Dr. Bethune's Children Page 14

  The next evening, when his mother went out for political study, Yangyang opened the drawer again. To his surprise, the book that he had flipped through the previous night was no longer there. He never saw the book again. And he never dared to ask his mother about it until the last birthday he spent on this earth. That day, he asked his mother what had happened to the book. His mother looked at him and said she had never heard of a book like that.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, as I’ve told you, soon after your children witnessed Chairman Mao’s funeral—that most solemn memorial ceremony—the squirrel you had met in Yan’an was arrested. She was charged as the leader of the counter-revolutionary clique and sentenced to execution, the sentence to be carried out after a period of two years. When the two years were up, she was then sentenced again, this time to life in prison. The judgement was the first in China’s history to be televised, and modern technology gave the former actress a final opportunity to act on the stage of life. She could no longer be described as gay and mischievous. On television, she was presumptuous and insolent. Over ten years later, she went mad and eventually killed herself while she was under house arrest. I don’t know whether she left a note. The news of her death was not released until three weeks afterwards, in a news bulletin consisting only of a single sentence. The report, which was not coloured by feigned emotion, nevertheless made me think of the indignant look on the face of our school’s Party secretary when she was reading out the scandalous contents of the book of incriminating evidence against the former actress.

  This woman, whom you found so charming, had been pitiless with her enemies. We learned that she had been responsible for the deaths of innumerable people during the Cultural Revolution, while you were becoming an icon. But you were a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. You saw her bright appearance, not the darkness in the depths of her soul. You could not, from her beauty and liveliness, predict the disastrous effect she would have on the future of China. In fact, you did not know anything about China’s future. You couldn’t. And you could not know the fatal relationship between your decision to come to China—which you described as a matter of must—and Yangyang’s death and the tragedy of his family.

  Yangyang’s death was a curse. It pushed his entire family towards ineluctable tragedy. Not even Yinyin could escape its clutches. That last evening, I begged her to stay in the apartment, because the situation outside was explosive. But she insisted on going out for a walk. She said she wanted some fresh air. She said the baby needed some fresh air. She said she would be back right away. She did not come back. She never came back. Even today, I don’t know how I should describe her death. Was she murdered or did she commit suicide? Was it an accident or a twist of fate?

  No matter what, I still believe that Yangyang’s and Yinyin’s deaths are two sides of the same coin, inseparable. They left the world in the classic way for Dr. Bethune’s children. It was a matter of must.

  A Celebration

  Dear Dr. Bethune, let us return to Montreal.

  Eight years after Yinyin and I parted forever, I started to live with a Vietnamese woman. She had come to Montreal a few years before I did. Like Yinyin, she was an orphan. Her mother had died on the evening they fled, and her father died on a boat in the South China Sea. It happened in the middle of the night. The refugees had carried out a simple funeral after he breathed his last and had thrown his body into the ocean. Nobody had woken her up. Several days later, their refugee boat was discovered by the Hong Kong Coast Guard. They were saved and sent to a refugee camp.

  My girlfriend told me that she had never gotten a good night’s sleep since her father’s death. Night-time for her was always a time of panic, of despair, and of guilt.

  The first time we met was an odd coincidence. It happened in her office, which was about four metres square. Her job was organizing government-subsidized French classes for immigrants. I went there asking for help filling out the form to apply for student support. To be honest, that was the first time I had been with a woman in such a small space since Yinyin’s disappearance. We were separated by a very small desk, on which there was a computer and a pile of paper. When she checked the form, our heads were each inclined toward the other, almost touching. A long-forgotten intimacy suddenly caught me. I smelled a woman, a smell I had for so many years stubbornly refused. I looked at her hair. My lips felt dry in that familiar way. Even more amazingly, I immediately felt that she was an orphan, like Yinyin. This intuition made me sentimental, but it also excited me.

  She checked my form, line by line. She paused at my marital status and looked up at me. Maybe she had never seen such a young widower. I explained that I had had a brief marriage, that my wife had died in an accident. She did not ask what kind of accident it was. She just looked at me and said she was sorry to hear it.

  We had our first date when my French course was about to end. Two months after our first date, we started living together.

  Unlike Yinyin, she was a perfectionist and very emotional. The first day we started living together, I noticed I had lost the most basic freedom, the freedom of expression. She used a negative tone in response to whatever I said. If I said that the weather was pretty good at a certain time of year in some Chinese city, her response was that I should go back if I liked the weather there so much. Such immediate and absurd associations left me with fewer and fewer things to say. Another way she limited my freedom of speech was by monitoring other people’s responses to my statements. When I was paying the bill in a café where I knew the owner well, I made a joke, and he laughed. But she got angry and didn’t talk to me the entire week. “Do you know what he really thought?” she finally said, adding that laughing at a joke doesn’t meant the person really thinks it’s funny. Another time, I had said a few things too many to a taxi driver, and she got out in the middle of the ride, which made me and the taxi driver feel extremely awkward. Even my attempts to endear myself to her always had the opposite effect. There are too many incidents to list, and some were so absurd that I can’t bear to describe them. In the end, being with her made me even more lonely than when I was alone. Our relationship changed me quite a lot. I became more and more afraid of other people’s reactions to what I said. And I dared less and less to say what I really wanted to say.

