Lamentations by Miriam Ho Nga Wai

Miriam Ho Nga Wai has made the2024 CBC Short Story Prize shortlistfor Lamentations.

She will receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand her work has been published onCBC Books.

The winner of the 2024CBC Short Story Prizewill be announced April 25. They willreceive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency atBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

If you're interested in theCBC Literary Prizes, the2024 CBC Poetry Prizeis open for submissions until June 1. The2025 CBC Short Story Prizewill open in September and the2025 CBC Nonfiction Prizewill open in January.

• The 2024 CBC Poetry Prize is now open to Canadian poets

Miriam Ho Nga Wai is an architect and writer based in Toronto. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod and Ecotone. She has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. She is a founding editor of the award-winning Canadian journal -SITE Magazine, and a former fiction editor at Guernica. Drawing on a background in architecture, her work explores themes of place, memory and longing. In the stolen hours before her daughter wakes up, she is hard at work on a novel and a short story collection.

Ho Nga Wai told CBC Booksabout the inspiration behind Lamentations: "Growing up, I witnessed how political unrest drives immigration to Canada and the way family units were often divided so that women and children were sent ahead to Canada. Years later, I was in a long-distance relationship myself and began to imagine the lives of the 'astronaut wives' I'd known."

You can read Lamentations below.

The falling snow, my aunt said, made tears fall from her eyes.

My aunt had moved to Canada. Her husband was still in Hong Kong. My mother imagined my aunt gazing out on a white wilderness, waiting forno, fiercely willing her husband's appearance on the horizon. Her anxious breath fogging the pane, the snow clotting and blotting her out.

How poetic, my father said, when he heard his sister's lament.

My father was romantic. He liked snow. On their first date he'd taken her to watch Dr. Zhivago. It was playing at the old market theatre where they showed foreign classics. My mother's angora cardigan must have been insufficient for the cinema air conditioning. She dragged the neckline up over her collarbone, but the wisps of lace and fluff offered no protection. Or was it the enlarged snowstorm on screen that clouded her senses? She shivered for two hours in that spooky technicoloured cavern. My father sat beside her, transfixed. Only at the end did he take her hand.

Did you know all that snow's fake? he'd asked, an electric shock of delight glittering off his fingertips onto hers. This was filmed in the summer, in Spain. The set was created with tonnes of crushed marble dust.

That it was merely an illusion, elaborately constructed, was small comfort to my mother who would emigrate soon with me a dream in her womb. She felt she had no choice. The year was 1991, and the British had been bullied into returning Hong Kong to China despite the horrors of Tiananmen. On TV, on the radio overhead at department stores, out the mouths of kindergarteners in playgrounds sounded that ridiculous song: On the last day of Christmas o' Margaret Thatcher what'll you give me / a knife or a sword /a gun or a cannon / If you'd asked, I'd have said a passport. But Hong Kong was Britain's economic powerhouse, and men stayed while women self-exiled abroad. Their job was to earn citizenship elsewhere, for their family's sake.

Jet lagged, stiff, skin sour from perspiration, my mother landed at Calgary airport.

You can't get around without a car, my aunt said as she funnelled her Corolla out the airport's parking garage maze. My mother watched the sallow fluorescents transition into diamond-bright headlights. The current of cars streamed into darkness. My aunt plunged in.

She had four years' worth of stories to share. How her lips cracked in the wind every winter. How the sun bleached a building, newly painted blue, to ashen gray by the end of summer. How it got down to minus forty in the winter with wind-chill.

My mother showed her the cashmere jacket my father bought on his last business trip to Switzerland. She took out her Italian leather gloves, my father's anniversary gift two years ago.

Feel these, she said. Feel how supple they are. They're lined with rabbit fur.

No one wears designer brands here. You'd feel out of place.

The car air smelled like nothing, but it sank down my mother's shirt. Drifting over me, though she did not yet know I was there.

In the back seat, my cousin hunched over her cassette player, a tangle of criss-crossing wires and hairline straps sliding off her exposed shoulders.

Aren't you cold? my mother asked her. She shrugged, a cascade of bare flesh.

She still understands Chinese, but she refuses to speak it.

Static leaked from her ear buds for the rest of the drive. She was eight years old the last time my mother saw her, spiralling down sidewalks in flounced skirts like a hummingbird. My mother had wanted to hold fast to her and tell her to never grow up.

She won't survive high school in Hong Kong, my aunt said. Here they've barely started long division. We got our passports last year, but we can't move back.

