All That Matters Page 4

  That Saturday afternoon, Third Uncle stopped my outside play and sent me back into the house to tell Father the taxi had arrived to take us to the harbour.

  “I’ll get the Old One,” he said, and called Poh-Poh to come away from the kitchen, where she had been plating sweetmeats and special dumplings to welcome Gai-mou to her new home.

  I found Father upstairs standing before his bed, busy with the new bedsheets. Finally, he used his knees to push against the large mattress to straighten everything. I was surprised at how his hand lingered for a long moment over the embroidered pillow that peeped out from the bedspread. When I called to him, he stepped away from the bed and gestured for me to stand beside him. A nod of his head directed me to look at my mother’s bamboo-framed picture sitting on the bedside table. Her hair in a tight bun, she had a very pretty girl’s face.

  “Tell your Ma-mah you will never forget her, Kiam-Kim.”

  “I never to forget you, Ma-mah,” I said, and brushed the picture with my fingers, just as gently as Father had done. He quickly slipped the frame between some silk robes lying in the opened trunk. Just as the heavy lid slammed shut, I noticed Father’s eyes were rimmed with tears. His pupils were stinging, as mine were, from the sudden jolt from the camphor in envelopes scattered throughout the trunk to keep away the moths.

  Father cleared his throat. “Time to meet Gai-mou.” He took my hand, and we walked outside and got into the taxi. Poh-Poh, in her embroidered jacket, was already sitting in the back seat; Third Uncle was beside the driver, listening to the purr of the engine. I shuffled over and sat on Poh-Poh’s lap. She commented that I was much too skinny for a six-year-old.

  “Five,” I said, correcting her with my Canada years. Next year I would go into first grade with Jack O’Connor.

  Third Uncle turned to speak but something stopped him. Over my head, the Old One handed Father a folded-up red handkerchief; he blotted his eyes.

  “Soot,” he said.

  I bit my lip, disappointed: Poh-Poh did not even think about my camphor-stung vision, nor did she care about the soot that gritted my eyes, too.

  “CPR docks,” Third Uncle said to the driver. “Pier A.”

  My legs tensed, restless with excitement. Third Uncle held up a small photo for me to see.

  “This your new gai-mou,” he said to me. “Remember how to greet her.”

  I was seeing Stepmother’s picture at last. A small face boldly stared back at me. I was delighted. There were no crossed eyes or pocked cheeks, just as Father had promised me: Gai-mou’s head-and-shoulder picture looked fine to me. Maybe even prettier than my mother’s small-faced one. I liked her long hair, and the shy smile.

  “Enough gawking,” Poh-Poh said and poked my cheek.

  Father refolded the handkerchief and returned it. I pushed myself back to cross my legs as Father did. Pushed again to get more room.

  Poh-Poh knuckled my head. “Sit still, Kiam-Kim.”

  I did.

  The taxi sped up, humming with all our thoughts. To the right of us suddenly appeared the huge hulls of ships and swooping gulls; between the bobbing vessels, rising across miles of cloud-reflecting waves, loomed the North Shore mountains. The air tasted of salt and smelled of tar. Someone was sniffing. I looked up: in the small frame of the rear-view mirror, the Old One dabbed at her eyes. The soot was bad today.

  When I first saw the tall, thin woman walking towards us beside Third Uncle, Poh-Poh reminded me, yet again, “This person your father’s companion, Kiam-Kim. This not your mother. This to be your gai-mou.”

  Father took one of the suitcases from Third Uncle, who said, “This is Chen Siu-Diep.”

  “Your Stepmother Chen,” Father said to me.

  The planks on the dock dipped and bobbed beneath my feet. Gulls darted into the waves for scraps. Amid the quaking of the boardwalk and the cries of the birds, everyone exchanged formalities, and I bowed politely, three times, to Stepmother. She bowed back.

  The tall lady then bowed to Father. He shook her silk-gloved hand and repeated her formal name—Chen Siu-Diep. Poh-Poh studied her carefully, her eyes unwavering. The dark prow of the overnight ferry made everyone look small. Crowds of people were greeting each other, calling out names in every language.

  Before the Old One, my new Stepmother bent her head even lower. Three times. In her wind-blown, long, dark coat with its China-style frog buttons, Gaimou looked slim and lovely. She turned away from Poh-Poh and bent down towards me. Above the noise of the squawking harbour gulls, she said words I barely could hear.

