All That Matters Page 5

  Poh-Poh’s black pupils rolled up into her head, and a huge gasp escaped from her.

  “Baby die,” she said.

  I jumped off my seat and ran to Poh-Poh’s side. She shifted her knee and let me jump up. A bloodthirsty thrill electrified me.

  “Show me how,” I said.

  Poh-Poh had just raised her palm over my mouth when Father slammed his fist on the kitchen table. The plates rattled.

  “Let him know,” Poh-Poh commanded. “Life is bitter and hard.”

  “No!” Father shouted. “This is Gold Mountain. Not necessary for Kiam-Kim to know such things!”

  Poh-Poh pushed me off her knee.

  It was the only time I had ever heard Father raise his voice against the Old One. Third Uncle started to say something but decided to keep quiet when he heard Stepmother coughing and starting down the stairs. When she stepped into the kitchen, looking famished for her share of dinner, Poh-Poh was piling up the empty dishes. Third Uncle lit his pipe as if nothing had happened. Father looked sternly at me to keep quiet.

  I kept quiet.

  Stepmother looked too exhausted to notice that anything was out of sorts. “Jook-Liang is sleeping at last,” she said.

  Father signalled me to offer Stepmother my chair. I jumped off the seat to help clear away the used dishes.

  “I bring you hot soup,” Poh-Poh said. “Take this, Kiam-Kim.”

  When I took the large serving plate from her old hand, I wondered at the long finger and scarred thumb, the way they pressed so firmly against the plate’s edge. I wondered at Father’s scowling face that suddenly turned away from the Old One to look so tenderly at Stepmother in her plain dress. He got up and pulled the chair back for her and pushed it in as she sat down. His ink-stained fingers brushed aside wisps of her hair that had trailed across her damp forehead. The sweet aroma of Poh-Poh’s thick, meaty stock drifted in from the kitchen. Stepmother took a deep breath.

  “Very good soup,” Father said to her. “The Old One make you blood-strengthening oxtail soup.”

  “Excellent soup for women,” Third Uncle said. He puffed at his pipe and shouted in the direction of the kitchen: “Very fine dinner tonight.”

  Father sent me into the kitchen to help. I could see Poh-Poh had pricked up her ears to hear every word of praise. It was my turn to say something to the Old One, such as “Thank you for the good food,” but so many thoughts tumbled through my head that I, instead, silently studied the Old One rushing about, watching as she shuttled plates into the sink. Then, with a deft finger and thumb curving around the bamboo ladle, the same finger and thumb that made Father shout at her, she swiftly poured simmering broth into Stepmother’s bowl. My blatant staring at her hand, at the open palm that lifted the porcelain bowl like a baby’s head, lifting without spilling a drop, must have trapped her between thoughts.

  “Grandson,” she said, and staggered against the sink. “Ghosts have followed me here.”

  As she squeezed her eyes to shut in the tears, pausing a moment before we would step back into the dining room, I somehow understood what the Old One had meant: life was bitter and hard. Taking my own small steps beside her, I stared at the steaming blue bowl, the hot blood-strengthening liquid swaying inches above my head.

  “Are we poor?” I asked.

  Third Uncle laughed. “Not yet.”

  Here in Salt Water City, he explained, we had a pine-board home with running tap water, a metal stove that ate logs in its grated mouth, and enough dried food stored away in a deep pantry for a month of eating. “No worry,” he said. “We keep your baby sister.”

  In Hahm-sui-fauh, Mrs. Lim told me, hardly any girl babies were abandoned, though quite a few were sold to merchant families to be raised as servants, or were traded for a boy baby who would be a greater joy for the adopting family, or—if undesirable and ugly—would be given away, like the children given away by white people. In this city, and in New Westminster, and even Victoria, there were buildings that warehoused hundreds of such children.

  Stepmother, too, must have been fretting. She consulted Third Uncle. He told her of his arrangements with the elders of the Chen Tong Society that he himself would see to any additional expenses the girl baby might entail; for sure, he said, our family would keep Jook-Liang. Third Uncle laughed at her Old China fears. Still, all that first month of Liang’s life, I remember how Stepmother clutched on to her girl baby as if nothing would separate them.

  “No worry,” Poh-Poh assured her. “Gold Mountain not like Old China.”

