Page 59 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
“Yes.” That’s it. Her one-word reply.
“I thought we were going to talk about maybe leaving Shek Ham Chau?!”
“I changed my mind. I spoke to them last night, and we came to an understanding. It is best if you and I stay a little longer.”
“What does that have to do with taking down my fu talismans!”
“I didn’t want to offend them, or make them feel unwelcome.” Her tone suggests she thinks that is completely reasonable.
“Offend the…” It takes all your effort not to swear. “Mami, ghosts shouldn’t be under the same roof as us. That’s what you’ve always told me.”
“This is different. I am honoring our dead,” she says, stooping to pick up another item. Spirit children chase one another in and out of the draped row of clothes while she works, and their whispers sound like water gurgling. “The island belongs to them, and we hide here in safety because of their hospitality.”
“Ghosts do not own anything,” you say, exasperated. “The world of the living belongs only to the living. It is they who are guests, not us.”
“You understand nothing,” Mami said, fingers shaking a little as she pegs a shirt to the line. “I should not have survived, daughter.”
“… What?”
“I told you. Almost everyone died in the typhoon, yet I lived.” She fumbles the next peg, bends to pick it up. “Why should I have such good fortune to still be breathing?”
“Mami…” Your heart is heavy at her words.
Having been down to the village yesterday during its haunting, you can well imagine how terrible it must have been for a child to wake up to such destruction, death, and fear.
She shakes her head. “They said it was my sister who was bad luck, a curse to everyone.”
“Sister?” you say, ears perking up. The other little girl in the photo. “What about your sister? What happened—”
“But they’re wrong,” she interrupts, talking over you. “It is me.Me.I lived while others died and ever since that day, I carry my cursed luck wherever I go. I feel I owe it to my ghosts. How can I turn them away when I should be one of them?”
That rare moment of vulnerability moves you to pity and sadness. Your mother is beginning to look like the ghosts she loves; she has stopped tying up her hair, let it grow loose and tangled around her shoulders. Her clothes, once hospital-clean, are unkempt. The sleeves are streaked, dirty, torn.
Life has been hard on her. It has been hard on both of you. In this haunted place, trapped between time and tides, your shared grief exists in limbo. As if you are both caught between the real world and the underworld, just like the drowned villagers.
“Mami, nobody is at fault for a typhoon,” you say, gentle as possible. “You do not owe these ghosts any debt.”
She recoils as if slapped, lips trembling. “Ignorant ugly chicken!” she shouts. “What do you know about my life, about this island?” She flings down the shirt she is holding—it is one of yours, of course—and storms back to the house, arms wrapped around her chest.
In that single moment, your brief burst of sympathy and pity evaporates like mist, burned off by the hurt and indignation of many years. How easily she kindles anger in you; how swiftly she stings and lashes out. Only family can hurt family in that way.
Slowly, you bend to pick up the discarded shirt. It is freshly muddy, and will need washing again.
Ignorant ugly chicken.
She might be your mother, but Mami can’t stop acting like a hurt child. Some part of her has never healed from the past. She may be your mother, and you her daughter, and you may live together on this island, but it is through necessity of survival. Nothing more.
No point running after her, not again. You’re flat-out tired of always reaching for her, something you have been doing your whole life, only to hit walls and barriers and slaps. Why should the burden of connection always be yours?
Baba asked you to look after her, and you’ve been trying. But everyone has a limit. This might well be yours. If Baba comes back, he can sort it out. If he doesn’t… Well. Mami is old enough to know what she is doing, and she has chosen this.
Fuck that old cow.
Fueled by anger and fear and confusion, you kick the bucket of laundry over and storm off. Let her wash the whole lot again.
It is so easy, when looking back on our lives, to judge relationships only on how they ended or how they broke down. In the wake of estrangement and arguments, it is so difficult to remember the joy we once felt in another’s presence.
There were good memories of Mami, and if pressed you could recall them. Those Friday evenings down by the dock, for example. The odd occasion she’d help with your schoolwork, or tell amusing stories from her day at the hospital.
