If You Still Recognise Me, page 14
“He was always so stubborn. If he wasn’t so stubborn, he wouldn’t have produced such stubborn children, and everything would be different.”
This is too cryptic for me. “From what I can remember, he was really nice.”
“Oh, nice to you! His grandchild! Of course he was nice to you. Grandchildren are everything. It’s always a joy to have a grandchild.”
‘Pou syun.’ The Cantonese phrase she used literally means holding your grandchild in your arms. The emotion that this phrase evokes hits me in a surprising way, making my throat close up. I think about being a baby, and Gung Gung rocking me in his arms, cooing over me.
Nice to you. Something only half healed twinges in my gut. “Po Po, did Gung Gung not treat you well?”
Po Po sighs again. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” she says, folding her hands in her lap.
She doesn’t say anything more for a while, and I think maybe that’s that, that this is all I’m going to get. Then she says, “Your mum and dad. They seem very happy together.”
“Yeah, well, I think so.”
My parents just have this sense of ease around each other. They don’t argue much. They take care of each other and buy each other little things and smile at each other even when they’re tired.
“Hmm. That’s good.”
And again. Silence. I’m sure this talk of my parents being happy must be related somehow to Gung Gung and Po Po’s relationship, but Po Po doesn’t elaborate.
“What about Mum?” I press. “Wasn’t Gung Gung nice to Mum?”
Po Po frowns. “Your mum didn’t like your gung gung very much.” Which isn’t answering my question exactly, but it’s something. It’s new information.
I don’t know how to reconcile this with my mum’s grief.
“What about Uncle Kevin?” I ask.
“Like I said, your gung gung’s children are all very stubborn.” A bee hovers inquisitively around Po Po’s feet. She doesn’t appear to notice. “Your uncle’s wife was so lovely! He found a good woman, and then…”
I’ve never thought about Uncle Kevin’s divorce much. It happened so long ago. I don’t remember his ex-wife at all. “Are you annoyed at him because he got a divorce?”
“Ah… It doesn’t matter now, anyway. Do you know if he’s going to come and visit soon?”
Aha! “I’ve asked him but he didn’t say.”
Immediately, I notice something fragile in Po Po’s face, usually so composed. Something that would flake and flutter away like white ash if I breathe near it. It makes me want to reassure her.
“I’m sure he will soon, though, if he knows you want to see him.”
“Well, he must be busy.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Too long ago. Your po po doesn’t even have a good enough memory to remember the last time.”
This is a ridiculous answer. Po Po’s proud of her memory. Sometimes she tells stories about Mum’s childhood at dinner, and, when Mum says she remembers something differently, Po Po always insists that she’s right and Mum’s wrong. “My memory is impeccable. Better than anyone’s.” The stories are usually only about Mum and Auntie Susan, not about Uncle Kevin.
But once Po Po said that Mum regularly bullied Kevin into doing school projects for her – Mum hated making posters and that kind of thing, but Kevin was good at it. I could feel the atmosphere around the table stiffen like an old tea towel hung out to dry, as though we were all having to watch a gay kiss on TV again.
Mum refused to admit this had ever happened, but after dinner, when we were doing the dishes, she said to me, “Kevin liked doing those posters. I didn’t bully him into it.”
So Po Po loves reminiscing but she’s only interested in memories from Mum’s childhood. Nothing past Mum’s adolescence. And she certainly doesn’t want to think about the last time she saw Uncle Kevin. But I have no doubt she remembers it and remembers it well.
Po Po lapses into silence after that.
If I can’t find out from Po Po what happened, surely I can find out from Uncle Kevin himself. It’s something for my brain to fixate on, at least, that isn’t just Ada’s crush on Gracie.
I’m still not sure what to do, exactly – not about Uncle Kevin, not about Ada, not about anything – so, after lunch, I ask Joan to come over.
When she turns up, she waves a USB stick at me, and I blink at her, confused. “I have hundreds of episodes of Chinese dramas on here,” she says. “They’ll keep your po po entertained.”
