Pieces of fragmented memoir and sample illustrations
Constructing Tina Freeth
Prologue: I used to have recurring dreams of Mom dying. Some nights I’d wake up sobbing with snot and sorrow drenching my pyjamas. The terror of not having her in my life was larger than my phobia of snakes and my fear of the dark. She was just like the light on the stairwell - always switched on helping me to navigate the ups and downs of life. I was twenty-six when my light went out. Mom died on the 6th August 2003 whilst I held her hand. As a child I used to sneak into her bedroom asking for pain relief from cramped calf muscles. ‘Put your foot on a cold floor,’ she would whisper, as she rubbed my hardened leg with her warm hands easing my pain away. It always worked, like some kind of instant magic. The one person who used to take my pain away, was gone. The woman whose apron strings I was tied to, had left me as others had left me before. She was the person I loved most in the world and suddenly I felt very much alone.
Introduction to Constructing Tina Freeth
I took it upon myself to become the keeper of my family’s memories, stepping into Mom’s vacant shoes as the head of my disparate sprawling family - The Freeths (along with the Kwans, Chans and a solitary Cheung). The legacy of my childhood (and of my many foster siblings and adopted brothers) was a cardboard box full of old photographs, it had once housed pots and pans. It sat in the corner of the living room in our old council house in Dale Road, Selly Oak. The damp had affected some of the photos and for nearly five years, I could not bring myself to go through them. In October 2007, Dad moved into a flat for older people and my two foster brothers, Carl and Seng moved into a friend’s vacant house. Despite the state of disrepair that our home had become in the years after Mom had died, dismantling it was heart breaking. We had always had a ‘home’ in Dale Road to go back to - it was where my Mom had raised us. Now that was sanctuary was gone.
It was not until I met Elaine Brambil, the artist who creates art out of memories, that I thought my old photos and yellowing documents might make for an interesting visual tale. The idea behind this collaboration is the sense that we are all constructs of our past and our choices. This book works in two ways: on a visual level it comments on memory and nostalgia, and as a written text it has helped me to understand a little more about my past and ultimately answer the question of who I am. Through the images and text I have been trying to reconstruct my past and make sense of the scraps I recall. Every family has its secrets, its characters, its tragedies and its pathos – mine is no different. We had many wonderful times; the unconditional love my parents gave to us ‘strays’ was phenomenal. I’ve become partly who I am because of my upbringing. In essence, I’m picking myself apart and putting myself together again…Constructing Tina Freeth.
HEARTY
The greatest love story I could ever tell is the one of my mother and I. Born in 1935, Jean, my Mom, fell in love with me at twelve days old. Perhaps it was love at first sight? I did not know much about the forty-two years that I was not in her life, simply that I loved her with all of my heart.
I never asked her why she wanted a house full of children as that was always the way it was. It was only after she died that I realised that looking after children was all she really lived for. Like a detective, I put together all of the fragmented tales that she had told me over the years and drew my own conclusions as to why she loved children more than her own husband, more than herself.
Her mother had died soon after her sister Minnie was born and so she had grown up in her father’s shadow. Without a mother to love and nurture her, she had decided to devote her life to giving the love to others that she herself had never received. She never talked about her mother I don’t even know what her name was or how she died. Sometimes she used to tell me how poor her family had been, and that her father used to send her out into the street to collect bits of coal that had fallen from carts. Having no money for shoes, she often walked around barefoot or wore shoes that were too small. At nineteen, her toes had to be knocked into shape and straightened. It made sense that she always made sure we had shoes from Clarks, feeling the machine sandwiching my feet with metal slabs is one of the highlights of my childhood. She wanted us to have the upbringing she never had, one with love, an abundance of food, and properly fitting shoes.
She already had two adopted sons, Stephen and Tony, both white and much older than I was. However, she preferred to foster Chinese children. What had changed that led her to invest her time and love into us little Chinese kids? I’m not sure. She used to declare: ‘Chinese kids are the best kids in the world’. We were foster children but not from ‘problem’ families or broken homes (although, many of the children returned to difficult home lives). All of our parents worked in takeaways or restaurants, trying to save enough money to start their own businesses. She was stared at when on the bus or pushing a ‘buggy’ with a Chinese baby in it. She raved about me, her smart daughter, top of the class, winner of art competitions at aged five. She would tell everyone in Selly Oak that I was ‘the best daughter in the world’ – everyone knew Jean and her rabble of kids. I was her ‘babby’ and ‘fairy elephant’. If she had owned the world, she would have given it to me. Often she told me – ‘If I’ve got it bab, you can have it.’
