The Opposite of Fate

In trying to write an obituary, I appreciated that there was still much I did not know about my mother. Though I had written books informed by her life, she remained a source of revelation and surprise. Of course I longed to know more about her, for her past had shaped me: her sense of danger, her regrets, the mistakes she vowed never to repeat. What I know about myself is related to what I know about her, including her secrets, or in some cases fragments of them. I found the pieces both by deliberate effort and by accident, and with each discovery I had to reconfigure the growing whole.

She had always been tiny. When she came to the United States from China in 1949, my mother recorded that she was five feet tall, stretching the truth by at least two inches. On the day she married my father, she weighed seventy-nine pounds. When she was nine months pregnant with me, she weighed barely one hundred—even more remarkable if you consider that I came into this world at nine pounds, eleven ounces.

By age ten, I was her equal in height, and I continued to grow until I reached an impressive five feet, three and three-quarter inches. Compared with my mother, I was a giantess, and this forever skewed my perception of myself. Although my brother John and I quickly grew bigger than our mother, she had never seemed fragile to us, that is, not until she began to lose her mind.

When failure to thrive set in and she began to lose weight rapidly as well, I offered her bribes: a thousand dollars for each pound she could gain back. My mother held out her palm in gleeful anticipation. Later, I raised the stakes to ten thousand. She never collected on a single pound.

In the last week of her life, she dwindled to fifty pounds, and although I had a chronic joint problem in my shoulders, my own pain disappeared whenever I needed to lift her from bed to chair or chair to bed. It seemed to me she was fast becoming weightless and would soon disappear.

Four years before all this, in 1995, my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was several months shy of her eightieth birthday. The plaques on her brain had likely started to accumulate years before. But we never would have recognized the signs. “Language difficulties,” “gets into arguments,” “poor judgment”—those were traits my mother had shown her entire life. How could we distinguish between a chronically difficult personality and a dementing one?

Still, I began to look back on those times when I might have seen the clues. In 1991, when we were in Beijing, she had declined to go into one of the many temples of the Summer Palace. “Why I go see?” she said, and retreated to a cool stone bench in the shade. “Soon I just forget I been there anyway.”

My husband and I laughed. Wasn’t that the truth? Who among us could remember the blur of tourist sites we had been to in our increasing span of years?

I recalled another time, a couple of years later, when we had gathered at the home of family friends to watch a televised interview of my mother, which had been taped earlier that day. The subject was the opening of the movie The Joy Luck Club. The interviewer wondered whether watching the film had been difficult for her, given how much of it was true to her life: “Did you cry like everyone else in the audience?”

My mother watched her televised self as she answered in that truthful, bare-all manner of hers: “Oh, no. My real life worser than this, so movie already much, much better.” Those were my mother’s words, but they were rendered into better English through subtitles. She was perplexed to see this. The son of our family friends called out to her, “Hey, Auntie Daisy, why are they translating what you’re saying? Don’t they know you’re speaking English?” He had the misfortune of saying this with a laughing face. My mother became livid. Forever after, she would speak about this young man, whom she had always treated like a dear nephew, with only the bitterest of criticisms about his character.

I wondered: Was her grudge toward him a sign that she was already ill? Yet my mother had always borne grudges. She never forgot a wrong, even an accidental one, but especially not an arrogant one. When her brother and sister-in-law who were visiting from Beijing told her they needed to return to China sooner than expected because of an important government meeting, my mother tried to persuade them to stay longer in California. What was more important, she cajoled, the Communist Party or family? Her sister-in-law, who had enlisted with the party in the 1930s as a young revolutionary, gave the politically correct answer. My mother was shocked to hear it. She took this to mean that her sister-in-law considered her to be worth less than a speck of dirt under the toe of her proletariat shoes. Later that day, my mother recounted to me what her sister-in-law had said. She added to that a number of slights that her sister-in-law had apparently delivered in the past week, and complaints about how, the last time she had visited them in Beijing, her sister-in-law had cut off the sleeves of an expensive shirt my mother had given to her brother, so it would be cooler. On and on my mother went, until her stream of injustices eventually did the long march through the fifty-five years of a formerly harmonious relationship.

If we, her children, did anything to suggest we were not one hundred percent in her camp, if we tired of listening and suggested with weariness—or rather, genuine concern—that she try to “calm down for your own sake,” she would become even more furious. “Not my sake,” she’d retort, “your sake.” Her face stiffened, her jaw quavered as she shouted and punched herself. Who cared what happened to her? Nobody! Her life was nothing. She was worthless.

Anger inevitably blended with anguish, and the helpless and lonely sorrow she had felt years earlier, during the illness and death of my brother Peter, and my father’s death seven months after that, both of them succumbing to brain tumors. My mother had both of them put on life support, and because of that, she told me years later, she had to do the worst thing in her entire life, and that was to take them off life support. “Don’t start,” she advised, “then don’t have to stop. No use anyway.”

This double tragedy of brain tumors was so horrific that the neurosurgeon himself, in trying to soothe my mother as she poured out endless questions of why and how can this be, simply said: “Mrs. Tan, it’s just bad luck, I’m afraid.”

