(2001) The Bonesetter's Daughter (42 page)

Ruth was tumbling in her head. She was being swept and tossed, and she was scared. “Thank you,” she finally said.

To Ruth’s surprise, her mother seemed to have no objection to staying at Mira Mar Manor. Then again, why would she? LuLing thought it was temporary—and free. After she had toured the place, Ruth and Art took her to a nearby deli to have lunch and hear her reactions.

“So many old people have radon leak,” she murmured with awe.

“Actually, not all of them are staying there because of radon leaks,” Art said. Ruth wondered where this was leading to.

“Oh. Other problem their house?”

“No problem at all. They just like living there.”

LuLing snorted. “Why?”

“Well, it’s comfortable, convenient. They have plenty of company. In a way, it’s like a cruise ship.”

LuLing’s face broke into a look of disgust. “Cruise ship! GaoLing always want me go cruise ship. You too cheap, she tell me. I not cheap! I poor, I don’t have money throw in ocean… .”

Ruth felt Art had blown it. Cruise ship. If he had been listening to her mother’s complaints these last few years, he’d have known this was precisely the wrong comparison to make.

“Who can afford cruise ship?” her mother groused.

“A lot of people find staying at the Mira Mar cheaper than living at home,” Art said.

One of LuLing’s eyebrows rose. “How cheap?”

“About a thousand dollars a month.”

“T’ousand! Ai-ya! Too much!”

“But that includes housing, food, movies, dancing, utilities,
and
cable TV. That’s thrown in for free.”

LuLing did not have cable TV. She often talked about getting it, but changed her mind when she found out how much it cost.

“Chinese channel too?”

“Yep. Several of them. And there are no property taxes.”

This also captured LuLing’s interest. Her property taxes were in fact low, stabilized by a state law that protected the holdings of the elderly. Nonetheless, each year when LuLing received her tax bill, the sum seemed agonizingly huge to her.

Art went on: “Not all of the units are a thousand a month. Yours is more expensive because it’s the number-one unit, the best view, top floor. We’re lucky that we got it for free.”

“Ah, best unit.”

“Number one,” Art emphasized. “The smaller units are cheaper… . Honey, what did Mr. Patel say they were?”

Ruth was taken by surprise. She pretended to recollect. “I think he said seven hundred fifty.”

“That how much I get Social Security!” LuLing said smugly.

And Art added: “Mr. Patel also said people who eat less can get a discount.”

“I eat less. Not like American people, always take big helping.”

“You’d probably qualify, then. I think you’re supposed to weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds—”

“No, Art,” Ruth interrupted. “He said the cutoff was a hundred.”

“I only eighty-five.”

“Anyway,” Art said offhandedly, “someone like you could live in the number-one unit for the same as what you get each month for Social Security. It’s like living there for free.”

As they continued with lunch, Ruth could see her mother’s mind adding up
the free
cable TV, the
big discounts,
the
best
unit—all irresistible concepts.

When LuLing next spoke, she gloated: “Probably GaoLing think I got lots money live this place. Just like cruise ship.”

TWO

They were celebrating Auntie Gal’s seventy-seventh birthday—her eighty-second if the truth be known, but only she, LuLing, and Ruth knew that.

The Young clan was gathered at GaoLing and Edmund’s ranch-style house in Saratoga. Auntie Gal was wearing a silk-flower lei and a hibiscus-patterned muumuu, in keeping with the luau theme of the party. Uncle Edmund had on an aloha shirt printed with ukuleles. They had just returned from their twelfth cruise to the Hawaiian Islands. LuLing, Art, Ruth, and various cousins were sitting poolside in the backyard—or lanai, as Auntie Gal referred to it—where Uncle Edmund had fired up a grill to barbecue enough slabs of spare ribs to give everyone indigestion. The outdoor gas-fueled tiki torches were wafting warmth, making the outdoors seem balmy. The kids weren’t fooled. They decided the pool was too cold and improvised a game of soccer on the lawn. Every few minutes they had to use the long-handled net to fish the ball out of the water. “Too much splash,” LuLing complained.

When GaoLing went to the kitchen to prepare the last side dishes, Ruth followed. She had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to her aunt privately. “Here’s how you make tea eggs,” Auntie Gal said, as Ruth shelled the hard-boiled eggs. “Use two big pinches black tea leaves. It must be black, not Japanese green, and not the herbal kind all you kids like to drink for health purposes. Put the leaves in the cheesecloth, tie it tight.