Joan describes several different Chinese dramas to Po Po, and Po Po chooses one. Joan starts playing it on the TV, and then Joan and I retreat into the kitchen, and I try to make her some coffee.
“You look like you have no idea what you’re doing,” she says, bemused, as I fumble around with my dad’s cafetière.
“Uh, I totally do,” I say, looking up instructions on my phone.
She laughs, batting my shoulder aside with a spoon. “No, you really don’t. Let me do it.”
I watch her. I’ve seen my dad make coffee lots of times before, but I’ve never paid that much attention. I try to now but I can’t stop thinking about Uncle Kevin.
“Po Po brought up something about Uncle Kevin’s ex-wife today,” I say. “It sounds like she wishes that he never divorced her.”
“That’s not uncommon,” Joan says. “I know my dad’s parents were really upset with him when he and Mum got a divorce. They thought he was in the wrong and should have tried to save the marriage for my sake or something. And now they don’t like my dad that much or my stepmum. We see them a few times every year, but it’s always awkward, and my stepmum hates it.”
“But if it’s the divorce that’s the issue that can’t possibly explain it. The divorce happened before I even started going to primary school, I think. It was before you and I became friends. So it was, like, another … six years or so after the divorce that my family stopped going back to Hong Kong. Unless those two things are unrelated? Like my grandparents got angry at Uncle Kevin for one thing, and then my Mum got angry at my grandparents for something else?”
“I guess that could be it.”
“Po Po said my mum didn’t like Gung Gung very much.”
“Maybe he wasn’t a good dad? And at some point your mum just decided she’d had enough and didn’t want to deal with him any more?”
Joan pours the steaming coffee from the cafetière into a mug and I think of her alone in this city for the first few days after she fled her family trip in Scotland. “Yeah. Maybe. Po Po said he was a ‘hard man’, whatever that means. He was so nice to me… I hope he wasn’t really awful.”
“Maybe it would be better if you stop there,” Joan says. “He’s gone. You never knew him that well. You can keep it that way and let everything stay in the past.”
“But what about Po Po and Uncle Kevin? I still don’t know how to reply to Uncle Kevin’s text.”
“OK, let me see it?”
I open up the chat and put my phone down on the worktop in front of Joan, rereading the text myself.
“Er. And did she say that she wants to see him?”
“Not as such, no. But she did ask if he was going to visit soon! Isn’t that kind of the same thing?”
“Elsie… No?”
I pick up the spoon and smack her arm lightly with it. “OK, fine. But she sounded like she wanted to see him even if she didn’t say it out loud. What should I tell my uncle then?”
“I still think maybe it’s best not to meddle. We don’t know what’s going on here. You should just let them deal with whatever happened between them in their own way.”
I can’t be satisfied with that, though. Not knowing.
I fire off a reply.
“There.” I show Joan my phone again. “I didn’t lie.”
“OK. Well. Let’s go and watch some of the court drama that your po po is watching?”
“Yeah, OK.”
It turns into a new routine: Joan comes over in the afternoons and plays more episodes of the drama for us. I would glance at her to see her reactions at the big moments, noting what makes her laugh or tense up or wince. She always takes the armchair closer to the TV, with her legs hooked over one arm, while I curl up at the end of the big sofa, hugging a cushion, and Po Po sits primly on a wooden chair – it’s better for her back, she says.
After spending so much time together on our holiday, I do miss seeing Ritika, but, between her little cousins coming to visit and her tutoring job, she’s got too much going on to hang out.
I don’t hear back from Uncle Kevin, and so one night, after dinner, as I’m doing the washing-up and Mum is putting away leftovers in Tupperware into the fridge, I ask, “Why hasn’t Uncle Kevin been round recently?”
“He’s busy,” Mum says.
I rinse out the dish that had contained fried fish in sweetcorn sauce, something Po Po thinks is much better than fish and chips. “Doesn’t he want to see Po Po? Isn’t that the whole point of bringing her here, so she can be closer to her family for a bit?”
