Transcription
In her final days, I had struggled with the question of whether to share the truth with my wife, the truth she had begun to ask from me. At times I was certain it was the right thing to do, that it would put my own mind at ease and give her the comfort she needed. But each time I saw her lying in bed, her body withering to its bones, the spirit fading from her face, I would lose my nerve. What could the truth mean to someone who had such a tenuous hold on her own life?
The state of indecision was almost brought to an end 3 days before she died. She was looking better that day, and I discerned a light in her eyes that I thought had been long extinguished. "There's something that I've always been meaning to ask," she said faintly. "What made you suddenly agree to immigrate?" I shuddered. "Didn't you say it was for the child?" I said, "That's what I said. I want to know what made you change your mind." I hesitated for a moment, but in the end did not tell her what she wanted to know. The truth I would write much later in the winter after she died.
After the incident with our papers series of exposees on education in Guangong province, I lost my passion for work. I knew that I could not change society and I was unwilling to let society change me. I became an outsider in the office. I lost my former drive to excel and only concerned myself with completing my assignments. Just as outside the office, I stopped having new interests or long-term goals. In this sense, there was some truth to my wife's complaint that I was irresponsible.
This irresponsibility was part of the reason I thought it strange that my wife suddenly became so intent on immigrating. It all happened after a get together she had with former classmates during which I later discovered she had had conversations with two friends that had left a deep impression on her. The first friend worked in the provincial education department and revealed to her the inside story of schooling in China, whereas the second who lived in Canada spoke glowingly of Canada's far more humane education system. The question of immigration became a source of bitter disagreement between us. And in our more heated arguments, she even threatened divorce, saying she would take our daughter to live abroad without me. I signed the divorce papers twice, but each time she tore them up in a fit of emotion before she was able to submit them.
It was a Thursday evening when everything changed. I stayed late at work that day to tidy up a report written by one of the interns about the chaotic state of an audiovisisual equipment market in Guangjo. As I was getting ready to leave, I noticed that aside from the light that was still on in the office of our new supervisor, there was no sign of life on the whole floor. It had been some time since I had worked so late, and there was something surreal about walking through the dark and quiet of the deserted office space. When I reached the elevator, I heard what sounded like sobbing, but it didn't really register with me at first. The report on the chaotic Guangzo market was still on my mind, and I was also thinking about where I would go to buy my daughter's favorite brand of bread. However, as I walked into the elevator, I suddenly felt that something wasn't right. Who would be sobbing in the office at this hour? Later, I would often reflect on how had this thought not occurred to me, everything would have turned out differently. I don't know where it came from, whether it was a matter of fate or chance, but for some reason, as I stood in the elevator, something came over me, a peculiar sensation, the repercussions of which would eventually include my consenting to immigrate.
Just as the doors were closing, I pressed the button to open them again and stepped out into the corridor. I stood there for a moment, and sure enough, I could still make out the sound of someone crying. I began to make my way toward where the sound was coming from, making an effort as I walked to measure my stride so it would appear as natural as possible. It was a bizarre situation. I was an outsider who cared little for work. Yet here I was after hours, gripped by a sudden concern about what was going on in the office. I did not know what had come over me. Was it curiosity, empathy, or a sense of responsibility? As I approached the door to my supervisor's office, it became clear that the sobbing was coming from there. The only room on the whole floor with the lights on, but I did not stop. There were CCTV cameras everywhere, and I imagined the security guard downstairs watching my every movement on the surveillance monitors. So, I continued to walk without breaking my stride until I had reached the editorial office. I entered the room, sat at my desk, and thought about what I should do. It was a simple predicament, I quickly realized, and I had three options: knock on the door to my supervisor's office, get the security guard to knock on the door, or ignore it and go home. In ordinary circumstances, the third of these options would have been the most appealing to an outsider like me, and the first option the least. But for some reason, I picked up the report I had just been working on and walked slowly to my supervisor's office door. Even if the security guard had been watching me at that moment, I thought to myself, he would not have seen anything he thought out of the ordinary. I paused for a moment outside the door, and when I was sure that I could still hear someone sobbing, I knocked softly. The sound stopped. Then I heard a drawer being closed and the sound of footsteps. The door opened to reveal the smiling face of my supervisor. "You're still here," she said. I handed her the report and said, "I don't know if this is what you were hoping for." I glanced briefly around the room and saw that there was no one else there. Was it my supervisor who had been crying just now? She looked up from the report I had given her with the same rigid smile on her face. "Leave it with me," she said. "I'll get back to you tomorrow." I didn't know what else I could say. I smiled awkwardly and said thanks before turning around and walking away. My eyes were trained on the corridor that led to the elevator, but my mind was still in the room behind me as I heard the door close. Then I heard it open again. Then a period of silence and finally the voice of my supervisor. She was calling after me. I stopped and turned around. "Come here a moment," she said. She asked me if I was in a hurry and I replied that I had nothing to do except buy my daughter's favorite brand of bread. "We can chat for a bit then," she said as she stepped aside to give me room to walk into her office. She closed the door and told me to make myself comfortable. So I sat on the sofa nearest the door and farthest away from her seat behind the desk. I hoped increasing the distance between us might calm my nerves, but to my dismay, she turned the chair on the other side of her desk around and sat right in front of me. I have never liked talking face to face with my superiors at work, and the whole situation made me tense. She, on the other hand, seemed completely at ease as she began to tell me that she knew how difficult it was being a parent, especially of girls. A daughter always caused her parents much more distress than a son did. Her own daughter was studying in the UK, and the older she got, the more worried she was about her. I did not feel confident enough to chat as an equal with my supervisor parent to parent. So I simply replied that my daughter was still young and we had not reached that stage yet. My supervisor went on to ask me who cooked in our family. I replied that I enjoyed cooking but my wife did not like the food I made. A solemn look appeared on her face as she said, "All families have these problems." We chatted for almost 40 minutes, and in that time, we did not speak once about anything related to work. Neither did she say anything that shed light on the sobbing that had emanated from her office moments earlier. And naturally, I was too nervous to bring it up. She did not give the impression of someone who had been crying. She seemed utterly relaxed the whole time I was in her office. In the end, she was the one who brought the conversation to a close, standing up and reminding me that I had to buy bread for my daughter. "It's best not to keep a child waiting," she said. "Your children are the most important thing."
