early twenties. Her hair was black, past her shoulders and parted at the side. Her hands were clasped together and held against her cheek, her head slightly tilted. But despite what the villager in Ning Kai Lee had said, my mother was not beautiful, given her prominent overbite and weak chin. And yet she possessed a compelling face with well-defined cheekbones and a broad forehead. Her dark, coquettish eyes stared directly at the camera. I thought about the young woman in that photograph—her almost flirtatious expression—and wondered if that was the person Jook had recalled for me, the woman who chased her father. I had seen another picture of my mother in her twenties, taken in Nanking, where she was going to school. Dressed in dark trousers and a traditional, quilted Chinese jacket, she stood in what appeared to be newly fallen snow. Her arms looked stiff, her shoulders hunched up against the cold. But in this picture, I could not make out her face. These were the only two pictures I had ever seen of my mother as a young woman. As a child I was fascinated with them, I suppose in the way that all children are curious about who their parents were before they’d had children. But because the land of my mother’s youth was so far away and so unlike Canada, my fascination was even more accentuated. I often think of those photographs, but I haven’t seen either for many years. They were probably lost during one of our moves, or my mother may have tossed them out in anger after my father’s death.

My mother first met my father in 1930, when he hired her to teach in his village. The young woman I remembered in those photographs would not have looked much different than the person my father met. She was unlike anyone who had ever lived in, or possibly even visited, Ning Kai Lee. With her education and big city background, she bestowed status on this tiny, impoverished village. When my father first met my mother, he would have been a man of thirty-eight, back from the Gold Mountain, a man in his prime and with considerable status himself. In such circumstances, a prize catch.

The eventual marriage between a woman from an elevated background and an eloquent Gold Mountain guest, who spoke with authority about Confucius and Mencius, China’s two greatest philosophers, was for the local villagers whom I met the stuff of fairy tales. As I had listened to their reminiscences, I had been amused by and skeptical of their stories, the mythology that had grown up around my parents, amazed that even though they had not lived in the village for almost sixty years, people knew who they were. But my mother, a beautiful woman? It was hard not to smile.

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