I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. Daniel Greyeyes’s face flashed before me.
“So one day, I was telling him about the colour of the sea, the way it changes from blue to green to black as it got deeper. Fang climbed up my branches to see. I told him not to. He wasn’t the most coordinated kid on the block, ya know? But he did anyway. He climbed onto one of the tallest branches, gazed out into the sea then spread his arms out like an eagle and went diving down. Next thing I knew, I woke up in his body. A bit scratched up, but in fine shape.”
I marvelled at how Mouse was telling me all this as if he were recalling a trip to the grocery store. “Then what?” I implored. This was getting good.
“Then, I took Fang’s identity and made the big leap to Gold Mountain. And that, lang lui, is where I came from.” He ended his story, grinned at me, and heaped more noodles into his bowl. I shook my head. I had to hand it to him. Mouse could really make it as a scriptwriter one of these days. As for getting anything real out of him, that remained to be seen.
“I saw you in Chinatown wearing ribbons once.”
“Oh, yeah. It must have been a festival day. I do that sometimes, you know, to remember. Call me sentimental,” he said and grinned with his hands spread. Mouse chewed thoughtfully, before asking, “And you, Miss Woo? Where’re you from?”
“Scarborough.”
“Oh. Cool,” he said, moving on to the chow mein.
It was already July. Five months since I had spoken to my family. They were probably sick with worry, but as more time passed, I felt less able to call them. I would not be able to handle Sophia’s smartassed remarks or Darwin’s prolonged silences. Most of all, I didn’t want to talk to Ma. Since her rant in the hospital, something seismic had happened in my heart. Our whole lives were a lie. If Ma was not who I thought she was, maybe Ba was not either. Then, I wondered, who was I?
Once upon a time, I thought there were things I could count on, even in times when everything else seemed uncertain. Mouse lived in a tree, longing to be released, while I had lived in a tiny smooth shell, afraid of the shifting sands outside. In some ways, maybe we were both just playing like kids and avoiding the next step. I didn’t know what that was for Mouse, but sitting with him on the rug, so full of stories, but also so alone in the world, I knew then that finding my family was mine.
At first, I didn’t want to go out with Mouse into Chinatown, in case people thought I was deen too. I didn’t think I was any more or less kooky than him, but unlike Mouse who saw the world as his theatre, I played out my fantasies in the privacy of my house. But once we ventured out, I relaxed. It seemed that everyone knew him and more importantly, liked him. Or at least, they didn’t regard him as a freak. The punk rockers who panhandled in front of the liquor store swapped mixed tapes with him; the dim sum servers put out his favourite dumplings before he even had to ask. He greeted all the street hawkers by name, falling into the old village dialect Toisan when conversing with the old ladies who sold onions and greens. Mouse also spoke excellent Cantonese to the bosses in the noodle shops. They clapped him on the back like a son.
“Lui peng-yao?” one of them asked, looking me up and down, wondering if I was Mouse’s girlfriend. I blushed, looking away. Mouse laughed and avoided giving an answer.
Truth be told, it was getting harder to contain the fluttery sensations in my stomach when he came around. I began to notice his arms, the taut slender muscle that ran from his elbow to his wrist. I became familiar with his scent, the smell of earth and rain. His neck curved where it joined his shoulders, and I longed to trace a finger across the turns of his jawline. I loved the sound of his laugh — a tinkling of bells, and the loud, raucous guffaws he made when he was really amused.
I tried to stop it. There would not be enough rocky road ice cream in the world for me to recover from another broken heart. It helped that Mouse stayed neutral as Switzerland toward me. I was his sidekick — the shepherdess to his Jet Li.
Still, sometimes I tread in lightly, put a toe into the water, just to see what would happen. “Why do you call me lang lui?” I asked him one night as we were strolling around the neighbourhood. The air was cooling down from a scorching afternoon. It was approaching twilight, and the first star was showing itself in the sky.
“Why not? Aren’t you pretty?” he asked.
“Not really. I don’t think so,” I said.
Mouse stopped walking and turned me to face him. “You’re nuts, girl. You’re a looker.”
“Riiight,” I said, pushing by him to keep walking.
“You know what your problem is, Miss Scarborough?” He stayed put on the concrete slab of sidewalk.
“What?” I sighed and turned around.
“You think pretty is all blond and blue eyes and Barbie doll body. That’s what all the sisters think growing up in this no-man’s land.”
I actually liked that he often called Canada “no-man’s land,” as in no place for people of colour like us. “No, I don’t!”