The next day in the canteen at lunch, my supervisor walked past my table and asked if she could sit in the empty chair opposite me. I felt my face immediately turn red. Ever since leaving her office, I had been thinking about our peculiar encounter. I had never sat so close to a superior and spoken at such length, especially about such personal topics. In fact, this was precisely what had been on my mind when she interrupted my train of thought with her question and before I could reply sat down. She asked if I had been able to buy the bread yesterday and whether my daughter was upset that I had returned home too late. She even asked if my daughter looked like me. As I answered her questions, I was as nervous as I had been the evening before, nervous about what I should say, about how she would react and about what my colleagues would think about us sitting together. I realized that what worried me most was not simply the fact that she was my supervisor, but that she was also a woman. a woman who was my supervisor who had chatted with me at length last night about things completely unrelated to work. I did not ask a single question and I said no more than was absolutely necessary. Our conversation revolved around children and she continued to chat in the same placid tone of the evening before. She told me how her daughter used to behave when she was my daughter's age and then what she thought of the motheraughter relationship and the best education for a child. It was only when she stood up to leave that she brought up anything to do with work. She said she had read my report and she asked me to come to her office that afternoon to talk about it.
After lunch, I found it difficult to concentrate on work. All I could think about was my work boss, my supervisor, and my life boss, my wife. And I found myself comparing them. At first, I considered their attitudes toward parenting and education and discovered I preferred my supervisor's approach. Her way of looking at and dealing with these issues seemed both more sensible and more sensitive than my wife's. The longer I considered these two women, the more the scope of my comparison grew until I found myself weighing up their educational backgrounds, their thinking styles, even what they wore and how they looked. My supervisor was more easygoing in terms of her convictions, whereas my wife was fidious in her views. When it came to clothes, however, it was my wife who paid no mind to what she was wearing as long as it was comfortable, whereas my supervisor took great care to dress well. Although she was older than my wife, my supervisor's skin and general physique were in better condition, and there was a youthful femininity to her movements and the way that she walked. The more I compared them, and the more things I compared them on, the more the prospect of visiting my supervisor unsettled me. And it only got worse as I continued to think about the two encounters that had already taken place.
10 minutes before the end of the workday, I finally went to her office and knocked tentatively on the door. I heard a voice say, "Come in." And I opened the door to find my supervisor absorbed in her work. She looked up from the documents on her desk to see me standing in the doorway, unsure of whether or not I should enter. She smiled and said, "Do you mind waiting a moment while I get this sorted?" I took a step back out of the office, closed the door, and returned to my desk. My colleagues were beginning to pack up their things, so I pretended to be getting on with some work. When everyone had gone, I retrieved a copy of Harvest Literary Magazine that I kept in my desk drawer. When I looked up from the magazine, I noticed how much time had passed. It was already around the same time I had left the office the previous day. I walked to the door, looked out, and saw that the light in my supervisor's office was still on. I took a deep breath, and making an effort to appear relaxed, walked slowly to her office. I knocked softly on the door and she opened it. "I've been waiting for you," she said. She closed the door behind me as I walked in and then locked it. I sat in the same place on the far side of the sofa as the previous evening and looked at the chair I assumed she would place in front of me like she had done the night before. She did not touch the chair, however, and I felt a flutter in my chest as she took a seat on the sofa next to me, only an arms length away. My body and larynx tensed up, even more than they had the day before. I had no idea what to say, and so I waited. I hoped she would bring up my report so I could hear what she had to say and leave as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this is not what she had in mind. "Do you have a picture of your daughter?" she asked. I thought it a strange request, but was grateful that the silence had finally been broken. I retrieved the photo of my daughter that I kept in my wallet. After studying the photo for some time, she turned to look directly at me. I smiled awkwardly, wondering what she would say next. "I think I can picture what her mother looks like," she said. I was about to say that my daughter did not look much like her mother, but decided it would be better not to complicate things. Little did I know, my supervisor was about to complicate things a great deal. "Do you love her?" she asked. I stifled a gasp. Her words seemed to pierce me like a knife. "Who?" I said, unable to prevent my voice from breaking slightly. She flicked her eyes toward the photo again. "Her mother, of course," she said. No one had ever asked me this question before, let alone a woman. let alone a woman I did not even know 24 hours ago. I told myself that I did not have to answer truthfully. "Sure," I said as I took the photograph back from her. "Oh, that's such a male answer," she said. "What the hell does mean?" I could not believe it. This wasn't the way a female supervisor usually spoke with her male subordinates. "Do you know how difficult it is for women?" She brought a hand to her face and began to cry. I had no idea what to say. My mind was all over the place as I thought about what I had heard the previous night from the elevator. "You men are all the same," she added through her sobs. There was a pack of tissues on her desk. It was the only thing I could think of to help. So, I walked to the desk, pulled out three tissues, and handed them to her. I would later regret this decision. If I had not tried to comfort my supervisor, perhaps her emotional outburst would have simply been a one-off, an exceptional incident that would not go on to affect my entire life. Rather than taking the tissues, she grabbed my hand and feverishly pulled it toward her face. She planted her lips on the back of my hand as her crying intensified. Never before had I felt another's tears roll down my hand, nor had my hand been kissed so passionately before. It was the first time I had seen someone reduced to such an emotionally raw state, and the dreamlike scene had a powerful impact on me. It kindled a strong sense of empathy and responsibility that