“Yes, and I’m sure he will come at some point.”
I pick up a bowl and give it a scrub with the soapy sponge. “Well, maybe Joan and I can go up to visit him?”
The idea was just kind of half formed in my head, but saying it out loud I realise it sounds perfectly reasonable. He always comes to visit us, never the other way round. Mum says that she doesn’t like Manchester, that Uncle Kevin loves Oxford. We have a look at a different Oxford college every time he’s here, and there’s a place in the Covered Market where he likes to get food. But I want to see where he lives.
He’s a freelance graphic designer, and he’s single and doesn’t have children – he got divorced when I was little, maybe five or six years old. When I try to imagine his home, I picture a sleek, trendy flat, mostly monochrome with the occasional splash of colour, well placed and eye-catching, plus cool posters on the walls.
“You and Joan?” Mum says.
“Yeah. We had so much fun in Cornwall, we thought we could have another little trip somewhere, and if we stay with Uncle Kevin it’ll save money. I’d ask Ritika to come too, but she’s busy. I know you don’t like Manchester but I’d like to see it for myself! Maybe I could just take a weekend off work or something? We can even bring Po Po with us so she can see him.”
The fridge door shuts decisively behind me. “That’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I told you, Kevin’s busy. He’s got some big project he’s working on, deadlines coming up soon. You shouldn’t disturb him.”
I turn off the tap and look at my mum, who is now wiping down surfaces with a wet dishcloth. “OK,” I say.
In my room, I pull out my phone and text Uncle Kevin.
And I wait again.
On Saturday morning, I’m trying to pick out what to wear for work as usual, cursing myself for not deciding the night before. It’s always before I have to rush off to work that I feel truly fed up with every single item of clothing in my wardrobe. I think about the outfits that Joan wears every day, the shirts and the trousers, usually very plain colours – white, black, grey, various quiet shades of blue – but so neatly put together and striking somehow. I don’t own anything like that.
The only trousers in my wardrobe are jeans.
After fifteen minutes of deliberating, I throw on a lilac dress with white polka dots. I go downstairs, say good morning to my parents and to Po Po, eat my omelette and run.
But, only an hour later, the door chimes and my mum walks into the Speech Balloon.
“That’s my mum,” I hiss to Felix, but I put on a smile as Mum gets closer. “Hi, Mum. What are you doing here? Is everything OK?”
“Of course everything’s OK. If it was an emergency, I would call you, not come here. I said I would try to visit you at work one day, didn’t I?”
“OK. Cool. Great. So this is where I work. And this is Felix, my co-worker.”
“Hello, Felix.”
“Hi, Mrs Lo,” Felix says.
“My mum’s last name is Pang, actually,” I say. “Chinese women don’t tend to take their husband’s surname.”
“Oh cool. Hi, Mrs Pang.”
My mum smiles. “This is a nice shop. Elsie said your father owns it?”
“Yeah. My dad’s just out the back.”
“Mum, I can show you the manga section if you want?”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
I lead Mum over. She stands there, just looking at it, for a long time, and then she says, “Wow, I really don’t know what any of these are. I’m used to reading manga in Chinese. They have different titles.”
I take out my phone and open up the Notes app. “Write down the Chinese titles for me?”
I never have a reason to write Chinese, so my ability to do it is almost non-existent, but my mum uses the Chinese handwriting input to list the titles for me, and I copy and paste each of them into Google to look them up.
Eventually, we figure out together what the English titles are. I can’t find all of them on the shelves here, but I do find a couple. Mum flips through them, her face softening, and I recognise the nostalgia in her expression. I probably look at Joan the same way sometimes, with that ache for what we left behind in childhood, remembering simpler things.
“You can use my staff discount if you want to buy any of these,” I say. “But maybe you want to try reading something new? Joan gave me a list of recommendations, but I haven’t even started on it yet because there are so many other things to read.”
“OK, tell me about them.”
