My garden – somewhat – the parallel of my life
I had my first garden in Limehouse, in the backwood of the city of Georgetown. It was almost an acre of land. I didn’t ask for it. It was more than I wanted plus I knew nothing about gardening. It was to please J who preferred to be a country squire. It didn’t even dawn on me that the place need care, except that John said he would mow the lawn. So I thought everything would be taken care of.
I was born as the third daughter of a young couple, with two sisters, two brothers and a mother on the maternal side and two brothers on the paternal side. There were so many adults in and
out of my life, yet I did not know what made them laugh or fight.
After the long winter, things started to grow in the garden. When I worked outside the home, it didn’t bother me how they grew. I was told the lady who used to live there took great care of the garden. I assumed that it would live on her legacy forever by itself. Then I had my first child and stayed home. There was only one big picture window in the living room where my little one and I could look out together. Usually nothing much happened except the occasional cars drove pass. After starring out for a long time, the vegetation seemed to wave at me. I looked for flowers but they were sparse. At first, the waving was friendly, then they turned into murmur, then grumble and finally scream for attention. There were also four rectangular rose beds laid back to back. The roses were gone. So they looked like four newly dug graves. Especially in the winter time when light snow rested on them, they looked dreadful. When I could not stand it anymore. I sneaked out to the garden when the little one took nap, armed with a trowel to start pulling and digging. But one hour working in the garden did not get me very far. I had to get back in before the little one woke up.
When I grew out of infancy and gained consciousness around me, something seemed to be terribly wrong in the environment. I was forever carried on the back of a maid. But if I came into the presence of my parents, they expected me to be a darling, pleasing and affectionate daughter to them. Whereas, my mind was asking the question, ‘who were these people?’ I didn’t want to have much to do with them. I identified the one who carried me as my mother. So I was given all kinds of sarcastic names except the real one. I buried myself in books and fantasies early in life. Hardly anyone could find me.
After 5 years in Limehouse. We had to move because our older one had entered school age. She would either have to go to the village school, which had a poor reputation or be home school. I was more than willing, but J would have nothing to do with it. I refused to take on the responsibility of driving J to work, then 45 minutes one way to a private school and spend a total of 4 to 5 hours a day on the road lugging a 3 years old with me. So we had to move. There were few choices of house in the city of Guelph, maybe, the real estate agent did not try very hard to look for us ( later I found out she missed the whole new subdivision). I saw the house in Everton on the ad, so we ended up in the country again, The yard was just as big as the previous one, except the garden was closer to the house. This time, there were not even immediately neighbors. When both the children could go to school, I would work at the bare plot to bring some colors to it. It was so quiet that I swear I could hear the heart beat of the earth.
After my origional family moved from China to HK to escape Communism, we we had to make many little moves to different addresses. Then the family came apart. Suddenly, everybody around me disappeared. I found myself living with people whom I did not know. My crying or temper tantrum had no effect on anybody because they had to struggle with their own lives shortly after the 2nd world war.
Life in Everton was livable except the news that came home. J felt incompatible to his job. The school was incompatible with its job. We had many fights before I was allowed to take the children out of the school and settled them in the public system. Three years later. J was laid off at work. In desperation, he answered his friend’s call, to work for his company in Vancouver despite my reluctance. But he had to go and I could not stop him. He phoned me many times to complain how hard and how much he didn’t fit in because his friend was so mean to him. Yet he chose to stay on. Meanwhile, the kids and I stayed in Everton for nine more months because our house was not sold. I kept myself busy with the kids, my garden. Discharging my frustration by distributing flyers for the Reform Party, to finally selling the old furniture and dishes to get ready for the impending move.
One day, when I was around 4 or 5, my siblings and I were brought back together like four yearlings into a one room holding pen with a kind hire hand who looked after us. Next to our room was another family. The street outside though bare, was like a playground to us. Life was care free for a short time. Then I was made to go with my older sister to somebody’s house to be tutored because I missed so much school that I couldn’t pass the entrance exam. After walking for more than half-an-hour in the hot sun, my body was tired. When I got there, I dozed off to deep slumber and woke up to disapproval eyes. This must have happened for a few months. Then one day, we were told to pack our few belongings to move in with the lady who paid our tutor. She was going to be our stepmother. I didn’t have much, only a pair of white canvas running shoes. I was crying all the way begging our father not to let me live with that lady. My cry felt on deaf ears. Of course, my demeanor at the door was not welcome. I was sadder than someone who was attending a funeral. But from there on, I had to listen to the barking orders, toe the line and be as pleasing as could be. I told myself secretly I would not show my tears anymore to anybody. So they started to flow inward.
Kids and I flew out to Vancouver finally. We lost the house which I pick in a more rural part of the city to the dead line. So now we are moving into a house which I had never seen in the different part of the city which I did not care. Though it was not a bad house, (the best one on the market the mortgage could afford.) It was still depressing in the drippy month of February. The garden was a workable size, but there was not much flower bed or pretty scenery to rest ones eyes on.
Though my siblings and I had a better roof on our head, clothes on our back, food on the table. Life was more like a military camp. We woke up everyday and went through the same things of going to school, did all kinds of chores of taking care of ourselves and cleaned up the apartment and its furnitures. Then sit at the table to do homework before and after supper until we hit the beds. Sometimes we were pulled out of our sleep in the middle of the night after our step mother finished her late shift in the hospital just to have our homework checked or practice our memory drills with droopy eyelids and spinning heads, like four raggedy dolls standing in a roll.
