Stories of Others


Dear Eugene,

Last night my mom-in-law asked me why I am the way I am.  She is childlike and would often ask the darnedest question and really beyond adorable.

In fact she asked a lead-in question first: Your family wasn't that poor when you grew up in HK, right?  She wanted to say I don't have a background of hardship and ask why then I would live like I have one.

I answered in a typically very me way to speak about not just the Whats of me but the Hows and invite her to see the What-ifs.

Reading, at one moment I allowed myself to be explicit, I am informed by what I read, by the stories of others.  My head (though I meant to say heart) is often somewhere else.

 Poland 1939, the Russian occupation.  That's where my head is recently.  I don't really talk about this part of me because this world is from a novel that is out-of-print but for whatever reason I have a copy of it.  Like, seriously, 1939?

Someone told me I must be 143 years old, giving me an extra stroke to make sense of the strange.  Every strangeness at night becomes the new normal by dawn, that's how I define growing.

Yesterday on Skytrain I saw something strange, two ladies a generation removed, the younger a teenager, leaning on each other as if to keep death at bay.  I've seen this image before in a war movie, more than one actually, or maybe in a photograph brown and tatter-edged.  But never in Vancouver.  Certainly not in 2018.

Poland 1939, I muttered.  Consanguinity, a strange word came out of nowhere.  I jerked my head away, embarrassed at the gaze I gave as I felt it was.

Then slowly I turned back, as if to look out the window beside them for a more familiar sight, somewhere out there.  The corner of my right eye confirmed I was not delusional and probably wasn't gazing for the ladies were paying no attention to me.

I left the train and let them stay at the fringe of the very me.

Yours, Alex

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