  Third Uncle expected a boy child, but like Father he did not mind the first being a girl. Uncle wiped his wire-rimmed glasses and told me that Baby Jook-Liang and I must remember how to refer to each other in Chinese, because we were Chinese. Little Sister soon was called Liang-Liang, which meant “Beautiful Bell.” In English, however, everything would be made simpler if we matched all our gai-gee, our false documents. That was why Liang-Liang would call her own mother Gai-mou: we would fool the demon immigration spies, who would otherwise deport us back to China.

  “Remember that in this country of white demons we are undesirables—Chinks,” Third Uncle said, “but we are, in fact, a superior people.”

  Father quoted a Chinese poet and spoke of the Middle Kingdom being “a country as old as sorrow.”

  That made me think that no one ever laughed in Old China. I was glad to be in Canada.

  “Kiam-Kim, never forget, ney hai Tohng-Yahn,” Father said. “Never forget, you are Chinese.”

  The way Father stared proudly at Third Uncle, who was showing me large picture books with ancient Chinese temples, and the way they both turned to study each page, telling me tales of monks who could snap steel rods and smash stone boulders with their bare hands, made me sit up straight in my chair. Even Stepmother looked up at me from her breast-feeding, as if it would be impossible, if not madness, to be other than tong-yung.

  “Baby be Chinese, too,” she said. “Tohng-Yahn is best.”

  I looked at her feeding Liang-Liang and reasoned that if, instead of having given me a skimpy butterfly when we first met, she had put into my palm a silver dragon with five claws, or even a tiger with fierce eyes, a great joy would now be sucking at her breast. And Father and Third Uncle would have lit firecrackers. Poh-Poh would have demanded Third Uncle pay for a first-class banquet at W.K. instead of dinner at the Pekin. From a red baby’s cap would dangle countless gold trinkets; twice the number of red-dyed eggs would sit on our best dishes, and many more pink-dotted dumplings for many more guests. My lip curled.

  “Kiam-Kim?” Stepmother beckoned to me. She shifted Jook-Liang onto her knees. “Would Big Brother like to hold her?”

  I quickly realized that it was useless to keep wishing the girl baby would go away. I finally got used to stroking the brown eggshell forehead and pushing the rubber pacifier between the tiny cupid lips to keep her quiet.

  “Gently,” Stepmother said to me.

  I tried again. Baby fingers grasped my thumb and held on tightly.

  “See how she likes First Son,” Father said.

  I pushed away from the cradle. With so much to discover in my own world, I did not mind sharing Poh-Poh and Stepmother with her. Father spent as much time as he could with me, and when he came home early he always gave me his hat to hang up on the small hook beside my own coat. In the beginning, the two of us would go for walks before the darkness came. But soon, as he took on more part-time work in the restaurants and warehouses of Chinatown, helped Third Uncle and other merchants with their invoices and accounts, studied English books in the Carnegie Library, and worked on his English with the minister from the United Church, Father was rarely at home when I was awake. Arrangements were made: other men and women, kindly acquaintances of Third Uncle, mostly elders, took me out for walks. Father taught me to recite their proper names while standing at attention; I mimicked appropriate greetings with a bow and learned how to accept small red-enveloped gifts of lucky money without rudely opening th
em to peep at the contents.

  “Too generous,” Poh-Poh would protest on my behalf.

  “Too kind,” Stepmother would instantly say as I held the lei-see in my hands for a respectful few seconds and lowered my head before another tall or squat newcomer to our house. Father was pleased to hear that I was considered polite and smart and gave others the pleasure of recalling their family life in Old China.

  Poh-Poh had taught me to feel with my fingertips during the exchange of lucky money and my humble thanks, to discover whether coins or crinkly bills sat inside the red folds of the lei-see. She said this would help me resist tearing open the flap. It was a trick she had taught the grandchildren of Patriarch Chen himself.

  “Lowly children,” Poh-Poh said. “All girls.”

  I didn’t care. I wanted to know what were the consequences if my fingers felt a coin or a bill. Poh-Poh laughed at my impatience. A ten- or twenty-five-cent coin meant I might keep it in my own piggy bank. A fifty-cent coin or any folding money meant Father or Stepmother took the lei-see from me.

  “For your education,” I would hear them say.

