Joss and Gold

Twelve

Twelve Noone knew how Ellen felc She also didn't know what she was feeling. She had no answer when her mother, her tough hands tugging at a thorny mimosa, asked, "Aiyah, thirty-six years old already, so old-why you still want to live alone?" Her mother knew more than she would say. She no longer bought Ellen perfume, silk blouses, anything in the color red. She no longer talked about her friends' eligible sons, about sending Ellen for a holiday to China or Taiwan where Auntie Tai Sim had friends-older bachelors looking for a wife. She did not ask whether Ellen was meeting any nice peopleshe always meant men---or whether she had seen her old schoolmate Gek Neo's newest baby, or heard that another school friend had gotten divorced but managed to remarry. She continued to look at Ellen inquisitively but with an air of resignation that should have upset Ellen. It no longer upset her because she had become resigned herself. And why should she have been upset at the inevitable? Ellen thought back on the nuns at the Sacred Heart Convent who had taught her Bible classes, home economics, drawing and painting, music and folk dancing. All were lessons for a gentle lady who did not have to go out into the world to work for a living. Lessons in home economics from white women who had never kept a house, whose pocket money came directly from God. Or the Pope. As good convent girls, she and her classmates could never make the distinction. LANDING "Those good nuns are my models," she told her mother. "They were contented to be teachers rather than wives, to be moth, ers to other people's children. As I am now." At this, her mother blew the air out of her nose loudly. Ellen was ashamed to hear it, because she recognized that snort as hers. She had learned the trick from her mother and could not unlearn it, which embarrassed her, for she had tried very hard-and had mostly succeeded-to leave her mother behind in Malaysia. This trick with air and nose, however, she could not lose. Her father did not talk to her about her personal life. Women's business, he said. Instead he talked to her mother about it, her mother told her. She did not say, see what you are putting me through! She never accused Ellen of being a bad daughter, an unnatural daughter. They were relieved she had become so stable, staid even, and they were a little afraid of her authoritarian manner, although she told them this was an act she had needed to learn in order to be an effective principal. But then they had no opportunity to become comfortable with the ways she had changed, for she came home only twice a year, for New Year and Ching Ming. Her mother preferred Ellen's visits on Ching Ming, when she could talk to her more frankly as they cleaned the ancestral grave sites. Every year her mother remembered to bring some old toothbrushes to brush the dirt off the inscriptions on the gravestones, and asked Ellen to pack the cups and dishes for the ancestral offerings. The paint had long disappeared, but the granite had remained uneroded and the Chinese ideograms as inci, sively carved into the hard stone. They had been clearing the wild brush from this ground for many years. Ellen remembered being carried as a small child from the narrow road where they parked their car and across overgrown and uneven trails to this family plot; here she was allowed to burn the joss and gold paper as her part ofthe annu' al adventure. Now she started the joss as quickly as she could to keep the mosquitoes away. She was afraid of getting dengue fever and dying, but her mother thought only of the dead. 237 JOSS and GOLD Yet her mother never talked about them. Their names were inscribed in Chinese characters Ellen couldn't read, and she had never heard their names announced. As a child she had been curious about the real persons buried under her feet, but it had seemed a sacrilege to ask for human names when Mother was worshiping ancestral ghosts. Now she was no longer curious. She was satisfied to know them only as past relations. Grandfather, Grandmother, Great Grandmother, Great Grandfather. Her...