Red Hot Canada
Dear Kate,
The very hot Vancouver weather this week reminds me of the time when I first arrived here, even more so that in our first family house from my senior high years all the way through university until I got married (it being one reason of me marrying young, no doubt), how the little "Old-timer" (over a-hundred-year old when we got it), its unique rancid carpet odor (not that I've known worse to compare), hardened patches of cigarette burns on it burned in my memory but nothing as vividly as what's on top: mice dropping, freshly scattered every morning around my bedside to test my tap-dancing steps, everything about the three-level "handyman's delight" (the top "floor" being--even for a short Chinese--a very low ceiling attic where my parents crawled and brawled, a towering inferno during summer and nature's freezer to chill what's left of their years) made all my summer there more searing, rain rainier, every punitive element of life more punishing, a pervasive loneliness, brooding confusion clouding over it all.
More, I said, as compared to what? As to how those summers could have been, hot but vital, even sexy and dangerous, like the kind young people should have, surfing board and skating wheels, bottled Coke and big-screen chills? Maybe, yet I've never imagined my youth this way--if only vicariously through the magnificent prose of Tim Winton and my son's very youthful summer as it's happening now.
More, as compared to how summer feels ever since.
Compared to those days, everyday after them feels tolerable, even enjoyable in my tolerating, which speaks about not merely happiness, but joy, even peace. And then came the summer before my last year in university: I took a job as a book salesman (remember how life was without internet, smartphones?), drove across Canada, to Nashville for my training, and spent a whole summer carrying a 30 lbs book bag (like a big unwieldy box cooler), banging on Oshawa doors (the motor city fearing for a showdown with GM that did end up in a shutdown) 13.5 hours a day under sustained +30°C Ontario sun, coming back like a piece of dark chocolate, as my parents called me, and everything after that shall forever be measured against those darkest bright summer days, every tear to the ones shed sitting on the curbside of an alien town, going without a sale in a week (thanks to my Cantonese accent and timid Asian vibes, I still think), praying to an invisible God, every breakfast to the smell of grease in a certain rundown diner, where I'd made a deal to have them serve me the same egg and toast every morning for the entire summer at a discounted price--but no coffee, because who knows where I could get my next chance to relieve myself, of any burden.
I wish my parents had done a better job to give me a more peaceful household during my most vital, summery years--and, if not that, at least get rid of the damn mice (which also took over our little shed, where I needed to unfriend them and clean up their kind gestures before reaching the lawnmower, something that my son has yet to learn how to use). I wish my father had come up with a better meal plan for me, instead of packing me the same ham and lettuce sandwich (always turned fetid and unrecognizable in my burgeoning backpack) every single day for my entire academic life, or had left me with no dark purple contusion all over my thighs and calves with his fast whipping discipline stick so that I had to wear long pants to school summers ago. What happened happened. I never hated my parents for my circumstances, in fact grew more sympathetic to how they and their life must have been during those years, offscreen space where my memory fails to fill but now my imagination helps me see.
I love Canada. It's a place where we have all been given more than a fair chance to flourish. It's no heaven on earth, but close enough, closest as it has ever been to any human being ever graced the face of this planet. Yes, it is by grace that I am welcome here, not by rights or privileges, never a matter of course. I have many fathers and mothers I've never known, and in their very imperfect ways, they've cultivated a good soil for me to flourish in this land strong and free.
Yours, Alex
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