That official pronouncement of bad luck then set my mother into a protracted search for the reason we were cursed. Were the rest of us doomed to die as well because of this bad luck? She believed so. Thereafter my brother and I learned to hide our headaches from her, to curb ourselves from saying we were “tired,” which was, of course, an excuse that all teenagers mindlessly blurt to get out of doing whatever they don’t want to do. Tiredness had been Peter’s earliest symptom that something was wrong. We had learned the consequences of saying we did not feel well: being hauled off to the hospital to undergo an EEG, an X ray, and later, once we returned home, being subjected to our mother’s endless and unanswerable questions. We saw her as our tormentor and not our protector against curses. Late at night, months after my father had died, she would moan, “Why? Why this happen?”

After my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I too was obsessed in knowing why. When did the disease begin? When had her logic become even more impaired than usual? It was important to know exactly when, for in that answer I would also know how much of her behavior, her tirades that had pained and inconvenienced us, her family, could now be viewed as illness and thus with a more sympathetic eye.

I recalled a Thanksgiving at her house when we had arrived late. It was my fault. I have always had a propensity for running at least forty-seven minutes behind schedule for anything and everything. “Why so late?” my mother said when I stepped inside. She took my tardiness as a personal insult, a sign of disrespect, tantamount to saying I did not think she was worth the time of day. She was sitting in her dining room, refusing to speak. This was the deadly silence we had known all our lives. The dark clouds were practically visible above her steaming head. Static was in the air we breathed. We told her to calm down—big mistake—and her silence exploded into threats to kill herself. There would be no Thanksgiving that year.

My little brother and I had heard similar threats all our lives. As a very young child, I also must have seen her try to cut her wrists with a knife. I assume this because I tried to do the same when I had a private moment of rage after being sent to bed. I was six at the time. Fortunately, I used a butter knife and was chagrined to learn that running a blade across one’s skin actually hurt.

My mother’s usual method of near-demise involved traffic. Her last attempt was typical. We were eating dinner in a restaurant, and she was obsessing about a family member whom she believed did not respect her. Lou, my brother, and I didn’t exactly disagree with her; the trouble was, we didn’t wholeheartedly agree. Her anger mounted until she leapt up from the table and ran out of the crowded restaurant with us chasing after her. Just before she dashed into a busy six-lane street, screaming that she wanted to die, Lou grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her, kicking and sobbing, back to safety.

My mother’s threats to “do it” rained so often that I developed an emotional shield. As a teenager, I pretended to be unaffected. She could rant and beat her chest. She could shower her fists on me. My face would remain maddeningly bland, as inscrutable as Westerners have always accused Chinese people of being. When she was not looking, I would walk briskly to the bathroom and have dry heaves. At times, I privately wished she would carry out her word. How peaceful life would be without her. This thought was immediately followed by fear that my secret wish would come true, and then I would be as guilty of murder as if I had killed her myself.

As my brother and I grew older, we supposedly grew wiser. Yet it did not matter that we were twenty, thirty, or forty. Whenever our mother beat her chest with her tiny fists, we knew what was coming, and were reduced to small children who trembled with fear that this time she might make good on her word.

As adults, we commiserated in anger and frustration over the fact that our mother could still make us feel manipulated, guilty, and fearful. Later we confided that we had grown to have her same furies. Sometimes, I have sensed the inescapable rush of a geyserlike rage, which soon would drench all reason from my mind and leave me with a self-destructive urge.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I learned that my mother, at age nine, had seen her own mother kill herself. I felt sorry for that nine-year-old child. I could now see that in many respects my mother had remained stuck at that age of her abandonment.

I recently learned that in China today, a third of all deaths among women in rural areas are suicides. Nationwide, more than two million Chinese women each year attempt suicide, and 300,000 succeed. And in contrast to any other country, more women than men in China kill themselves. I pondered this. Conditions for women in China have changed for the better in the last hundred years, and life in the countryside may not be egalitarian, but is it really so bad that women are willing to down a bottle of rat poison? And why is ingestion still the preferred method?

More than two million reported attempts. How many attempts are not reported? China as a society is loath to make shameful events public, so the real number is probably staggeringly higher. I found this all strangely comforting, as if in this context our family was practically normal. In Western terms, we were a dysfunctional family. From a Chinese perspective, however, my mother’s urge to kill herself was understandable. It was part of a larger legacy passed from generation to generation, grandmother to mother to daughter. In lieu of the family silver, what was inherited was a suffering silence followed by sudden implosion, an urge to blot out all memory of existence.

My mother had always bragged about her memory. She never forgot anything. It wasn’t that she remembered just dates or facts and figures. When she remembered an event from her past, especially a traumatic one, it was as though she had boarded a time machine and had been transported to the moment she was remembering. She was experiencing it again as she spoke of it.