School experience was not a happy one in the second year in Delta. We didn’t want it happen again. So we decided to move to a different district in the same area. I was happy with the more spacious rooms and the fact that I could keep my daycare entirely downstairs. The work required more of my time and I was happy to do it in order to make enough to pay a bigger mortgage. There was no time for gardening. The grass on the front lawn was yellow no matter how much I watered. It took me couple of years to figure out, that the soil was so depleted, nothing could have grown there. The back yard had no flowers, just the prickly juniper. They were supposed to be sculptured. But they had been neglected and looked more like death rolls inmates whose head are ready to be chop off. Weed covered the ground facing 64 Ave. Round the corner was a rubble pile of stones. I couldn’t understand how in a fairly nice area thing could look so dreadful after 25 years of construction. But neither could I do anything. There was no time after work, with housework and two kids in soccer game. Life was a whirlwind.
My siblings and I were being moved around different schools almost every year like it or not, depending on the fancy of our stepmother who would like us to move up the scale of education. If we were little animals, we might have die of heart attack from shocks for inconsistent environment. My younger brother did react with a lot of symptoms to the changes. As a result, none of us put down any roots. We were withering inside and out as we tried to go to sleep with background fighting every night. Our mother tried to visit us different times. She was discouraged by our father. I even got mad at her for her absence when I saw her. I refused to have anything to do with her. So she finally gave up.
Until one day, I called in a load of dirt. Spread it over the lawn, threw in some grass seeds. That year, we had a half descent lawn. The following two years, I cut back and pulled up all the juniper, the overgrown spiraea, the expiring rodos. Spent a whole week with two young men to fill the city’s land on 64 and the back garden with top soil while my family looked on.
When I was thirteen, the fighting adults called for a separation. My sister and I ended up taking side with the female. Our father moved out with the two boys. I didn’t see them for many years. Life was not a whole lot different except now our stepmother exploded on us all her anger and bitterness. At sixteen, I was contemplating either suicide or move out. I stole away quietly and moved in with my aunt. It was easier than the time when I was seven, when I ran away with my two younger brothers to find our mother. Unto this day, I still have no idea how I did it without an address. I also skipped school, wandered around in the city and found my way home reluctantly. May be because HK was a very small city after all.
Shortly after that, I saw a lady working at the corner of our street. She removed rubbles, dug a big hole, fill in with topsoil, cut logs to landscape. She worked even to the middle of the night. I was curious. I went over to talk and help. We became good friends. With dirt on the ground (though the cheapest grade,) I went with my friend to the Cloverdale flea market to pick up some cheap plants and plunked them in the flowerbeds. It gave me hope.
After moving out, I had to gather myself to work on my schoolwork, which really suffered because of my emotional turmoil and lack of concentration. But things didn’t come together overnight. Yet for the time being, I had some breathing space.
The next spring, some plant did ok and some didn’t. The following few years, as I put more new plant in, I had to dig up the previous ones to relocate them either for aesthetic reason or their sizes. Every time I persisted until my muscle and joints would gave out.
I failed my second last high school year. They wanted me to repeat a year. most of the teachers there were so mean and I distained it. Our mother was able to pull some strings to get me into another school which I eventually passed the public exam without having to repeat a year. During that year, I also made a good friend who came from the same school and faced the same school situation as I did. She turned out to be my bosom friend unto this day. We landed on our first job together. As a hind sight, we knew it was humanly impossible being two of 20 recruits out of 5000 applications. There were plenty of applicants with better qualification than either of us. The job required a lot of change in work sites. We both started at the airport. She went to work in the harbor next. I was moved around different departments in the head office. Two and a half years had passed when I handed in my resignation and moved to Canada.
The plants finally established roots and started to blossom. It was great fun whenever my friend and I visited the flea market and brought home more plants which also meant work.
It was a new life for me grown on different soil in Canada. My desire was to find out the God who gave me a big helping hand all the way like the sun and rain he provides for my plants and all the living things. For it was no less than a miracle I was here. Every visit to the campus Bible Study was like a long buried seed fighting its way out of the dirt to raise its head to the glorious sun . I had learned how to release the pass and to move on with him who promised never to leave me.
If one has plant, it also mean one has to weed, which is a lifetime job. It is because weed does not stop growing. I tried bark mulch. They do wear down and disintegrate into the soil. Herbicide brings more harm to the environment, so it is a ‘no, no’. The hands end up the best tools to get rid of weed. Some plant can self propagate so profusely. In a sense, they are weed too, if you do not want them to take over your yard.
A new lease on life is just the beginning. From there on, it is to allow God to weed out the things in me, which are not fit for his garden. If I tried to pull out the weed in my soul, I fell flat on my face even after I tried my best. They would come back after a while. After many years of trying, I had to admit to God I could not do it. Then the wonderful thing happened. He asks me to lie still like dirt on the ground and he gently pulls them out, one at a time, effortlessly. The main thing for me to do is to identify with him, which thought or action of mine is weed. As soon as I agree with him, he will do the operation. For he is the one who wants to take the credit.
2 Corinthians 12: 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness."
If a professional gardener comes to look at my garden, He or she would probably find a lot of things which need to be changed or improved. The result would not represent my life. As is now, it reminds me how far I have come along, not how perfect.
