My Mother and My Shoebox Farm
By Diana Pi
Growing up, I didn't know that we were poor. This was some fifty years ago, in a post-civil war urban slum in Taiwan. Rickshaws ran side by side with taxis. Children turned yellow eating street foods like roasted pigeons and shaved ice. We lived in a spartan project, rows upon rows of elongated concrete block houses, built en masse by the military.
Because we had no refrigeration, my mother went to the open market daily and brought back live critters for my brother and me to keep as pets. At different times, we had quail, frogs, rabbits, and a spotted snake, which escaped. We raised minnows and catfish in a bucket. For the longest time, we had a turtle that roamed free in our house feeding on a diet of kitchen droppings.
One day, my mother got hold of some silkworm larvae. Once my brother and I found out what silk is and how expensive, we had high hopes of making it big. We ran our modest silkworm farm out of two shoeboxes. Wouldn’t you know these fat worms only ate fresh mulberry leaves. Every day after school we roamed the neighborhood scaling fences and trees, legally or illegally, collecting the leaves, until one fateful night, a colony of ants absconded with the larvae—and the sweet, sweet dream of our first enterprise.
On our street, the envy in other children’s eyes was undeniable. My brother and I lorded over our urban slum like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, parading up and down the block to show off our shoebox of fat silkworms wallowing in a sea of half-eaten leaves. We went home when hungry, and mother would always be there, ready with thinly chopped cabbage stir-fry, hot noodle soup, a sympathetic ear, and warm rags for our misadventures.
To those children, we were the haves, and they the have-nots. But their parents regarded us warily. In austerity, it was enough if one could feed one’s family. Where we saw pets, they saw animals meant to be slaughtered and eaten. They kept their distance.
Not once did we suspect anything unusual about our pets-in-the-shoebox, or our long leash. It was a way of life and because she was our mother, we never questioned it. But death showed a side of my mother that chilled me.
My first "real" pet, Little Flower, was a beautiful, fun-loving white dog of undistinguished parentage but of distinguished good nature. Even now when I close my eyes, I can see those sunny yellow spots on her snow-white coat. Just a puppy when we got her, my perfect companion, one I didn't need to haul around in a shoebox or a bucket. I’d loved her with all my soul. But eight months after we got her, I came home one day, and she didn’t race to greet me, wagging her tail off. Mother came out of the kitchen, told me to hold my hollering about the house.
"The dog died this morning," she said matter-of-factly, wiping her hands on her apron. I demanded to see her body. Without any fanfare, emotion, or attempt to console me, she said that she had disposed of it that morning (in the subtropics, things decompose fast). I remembered walking away, not saying anything but not crying either. I figured if she wouldn't cry, I wouldn't either.
But the puppy's death didn't go away. Ever. Not with me. I knew my mother loved that dog, too. We couldn’t afford premade dog food, so every day my mother made a bowl of egg fried rice just for her. I couldn't, just couldn't understand how she could be so cold about something so sad. I could not forgive her. I started nursing a deep hurt, regret for my first irreparable loss, and the first seed of doubt about my mother. I was convinced this coldness would be her funeral yet.
Like me, my brother, a year younger, shared a much less pragmatic and more sentimental approach to death. In time, we developed our own grieving ritual. If the animals died on our watch, we trotted to a distant hillside, buried them—properly—in shallow graves, mounted small pebbles. We made up our own religious chant, the volume of which more than made up for the lack of content.
The content, though, was all around us. On every other street corner in Taipei stood a small pagoda brilliantly colored like it was freshly painted daily; the sweet, burning aroma of incense smote my face everywhere I turned, choking the already humid air. Every day, I saw people rocking, chanting, praying; old women scooting on their knotty, arthritic knees, mopping floors, polishing the copper urns in continuous circles as if the perpetuity of their motion were the only thing that could ensure the future and health of their families. What's more: the Buddha might look serene, forgiving, and lotus-calm, but some of his fellow deities, darkly emotive, strike-ready with hook-swords, looked downright menacing. I prayed secretly, out of curiosity, out of fear.
