Ed Yeung, 1978-2007
The dust, light-winged as soot, is swarming thickly across the flashlight beam. I sneeze and the specks pummel across the light. Everything, I suppose, turns to dust eventually. A man's memories end up in some attic or in a Salvation Army bin. His name becomes a fleeting statistic and his face is lost in fading photographs, the clothing quaint, the anecdotes gone.
All our ordinary stories are changed in time, altered as much by the present as the present is shaped by the past. Potent and pervasive as a prairie dust storm, memories and dreams seep and mingle through cracks, settling on furniture and upholstery. Our attics and living-rooms encroach on each other, deep into their invisible places.
Obasan shuffles to the trunk and stoops to lift the lid. The thick dust slides off like chocolate icing sugar - antique pollen. Black fly corpses fall to the floor. She pushes aside the piles of old clothes - a 1920s nightgown, a peach-coloured woollen bathing suit. A whiff of mothballs wafts up. The odour of perspiration.
"Shall I help you?" I ask, not knowing what she seeks.
"Everyone someday dies," she answers.
I scan the contents of the trunk, zigzagging the flashlight beam over the old clothes. The thin flowery patchwork quilt Mother made for my bed when I was four years old is so frayed and moth-eaten it's only a rag. I remember standing by the sewing-machine, watching as her hands, quick as birds, matched and arranged the small triangles of coloured cloth. I would like to drop the lid of the trunk, go downstairs and back to bed. But we're trapped, Obasan and I, by our memories of the dead - all our dead - those who refuse to bury themselves. Like threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, or depart. When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles.
Joy Kogawa, Obasan