Incompletion and Mnemonic Recollection

In The Garden of Evening Mists, Yun Ling tries not to think about her three years in the Japanese internment camp as she goes about her daily life, and she usually succeeds. Yet, “occasionally the memories still found their way in, through a sound I heard, a word someone uttered, or a smell I caught in the street” (Tan, 5). Yun Ling knows that she cannot bury her memories; they may be triggered by a word or a phrase, a painting or a picture. An encounter at the Selangor Club with a family friend, Magnus Pretorius, whom she has not seen in 11 or 12 years, triggers Yun Ling’s recollection of her sister’s dream “of building her own Japanese garden” (Tan, 41). Magnus, whose name echoes that of Albertus Magnus, the 13th-century Catholic saint and Aristotelian philosopher, is a surrogate father figure in the novel who adopts an Aristotelian view on life, and advises Yun Ling to build a garden for her sister. The suggestion “make it a memorial for her” sounds ridiculous to Yun Ling. Having worked as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal since the end of the war, she even feels somewhat insulted by Magnus’ offer to ask his neighbor, the Japanese “emperor’s gardener,” to design a garden for her sister (Tan, 41). Three weeks after their meeting, however, Yun Ling finds herself writing a letter to Magnus to ask him to arrange a meeting for her with the Japanese gardener. She arrives at Magnus’ Majuba Tea Estate during a tense time when the war between the British colonial government and the Malayan Communist Party embroiled the country in violence and terror. Filling Magnus in on her life shortly after the war while taking a stroll outside Majuba House, Yun Ling catches sight of a pair of identical marble statues on the lawn.

Magnus tells her that they represent Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory, and her unnamed twin sister, the goddess of Forgetting. Noting that the statues are “not completely identical,” as Mnemosyne’s features are more refined, Yun Ling suggests that Mnemosyne is the older sister, as “memory must exist before there’s forgetting” (Tan, 36). Yun Ling’s answer implicitly links Yun Hong, considered the more beautiful sister, with Mnemosyne, and herself with Forgetting. Although Yun Ling was three years younger, the sisters had been very close; perhaps even as close as twins.

As an epigraph to his novel, Tan quotes from Richard Holmes’ A Meander Through Memory and Forgetting-.

There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

Resonating with Yun Ling’s and Magnus’ discussion of the two marble statues, Tan’s epigraph asserts the duality and paradoxical nature of memoty and forgetting in life. Yun Ling is the sister-goddess of Forgetting, symbolized by her progressive brain aphasia in later life, who must travel into the deep caverns of her mind to seek Yun Hong, her twin sister of Memory, toward whom all her memories tend. To learn who she is, to “feel complete once more,” Yun Ling must go back in her memoty to mine the past and release that part of her still “trapped [...][and] buried alive with Yun Hong” in the camp (Tan, 268). Indeed, The Garden of Evening Mists, which is dedicated to the author’s sister, tells a compelling story of sisterhood scarred by a brutal war, of a surviving sister’s guilt and efforts to return to her lost sister “to free her spirit from where she had been immured” (Tan, 265). Yet the camp’s location is unknown. Yun Ling, the sole survivor, was blind-folded when taken into and out of the camp and knows only that it was deep in the jungle. Although it is physically impossible for Yun Ling to return to the camp to free her sister’s (and her own) spirit, her “rememory,” to use Toni Morrison’s powerful conceptualization of the workings of traumatic memory, is the site at which Aristotelian “mneme” converges with “anamnesis,” and allows her to actively travel back in her mind (and in time) to recollect and recall, afforded “temporal distance” by her physical and psychological engagement in a Japanese garden in the jungle-fringed mountains (Ricoeur, 17, 18).²

For Tan’s reluctant narrator, Yun Ling, the journey from camp to garden and the task of addressing wounds in words is physically and emotionally draining. The horror Yun Ling endured through the Japanese occupation of Malaya has turned her into a ghost of a person with “no shadow beneath her feet,” seeming to have no secrets or hidden memories (268). Yet, her meeting with Aritomo to ask him to create a garden for her sister releases painful memories. The fact that Aritomo is Japanese arouses hatred in Yun Ling. However, Aritomo refuses to design “a garden in[the] memoty” of a sister who “lies in an unmarked grave”;

