time I listened my father was telling Aiyi about his life since he last saw her. How he had gone to Yenching University, later got a post with a newspaper in Chungking, met my mother there, a young widow. How they later fled together to Shanghai to try to find my mother's family house, but there was nothing there. And then they traveled eventually to Canton and then to Hong Kong, then Haiphong and finally to San Francisco…
'Suyuan didn't tell me she was trying all these years to find her daughters,' he is now saying in a quiet voice. 'Naturally, I did not discuss her daughters with her. I thought she was ashamed she had left them behind.'
'Where did she leave them?' asks Aiyi. 'How were they found?'
I am wide awake now. Although I have heard parts of this story from my mother's friends.
'It happened when the Japanese took over Kweilin,' says my father.
'Japanese in Kweilin?' says Aiyi. 'That was never the case. Couldn't be. The Japanese never came to Kweilin.'
'Yes, that is what the newspapers reported. I know this because I was working for the news bureau at the time. The Kuomintang often told us what we could say and could not say. But we knew the Japanese had come into Kwangsi Province. We had sources who told us how they had captured the Wuchang-Canton railway. How they were coming overland, making very fast progress, marching toward the provincial capital.'
Aiyi looks astonished. 'If people did not know this, how could Suyuan know the Japanese were coming?'
'An officer of the Kuomintang secretly warned her,' explains my father. 'Suyuan's husband also was an officer and everybody knew that officers and their families would be the first to be killed. So she gathered a few possessions and, in the middle of the night, she picked up her daughters and fled on foot. The babies were not even one year old.'
'How could she give up those babies!' sighs Aiyi. 'Twin girls. We have never had such luck in our family.' And then she yawns again.
'What were they named?' she asks. I listen carefully. I had been planning on using just the familiar 'Sister' to address them both. But now I want to know how to pronounce their names.
'They have their father's surname, Wang,' says my father. 'And their given names are Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa.'
'What do the names mean?' I ask.
'Ah.' My father draws imaginary characters on the window. 'One means 'Spring Rain,' the other 'Spring Flower,' ' he explains in English, 'because they born in the spring, and of course rain come before flower, same order these girls are born. Your mother like a poet, don't you think?'
I nod my head. I see Aiyi nod her head forward, too. But it falls forward and stays there. She is breathing deeply, noisily. She is asleep.
'And what does Ma's name mean?' I whisper.
' 'Suyuan,' ' he says, writing more invisible characters on the glass. 'The way she write it in Chinese, it mean 'Long-Cherished Wish.' Quite a fancy name, not so ordinary like flower name. See this first character, it mean something like 'Forever Never Forgotten.' But there is another way to write 'Suyuan.' Sound exactly the same, but the meaning is opposite.' His finger creates the brushstrokes of another character. 'The first part look the same: 'Never Forgotten.' But the last part add to first part make the whole word mean 'Long-Held Grudge.' Your mother get angry with me, I tell her her name should be Grudge.'
My father is looking at me, moist-eyed. 'See, I pretty clever, too, hah?'
I nod, wishing I could find some way to comfort him. 'And what about my name,' I ask, 'what does 'Jing-mei' mean?'
'Your name also special,' he says. I wonder if any name in Chinese is not something special. ''Jing' like excellent
I think about this. My mother's long-cherished wish. Me, the younger sister who was supposed to be the essence of the others. I feed myself with the old grief, wondering how disappointed my mother must have been. Tiny Aiyi stirs suddenly, her head rolls and then falls back, her mouth opens as if to answer my question. She grunts in her sleep, tucking her body more closely into the chair.
'So why did she abandon those babies on the road?' I need to know, because now I feel abandoned too.
'Long time I wondered this myself,' says my father. 'But then I read that letter from her daughters in Shanghai now, and I talk to Auntie Lindo, all the others. And then I knew. No shame in what she done. None.'
'What happened?'
'Your mother running away-' begins my father.
'No, tell me in Chinese,' I interrupt. 'Really, I can understand.'
He begins to talk, still standing at the window, looking into the night.
After fleeing Kweilin, your mother walked for several days trying to find a main road. Her thought was to catch a ride on a truck or wagon, to catch enough rides until she reached Chungking, where her husband was stationed.
She had sewn money and jewelry into the lining of her dress, enough, she thought, to barter rides all the way. If I am lucky, she thought, I will not have to trade the heavy gold bracelet and jade ring. These were things from her mother, your grandmother.
By the third day, she had traded nothing. The roads were filled with people, everybody running and begging for rides from passing trucks. The trucks rushed by, afraid to stop. So your mother found no rides, only the start of dysentery pains in her stomach.
Her shoulders ached from the two babies swinging from scarf slings. Blisters grew on her palms from holding two leather suitcases. And then the blisters burst and began to bleed. After a while, she left the suitcases behind, keeping only the food and a few clothes. And later she also dropped the bags of wheat flour and rice and kept walking like this for many miles, singing songs to her little girls, until she was delirious with pain and fever.
Finally, there was not one more step left in her body. She didn't have the strength to carry those babies any farther. She slumped to the ground. She knew she would die of her sickness, or perhaps from thirst, from starvation, or from the Japanese, who she was sure were marching right behind her.
She took the babies out of the slings and sat them on the side of the road, then lay down next to them. You babies are so good, she said, so quiet. They smiled back, reaching their chubby hands for her, wanting to be picked up again. And then she knew she could not bear to watch her babies die with her.
She saw a family with three young children in a cart going by. 'Take my babies, I beg you,' she cried to them. But they stared back with empty eyes and never stopped.
She saw another person pass and called out again. This time a man turned around, and he had such a terrible expression-your mother said it looked like death itself-she shivered and looked away.
When the road grew quiet, she tore open the lining of her dress, and stuffed jewelry under the shirt of one baby and money under the other. She reached into her pocket and drew out the photos of her family, the picture of her father and mother, the picture of herself and her husband on their wedding day. And she wrote on the back of each the names of the babies and this same message: 'Please care for these babies with the money and valuables provided. When it is safe to come, if you bring them to Shanghai, 9 Weichang Lu, the Li family will be glad to give you a generous reward. Li Suyuan and Wang Fuchi.'
And then she touched each baby's cheek and told her not to cry. She would go down the road to find them some food and would be back. And without looking back, she walked down the road,