  “This … for you, Kiam-Kim.”

  Gai-mou put a lei-see, a lucky red envelope, in my hand. I tipped it open right away. Out slipped a tiny butterfly of Chinese silver, its pair of engraved wings no larger than two pennies. “Can you say my name?” Her Toishan tones were soft, unlike Grandmother’s often abrupt sounds, and her voice was sweet.

  “Siu-Diep,” I said, making my own voice even softer.

  “Means ‘Little Butterfly,’ ” Third Uncle said, as if I didn’t know. “Very pretty.”

  “Hold it tight,” said Poh-Poh, bristling, her voice loud and as abrupt as ever. “Like this.”

  I tightened my fist.

  Stepmother stood up, and Father shyly took her by the elbow and guided her towards the waiting taxi. People with rolling carts of luggage pushed by them.

  Third Uncle Chen looked very pleased, and after saying “Be happy” and waving goodbye to us, he took another taxi to go back to Chinatown to check on the menu for tonight’s welcoming dinner at the Pekin. There would be eight tables, seating ten each, he had proudly told Father. The Chen elders, important associates of Third Uncle, and many of his new friends had accepted, including six of Poh-Poh’s mahjong ladies, and our neighbour, big Mrs. Lim. Poh-Poh refused to let me ask Jack O’Connor to join us. There would be other children there, she said, like the Yip Sang children, the Chongs and Kees. “Yes, yes, lots of Chinese children to play with!”

  Third Uncle’s taxi drove away. At last, we, too, were headed home.

  I sat between the two women at the back and Father sat beside the driver, giving instructions. Stepmother’s trunk needed to be picked up at the landing for another customs inspection. She had been, for almost three weeks, languishing in the Customs House in Victoria, which everyone called the human isolation coop, the Pig Pen—the Gee-ook—patiently waiting for her official clearance to come into Vancouver. She did not mind me staring at her, wondering, thinking my thoughts.

  When the taxi finally turned south, crossing the familiar streets of Hastings and Pender and then turning east on Keefer, a pain started to throb in my hand. The silver butterfly had impressed its shape into my palm. Stepmother looked down.

  “I’m happy you like it,” she said to me.

  “Say thank-you,” Poh-Poh said to me, suddenly in her most formal and soft Cantonese tones.

  I looked up at the beautiful woman and said, “Thank you, Gai-mou.”

  Stepmother bowed her head. She was so much prettier than any lady we knew in Chinatown.

  Grandmother shifted herself and made me hop onto her lap and sit still. I held my palm out for her old eyes to study the delicate curve of the wings, as if they were poised to take flight.

  “This more for a girl,” Poh-Poh said, and lifted the silver butterfly from my hand. “I take care of this.”

  If the piece were more for a girl, and Father did not turn his head or raise his voice to contradict the Old One, I knew protest was futile. I stuffed my empty palm into my pants pocket and sank back, jiggling on Poh-Poh’s bony knees as she shifted with the movement of the taxicab. Why didn’t Chen Siu-Diep give me a silver dragon? Or a tiger? Those were fierce animals made for tough boys. I tried not to sulk. I tried to show respect.

  Poh-Poh asked Stepmother to pass over to me the documents she had carried with her from Canton. Gai-mou slipped a long brown envelope, folded in half, out of her handbag.

  I remember the dark-coloured papers sticking
out of the opening as she let the envelope fall into my hand, its weight a thousand times the weight of the butterfly. Poh-Poh took it away as quickly as she had lifted the silver amulet.

  “These your Ma-mah’s documents, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh told me, putting the package into Father’s reaching hands. She looked at Father. “Belong always to First Wife.”

  Stepmother quietly closed up her purse and looked straight ahead at her new world, at the distant mountain slopes across Burrard Inlet, and to our right, at the warehouses and buildings with their mysterious signs.

  Father and the taxi driver carried the three suitcases into the house. The trunk would later be delivered by one of Third Uncle’s friends, who had a small van. Far away from the harbour, and five blocks away from False Creek, here the air was sweetened from the last roses in the O’Connors’ front yard.

