18.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Evelyn Lau

HOW IT BEGAN

JANNY

I remember my cousin Janny
hunched over the kitchen sink
scrubbing the household dishes at dawn
that summer we visited Grandma
in California. Treated like a slave
in feudal China, brunt of Grandma’s wrath—
piece of trash, monkey on her back,
good-for-nothing bastard daughter
of her own fourth child, Auntie No. 4
who had Janny out of wedlock—

still a shocker for a Chinese family
in the ’70s. It was rumoured
my aunt never knew the father, or that
he rightly washed his hands of her,
this tired baggy-eyed woman
who trudged home from work
at the fast food restaurant, reeking
of grease, ripping the brown-and-yellow
paper hat off her head as she sat down
to dinner in her stained uniform.
Auntie No. 4, who decades later would die
in a homeless shelter for battered women…

Janny barely spoke during our visit—
scrawny-shouldered, shaking
with shyness, beaten down by the daily
hail of Grandma’s hatred. I remember
the way she flinched at loud noises
or sudden movements, with a look
of such tense, whimpering terror in her eye
it made you want to hit her—

yet somehow she escaped. The news
of her life filtered through to me, over the years:
Your cousin Janny’s going to school.
Janny’s getting married, moving to Texas.
Janny has children now.
How? I always wondered. It was a puzzle,
the laws of the universe upended,
the sky swimming with fish and the sea
crammed with clouds. Maybe
there was an escape route, a hidden exit,
a trap door I hadn’t found in all
these years of wild searching.
Maybe my cousin had stumbled upon it
in her despair, crawled her way out
into a normal life. I pictured her
in some sun-soaked small town—
white picket fence, toys in the yard—
waving to her kids on the school bus,
folding herself into the tanned arms
of a man who loved her.

The call came this weekend:
Your cousin Janny passed away.
She killed herself. Her fifteen-year-old son
(a straight-A student, my aunt hastened
to add) came home from class to find her
overdosed on the living room sofa.
I thought she had escaped
her fate, and maybe there were days
she thought so too, living out a normal life
like someone else’s dream.
Living a life like it was rightfully hers.

- Evelyn Lau: as published in Geist