All That Matters Page 2

  “Clean up for Father today,” she would say to me on days when expected warehouse inventory and supplies hadn’t arrived for counting and storage. “On his afternoon break, Father take you for a walk.”

  Wearing one of Third Uncle’s English suit jackets and the scooped Stetson he had bought from Modern Tailors, Father would take my hand and we would walk fifty feet south, behind Pender Street, down Carrall, and see the whole spine of Chinatown pushing against the thriving industrial mud flats of False Creek. Checking his pocket watch, Father lifted me up when I grew tired and pointed out the huge doors that opened up into the back of Third Uncle’s warehouse. From the tops of bales and barrels, men waved to Father, who proudly lifted me even higher, urging, “Wave back, Kiam-Kim!”

  By four in the afternoon, a fresh sea wind would blow in from the inlet. Until its arrival, the yellow-tinged air often tasted of the acrid smoke and fires spewing from the three- and five-storey-high brick chimneys of mills and refineries. The industrial sites were mostly crammed together under the distant Georgia Viaduct, but they also sat in exile all along False Creek like grim castles anchored deep in toxic black mud. Chinatown children like myself were warned not to go near any puddles, the shallow pools whose rainbow-glazed waters, we were warned, would quickly eat away our skin and leave only our bones behind. Then Father would take me back up the narrow stairs of our residence, and Poh-Poh would give him some extra food to see him through his long shift. I ran to the window and looked down to see Father crossing the street to wave to me before he disappeared into Shanghai Alley.

  Our apartment was beside the warehouse district and among the busy narrow byways of Shanghai, Canton, and Market alleys, the three cobbled laneways located between Abbot and Columbia streets. These busy back lanes were enclosed on the south side by the expansive rail yards of the Great Northern and Canadian National railways. On these manmade flat-lands of False Creek, freight cars and engines crowded the CPR Roundhouse, an enginehouse with a giant cranking turntable to shift the direction of the trains.

  When the air was still and muggy, and gritty with the soot of train engines, Poh-Poh tied a wet cloth over my mouth and nose. After an hour, the damp cloth turned grey.

  At all hours, the foih-chai, the trains, tugged freight cars that banged together like thunder and shook the windows of our rooms. At bedtime, Poh-Poh stuffed cotton in my ears until I got used to the noises.

  “Only dragons playing,” she told me. “Lucky dragons.”

  BANG! BANG!

  “Only CPR freight trains,” Father said, and took me by the hand one morning to show me how giant boxcars slammed together and shook the ground, crossing from the shipping docks below Hastings to East Pender, rumbling deep into False Creek to disappear into the steaming bowels of the Georgia Viaduct.

  When we were alone in our tiny bedroom, Poh-Poh used to whisper to me from her bed: “At night when you sleep, Kiam-Kim, foih-chai change into iron dragons—lucky dragons to protect you from white demons. You be like Father: no worry.”

  Father did not worry about dragons. He had already been set up by Third Uncle to worry about entering numbers into large accounting books, numbers taken from piles and piles of invoices. Poh-Poh told me that Father was now so busy with numbers that he had no more room in his brain to worry about iron dragons.

  I, too, did not worry—at least, not in the daytime.

  On our afternoon walks, after all, Father had shown me that a train was a train, a solid, whistling, steam-blowing piece of reality. But at night, just before the darkness swept me deeply into sleep, as shunted boxcars went BANG! BANG! against each other, and as Father worked on his books under the single desk lamp in the next room, and Poh-Poh, with her knees and elbows cracking every night, as she sank back into her pillowed chair beside my cot, and as my eyelids sank under the weight of unbidden dreams, I felt stirring beside me a steel-plated, steam-hissing grey dragon uncoiling itself. Throughout the night, as the trains rumbled out of the roundhouse and click-clicked across Pender, bisecting the yellow light of street lamps, I saw dragon eyes flash across the bedroom ceiling and fly into Poh-Poh’s ancient head.

