All That Matters Read online

  Praise for ALL THAT MATTERS

  2004 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD WINNER

  GILLER PRIZE FINALIST

  NATIONAL BESTSELLER

  “Choy’s effortless style is mesmerizing, and his characters are compelling. Perhaps the most enticing aspect of his writing is the glimpse he offers into the vibrant world of Chinese-Canadian culture.… Choy’s fluid writing style … merges Chinese words and rhythms into the narrative. Non-Chinese readers will learn a lot about the culture and the language without realizing they are being taught.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Good news for fans of Wayson Choy’s memorable first novel, The Jade Peony. All That Matters … is every bit as good as its predecessor.… All That Matters is a paean to decency and humanity [with] humour, understatement and precise attention to detail.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “A finely crafted novel.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “Choy’s ultimate gift [is] to be able to employ words like ghosts, curses, blessings, and omens and have even the most analytical of heads nodding with understanding. The Vancouver of the 1930s that Choy has created is where the historical meets the mystical.… Choy sustains the balance even as he touches on heavier issues—war, cultural divisions, a mixed-race love triangle. And life, he seems to tell us, isn’t so hard to figure out.”

  —Time

  “All That Matters was worth the eight-year wait because, besides opening a door into a beguiling and largely unknown world, the author grapples satisfyingly with the big questions.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Choy’s effortless storytelling and believable characters make All That Matters an unforgettable window into immigrant life, and a fascinating look at a key period in Vancouver’s evolution.”

  —Vancouver Review

  “All That Matters rewards the reader with a richly textured evocation of childhood in a community as oppressive as it is nurturing. Once again, Choy has created a complex world, peopled with characters you will love as though they were your own family.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “All That Matters is an immensely appealing novel. Populated with captivating characters and laced with a wealth of Chinese lore, the book, short-listed for this year’s Giller Prize, is a worthy contender.”

  —The London Free Press

  “Choy tells stories that need to be heard.”

  —NOW magazine

  “All That Matters is a sweet coming of age story.… Choy reveals his characters and story so slowly that by the end the reader will begin liking the unlikable and understanding what at first seemed incomprehensible.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  Copyright © Wayson Choy 2004

  Anchor Canada edition 2005

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Choy, Wayson, 1939–

  All that matters / Wayson Choy.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67486-7

  1. Chinese Canadians—Fiction. 2. Chinatown

  (Vancouver, B.C.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8555.H6658A64 2005 C813′.54 C2005-901110-6

  This is a work of fiction. Therefore, any references to actual events and locales, and any resemblances to persons, mythic, living or dead, are used for purposes of fiction and are entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by

  Anchor Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To those who saw me through

  a dark time: you are family.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Beginnings

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Endings

  Note

  Acknowledgements

  THE MASTER SAID,

  “WITH WORDS, ALL THAT MATTERS

  IS TO EXPRESS TRUTH.”

  The Analects of Confucius

  BEGINNINGS

  WHEN I HEAR THE SEA WIND blowing through the streets of the city in the morning, I can still feel my father and the Old One—together—lifting me up to perch on the railing of a swaying deck; still feel the steady weight of Father’s palm braced against my chest and Poh-Poh’s thickly jacketed arm locked safely around my legs. I was three then, in 1926, but I can still recall their shouting in the morning chill, “Kiam-Kim, Kiam-Kim,” their voices thin against the blasts of salty wind, “Hai-lah Gim San! Look at Gold Mountain! Look!”

  I saw in the distance the mountain peaks, and my toes curled with excitement. As I pressed a hand over each small ear to dim the assault of squawking gulls, fragments of living sky swirled and plunged into the waste spewing from the ship’s belly, and the sun broke through.

  All at once, the world grew more immense and even stranger than I could ever have imagined; I ducked my head to one side and burrowed blindly into Poh-Poh’s jacket. Father plucked me off the rail and put me down to stand up by myself.

  Poh-Poh did not stop him.

  “We are near Gold Mountain,” she said, her Toishan words shouted above other excited voices. “Straighten up, Kiam-Kim!”

  I watched as Father clutched the rail to hold our place against the surging crowd: he looked ready for anything.

  I put my own hands around the middle rail and threw my head back, and tried to look as bold and as unafraid as Father. Poh-Poh glanced behind her. A wrinkled hand shakily held on to my shoulder. I shouted to her to look at the swooping gulls, but she did not hear me.

  As the prow rose and crashed, and the Empress of Japan surged into the narrow inlet, gusts of bitter wind stung my eyes. At last, to greet the approaching Vancouver skyline, the ship blasted its horn.

  “Look there, Kiam-Kim!” shouted Father. “Way over there!”

  I looked: along a mountain slope, a black line was snaking its way towards the city.

  “See?” Father said, kneeling down to shout above the chaotic machinery clanking away in the ship’s belly. “I told you there would be trains.”

  I laughed and jumped about until the sea air chilled my cheeks. The Old One bent down to lift a thick coat collar around my neck. The air tasted of burning coal.

