My Sister Ivy

A few months ago, My sister Ivy died after fighting lung cancer valiantly for three and a half years. Often, I think of her like she is still here, asking myself what would Ivy think about this and that, she was the sibling to whom I talked the most. Maybe it was a habit from when I was her baby brother.

Ivy was 2.5 years older than me. We were almost the same size at this point, Ma said Ivy used to carry this big slug around.

Ivy was the rock of our family and to her husband and children, and the benefactor of many friends and relatives. No only she carried her chubby brother around, she held down the fort when the rest of the family left Hong Kong in the early 70s, she shouldered the responsibilities of closing our family home of 20 years alone when she was still in secondary school. Sometimes she half joked that if there's such a thing as reincarnation, she wouldn't want to be human again because being human was just too hard. Perhaps she was right, setting the bar high for being a good human is not easy, not even for her.

A Victim

Soon after our family moved to North America in the 70s, we all got stuck in the ruts of college, family and adulthood. The siblings did get together from time to time, still my memories of Ivy are mostly from our childhood in Hong Kong. That Ivy I knew was a vivacious girl or even a mischievous one. We often reminisced about how we used a rod stringed to an emptied out watermelon and tried to cover the heads of unsuspecting passers-by under our balcony with the rind. We probably never scored a direct hit from the 3rd floor, but we ruined enough clothes that rocks, and I swear, dog pooh were thrown at us by the angry victims while we laughed breathlessly.

Trigram Evil Eye

Some of our neighbors were probably not pleased with the Chang children either, and the flat on our right was upset enough that they hung a trigram mirror facing our balcony. One time when Ivy and I were on the balcony just minding our own business, the neighbor lady just suddenly flipped out, grabbed a 10 foot laundry bamboo pole and tried to kill us with it while shouting "I'm going to blind you! I'm going to poke your eyes out!" We ducked and realized there was no chance that she could touch us at that angle and started laughing loudly until the old witch exhausted herself. We used the expression "I'm going poke your eyes out" in exaggerated feigned anger and always found it hilarious (it is a lot funnier in Cantonese, word by word, it's literally "poke and explode your eyeballs".) Of course, Big Brother Robin set up some cleverly angled mirrors to retaliate the trigram evil eye, at certain time of the day, the neighbor felt they had a searchlight pointed directly at their living room.

Ivy's hands were impossibly small, if you shook her hand, her lack of strength would be immediately evident and she had no interest in anything athletic. When she was a girl, she was also extremely afraid of the needle, and it's at the doctor's office she was an athlete. It usually took more than one nurse to restrain her to give her a shot (at that time, if you went to the Doctor for whatever reason, you'd always get at least one shot). If she managed to escape, people would be chasing her around like a slapstick movie. One time Ma actually sat on her to stop her from struggling. At the time I found it very amusing, only if I knew how she had to deal with the needle in her last days, chemo session after chemo session...

When I was about 10, our mother bought a pair of discount airplane tickets from Canton to Shanghai, Ivy and I were to travel by train to Canton and from there take the plane to Shanghai to visit our maternal grandparents in Shanghai. To this day, that was still the trip of a lifetime for me. First, the two of us were totally on our own; second, no one we knew had been on an airplane; third, all the fellow travelers thought we were so cute. The train ride to Canton was uneventful but unbeknownst to us, we were to spend a night at a nice hotel (probably The Five Goats). We two country bumpkins were surprised by the hot water faucet actually worked (at that time in Hong Kong, most families did not have hot water on tap; the hot water faucet was only for show.) So we filled the tub to the brim and took turns having many luxurious baths until there was standing water on the bathroom floor. Dinner at the hotel was a rice plate with fresh mushrooms -- it was just before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution -- and I suppose now it was actually quite a fancy dish, but both of us found it gross and spit out most of the food. Despite the "opulent"  accommodations, we couldn't get on the plane soon enough the next day and luckily before they found out about the bathroom.

The ride to Shanghai was extremely bumpy. I remember the plane was carrying lots of bananas and tropical fruits (probably for the party cadres, the Great Leap Forward Famine just ended a few years before so food in China was still scarce.) I am quite sure the airplane cabin was not pressurized because when the plane flew into the clouds we could see the white stuff immediately got inside the fuselage. We both puked our brains out most of the way and landed in Shanghai on an oppressively hot day.

Shanghai Airport, notice the peasant air conditioner next to the mid century sofa and
the two Hong Kong kids in not typical proletarian clothes. Ivy was wearing a lot of beads.