Psychiatrists might call that a posttraumatic flashback, but to me, her memories were gifts. In 1990, before she became ill, I set up a videocamera and had her tell her story. I was concerned she might be self-conscious. And at first, she did speak carefully, looking shyly at the camera. But soon enough, she had gone back to her past and was re-creating it for me, as someone might who is under hypnosis. She was recalling her own mother’s sadness after her husband died of illness, leaving her to care for two small children without any means of support. My grandmother’s young son would take clothes to a pawnshop so the family could have a little money. “Can you imagine?” my mother would say to me, as she told her story. She would repeat this question often, making me work harder to imagine it.

Later, she enacted a day when her first husband returned home roaring with anger so he could make a big show in front of his friends. It happens afresh in her memory’s eye: He pulls out a pistol and makes her kowtow to him. “What are you looking at?” he bellows to the friends, who stand by the door, their mouths dropped open. They kowtow too. She is looking up at him, at the wild waving of the gun, getting ready to duck in case he shoots. But then “that bad man” begins to laugh. It’s a joke, he made us do this as a joke.

In another memory, she is holding a baby in her arms, her first son. He has just died of dysentery, because her husband refused to interrupt his mah jong game with the doctor. I said to her as gently as I could, “What did you feel when the baby died? You must have been in so much pain.”

She looked up blankly. “No pain, only numb. I said, ‘Good for you, little one, you escaped. Good for you.’”

One time, several hours into one of her stories, she stopped talking and looked at me as if she had just woken from a dream. “Maybe you don’t want this part on TV,” she said. I was amazed to realize she was cognizant of the camera. “This part concerning sex …” The camera kept rolling, and she lowered her head to say conspiratorially, “He want sex, I go to bathroom, pretend use my chamber pot. Oooh, oooh, so sick, bad diarrhea. That night, no sex. So many nights, I pretend I go to my chamber pot.” She was laughing when she told me this. The camera caught it all.

The more I heard, the more I wanted to know. I could not believe I had once taken no interest in these stories she tried to tell me for years. Now I wanted to go back to the past. I wanted to be there with her, to be her witness, to agree with her, “Your life was terrible.” It was not too late to comfort her.

In 1991, I presented her with my second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, a story based on her life, one she had asked that I write. She began to read the first page, then said with consternation, “Helen? I never knew Helen in China.” I reminded her that this was not that Helen, this was fiction and the characters were made up. “Ah, yes, yes,” she said, then resumed reading, before soon stopping again. “I never live in pink house in San Francisco.”

Months later, I asked whether she had finished reading the book. “No time,” she said. Even later, her excuse was this: “Why I need finish? That’s my story. I already know the ending.”

I saw more things that she could not finish: Half-knit sweaters. Bills she opened but had not paid. Food she had defrosted but had not cooked. Her apartment was becoming untidy, not just cluttered in the way it had always been, but dirty. She forgot to lock her door and the security elevator. She forgot how to go in reverse and dented her car backing out of her garage. She later bashed it again, running into the back of a truck. And even stranger, she didn’t seem very concerned that her car was full of dings.

I also noticed that my once fastidious mother was looking disheveled. She wore the same clothes every day, a purple sweater, a pair of black stretch pants. She was not bathing. Her hair was dirty and it smelled. One day when I suggested she wash her hair before we went to a dressy event, she commented that the shower knobs were broken.

I went to the bathroom to check. They were fine. It occurred to me that she did not know how to adjust them. As someone who goes on book tours and stays in a different hotel every night, I know how disconcerting it is to figure out how the water works without getting either scalded or doused with cold water. I turned on the water, adjusted the temperature, and ran a bath for my mother. Then I noticed that she was missing soap, shampoo, toothpaste. Why had she not bothered to buy these things? I made a mental note to do some shopping for her.

Sometime later, our family was gathered around the dining table for a Thanksgiving different from the disastrous one of a few years before. We were with my husband’s family. The conversation touched on sports, the weather, politics, and then eventually on O. J. Simpson’s acquittal. My mother had a comment to make there. “Oh, that man kill his wife,” she said with great authority. “I there. I see it.”

“You mean you saw it on television,” I corrected.

“No!” my mother insisted. “I there. He hide in bush, jump out, cut the knife on that girl’s throat. So much blood, you cannot believe so much. Awful.”

My mother’s English often left seeming gaps in logic. I frequently served as her interpreter, even in childhood, when I wrote my own letters to the principal, excusing my absence from school. I now attempted to clarify for the others what she meant: “Oh, you saw a documentary on what the lawyers said happened.”

“Maybe you see documentary,” my mother replied. “I see everything. I there.”

“What do you mean?” I said. Lou put his hand on my arm. Those around us had grown quiet, sipping wine or chewing turkey in embarrassment. But I couldn’t stop. I had to know what was going on. Did my mother think she had astrally projected herself?

She was oblivious of everyone’s discomfort. “I hide in bush too.”

“You saw him get in his car and go home?”

My mother nodded. “I follow.”

“How? How did you get to Los Angeles?”

I couldn’t shake her illogic. “I don’t remember. Must be I drive.”

“And you were in his bedroom when he cleaned up?”

She nodded confidently.