February 5, 2008

          On July 4, 2005, my first Independence Day, I was in San Francisco with my grandparents to visit my cousins.  We were flying home to Toronto in a few days.

          I had spent the day volunteering at the Marin County Fair, serving Chinese food to hungry fairgoers for a ridiculous eight dollars a plate until eight at night.  It sounds like a weird thing to do when you’re on vacation, but the alternative was to babysit my grandparents at my aunt’s house.  Needless to say, I was up for the volunteer work with my nineteen-year-old cousin and his friends.  After a tiring night of work, I hung out with my cousin Darren and his friends.  I was sick of playing second fiddle to Darren’s girlfriend, Cassandra, or Casey as everyone called her.  When my aunt came to pick us up at midnight, I was more than ready to leave.  My grandpa was sitting in the passenger seat, and my grandma in the back, so it made squeezing three teens in the back a difficult task.  We managed, but the ride back was an uncomfortable one.  At last we arrived to my aunt’s house.  Being in sunny, warm California, all the houses had an open roof enclosure and a courtyard in between the front door to the house.  I led my grandma through the courtyard and to the glass patio door, into the house, helped her to remove her shoes, brought her slippers, and turned back to the car.  Darren was driving Casey home and I forgot to say goodbye to her.  No matter how annoying it was to be the third wheel, she was really nice to me.

“Bye Casey, it was nice to meet you,” I said, turning back to the house as the black Ford Focus drove out of the driveway and headed down Huckleberry Road.

I closed the front door, making sure the cool night breeze wouldn’t blow the door open before Darren returned.  My eyelids fluttered as my eyes dried.  Even though it was midnight in California, it was three in the morning, Toronto time.  I couldn’t wait to just brush my teeth, wash my face, and change into my pyjamas.  I trudged past the grasshoppers’ chirping.  My eyelids drooped.  The next thing I knew, I bumped into the glass door, face first.  Glass shards covered the rug, then scattered across the hardwood floor.

My Auntie Helen and Uncle Eddie ran from their bedroom and froze.  I was still standing outside, my eyes wide, face white, throat dry, sweaty right hand still held in midair as if I was reaching for the door handle.

“I… I… I’m… so sorry,” I said.  My breathing was shallow and uneven in between each word. 

They grabbed their shoes and treaded over the danger zone.  My aunt came up to me and looked at me.

“Karen… what hap… did you… are you alright?  Are you hurt?”

I felt my forehead.  It felt normal.  Nothing red rubbed off my fingers. 

I nodded.  My uncle clutched a dust pan and a brush in both hands.

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt on this.  You know how your grandparents are,” he said, with a strained smile.  I smiled weakly and wondered why my grandparents hadn’t come to find out what all the commotion was about.  I felt a strange wetness on my right leg.  My chest tightened and my right hand edged down my capri pant leg.  Blood.

I started to panic and my breathing became shallow as I pulled up my pant leg.  Three big gashes spread across my right knee. 

“Auntie Helen… I… got cut.”

She took a look at my knee.  “Eddie, get the first aid kit!”

My uncle vanished and reappeared with a white plastic box.  Auntie Helen sat me down on steps to the den.  She rolled up my pants up and looked over the wound.  I couldn’t look, I just couldn’t look.  I turned my head and closed my eyes.  Auntie Helen dabbed the three gashes with sterile white cotton pads. 

I winced.  It didn’t really hurt, but just knowing I was bleeding freaked me out.

“Eddie, what are we going to do?  Brandon has the van in San Jose, and now Darren’s off with the car.” Her brow wrinkled as she cleaned my leg.

Auntie Helen bandaged my leg with white gauze.  I bit my lip.  My mom only gave me five hundred dollars to spend on the entire trip.  Since my grandma made my mom treat the family to an expensive seafood dinner, I already spent 350 of that.  And I didn’t even get to enjoy that meal since I don’t eat seafood.  I really hated my grandma’s lack of sensibility right now.

“Here, you can look now, the bandage is on,” my aunt said.  She patted my shoulder.  A layer of white covered my knee.