*

My aunt lived in a new development shadowed by the Rockies, where the peach, pink, and gray brick houses were permutations of each other with peaked roofs and bay windows and garages gaping like mouths. You got into the house through the garage, my aunt explained, because it got so cold that you wanted to go straight from the warmth of your car into the warmth of home. Driveways lolled like long tongues onto residential roads that ran in curlicues and looped back on themselves like letters in cursive. My mother ground her heels to stubs walking these roads, only to learn that the sidewalks ended in a wave of weeds. The closest store was a fifteen minute drive away. My mother had to ask for a ride if she needed anything.

What trouble? my aunt said, when my mother apologized for inconveniencing her. It's not as if I have anything else to do.

Her days were as empty as the wheat fields that sequestered the neighbourhood. She had no job besides driving her daughter to school and back.

My aunt's house had four bedrooms. A master bedroom with an ensuite, his and hers' sinks, my aunt's faucet crowded with expired lotion, my uncle's bearing toothpaste stains from his last visit. When was that? Their daughter had two bedrooms, one to sleep in and the other for her stuffed rabbits in the absence of siblings. My mother would inhabit the guestroom for the three years it took to get a passport. In the oversized guestroom, her suitcase looked forlorn.

My aunt gave my mother driving lessons. They drove to get a stack of glossy calling cards with ciphered codes for my mother to dial, every digit an obstacle to connection. They got them from a building that stretched along the fraying asphalt, all the storefronts vacant except for one with a sign bearing the long word CONVENIENCE. Inside, racks of imported crackers blocked sunlight. The crackers were past expiry date. The Asian storekeeper looked expired, too. This, my mother noted, was the fate of immigrant men, no matter their past glories.

My father was a rising star at a British corporation. With his first pay raise he'd bought a car to cruise the hills of Hong Kong island, leaving behind the march of high-rises that were eroding the mountain, the asphalt ribboning sharp cliffs, my mother swallowing wind until she had to lean out the window and vomit. From then on, my father stocked the glove box with crisp packs of vacuum-sealed linghimui for her.

My father dreamed of driving through the Rocky Mountains. What if we got lost? my mother asked every time they planned their hypothetical trip. She was overcome by the perils of navigating unknown roads in a faraway country. My father was confident. There is only one road, he told her, fingering a line snaking across the shadows on the map. It was the Banff-Windermere highway, a scenic road built in the 1920s for people to experience the wilderness, because everyone in America had a car. Caribou, bison, even bears, could be sighted along the highway. Park keepers lured them out with salt licks, my father explained.

In Canada, now, my mother held a dried prune between her teeth to stave off motion sickness. She pushed it around with her tongue instead of answering my aunt's litany of advice. It was a California prune, blue-black like a bruise. That's all they can get here, my aunt assured her. It had the sickly sweetness of cough syrup, none of a linghimui's sharp, familiar tang.

I wish Eddie were here, my mother'd say.

And what would you have him do? my aunt asked.

That my father was good at driving, good at English, loved winter, was not the answer.

My mother conjured my father in the passenger's seat beside her. He would give her patient, methodical directions. He would alert her to the speed limit and the watch-for-deer signs that jutted out like stealth examiners. He would tell her which streets were cul-de-sacs and which ones were looping crescents that returned her to where she started.

My aunt screamed STOPif a skunk or pet cat chanced on the road. Once, they halted in front of another driveway. The car backing out was irate.

A man emerged, an Asian man in his 30s wearing sweatpants, probably heading out for midday groceries. That meant he was unemployed, probably calling life overseas an early retirement.

Can't you drive, he'd begun before taking in the two women, the absence of husbands.

Astronaut wives, he remarked to his wife watching anxiously from the passenger's side. 'Astronauts' were Hong Kong men who banked overtime for long weekends airborne on the trans-Pacific flight path to see their family, and left again with no time to recover from jet-lag.

My aunt claimed the wheel from my spooked mother, who watched the windshield and steeled herself for winter. My mother and father liked to rent movies on Friday nights. My father always picked dark and tragic films that took place in cold, remote countries. My mother would nestle into his left shouldershe always sat on the left side of our Italian sofaand watch the alien brightness of the screen flood our walls. The blue light would blanket us all, but she only saw how it transformed him. His gentle features sharpened in the harsh glow. His glasses gleamed. She could have watched the whole movie mirrored in miniature on the convex curve of his lenses.

Now and then the road veered west, and the flat, geometric face of the Rocky Mountains surprised her like an old friend.

*

My mother never learned to drive. She refused to endure years of counting down the days until my father's next visit, of wasting money on long distance calls while their bated breath (or baby's breath) tunnelled along the cyber optics spanning halfway around the world. Six months into her stay I was born, premature, impossibly small and in constant need of warmth. When I survived the incubator my mother took me home to Hong Kong. Come what may, I would always have a passport.

