Pieces of Staging

By Josey Foo

My mother suffered a stroke in April of this year that left her, for a short while, in a coma. Her children, dispersed all over the world, dribbled back to Kuala Lumpur in the following week to, we thought, say goodbye to her in Tung Shin Hospital. I began my journey from a small town in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico, my brother from upstate New York, my sister from London or Hong Kong, while another sister and brother came from Damansara and Cheras in Selangor, the very large Malaysian state that encompasses the tiny Kuala Lumpur Federal Territory.

We siblings were divided into two camps that barely spoke to one another. On my eighteen-hour flight home, I thought about why, for the first time in years. I sat next to an elderly Chinese-American psychologist named Violet who now lived in Perth, who said that family dysfunction is normal in dispersed Chinese families. Her own family had immediate branches in Brazil, San Francisco, Kenya, and Hong Kong, and was barely on speaking terms. Her family, like mine, had parents who for years were wholly dependent on their children for support and had accepted that they no longer had any authority over their children. They had also accepted that their children had become more or less strangers because of the different countries they were now a part of. In Confucian terms, it was as if the head had been removed from a body. The body was now dissembling itself to create a head out of unsuitable parts. At the same time, it seemed our family had never had a true head, even when we were small, because issues of love and culture had dogged us from the beginning.

During the past week, vicious emails had been sent back and forth among my mother’s children, filled with blame and resentment and assertions about which of us were more filial, less filial, not filial, or good and bad human beings. My emails were succinct, one-or-two-line, emotionless accusations, while my sisters’ were lengthy, angry accusations. I thought that they must feel extremely hurt that their youngest sibling, who was absent in the care of our mother, and who had become an American it seemed in every way, had the gall to “talk back,” and to do it coldly with minimal words. I also just thought they were crazy.

Upon arriving, I had put my luggage in a hotel room close to Tung Shin Hospital and gone right away to see my mother. As I walked to the hospital, unable to see it until I was almost upon its gates, I thought of my mother in a coma, unaware of the latest descent of her dispersed children into spectacular despair.

Tung Shin was an old private Chinese hospital in Kuala Lumpur. The hospital building was very old with its age not masked at all by a modern tinted glass front column rising from the entrance porch. Eleven floors of windows with peeling paint could clearly be seen on either side of the column. The hospital sat at the top of a steep slope. Cars parked in the compound were domino-like, parked too close together and seeming almost to topple over. I climbed slowly. It was difficult to breathe due to the haze. The haze happens every summer, blown in by monsoon winds from Indonesian forest fires across the Straits of Malacca to the west, deliberately set by farmers. My brother had told me to wear a respiratory mask if I intended to walk outside.

I still had on the clothes I had traveled in, my husband’s loose-fitting pants and shirt. I thought, These pants of my husband’s should be taken off at some point. Then I thought no respectable woman in Malaysia would go out in public looking like this. I thought, These clothes either make an aggressive and unseemly grooming statement or show outright despair. I thought, Which is it? Come on. Then abandoned the thought.

Just two years earlier, the hospital compound had been filled with crowds of people who had attended a “Bersih” rally into which police had fired tear gas. Bersih is Malay for “clean.” The rally was to bring out people opposed to corrupt government to vote in the coming elections, and Bersih’s full name was Gabungan Pilihanraya Bersih dan Adil (the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections). The tear gas affected patients in some wards. Eighteen Tung Shin doctors made a public statement that police had fired tear gas within the compound. Politicians in the government said the police shot the gas in the compound to protect patients from the crowds. Later, they insisted no gas had been fired in the compound. The opposition lost that election.

The haze followed me into the lobby where all the nurses and some of the waiting people wore masks, while the people without masks seemed uninterested in their health. Up in the ninth floor ward, the air seemed clean and clear and there were no masks. Through the tinted glass on the ninth floor, I could see large pits and mounds that, at street level, were hidden away behind a fence. The pits couldn’t be imagined from the street.

The ward was split in two sections, A and B. My mother was in B. There were small sofas in the ninth floor lobby, and two people who had spent the night there were still asleep, likely relatives of patients on the ward. I found my mother’s room right across from the noisy nurses’ station, and I thought, Maybe too close. Then I remembered one of the emails said that ambient noise was important for stroke victims. I imagined all of us grouped around her bed. I imagined our mother looking back and forth between our faces, unable to understand yet another of her children’s arguments, begging her youngest child to simply be respectful.

She seemed asleep, not in a coma. Every light in her room was on. There was a bathroom and two sets of windows overlooking a wall and looking out to the ward. All the curtains were pulled open. The woman in the next bed was smiling and staring up at the ceiling, oblivious to me. There was a tall cupboard with a mirror above more storage. There was a shawl and some coffee mix and biscuits in my mother’s cupboard. The temperature in the room felt warm, so there was no need for the shawl. It was maybe too warm, as she liked her rooms cool. One of the emails had explained why Mum didn’t have her own private room, saying that Mum had a roommate because of that need for ambient sound. My mother was a humble and traditional Peranakan Chinese who loved being with other people, even strangers. I thought, Mum might actually prefer being in a public hospital in a large shared ward.