STUBBY
Dad or Ronald Freeth, was born in 1931 in Birmingham. He left school at fourteen, as did Mom. They both went to St Thomas’s but only met after they’d left. Dad would tell me of his Warwickshire cricket tryouts, he could have played for the county, he said, but chose to be an angler instead. I wondered if I should believe him or whether it was a ‘porky pie’ like the countless times he said he had a rich uncle in Texas. Terrible with money, my dad spent their wedding money in the pub. Mom had told him to look after it whilst she was in the Royal Orthopaedic having her toes hammered straight. Because of my dad’s lack of money management skills, my mom had to get the bus to her own wedding. I think her revenge was slow, painful, and lasted over forty years.
His mother was called Alice, who according to Mom was both ‘mad and paranoid’ and that he’d go that way too. Mom used to rile Dad by saying how he lost all his teeth before he was forty because his mother constantly feed him sugar. Even though his mother was dead, Mom highlighted how terrible his mother had been telling me: “all she used to cook him was a pork chop and a spoonful of peas, that was it” - as if that alone explained his fussy eating habits. Dad refused to eat what he deemed - “foreign muck” or anything with a sauce, spices, or herbs. Only fried or boiled to death food passed his toothless mouth.
Dad’s one and only passion was fishing. He left Mom to look after us kids - we were chosen by her anyway. He would spend every Tuesday and Thursday fishing on the River Severn in Worcestershire. I had a disgusting habit of sticking my hands in my dad’s maggot box, where the little writhing creatures were bright orange as they’d been covered in Taj Mahal curry power. Perhaps I secretly wanted to eat the funny little things with their black eyes and no discernable nose or mouth. I also loved running my fingers in the boiled hemp seed box, the little shiny black balls had been boiled for hours filling the house with a warm nutty smell. It always pained me that he would use real food such as sweet corn and cut up squares of luncheon meat for bait. I’d sit by his side waiting for the cut off edges begrudging the fish chunks of meat that I could have eaten.
Happy Gathering
My biological parents Jason and Lorna, arrived from Hong Kong in 1976. I had always assumed that they were married when I was born, but discovered later that I was a little bastard. It was less of a shock than I thought it would be, what did it matter that the parents I didn’t like weren’t married when I was born? It didn’t really make much difference.
My earliest memory is outside the Happy Gathering Restaurant - Birmingham’s first Cantonese restaurant. It was ironic that it was called that as our visits there were never happy occasions. It was where Jason worked and I think I was around three years old. My memory is of Jason trying to get me into his car but I am kicking and screaming refusing to be taken anywhere by him. That’s it. I have no idea about why I was so upset or where we were going but that’s my earliest memory. I’m not sure why I hated him more than Lorna. I felt she was a cold woman who didn’t buy me presents and when she did they were toys for boys. I couldn’t help but link the two. Had she wanted a boy instead of a worthless Chinese girl? I do remember wanting to be a boy from a young age, I thought they had more power and I had none.
Mom used to tell me how Jason was such an arrogant man. She would say: ‘You know once he was rude to me?’ I had heard this story many times before. ‘We were eating at the Happy Gathering, and he said in a snidely way ‘Do you want rice? No, you English just like to eat chips don’t you?’ – I didn’t like him at all.’ Her message was very simple, he’s bad and you are better off with me. I loved her for it. I realise now, looking back that all of the information I was told about my existence and biological parents was filtered through Mom. She loved me so much that I had years of being told: “She had an abortion, Lorna did, actually more than one, several. Didn’t want you at all.” Was I a mistake that had simply slipped through the net like one of Dad’s fishes?
Mish Mash
When I arrived in 1977, I wasn’t the only child living at 38 Dale Road. There were already five other children. I slept in a makeshift cot or rather, a draw. Jean and Ron had already adopted my older brothers Stephen and Tony from babies, both were white and teenagers by the time I arrived. Sharon was the oldest Chinese foster child, aged about five, Wing Kam came next, she was three when I arrived, her brother Peter was a year older than me. Thinking back to our little three bed roomed council house, I don’t know where everyone slept. I’m guessing a couple of us slept in mom’s bed.