  Stepmother looked up at our pine-board house, so unlike the red-brick buildings surrounding Patriarch Chen’s courtyard. Fearful of some misunderstanding of his situation, Father explained to Gai-mou how we rented this house from the Chen Tong Society, and how Third Uncle helped. He offered his hand and helped Stepmother out of the taxi.

  She followed Father up the front steps, across the porch, and through the front door. I caught a glimpse of a scarf of pale silk fluttering from her shoulder.

  The Old One looked disgruntled: she should have been the first to follow Father into the house.

  Stepmother found things confusing at first, though Mr. Ben and Mrs. Annah Chong came to her rescue many times. The couple ran a corner store at Princess and Keefer, two blocks east of us, and Poh-Poh had known their elderly cousin back in a Toishan village. Mrs. Chong made it a point to drop by between her visits to wholesalers on East Hastings Street. She did most of the ordering for their store. Ben Chong did the books and stood by the cash and watched over their daughter Jenny, who was my age.

  The majority of those who settled early in Vancouver’s Chinatown came from the same Sze-yup, Four County village district, or spoke related dialects from the Samyup, Three County areas, closer to Canton and were therefore considered superior members of Chinatown. Everyone seemed to know someone in Old China who knew someone else closely related to them.

  Poh-Poh helped Stepmother to quickly settle in with a group of ladies who, like Poh-Poh, loved to play mahjong. “Get to know others this way,” Mrs. Pan Wong told her. “Get to know everyone!” They showed her how Vancouver ladies dressed for different occasions and gave her dresses they no longer fit. They oooohed over Stepmother’s slim hips, and their laughing husbands made remarks about Father being seen leaving work earlier than usual to rush home—with Third Uncle’s blessings.

  As they had done for Poh-Poh, the mahjong ladies gradually introduced Stepmother to everything know-able in Tohng-Yahn Gaai, China-People Street—or at least as much as the women were permitted to know. They told her she would soon not notice the bad smells from the mills and refineries when she came into town. Soon she would not even hear the banging trains and whistles. Part of life, they said. Canton and Hong Kong were far worse.

  “Buy meat here,” Mrs. Annah Chong advised her, pointing to the open counter of Chong Lung’s Meat Market. “My cousin never cheat you.”

  “Fresh vegetables,” Mrs. Sui Leong sang out, “best to buy in the morning at Keefer Market.”

  Mrs. Pan Wong named the best tailors in town, but suggested how clothes were cheaper to buy at American Steam Cleaners. “Left-behind clothes best buy.”

  The Chinatown clothing, dry goods, and grocery stores were often musty from ceiling-high bales of English cloth and China silks, or pungent with sharp odours of ginger root and herbs and dried shrimp. Carved hardwood-handled scoops crunched into eye-level barrels filled with rice and grains. The scoops made zzzzz sounds and spilled their contents onto curving copper pans that hung on balances and swayed like floating sampans above my head.

  In Ming Wo, the long, dark counter stretched beyond me. Oak casks of vinegars and soy and wine sat around me like steps, and I stuck out my foot to mount them.

  “Don’t climb,” I was told by one storekeeper. “This morning a boy just like you drowned in a vat of my best liquor!” As proof, he lifted up a small open-tongued shoe tied to the lid. “His mother pay lots of money for damages.”

  Stepmother sighed, but not as deeply for the drowned boy as for me: I had forgotten my manners.

  “Shoe for cats to play with,” Poh-Poh told me later. “Cats keep away mice.”

  Poh-Poh’s complaining voice dominated those shopping trips. Later, when I was old enough, she told me how useless it was to argue prices with the Gold Mountain merchants, so unlike the way things were done in Old China. Winning no monetary advantage, she admitted to anyone who would listen how hard it was for an Old Head to get used to new ways. But Stepmother told me Poh-Poh always managed to buy the choicest cut of pork, the fattest chicken, or the last clear-eyed fish in the pail. We ate well.

  That year, Third Uncle’s stock-and-bond investments had doubled in value. He gave Father an increase in salary.

  “You know my accounts,” he boasted to Father. “I buy another warehouse with no problem. No worry.”

  Poh-Poh looked up, fearful that the gods had heard such arrogant talk.

