November 20, 1951 - Hong Kong

A Prescient Return?

Somehow, I had a vague premonition that my mother was in trouble. I told my mother-in-law that I wanted to return to see my mother in Hong Kong. When I got back, I had been living in the village for a year and a half, so I looked like a peasant. My own brother, who came to meet me at the train station, didn’t even recognize me and I had to take a taxi home. My mother was fine, but somehow I was glad I came to visit her.
One day we went to buy some cloth to make a baby carrier for me—the kind with a frame that you sling on your back—which is the custom in our family, and afterwards I told my mother I wanted to take her for lunch at a restaurant. But on our way, she got spooked for some reason and insisted on going home. The next day she was dead.
For the wake, her body was placed on planks set on two chairs in the living room, with a shroud covering her face. All her children and grandchildren had to kneel and pay their respects for two days. Because she died in our home, which was on the third floor of a 3-storey building, we had to remove the front windows and build bamboo scaffolding to lower the casket down, as it’s against Chinese custom to bring the dead down the stairs.
I haven’t left Hong Kong since then.
Ben, my second son, was born 5 days ago.