  Soon after our arrival, Third Uncle Chen—whose business was doing very well—urged the elders in our surname association, the Overseas Chen Tong Society, to support his wish to bring over a female helpmate and companion for my father. He explained to them that Father’s only wife had died of the coughing sickness in China when his son was not yet two, and that was why elderly Poh-Poh had come with us to Gold Mountain—so I would have proper family care. Third Uncle and the Old One had discussed these circumstances, he explained. “My good cousin needs help to care for his old mother and his First Son,” Third Uncle said to the Tong elders.

  The Tong elders were not unsympathetic to the bachelor-men in Chinatown who, more than fifteen or even twenty-five years before, had left behind their families in China and were now unable to bring over those same wives and families because of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. Most of the men were too poor to pay the exorbitant price for the special documents to have their families join them in Gold Mountain. But Third Uncle could afford the expense, and the elders at once agreed to help him with the arrangements. And so one day he came to our rooms and proposed the idea of his buying a gai-mou, a helpmate for Father.

  Third Uncle did not think a healthy, educated young widower like my father with his small son and elderly mother should live in Chinatown without “properly trained companionship.” Besides, hadn’t Poh-Poh been clamouring for Father, somehow, to have more grandsons while in Gold Mountain?

  “Before I die,” she kept saying to him, “I want to see three grandsons.”

  Even in Gold Mountain, Poh-Poh did not wish to tempt the gods. If she boasted that she would surely live long enough to see three grandsons survive her, Death might snatch me away. Always a price would be paid for expecting too much. But Third Uncle, taking his afternoon tea in our crowded kitchen, agreed with the Old One that more sons in Gold Mountain would be useful. After all, more family meant even more help in his warehouse, and I, First Son, would learn to be responsible for the new offspring. He ahemed to catch my attention. I looked up from my toy puzzle of the Three Bears. Third Uncle adjusted his glasses and grinned.

  “My own brother guided me when I was growing up like you, Kiam-Kim.” His Toishan dialect fell into a talk-story rhythm. “My dai-goh was like a big tiger. Always looking out for me.”

  Poh-Poh patted me on the head. “Kiam-Kim will grow up smart and become such a tiger.”

  Father smiled at the thought.

  Third Uncle tapped his pipe against his teacup. Tap, tap! Enough of his tiger brother! He reached into his briefcase and handed Father bundles of stapled invoices. “Due the end of the month,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Father plopped the thick wads on his makeshift desk, an old door braced over two filing cabinets.

  “Yes, Chen Bak,” Poh-Poh said to Third Uncle, returning to the important topic, as if the idea were new to her. “I die soon. My only son and grandson will surely need a gai-mou.”

  Father frowned at the nonsense of Poh-Poh dying soon, but he clearly liked the idea of a gai-mou. He also wanted more sons. Third Uncle showed him a small picture.

  “Patriarch Chen say this one available,” he said. “Papers can be bought right away.”

  Behind his glasses, Father’s eyes lit up.

  “Very practical,” he agreed.

  Knowing that someone besides the Old One would look after things at home, Father explained he would be able take on extra work in the warehouse office, and he might even do some writing for the local papers.

  “This new companion not wife,” Poh-Poh said, squinting at the small picture in her hand. Her village dialect sounded tense, foreboding. She put down her teacup. “She never-never to take First Wife’s place.”

  “Of course,” Father said, pausing to show his respect for the Old One. “No one replace First Wife.”

  I wanted t
o see the small photograph, but Third Uncle slipped it back into his thick wallet before I could ask. My heart sank, but I knew to keep my place and stay silent. This was all grown-up business. Father was now recalling how beautiful my mother had been. That made me wonder if the new woman was ugly, so the ghost of my mother would not be jealous.

  Grandmother’s wrinkled eyes watered at the mention of my mother. I knew what she was thinking.

  Many times she had told me how she had held dying Ma-mah in her arms, gently rocking her on a thin mattress, the small head wheezing its last breath against the deep curve of Poh-Poh’s neck.

  “All at once, your beautiful Ma-mah still and heavy as stone.”