“Auntie Helen, I’m really, really really sorry about this.  I don’t know how it happened…  I mean, when I brought 婆婆 in, I saw the door, I don’t know how I forgot all of a sudden…” 

Darren came into the den.  “Oh… whoa.  Are you okay Karen?”

I shrugged, looking up at him.  Behind his thin silver rimmed glasses, his brown eyes were big and wide.  His forehead was wrinkled from concern.  I was surprised he wasn’t laughing at me.  He went down the hall to grab my passport from my suitcase.

Hospital, oh great.  Auntie Helen helped me up, and we shuffled out of the house.  We passed my uncle picking up the glass, the remains of the door, the leafy plants and bushes, the stupid grasshoppers, the front door, to the Ford Focus.  Darren came to the front window and handed me my passport.

“I don’t know anything about my health insurance,” I said.

We drove past darkened houses and shops, dark forests, an empty light-up baseball field, a lonely Shell and Dunkin Donuts, and down the empty highway.

I sat on the black doctor table seat at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center and my aunt sat in one of the metal chairs near the door.

“Don’t worry, Karen,” Auntie Helen said with a kind smile. “I know it was an accident.  And going to the hospital is no big deal.  I mean Brandon and Darren have come to the hospital plenty of times before.  In fact, when Darren was four, they were both jumping on the bed.  Then Darren fell off and grazed his head on the bed frame.”  A white-haired, plump man in scrubs and a sterile white lab coat came in and introduced himself.

“Someone has good first-aid skills,” he said as he unbandaged my leg.

My aunt smiled. “Thank you.”

“I suppose you took the courses?”

“Yes, I have two boys at home so it came in handy.”

The doctor looked up at me.  “We’ll have to staple your knee together.”

I stared at him. 

“Staple my knee?” I said.  “What?  I didn’t even know you could do that!  What happened to stitches?”  I asked. 

“This is just a minor cut,” the doctor said. 

He clutched the stapler to my knee.  I turned away. 

I winced when the staple pierced my flesh. 

Staple after staple, my knee became more and more accustomed to being stapled.  By two in the morning, three rows of silver stitching ran down my knee.  I left the hospital with a souvenir health card, sample pack of Tylenol, tiny packets of Tougera First Aid Antibiotic Double Antibiotic Ointment.

When we returned to the house, the floor was spotless and the rug no longer looked like a sparkly death trap.  Uncle Eddie and Darren tied the trash bags and put them in the garage.  They covered up the human sized hole in the door with cardboard and masking tape. 

“I’m so so sorry you guys,” I said, biting my lip again.  I couldn’t look them in the eye. 

Uncle Eddie shook his head.  “It was an accident, don’t worry.  You’ve been through a lot tonight, you should go rest.”

I laid in bed, unable to grasp what had happened.  I touched my right knee, just to make sure it wasn’t some big dream.

I woke up at 10:00, 2:00 in the afternoon, Toronto time.  I had never woken up so late before.  I overheard my aunt telling my grandma what happened.  I touched the tan fabric bandage my aunt had wrapped around my sterile white gauze bandages before I went to bed.  I wanted to go home so bad.

The Days I’ll Always Remember

March 4, 2008

公公 sat on the bench in the foyer, trying to get his shoes on.  I took off my mittens, put them in my pocket and bent down to help him.  I took the shoe out of his fumbling fingers and brought it to his foot.  I helped him push his foot in and then stood up to help him up.   We walked out of my uncle’s house to our car.  I opened the back door and helped him in, making sure he had his seatbelt on and then closed the door.  Then I went back in the house to get 婆婆 and do the same thing over again.

With my grandparents and my mom squished in the back, and my dad sitting in the passenger seat, I turned on the ignition and set off to Tako Sushi restaurant. 

“Wow, Karen is such a big girl now,” 公公 said, as I stopped at the red light.  “All grown up and now she’s driving us around.”

I stopped at the restaurant door and let my grandparents off first.  Then I parked the car and headed inside.  I slipped into the empty seat next to my grandpa.

“公公, what are you ordering?” I asked.  I closed my menu and putting it in the pile at my side.

“Hmmm,” he murmured.  His eyes scanned the glossy pages carefully.  I took the menu from him and turned the page.