made me forget that the woman in front of me was my supervisor, someone I barely knew 24 hours earlier. I leaned my face closer to her disheveled hair. She was now a woman whose suffering was my responsibility to help lessen. A woman who needed my support. She must have felt my breath as I leaned closer to the back of her head because she suddenly stopped sobbing. She lifted her head and looked at me through tearary eyes. "Men don't know how lonely women are," she said before lowering her head and placing it back on my hand. "You don't know how lonely I am." I noticed how she changed men and women for you and I. She had moved from a comment about people in general to one that brought the two of us in particular together. And the link that connected us was loneliness. A pang of sympathy caused me to realize even more keenly my duty of care toward her. "I know," I said. "I know." She lifted her head and looked me in the eyes as she grabbed my hand with both of hers and placed it on her chest. This was not what I expected. I was too afraid to look at her, so I closed my eyes and turned toward the door as I tried to pull my hand away. She misunderstood my concern. "Don't worry, I locked the door," she said. She placed her hands on either side of my face and pulled me back to look at her. "No one will disturb us," she added softly, as if cajoling a child. I opened my eyes and saw that she had undone the buttons on her blouse. Before I had a chance to react, she had taken off her bra, grabbed my hand, and placed it on her breast. I was both shocked and excited, and I could not help but noticed that the breast in my hand must have been twice the size of my wife's. This almost unconscious comparison filled me with a strong sense of guilt both about the half- naked woman before me and the woman who was at that moment waiting for me at home. I felt paralyzed. I could not bear to look my supervisor in the eyes, nor did I dare to look at the bare breast in my hand. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth as if subject to some terrible torment. That's when I felt my supervisor undoing my fly. I immediately pushed her away. "No, please don't," I said. "We shouldn't be doing this." My protestations did not dissuade her. If anything, they only seemed to spur her on. She knelt on the ground, undid my trousers, and brought her face toward my crotch. On a physical level, I seemed immune to her provocations, which only aggravated my conflicted mental state. On top of the nerves, excitement, and guilt I had been feeling, I was now struck by a painful sense of shame. I was acutely aware of every movement of her mouth and tongue, but there was no reaction. whatsoever from my body. "Don't you like it?" She lifted her head and looked at me disappointedly. I could not look at her. I did not know what to say. "You're nervous," she said as she did up my fly and pressed her hand softly against my crotch. She got to her feet and tidied up her clothes before sitting on the sofa next to me. I took a deep breath and leaned forward, placing my head on my knees. She put her hand on the back of my head. "It's fine. You're nervous, that's all," she said. "It'll be all right next time."
She began to tell me about her marriage. She said that for three years there had been no relationship to speak of between her and the man she had married, even though they continued to live in the same house. She had known for some time that he had a mistress, but at first she had thought it was just one of those moral lapses so typical of men. She was sure it would pass and that things would return to normal. However, it became clear that their marriage could never be what it once was when she discovered he wanted to marry his mistress. He had been asking her for a divorce ever since their daughter had left to study in the UK, but she was against it. Her husband did not understand her attachment to their marriage, which was, after all, a marriage in name only, and could not see what difference a divorce would make to her. He had presented her with divorce papers four times now, with what he considered very favorable conditions for her, but each time she'd refused to sign, tearing the documents to pieces and throwing them in the toilet without even looking at them. Eventually, he had decided to change his approach, and it was yesterday, the day I had first heard her crying in her office, that she had received a package by registered mail from her husband. It contained a fifth set of divorce papers and an accompanying letter on which were written only two sentences. The first explained that the package included a draft of the final divorce papers he would send her. The second sentence stated simply that if she still refused to sign, he would see her in court. When she got to this part of the story, she began to cry again. "What should I do?" Her question seemed half-posed to me and half posed to herself. I knew this was not a question I could answer directly, but I still felt I ought to comfort her. I put my hand on her back and was trying to think of what I ought to say when she stopped crying. "But today is a happy day," she said. "I shouldn't let this boring stuff get between us." As she said these words, she looked deep into my eyes. She leaned forward and placed her lips on mine slowly, as if performing some kind of sacred ritual. It was a sensual moment. more sensual than anything that had taken place between my wife and me. And I did not pull away. I was excited. My whole body was excited. And when our lips gradually parted, I saw the same hungry look in her eyes. "From now on, don't think of me as your boss. And don't worry about the age difference between us," she said. "From now on, I am simply a little woman who needs your compassion."
By the time I got home, my wife and daughter had already finished their dinner and cleaned up. I worried they might be able to smell an unfamiliar scent on me, so I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face before going to the kitchen to eat some leftovers. My wife told me to heat up the food first so that I would not get indigestion. I said it was fine that my stomach was not usually affected by that sort of thing. "If you can't even be responsible for your own body, how are you supposed to look after this family?" My wife said. "Normally, I would not have responded to this all too familiar criticism. But something about everything I had just experienced had rendered me unusually sensitive. "What do you mean by that?" I said, raising my voice. My wife was evidently not prepared for my answering back, and she simply looked at me confused with her mouth slightly open. "Why do you always speak to me like that?" I went on. "Why can't you behave like a little woman when you're speaking to me?" "You've had a bad day," she said, the softness of her voice barely concealing her contempt. "Actually, it's been a great day," I said, lowering my voice to mimic her spite. My wife clearly had no idea what to make of my reaction. After standing stunned for a moment, she left to tell our daughter to get ready for bed.
