“Why is Mom fat?” I asked my Dad.
My Dad looked at me with a mix of pain and anger.
“Don’t say that about your Mom ever again, you hear? You don’t know what she’s been through to give birth to you.”
My Dad said this a bit louder than his indoor voice, and with a tone that told me I had done something wrong.
“As a matter of fact, she wasn’t like this before she gave birth to you,” my Dad said.
“Really?”
“Yes, here, let me show you.”
I followed my Dad to the big, gray, box-shaped TV in the living room. There was a picture of my Mom, my Dad, and myself on top of the TV. My parents were sitting on a large rock, with my Mom facing slightly to the right of the frame, while my Dad, who was half sitting, half standing on a higher elevation, was facing slightly to the left. Sitting in the middle of my Mom and my Dad was a toddler sized version of myself. I had this scared look on my face, and I had chubby cheeks. All around us were light green bushes, dark green leaves and pink and purple flowers. Some of the flowers had rose-like heads, while others had droopy, hanging heads.
“You see? Your Mom is skinny here, yeah?”
My Mom was skinnier in the picture. There weren’t any protrusions around the waistline in the photo.
“Now look at this one. Even skinnier.”
My Dad led me into a room where we kept the computer and a second, smaller, black box TV. Hanging up on the wall of this room was a photo of my Mom and Dad on their wedding day. The frame was silver, and it was just the two of them standing in front of a tree. My Dad was in a black suit, looking even younger than in the previous photo. My Mom looked younger as well, and even with the slightly poofy wedding dress, she looked even skinnier than in the previous photo.
“Why did she… become big then?” I asked.
“When you were born, you wouldn’t come out. They had to goite hoi your Mom’s stomach to pull you out.”
Goite hoi. It was Cantonese. The first word, goite, is pronounced with a certain sharpness and forcefulness to it. You had to say it almost gutturally, tensing up your body and core like you had just gotten punched in the stomach. Then, the second word, hoi. It’s pronounced more gently than goite, but it would take the rest of the air in your lungs to properly say it. If goite was the punch to the gut, then hoi was the air leaving your lungs. Together, they formed goite hoi, which loosely translated to, in English, tear open.
They tore open my Mom’s stomach to get to me. That realization shocked me. Like suddenly waking up from a dream. It sounded terrifying to hear about being cut open by someone, and to find out my Mom had gone through that made me feel guilty for calling her fat. At the same time, I felt at awe looking up at my Mom’s wedding photo. Comparing the version of her in the photo to the version of my Mom in the present felt like I had found evidence of a heroic sacrifice that I had never known about. I wanted to know more about my Mom, and to learn about what other heroic sacrifices or hidden hardships she might’ve endured that I never knew about.
* * *
“When did you know that you had polio?”
My Mom was sitting at the dinner table. She was looking at the tablet in front of her, pressing her finger against the screen every so often.
“Well, I don’t actually know. I just guessed I had it when I saw my elementary teacher. Her leg was just like mine, and she had an even worse limp than me,” my Mom said without looking at me.
My Mom pressed her finger against the screen again. A youtube video started playing, and the audio was that of a loud restaurant. Everyone was speaking Cantonese. She had become enticed by this one Cantonese speaking youtuber, who went around rating different restaurants in Toronto. All of these restaurants were Chinese restaurants.
My Mom went to a Canadian school for the first time when she was nine or ten years old.
On her first day, my Mom was being led down a hallway to her new classroom. Since she had just arrived from China, my Mom couldn’t speak any English. On top of this, she couldn’t walk as fast as she liked because her right leg was much smaller than the other. For some reason, my Mom’s right leg didn’t have as many muscles as her left, meaning she had to half drag her leg every time she walked.
“That’s your new classroom,” the person leading my Mom said.
He pointed to a doorway in front of them on the left side of the hall.
A woman limped out from the door, turned towards my Mom, and started limping down the hallway. It was the elementary teacher, and she walked while half dragging one of her legs.
“Welcome- oh! Why are you limping?” The teacher asked.
My Mom blinked. She just stared at the teacher, unable to say anything.
“It’s nothing to worry about. She’s not injured,” the person next to my Mom said.
“That’s a relief.”
The teacher was wearing a dress and her legs were mostly covered, but my Mom could tell that one of her legs was much smaller than the other.
“Anyways, I’ll leave her to you now. I still have to make sure there aren’t any others who are lost.”
The person that led my Mom to the classroom waved his hand before walking down the hall and out of sight.
The teacher turned to my Mom and tried to bend her legs slightly to lower herself to my Mom’s height. But when her weaker leg started shaking, she decided to stand up straight instead.
“You’re not injured, right? Your leg doesn’t hurt or anything?”
My Mom shook her head.
“Do you know why you have a limp?”
My Mom shrugged.
“You might be like me, then. I have polio.”