“公公, that’s the wrong page.  That’s the lunch menu.  We’re eating dinner.”

He nodded and pointed at #23, the Toronto special.

I shook my head and pointed at #26, Montreal.  “公公, 23 is just teriyaki chicken.  Why not get chicken and salmon?  You like salmon.”

He nodded again and looked up.  “Yes yes.  Ah Karen, you really know what 公公 likes.”

I smiled weakly, and took my chopsticks out of the paper sleeve and broke it.  I took 公公’s and did the same.

I drank my miso soup, took out my CCT textbook out from my bag and flipped through the pages.

“Ohhhh, so hard working ahh… do you have school tomorrow?” he asked.  He shelled green peas in his bowl and popped them in his mouth.

“No 公公, it’s Christmas break.  There’s no school.”

“Oh.  So Jeanette has no school too?”

“Mhmm,” I agreed absentmindedly, flipping to Chapter 14, page 459.

 “So you have to think about which university you want to attend this year, right?”

 “公公, I’m already in university.”

“Really?  Oh yes… yes.”

“UT?  The campus near home.”

“Oh yes, Mississauga. You are very smart to get into such a good school.  Toronto is such a well known school.  Even I knew about it when I lived in Hong Kong.”

“Mhmm.”

 “Oh Karen.  公公 loves you and Jeanette very much.  You two are such good girls.  You two work so hard and are so smart.”

“Mhmm, we love you too 公公.”  My response felt so automatic.  It’d be with more feeling if he didn’t say the same thing every time we visited.  There are only so many reactions to ‘I love you grandchild’.

“That’s why we like to take you two grandchildren on vacation,” he said.  The ‘we’ referred to my grandma who disappeared for the washroom ten minutes ago. “I’m sure most of your friends haven’t gone to St. Kitts before.”

“Yup, we’re really lucky our grandparents love us so much.”

“And then we took you to San Francisco with us a few years ago.”

“Mhmm.”

“Oh.  And that’s the time you got hurt,” he said with a chuckle.

I laugh weakly and look at my right knee which was covered by three fading scars. “Uh huh…”

“Last summer your family went to Hong Kong, right?”

“That’s right 公公.”  My parents looked at me over their bowls of soup and laughed.  We all knew what was coming next.

“And you went to Japan too?  Did you know I used to live in Japan?”

I rolled my eyes.  This was the same conversation we had every single time I talked to him.  And that was at least two times a week on the phone ever since we had returned from our vacation in Hong Kong in August.  And every time I visited him in Scarborough.

“Yes 公公, I know.  You told me before,” I said.

“Oh yes, I lived there for work.  I hated it there because of what the Japanese did to the Chinese.”  He said, referring to the Nanking Massacre that occurred during World War II.  “I hated it so much that I refused to learn the language, even though it was so easy to learn.  All I could say was ‘ohayoo gozaimasu’ which means good morning and ‘nihongo wa wakarimasen’, every time someone would try to ask me for directions because it means I don’t know Japanese.”

“公公, you are so silly.  If you had learned, you could have taught us.  Jeanette likes to watch Japanese cartoons, you could have taught her.”

“The Japanese were really terrible in China.  When I was walking home from school, I would avoid taking the shortcut because the Japanese guards were stationed there.  I would go the long way, and walk an hour longer just so I wouldn’t have to bow to them.  Once I didn’t want to bow to them and the guard stopped me and put a gun to my head, threatening to shoot me if I didn’t bow.  So I said I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

I sighed. “Ah 公公, you’re lucky they didn’t kill you.  You shouldn’t have been so rebellious.”

“No, I had to disobey them.  I couldn’t let them scare me.”

“Ahh, you were so brave 公公,” I said. I flipped to the back of the textbook for a definition.  Hypodermic needle theory.

“And they put the gun to my head!”

“You already said that.”

“Oh yes… yes…” he said, trailing off in thought.

The waiter returned with the Montreal meal.  I pointed at 公公’s setting and they put it in front of him.  He snapped out of it and picked up his chopsticks.  I continued to read, savoring the few minutes of silence I had.