After I had finished cleaning up the kitchen, I went to the bathroom to wash before bed. In the shower, I looked down and saw my body in a way I had never seen it before. It was the first time I had ever noticed my body. The first time in my life. Less than 30 hours before, it had been just another forgotten relic that had outlived its usefulness. Now it was the sight of a newly born passion. It had been noticed, needed. Pride burst out of my chest. I looked up to the nozzle and enjoyed the wonderful heat of its spray as it ran down my face and over my body. But then I felt a sharp pain in my head and a fearful solitude came over me, just as it had done a couple of hours earlier when I had left my supervisor's office. "What should I do?" I heard her question echo in my mind. This time, however, the desperation was mine.
I went straight to bed after my shower, but by 11, I was still wide awake. I was thinking about how helpless my situation had been since I met my wife, and how stifling and dispiriting this helplessness was. I remembered the talented but unfortunate woman and the girl I was meant to meet in the old summer palace. My wife had never been able to fill me with wonder as they had, or to affect me as they had with their purity. She had aroused in me nothing that resembled the emotional turmoil I had experienced only hours before. My wife had only come to bed at 11:00, but she'd fallen asleep immediately. As I listened to the rhythmic sound of her breathing, I felt a painful contraction in my chest. Tears started to run down my cheeks and into the pillow. I could not locate the source of this hurt. Was it guilt, remorse, shame, or despair? I turned toward my wife, and something about her figure in the dark triggered a strange sensation in my body. I looked at her chest as it rose and fell under the sheets, and the physical sensation that had come over me began to grow stronger. I stretched out my hand. I wanted to put it under her shirt and hold her breast. No, my breast. It belonged to me. No one had ever held it before except me. We had lived together for many years. This was the first time I had ever felt such a forceful sense of belonging, of possession. It was short-lived, however, because the real master intervened. "Stop that," my wife said, the annoyance audible in her voice as she pulled my hand roughly from her shirt and pushed it away. She turned swiftly away from me and went back to sleep.
For the next two months, I was pulled between two extremes. On the one hand, my wife's unflapable indifference was difficult to bear, while on the other, my supervisor's unbridled appetite had me constantly on edge. I was split between two predicaments that meant I dreaded both going to work and going home. I never did get used to my supervisor calling me to her office to discuss work, even if what she had said turned out to be correct. It was all right since the second time. But the physical pleasure was not enough to dispel my mental anguish. Each time I left her office after one of our discussions, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. She, on the other hand, was always reluctant to let me leave and said that she found it difficult to think of me going home to spend time with another woman. I told her I felt the same way, so she decided not to let boring stuff, which meant anything to do with her husband, interfere with our encounters. This did not solve the problem, however. There was something disconcertingly conspicuous about her very silence on these matters. I did not know what it was she really wanted from me. Why did she refuse to let go of her marriage if it was, as her husband had said, a marriage in name only? I found it difficult to accept the fact that each time we parted ways, she was going home to another man. This was perhaps the main reason I refused to go to her house. During our two-month affair, she invited me three times. Twice on the weekend and once more during work hours. She told me there would be nobody home and said I was bound to be more relaxed there. However, the thought of sitting on the same sofa he sat on, using the same bathroom he used, even seeing the same windows and walls that housed him. This man, who had once satisfied the woman I was having an affair with, filled me with revulsion. I made no excuses to explain why I could not go and simply said that there was no way I would be more relaxed. But she seemed intent on having me go to her house, and it was obvious that my unwavering refusal disappointed her. It was only when she invited me for a third time that it finally dawned on me that my role in our relationship was not simply to satisfy her bodily cravings. I was also there to address a shadowy psychological need. She was using me to get back at her husband as a strange way of reinforcing her refusal to divorce him. And something about me being in her house had a symbolic function that would help her deal with the hurt she had suffered. With this realization, I only became more adamant in my decision. "Find someone else to go with you," I said angrily. From that moment on, I began to think that my situation, divided between two extremes of passion, was even more boring than the boring stuff my supervisor endeavored to keep from me.
All this meant I was neither particularly surprised nor that upset when my supervisor happily told me one day that her husband had changed his mind. It was not what she said, but where and when she said it that left a sickening taste in my mouth. We were in her office. She had just finished breathlessly saying, "That was great." and was pulling up her trousers when she smiled at me and said, "My husband finally changed his mind." I looked at her in stony silence. "It doesn't bother you, does it?" she said as she pulled me up from the sofa. "I'm so happy he finally saw sense," she said. "It's just," she paused. "We won't be able to do this anymore." She held on to me tightly. I stood rigidly in her arms, my hands motionless by my side, waiting impatiently for her to let me go.
That night, when my wife turned off the bedside lamp, I turned over, put my hand on her left breast, and nestled my face into her shoulder. It had been some time since I had acted so intimately with her. "Let's do it," I said. It took a while for my wife to realize what I was saying. "Do what?" "Eimmigrate," I said. I could tell my wife had turned her head toward me. I did not move. My head still stuck to her shoulder. "You were right," I said. "When when you said that it's what we must do for our child."
