Dandelion

Jamie Chai Yun Liew

dandelion

DANDELION

Copyright © 2022 by Jamie Chai Yun Liew

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

Cover and interior art by Ophelia Liew

Edited by Catharine Chen and Shirarose Wilensky

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Title: Dandelion / Jamie Chai Yun Liew.

Names: Liew, Jamie Chai Yun, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210390808 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210390816 | ISBN 9781551528816 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528823 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8623.I37 D36 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

For my mother and migrant mothers everywhere

小Small

WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, my mother walked away from her family. She didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t leave a note. She didn’t call. I never saw her again. I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.

Every Mother’s Day, I have the same ritual. I stay at home to avoid seeing mothers and daughters brunching. I don’t look at my phone, evading the pictures, the tributes, and the new memories.

It’s been twenty years since my mother left. This Mother’s Day, I am rubbing my ankles, swollen from bearing the weight of my pregnant belly, and thinking about how my mother used to rub her left ankle the same way when she was tired, stressed, or anxious. I look out the window and see a woman pushing a stroller, her mother walking beside her. I look down at my belly and worry about what kind of mother I will be. I am scared of doing this without my mother. Most of all, I am afraid of bringing a child into this world.

Part 1 之前Before

氏Clan

MY FATHER’S OLDER SISTER AUNTIE CHOO NEO placed chicken satay sticks on the backyard barbecue. She shot a dirty look at Mother. Auntie complained that Mother didn’t cook the way Father liked and often referred to her as “Father’s light-skinned child bride.” She told Mother to stop playing and start cooking. Mother rolled her eyes behind Auntie’s back. My little sister, Bea, and I laughed with her.

Auntie Choo Neo came over every weekend to cook dinner. It stung Auntie that we lived in the Heights. She and Uncle Stephen had bought a small bungalow near downtown Sparwood, a more modest house than ours given that there was just the two of them. She visited weekly, hoping her presence in Sparwood Heights would elevate her status, our Mother whispered to Bea and me. I asked Mother why Auntie needed more stature when she was already tall, with broad, sturdy shoulders. Mother replied that status was more than just physical, that Auntie wanted to appear rich, powerful, and all knowing. Whenever she came, Auntie Choo Neo proudly wore her kebaya Nyonya, a brightly coloured, fitted, embroidered blouse paired with a batik sarong.

I hopped off the swing and ran over to Auntie Choo Neo. Although she picked on Mother, she was my elder, and one of the few people I had known my entire life. The oldest of Father’s siblings, she loved to lecture, correct, and order Mother around, but not me. Auntie would let me hover, but she kept a careful distance. If I inched too close, to rest my hand on her or hug her, she would pull away as if afraid she would catch something.

The turmeric in the marinade must have brought Auntie some warmth that spring day in 1987, as she taught me how to make satay. As she was preparing the sauce that accompanies the skewers, she told me, “The secret to this recipe is to allow the nutty spices to make space for one another.” She permitted me to dip my fingers into the dark, rich sauce, to savour the flavours dancing in my mouth.

“Lily!” Mother bellowed. “Stop sticking your fingers in the bowl!” She was sitting at the picnic table, rubbing her ankle, tracing her fingers around the bones on both sides of her foot. She had told me she had injured it as a teenager in a bicycle accident, and it was never the same after that.

“Ayoo, Swee Hua,” Auntie Choo Neo scolded. “No need to yell at Lily. She is learning how to make satay from the best.”

Mother’s eyebrows furrowed and her eyes narrowed, like a cat watching its prey. Then, as though retreating on soft paws, Mother dutifully set the table.

Auntie Choo Neo reminded Mother to set an extra space at the table for those who could not join us. My cousin, her son, Winston, was the only missing guest. The only person who defied Auntie Choo Neo, he chose not to come to Canada despite her efforts, and now she talked of Winston as if he were dead. I had heard Mother describe Auntie Choo Neo’s “eulogies” as if she were kao peh kao bu, crying about dead parents.

Auntie talked about Winston as we ate dinner. “Aya, jin hao se, so young and yet a life already wasted.”

Uncle Stephen sighed. “Gao liao, enough already.”

“You give up on your only son so easily,” Auntie growled back. “If you were a good father, he would be here. He would not be stateless. He would be Canadian.”

“Aya, Choo Neo,” Mother said. “He’s got permanent residence in Brunei. He’s not without status. You should be proud of him. He has started his own business. He’s building his future. He’s not living in a long house with the Iban.”

Auntie Choo Neo scoffed, surprised that my mother would dare challenge her. “He might as well be with the orangutans in Temburong on the Brunei River! How can you think he has a future when he is nobody! His car dealership is like that plastic bag blowing in the wind. It’s flying high now towards the clouds, but once it falls, it will be treated like the garbage it really is.”

“Choo Neo, at least you know we’re safe in Canada,” Uncle Stephen reminded his wife. “Thanks to Ah Loy’s foresight to sponsor all of us, we are not without status.”

Auntie Choo Neo turned to Father. “Yes, Ah Loy is a dutiful brother. But what good is it for us to be here when my son is languishing back home?”

“It’s never too late,” Father said. “You should continue to talk to Winston, put some sense in him.”

Mother laughed bitterly. “Time will tell if there is any sense in moving here. What would Winston do here? Work in the mine with you and Stephen, Ah Loy? He’s running his own business back home, driving a nice car, and living in a nice house that is being cleaned by an amah. He’s his own boss, and he has youth on his side. That is more than I can say for the two of you.”

