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BRICK 90 But along with my appreciation came a fl icker of uncertainty; perhaps we were not as confidingly close as I had once believed. Walls were bound to appear when my sons crossed the border into adolescence, but I felt with growing amazement that the walls were a lready forming, were perhaps a lways a lready there. Walls not necessarily built by an eagerness to keep prying people (or prying mothers) outside so much as forged of the wish to keep something inside. To themselves. I began to realize we can desire a hiding place even when no one is looking. We returned to the tree throughout their childhood and early adolescence, depositing secrets like squirrels stashing acorns. The initial air of play and experiment shifted into one of existential industry. The project? To build a cocooned and unreachable self. that we see her arrive at the empty hotel room just after he leaves. And this is where the tree comes in. Toward the end of the film, when Chow has realized he and Su can never be together, he recounts a story to his friend Ping about how in older times, when a person had a secret, they would go up a mountain, carve a hollow in a tree, whisper their secret into the hole, and cover it with mud. They would, as Chow says, “leave the secret there forever.” When I first watched the film as a much younger woman, I believed fully in this world of whispers and hollows. My heart was with the secret keepers. It was with Chow and Su. It was with characters, fictional or real, who said: We all have parts of ourselves that aren’t for everyone to know. Telling our secrets to a tree was not an original idea. It came from one of my favourite movies, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), a story of two lonely neighbours who live in a cramped apartment building in the Shanghai community of early-1960s Hong Kong. In the film, Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung) slowly become aware their spouses are having an affair. As they grapple with this betrayal, they begin to fall for each other but resist their feelings, resolving never to stoop to their spouses’ level o f i n fi d e l i t y. But resolve erodes, and there comes a pivotal moment where, after receiving an offer for a job overseas, Chow finally surrenders to his feelings and asks Su to go with him. He waits for her at a hotel room, but she never comes. The heartbreak for viewers is Not too long ago I found out about a big secret, one bigger than any tree could hold, and over the course of several weeks, the carefully crafted story I had been told about my family broke apart. For nearly fifty years, my (now-deceased) father, to whom I was very close, and my (surviving) mother kept a secret about my paternity, withholding the information with such deliberateness and uncustomary consistency it tangled them up with each other and their volatile marriage long past the point they could have been free. The secret revealed itself in that banal way, through a recreational DNA test. Aspects of my life that were once sturdy felt unsteady. I lost a sure sense of ground. I mean this literally: I fell on a mountain; I slipped down the stairs. Objects seemed to appear from beneath, stumbling me. But I also
page 93
mean it figuratively. I stopped believing in secrets. Shadowy nooks became intolerable. Even a whiff of the clandestine could make my limbs freeze in alarm. The person I had once been believed in discretion and hiding; now I wanted stadium-lit, evangelical honesty. For fifteen months, I tried to haul long-concealed facts into the open, moving through the passageways of our family history to unstash a century’s worth of acorns. I consulted genealogical researchers and records. I interviewed family members and strangers and, in so doing, uncovered affairs, desertions, tragic early deaths, evidence of racial passing, gambling debts, sudden windfalls and losses. I ended up with a stockpile of secrets and the heft of a shady inheritance. What had been held from me had suddenly become mine to hold and possibly, through my writing, share. I eventually learned the identity of my biological father. But the more I tried to unearth my mother’s full story, the more closed and evasive she became. I had never felt more certain of my right to the truth. But my mother—a woman known for her wily charm, for her luxuriant individuality, and for following what my friend calls “different drummer” protocols—remained cagey and nondisclosing. I didn’t know (I still don’t know) where her burning secrets went, whether my mother entrusted them to a tree. Or to a wall. Or to no one. The air around us was thick and unclear. I kept trying to reach her. But she had her shuttered face on and was giving nothing more away. Eight months after my paternity discovery, my mother was diagnosed with dementia—a cognitive KYO MACLEAR 91 haze that is its own secrecy generator. Her caginess had a pathological name. With my new passion for clarity, whispering to trees suddenly felt dubious. What had I been thinking, turning my sons into secret-making machines? Now when they would stop by the tree, I would press on, disowning the person who had previously supported this ritual. I had new ideas about our family’s emotional comportment: No tucking things away! We must be transparent! The months passed. The tree was hungry for secrets. Or it was sated and relieved. It beckoned visitors with hiding tendencies. Or it was done listening to humans. It cared or did not care whether it absorbed secrets or absorbed nothing at all. But my sons, wary now that my interests and affections could shift in an instant, seemed to care or feel abandoned or wish for me to rekindle warm associations with the tree. We walked by the tree a dozen, two dozen times without stopping. Then one day, as we were walking, my younger son pointed down the street and said: “Oh no.” The area around the tree was now a construction site. Someone had crudely wrapped the tree in layers of orange plastic snow fencing with the avant-garde eagerness of a drunk Christo and JeanneClaude. Tall plywood planks jutted from a mound of roadwork rubble near the trunk. Our Tree with the Big Ear was blocked from access. My younger son looked me in the eye, accusingly, as if I’d had a hand in it. My older son sighed: “I guess they’ll just knock the whole thing down now.” We stood there for a moment with our feelings of anger and disappointment. Which included the

