If You Still Recognise Me, page 21
I don’t know why we have to but I suppose talking in English in front of Po Po is rude, or maybe Mum doesn’t want Dad to be involved, either. I follow her upstairs, and she picks the master bedroom, not mine. The muted tones of the room, compared to the bright colours in mine, always make me feel more grown up, but also a little sombre.
We both sit on the very beige bed.
“It’s been a strange eight years,” she says. In Cantonese now because it’s a language she feels more comfortable in.
I personally prefer English but I answer in Cantonese because I can’t have this conversation if we’re fundamentally disconnected on some level. “Yeah, I’m now finally getting that. All I felt before was a bit confused as to why we hadn’t been back to Hong Kong in so long.”
“Yes… Well, eight years ago, your uncle went to Hong Kong with his friend.”
God, even Mum was still pulling this shit. “His husband.”
Mum puts her hand on my knee. “His husband,” she amends. “But David wasn’t his husband then. He was his … boyfriend.”
She says this as carefully as one would pick up a xiaolongbao with chopsticks pinched round the tip of the dumpling, so as not to break the thin wrapper and let all the hot, flavourful broth inside leak out. She glances at me as if seeking my approval but I’m not going to congratulate her just for this minimal effort.
“We… In Cantonese, we have a habit of calling these people friends. Even if you had a boyfriend, I would probably sometimes call him your friend.”
I didn’t know that. “OK.”
“So… Kevin and David went to Hong Kong, and they tried to go for yum cha with Po Po and Gung Gung. And Gung Gung walked out when it became clear who this white man was to Kevin. Po Po apparently stayed behind just to finish her dim sum and then left. The only time Gung Gung spoke to Kevin after that was a phone call to say that he didn’t ever want to see him again. No word from Po Po at all. Kevin came back and told me what happened, and I … I was so upset. I had known this about him since we were teenagers. He’s my brother. He’s… It was clear to me that my parents were wrong. I thought that if I stopped speaking to them and if your Auntie Susan also stopped…”
“So Auntie Susan hadn’t been to Hong Kong in eight years, either?”
“Yes. Like me, she returned for Ah Gung’s last few days and for his funeral.” Mum sighs. “But yes. That was our tactic. For eight years, we never visited, never called, never messaged. Apart from in the first few weeks after they disowned Kevin, when Susan and I both rang to tell them that we weren’t happy with how they had treated him. And, after that, no contact at all. We thought that we could change their minds. If none of their children were talking to them, maybe they’d soften. Surely they’d get lonely.”
“But they didn’t.”
“They didn’t. Your gung gung was always disastrously stubborn.”
“And what about Po Po? How does she feel about all this now?”
“I’m not sure. I know she has her regrets but we haven’t delved too deeply into the subject. It turns out that, when you don’t speak to somebody for eight years, it’s not easy to start again, especially about the one issue that divided you for so long. All I know is that I don’t want her to be alone right now.”
“So why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“It was a difficult situation. I wasn’t sure you’d understand it. You were only ten.”
“And Kevin being in a relationship with a man? That wouldn’t have been hard for a ten-year-old to grasp. Plenty of ten-year-olds understand that just fine.”
I’m getting frustrated. Joan said she’d known she was a lesbian when she was only eleven.
“Yes. I know. But you were… You were. You know. You were such a naam zai tau. Everyone thought you were a little boy. I wanted to wait until you were older. When you were more settled in your own identity.”
“Wait, what?” There’s some kind of twisted logic behind my mum’s words that isn’t easy to piece together, intellectually or emotionally. “You didn’t want me to know about Uncle Kevin because I was a naam zai tau? You thought that if I knew about him I would… I would become gay.”
Before today, I don’t think I’d ever said the word ‘gay’ to my mum. This one word feels like an emergency siren wailing through the streets, all other traffic parting frantically before it. Flashing lights above me and underneath the word GAY emblazoned in bold capital letters on my forehead.
“No… Not. Not that. I just didn’t want to put any ideas in your head that weren’t already there.”
This is absolutely infuriating. I cover my face with my hands. “Oh my God. Mum. That’s…”
I don’t even know what to say. It seems like the perfect opportunity to come out and say, Well, I did turn out to be queer, despite your best efforts at keeping the whole concept of being gay under wraps. But I can’t do it.
“And now I’m old enough to find out?”
“You’re too old for me to keep things from you. And then there’s Joan…”
“What about her?”
“Ah, your mum went to secondary school in Hong Kong! I’ve known girls like her. There have always been girls like her. I thought, if she’s your best friend, then you already have those ideas in your head.”
Mum and I are fast veering into very weird territory. Not that this whole conversation isn’t totally bizarre. Two days ago, I never would have expected to be talking about my gay uncle with my mum.
“Oh my God. OK. Well, I’m glad you’ve told me everything now. Please don’t say you’re keeping any more massive family secrets from me because I will not be able to handle it.”
“No. I’m all out of secrets.”
“Great.”
I get up to finally, finally retreat to the sanctuary of my own bedroom after what feels like a whole month away from it, but my mum touches my arm.
“Wait. I have more to say.”
“What is it?”