Yun Ling is instead given the chance to learn to design the garden herself as an apprentice to Aritomo (Tan, 49). Seeing Yun Hong’s painting hanging in Aritomo’s study also reminds Yun Ling of her sister’s absence, and the fact that she is “living the life that should have been [her] sister’s” (Tan, 85). Yun Ling, the “wrong” sister, who is uninterested in garden design, goes on to learn the “Art of Setting Stones” and the principles of shakkei (borrowed scenery) (Tan, 86, 110). Aritomo details four ways of achieving shakkei: “enshaku distant borrowing - took in the mountains and the hills; rinshaku used the features from a neighbor’s property; fushaku took from the terrain; and gyoshaku brought in the clouds, the wind and the rain.” His creation of Yugiri borrows from the contours of the Cameron Highlands, the landscape of Magnus’ tea plantation, the flora and fauna of the rainforest, and other blessings of nature to fashion “a paradise in the afterlife” on Earth through “mono no aware, the sensitivity to the sublime” (Tan, 139, 80).

However, Yun Ling initially dismisses shakkei as “nothing more than a form of deception” (Tan, 139) and insists that Aritomo’s “memories are a form of shakkei'' making his life in Malaya feel “less empty” or less incomplete. Yun Ling’s present life in Yugiri and her memories are also a form of shakkei - “borrowing from [her] sister’s dreams, searching for what [she has] lost” (Tan, 143). In this sense, the principles of garden design are inevitably applied to life. As Yun Ling gradually comprehends and appreciates these principles, she is finally able to reorder and re-pattern her life - past, present, and future. Yun Ling gains a full understanding of the events of her internment with the help of four people - Yun Hong (fushaku), Magnus Pretorius (rinshaku), Yoshikawa Tatsuji (a Japanese historian) (enshaku), and Aritomo (gyoshaku) - who may be respectively identified with the four ways of implementing shakkei and also by accumulating knowledge of four cultures: Chinese, Malay, English, and Japanese. While Magnus’ and Tatsuji’s contribution to Yun Ling’s shakkei are discussed in the next section, the significance of Aritomo’s request that Yun Ling tell him about her imprisonment should be noted here. It’s not a mere coincidence that Yun Ling’s telling of her war experience to Aritomo would be connected with clouds: her name Yun Ling means “Cloud Forest” and gyoshaku makes use of clouds. In the small garden in the Temple of Clouds, to the sound of nuns’ (formerly Juganianfu, or comfort women) chanting, Yun Ling begins to tell Aritomo “what happened to [her] [...] in the camp” (Tan, 242). Yun Ling recalls and recounts the daily suffering of the Japanese prisoners: hunger, disease, beatings, deaths, and, in particular, “an injury inflicted on [her] body” - the loss of her two fingers (Tan, 3). The more beautiful Yun Hong is forced to become one of the Juganianfu, whereas the plainer Yun Ling quickly finds other ways to survive: learning Japanese, working in the kitchen, interpreting for the other prisoners, and using her sister’s knowledge of Japanese gardens to get closer to Tominaga Noburu, who in the end helps Yun Ling to escape. However, Yun Ling tells Aritomo only what she wants to remember. The greater and cruder truth comes later, when Aritomo probes deeper into what she really did in the camp. Answering that she did “whatever was required for [her] to live,” Yun Ling admits that she worked for the Japanese:

I gave information to Fumio. I told him who was planning to escape. I told him who was constructing a radio, where it was hidden. I still received my share of beatings, but I got better rations. I got medicines. Yun Hong found out. She begged me to stop. I refused. [...] I left Yun Hong there

(Tan, 284)

In the camp, she was neither Yun Ling nor Cloud Forest, but Kumomori; her Japanese name allowed her to pretend that the things she did - especially working for the Japanese - were done by someone else. Perhaps this is why Yun Ling wants to forget her past, has never recovered from the experience of being a prisoner, and cannot let go of her hatred of and anger toward the Japanese -because they had turned her into a different person, a stranger to herself. Yun Ling had buried Kumomori deeply in her mind and in her memory, yet to deny the existence of Kumomori is to erase a part of herself; without acknowledging Kumomori, Yun Ling is an incomplete person.

In his depiction of the intricacy between history, memory, and forgetting, Ricoeur identifies “the polarity between forgetting through effacement and forgetting kept in reserve” (503). This allows an understanding of “incompletion” as being manifest in the inexhaustibility of history, and the selectiveness of remembering.