  I was not yet sixteen months old, and had been napping on the pillow beside the two of them. As the Old One held and rocked my mother’s lifeless body, their two heads nodded above me. Grandmother had shouted for Father to come to the inner room, but he was out in the far courtyard gathering winter melons to take into town to barter for medicine and he did not hear the cries that Ma-mah had died. Distracted by the shouting, the chambermaid from Patriarch Chen’s compound rushed to the bedroom; the girl witnessed how I had awakened, with my child’s eyes opened wide and gazing upwards. Suddenly I began to burble my own childish talk, tiny arms outstretched to touch the still-warm cheeks, as if bobbing Ma-mah’s head were conversing with me, her eyes opened as wide as mine.

  Before she fainted, the hapless servant girl swore she heard my mother speaking back to me.

  This moment remains with me, for it was told to me by Poh-Poh and by Father, who interviewed the poor servant girl, a story told to me as if, by its retelling, what Poh-Poh and the servant girl thought true would remain forever true, that my rightful and only mother had loved me to the end. Her last words were said to me alone, words now locked away in my child’s heart, though I would never be able to recall them. And what did I sputter to her? Did my mother smile to hear my babbling? Would she know that this witnessed last moment between us, told to me again and again, would bind me to her for as long as I live? No one, I thought, would ever replace her.

  “In the village,” Poh-Poh said, “they still tell this story.”

  Neither the servant girl nor Poh-Poh knew what I might have said or what I might have heard. They dared not guess, lest First Wife return to curse them. But no one in Patriarch Chen’s household, not his two sons or three daughters, or the dozen servants, thought the incident unusual. The villagers insisted that Ma-mah had uttered her very last words to me; when I woke up and responded, she must have died in peace. There was proof enough in the year of mourning that followed her death: her spirit never came back to trouble me. But Father had been busy in the garden and came rushing into the bedroom too late. Father sat beside Ma-mah’s shrouded body for a whole day and night. On the second afternoon, at Poh-Poh’s insistence, he was pulled away by Patriarch Chen’s two ox-strong sons.

  Months later, at the Old One’s insistence, she and Father went to see a village mystic, who said he had glimpsed Ma-mah’s frail figure standing at Father’s side; she warned him that whoever dared to replace First Wife would become a curse to our family. Shaken by this portent, Poh-Poh urged Father to heed the future.

  I had been told my mother had traditional bound feet, so I could imagine, when she was carrying me in her belly, she leaned on Father for support. When I was much older, I overheard Father tell Third Uncle that whenever he missed my mother being with him, he sometimes felt a slight push against his back, even when there was no wind, not even a draft.

  Whatever the story about my mother’s ghostly presence, we accepted things as they must be. I learned that she had been the Patriarch’s gift to Father and to Poh-Poh, as well, who had been a faithful servant to the Chen household for three decades. No one ever spoke of my mother’s history. At her death, perhaps because Father and Poh-Poh both loved her so much, she became somehow irreplaceable. The new companion for Father would have no choice but to keep her place: Poh-Poh would see to that.

  “No worry,” Third Uncle assured her. “The new woman be told she a gai-mou.”

  A gai-mou would never be named an official wife. She was not a concubine either, but a helpmate. She was a false mother, as important as false papers for our survival in Gold Mountain. She would have duties like a wife, and work as hard to help us all survive as a family.

  Father told me that this new woman was to be my stepmother, and I was to be as respectful to her as I would have been to Ma-mah, though this new woman could neither be his real wife nor my real mother. Third Uncle added a saying from the Book of Rites.

  “Of all the virtues,” he said, his eyes rolling above the steel rims of his thick glasses, “filial piety is the first.”

  Father explained its meaning to me. I listened carefully and accepted what I was told. Over Poh-Poh’s black tea and the porcelain cups of Tiger Bone wine, the two men went on talking. Father and Third Uncle agreed, and tradition dictated, that the Old One would determine the new companion’s family duties.

  “It helps,” Third Uncle continued, “that this Chen Siu-Diep has had over a year of special training in Patriarch Chen’s household.” That was the first time I had heard Gai-mou’s name. I knew that Siu-Diep meant “Little Butterfly.”