Of course, my Mom never confirmed whether or not she truly had polio. She wasn’t interested in figuring it out for some reason. But what my Mom did know was that she never got vaccines as a child. Her mother never brought her to the places that would’ve vaccinated her when she was a child because she didn’t know about them. Polio was one of the diseases that you were vaccinated against as a child.
—
“Did this happen at an intersection?”
“No, no. It happened- here, show me the street view.”
We opened up the street view on google maps. We were just outside one of those plazas with a bunch of different shops, like a supermarket, a dentist and a doctor among others. There was also one of those large, rectangular monoliths that listed all the stores in the plaza. It said 4186-4190 Finch AVE. EAST at the very top in white letters.
“Is this it?”
“Yes. That’s the place. That’s where I almost got hit by a car.”
When my Mom was pregnant, there were three events that she remembered quite vividly.
The first event happened when she just finished a check up at the doctors. She was outside on the sidewalk, walking back and forth along it while waiting for my Dad to pick her up. Behind her was the large, rectangular monolith that had all the names of the stores within the plaza. To her right, there was a wide grass path nearly twice as wide as the sidewalk. In front of her, an old man was walking slowly towards her.
The old man was walking on the right of the sidewalk, closer to the road.
My Mom was walking towards the old man when she suddenly saw a car speeding down the road, coming up from behind him. For some reason, it jumped the curb, drove along the grass patch to the right of the sidewalk and nearly hit the old man in the process. When the car reached my Mom, it was a little over two arms length away from hitting her. By the time the car reached the monolith with all the store names, it suddenly jerked onto the road and continued on as if nothing had happened.
When my Mom turned to the old man, who had also witnessed the reckless driving, he had the widest eyes she had ever seen.
“They almost hit me,” he said.
My Mom wasn’t as shaken up as him, since the car was further away from her when it passed compared to the old man. But even then, she remembered the people in the car. They looked very young, about eighteen or nineteen years old, and there were three or four of them in the car. When the car returned to the road, my Mom heard them laughing and hollering with that nasally, high pitched voice you would hear from every dickhead in a TV show. You know, the ones that are written to be as obscenely obnoxious as possible.
—
“Like, was it an actual burn?”
My Mom was lying in bed. She had propped her pillow up so that she wasn’t lying flat on the bed, and she had the duvet cover over her shoulders. She had one hand holding up a black tablet in front of her face and the other pressing the screen frantically. She was playing Happy Clinic, and would always complain to me about how hard it was to pass each level.
“No, it wasn’t an actual burn, like- or black anything- It was more like an indent,” my Mom said.
“An indent?”
“Yeah. I was wearing one of those.”
My Mom pointed to one of the jackets she had hanging on the doorknob of her closet. It was covered in dust, but it was still in good shape and without any rips, tears or stains. It was a thick jacket too, like something you would wear at the tail end of autumn or early winter.
“There was an indent… What color was the indent?”
“There weren’t any colored markings from the rope. It was just an indent in the jacket where the rope hit,” my Mom said.
A little while later, my Mom found the jacket that she was wearing when she got hit by the rope.
“You’re in luck,” she said as she laid the jacket out.
Sure enough, there was an indent almost exactly a centimeter wide and ten centimeters long on the jacket’s sleeve. And the indent was severe. The jacket’s surface was smooth and fur-like. The indent, however, was rough and hard like velcro. The rope basically lacerated the jacket.
The second event happened when my Mom was at a festival. It was a windy, autumn day, and my Mom went with my Dad to watch a kite show.
The show itself was happening in an open field. Between the people flying the kites and the people watching, there was a temporary rope barrier separating the two. My Mom was standing just behind the rope, meaning she had front row seats to watch the massive kites flying around in the sky.
All of a sudden, one of the strings holding the large kite snapped. The string flew through the air and whipped my pregnant Mom in the left arm and leg, just missing her stomach. It felt like she had burned herself with boiling water.
Thankfully, there was no scarring and my Mom recovered without issue, perhaps, in part, because of the jacket she was wearing at the time.
—
“So, the doctor said, ‘we’re going to have to cut you open?’”
“A cesarean cut. And, no, they didn’t say it like that. But they did cut me open to pull you out,” my Mom said.
My Mom was lying in bed, on her side. She was looking away from me, staring at the black tablet in her hand. I was next to her, lying on the other side of the bed with my hands behind my head.
I found it strange that she was so calm telling me about how the doctors cut her open.
“Why do you look and sound so nonchalant when you tell me these things? Like, it sounds like you don’t care at all that they cut you open.”
My Mom turned over to lie on her back. She looked directly into my eyes.
“Well, what would you want me to look and sound like?”
Then, she half shouted a yell, her voice bouncing between highs and lows like a wave to replicate a fright filled scream.
“I didn’t say you had to look or sound scared or anything, but you sound like you don’t care about these things.”
She clicked her tongue.
“There’s no point in dwelling on bad things,” my Mom said, half exasperated.
She turned away from me again, laying on her side as she went back to staring at the tablet.