The end of the end. The ice rink on Mount Royal officially closed in the second week of March. And on the very last day, I arrived before sunrise. The pavilion had yet to open, so I changed into my skates on one of the benches outside. I thought back to the Korean student who was the first to bring me up the mountain that winter. She should have left Canada and been back in Korea by now. I did not know if she had ever returned to Mount Royal, or whether she had even thought about it during her time here. If she had any idea what a remarkable winter our apparently chance encounter would lead to, I was sure she would regard it with the same wonder as I did. The temperature had risen the previous evening, and the workers who tended to the ice rink hadn't yet arrived. which meant the surface was uneven and it was difficult to pick up any speed. After around 20 minutes, I grew tired of skating. I took a seat on the bench where I had just changed my skates and looked out vacantly over Beaver Lake, covered in snow. Perhaps it was a result of the wistful mood that was coming over me as winter drew to a close. But there was something exhilarating that morning about the radiance of the sun as it inched over the horizon. I had had no news from Celia since her suicide note, and what remained of Misoka was no more than a pile of photocopied fragments of a novel. This most unusual of winters was coming to an end. I was struck by the uncanny sensation that I was fading away. I thought back to the first question Hermit Wong had asked me. What was I doing here? Over the course of this winter, the answer had been getting more and more complex. The number of causes for my circumstances steadily increasing. appearing on the mountain for the last time that winter. It seemed that I was here because of Misoka, because of Celia, because of Mount Royal and its glittering white snow, because of Beaver Lake and its frozen thick surface. But as winter slowly departed, it would take all of these reasons for being here with it. I felt myself fading away with the season and a new idea was appearing in its place. It was time to leave. There was no reason for me to stay. The sound of a woodpecker interrupted my thoughts. Its empty tap tap tap breaking the silence of the woods, hollowing me out even further. Yes, it was time to leave.
On the way home, I stopped by my wife's grave and burned the pages on which I had written the truth she needed. I had come to the conclusion that she would not care about all the details of what had happened or exactly how I had felt at each stage of the process. So in my final version, I had simply recorded the key events and all the things I had done for which I was genuinely sorry. My list of regrets was exhaustive. From my consistently irresponsible attitude to the day I raised my voice to her in the kitchen after my first transgression with my supervisor. I even expressed remorse for the worst argument of our time in Montreal, which had started when she decided she wanted to buy the house we would later live in for 9 years. She had been determined to buy it ever since she came across the advertisement by chance one day, but I completely disagreed. Aside from being uninterested in owning property in general, I did not think much of the location of the house, which I said was too far from both my daughter's school and the convenience store. In my letter, I conceded that I did not have her head for business or her eye for the economy. I explained that although I had sold the house after she died, it was out of respect and admiration for her and had nothing to do with my original opposition to her decision. I waited until nothing remained of my truth except Ash. But as I walked away, I remembered my epiphany at the top of the mountain. I returned to my wife's grave and told her that I had begun to consider leaving Montreal. My Taiwanese neighbors method turned out to be as effective as she claimed it would be. That evening, my wife did not appear in my dreams, which meant that I had given her what she had wanted, and she had accepted my apology. More importantly, she had forgiven me. She had consented to let me go. And to this day, after so many years, my wife has not reappeared.
The following day, when I woke up in bed, I opened my eyes feeling completely reinvigorated. It was time to draw my 15 years of life as an immigrant to an end. I decided to go back to China. I knew I had grown unaccustomed to its air and its ways, its joys and its strife. In the 15 years I had been away, my native land had become foreign to me. Or was I the one who had been transformed, who had become a foreigner? The last time I was back, my friends and relatives all said I was different. I no longer understood what they were talking about when they smiled and joked or grumbled and moaned, and I felt separated from their memories of jubilation and hardship. I had no desire to share with them my own views of China as an outsider, an immigrant returning home, nor had I spoken about my life abroad. In general, I kept to myself. It was clear they all said that Canada had changed me. The fact was we were all different in this globalized information age. Everyone was changing and no one could understand anyone else. We could not see the change in ourselves. So we assumed that it was everyone else who was changing. The absurdity of our condition struck me. But it did not shake my resolve. I had made my decision. I would return to my native land, no matter how unrecognizable it was.
The first thing I had to do was tell my daughter. I had no intention of letting her know how sudden my decision was, or how it had sprung from that empty tap, tap tap I had heard coming from the woods of Mount Royal. So, in the email, I explained that it was the result of a winter's long consideration. Of course, what I meant by a winter was all the events that had led, albeit indirectly, to my decision. I closed the email saying I hoped she could find time to see me as quickly as possible so we could put things in order before my departure. It took almost a month to get everything ready for leaving, during which time I eagerly awaited for my daughter to get in touch. Although my disappointment grew with each day that she did not get back to me, I was mentally prepared for such an outcome. I knew there was a possibility that she would not respond at all. I also wrote to Celia twice. I was now pretty much convinced by Misoka's theory. But I still held out for a miracle. With everything that had happened that winter, I no longer believed anything was impossible. In my last weeks in Montreal, I even saw Misuka once through the windows of a subway car as she adjusted her wheelchair on the platform. It was clear she had just arrived at the station, and we must have been on the same train. But why could we not have also been in the same carriage? Was it meant to be or had it just happened to turn out that way? I feverishly knocked on the glass, but she didn't hear. As the train pulled away from the platform, I was hit once again with the realization that winter was truly over.
I only bought my ticket home a week in advance. I agonized for two hours before deciding to adopt the senior junior principal and send a final graveling email to my daughter in which I told her I hoped that we could see each other before I left. I filled it with sentimental phrases like "I don't know when the next chance will be" and attached my flight information in the hope that she would see for herself how little time there was left. I learned the senior junior principal from my Taiwanese neighbor. The first time I had complained to her about my oblivious daughter, she responded by shaking her head and telling me that it was exactly the same with her family. Since moving out to a place only 15 minutes walk from the apartment, her son's record for the amount of time spent without visiting was 1 year, 3 months, and 8 days. She went on to tell me that over many years observation she had developed two principles for dealing with children: the armle principle and the senior junior principle. A parent could never force children to do anything because the leg is stronger than the arm. She said and they are the legs. Furthermore, one had to abandon one's sense of seniority and learn to act as though they were the child's junior, which meant putting up with all manner of humiliation, no matter how painful and patiently, humbly, shamelessly waiting for them to come around. She concluded that the child would always return to the parents side in the end and reconciliation would eventually be achieved. I never did receive a reply from my daughter, but 2 days before my flight, just as I was thinking that all hope was lost, she phoned me. It was the first time she had called since moving out of our home and out of my life. I hadn't heard any news from her all winter. Perhaps one of that winter's darker miracles. So when I heard her familiar voice, I found it difficult to contain my excitement. She seemed completely relaxed, utterly natural, as if it were just an everyday conversation between us, as if an entire winter did not separate this phone call from the last time we spoke. She asked me where I was spending my last night in Montreal, and I told her that my Taiwanese neighbor was letting me sleep in her living room. "Why not stay here?" she asked before telling me her address for the first time. She even said she would leave work an hour early to see me. It was hard to believe. Was it possible my fortunes could be reversed so completely in a moment? The reconciliation my Taiwanese neighbor had promised had arrived. This was the final miracle of that most unusual of winters.
