Our apartment in Hong Kong, the ceiling fan humming as I lay on the sofa, Ma playing a record for me before bedtime. That had been our nightly routine, one song and then bed. Usually she chose Chinese music, but this one night she had put on a man singing with sorrow in another language, the words escaping him in gasps of regret. She had turned away then. When I could see her face again, she had composed herself and showed me no more of her feelings.
I had gone to bed that night, and many nights since, thinking about Ma’s life and the grief that connected her to that music. I knew her parents had been landowners and intellectuals, and for that, they’d been unfairly sentenced to death during the Cultural Revolution. Before they died, they had spent all the wealth they had left to get Ma and Aunt Paula out of China and into Hong Kong before it was too late. And then Ma’s true love, my pa, had been taken from her far too young, only in his early forties, going to bed with a headache one evening to die of a massive stroke later that night.
I picked up the photograph that had fallen from the record album. It was the one Ma had framed and kept on the piano in our living room in Hong Kong. Like many people in Hong Kong then, we didn’t have a camera because it was too expensive, and so this was the only photo I’d seen of the three of us. Despite the stiffness of the pose, the three heads were slightly inclined toward one another, like a true family. Ma looked lovely, with her small neat features and pale skin stretched tight over her bones, and Pa was the perfect accompaniment: dark luminous eyes, handsome and sculpted, like a movie star. I looked at the size of his hands, one of which was tenderly-it seemed to me-cupping the child’s elbow, my elbow. That was a heroic hand, a hand that would take over a heavy plow, a hand to save you from demons and muggers. And me, balanced on Pa’s knee, about two years old, and peering curiously at the camera. I was wearing a sailor’s outfit and my hand was raised to my forehead in a military salute, no doubt the photographer’s idea. Lucky child: had I really been so cute, had I ever been so happy?
A few characters had been scrawled on the back. Our names and the date. I knew it wasn’t Ma’s handwriting, so it had to be his. I ran my finger over the impressions the pen had made in the thick paper. This was my pa, his hand had written these words.
This was all I had to take the place of memory. However, no matter how great my loss, Ma’s was even greater. She had actually known and loved him, and his death had left her alone to raise and support me. I carefully put the record and the photograph back. I wanted more than ever to be by Ma’s side, helping her in any way I could.
Finally, I could leave for the factory. I passed by a street cart with a sign that said “Hot Dogs.” The vendor was selling thin sausages in rolls with yellow sauce on top. It looked and smelled delicious, but I had only a subway token and a dime for emergency phone calls in my pocket. On the subway, I felt as if everyone was staring at me: that kid didn’t go to school today. I saw other kids with backpacks going into the train station and I hoped I wouldn’t see anyone who recognized me. A policeman stood by the token booth, a gun slung from his belt, and he stared at me as I put my token in the slot.
“Hey!” he said.
I froze, ready to be arrested. But he was looking at another kid who had thrown a crumpled paper bag on the floor.
“You pick that up!” he said.
I passed through and ran down to the train platform.
THREE
Ma and I soon learned that our apartment didn’t have any heat. Hopefully, we scrubbed the radiator in the room we slept in, rubbing until we’d taken off most of the flaking paint with the dust, but it remained dead no matter how we twisted the knobs. We explored the third floor of the building and found all of the other apartments to be empty. Trash was piled up everywhere-by the doorways, in the crevices of the steps. There was a stack of half-empty boxes by one doorway, as if someone had disappeared or died in the middle of moving out. The boarded-up storefront below had a faded sign that said “Dollar Store.” We found the entrance to the backyard, which was one enormous heap of garbage, probably tossed down by residents and neighbors over the years, and the door to the basement was locked.
When Ma politely asked Aunt Paula about how the heat worked, Aunt Paula understood her real question and replied that she had already asked Mr. N. for permission to fix it. She said we wouldn’t be staying at that apartment for much longer anyway.
It was freezing during those days I played hooky in that apartment. After skipping school for almost a week, I saw my first snowfall. Flakes came slanting down from the sky and at first, the concrete sidewalk absorbed them like a sponge. I touched the window with my hands, amazed it was cold when it seemed to me that the falling rice should be warm, as if it were a soup. With time, the ground became a blanket of white and gusts of wind blew snow from the rooftops, flurries swirling in the air.
Even now, my predominant memory of that phase of my life is of the cold. Cold like the way your skin feels after you’ve been slapped, such painful tingling that you can hardly tell if it’s hot or cold. It simply registers as suffering. Cold that crept down your throat, under your toes and between your fingers, wrapped itself around your lungs and your heart. Our thin cotton blanket from Hong Kong was completely inadequate, since Hong Kong shops didn’t sell anything substantial enough for New York winters. We slept under a pile of jackets and clothes to try to stay warm. I woke up with parts of my body numb and frozen: unexpected places like my hip, where a sweater had slipped off the mound.
Slowly, a sheet of ice grew over the inside of the windows, a layer of distortion spread thick across the panes. As I stared outside, I used my blueing fingers to melt circles in it, trying to reach the clear glass underneath.
One afternoon, I pulled off a corner of the taped-on garbage bags in the kitchen so I could see what the back of our building looked like. It was a clear day. When I peered out of that opening, I looked down at the roof of a large extension built on our ground floor. That must have been where the dollar store had kept its extra merchandise. People had thrown so much trash onto that rooftop that you could hardly see its surface, but I could discern a large hole in the roof that no one had bothered to fix. A sheet of old newspaper clung to the ragged edge of the hole, flapping in the wind. When it snowed or rained, the inside of that extension must have gotten soaked.
From our kitchen window, I could also see into the apartment immediately next to ours in Mr. Al’s building, where it extended deeper than ours. That apartment was strangely close for something so separate, contained within a completely different building yet only a few feet away. I could have stuck a broom out and tapped on its window. Behind the glass, I made out the form of a sleeping black woman. I could tell her apartment had heat because she was wearing only a thin housedress. She had a few curlers in her hair. Her arm was tenderly cradled around a small blanketed form and I realized it was a baby. The rest of the mattress was strewn with tangled clothes, and above their bodies, a triangular section of plaster was missing from their wall. But I could see how much they loved each other, despite their poverty, and I longed for the simpler times Ma and I had shared.
When it became too cold for me to look any longer, I put the garbage bags back into place.
The next day, I’d just shut the factory door behind me when I saw Matt dragging a massive canvas cart piled high with mauve skirts in the direction of the hemming station. The mountain of clothing loomed over him and he had to walk backward using both skinny arms to drag the cart along. I slung my book bag over my shoulder and started heading for Ma’s and my work area in the back, but to my surprise, he called out to me in Chinese.