Father shifted in his seat, set down his satay, and pushed his plate towards the centre of the table. “You envy Winston, Swee Hua,” he said, “but his life is a house of cards. He relies on a Malay to even have his business. His name is not on the ownership papers. Everything he has built could be taken away just like that. One day, a storm will come, and everything will tumble down. No amount of money could help him crawl out from under the rubble and rebuild. If I were Winston, I would ask, ‘Why would I put my life and that of my children’s at risk?’” Father wiped his mouth with his napkin and continued. “We are nothing to those in power. They don’t recognize you. They don’t look at you. They can discard you and kick you out. Winston, like all of us stateless people, is expendable, and I don’t want to wait for the day when my life and the lives of my children come crashing down. I’m sorry, Choo Neo, but you do have reason to worry. If I were his father, I would drag him out of that jungle and bring him here.”

Bea grabbed the last satay stick and placed it on her plate, pausing to see if I would protest. I didn’t. Everyone saw Winston so differently.

Mother chimed in again. “Here, yes, you have papers, but nothing else, Ah Loy. We live in a valley far away from the city, and you work underground. Our children are separated from so much family. They are not learning their language or their culture. The other day, I heard Beatrice tell someone that she doesn’t know Chinese because she doesn’t need it. The air here can freeze you to death, and the food is flavourless. Think about the asam fish head soup back home, with fresh galangal and lemongrass. The green everywhere and the mangoes growing in our backyard. Think about the pungent smell of durian.”

Even Auntie Choo Neo nodded slightly and murmured in agreement.

“I can see why Winston chose to stay where he is,” Mother said. “Let me ask all of you: What’s holding us back? We have citizenship now. We can go back home.”

“Home?” Father harrumphed. “How can you call that place home? Why would I leave a place that has welcomed me and my children to go to a place where people look at us like we’re the shit floating downriver from the stilt houses of Kampong Ayer? You can’t even have a beer without the state taking that away from you, too. Who wants to live in a dry state?”

“We can drink all the teh tarik and eat all the cendol in the world,” Auntie added, “but Ah Loy is right. We would always hunger for more. The joy the food brings to our lives would be a distraction from the worry that we would be kicked out or denied something one day. Even the heat is tiring there.”

“Then we can come back to Canada,” said Mother.

“I don’t want the yo-yo life,” retorted Auntie.

“It’s not right. We can’t go back,” Father said. “We chose this place, and it chose us. We have to give back the way it has given to us.”

“There is no betrayal in wanting to go back to where we came from,” Mother argued.

“That’s all that place is now, Swee Hua. A place where I came from, and that’s it,” Father maintained. “We barely existed there. What future did I have, working under the table, wondering if I would still have a job one day? I could eat like a king, but my children would be learning Malay or denied schooling? What for?”

“You’re fooling yourself, Ah Loy,” Mother insisted. “Only a certain kind of person can truly feel secure in this cold country.”

“Ayoo! You’re both wrong.” Auntie Choo Neo threw up her hands. “It’s not as if we’ve forgotten where we came from, Swee Hua. But Ah Loy is right. We did not belong back home. As long as we are together, we can remember and pass down our traditions, even here in Canada. We will always find home, wherever we find family. We cannot forget who we are.”

In bed that night, I was hypnotized by the sound of the train travelling through the valley, rumbling over the tracks that had been laid there decades earlier by other hopeful migrants. I wondered how Father, like those migrants, could leave the land of his birth and turn his back on it forever. How could Mother be so devoted to returning to her homeland? My parents were two sides of a magnet; the same place repelled one and pulled the other.

山Mountain

WHENEVER MOTHER REGALED US WITH FANTASTICAL TALES of her exotic birthplace, bursting with the sultry equatorial heat, the mangroves’ briny clutch, the sweetness of the rambutan, the sharp spiciness of fresh galangal, and the salty shrimp paste, Father brought my mind back to the Rockies, reminding me that I had never been to the beaches and rainforests of Brunei. Draped with shawls of coniferous trees, strewn with silver rocks, and capped with snowy barrettes, the mountains surrounded us in Sparwood. We worked in them, played on them, and lived among them. We could never escape them.

My father told me that the mountains reminded him only of work. He gazed sadly at the belly of the mountain—where the coal mine was—squinting, drawing on a cigarette. The mine’s smokestacks—four of them crowning the mountain—resembled the cigarette perched between his lips, its ashes building like the coal waste pushed from the mountain’s burning innards. Father spoke with such sullenness about working in the mine that I imagined the mountain casting a shadow on his face, like a ghost clinging to his stubble.

To my mother, the mountains were the walls of a prison. They contracted like an accordion, teasing her by giving her space, and then rapidly closing. She grumbled that Father had promised her excitement and adventure in a modern city, that he hadn’t thought of her when he brought her to this secluded town. It didn’t help when I pointed out the sound of the trains echoing in the valley. “Nobody knows we are here. I can’t die here,” she would vow. “Nobody knew you lived in the sultanate of Brunei before either,” Father would remind her. “It’s better to die here than rot in the heat back home.” It was as if they were pollen that was lifted by the wind and landed in this place when the air quieted, unplanned, unprepared, planting themselves in soil they did not choose.

Bea and I saw the mountains as our playgrounds. We biked on their paths, hid among the pine, spruce, and fir trees, walked along the creeks, and played with the bugs and frogs. We sought refuge within the greenness of the mountains.

Sparwood was a modest town, with just 5,000 inhabitants, most of whom were employed by the mine. Those who did not work for the mine worked for the people in the mine. The library, post office, grocery store, mall, and recreation centre were all built in part by the mine and for the benefit of those working in the mine.