Stephen hated me. Fifteen years older than I was, he looked like David Bowie sporting a bony face with no emotion, well apart from pure bitterness. I really did not get on with him. The invasion of the Chinese kid’s into his living space must have upset him; he was a working class white teenager growing up in the Seventies who didn’t know who his real parents were, perhaps he had some right to hate me as he did. Tony was more caring towards us and me in particular, but quite aggressive to random people in pubs on a Saturday night. He would tease us all in a nice way and seemed to love us, despite his neo Nazi tendencies. His skinhead phase and hobby of making weapons from chair legs wrapped in black tape was worrying. I would often rifle through Tony’s rooms when playing, once I found a nine-inch dagger, and a club with metal spikes. Often new holes would appear in the doors and walls of our house. His green walled bedroom with the poster of the girl in tennis gear showing her bum cheek had blood stains on it. He’s call us ‘chink’ and we’d think nothing of it. Our names were always changing anyway.
I’ve always been called Tina because I was tiny when born even though that wasn’t my birth name. Wing Kam got to keep her Chinese name, although there was a period when the name Nancy was banded about. Her brother Peter was not so lucky “our Pete” stuck. Peter was nearer to my age and was the originator of my first nickname – ‘Nin’. He was unable to pronounce Tina and so ‘Nin’ was my name. Everyone started to called me it and even now some of them still do. Wing and Pete eventually moved up North to Oldham where their parents made them work behind the counter of their chippie/take-away. They picked up broad Mancunian accents and breathed in fresh country air. We would often visit them and think of them as part of our family even though they had officially left us.
We were a right mishmash of children, a house full of unwanted kids. We all went to Tiverton Junior and Infant School but some never made it all the way to the end and left our house before they got to secondary school.
‘Welcome'
With the departure of Wing Kam and Peter ‘up North’ and the traipsing of Sharon from her mother’s house to her brothers’ place and beyond, there was room for more Chinese kids to fill the void. I think my Mom thought I needed Chinese company, or maybe she did. Next came Carl, or rather Wai Kwong Kwan. A cutie born in 1982.
Carl was a happy baby, but as he got older he would often go into baby tantrum mode. This was most prevalent around dinnertime. He would not eat his food throwing it on the floor, however, he did love peas. His real parents opened the Wan Hing (Welcome) takeaway was around the corner from our house on the Bristol Road, the Kwans set up abode in the flat above it. Three years after Carl arrived at our house his brother Wai Seng was born. Seng did not live with us properly at first but later did become part of our clan. I enjoyed playing hide and seek with ‘the boys’ (as they affectionately become known). We grew up together and I saw them nearly every day even when they moved into the takeaway flat.
My mom was hired as the counter lady, she loved chatting with people and the extra cash in hand she would get on a Sunday night helped feed me and Dad (My older brothers had left home by this time). Her jovial face and easy banter made her a favourite with the local students and residents alike. Mom was a good endorsement for the takeaway as people trusted her. If Jean worked there, then it must be ok. The pub next door would close at eleven and the dregs would file in, ordering their sweet and sour chicken and chips, their curry sauce and noodles. The food was not bad. I even got a job there myself on the busy nights, Friday and Saturday nights. I was twelve, I wasn’t going out on the razz or part-taking in underage drinking. I got on with ‘the boys’ for the most part. I was their bigger and dominant older sister. They knew that I liked to eat and would often give me food from the kitchen. My mom would also sneak me bits of chicken that had been fried especially for sweet and sour chicken, it was coated in egg and rolled in corn flour, then fried. I loved it. I would nick bits of chicken on my way to the downstairs toilet. I was dubbed the ‘chicken nicker’ by my Mom.
Overeaters Anonymous
Now my relationship with food is a love/hate one. As I’ve gotten older I realised that much of what I was fed as a kid was not very good for me and I’ve been trying hard to shed pounds and rid myself of the eating habits picked up as a child, namely, eating for two (when I’m not expecting a baby) and eating crap. My ‘puppy fat’ was a result of my consumption of: weekly delivered pop (from the pop man who had a float like the ones milk men drove); fried food coated in breadcrumbs or batter (Findus crispy pancakes, fish fingers, Bernard Matthews chicken drummers, chicken kievs and so on); home-made chips, steak and kidney pies (I had a real addiction to the chip shop ones); meat, meat, meat! When Mom worked at Wan Hing I was in food heaven, a constant supply of Chinese takeaway, cold spring rolls for breakfast and Yung Chow fried rice for lunch with stale prawn crackers. My appetite grew in proportion to my waistline, I used to measure it with a tape and realised one day that I’d expanded to a thirty-six inch waist. I had been quite a fussy eater at nursery school refusing to eat fresh tomatoes and bananas and was a skinny child. I’m not sure when I went from not eating lots of things to gorging myself on EVERYTHING!