  Many topics of conversation were absolutely forbidden zones. Except for that first time we met, I never mentioned Yinyin again. I never told her about my intuition that first day that she was also an orphan. I do not know if that intuition was the reason I never let myself get close to her. I never mentioned Yinyin or you, dear Dr. Bethune. Maybe she doesn’t even know who you are. And I always avoided walking past your statue with her, for fear that she would direct her sarcasm at my esteem for you. All in all, our relationship had no future, just as it had no connection with the past.

  Even so, it lasted almost four years. Then she left me. Her goodbye was not an attack on me, but it was an insult. She said the reason she had accepted my offer to go on our first date was that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, because she had discovered that he was still in contact with his previous girlfriend. She said that was the darkest time in her life. It left her listless and depressed. And this emotional tumult on dry land was more painful than when she was a refugee getting sloshed around on the ocean. She decided to start a new relationship in order to drag herself out of this sorry state and also to get even with her ex-boyfriend. That’s why she chose me. “That doesn’t mean I don’t like you,” she explained kindly. “Actually, the first time you came to my office, I had a good feeling about you.”

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I know that you had relationships with a lot of different women in your life. And I know that quite a few of those relationships brought you humiliation. So you must understand my reaction when I heard her farewell. I was not one of the people whose feelings and opinions she cared about. I was nothing. I was nothing. Of course, my reaction was not important to her in the least. I quietly accepte
d her decision and politely wished her happiness. I think that what I said to her in the end might make her feel good. This time I wasn’t wrong, for once. It was one of the few times in our relationship where we had some kind of chemistry. Then she left. She did not want me to see her out. She said her ex-boyfriend was waiting for her downstairs. He had returned to her. She said she loved him too much, and that she could forgive the hurt. She left with expectations for the future based on the past. And the only mark she left on me with was my new love for Vietnamese noodle soup.

  Soon after that relationship ended, I invited my parents to visit me. We had not seen each other in almost twelve years. I had hoped that time would have healed the wounds and allowed us to forgive the harm we did one another in a series of incidents, because of my marriage to Yinyin. My parents accepted my invitation and made plans to spend at least three months with me in Montreal.

  But, what happened was the opposite of what I had hoped. Their visit brought us nothing but unhappiness.

  From the day they set foot in Montreal, they began to complain about the city, the people, and the country. They didn’t like anything. The city was too quiet, too dark. The buildings were too old, too weird. And there were too many potholes in the roads. The things my father found hardest to tolerate were the television programs. “Besides hockey, there’s nothing to watch on television.” He did not understand why people here were so fond of hockey, “ice ball” in Chinese, a ball game in which there isn’t even a ball. He had not even gotten over his jet lag when he started thinking about going back. “It’s only when I got here that I realized how good China is,” he said. “China is the best place in the world. It’s so lively. I never feel lonely there.” And when I took him to see your statue, he said that he only truly understood now, after coming to Canada, why you had wanted to go to China. “Dr. Bethune was a passionate person. How could he stand living in such a dismal place?”

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I did not want to correct my father. I did not want to tell him what terrible loneliness and solitude you had to bear in China. You, my spiritual father, did not have books or newspapers. You did not have female companionship or coffee. You did not receive the letters you dreamed of receiving. I did not interrupt my biological father’s endless complaints.

  Unlike my father, my mother was so limited by the way she lived on the other side of the planet that she behaved as if she were still in China. Every day, she talked about their little world back home. She said that the madwoman was getting crazier and crazier. One time, she even put urine in her husband’s lunchbox. Another time, she went to the police to accuse her husband of wanting to use DDVP to poison her. The police investigation reached the opposite conclusion—that the one who was trying to poison the other was the madwoman herself, who had laced the honey with DDVP. After the poisoning incident, the madwoman was sent to the mental hospital for the second time. My mother also mentioned the neighbours’ sympathy for Yangyang’s father. They all thought he should get a divorce, but he was not willing to do so. My mother kept on repeating these stories. Sometimes she would remember other things that happened long before, such as when the martyr’s bride knocked on our window asking us to save her life. “I never imagined she could be so ignorant,” she sighed.

  I found my mother’s Schadenfreude towards Yangyang’s family tragedy particularly disagreeable. I always attempted to find a way to interrupt her. Once, in the middle of her monologue, I reminded her that Canada is a wonderful country. “There are lots of interesting things here,” I said.

  She stopped and stared. She knew what I meant, of course, but she just carried on with her tirade. “Who knows what that madwoman might do next?” she said. “Sometimes I wonder whether she’s really mad, or whether she’s just acting mad.”

  I knew that this was just a prelude, that the real drama was still to come.