I pause to consider the titles that Mum used to like when she was younger. I’ve been reading about different manga genres just to make sure I can keep up if customers ask me questions, and it seems that Mum likes shounen – the high-action stuff.
I take something from the shelf and present it to her. “This is the best shounen manga ever, according to Joan. I looked it up – it’s super popular – but apparently it’s really, really good. And there are also two anime shows of it? But only the second one is actually a proper adaptation…”
“Oh, I think I’ve heard of this actually, yes,” Mum says, leafing through the first few pages. “I’ll go for it.”
“Cool!”
I turn to go back to the till to ring it up for her, but she puts a hand on my arm. Not for the first time, I think about how thin she is these days, the bones of her wrist too prominent, as if they’re about to pierce her skin.
“Yan Yan, I did want to speak to you about something. Uncle Kevin called and said you texted him about going up to visit?”
“Oh. Yeah. I did. Sorry, I know you said he was busy but I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
“Yes. Well, we talked about it, and he thinks it would be OK for you to visit, but it’s probably best not to bring Po Po for now. In fact, you mustn’t tell her that you’re going up to see him. I’m sure you know that things are a little difficult between her and Uncle Kevin…”
I’m sure you know? It’s so bold of my mum to suddenly say that to me when everybody in my family has refused to broach the topic up till now.
“Um. OK. I mean, I don’t really know what’s going on. Can you not tell me?”
Mum looks down at the book in her hand. “It’s better if I leave it to your uncle. You will… It will be good for you to see him. You and Joan.” She pats my arm a few times absent-mindedly. “Did he ever meet her?”
“I don’t think so. Joan doesn’t remember meeting him.”
“It’s really so lovely to see how much she’s grown up,” Mum says. “I’m so happy for you that you’ve found each other again. Sometimes you lose someone important to you, and you never get them back.”
After dinner on Sunday, Dad brings up the fact that he’s been looking at concert tickets. “How about Thursday?”
“This coming Thursday? Hold on.” I bring up the calendar on my phone. “Yeah, no, sorry, Dad. We have an event at the Speech Balloon that evening. I don’t have to work then, but I’d like to go to it, anyway.” It’s Tam’s event.
“OK, let’s go … Friday then?”
“Yeah, that sounds fine for me. I’ll check if Joan and Ritika are free.”
Joan replies pretty quickly with a thumbs-up emoji.
Ritika dithers a bit more.
I tell Dad, who says he’ll buy the tickets later.
Up in my room, I end up looking at the fic that Ada wrote for Gracie again. She posted it at the beginning of the week, and Gracie was the first to leave a comment, and they had a long conversation right there in the comments thread, throwing I LOVE YOUs at each other like a pillow fight of affection. I didn’t leave a long comment like I usually do. Just a quick one: i already told you how much i loved this and i still do! this is sooo amazing!!
I haven’t really spoken much to Ada since, and she hasn’t reached out, either. I know she’s probably busy at camp, but I’m guessing her priority now is to message Gracie whenever she has a spare second.
I have to do something else – anything else – rather than mope over this. So I pull up the family photos on my laptop. Dad moved all of them on to the cloud some years ago, but I’ve never really looked at them, especially not the ones from years back. They’re organised by year, and I’m looking for Uncle Kevin’s ex-wife, so I go back to 2008, when I was four. I find some from Lunar New Year, which feels like the obvious time period to look for photos that include my extended family.
I spot Uncle Kevin’s ex-wife, a Chinese woman with long hair in a ponytail, wearing a purple fit-and-flare dress. She’s pretty.
Me, on the other hand… I really could have easily been mistaken for a boy, with my spiky, short haircut, baggy trousers and polo shirts. Naam zai tau.
I look through more of the albums.
There are photos of my ye ye and ma ma – my grandparents on my dad’s side. They live on the outskirts of London, and we visit them sometimes. There are photos of trips to Hong Kong. Gung Gung’s round face and Po Po’s pointier one, younger and smoother. Auntie Susan’s there too, with her husband Jeremy and their kids – my cousins.
