My Mother's Story: The Fiction & Fact

Abstract

My Mother's Story:The Fiction & Fact Xu Xi (bio) First in a series of essays called, collectively, My Mother's Story. My mother, Kathleen Klin Phoa (潘 吉 林) circa 1948. Fact. A student at St. Mary's Canossian secondary school in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Fact. Despite the hiatus that was the war, she was still a girl. Oh, she knew she was almost a woman, but inside, she felt like the schoolgirl she still was who had to matriculate, to further her studies, to become a medical doctor. That was the plan in the run up to 1947. By then, the Japanese had left Singapore and she must have wondered what the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, her former boarding school, looked like now. She had gone home to Indonesia when the war began, but her father had sent the family to the hills of Wonosobo in Central Java, away from the occupation. In Tjilatjap, their family home was gone, leveled by the bombs, as she would tell us all through our childhood, when she was still "Mum," long before that got lost to Alzheimer's. Her version of the war in Indonesia may be fiction, but we have the documents to prove she did indeed attend the Singaporean convent school, and that she later did attend St. Mary's Canossian in Hong Kong from where she did indeed matriculate, and that the University of Hong Kong did indeed offer her a place to study. Medicine is another story—she never attended university. She qualified as a pharmacist instead and either apprenticed or worked for a brief while at Queen Mary Hospital. Then she met Dad, got pregnant, and became "Mum," and could no longer be a girl. [End Page 157] But in 1947, well before she met Dad in Hong Kong, she was, perhaps, already too old to be a girl. It already feels like summer even though it's only May. It is 2011 and my mother and I are in a taxi on the way to her regular medical checkup. Dr. Pei is a geriatric specialist; over half a year ago, her Malaysian gp recommended specialized elder care. Her gp, Raymond, I've known for years as the author of a memoir, because we once shared the same publisher. He became our choice when Mum first needed medical supervision after a lifetime without a regular doctor. He's my doctor now as well, since I moved back to Hong Kong in early 2010 to a full-time university position to help my sister with Mum's Alzheimer's care. This return "home" was after a dozen or so years of a freelance life, inhabiting the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong, and the South Island of New Zealand, though New York was home then. A life I miss. That's Kowloon Tong Club, she says. And Maryknoll School. And St. Teresa's Church. Yes, yes, yes, I say as I do each time she exclaims at these passing landmarks, as if these were sightings after a long time away. Perhaps for her they are. She and Dad held their wedding reception at the club, just as I did for my first marriage. Champagne flowed, but that's Dad's story, not hers, for both weddings, theirs and mine. She sewed her own white dress—more cream than white—which doubled as her evening gown to fit an eighteen-inch waistline. Except that's fiction, because by the time they married, her waist could no longer have been eighteen inches, assuming it ever was, but that is my mother's story and has been ever since she heard Vivien Leigh utter that svelte ideal in Gone with the Wind, one of the few movies she ever recalls. We "the children"—as we forever were to our parents, and even to ourselves—shredded that dress in play over the years and now, none of the dresses she sewed remains, except for one Thai silk cocktail dress. It's black with a pattern of large golden blooms, less garish than you might imagine, with a shawl of the same material. When I unearthed it while clearing out the horrifying...