YEAR OF THE WATER HORSE: A Memoir, by Janice Page
Janice Page’s Taiwanese husband, James, has a standard response to hard questions. “You ask me, who I gonna ask?” This verbal shrug can be frustrating, as Page, a longtime journalist used to seeking concrete answers, writes in “Year of the Water Horse,” her moving new memoir. But his catchphrase, she notes, comes in handy “for gently but flatly dismissing questions with no answers.”
It also highlights some of the cultural differences between a woman raised on Greater Boston’s South Shore in the 1960s and 1970s and a man whose family fled China during the Communist Revolution. “You ask me, who I gonna ask?” pops up throughout the book as Page faces a series of existential questions including Is my family cursed? and Should I start one of my own?
“Year of the Water Horse” begins with a description of what Page says was the greatest day of her life, during which she, the youngest of six, accompanied her mother, Yolanda, on a ditch day. It was July 1966, and Yolanda was righteously fed up. She’d had her children over a 19-year span, and raised them in a two-bedroom, single-bathroom ranch in Braintree, Mass., with a husband, Jocko, who couldn’t deal with puberty as it related to his four daughters. (Inexplicably, he also had issues saying his wife’s foreign-sounding name in public.)
On this particular day, Jocko invited people over and expected Yolanda to hop to it. Instead, she fled, and Janice, her “change-of-life baby,” was the beneficiary of her mother’s brief but memorable walkabout. They went to an amusement park, the beach and the drive-in and had multiple meals involving ice cream.
Raised in an era when every big family joked about the milkman having fathered at least one of the children (if you know, you know), Page emerges into young adulthood devoted to her family but independent and intrepid. The summer of 1979, before she leaves for freshman year at Rutgers, she picks up three waitressing jobs, including one at a new restaurant called Mandarin Garden, serving unfamiliar food. “But you know pu-pu platter, right?” asks her boss, Benny Wu. Benny hopes Caucasian waitresses will help his suburban clientele take the leap beyond pu-pu.
Mandarin Garden immediately expands Page’s landscape and in 1985 leads to an introduction to James (given name Kao Shun), a recent immigrant from Taiwan who works at Benny’s second outpost, Mandarin House. James dresses in Filene’s Basement’s finest, sometimes talks like John Wayne, loves music and is unfailingly kind and considerate. But Page, by her own estimation, is broken. Her mother suffers from mental illness. Her sister Patty has just died from breast cancer, and then a beloved brother-in-law dies. Their courtship is slow, steady and, as Page’s career in journalism takes off, even bicoastal for a time.
James is some kind of wonderful. He’s by her side emotionally when another sibling dies and her father is diagnosed with esophageal cancer (cancer haunts the Page family, for reasons that later become clear). Page is ambivalent about marriage, but by 1994, during her first visit to Taiwan to meet his family, they arrive wearing promise rings.
It’s on that visit, with the introduction of James’s mother, Yu Ying, that the book, after some narrative wandering, begins to coalesce into a memoir of mothers and motherhood. The commonalties and contrasts between Yolanda and Yu Ying, who suffered a terrible loss as a young mother during the Communist Revolution, feed into Page’s evolving views, and ultimately, inform her decision to become a parent.
Page, the arts editor at The Washington Post, is salty, blunt and self-deprecating: “Janice is the name you bestow on the most annoying character in your book, play, movie or television show,” she writes in a chapter about trying to name the child she and James will bring home from China. She weaves pop culture references into her storytelling, not always seamlessly. But those that land well, like one related to the television show “Felicity,” are charming.
She often thinks cinematically, turning some of her major life moments into faux screenplay excerpts on the page. This approach is both an indulgence and a choice, presumably intended to universalize her story for the reader. But it also creates distance between her most emotional experiences and the recounting of them.
This is not surprising given Page’s opinion on therapy. She acknowledges its value (“the healthiest kind of exercise”) but declines the opportunity: “Just the thought of inching back through my own darkness to clean out the drainage ditch exhausts me.” I’d argue that any memoirists worth their salt — which Page definitely is — are engaged in something that adds up to some solid therapy. The peace she experiences at the end of “Year of the Water Horse” is hard-earned, and a pleasure to share with its resilient author.
YEAR OF THE WATER HORSE: A Memoir | By Janice Page | Pegasus Books | 272 pp. | $28.95
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