'Story' derives from 'history', from Middle English, French, Latin: storie, estorie, historia. It should imply truth in an account, objective fact,; but we use it now as a synonym for fiction, things made up.

This is a story my mother once told me. Your grandfather died when I was two. I never knew him.

My parents don't talk much about their childhoods. I gather it to be very different from mine - poorer, more distant from their parents, harder. I can see the frustration in their eyes sometimes, when I take another thing in my life from granted, when I don't want to do the hard work, when I don't have to do what they did - in order to leave it behind. It doesn't make my carelessness any better to recognise that. My mum drifted through a series of foster homes when she was younger, while her single mother worked and worked in factories, stayed at the dormitories, until she could support them both. I have seen where my mother grew up, I have vague memories of a single bedroom in an old flat up at narrow dark staircase, peeling paint and walls that don't reach the ceiling. Five families lived there in a space the size of our two living rooms pushed together, sharing a kitchen, a bathroom, an open lounge. My mum kept a series of pets in her childhood: a turtle that hibernated itself to death, a fluffy puppy, goldfish, silkworms. At school, she was pretty and popular, she remembers that from about twelve onwards boys were always bringing her gifts out of the blue, distracting her from her studies. Don't do what I did, she warned me when I was younger, Don't throw your education away. I could have done so well for myself, if I had made it to university. And she would have, I know.

These are the stories my mother tells me, when I ask about her life before Australia, before me, before. The unknown past, the shaping of her person. I want to know who she is when she was not a mother and a wife, just a girl. There's a skill in pulling these strands of history from her, certain questions like specific buttons. I push them again and again, hoping for a little more information this time, a new story spinning away that I have not heard before.

This is the story of my grandmother. Once upon a time, in a different century, my grandmother lived in rural China, on land once owned by her father. My grandfather was a pilot from Beijing, posted to the very town where my grandmother lived, a city on the Chang Jiang river. Her father wanted the marriage, this rich city boy in their midst; this is the only part this unknown great-grandfather plays in this story; her family disappears altogether afterwards. That part of my family is long gone, a gap in the story, so many gaps. My mother would have liked to have been able to push her mother for the story, like me, time and time again, but she heard the same fragments here, forbidden to ask or mention her absent father. There are secrets mother cannot tell their daughters, and the story grows a little shorter each time, with each telling, until one day everything disappears. Eventually, the family fled to Hong Kong from China while it was still possible, though with some difficulty still, for my mother was only a few month's old then, a babe in her mother's arms. Hong Kong is where she grew up, where she met my dad, where I was born.

It was almost three years before I returned to Hong Kong after we immigrated to Australia. My grandmother lay in a hospital bed for ten months, her home for those last months of her life, in a hospital at the top of a steep mountain that we walked up, every day while we were there. A grey-white room always in shade, six beds to a room, and another six, just the same, in a room across the hall. I was seven then. I learnt to play Chinese chess and 'apple' chess in the hospital waiting room, taught by nurses who could spare the time, patients who could still leave the confines of their beds. I flew to Hong Kong three times that year, each school holiday in that period and for her funeral, and my mother compensated by taking me to all sorts of fun places after each daily visit - amusement parks, floating restaurants, shopping.

This is a story I believe my mother to have told me in this time. We were walking in a busy shopping district, holding hands on the sidewalks, against the hustle and bustle. I had once lived here, unknowingly - only months old at the time, a babe in my parents' happy arms. My mother stopped and looked up at one point, showing me a window, one in a myriad lattice on a side of the building above us. That's where we lived, she said confidently, I mean, I think so. We walked on until we reached the intersection ahead, a crossroads buzzing with people and disobedient traffic. Diagonally across from us rose an apartment block, black glass and silver edging, some 80s view of modern. That building, my mum said, and pointed. I followed with squinting eyes, against the light. When we first moved here, it was still new, and very expensive. Soon after the people moved in, one tenant complained about a terrible smell in his apartment, one he couldn't identify and couldn't find the source of. No matter what they did - fumigation, purification - the smell lingered, and grew worse - a sour, decaying rot. They figured it to be some kind of growth behind the walls, so they ripped the flat apart, tore down the walls. They found a dead girl in the cavity there. The news papers loved the scandal, the news was everywhere. They arrested a builder in the end, an ex-boyfriend. But it was a long while before people wanted to live there again, some time before people forgot. The lights changed from red to green as she talked, and we crossed the road. My childish face upturned and horrified and fascinated, staring at this building, feeling as though it was staring back at me as we passed by.