“Could you at least not look at your tablet when I’m talking to you?”
“I’m still listening to you,” my Mom said, not looking at me.
The night before my Mom was going to give birth, she felt a sort of discomfort around the stomach and uterus region. Feeling worried, my Dad drove her to the hospital to have it checked out by a doctor.
“It seems you’re dilated now, so it might be time for you to give birth,” the doctor on duty said.
They led my Mom to a room in the birth center and let her get changed into one of those hospital gowns. Afterwards, they started to stick what my Mom calls “monitor things” onto her stomach in order to monitor the baby’s condition. It was a bunch of narrow wires stuck onto the bulge of the stomach.
After an entire night of little activity, my Mom was given what she calls, in Cantonese, “Chau Saang.” It was supposed to help speed up the process of giving birth.
After that, the nurse asked my Mom whether or not she wanted an epidural to numb the labor pains. My Mom agreed to getting an epidural, and the nurse jabbed it into the back of her spine.
When morning arrived, the doctor came into my Mom’s room. His shift was about to end, and he told my Mom that it should be time to push. When my Mom tried to push, no baby came.
“There should be an urge to push. Do you feel it? It’s like taking a poop,” the nurse said to my Mom.
“I don’t feel anything,” my Mom said.
My Mom couldn’t feel anything because of the epidural. There was no feeling in her legs, meaning she couldn’t feel any urge to push. So, my Mom, the nurse and the doctor had to wait until the epidural’s effects wore off.
After a while of waiting, the doctor monitoring my Mom left the room and went home. When a replacement doctor arrived, she took one look at my Mom’s uterus and shook her head.
“You’re not ready to push. The baby’s not even in the birth canal.”
So, my Mom continued to lay in bed, waiting for the doctor to tell her to start pushing. At first, there wasn’t much activity. However, after an hour passed, the doctor noticed that the baby’s heart had stopped beating. Twice.
“The baby is in distress,” the doctor said. “We can’t wait any longer. We have to do a cesarean.”
In other words, they needed to cut her open.
So, my Mom was rushed out of her room, down the hall on her bed with the lights passing over her one by one, and into the operating room where they would do the cesarean cut. When she got there, the doctors quickly started to set everything up. The bed my Mom was lying on pushed her up until she was at a 35 or 45 degree angle. They put a curtain in front of my Mom so that she wouldn’t see them cut her open. And one of the doctors gave her anesthetics to numb the lower half of her body.
“Press this if you feel any pain,” the doctor giving my Mom anesthetic said.
He gave her a strange object that looked like a pen. It had a button at the top of it, and whenever my Mom pressed it, more anesthesia would be administered from a bag hanging next to her. And my Mom pressed it a lot because she felt a funny feeling in her stomach. That funny feeling was the pressure of them cutting her open.
At the same time the doctors cut my Mom open to pull me out, the anesthetics were affecting her negatively. She ended up turning to one of the doctors before vomiting. My Mom vomited as they tore her open to pull me out.
When I was finally taken out of my Mom, I didn’t cry. In fact, I didn’t breathe. When I was in distress, I accidentally swallowed the amniotic fluid in my Mom’s stomach. If they didn’t take that fluid out, I could get an infection, or worse, die from asphyxia. Luckily, the doctors were quick. They were able to put a plastic vacuum to my mouth to suction the amniotic fluid out of my throat and lungs. Only then, was I actually born. And it was only then did my Mom hear me cry for the first time.
Yet, even after all that had happened, my Mom still wasn’t done at the hospital. The doctors had to put me into an incubator and monitor my condition, since I could’ve had an infection from the amniotic fluid. On top of this, I was also underweight and refused to take milk. Because of this, the Pediatric Doctor arranged for my Mom to stay at the hospital until they deemed my condition stable enough to be taken home.
They ended up staying at the hospital for five days, which was about two or three days longer than what was normal. Only after all that did she finally get to take me home.
—
“What are you looking for?”
“Pictures,” my Mom said.
My Mom opened up a cabinet, pulling on the broken, plastic handle.
“Here it is,” she said.
She pulled out a thick photo album with Winnie the Pooh on the front and plopped it onto the bed. She flipped open the hard cover and pointed to the only picture on the first page. It was the baby version of me. I laid in this nearly transparent greenhouse shaped container, and I was looking at someone outside of the frame. I had this sleepy eyed look, as if I didn’t care about anything. Yet at the same time, I seemed to smile at the sight of whoever was out of frame. On my chest were two or three white wires, the monitor things that my Mom mentioned.
Around the greenhouse shaped container were blankets, dials, snake-sized tubes, wires, and monitors.
On the left side of the photo was a hand. The frame cuts it off, so there’s no way of knowing who it was. I was looking at them, though, and smiling. It might’ve been my Dad. It could’ve been some nurse. But it should be my Mom. Yes, it should be my Mom. She deserved to be in the photo.