“I … I don’t regret picking my brother’s side. But it was still a very hard eight years. And it’s been especially hard this year. My father dying… I know Kevin couldn’t do it; he still couldn’t bring himself to see the man who had so completely rejected him. But Susan and I had to see your Ah Gung one last time before he died. And, when I saw him fading in front of my own eyes, I … I wished everything could have been different.”
Mum pauses to stroke a photo on her bedside table, of her and her siblings and her parents. The picture is probably older than me. But I don’t think it’s always been there. Mum must have been going through photo albums. The frame is pristine, and they’re all together, at some sort of celebratory banquet – the wall in the background is tomato-red. Maybe it had been one of Gung Gung’s birthdays. He’s in the centre, as jolly as I remember him.
“I miss him,” Mum continues. “The side of him that was gentle and fed pigeons and crooned along to love songs on the radio. I wish he’d never given me a reason to hate him. And I … I don’t want that for us, Yan Yan. Do you hear me? I don’t want our relationship to ever fall apart so badly that we don’t speak for the rest of my life. I will try my best to listen to you and understand you, no matter what.”
She clasps one of my hands between both of hers and starts to cry.
I hate seeing her like this, the desolation on her face like a brick thrown through the glass walls of my heart. I imagine her sitting beside Gung Gung’s hospital bed, looking exactly like this, holding his withered hand as it grew cold.
Her own hands are bony too, but they’re as warm as the air in the kitchen whenever it’s white with steam from her cooking.
“I hear you,” I say.
Now that I know that she’s so supportive of Uncle Kevin, I’m slightly more confident that she would be OK with me being bi, but I still don’t feel like coming out to her right now.
“Thanks, Mum. I’ll never disown you, either.”
Mum looks startled by my terrible attempt at a joke but she’s no longer crying, and she might even be smiling, just a little. “Promise, little onion?”
Little onion. She hasn’t called me that since I was a child. I can’t even remember where the nickname comes from. “Promise, Mum.”
As I leave the room, I try very hard to believe that my mum will always love me unconditionally, an exercise that I’ve made myself do repeatedly ever since I realised I was queer, and in this moment it seems just a little less impossible than it ever had before.
For the umpteenth time this summer, with the morning light streaming through my window, I examine my wardrobe. It isn’t helping with my frustration at all.
I’m avoiding leaving my room. I can’t bring myself to confront my po po yet. If Mum can’t broach the subject with Po Po, I’m going to do it for her. But I’m trying to put it off a little longer.
So I’m thinking about my clothes. Really thinking about them.
Dresses, miniskirts, fitted tops. Nothing so short or tight that my parents would disapprove. I mostly prefer things that look pretty. Lace and softness, florals everywhere. I like opening my wardrobe and seeing a garden in bloom.
When I started secondary school, without Joan, I was suddenly so much more aware of how wrong I looked compared to other girls. There was the school uniform that we all wore, of course, but when I bumped into anyone I knew from school at the weekends, when I was out and about with my parents, I could practically hear the laughter as soon as I turned my back.
So I made myself more like all the girls in pretty dresses, to fit in. By the time Leo came along, there was no trace of the girl I used to be, with her short hair and cargo shorts and her distaste of anything girly. I had erased her.
And Leo was clear about what he liked me to wear. Which outfits he thought I looked best in. The way it cut through his breath when he saw me wearing something that turned him on still makes me shiver to recall.
And my parents, too, had an image they wanted me to fit into. Mum’s eyes lighting up when she saw me in a pretty dress, Dad’s face smoothing over with approval. My daughter is so beautiful.
If it hadn’t been for Joan, I would have forgotten about the girl I was entirely. I would have lost her forever, just as I’d lost Joan.
But I have Joan back.
It’s not that I hate these feminine clothes now. I don’t. I like how they look; I even like how they look on me. But more and more I think liking something because it’s pretty and liking something because it truly expresses who I am are two different things. I wonder if I would feel more comfortable in something else. If the girl I was before still lives inside me; if I can draw out the ghost of her and colour her in again.
But I don’t know where to start. It would be weird if I suddenly started dressing like Joan. Joan would find that weird, wouldn’t she? First that terrible conversation I got us into about her non-existent feelings for me, and now, if I was seen to be … copying her style, that wouldn’t help the situation at all.
I nudge the wardrobe doors shut. Maybe if I wait until I start uni, then she wouldn’t be around, and isn’t uni the perfect opportunity to reinvent myself, anyway?
But this train of thought only conveys me to a yet more unpleasant destination, because now I’m thinking about being away from Joan again, for months at a time.
She hasn’t said anything about whether she’d be coming over to watch TV with me and my po po today. Given that I’m planning to talk to Po Po about her homophobia, and I have no idea how that’s going to go, it seems best if I wait until I’ve done that to ask Joan over.
I message her.
So at least that means she still wants to see me, right?
I can think about all of this later. There’s an old woman downstairs I have to talk to.
The temperature has dropped a little after the rain over the weekend, and there’s a fresh breeze coming from outside, cold and sweet. Po Po isn’t in the garden but standing in the kitchen, looking at the family photos on the fridge door, held there by an assortment of magnets including some from Disneyland Paris just last summer, where the most adventurous ride my mum was willing to go on had been Dumbo the Flying Elephant. Most of the photos are recent, and they’re of me and Mum and Dad. A couple include Auntie Susan and her family, and some feature Kevin too.