When my grandmother died, I was at school here in Australia. They didn't tell me until term ended. I prayed for her, every night, in that intervening time. I don't remember much of the funeral, except that I saw her in the open casket, painted and stiff, and I watched as her coffin slid away on rails to the furnace hidden below us. Her stories died with her, melted into the fat and ashes in an urn. I was too young to know what we had lost, to plunder the stories in her mind, answers to questions of what she did in her life, and why. But more than that, I just miss her. I would have her back, even without the stories.

This is a story my mother told me during an argument. My grandfather didn't die when my mother was two. My grandfather was alive after my grandmother was not. He has a different surname from my mother, from me. I asked her to write it down for me once, because I fear that I will forget it, one day soon, and then I will never be able to find out about him, if I wanted to. Some days, I recognise that truthfully, I will never know any more about him that that surname, as common as an English Smith or Brown. My grandfather had other wives, other children, other grandchildren he knows; lives he didn't leave behind. My mother told me the truth in a fit of anger one day. He was alive and had written to her, three times in that last year. Overtures inviting her inside his life with pictures of his family, and inviting her to come closer and share hers. To bridge a gap of more than forty years that he'd been absent, and silent. My mother told me this story once and that is all I learnt. When we travelled to China a few years later, I asked her if she ever wrote back, and she just said, No.

When I was twelve we did a school project for History where we prepared a family tree and gathered some family histories. I can still taste the envy, poring over the centuries of names and dates and stories laid bare on the pages compiled by my friends. I had an A4 page with maybe twenty names in totals over three generations - grandparents I could not name, do not know, cannot acknowledge. Cousins and uncles and aunties, each year distanced further and further into the unknown, lost to me. I still wonder what these missing family members are like, if they share features with me, if we are unwittingly similar, just on different continents. I wonder if I would know them if we passed on the street. Then I think, No.

This is a story I have written, retold in my own words, filtered through my fractured memory. Memory is a fragile thing, easily alterable, often deceitful, turning history into stories ready made for telling.

In 1998, we returned to Hong Kong for another funeral, this for my father's father. Three days of mourning - noisy confusing funeral rites, talking awkwardly with cousins I had not seen in years, listening to sobbing relatives and watching my subdued father. There was shopping too, because what else does one do in Hong Kong? My mother and I, walking down the same street as eight years ago, passed our former home, towards the black and silver apartments. I ask my mother, out of curiosity, if she remembers telling me the story about that building. It's her turn to squint now, the sun glaring off the same glass, and she asks me, puzzled, what story I'm talking about. I list off the simple facts as I remember them - the girl in the wall, the builder boyfriend, the smell, the tenants horrified and fleeing. My mother gives me a look, you know the type. There was a murder case about the building on the corner, she says slowly, after a pause, but. Someone stabbed their girlfriend in their apartment, something like that. Nothing so gruesome as a body hidden in the wall. Another pause. Where on earth did you get a story like that from? She walked on, shaking her head. I stared at the windows, a dusty greenish tint in the sun, but still so dark that you could not see if there was anything, anyone behind them, no sign of life inside. At the base of the apartments, shoppers mulled over purchases and darted across the road in and out of the building. Nothing sinister, just another day, another high rise in a city of skyscrapers, each one the same as the next, as mysterious and ordinary.

END

5/5/06

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