Sunday roast dinners were my absolute favourite thing in the world, and the most religious experience I could have, Sunday school was a bore – who needed God when you had Sunday lunch?
Mom gave me the largest plate for Sunday lunch, I think it was her way of showing me she loved me, my overfeeding me. The plate was blue and white oval with a printed country scene in the middle. I have a suspicion that it was actually serving plate because of the size. I could have fed two and a half people from my plate. Not only was it wide, but the food was stacked three to four inches high. Skyscrapers of mash potato and meadows of green vegetables, covered in a sea of thick meaty gravy, it was divine. I ate all of mine, and then would snoop about looking for bits other people had left on their plates. Portion control has never been a strong point of mine.
When my mom died, I took over making those Sunday dinners. I fell into the pattern of serving Dad and my brothers first, was this what it felt like to be a surrogate wife and mother? To leave yourself with the leftovers? I don’t cook Sunday roasts anymore, and I don’t eat meat.
Communication
I have to admit apart from food I’m also addicted to communicating with people. I once spent three hours writing one e-mail to one friend, who didn’t need me to spend that long on the e-mail as he was in my class anyway. I never wrote short stories or made up imaginary things to write about, however, I was always writing letters growing up. I had many pen pals from all over the world. I forget now how I found some of them. My first ever friend at school was called Monica Escobar, we were five and I remember her curly brown hair and her dark eyes. Her pink party frock seems to have indented itself into my mind too. She left me after a year of playing in the playground, heading back to Columbia. I received one letter from her, and I wrote her one letter back. That was the extent of our long distance friendship.
My first ‘proper’ pen pal was Maria Teresa Voutsina, she thought it funny that her initials were MTV like the music channel that I’d never seen on TV, but only heard of in the days before SKY and cable television. Maria was Greek and bossy. I’m not really sure why I kept in touch with her or what we had to say, but our correspondence lasted for a few years. I think it was having some continuity, and writing to someone I knew from school who’d gone back home to Greece was easy. I didn’t always have to think of new things to write as I could always regurgitate memories, such as “remember the time when I wrote - AISHA HANDS IS A BITCH - on the toilet room door and drew a rabbit next to it?” (Aisha didn’t look like a rabbit, she was very pretty and had nice clothes from Marks and Spencers, and although she didn’t have a dad at home, her mom was ‘ace’). I stopped writing to Maria when I found out that she was coming back to Birmingham to do a degree in Math. I realised that I didn’t really like her and the thought of being actual friends with her was daunting.
I still write letters occasionally, but now I write to people I actually like and miss. E-mail has become the most effective way for me to communicate to my hundreds of friends scattered around the world, if I had to write letters to keep in touch with people I’d have about seventy percent less friends in my life.
Excursions
I used to take disadvantaged kids on day trips when I was a student at Birmingham University. Some of them had never been to the seaside, or eaten rock. I realised then, how wonderful my childhood had been, and how my parents had always taken us all out on day trips even though we had very little money and never had family holidays. The first time I went abroad I was sixteen and Wing and I went to Eurodisney, it was a pile of crap and rained the whole time.
Blackpool and Rhyl were often places we’d go, catching the Nash’s coach by Oak Tree Lane at eight in the morning. I hated getting changed on the beach, my prudish side apparent even at age six, when I was conscious of being naked under a towel in a public place. I liked to collect shells and bit of seaweed, bring it all back to Birmingham, only to leave it outside in the yard to be swept up and thrown in the bin.
On our day trips we sometimes took a neighbour’s daughter with us, Michelle. She was mixed race, but looked Navaho. Her mother had married twice and now lived with a large man who prided himself on collecting German wartime memorabilia. I saw his German helmet but never got to see his luger gun. He had swastikas all over the house. Michelle came to the seaside with us and once to Worcester, on both occasions she soiled her pants. I’m not sure why a girl of eight would not ask to go to the toilet. I don’t think we took her anywhere again after that.