On the evening before my last night as an immigrant, I walked for the first time into my daughter's home. It was her very first home as an independent adult, a home that was hers and hers only. But I could not help but think that in some way it also belonged to that winter. I was over the moon, but I did not want to make my daughter uncomfortable. So I stifled the tears that I knew would be hard to hold back once they had started to flow. She showed me around the apartment and then sat with me at her dining table and told me about the neighborhood. Everything in the apartment was arranged much more neatly than I would have expected, and I wondered if she had tidied, especially for me. The image of her preparing the apartment for my visit filled me with joy. Was it possible she truly cared what I thought? I had always assumed she had long stopped caring. Afterward, she took me to an Italian restaurant three blocks from her apartment. She was still not as talkative as she had been when she was younger, but I was grateful to finally have the chance to have a normal conversation with her. We had not spoken like this since she started high school. She answered my questions, shared her opinions, and even asked me questions of her own. As we ate, she told me she approved of my decision to return to China. "You won't be so lonely there," she said. I sighed. "Who would have thought this is how the winter would end?" My daughter seemed to take this as a criticism directed at her. "I really have been very busy," she said guilty. "I'm not blaming you," I paused. "In fact, I should be thanking you." My daughter looked at me quizzically. "For some time now, I've not had a life of my own," I explained. "You deserve a life of your own," she said. And I felt the solicitude in her words. "Do you remember when we used to go skating on Mount Royal?" I asked. "That was a long time ago." "This winter, I went skating there pretty much every day," I said. The surprise was visible in my daughter's face. I smiled and said, "Yes, I've not been so lonely this winter. That's the way it should be." And each time I took your skates with me. "Really? Why?" "I wanted to get that old feeling back." My daughter paused for a moment. "Did you?" she asked. I looked her in the eyes, thankful for the chance to be sitting with her, and thought about telling her that this was the old feeling I had been looking for. But I did not want to make her feel uncomfortable, so I simply said, "This winter has never failed to amaze me." My daughter did not pursue the topic any further, and instead asked about her grandparents. In the first email I had sent her, I had mentioned that my parents' health had taken a turn for the worse and that one of the reasons I was going back was to look after them.
After we had finished eating, my daughter took me to the park behind her home. As we walked, I told her about our family's financial situation. We had managed to save up quite a lot of money after 13 difficult years running the convenience store. Plus, we had made a reasonable amount from the properties we had bought. I took the opportunity to praise her mother's financial foresight. She had been right to insist on buying both the convenience store and our house. Then I told my daughter that I lived very simply, so she was sure to receive a sizable inheritance. This news left little impact on her. She said there was no need for me to be so tight with my money, especially if it was with a view to leaving her a larger
Inheritance. "Did you not say that if you had the time and money, you would like to travel the world?" she said. "You remember I used to say that it was something I had begun to talk about after Hermit Wong left, but I was touched to hear that my daughter had taken note of it. I really want you to be able to live the life you want," she said.
It had been a long time since I had felt such empathy from my daughter, and I looked into the pristine night sky and sighed. "What had I done to deserve this blessing?"
"You're going to miss Montreal's clear skies," my daughter said.
"I'm going to miss Montreal's miracles," I replied.
This was clearly not what my daughter had expected. She looked at me and seemed, for the first time, to perceive the change that had taken place in me. As we came to the park entrance, I reminded my daughter to go to her mother's grave once in a while when she had time. As I said this, a peculiar thought came to me. I stopped walking and turned to her.
"You must know that there wasn't much feeling between your mom and me," I said. "But when I die, I'd like to be buried next to her."
My daughter pulled on the corner of my coat to indicate that we should keep walking. "That's still a long way away," she said. "I always thought you should think about finding someone else to spend the rest of your life with."
The next day, my daughter said she would come with me to the airport. I made a show of refusing, but of course, was secretly overjoyed when she insisted. For some time in the taxi, we sat in silence as I wondered what she was thinking. I thought back on the first evening we arrived in Montreal 15 years earlier. But my revery was interrupted by my daughter.
She said that from now on, I could email her if I had anything I wanted to talk to her about. I understood, of course, what she meant. She was telling me that from now on, she would reply to my emails. The magical reconciliation had truly taken place, and I felt the full strength of my love for my daughter.
I told her that I had put the check she had refused to accept the night before under her pillow. She scolded me good-naturedly for my deception, telling me she was not in need of money. I said it would make me feel better, that I wanted her to keep it for emergencies.
When we arrived at the airport, I suggested she get back in the taxi, but she refused. She accompanied me as I collected my boarding pass and even stayed with me until I got to security. I began to feel self-conscious because I did not know how to say goodbye. I didn't want to regret this moment, but I also was worried about embarrassing my daughter.