  Of course, to open any lei-see in front of guests was very rude and would expose my lack of manners. Worse, Stepmother warned me, whoever gave me a coin, however generous, would feel that they had suk-mein, lost face, in front of anyone else who might have slipped me folding money.

  “Father would lose face, too,” she said. “Guests would shake their heads and say, ‘What an impatient and greedy First Son!’ ”

  “Yes, yes,” Poh-Poh chimed in. “People would say, ‘Has this greedy grandson of yours mo li—no manners?’ ”

  The world, I discovered, was filled with such refinements, and to have mo li meant not only to lack manners but to have little sense of social ritual, thus bringing a bad reputation to one’s family. Poh-Poh’s brows furrowed at the tragic thought that her grandson might have been born an idiot with mo li. She quoted something from Confucius, “Follow the Right Way.” This was the highest authority, to warn me to be on my best behaviour. The classic four-word proverb meant nothing to me, but the Old One’s warning tones as she pronounced each word so precisely spoke volumes: Confucius was High Authority.

  Lucky money was a social ritual I liked. Whenever my longings began to run away from Old China ways, lucky money brought them back.

  “What’re those red things?” Little Jack asked me once, when I was showing off how many lucky packages I had collected from a dinner party at the Pekin celebrating Poh-Poh’s and my birthday. It hadn’t mattered that our birthdates were days and months apart; Father felt it was time to honour the Old One, and Poh-Poh said I should have my share of joy, too. Everyone gave me a toy or lucky money. Afterwards, the lady guests came to our house to play mahjong, and the men went someplace to gamble and drink. My pockets were bulging with lei-see. I got tired of playing with the other children and looked out the front window, and I saw Jack staring at me from his porch.

  “Look what I got,” I said, showing a fistful of red lei-see packages. “Bet you don’t have any.”

  Jack came closer to see. I held my fist out and offered him one. I checked with my fingers that only coins were inside. Otherwise, Father or Poh-Poh would be mad at me. All at once, Jack laughed and tore open the envelope.

  “Hey, it’s money!”

  “No,” I said, “it’s lucky money.”

  “You bet it is,” he said, holding up two fifty-cent pieces.

  Then he ran into his house. There was nothing to do but go back into my own house. A few minutes later, there was a loud knock on our door, and Stepmother saw Mr. O’Connor’s tall, lanky figure shadowing our parlour window. Everyone stopped playing mahjong and stared quietly at the front door. Stepmother hesitated to open it. In the dining room, Poh-Poh glanced at Jenny Chong’s mother, who spoke English. Mrs. Chong got up with a heavy sigh and went down the front hall. She was always interpreting for Chinatown residents.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Chong used her customer-service voice with Mr. O’Connor. “May I please to help you?”

  “Your boy gave my son this money,” Jack’s father said. “Should he have done that?”

  Mrs. Chong could see the torn red envelope and the two coins peeking out.

  Poh-Poh looked hard at me. Stepmother stood up from the parlour table and shook her head.

  “You gave lucky money away?” Poh-Poh said, in Toishanese. I could see Jack’s father was wondering about the Old One’s serious tone. “Now you tell that foreigner what you mean by that.”

  Poh-Poh got off her chair and pushed me forward down the front hall. Mrs. Chong stepped aside. Jenny Chong came running out from the back to see what was the matter. She was always a Nosy Parker.

  “For Jack to keep,” I said to Mr. O’Connor.

  The tall man looked past me to see how Stepmother or Poh-Poh would respond.

  “Play cards,” Poh-Poh said in Toishanese, and the other ladies immediately began pushing the tablets noisily around the table, ignoring the situation at the door.

  Stepmother watched me step back. Mrs. Chong shut the door.

  Then the noise of the clicking game resumed in both rooms. No one said anything to me as Mr. O’Connor’s figure left our porch and descended down the steps.

  Jenny Chong said, “Give me one, too.”

  Mrs. Chong reached out and slapped her daughter’s head. None of the ladies in the room took notice.

  When I was put to bed, Poh-Poh wagged her finger at me. “Only a fool give lucky money away! Are you a fool?” Shortly afterwards, Stepmother’s shadow crossed my bed. I shut my eyes and refused to acknowledge her. She tucked me in and slipped some extra coins in my palm.