“Now put these cooked eggs in the pot with the tea leaves, a half-cup soy sauce for twenty eggs, and six star anise,” GaoLing continued. She sprinkled the mixture with liberal amounts of salt. Her longevity was obviously a tribute to her genetics and not her diet. “Cook for one hour,” she said, and set the pot on the stove to simmer. “When you were a little girl, you loved to eat these. Lucky eggs, we called them. That’s why your mommy and I made them. All the kids liked them better than anything else. One time, though, you ate five and got very sick. Big mess all over my sofa. After that, you said no eggs, no more eggs. You wouldn’t eat them the next year either, not you. But the year after that, eggs were okay again, yum-yum.”

Ruth didn’t remember any of this, and wondered whether GaoLing was confusing her with her daughter. Was her aunt also showing signs of dementia?

She went to the refrigerator and took out a bowl of scalded celery, cut into strips. Without measuring, she doused the celery with sesame oil and soy sauce, chatting as if she were on a talk show for cooks.

“I’ve been thinking one day I might write a book. The title is this,
Culinary Road to China
—what do you think, good? Easy recipes. Maybe if you’re not too busy, you can help me write it. I don’t mean for free, though. Course, most of the words are already in my head, right here. I just need someone to write them down. Still, I’d pay you, doesn’t matter that I’m your auntie.”

Ruth did not want to encourage this line of thinking. “Did you make those same eggs when you lived in the orphanage with Mom?”

GaoLing stopped stirring. She looked up. “Ah, your mother told you about that place.” She tasted a piece of celery and added more soy sauce. “Before, she never wanted to tell anyone why she went to the orphan school.” GaoLing paused and pursed her lips, as if she had already divulged too much.

“You mean that Precious Auntie was her mother.”

GaoLing clucked her tongue. “Ah, so she told you. Good, I’m glad. Better to tell the truth.”

“I also know both you and Mom are five years older than what we always thought. And that your real birthday is what, four months earlier?”

GaoLing tried to laugh, but she also looked evasive. “I always wanted to be honest. But your mommy was afraid of so many things—oh, she said the authorities would send her back to China if they knew she wasn’t my real sister. And maybe Edwin wouldn’t marry her, because she was too old. Then later you might be ashamed if you knew who your real grandmother was, unmarried, her face ruined, treated like a servant. Me? Over the years, I’ve become more modern-thinking. Old secrets? Here nobody cares! Mother not married? Oh, just like Madonna. But still your mommy said, No, don’t tell, promise.”

“Does anyone else know? Uncle Edmund, Sally, Billy?”

“No, no, no one at all. I promised your mother… . Of course Uncle Edmund knows. We don’t keep secrets. I tell him everything… . Well, the age part, he doesn’t know. But I wasn’t lying. I forgot. It’s true! I don’t even feel like I’m seventy-seven. In my mind, the most is sixty. But now you remind me, I’m even older—how old?”

“Eighty-two.”

“Wah.” Her shoulders slumped as she pondered this fact. “Eighty-two. It’s like less money in the bank than I thought.”

“You still look twenty years younger. Mom does too. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone, not even Uncle Edmund. Funny thing is, last year when she told the doctor she was eighty-two, I thought that was a sure sign something was wrong with her mind. And then it turned out she did have Alzheimer’s, but she was right all along about her age. She just forgot to lie—”

“Not lying,” GaoLing corrected. “It was a secret.”

“That’s what I meant. And I wouldn’t have known her age until I read what she wrote.”

“She wrote this down—about her age?”

“About a lot of things, a stack of pages this thick. It’s like her life story, all the things she didn’t want to forget. The things she couldn’t talk about. Her mother, the orphanage, her first husband, yours.”

Auntie Gal looked increasingly uncomfortable. “When did she write this?”

“Oh, it must have been seven, eight years ago, probably when she first started worrying that something was wrong with her memory. She gave me some of the pages a while back. But it was all in Chinese, so I never got around to reading them. A few months ago, I found someone to translate.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” GaoLing pretended to be insulted. “I’m your auntie, she’s my sister. We are still blood-related, even though we don’t have the same mother.”

