Au Poor

It’s twelve years now since the Australian Chinese Daily carried the following item under Local News: “On the lower north shore, a housewife, aged sixty-one, committed suicide on Wednesday night by slitting her wrists and hanging herself.”

It’s twelve years since everything changed.

It was Tsiang, Au Poor’s daughter, who found her mother’s body. It was Tsiang, my son’s wife, who noticed blood leaking out from under the family’s garage door. May Ling, their two-year-old daughter, was asleep in the house. Tsiang was the one who found her mother hanging by her neck from a rope.

I’m worried about Tsiang, I said to a psychologist friend. The anger, the cruel outbursts, her refusal to get help, and, now, the marriage breakdown.

The death of her mother is probably still too painful for Tsiang to look at, my friend said. It’s not unusual when a parent suicides for the child to try to repress and silence the feelings.

How would you ever recover from something like that?

Well, my friend said sadly, I would say one doesn’t recover, but one’s relationship with it can change over time.

I knew Tsiang longed to see her mother again in the garden among the orchids and the chokos, in the courtyard sweeping up leaves, at the front door waving goodbye, in the kitchen cooking beside her aproned husband.

Au Poor would have turned from the stove, stood there a moment, then brought the boiled eggs and soy sauce to Tsiang in the next room. It was Tsiang’s habit to drop May Ling off to her parent’s house and to eat breakfast there before going to work. That morning, Tsiang was reading the newspaper at the dining table. She looked up and took the bowl of eggs from her mother. Has the changed medication made any difference? she asked. Do you feel any better?

I’m just the same, she said. Don’t you know? That counsellor is no comfort. I’ve nothing to tell her. Eat your eggs, Tsiang. You need to eat. I’m just so tired.

She died that afternoon.

What started me thinking again about the silence surrounding the death of Au Poor, was one day walking my grandson home from school. He mused out loud: I wonder how Au Poor died? Probably cancer, he answered himself. Or old age, he added after a pause.

Your grandmother wasn’t that old, I said.

I didn’t add any more. I didn’t tell Alexander how hard it had been to find a counsellor who spoke the Hainanese dialect. Eventually, after two visits, the woman had no name for what was wrong with Au Poor. She even said there’d been an improvement.

And I didn’t tell Alexander how his grandfather had given Au Poor a talking-to in her coffin: You were silly to think you were causing too much trouble for us all.

I asked May Ling why her grandmother had been called Au Poor, meaning the grandmother on the father’s side, when she was actually May Ling’s grandmother on her mother’s side.

May Ling said, Maybe because Au Gung (grandfather) didn’t have any sons.

I said that perhaps their two other children, the ones who had died a long time ago, back in China, before May Ling’s mother and her sister were born, were sons.

No, May Ling said. They were girls.

Do you know how old they were when they died? I asked.

I don’t know, she said.

May Ling and my son were sitting on his half of the family settee. They were reading their books. They looked up and frowned at me. They were upset in case young Alexander had heard the questions I’d asked. They shook their heads at me. No, they didn’t know anything.

Everyone remembers her in their own way, my son said. Leave it be.

You were only two years old when Au Poor died, I said to May Ling. I remember the next day when Mum and Dad asked me to come over and take you for a walk in the stroller. I remember when we got back to Au Poor and Au Gung’s house, you mimicked people crying. You couldn’t talk yet, but you mimed with your face what was going on inside the house. I wasn’t invited in, so I dropped you off at the front door.

I don’t remember, she said.

Au Poor looked after you every day while Mum and Dad were at work. What do you remember of her?

I don’t remember anything.