My Mothers Dresses

​         My  parents landed in Vancouver in 1974, coming by way of Malaysia and Hong  Kong. They came with their own languages: Cantonese, Hakka, Malay but  all these gave way to the ocean of English. Their memories, too,  contained maps. Maps of Kowloon, of Sandakan and Tawau, of Melbourne,  maps of the alleyways and side streets that once housed the labyrinth of  their childhoods.          All  that seems very long ago. In 2002, when my mother died, I wandered in  circles around her empty house. By this time, my parents had been  separated for many years and my mother lived alone, in the nearby  suburbs. After her funeral, I stood in her closet and leaned against her  clothes, breathing in the lingering scent of her. I recognized dresses  she had worn decades before, blouses that I had fallen asleep against,  shoes that I had played in.qipao           In  my mother's house, I also found the books of her childhood, these  heavy, elegant tomes of Chinese stories. Because I cannot read the  language, I do not know what the books say, nor what stories they hold. I  cannot enter into their world, into the imaginative space that my  mother once inhabited. I can only carry them with me, dresses that I  cannot fit into, complex, alluring scripts that contain the lacework of  things I cannot know. Perhaps that is why I find myself so hungry for  literature in translation from China and from Southeast Asia. I imagine  that books can lead me where my mother no longer can, that they offer  secret entryway into a house that is otherwise closed to me.
​          In my life now, I leap back and forth between Asia and Canada. Each  year, the ribbon of homes that I leave suspended behind me, lengthens.  Home is Canada and it is also an open box within myself, a fixed  structure to which I can bring all the treasures I have collected, all  the beauty from away. It is the place where all things sit, sometimes  peaceably, sometimes uncomfortably, shoulder to shoulder.          "Literature,"  wrote the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, "is never just a national  concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a  journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's  eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if  they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as  if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first  travel through other people's stories and books."          I  come from a family that was bereft of storytelling. Indeed, the stories  that mattered were the ones least likely to be told. My world was a  secretive one and my parents--always complex, always unfathomable--were  harried and melancholy and distant. We shared so few confidences. To  ease the loneliness and to find my own way forward, I filled my mind  with stories, great stacks of books that I hoarded from the library and  resisted returning. Writers, I learned, were the bearers of secrets:  imaginary ones, real ones. They gathered the detritus of our slipshod  world. To make life cohere was, itself, a kind of magic. It was a kind  of love affair.          I  count myself lucky to be among these readers, and to have found a home  not only in Canada but in the world of books: in this country, the  landscapes are infinite, there are rooms to which I can return again and  again, trailing behind me my treasures and my discontent. Literature  cannot save us but what it offers is more worthy and more perilous, for  within it we find a space in which to question, to reveal, to despair  and to hope. It offers a house for the imagination, a house filled with  the detritus of this real and shifting world, a house of disquiet.          In his masterful novel, ,  the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro write: "I saw a new world coming rapidly.  More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very  good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes  tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she  knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading,  never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you  were doing. I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've  never forgotten."           My  truth is, I belong to many places. I have a history in China and in  Malaysia, and I have a home in Canada. The truth is, I have found common  ground with those whose homes are vastly different from mine, and whose  beliefs challenge the ideas I have taken for granted. Literature is the  stadium, the sparring ground, the theatre and the meeting hall. Without  it we are multiple solitudes, trapped in our own homes; without  literature, I fear to make my home into a prison. Words have always been  my way out, a rope to climb to different vantage points, away from  myself and towards the other; a means, as Hannah Arendt wrote, "to  humanize the wilderness of experience." It is the home that forces me,  innocent and knowing, like a child into the world.