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BRICK

90

But along with my appreciation came a fl icker of uncertainty; perhaps we were not as confidingly close as I had once believed. Walls were bound to appear when my sons crossed the border into adolescence, but I felt with growing amazement that the walls were a lready forming, were perhaps a lways a lready there. Walls not necessarily built by an eagerness to keep prying people (or prying mothers) outside so much as forged of the wish to keep something inside. To themselves. I began to realize we can desire a hiding place even when no one is looking.

We returned to the tree throughout their childhood and early adolescence, depositing secrets like squirrels stashing acorns. The initial air of play and experiment shifted into one of existential industry. The project? To build a cocooned and unreachable self.

that we see her arrive at the empty hotel room just after he leaves.

And this is where the tree comes in. Toward the end of the film, when Chow has realized he and Su can never be together, he recounts a story to his friend Ping about how in older times, when a person had a secret, they would go up a mountain, carve a hollow in a tree, whisper their secret into the hole, and cover it with mud. They would, as Chow says, “leave the secret there forever.”

When I first watched the film as a much younger woman, I believed fully in this world of whispers and hollows. My heart was with the secret keepers. It was with Chow and Su. It was with characters, fictional or real, who said: We all have parts of ourselves that aren’t for everyone to know.

Telling our secrets to a tree was not an original idea. It came from one of my favourite movies, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), a story of two lonely neighbours who live in a cramped apartment building in the Shanghai community of early-1960s Hong Kong.

In the film, Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung) slowly become aware their spouses are having an affair. As they grapple with this betrayal, they begin to fall for each other but resist their feelings, resolving never to stoop to their spouses’ level o f i n fi d e l i t y.

But resolve erodes, and there comes a pivotal moment where, after receiving an offer for a job overseas, Chow finally surrenders to his feelings and asks Su to go with him. He waits for her at a hotel room, but she never comes. The heartbreak for viewers is

Not too long ago I found out about a big secret, one bigger than any tree could hold, and over the course of several weeks, the carefully crafted story I had been told about my family broke apart. For nearly fifty years, my (now-deceased) father, to whom I was very close, and my (surviving) mother kept a secret about my paternity, withholding the information with such deliberateness and uncustomary consistency it tangled them up with each other and their volatile marriage long past the point they could have been free.

The secret revealed itself in that banal way, through a recreational DNA test. Aspects of my life that were once sturdy felt unsteady. I lost a sure sense of ground. I mean this literally: I fell on a mountain; I slipped down the stairs. Objects seemed to appear from beneath, stumbling me. But I also

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