Once Mom and Dad took us to Warwick Castle but didn’t have enough money for us all to go in so we just walked around the outside of the castle walls instead, curious as to what was going on inside. To get out of Birmingham, mom would take us on the train to Redditch and Coventry where the shopping centres had the same shops as Birmingham, but it was the journey that counted in the end. Variety and getting out of the house were important to my Mom who would simply go to the market or a supermarket three bus rides away just to go somewhere different.
Disparate
The neighbours to our left were the dirtiest family in the street. The matriarch, Yvonne, used to smoke forty a day and one time burnt me with her fag. Mom used to despair how each child of theirs drank from baby bottles of tea, milk and sugar. Mom would not let us drink a cup of tea or coffee until we were in our late teens, they were for adults only.
When playing in our garden, it was common to see brown strained terry towelling nappies flapping stiffly in the wind. Over time the neighbours kids, had their own kids and often we’d see them playing in the back garden naked and caked in mud. Once, Carl, Seng and myself witnessed one of them chewing on a discarded bone like it was some kind of barbeque rib. Mom always made sure that we would never be like our neighbours children. My cat Mo used to be live with them, her former name was Tibbs. It was their utter disregard for her wellbeing was the catalyst for my catnapping. Once one of them spotted my cat and said: “Isn’t that our Tibbs?” to which I replied, “No, she’s my Mo.” – they didn’t have food to feed themselves let alone a little cat. Like my Mom, I had a desire to take in those who needed love.
We were also friends with the house next to theirs. This consisted of husband Colin, with his ex-wife Christine, and her four children, and his current girlfriend Wendy and her two of children. Both our immediate neighbours and the house next to them had a random mixed race babies born in the middle of otherwise white families. Knowing that we weren’t the only light brown children in the street was somehow a comfort. No family in our street seemed ‘normal’ – we were all disparate and jumbled up households.
Mandarin
I should have gone to Taiwan in January 2002, but Mom was using a wheelchair as her hips had crumbled under her massive weight. It was a good thing I didn’t run away to the land where things are made because she needed my help. During March 2002 my dad drank weed killer as his depression and inability to assist his wife in her daily life of excruciating pain, had all become too much. With all of that going on, flying three thousand miles away to learn Chinese wasn’t really an option for me despite really wanting to go and discover my ‘Chineseness’. Hospitals were my second home that year. Mom had her second hip operation that was unsuccessful in giving her back pain free mobility. Her lack of exercise and movement caused her legs to swell, she had deep vein thrombosis at the same time as Dad’s suicide attempt. Ironically, they were admitted to the same emergency ward at Selly Oak Hospital, him at one end detoxing, and her at the other trying to thin out the blood clots so she didn’t die. Mom was always aware that she didn’t want to be a burden on me, I told her “you’ve looked after me for twenty-four years, I can look after you two, it’s alright, I’ll go to Taiwan some other time.” I wasn’t sure if that was the Chinese part of me, looking after my elders, or whether it was my attempt to pay them back for all of the love they’d given to me (not to mention money, time and food). Taiwan, would have to wait.
In October 2002, Mom had her first heart attack. A precursor to the one that finally killed her less than a year later. I didn’t believe in God, didn’t really need religion or beliefs in anything, but the night we were called to Selly Oak Hospital at midnight to say our final farewells. I prayed to whoever, whatever was up there. I asked the divine to help me, I said: “I’ll do anything, just please let her live.” I wasn’t ready for her to die yet. Around three a.m, the nurse told me Mom wanted to see me, I went to her bedside not knowing what I would see or hear. I held her hand and cried, she was looking at me and crying too. Then she laughed and said through her tears, “I’m not going yet. I’m not ready to go. You’re going to Taiwan! It’s not going to beat me! You’re going to Taiwan!” – I smiled, and four months later I got on a plane to Taiwan to learn Mandarin Chinese.
Epilogue: The twenty hours it took me to get back to England from Taipei, were the most painful of my life. I flew over the pacific in a dimmed cabin, not knowing if she was still alive. Thankfully, she held on for her prodigal daughter, to return. She opened her eyes, rising out from the darkness so that I could tell her that I loved her one last time.
(© Elaine Brambil and Tina Freeth, 2008)