Book I Chapter 01

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HAINAN DAO BOOK I

CHAPTER 01

It happened the same year I finished my medical internship. My sister Abby called me up from Hong Kong and told me that my father was finally dying.

He had had a number of heart attacks already. This was probably the Big One, she said to me. I could hear her wiping her nose via long distance.

Getting up from my chair, I wandered over to the window with the receiver still held up to my ear. Outside, it had begun to rain. I turned my gaze upward and frowned and wondered at all the water. Water and more water still, falling from the clouds in the sky.

I told her I'd be out there as soon as possible and hung up the phone.

Turning to face my opened closet, I sagged my shoulders and sighed. I reached in among the clutter. I worried out my dusty suitcase and plopped it down in the bed. With a dampened piece of paper towel, I ran my hand across its surface, soothing away the years, wiping away the memories, and then set my mind down to packing.

My father and I never got along. Well, that's not actually true. You have to know someone before you can say you don't get along with him. What I knew of my father, everyone knew of my father.

It was a common joke within the family that my dad, Mr. Shiying Chan had been a difficult baby to deliver. That was due mostly to the fact that he wouldn't let go of the abacus in his hand as he was being evicted from the womb. He had been brought into the world to do just one thing and one thing only. Business. Making money. Buying and selling. That was his destiny. His gift.

After the Second World War, as China headed toward its great change in colour, my father's gift told him to leave the Island of Hainan where he had been born and raised. It would be bad for business, it told him. Go to Hong Kong. It is your fate.

In time, still guided by the same voice, he had founded and went on to run a series of garment factories and was quite good at it. He was doing well. He was prospering. But the voice wouldn't let him alone. It urged him to plan, and eventually move the lot of us, his wife and children, here to Canada where we had come to finally settle down.

My family isn't very large. There are my two older sisters, Abigail and Courtney, and then there is me and my younger brother, Dylan. I was ten years old when I stepped off the plane and first squinted my eyes against the sterile Canadian sunshine. After getting through customs, I was surprised to find we had friends already there waiting for us. My father's friends. To this day, I still haven't stopped running into varying versions of my father's acquaintances, no matter where I go, though I have stopped being surprised.

Over the next few days, we shopped around for a house and moved in. Within another twenty-four hours, all of us, the children, had been registered into schools and even the shopping had been done. That was quite typical of Hong Kong efficiency, or so the old man had insisted.

The day before I was going to start my first day of school, my father had already booked himself for a flight back to Hong Kong. Had to keep the business going, he said to me.

I remember smiling and waving at him when we saw him to the airport.

In that first year, he flew back to visit us three times, bringing us toys and clothes from the factory. Every one of those trips felt like Christmas.

By the next year, he hadn't come at all. He was busy, he said.

Three years after we landed, my mother died.

Now, another twenty years after that, as I folded up white shirts to fit into my brown suitcase, I was thinking that my father's heart, if not the rest of my father himself, was finally coming to realize just what that meant.

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