Because Auntie’s father couldn’t walk or work, her mother was forced to support her family alone. By this point, she had four daughters—a grave disappointment. These daughters would not carry the family name, would not help her cross the river of death to ascend to heaven, and they’d all require dowries if they were to ever marry. So, my great-grandmother decided, these girls would need to fend for themselves. Though she struggled to earn enough to house and feed six people, she still scrambled together the money to pay for all of her daughters to go to school.
To do this, she tailored clothing. She sold lunch to the men who worked the mines and came up with discounted meal plans for them to ensure she’d have a steady supply of income every month. She took any odd job that was offered to her. And, of course, she did the domestic labor of raising her four kids.
But under Japanese occupation, the mines closed entirely. There were major food shortages, and thousands of people suffered starvation. Japanese people were suspicious of the Chinese Malaysian community because of China’s involvement in the war, so they regularly tortured, imprisoned, and disappeared young Chinese men. To avoid suspicion and harassment—and to make a little bit of money on the side—my great-grandmother bought clothes for cheap from grave robbers, who dug up corpses, looking for gold. She and her daughters unraveled the dead people’s clothing, spooled the thread, and used it to sew new clothing…and make Japanese flags. She sold these flags back to the Japanese soldiers—the World War II equivalent of undocumented immigrants selling Trump hats on Canal Street.
After the war, when the British came back to recolonize Malaysia, my great-grandmother found the moneymaking magic of mah-jongg. Her talent was indisputable—she was a force of nature with the tiles and eventually earned enough to open her own gambling house. Once, she thought she might be able to make a pretty penny selling opium in the gambling house, so she crossed the border to Thailand and brought home a fat sack of it. As soon as she got back to Malaysia, the going rate for opium collapsed. She lost a big chunk of her savings on something that was now nearly worthless. Instead of crying about it, she splurged on crab to calm her sorrows. “What to do?” she asked. “Might as well eat crab, lah!” That was her attitude, Auntie recalled proudly. Relentless optimism, despite everything.
This was the lesson, then—a lesson Auntie repeated to me over and over throughout the years: that my great-grandmother’s history was worth our remembrance and our respect because of her hard work, her sacrifices, and, most of all, her unfathomable endurance. It made perfect sense to me later in life when I discovered that the Chinese word for endurance is simply the word knife on top of the word heart. You walk around with a knife in your heart. You do it with stoicism. This is the apex of being.
And so Auntie endured, even though she grew up destitute and fearful, even though she grew up hungry through multiple wars and occupations. She endured when she grew up and was unable to marry or have children because she wasn’t pretty or wealthy enough. She endured as she hustled most of her life as a car saleswoman, a secretary, a pawn-shop owner, and a lottery rigger, while also caring for her sister’s six children. Auntie was especially close to my youngest aunt, whom she essentially raised and loved as her own. And then my youngest aunt died of leukemia at only thirty-five. Still, Auntie endured.
“When the sky falls, use it as a blanket,” she repeated to me, day after day. “Big things, make small. Small things, make nothing. When someone wrongs you, never keep it in your heart. Let it go.”
* * *
—
So it felt significant—generous—for Auntie to sit here and tell me that the way my mother raised me was unfair. It was a permission of sorts to recognize—even among this generation that was so inured to pain—that the way I was brought up was not right. Not how it was supposed to be.
It had been so unfair, it seemed, that Auntie had placed a finger on the scale of my life, trying to level things. All that time, I had not actually been the favorite child. I was not loved more or less than anyone else. But the truth was something better than that: I had been seen. My family had seen me. And they loved me enough to orchestrate a grand performance that had spanned decades and involved my entire family. All those years of “Ho gwaai, ho gwaai. You’re so well-behaved. You’re such a good girl.” At first, those lines were crafted to show my mother that I was deserving of love. That didn’t work. But perhaps they were also endeavoring to show me.
CHAPTER 29
For a long time, I considered my family’s coordinated deception—their theatrical elevation of me as the favorite—to be a great act of love. But after I visited San Jose—after I interviewed so many people suffering from similar deceptions in the name of protection, after I witnessed over and over the wreckage of secret-keeping—I began to tire of the charade.
I counted the lies and misdirections that were fed to me as a child. The pile was so high.
* * *
—
I am twelve. My mother calls me into her room. She is plucking her eyebrows at her dresser, sitting on a chair with a pink-and-green embroidered cushion. I grab an ottoman and sit next to her, start playing with her lacquered jewelry boxes, running my fingernail along the exotic little Chinese houses etched into the wood and filled with opal. “I have something to tell you,” she says as she plucks. “I am adopted. Your Ah-Ma isn’t your real grandma. Uncle C. isn’t your blood uncle. They are my adopted family, who adopted me when I was a baby.”
“Oh, okay,” I say. I wait. There is nothing else, so I ask, “Why did your parents give you up for adoption?”
“I don’t know that,” she says. “I never met them.”
I can’t tell if she is sad, angry, or neither. “It’s okay,” I say, just in case. Eventually, she tackles her mustache, and I leave the room.
* * *
—
I am thirteen. My mother has just left, and my father spends many nights theorizing about why she ultimately decided to leave: Maybe she was a lesbian. Or she was sleeping with her supervisor at the school district where she volunteered. Or she was sleeping with one of her many male tennis friends. “I always knew she was a good liar,” he says one day. “We never told you this, but you have a half sister.”
I am sitting at my mother’s dresser, at the same chair with the embroidered cushion. “What?!”