*

Is it snowing yet? my father greeted my mother on phone calls, shouting into the receiver in case the connection was bad. She always said no, not wanting to worry him.

Only seven degrees today, three tomorrow, and it's falling below zero next week, he'd say. It might snow anytime.

She had his forecast memorized, too. A high of twenty-two degrees in Hong Kong. He would have woken up to their fan's regular hiss. Did he rise neatly from his side of the bed, or had he sprawled across the free space of their mattress in her absence? She had the side against the wall, where his warmth shielded her from the little gusts of wind drifting over the wrinkles on the sheets.

In the car, setting her shaking hands on the wheel, she watched them flake like a cigarette showering ashes.

My aunt told her she needed moisturizer. Dreading the lonesome bottles on my aunt's vanity, the gush of cold cream that my aunt threatened, my mother said she'd brought some with her. Shiseido. My aunt said it was useless here. She made my mother get out of the driver's seat so that she could drive to the mall.

That nondescript concrete building with no billboards, no crowds queuing for the latest fashion launch. Maybe this was the building bleached gray by the sun, maybe they'd all been. Inside, things cost five times as much as they would have back home. The merchandise at every store was made-in-China.

My aunt belched cosmetics samples onto my mother's palms. White cream eddied into the criss-crosses, vanished, and stung.

Moisturize every night, or else you'll get wrinkles. And then what will you look like when your husband sees you again?

On their way to the checkout, my aunt tried on a jacket. She did it to cheer my mother up, to make the shopping trip something fun. It was too big for her, the sleeves hulking into a shrug. The polyester had an eggy sheen that betrayed its poor-quality. Under the store's half-burned out lights, my mother thought my aunt looked wind-battered, prematurely aged.

They shuddered across the parking lot. It had begun to snow.

My husband should be here.

Well, men have to make money.

My mother had said the same thing herself. She did not want Eddie to share the fate of the immigrant men they'd seen idling behind the counters.

Poor you, poor us. Two women stranded out here in the cold.

She was waiting to turn at the lights. The clacking signal mirrored their heartbeats.

My husband still visits, but I know he has another woman back home. I'm not trying to worry you, I just want you to know it's common so that you are prepared.

Snowflakes landed on the windshield. The windshield wipers rudely slapped them away.

Eddie would never cheat on me, my mother said. She tucked her fingers into the gloves my father gave her, as if in preparation for taking the steering wheel. The downy fur soothed her puckered skin. She would take the wheel if she knew how, she would drive straight to Banff. She searched the Rockies to orient herself.

A truck charged the opposite lane. For a moment everything screamed: the guzzling engine, the wheels milling a shower of road salt at us, the depressed horn. The horn was still screaming in her ears long after the monster wheels avoided grazing my aunt's car.

Once they were out of the intersection, my aunt said,

Black ice.

Then the Rockies greeted my mother, framed by an ornate snowflake border that the windshield wipers made. It looked like a Christmas card, treacherously beautiful.

It's called black ice because you can't see it, my aunt explained. Her teeth shook as she spoke, but she gassed the pedal and drove on home.

*

Next to my parents' bed hangs a calendar photo of Lake Louise. It is flawless, devoid of tourists, bad weather, only prim caps of snow gracing the mountain peaks. The rock faces shimmer off the glossy print and the aquamarine lake catches the glare of the bedroom lamp. The calendar is years out of date, but my father is still enchanted by its gleam. My mother tells him the mountains were never so shiny. They've never been. My father's short stay in Calgary was spent beside my incubator.

Anchored by your anchor baby, my mother laughs.

When I wanted to be an astronaut, he'd tease, wistful.

In their room it's perpetually July '97. I like to gaze at this picture, dreaming of who I'd be if I'd grown up there instead of here. On our last vacation to Mt. Fuji, I broke away from the group until I lost the constant notes of my father's elation, my mother's anxiety. I hiked into a crescendo of frosted pine. I wasn't cold. I was lapping my tongue to taste a flurry.

Read the other finalists

• Old Bonesby Kate Gunn (Vancouver)
• How to Make a Friendby Zilla Jones (Winnipeg)
• The Babyby Kailash Srinivasan (North Vancouver, B.C.)
• Permission to Pauseby Carley Thorne (Toronto)

About the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize

The winner of the 2024CBC Short Story Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency atBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

If you're interested in theCBC Literary Prizes, the2024 CBC Poetry Prizeis currently open until June 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2025CBC Short Story Prizewill open in September and the 2025CBC Nonfiction Prizewill open in January 2025.