  “Listen carefully, Kiam-Kim,” Father said. “Can you make out the train whistle?”

  I listened. But I was not thinking of trains.

  Grandmother had told me the story that dragons screeched and steamed out of hidden mountain lairs: sweating, scaly dragons whose curving bodies plunged into the sea and caused the waters to boil and the wind to scorch the faces of intruders until their eyes, unable to turn away, burned with tears.

  The wailing finally reached my ears. The black line turned into freight cars headed towards the city’s row of warehouses and jutting docks. The train engine gave another shriek.

  In response, the ship blew its horn again. A shawl of sea birds lifted skyward. Ship and train were racing to reach the same point of land. Pe
ople behind us applauded.

  Father raised his hand to shield his eyes against the dancing sunlight.

  “We’re here, Mother,” Father said to Poh-Poh.

  I said to myself, “… here …,” and gripped the rail even harder.

  The long train now disappeared behind a shoreline of low buildings. With my eyes following the great billows of smoke, I heard clearly the echoing screech of wheels.

  “The cries of a dragon,” said Poh-Poh.

  Father said, “Just the train coming to a stop, Kiam-Kim.”

  But the Old One’s voice was so certain that I held my breath.

  ONE

  WHEN I WAS THREE YEARS OLD, Father, Poh-Poh, and I were sent away from our Toishan village to Hong Kong, sent away by the Patriarch Chen, who was recently a Mission House convert and the head of our clan. As a demonstration of his Christian charity, the old Patriarch had agreed to clear the way for Third Uncle to sponsor us to come to Canada, so that Father, Grandmother, and I, First Son, would have a chance to escape the famine and the civil wars raging in the Pearl River Delta of Kwantung province. Those who could leave Sze-yup, the Four County village district in Southern China, would have a chance for a better existence. Those who settled in Gold Mountain might find work and send back remittances to help the ones left behind; every sojourner would return home when life improved in China.

  Much later, I learned that before he had put up the money and bought the documents for us to join him in Vancouver, Third Uncle had to consider the feelings of his dead wife. He consulted Chinatown’s Madame Jing, who set up her fortune-telling table in Market Alley and had known him since he first arrived in Gold Mountain. She interpreted the final toss of the I Ching coins.

  “The spirit of your dead wife approves,” she said.

  Soon after this sign of approval, American gold and large Mexican silver coins were paid into various hands. Six months later, we sailed on an Empress steamer and landed in Victoria, then headed to Vancouver to settle in the Chinatown rooms that Third Uncle had rented for the three of us in a building on East Pender Street, just half a block from his warehouses on Shanghai Alley.

  Third Uncle was not my father’s brother. In fact, he was a very distant cousin from Sze-yup, connected to us only through our mutual clan name of Chen; his own blood brother had died years ago in the interior of British Columbia. Over fifty, and successful as an import-export warehousing merchant, Third Uncle had been shocked into acknowledging his own mortality. In less than a month, five of his Chinatown associates had died, two from heart attacks, two from the coughing sickness, and one from a stomach tumour. He confronted a chilling fact: he had no family members in Gold Mountain to carry on after him. What legacy, then, had thirty years of his work and investments built? He promptly decided to sponsor a “namesake family” from Old China, a maaih-gee ga-ting, a “bought-paper family” that would replace what he himself had tragically lost.

  During the long period of civil unrest in Southern China, Third Uncle’s own wife and ten-year-old son had met a fearful end. The two were abducted by a peasant warlord and held for ransom. But the ransom note arrived in Vancouver with an incorrect address, the name on the oversized envelope badly blotched by rain, and for three months on the front window of the Chinese Times office, the indistinct envelope was displayed, unclaimed. When it was finally opened and read, it was already too late: another letter had arrived from Patriarch Chen to say that a box had turned up, and it held the severed heads of Third Uncle’s wife and son. The two decapitated bodies were found in a neighbouring field; mercifully, the bones and skulls were brought together by Patriarch Chen for an appropriate burial, or their ghosts would have wandered hopelessly in the fields and ponds.

  Third Uncle wept to think that he had countless times walked past that large envelope. He had even laughed at the awkwardly constructed ideograms, as if a childish hand had struggled with each wavering stroke of the brush: he had wondered who was so ignorant, or so ill-advised, that they would not have hired a street calligrapher to write the words properly. It turned out that the words had been brushed by his own young son. The Chinese Times retold this sad story and urged people to check carefully the still unclaimed envelopes taped to the Carrall Street windows: “Some words are made unreadable by rain,” the editor wrote, “and some, by tears.”

  Years later, Third Uncle told me that after the loss of an older brother in Gold Mountain, and then of his own wife and son, he had no intentions of ever again enduring a “blood loss.” Further, after receiving the tragic news in the letter from Patriarch Chen, he had been warned by Madame Jing that if he dared to remarry, he would offend the ghost of his angry wife and bring a curse upon himself.

  “Your wife feels you deserted her,” the fortune teller had said, wagging her finger at him. “She saw you walking by that letter. She saw you laughing.”