  The drama played out in a Vietnamese restaurant in my neighbourhood. I took my parents there to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. But there was nothing to celebrate. My father started to complain about Canadian restaurant service as soon as he sat down, and my mother kept repeating the same stories she had been telling on the way to the restaurant. “That madwoman accused a neighbour of sexual harassment!” I looked at my parents. I found their dedication to their respective pet peeves extremely annoying. But I tried to tamp down my own emotions. “Can we please talk about something else?” I asked quietly.

  I never imagined what a violent reaction this would provoke in my mother. “Our family was almost destroyed by that madwoman,” she said furiously, pointing her finger in my face.

  Her body language and her rough words hurt me deeply. “How can you spout such nonsense?” I yelled. This was the angriest I had ever been at my mother.

  My father was shocked at my outburst. He shook his head and said in a low voice, “Life here is even worse than I thought.”

  His words seemed to encourage my mother, and she started yelling. “If it hadn’t been for that little vixen she adopted, our family wouldn’t have ended up like this!” She was screaming even louder now. “It’s been twelve years since you left us.”

  I could not bear the way she referred to Yinyin. But again, I tried to restrain myself. “You should not mix everything up,” I said, calm on the surface.

  My mother kept on criticizing Yinyin. “If it hadn’t been for that vixen, who crawled out of her den, you wouldn’t have ended up like this.” She paused, and looked at my father, and then kept on speaking. “Your stupid marriage ruined us, and it ruined you, too. Look at the kind of life you are leading!”

  “You never tried to understand us,” I said. “We loved each other. I still love her.”

  “That was the reason why your marriage was so stupid,” my mother said. “That little vixen was not worthy of my son’s love.”

  “Please do not refer to Yinyin in that way,” I beseeched her.

  “That word isn’t my invention. That’s what that madwoman calls her,” my mother said. “That’s about the only thing we agree on.”

  “I never thought you would be so unfeeling,” I said. “Yinyin died so many years ago, and here you are, still complaining about her.”

  “I may be more heartless than you think,” my mother said. “I’m very happy that she died the way she did, without the chance to explain herself.”

  I was totally unprepared for my mother saying such a thing. This was way beyond what I could bear. I immediately stood up and stared at her, livid.

  My mother seemed prepared for my reaction. She remained sitting calmly, not the least flustered. Then she finished what she had to say. “If she hadn’t died, we would never have had a chance for a family reunion.”

  Her heartlessness sent me over the edge. I was apoplectic. But she just looked out the window as if nothing were the matter. After a moment, I ran out of the restaurant.

  For the first time in my life, I felt like an orphan. I was sad about the way my mother had insulted Yinyin. I felt like I had lost my parents forever. I walked over to Place du 6 décembre. I was crying so hard that my tears had wetted my shirt.

  This small park is a memorial to the most frightening night in the history of Montreal, even Canada. In the same year that Yinyin died in the shadows on the streets of Beijing, fourteen female students at the École Polytechnique de Montréal—the engineering faculty of the University of Montreal—were killed by a gun-wielding man who blamed women for his troubles. Two of the victims were born in the same year as Yinyin. The man left a note in which he expressed his hatred of feminists, of women. In contrast to Yinyin’s death, there at least seemed to be an explanation for the December 6th tragedy.

  I sat down on a bench in the square. Scenes from my life with Yinyin kept on appearing in my mind. “Now, I too have become an orphan,” I said quietly. In my mind, she very tenderly touched my cheeks. I felt a kind of healing intimacy.

  It w
as very late when I finally went home. I hoped my parents would already be asleep, but they weren’t. I had just sat down in my room when my father walked in. He said I should not have treated my mother like that in the restaurant. He said I should go and say I was sorry. I said I would not do so. I said that she should apologize to me. And to Yinyin.

  “You know how difficult what you did is for your mother to bear?” my father asked.

  “Does she know how difficult it is for me to bear what she said?” I replied.

  My father looked at me sadly. “We used to be such a tight-knit family,” he said. “Now I feel like your mother is right. That girl disrupted everything.”

  I looked out the window. I did not want to have another argument.

  “We have already decided,” my father said. “We’re going to go back early, the sooner the better.”

  I also felt no wish for them to stay any longer. The next morning, I changed their tickets. Three days later, they left. We had spent less than two months together.

  I took them to the airport and helped them check in. I watched them go through security without a hitch. I did not say anything to them. I did not even say goodbye.

  Because of Yinyin, my family, which had reunited after so many years, was once again split up.

  A Mother

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I was estranged from my parents for almost two years after that. But on the day of my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday, I got back in touch with them. It was a strange day. In the morning, I left my bank card in the ATM machine, which had never happened before. At noon, I was almost hit by a car at an intersection not far from my home, when I mistook a green light facing a different direction for the one that allowed me to cross the street. That evening, I sat alone at the same table in the Vietnamese restaurant where my parents and I had eaten dinner the evening of the argument. When I was almost finished, I realized that the next day was my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday, and that it was already the next day in China.