When we were brought to her hospital bedside to say goodbye to our mom, she said to my older sister, “Take care of Doreen because she is wild.” I was eight years old, but I understood that our mom’s words were not a rebuke or a warning. I knew that she cherished the wild child as well as the sensible one.
This wild child thing no doubt started with my nanny, Ah Seem, who would never have thought of it that way. She just thought that making me happy was her job, and she let me do all the things that she would have loved to do.
To get to my play date, she would hail a sampan nowhere near where we were going. She would let me trail my hand in the water and even stand up, balancing precariously next to the laughing sampan woman and pretending to row, feeling the cool spray in my face. Ah Seem convinced my mom to let her take me to her family for Chinese New Year, so that I could chase the dragon and dance in the street with the other children. She took me to over-the-top Chinese opera and let me eat from vendors, and sleep on her lap when even the clashing gongs couldn’t keep my eyes open.
When I was three, our family had a summer shack built on stilts in the outer harbor. Ah Seem took me there to cool off. One afternoon, a boat that looked like a huge dragonfly came by. My Uncle Artur was driving it.
My uncle said that his boat could also fly. Did I want to fly? The only one there to say no was Ah Seem, and of course she said go with your uncle.
That was my first trip over the rainbow.
Many years later, I brought it up in a conversation with my aunt. She stared at me. Artur? A pilot? Never! He was your grandmother’s baby. He never left home. He never married. He had the same work. You were only three and your mother let you? You must have imagined it, probably when you saw Meryl Streep and Robert Redford flying around in that little plane in “Out of Africa.”
How could that be? How could she not have known that Artur was a pilot? And yet, it was out of character, if you thought of him that way. But I remember what I remember.
It wasn’t until 1995, when I was rummaging in the stacks of a Chinese bookstore in Macau, that I came across a graduation photo of a Pilot’s Training Course. Smack in the middle of the front row was my uncle Artur!
Some childhood memories are precious, especially those you can’t edit out or dismiss because they don’t fit.
My uncle Artur with his class of pilots
Me at our summer shack.
Macau in pre-war days.
The inner harbor
Sampans
Recent Comments