Before I could make a decision, my daughter reached out and gave me a hug. She had not hugged me since her mother's funeral, and after our relationship had soured. I had come to think that that might have been the last time I would ever hold her in my arms. I would never have imagined that she would be the one to put her arms around me, rest her head on my shoulder, and in the voice I had been yearning to hear all winter, wish me a safe trip.
The emotion building inside me finally became too much to bear, and the question I had been holding back for more than 12 hours burst out of me. "Do you like it here?" I asked, my voice cracking slightly.
My daughter didn't seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary about my question. "I do," she said. This was the answer I was waiting for, the answer I needed to hear. My eyes began to well up.
"Do you remember the first time I asked you that question?" I said, when we stepped out of this airport 15 years ago. My daughter nodded. "I remember you took a deep breath of the icy air, turned to me with a dreamy look in your eyes, and said exactly the same thing. I do." She nodded again. "After that, I asked you again. Do you remember? Every time we were alone together, I asked you. When we went up Mount Royal to go skating, I would ask you," I said. "Your answer never changed. In my whole life, this is the thing for which I am most grateful."
My daughter hugged me again and reminded me I had a flight to catch. The tears began running down my face. "You know, it's the one thing in the last 15 years of my life that hasn't changed."
With that, I left the city I had lived in for 15 years, seen off by my daughter, and the one constant that kept me going in that time.
On the plane, I remembered what Hermit Wong had once told me was the mysterious thing about being an immigrant. "Once an immigrant, always an immigrant. For someone who has immigrated, returning home is simply a second immigration. You can never go home. You will forever and everywhere be a stranger." He was right. Of course, the last two times I had been in China were proof enough. In the last 15 years, I had only experienced my native land through some medium—the news, what people said, the internet. I had not felt for myself its moments of elation and suffering. Similarly, as far as the people back home were concerned, I was no more than a distant, insignificant grain of sand. They had no way to know the pleasure and pain I had felt while I was abroad, and they had no need to know. If anything, the winter I had just experienced would only have estranged me from them further. I reminded myself that I would have to be prepared for the difficulties this second immigration would bring.
1,952 days have now passed since I left Montreal. During this unremarkable time, images and memories of Mount Royal have often returned to me. These reveries have done little to bring me closer to that winter, and if anything, only seemed to draw me further away. In the end, the dream is always rudely cut short, and I find myself back in a reality that makes it hard to believe the events of that winter. The mysterious appearance of two enigmatic women, their equally mysterious disappearance. It seems the world in which I now live could not have less to do with Celia and Misoka.
I have spent most of my time since my second immigration looking after my parents. They became my world. For the first 3 years, this mostly involved being at home. But on the third day of the Chinese New Year, in the fourth year, my father started coughing up blood and had to go to the hospital. It did not take long for the doctors to diagnose him with lung cancer. One week after my father was admitted, my mother suffered a stroke and was sent to the same hospital. My father was on the eighth floor and my mother on the third, which my father knew about, but my mother didn't. From the day my mother was admitted to the hospital, they did not see each other. Even though my brother had arranged for a helper to look after each of them, my parents still required a lot from me. I decided to split my day between the two of them. I got to my father's room at 9:00 in the morning and left at noon, then went on to look after my mother from 1 until 5. It was like having a 9-to-5 job, except, of course, without weekends off. Life was beginning to resemble my time working in the convenience store.
After the stroke, my mother quickly lost awareness of her surroundings. Before long, she could not even recognize the son who did everything right, let alone me, the one who did nothing right. She began to call me dad. Perhaps because deep down inside, that was the only person she could imagine tending to her everyday. Her mood began to get worse. Apart from dad, of whom she seemed slightly afraid, she treated everyone else, including the doctor, with contempt and was very uncooperative when it came to her treatment.
My father and I, on the other hand, got much closer. We spoke much more than we ever had before, and he even asked me about my time in Montreal. I found his attitude toward my mother slightly disconcerting. He never asked to see her, but each morning when I arrived in his room, he would ask me how she was doing. "Is she still alive?" he would often ask. The vulgar turn of phrase made me wonder if his condition had not also affected his mind in some way.
One day, I lost my patience. "Would you prefer it if she was alive or dead?" I asked. He appeared slightly confused. "I'm just afraid," he said. "Afraid of what?" "Afraid of her dying before me," he said. And then, before I could think of a comforting response, he added, "And afraid of her dying after me."
At first, I didn't know what to say to this contradictory answer. But then I saw a chance to get back at him for his years of scorn. "That's a puzzle mathematics cannot solve," I said, laughing coldly. My father picked up on my petty act of revenge and sighed before saying, "Mathematics could never solve anything." The regret in his disconsolate response made me drop my hostile stance, and I put my hand on his. "She's still alive," I said softly, but barely. "She doesn't recognize anybody anymore."
He coughed before saying, "I've always thought our marriage was a mistake." I had never heard my father say a bad word about his marriage before. "Why?" I asked. "She's a very intelligent woman," he replied. "She should not have had to spend her life in a small town with a nobody like me." He paused for a moment before going on. "She deserved a completely different life." That was the first and last time I heard my father talk this way about his marriage. It was also the only time I had ever heard anybody find fault with their marriage on behalf of their partner. After that, my father stopped asking me about my mother's condition.
Around half a year ago, my father asked me about my plans for the future. I said I didn't know. He replied that it wouldn't do to be alone, that I ought to find someone suitable with whom I could share my life. "Easier said than done," I said. "Of course, you don't need me to tell you that. You've seen for yourself the repercussions of getting it wrong." I laughed coldly and told him it was impolite to make fun of the dead. He looked at me sternly and said, "Yes, I'll be there soon myself." He motioned me to lean closer. "Actually, I think there's someone." "Who?" I asked apprehensively. He pointed to the door, and I stared at it but did not understand. Then he mimed injecting himself with a needle, and it dawned on me. "He must have meant the head nurse he liked so much." "I hear she's recently divorced," he said with a grin, as if a divorce was something worth celebrating.