 
After getting thoroughly spoiled by the grandparents for a month, we could speak the Shanghai dialect like native Shanghai kids and were quite sad to leave. I don't remember if I cried or not, but Ivy certainly did bawl her eyes out. We took the train all the way from Shanghai to Hong Kong on the return trip. On the train Ivy discovered one of her male school teachers (from a school sympathetic to the Communists that she attended previously) was also onboard. It was then I saw Ivy's remarkable recovery from her sorrows and as a wildly excited prepubescent girl, running back-and-forth between two cars all giddy and silly. Half a century later, after my sisters and daughter had become women, I'm often think of their ephemeral girlhoods, sugar and spice do have a shelf life.  Oh, only if I could bottle the exuberant spirit of a 12 years old girl.

Roughly at that time, Ivy transferred from a Chinese based school (a so called "patriotic school", not strong academically) to a more challenging English school. It was not a smooth transition and she needed a tutor. While my older brother and eldest sister had a decent tutor Mr Chen, Ivy's tutor was not a very good one.  He transliterated English words into groups of Chinese mnemonics, English words were pronounced exactly like Cantonese. He explained that "ch" sounded like Cantonese 池, so "how much" was "how mut chee" and so on. Maybe because Pa snickered when Mr. Yuan taught English, I figured the tutor didn't deserve our respect, one day, my younger sister and I tried to find ways to rouse this poor tutor. First we ran around the table where they were sitting chanting and singing silly songs, then it escalated to touching, ever so lightly, the tutor's shirt and the hair on the back of his neck while Ivy tried desperately no to laugh. After a few minutes, Mr Yuan's entire head suddenly turned beet red and he stood up, exploded into a very pompous rant and quit on the spot. I was too stunned and dared not to laugh, but Ivy couldn't help herself. To this day, a reenactment of that outburst is still our (inside) joke non plus ultra, a joke that never got old.

No thanks to the tutor, Ivy's grades improved and by the time she was in College, she was a hardworking math major and later earned her MBA. She had turned things around completely, from running away to taking challenges head on. Hard to imagine now, Ivy was a chubby toddler and she did gain her freshman weight when she started school in Maryland. Determined to overcome everything that's in her way, she kept the weight off for the rest of her days and never smoked nor drank. (Her son Chris is very much into wine, and his wine is still labelled Ivy Cellar.)

Putting on the freshman 15 

Recently, Ivy told me she never had a manicure in her life, she thought it's just too extravagant. Despite being very well-off, Ivy's taste was everyman with a few exceptions. She had nice houses, furniture, china, and a vast jewelry collection. Jewelry was almost an obsession, every city she visited, jewelry shopping was usually on her to-do list.

Maybe I have some clues about this very extravagant hobby. In Hong Kong, during Chinese New Year, children received lucky money from their parents and older (married) friends and relatives. The money was enough to buy some toys and candies or firecrackers. One year, Ivy and I had some lucky money in our hot little hands and we saw the most beautiful things in the world, a street vendor was selling what appeared to be diamond jewelry at prices we could afford. I remember we bought a pin and some unbelievably pretty earrings and ran to show Ma, Ma being a child herself, said our offerings were fakes and tawdry, she didn't think she could wear something like that. Ivy and I were so crestfallen that we never forgot the horrors of that experience. Perhaps from that experience, Ivy always bought stuff of real value, when she was sick, she spent a lot of her waning energy on shopping for diamond earrings for all her nieces and granddaughter.    

Ivy and Ma

Since Chinese has difference 4 distinct words for old sister, old brother, younger brother, and younger sister, it's considered quite blessed to have one of each plus husband, children, and parents. By that criterium, Ivy was the most blessed but I still can't wrap my head around the fact that the most blessed person is gone.

When the wife of philosopher Zhuang Zi  (369 BC  莊子) died, his friend found him squatted on the floor beating a bucket and singing this song:

生死本有命，氣形變化中。天地如巨室，歌哭作大通

Life and death are part of the circle of life
The transformation of gases and matters
All in the big house of the universe
Singing and crying are the same

Of course we Chinese are not the only wise one. Around 500BC Greek philosopher Parmenides famously said "Nothing comes from nothing" therefore nothing is ever created or destroyed from the beginning of time (conservation of mass). Surely, every atoms in our persons came from the stars and shall return to the stars.

Maybe Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet says it better, when Juliet (mistakenly) thought Romeo had died, she remembered Romeo's smiling face and said:

When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.