  The three of them smiled to hear her formal name mentioned so casually.

  “With her special training,” Third Uncle continued, “this woman will accept her family position without complaint.”

  Poh-Poh’s face went ashen. (Many years later, at eighty-three, Poh-Poh recalled this moment and told me how the darkness had almost overwhelmed her.) Her thin lips pressed tightly shut; she felt as if her lungs were being crushed. She released a deep sigh, expelling untellable secrets. Third Uncle asked her if anything was wrong.

  “I die soon,” she said, and laughed to push away his prying concern. “Your stepmother come soon, Kiam-Kim.”

  She handed over another sugar biscuit for me to dunk into my watered-down tea and praised my sitting so quietly during all their talk. Third Uncle lit up his pipe. The second-floor kitchen was flooded by the late-afternoon sun, and the painted table gleamed with sunlight. I had been thinking of tiger brothers as my nose crinkled at the strong medicinal smell of Tiger Bone wine. The shingle-mill whistle blasted into the air to announce the beginning of another shift. Poh-Poh brushed back strands of white hair. Seeing how Father dutifully poured her some more tea, I must have felt, with a four-year-old’s acceptance of the only universe possible, that all things were as they should be: when Stepmother arrived to join us, we would be a family in Gold Mountain.

  Third Uncle hired an elder to write a letter to Patriarch Chen, promising another large donation to the China Mission House in exchange for arranging Chen Siu-Diep’s arrival in Gold Mountain.

  With Father growing more willing and more anxious to live with a new companion, the secretary-treasurer of the Chen Tong Society agreed to be a sworn witness before a government official that the woman named Chen Siu-Diep applying for “reentry” had been a former resident of the Dominion of Canada.

  Such proof for re-entry mattered, for no new Chinese immigrants were allowed into Canada, even though Chinatown still needed more young women to wait on tables and to work the night shifts in the beds of lonely men. These earlier arrivals, the kay-toi neui, the stand-at-table girls, were once easily available. But Chinese bachelor men and common labourers were a glut in Chinatown.

  By the late 1920s, Vancouver’s rooming houses and rooms-by-the-week hotels were overwhelmed by the thousands of labourers left behind by the collapse of the railroad work camps and by those coming back into town from their seasonal jobs in lumber and fishing. I took for granted the voices of men shouting up and down our apartment-hotel building, noisily stomping up the wooden steps in their work boots. Their voices could be heard on our second floor, farther down the hallway, from behind the locked doors of men with enough luck and money to rent a kitchen-room setup. Whenever Poh-Poh and I left our apart
ment, her obvious age and my shy stares combined to bring respectful greetings from the lips of even the roughest-swearing men. Poh-Poh told me not to repeat the phrases I heard shouted back and forth. She never explained what they meant, but anytime I repeated them in her presence, she knuckled my crown.

  Above us on the third floor, Third Uncle told Poh-Poh, many unemployed men took their half-day turns on narrow cots in divided eight- or ten-foot-square spaces separated by paper-thin hardboard walls or by flimsy curtains. Larger beds were sometimes rented and shared in work shifts of two or three men.

  “We lucky we have two rooms and kitchen,” Poh-Poh told me, when I asked if I could sleep downstairs in one of the rooms directly behind the tailor’s shop, alleyway rooms that were separated by curtains. My short legs were tired of climbing up and down the two flights of stairs, though pushing my way to the third floor was always an adventure. I liked to sit on the top step and listen to the many sounds that came down the hallway until Poh-Poh shouted for me.

  On weekends, behind-the-doors muffled coughing was drowned out by the voices of younger men shouting and singing, sometimes mixed with the voices and laughter of women. Poh-Poh’s face broke into small frowns: this was no place to raise a grandson. She sighed, and must have longed for the quiet of her servants’ quarters back in Patriarch Chen’s compound. At times, the rattling and spring-squealing of metal cots, which no one bothered to explain to me, combined with the stomping of feet, shook our overhanging ceiling lights. This made Poh-Poh complain, with bent mouth, that the whole raucous population of Chinatown lived above us.