  During the years since that tragedy, Third Uncle kept good company with a few women companions in the Chinatown teahouses, but he never invited any of them to his private rooms in his main Shanghai Alley warehouse. He slept alone there, beside a fading picture of a tall woman and a young boy, and he never remarried.

  After thirty years in B.C., and after keeping the memory of his wife and son for so long—though he remembered only a baby the weight and size of a winter melon when he left for Canada, and remembered clearly how he pushed the tiny penis and assured himself the infant was a boy—and shortly after the funeral of his fifth business peer, Wong Ying Si, who boasted that Death would never touch him until his seventy-fifth year, and who died at the age of fifty-three, it was time for Third Uncle, then fifty-three himself and a wealthy merchant with three warehouses, to sponsor a family from his clan to become his own kin. Such sponsorship schemes were not unusual for Chinatown, though only those merchants with enough money could manage them, bringing over to Gold Mountain their brother’s whole family, for example, or a family member of a favourite concubine. Third Uncle quickly arranged with the Chen Association to assist him in sponsoring his paper family.

  Arrangements were made through Patriarch Chen back in our Toishan village to settle on the right person for Third Uncle to bring over. He wanted a much younger man who would know some English and would be able to work beside him and help him with his accounts; he would sponsor this man and two of his family members, and pay for the documents and transportation to Gold Mountain. According to the agreement, this paper family would accept him as one of theirs. As a gesture of goodwill, Third Uncle also agreed to donate a large sum of money to the China-Canada Mission House, which the Patriarch favoured.

  Father, as it happened, with his gift for studies, had been taught elementary English by the Mission teachers. He had also been helping with their complex accounts, translating the Chinese and English bills and invoices. His mother, my Poh-Poh, had been one of Patriarch Chen’s household servants, but now in her sixties, whatever her merits, she held many secrets and was getting too old. Because of the famine and the civil war, Father readily agreed to the overseas proposal and signed some papers, and so we arrived in Vancouver. Father was thirty years old, and Poh-Poh was almost seventy, and I, three. Poh-Poh and I were Father’s only two surviving family members; before my second birthday, my mother had died from the coughing sickness.

  Ghosts and Old China haunted us, just as they had haunted Third Uncle. Only the stillborn can leave the past behind.

  The first three months in Hahm-sui-fauh, Salt Water City, we occupied two badly lit rooms on Shanghai Alley, across from Third Uncle’s warehouse. A barbershop was below us, and Poh-Poh and I could hear the chatter of men all day. There, Father sat and drank tea with Third Uncle while he was introduced to the community, and men came to smoke water pipes that gurgled in wooden buckets. Women came to visit us upstairs. They came and pinched my cheek and gave me stuffed animals, and soft candies to chew on, and chatted endlessly with Poh-Poh. Sometimes a boy or girl would visit and play with me. Sometimes I sat with Father downstairs in the barb
ershop and wondered at all the strange faces.

  Then we moved into two spacious front-window rooms in a deep, three-storey brick building directly across from the Sam Kee building on East Pender and settled among the clutter of mismatched furniture and a cubbyhole kitchen. I existed there in a noisy jumble of dialects. Middle-aged or elderly faces bent over me, but were quickly forgotten and made little impression. Their concerned chatter, the smell of their seldom-washed bodies, made me wish for playmates my own size.

  “Where are Jo-Jo and Little Pot?” I asked, wondering where the servant girls’ two boys had gone. “Where is Wah Doy?” Wah Doy was an older boy who played clap-hand games with us in Patriarch Chen’s compound nursery. Other laughing faces came to mind. “Where is—?”

  “All gone now,” Poh-Poh told me. “All left behind.”

  The musty second-floor apartment opened only to a long, dank hallway. There was no courtyard, no palm trees, no smell of the wet or endless dry seasons, of the dust rising from the ground in swirls. Only the oily smells and train-clanging sounds of False Creek. When I was not distracted by a new toy, Father told me, I whined for my village playmates, for pudgy faces, for hands and feet that pushed against my own and smelled familiar. I must have wished that the world had not changed so suddenly.

  Poh-Poh wished, too, for the familiar routine of Patriarch Chen’s servant quarters, where she had held me by my squirming, slippery waist in a large porcelain bath bowl painted with birds. In the middle of a walkabout room enclosed by flimsy curtains, she would pour from a jug the lukewarm water that Father had first bathed in. After me, she would climb in and take her turn, talking to me loudly so that no one would walk in on her. I was too young to know any difference, and only wanted to push my nose against her skin. Poh-Poh smelled of the kitchen herbs, of the mint and coriander that she crushed in her palms and rubbed over the back of her neck. In Gold Mountain we washed with a yellow soap that smelled like lye and we never bathed together again; I was stood up in an iron tub, and water poured down from taps with just a twist of the white porcelain handles. Actual doors hook-locked shut, and with no need to chatter loudly against any accidental intruders, Poh-Poh let me splash and babble to my heart’s content while she fell into singing to herself tunes that she told me were sung to her by a magician-acrobat when she was a young girl in China.