I wonder if there might be photos with David in them soon, now that I know about him.
There were probably photos of Po Po and Gung Gung on this fridge door once upon a time, but I can’t recall. Maybe Mum took them down because it hurt her too much to be reminded daily of her stubborn parents.
“Could I make you some tea?” I ask Po Po. Weird how I can still be civil to someone who disowned her son for being gay.
“No need, thank you,” she says. “Let’s talk about your uncle.”
I’m a little surprised that she’s raising the topic first, but this makes it easier for me. We go into the living room, where I sit down cross-legged on the armchair that I’ve come to think of as Joan’s seat this summer.
“Did he say anything about me?” she asks.
“I think he preferred not to talk about you.”
She sighs. “But he’s doing well.”
“Yes.” Bitterness, like a bowlful of Chinese medicine, laces my voice.
“You probably have no experience of this.” Po Po rubs one of her hands over the other, twisting her jade bracelet round and round her wrist. “But sometimes you fall in love with someone, and over time they… They either become, or they turn out to be, a completely different person. And, by the time you see it, it’s too late.”
I have so much more experience of this than Po Po assumes. “Are you talking about Gung Gung?”
“When I first met him, he was the sunniest person I’d ever known. But, as I would learn, a life together with him was not easy. He had to be right all the time. He couldn’t compromise. So I shed more and more of myself in order to keep our marriage running smoothly. This didn’t feel like a problem at first. I could have flaked away into nothing and it wouldn’t have bothered me. I loved him that much.”
Po Po stares down at her hands. They’re wrinkled like creased silk.
It’s strange hearing Po Po talk about love. Not that I think she’s incapable of it or anything, but really it isn’t a subject my family is comfortable with. Love is something that happens silently. When Dad takes my empty bowl and refills it with rice without me having to ask for more; when Mum cooks my favourite dish, beef with sha cha sauce, and keeps picking up pieces of beef with her chopsticks and dropping them in my bowl even though I insist I’ve had enough; when Mum plays Dad’s favourite classical music tracks to wake him up on Sunday mornings so that the whole house fills with orchestral swells, gentle and vibrant at once, and brings him breakfast in bed; when Dad brings home a box of Mum’s favourite cookies, gooey and warm with half-melted chocolate.
So much of what I understand of love in my family seems to revolve around food.
When I look at Po Po, it’s with the taste of soy-sauce chicken wings in my mouth.
I feel a new kind of sympathy for her, knowing that we share the experience of making ourselves smaller and smaller for love. How much more do we have in common? I remembered so little of her before this summer but I know how insubstantial a person can become when they’re drained by the wrong kind of love. To me now, Po Po is as vivid as an autumn afternoon, ablaze with colour.
“Po Po… You don’t blame yourself for the way you loved him, do you?”
“I’m too busy blaming myself for other things.”
“Po Po…”
Her shoulders sag a little. “It got harder when we had children. When they grew up, I started to daydream about leaving him sometimes. But … in the end, your po po is an old-fashioned woman. A divorce seemed out of the question.” She winces. “And all my children wanted to head off into different parts of the world. I couldn’t bear being left alone, so I stayed with your gung gung.”
I hadn’t thought about that. The fear of loneliness. And I hate how much I understand it. I hadn’t been the one to break up with Leo. If it had been up to me, we might have stayed together forever, and some days that’s the thought that frightens me more than anything: how much of myself I was willing to sacrifice to an undeserving love.
“It must have been hard when all your children moved away, and you were alone with him. I’m sorry.”
“If I had been a better parent, maybe at least one of them would have stayed.”
“I think a lot of children want independence from their parents. It’s not necessarily your fault if their paths take them elsewhere. And especially… I guess Kevin especially. It would have been a lot easier for him to have that space for himself.”
“I always felt like I had an inkling… About your uncle.”
Po Po looks down at her feet, which are clad in fluffy slippers, incongruous with the rest of her elegant outfit, her satin blouse and sleek trousers. She always dresses flawlessly even if all she’s going to do is lounge around the house.
“But then he married a woman. When he got divorced, I hoped he would just quietly live his life in England, and your gung gung would never have to find out. But your uncle came to see us and, as soon as he walked into the restaurant with his friend, I knew it would all go wrong. Your gung gung left in a rage, and I kept sitting there, and we all had shrimp dumplings and cheung fun.”
“So you were OK with it?”
“No. I was just better at controlling my temper than your gung gung. I was angry at my son. We already didn’t know what to tell people about his divorce. He could’ve had a normal life. Instead he chose to upset his parents.”
“He wasn’t doing it to upset you. He wanted you to be happy for him.”
“At the time, I could only hate him for being so selfish.”
I feel riled by this comment. “He wasn’t selfish!”
“I know many people who would agree with me.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re right.”
“I understand that a little better now. But your gung gung never wanted to see your uncle again. I was that way too, at first. I didn’t want anybody I knew to find out that my son was … like that.”