The truth was, Ruth had feared her mother might have written unflattering remarks about GaoLing. And it occurred to her now that GaoLing might have also censored the parts that dealt with her own secrets, her marriage to the opium addict, for instance. “I didn’t want to bother you,” Ruth said.

Her aunt sniffed. “What are relatives for if you can’t bother them?”

“That’s true.”

“You call me anytime, you know this. You want Chinese food, I cook for you. Translate Chinese writing, I can do this too. You need me to watch your mommy, no need to ask, just drop her off.”

“Actually, remember how we talked about Mom’s future needs? Well, Art and I looked at a place, Mira Mar Manor, it’s assisted living, really nice. They have staff twenty-four hours a day, activities, a nurse who helps with medication—”

GaoLing frowned. “How can you put your mommy in a nursing home? No, this is not right.” She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head.

“It’s not what you think—”

“Don’t do this! If you can’t take care of your mommy, let her come live here with me.”

Ruth knew that GaoLing was barely able to handle LuLing for a couple of days at a time. “Nearly gave me a heart attack,” was how she had described LuLing’s last visit. Still, Ruth was ashamed that her aunt saw her as neglectful, uncaring. All the doubts she had about the Mira Mar bobbed to the surface, and she felt unsteady about her intentions. Was this really the best solution for her mother’s safety and health? Or was she abandoning her mother for convenience’ sake? She wondered whether she was simply going along with Art’s rationale, as she had with so many aspects of their relationship. It seemed she was always living her life through others, for others.

“I just don’t know what else to do,” Ruth said, her voice full of the despair she had kept pent up. “This disease, it’s awful, it’s progressing more quickly than I thought. She can’t be left alone. She wanders away. And she doesn’t know if she’s eaten ten minutes ago or ten hours ago. She won’t bathe by herself. She’s afraid of the faucets—”

“I know, I know. Very hard, very sad. That’s why I’m saying, you can’t take it anymore, you just bring her here. Part-time my place, part-time your place. Easier that way.”

Ruth ducked her head. “Mom already went for a tour of the Mira Mar. She thought it was nice, like a cruise ship.”

GaoLing gave a doubting sniff.

Ruth wanted her aunt’s approval. She also sensed that GaoLing wanted her to ask for it. She and her mother had taken turns protecting each other. Ruth met GaoLing’s eyes. “I won’t make any decision until you think it’s the right thing. But I would like you to look at the place. And when you do, I can give you a copy of what Mom wrote.”

That got GaoLing’s interest.

“Speaking of which,” Ruth went on, “I was wondering whatever happened to those people you and Mom knew in China. Mom didn’t say anything about her life after she left Hong Kong. What happened to that guy you were married to, Fu Nan, and his father? Did they keep the ink shop?”

GaoLing looked to the side to make sure no one was close enough to hear. “Those people were
awful.”
She made a face. “So bad you can’t even imagine how bad. The son had many problems. Did your mother write about this?”

Ruth nodded. “He was hooked on opium.”

GaoLing looked momentarily taken aback, realizing that LuLing had been thorough in her account. “This is true,” she conceded. “Later he died, maybe in 1960, though no one is sure-for-sure. But that was when he stopped writing and calling different people, threatening this and that to get them to send money.”

“Uncle Edmund knows about him?”

GaoLing huffed. “How could I tell him that I was still married? Your uncle would then question if we are really married, if I am a bigamist, if our children are—well, like your mother. Later, I forgot to tell him, and when I heard my first husband was probably dead, it was too late to go back and explain what should be forgotten anyway. You understand.”

“Like your age.”

“Exactly. As for the Chang father, well, in 1950, the Communists cracked down on all the landlords. They put the Chang father in jail and beat a confession from him for owning many businesses, cheating people, and trading in opium. Guilty, they said, and shot him, public execution.”

Ruth pictured this. She was against the death penalty in principle, but felt a secret satisfaction that the man who had caused her grandmother and mother so much misery had met a fitting end.

“The people also confiscated his house, made his wife sweep the streets, and all his sons were sent to work outdoors in Wuhan, where it’s so hot most people would rather bathe in a vat of boiling oil than go there. My father and mother were glad they were already poor and didn’t have to suffer that kind of punishment.”