  Within a year, our household had found its rhythm. Poh-Poh could lie longer in bed after Father left for work. And Stepmother, already trained from Patriarch Chen’s service, did the housework without complaint. Father worked later and later at the warehouse, and I started first grade at Strathcona School. But even though my schooling interested Father, everyone in the family, as well as Third Uncle and the mahjong ladies whenever they visited us, began to turn their focus on Stepmother. She had fainted one afternoon, and had been throwing up in the mornings. Poh-Poh did not take her naps, but kept an eye on Stepmother.

  Even big Mrs. Lim, almost as old as Poh-Poh, crossed the street every other day from her rock-perched shack, bringing soups, a mix of boiled herbs and greens to feed Stepmother, she said, to help balance the wind-water humours that seemed to trouble Gai-mou’s digestion. For months Gai-mou needed special foods. Poh-Poh told me it was hard for some people’s digestive tract to adjust to Gold Mountain water. That seemed true to me, for Stepmother soon grew very big in her tummy and was often sick in bed.

  “Soon she be better,” Mrs. Lim told me. “Be patient.”

  “New baby soon,” Jack told me, throwing back his blond head as if in great agony and slapping his puffed-up tummy. “Pops out of the belly button.”

  Jenny Chong was with us that day. She was our age, but pretended she knew so much more than we could know.

  “Not from the belly button!” she said. “From the pee-pee!”

  I missed the event by sleeping through the whole night. After the girl baby was born, I thought Stepmother would now be a real mother. But she was still to be called Stepmother.

  Poh-Poh had heard the church bells ringing during the first morning of the baby’s birth. The church people helped the poor in Chinatown.

  “Listen,” the Old One said, bending her ear to hear better. “Good sign.”

  And so the chimes partly inspired my sister’s birth name, Jook-Liang, “Jade Bell.” Father told me the last sound, liang, could also mean “bracelet,” the name Stepmother herself had desired, Jade Bracelet. Whether “Bell” or “Bracelet,” or both, even baby sister would be raised to call her own mother Stepmother.

  Poh-Poh was our family elder, and Stepmother was expected to remember her place as a gai-mou in the family; otherwise, Stepmother was warned again and again by Poh-Poh and Third Uncle, First Wife’s ghost would take her revenge upon the family. Father did not protest, but some days I saw him pacing back and forth, wringing his hands.

  “Say nothing,” Mrs. Lim told him. “Let Poh-Poh handle things.”

  And so she did.

  “We lucky to be family here,” Poh-Poh said to Stepmother at the one-month birthday dinner Father held at home for the birth of his
daughter. The birth was considered a siu hay, a little joy, and not the dai hay, the great joy a boy baby would have inspired. Poh-Poh sighed. “No one starve here,” she said, which meant that we did not have to get rid of the girl child, as was done in Old China. The Old One looked confident. “Next baby be boy child.”

  Stepmother nudged Jook-Liang closer to her breast.

  When Third Uncle was finishing his supper with us in the dining room one evening, and Stepmother was upstairs breast-feeding Liang, I asked Father why Gai-mou sometimes wept at night. Even when she was so tired, why did she clutch at the little baby and seem so reluctant to surrender her to Poh-Poh? Father ignored me.

  “Why?” I pestered.

  The tears of others had always provoked my curiosity.

  “Tell,” Third Uncle said, and sucked at his unlit pipe.

  “Why not?” Poh-Poh said. She stopped piling up some plates and sat quietly. “Tell First Son.”

  All this I recall, because for years thereafter, Poh-Poh would remind me of the day that I first understood how certain ghosts had pursued her from Old China. Father shifted uneasily. What, after all, might a six-year-old properly understand?

  As if to keep Stepmother, who was still upstairs, from hearing a word, Father lowered his voice. I bent my head towards him.

  “Gai-mou knows that a poor family in China, one just as poor as her own family had been, would have snatched baby Jook-Liang from her, and the tiny thing would have been quickly sold or given away to another family. And you, Kiam-Kim, would never have known that she had once been your sister.”

  “Never?”

  “She would never have been given a name,” Third Uncle said. “And without a name, she did not exist.”

  “Aaaiyaah!” Poh-Poh interrupted. She looked at the two men before she decided to speak further. “And if baby unlucky, someone palm her mouth and clamp her tiny nostrils. Like this.”

  My eyes widened as the Old One’s palm pressed against her own wrinkled mouth, and her gnarled thumb and slender forefinger pinched shut her nostrils.

  “And then?” I asked.