Chapter 1 - part 2

Weirdness was a way to both emulate and yet repulse my mother. See? I take after my mother in temperament. My sister once said that my compliments always came backhanded. I made a deferential bow to my mother at the time; I said I had a great teacher. (Yes, that was a backhanded compliment and no one noticed at the time) My mother cannot abide by strangeness. She fears it but at the same time, respects it. Among Chinese her generation, my mother is already construed as weird. Therefore, to outweird her... well, that was strange indeed then.

Aside from these two things that I know about my mother from her time in Shanghai, that she was great and popular in school, and that she'd hop from movie house to movie house on Saturday (Sunday was reserved for church activities and there was this superstitious belief that bad luck would befall you if you went to the movies on Sunday), I know very little else.

I once asked her what life was like under the Japanese occupation (something my sister would never think to ask, she just isn't curious about those kinds of questions), all she would tell me was the reason why she won't eat white rice. According to her, during the Japanese occupation, rice was so scarce that often, there were maggots writhing in the rice, posing. I've noticed recently, she'd eat half a bowl with dinner though.

I would ask about her grandparents, and all she'd mutter was that her grandfather was very mean, very angry. I'd ask about how her siblings treated her back then, and she 'd just say that both her brother and sister ignored her which was how she liked it. I'd ask how did my grandparents treat her and she'd repeat that she was ignored.

Yet it seemed that everyone was jealous of my mother, according to her. She had the quickest wit, the quickest mind. And to prove it, she would have me race her; she using her abacus and me using a calculator. Or sometimes, she'd have me race her multiplication skills against the calculator. I'd give her a 5 digit number to multiply by a four digit number, and inevitably, she had the answer before I finished finding the numbers on the calculator.

Sometime during the mid to late 40's, my grandparents saw the writing on the walls for themselves. They were scholars, purveyors of Western influences including art (my grandmother taught piano), and worse, they even worshipped a foreign god. The Communist Party was taking over and none of these things would be tolerated. Therefore, they decided to uproot the whole family and become refugees.

This decision couldn't have been easy to come by even though a lot of the peripheral family (To the nuclear family, these would seem peripheral. However, to the Chinese especially at that time, second and third cousins were considered close) had left in search of easier and/or better places to live. My grandfather left his school and with three teenagers and a wife in tow, moved them to Macau. My mother didn't seem too bereft at leaving Shanghai. I don't think she was happy there, except when she was goofing off at school, or when she was escaping, through the movies.

[550 words]