Free The Year of Finding Memory by Judy Fong Bates

those things. You see, the stars were wrong. There was nothing my father could do about it. The gods had already decided to be unkind, giving me that very no-good man.”
    At this point she always let loose with a rueful laugh, signalling the end of her story. Sometimes a shake of her head followed, with a few words muttered under her breath, as if there was more to tell, probably worse, which I would never hear. A part of me never liked these stories about my parents’ past lives. I didn’t like the fact that both of them had been married before and that I had half-siblings who were much older, some old enough to be my parents.
    When I was seven, I had a friend who told me that her mother was twenty-nine. One day we were playing at the sandbox in the park, and I saw a young, slim, dark-haired woman leaning against the corner of a picnic table. She was watching us. She was dressed in a sleeveless blouse, her long, tanned legs stretching out from a pair of short shorts. I canremember my astonishment when my friend looked up from our play and ran toward this young woman, calling her Mummy. It felt so unfair that she should have this mother who was so young, so pretty and feminine, while my mother seemed, well, so plain and old.
    I didn’t want parents who washed other people’s clothes. I wanted ones who were young, with bright, sparkling smiles, who lived in a house with a flower garden and a swing set, drove a car. I wanted a father who wore a suit and worked at the office , a mother who stayed home and baked cookies. I wanted parents who spoke English. My parents were outsiders, people without status. Although my embarrassment shamed me, I saw how hard my father and my mother worked and how little they had. I felt their helplessness in the marrow of my bones and I hated it.

    For as long as I could remember, my mother had told me how much she loved me, that I was her thlem gwon , her heart and her liver. Yet in the same breath, she would tell me, as if my love didn’t count, that the only person who had ever loved her was her thoh , her sister-in-law, the one married to her oldest brother, the man I called Big Uncle. My mother was only a child of six when he’d brought this woman home as his wife. By then her own mother was dead, and it was this thoh who raised her. In my mother’s hometown of Taishan, Big Uncle was a much celebrated man. Before he was married he had been to school in Peking, where he had passed theImperial Examinations. For his homecoming the entire street was festooned with red and gold banners, and the air echoed with the sound of exploding firecrackers and the smell of scorched paper. Banquets were held in his honour, and baskets of delicious cakes and biscuits were given out to neighbours. Because of that single accomplishment, many doors opened for Big Uncle. He became a high-ranking official in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and afterwards a man of exceptional wealth. According to my mother, Big Uncle was mung kah lah , powerful.
    I listened with rapt attention to the stories about life in Canton, living in Big Uncle’s five-storey mansion, surrounded by manicured gardens and a high, wrought-iron fence, its imposing entrance guarded by a gatekeeper. Big Uncle had a staff of twelve, including servants, cooks and chauffeurs. He had built a private screening room for watching movies and a rooftop garden, where he, his family and guests would spend summer evenings sitting around a marble dining table, looking up at a star-studded sky, while servants brought out one mouth-watering course after another. The aroma of the food mingled with the fragrance of flowers redolent in the moist, night air. I could see it in my mind: the women slender and fine-boned, in their fitted silk cheongsams , fingernails painted, hair coiled into perfect French rolls, the men elegant in their smart, Western suits, the conversation witty, the laughter silky. Just like the movies.
    It’s still difficult for me to