Her face was relaxed, peaceful, but seemed swollen. Maybe she had gained weight since I had last seen her a year before, when it was her liver that had put her in a different, more specialized private hospital. She seemed to simply be resting. The nurses had wrapped her legs in thick white stockings. At the bottom of the bed were rolled up blankets, flexing her feet. I lifted her right hand, pressed my lips to her fingers, smelling her skin. She was ninety, her skin fine as a baby’s and smooth on her arms and cheeks. Her skin was beautiful, softer than a young woman’s.

I listened to the nurses, thinking that Mum could hear them. As I thought this, her eyes seemed to move behind her eyelids, as if she were in some kind of REM sleep. Her closed eyes seemed to move back and forth from my face to the open door. She was looking for the faces of all her children. She would want the children who loved her more and the children who loved her less to be together in one room.

I held her hand. She used to pretend to let even her smallest children lead her around in exchange for letting her hold their hands. It surprised me later on to see other mothers ordering their children around. It surprised me that other mothers could speak in long sentences with their children, because Mum didn’t. She spoke only Chinese dialects. My father, a Peranakan Chinese man, had his children speak English at home. The Peranakan Chinese had left China at different times and evolved different subcultures, some loyal to China, others embracing the colonial British culture, so theirs was a cross-cultural union. He had fallen in love with her as he rode his bicycle by her house every day and saw her sweeping her driveway. My father loved the English poets and could recite Wordsworth and Keats and The Charge of the Light Brigade. He had told his children to leave Malaysia to better themselves in the West. He married my mother in spite of her Chinese education and, it seemed to me, found my mother’s culture, her relatives, and even her language backward and foreign.

I remembered when I was small, leading my mother from the car toward an old house in the old city near the Chinese graveyards. I led her into a formal entrance room, through a cool sitting space and soot-filled room of ancestral paintings and altars, and into the second sitting room where relatives would sit. We sat attentively on formal straight-back chairs, listening carefully to the gentle, slow Chinese talk of her side of the family, that I couldn’t understand. She would listen intently, whether it was English or the Chinese dialects being spoken, as if she equally understood both. When the conversation was English, she would nod her head once in awhile. When it was Chinese, she joined in and said things. As she grew older, she spoke less and less Chinese, maybe losing her Chinese dialects from not speaking them enough.

People speaking near her in English might have thought her simple-minded, instead of someone who never could speak the language well enough to join them but pretended to understand. She watched the speaker’s body to grasp, not what they were trying to say, but how they expected her to respond. More than her other children, I knew this because of being gone and, for a very long time, being able to reach her only by phone. Without being able to see me, she didn’t know how to respond. She would say the same phrases over and over, and I would repeat them back. I love you. Are you happy? When are you coming home? She began to speak with me only in Hokkien, simple sentences, because that was all I could understand, and I would answer yes or no. Maybe you’re pretending to be in a coma now because you don’t want to pretend to listen anymore. 

Maybe at first she pretended in order to play or please. Maybe she pretended later, after the children were all grown up, because she was afraid we would find her out.  Maybe all that pretending made you really lonely, Mum, like anyone is who lives a lie. Maybe all your children are liars and lonely too, one-sided like pieces of staging. 

I looked at my phone that showed I had been in the room now an hour. My sisters would likely come later, as it was barely eight in the morning.  I would see my brother in the evening. That was the plan.

I put my head in my hands, suddenly so tired that it surprised me that my mother was in that bed, it seemed improper that she was in her green hospital gown, and I was convinced she was pretending to be in a coma. I was convinced she just wanted to be alone.

She loved rituals she could do alone. Getting out of her bath, drying herself and stepping into her sarong, sitting in front of her dresser, applying eau de cologne and powdering her neck and shoulders. She took her time. She never wet her hair, wearing it always up in perfect coils made by her hairdresser. I watched from her bed, six years old, dreaming of when I would grow up and become like her, moving slowly, arranging my arms and legs gently, pausing, as if collecting pauses were the only reason for moving.

I got up and left for the hotel, thankful that it was close by, and that I could sleep.

Josey Foo works in mixed forms. She has published three books of prose, poems, and pictures. Endou (Lost Roads) includes a fully realized children’s picture story of a three-legged traveling beagle and a seven-part essay that was a The Best American Essays 1995 selection. Tomie’s Chair (Kaya) is a meditation on an ocean of choices involved in moving a chair to another part of the room. A Lily Lilies, co-written with the dancer/choreographer Leah Stein, contains poetry and notes on dance and focuses on the impulse to move. Her work has appeared in The Boston Review, The Provincetown Journal, The American Voice, and other journals. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her poetry and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship for prose. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She can be found online at joseyfoo.com.