sharp.“The last time you were here you were neet ei gwoy , teeny tiny. I remember. You came with your mother and her daughter—the one who’s married to a university professor. Your mother brought you here before leaving for Hong Kong. You wouldn’t remember. You were still little. But I remember you, your mother and your sister.”
“Y … you remember my mother?” I stammered. “It was so long ago.”
“Everyone in the village knows about your family. Your father was a Gold Mountain guest and he hired your mother to teach at the school. She was the best teacher this village ever had. Even though she was here for only a few years, everyone still talks about her. And your father was a special man. They were both very smart people. By the time the war was over, his first wife was dead. People were not surprised when he came back and married your mother.”
I stared in disbelief at this stranger who knew these private details from my parents’ life. She smiled politely. Her words were opening a door. I had a persistent memory of my mother and me being taken somewhere by bicycle when I was a child. It was one of those vignettes from the past that lives on as a free-floating fragment. In my child’s mind I had understood that the journey was an important one, but I did not know why. As I listened to the old woman, the scene came into focus. It wasn’t a bicycle after all. I saw myself, a young child sitting on my mother’s lap, with Ming Nee beside us, inside a pedicab. We were travelling from the market town where my parents had opened a store after the war. Yes, of course! We were returning here, to our ancestral home in this village, towhere I now stood. Once again, I could see a blur of silvery spokes inside wheels turning on the dirt road. Once more, I felt the security of my mother’s arms around me, the warmth and softness of her body pressed against my back, the rush of wind against my face.
Everything now made sense. My mother would not leave China without making an offering to our ancestors. She had no grasp of what life in the New World held for her. She knew, even then, that her oldest daughter would soon be left behind, while she and I would cross the Pacific to join my father. She needed all the good fortune that fate had to offer. A blessing from the ancestors was something she could not risk ignoring. I watched Shing, then Doon, as they each finished bowing before the family shrine.
When it was my turn, I carefully lit my sticks of incense and slowly bowed three times before placing them in the vase. I watched the smoke rise. On this very spot, more than fifty years ago, my mother would have stood, filled with dread, her hands clasped in prayer, appealing for the protection of our ancestors. I thought of my own life, blessed with good fortune. How wise it had been of my mother to pay her respects to the ancestors. How lucky for me.
FIVE
A lthough our spacious room in the five-star Ever Joint had a floor-to-ceiling window, plush carpeting and plump, upholstered chairs, the mattress, even with its thin, quilted cover, was the hardest bed my husband had ever slept on. He had difficulty adjusting to the rigid surface, but for me it brought back early childhood memories of hot summer nights in the back room of the hand laundry, lying on a low, wooden table spread with a bamboo mat. My father would sometimes sit beside me, and I listened while he told stories, some historical, others mythological, but always transporting me to a place that was far away and shrouded in mystery.
Michael was sitting at the desk, bent over, writing furiously in his black Moleskine. He was determined to keep a written record of our journey, believing photographs to be too objective, without the nuance of words. I kept a diary as well and had just finished writing about the meeting with the old woman in my ancestral village. I hadn’t thought much aboutwhat she said until I saw her words written on the page.
“That