  TWO

  POH-POH WARNED ME THAT I was no longer the same Tohng-Yahn boy she took by the hand when we first struggled up the crowded third-class gangplank in Hong Kong to board the CPR steamship to Vancouver. “You old enough now to keep secrets.”

  Grandmother was right. I was eight years old that fall of 1930, as I stood waiting in the doorway of our cramped, stuffy Chinatown kitchen to help her wash and prepare the vegetables. The door jamb had lines that Father pencilled on to record my height. Father had said that when I reached a certain height, I would be trusted to know more, to know family secrets that even my very best friend, Jack O’Connor, could never be told.

  “I’m taller now,” I said, looking as grown-up as I knew how. “I’m bigger, too.”

  The Old One laughed.

  “You not Tohng-Yahn like before, Kiam-Kim,” she said, displaying her old know-it-all village manner and shaking her wrinkled head at the fierce-faced, nearly cross-eyed Kitchen God stuck on the wall. Even he agreed. Poh-Poh unhooked Stepmother’s flower-printed apron from the doorknob. I looked at the dangling garment and took a step back into the dining room. Poh-Poh shook her head again.

  “You not Chinese like before. Now you just a mo no boy, a no-brain boy!”

  Poh-Poh did not mean that I didn’t have a brain; she meant that I didn’t have the right kind. One day when I sat in my room, bent-mouthed and feeling crushed, Stepmother told me to pay no attention.

  “When you count up Father’s invoices to match up his bookkeeping entries, what does the Old One always say?”

  I thought for a moment. “Poh-Poh says, ‘Kiam-Kim has a Number One Brain.’ Then she pulls my ear.”

  “Yes, yes …,” Stepmother said. She sighed. “To keep First Son humble.”

  I protested and punched my pillow.

  “Father always laughs.”

  “You must laugh, too!” A delicate hand brushed away my tears. “Yes, laugh. Then you have a Tohng-Yahn no, a Chinese brain like your Poh-Poh.”

  Stepmother smiled when I got her meaning: never take Poh-Poh too seriously. Smile. Laugh. Stepmother herself barely reacted to any of Poh-Poh’s abrupt suggestions: “Steep tea longer.” “Fold sheets this way: tight-tuck every corner.” “Hold the baby … firmly.” “Eat more meat.”

  To each command, Gai-mou
would respond with a faintly pleasant smile, as if Poh-Poh’s take-charge voice should not be taken too seriously. After a moment, she would submit to Poh-Poh’s way: the green tea was steeped longer; bedsheets were stretched just so and all four corners stiffly tucked in; the baby firmly held; and, finally, another morsel of meat was politely swallowed.

  “Ho, ho! Good, good!” said Poh-Poh, satisfied that Gai-mou had not disregarded her. However, even as the Old One increased her pushy ways with me, Stepmother began gradually to fold the bedsheets in her own way. In the midst of her breast-feeding my sister, she lifted Liang-Liang to burp, not as firmly as Poh-Poh would have liked: the tiny head limply propped over the towel-padded shoulder and slowly slid down again to feed. Stepmother was doing more and more things in her own way.

  Mrs. Lim remarked on how the dinner table was set. Poh-Poh said, waving her hand dismissively, “Gai-mou work too hard to do everything right.”

  Eventually, even Father noticed that certain habits had changed in our house: now the Old One folded her own sheets exactly in the way Stepmother did, with three corners tightly tucked in but with one inviting corner flipped back.

  Father was relieved to see that the two women got along most days, though once I saw him wink at Stepmother as if they had agreed upon a secret strategy to use their Chinese brains to contain Poh-Poh’s abrasive inclinations—using the kind of brains I lacked. But if the right grey cells hadn’t yet bloomed inside me, at least I was now taller than the last pencil mark scratched on the door post: taller and bigger and able to keep a secret. And too tall to travel free to Vancouver Island.

  “We’re going to the Chinatown in Victoria to get you and Liang a new brother,” Father had said that morning.

  “There will be two sons in family, Kiam-Kim!” said Poh-Poh. “Two grandsons!”

  “It’s a secret,” Stepmother said.

  “No one else must know,” Father explained, “or the government officials might give us trouble. Understand?”

  I tried to argue that I should go to Victoria instead of Liang-Liang.