Mother, inscrutable in her manner, shrugged off death as nature, religion contradictory to science. Showing grief, to her, was accepting the old world, its tradition and superstition. But Mother didn’t shy from talking about her own moneyed upbringing as the middle of eight girls born into aristocracy. Like all her sisters, the minute she was born, she was whisked away and cared for by a nanny. She didn't recall ever calling or have the chance to call her mother “Mother,” didn't even know who her father was until she was in elementary school.
"How’s that possible?" I asked her, thinking enviously of a household without rules.
"Big house," Mother said flatly.
She talked about her childhood as if it were the story of another child living through the confusion, cold and neglect of the well-to-do. During that time, my uncle, the only son, owned a pony and rode a jeep in a countryside where people died of starvation. He alone inherited the family estate near the Forbidden City, the mansion at the foothills of Guilin’s karst mountains, and the family wealth. He alone was the object of their father's attention, reprimands, ambitions, and life philosophy. He alone suckled from their mother’s bosom.
When my mother finished sixth grade, she decided she wanted to leave home and go to a boarding school. After high school, instead of getting married like her sisters, she enlisted in the military, which paid for her nursing school in exchange for consigned service. Instead of retreating to Taiwan with her family, she did it with her military school.
Looking at her old school pictures, my mother was beautiful, flawless, even in military uniforms. I lamented how plain I turned out.
“Nothing to envy,” she would say. “I was always hungry.”
She snubbed the family money, control and tradition. And when she finally married my father, a soft-spoken pediatrician ten years her senior, she swore that she would raise her children doing everything opposite to what her mother did and set out doing just that.I asked what her parents thought of her rebellion.
She said simply, “Nobody cared.”
I embraced her story and her angst as my own truth, but I never lived it. When I was young, I got into a few good fistfights in my neighborhood. When she punished me, it was no better or worse than what she gave my brother.
As I grew older, life got easier. We emigrated to the U.S. when I was fourteen. My father found a job working with special-needs children. We moved to upstate New York. They built a small ranch on a hill. On a clear day, you could see the tips of the Catskill Mountains.
There my mother raised pigeons, peacocks, chickens, ducks and golden pheasants. The month I left for college, she adopted a stray puppy, a shepherd and beagle mix, our first since Little Flower. Butter, Mom called him.
My first Christmas home, it was obvious that Butter had taken over our house, no, our world. I believed he considered himself human, our equal if not our better. He sat his butt on the sofa, one leg daggling off its edge and the other three planted on the ground. He was smart and spoiled rotten. He knew how to open the front and back doors, which had different locking mechanisms. Coming and going as he pleased, chasing gophers when my mother tended her garden. He lived to the ripe old age of sixteen.
When he died, my mother sat by the porch door, staring at the splintered wood around the doorknob made by years of Butter’s clawing—and cried and cried and cried. I was damn surprised; I’d never seen her carrying on like that. I still had this image of her standing akimbo, telling me to quit hollering, that Little Flower had died that morning.
Then I noticed other changes in my beautiful mother. Had gray peppered her hair overnight? When had the wistful lines by her eyes deepened and multiplied?
When my grandmother fell ill, my mother flew back to Taiwan and cared for her until she died. Last year, she and another sister planned to accompany my diabetic uncle, who just had a kidney transplant, to claim his estate in China, the country now opened to expatriates.I said if the house wasn’t going to her, why bother?
“It isn't about the money,” she said in a low voice, her eyes glistening. “It was never about the money. I wanted my parents to love me, to treat us girls differently. But now I know, it was a different time, a different era. And really… it was nobody’s fault.”
Diana Pi is a general internist from Cleveland, Ohio. Currently she works at the Lorain County Free Clinic and writes a biweekly health column, “The Medical Insider,” for the Westlake/Bay Village Observer.