"I would be lying if I said my father's suggestion did not strike accord with me." I was also fond of the head nurse he was talking about. I liked the way she looked and the way she spoke, but perhaps most of all, I liked the fact that she read. I had noticed she often walked around with a useless book in her hand. It had never occurred to me that something might happen between us, but when my father pointed it out, I realized that she was someone I would consider suitable. My father said he could tell she was interested in me. She often asked about me and had even wanted to know what book I had recently been reading. My father went on to criticize me for being an insensitive dope.
3 weeks earlier, the head nurse had recommended a novel called *The Empty Nest*, but I had not given her recommendation much thought. I had yet to get my hands on a copy. "If I'm not mistaken," my father said, "there is something in that book she wants to communicate to you." I had not forgotten the head nurse's recommendation and even remembered that she had said it was a novel that my father and I could read together. The problem was that I had long before lost interest in Chinese contemporary fiction. But that day at noon, I went straight to the bookstore and bought a copy. I read it all afternoon at my mother's side, and when I got home, I didn't stop reading it until I had finished it late into the night. I didn't discover a secret message in its pages, as my father had predicted, but I enjoyed it a great deal. Not only was it written in clear, concise prose and carefully structured, but it had genuine emotional heft and conceptual depth. As I read, I kept thinking back to the period of my life in which I had lived in an empty nest, during the winter in which I lost contact with my daughter, when I too felt as if life were cheating me. Were it not for Celia and Mizuka, perhaps I would have come to the same end as the one implied in the novel, cutting my own life short in the cold of a night when everything had become too much to bear.
The next day, I waited until there was no one else in the head nurse's office before going in and sitting at her desk. I thanked her for her recommendation, adding that I had finished reading the novel the previous day and had liked it a lot. I told her that my father had once almost fallen victim to a telephone scam, so many of the novel's details rang true. It was the first time I had properly spoken with the head nurse and the first time speaking to her at all since finding out that she might be interested in me. As we spoke, I was pleased to discover nothing contradicted my initial positive impression of her. In fact, as the conversation went on, I only liked her more.
From that day on, the head nurse and I spoke more and more frequently. It was not long before our conversation expanded beyond the confines of literature to cover every detail of our lives. I was gratified to discover that we had similar ways of looking at all of life's problems. And one day, I even ventured to talk to her about Celia and Mizuka. To my delight and astonishment, she had a profound insight into the words and actions of these curious women and immediately understood what had drawn me to them. She offered perceptive speculations about their lives, which in turn aroused fresh speculations of my own. She even expressed a desire, if there's an opportunity one day, to visit Beaver Lake. As our conversations flowed more freely and touched upon deeper topics, I couldn't help but imagine our life together.
My mother passed away on the last weekend of August. My brother and I decided it would be best to keep this information from our father, who was only just holding on to life himself. But 3 days after her funeral, as I was leaving his room, my father called out to me, "From now on, can you come and look after me in the afternoons as well?" I froze. "I—I have to go downstairs to—" "She's gone." My father interrupted me. "What do you have to go downstairs for?" I didn't know how he knew, and I did not want to know. I returned to his bedside and sat down.
The doctor said that depending on how my father reacted to the chemotherapy, he either had a few months to live or a few weeks. This death sentence meant little to my father, whose mood only got better as time went on. That was because he could see the relationship forming between the head nurse and me, and knew we had already begun to plan our future together. He saw it as a sign of reconciliation between father and son. He smiled and told me that it had taken a while, but I had finally done something that made him happy. He saw it as a personal achievement. And one day, he even said, "All this cancer business wasn't for nothing."
The head nurse and I attended my father's funeral together. As his ashes were placed beside my mother's and the graves sealed, I remembered what I had said to my daughter the night before I left Montreal. "When I died, where would I be buried? Who would I be buried with?" I glanced at the head nurse beside me, and she tenderly squeezed my hand. At that moment, my daughter's words rang in my head. "That's still a long way away." Yes, maybe this is where the story of that most unusual of Montreal winters should end.
Acknowledgements. My gratitude goes first to all those people I encountered between 1971 and 2016 on three continents who inspired me to write a novel dealing with the convoluted human condition in a fascinating age now called globalization. I am also grateful to Steven Nashef in Beijing, a poet himself, who has converted the poetics of the Chinese original into the beauty of the English version. To Carol Channer in Montreal, the first reader of the translation, whose little suggestions on word choice have brought me much confidence not only in the translation but also in the novel itself. And to Hang Chen in Tokyo, a researcher of my writing, who helped me choose the name of one of the main characters. My gratitude is also due to Thomas Cole in London, my agent, whose enthusiasm has opened new possibilities for my career. And my special thanks go to Scott Frasier in Toronto, my publisher, who, on the basis of only a tiny sample of the translation, was determined to make this book happen, and to his team at Dundurn Press, as well as Jess Schulman, the first editor in the process, who have perfectly completed the mission.
About the Author. Shrea Yiwi has a B.Sc., a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, an M.A., a Master of Arts in Literature, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics. He is the acclaimed author of 20 books, including *Desertion*, *Dr. Bthoon's Children*, and *Sunzuners*, as well as *The Empty Nest*, which topped major literary charts in China. His books have been translated into English, French, and Swedish. He lives in Montreal.
This is Kevin Chen. We hope you have enjoyed *Celia Misoka*.
Text copyright Shria Yiwi 2022. This audiobook is published by arrangement with Rare Machines, an imprint of Dundurn Press. Audio production copyright 2022 by Script Audio. This program was produced by Lantern Audio, executive producer Greg Cooler. All rights reserved.