“You,” he said, shaping his hands in the air, “are a goddess from the East. Your shining black hair, your almond eyes, your wide cheekbones, your strong calves. You were made to run through fields and rivers like the wind.”
“Okay, enough, Mouse. Seriously. Stop.” His weird musings were fun when we were dreaming up storylines, but now it felt like he was making fun of me. I started to walk away.
He caught up and stepped in front of me. “Miramar. You are beautiful. I swear.” He raised his palm as if making an oath. It was also the first time he had ever said my name.
“Okay, okay,” I pushed him away. “Thanks. I guess.” We continued walking in silence for a few minutes before Mouse told me his theory on Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch while my heart thudded in my chest like a scared rabbit’s.
Chapter 26 ~
Wu was accused of treason for fighting in the resistance army and was put in a cell to await her trial. She charmed her way out. No one knew how she did it, but only that she hopped on a horse and rejoined the army the next morning. When asked, she simply said she told the jailer a story. Her story was so powerful that it moved him to tears and uncontrollable laughter. In gratitude, he freed her and gave her a purple ribbon to wear around her sword. She was known as much for her talk-story as for her courage on the battlefield.
MOUSE HAD ALL KINDS of friends. Sometimes, I joined him in the small park in Kensington Market. He liked to hold court on a picnic table, surrounded by people. There was Al the homeless guy who lived in the park. He had a grocery cart filled with his belongings and would spit at anyone who got too close to it. Al didn’t speak much. When he did, it was an event.
There was a group of punks who hung around Mouse as well. They were mostly dressed in ripped shirts under studded motorcycle jackets and tattered jeans held together by safety pins. The girls wore black fishnet stockings and Doc Martens laced up to their knees. I was initially nervous around them, but Mouse said, “Punks are good people. It’s the skinheads you have to be careful about.”
There were also the occasional hippies with long greasy hair, floral skirts, and love beads. They often carried small paperbacks, at times breaking into a recital of poetry or prose. Sometimes it was Kerouac and other times Ginsberg with an occasional appearance by Walt Whitman, all of which gave me a tingle in the back of my neck.
We spent long afternoons on weekends just hanging out in the park, while kids played in the wading pool and on the jungle gym. Someone always carried a flask filled with mystery booze and passed it around generously, and if there was not any alcohol, there was always weed. The air there was constantly sweet with the smell of it. I refrained from both and was glad to see Mouse did too. He was, as he liked to say, “high on life.”
So gathered, Mouse would entertain everyone with his stories. He had lots of them. On one afternoon, one of the punk girls mentioned she was thinking of changing
her name. “Like, Sheena, ya know, after the Ramones song?” She was maybe sixteen, with a pink mohawk, black lipstick, and fingernails chewed down to the quick.
“Sheeeee-na,” Mouse drawled out the name, looking at the sky. “Yah, I like it. Sheee-na. That’s what I’ll call you.” Sheena smiled, pleased with herself. I could tell she had a crush on Mouse. She sat with one ripped fishnetted thigh pressed against his leg even though there was lots of space on top of the picnic table. I loathed her by whatever name she went by. I sat below them on the bench, eyeing their legs and wondering if Mouse would draw closer to her or pull away. But he stayed where he was, which I didn’t know how to read.
“Hey, Mouse, how’d you get your name?” one of the hippies named Stan asked, scratching at his beard.
“I got it when I was working the rails,” Mouse began. “Don’t cha all know that the Chinaman built your goddamn railroad?” Mouse chastised. There were shakes of the head.
“Well, there’s a history lesson in this story, boys and girls.” Everyone drew closer. They loved Mouse’s stories.
“So the Chinaman was brought over from the old country to build this here Canadian Pacific Railway in Gold Mountain, see? We were cheap. Whites wouldn’t do it for the money they offered, so Sir John A. Macdonald gave us a ring-a-ding.” Mouse held a pretend receiver to his ear. “Hey, how the hell are you, Mr. Ho-Lee-Chow? We got work. Lots of it. Great work, great pay, great benefits. C’mon down! You can be the next contestant on The Price is Right!”
Mouse switched his tone. “So here we were. Shit work, shit pay, no benefits, no four percent holiday pay. No siree, Bob! Our job was to break rocks so the fire dragon could pass across the country. The gweilos told us we needed to break a lot of rocks, sometimes even through the mountains.” Mouse leaned towards his audience. “This scared the shit out of us!” He shouted suddenly making everyone jump. “How the hell were we gonna break a hole in a mountain? Everyone knew the mountain spirits were the most powerful of all spirits. You don’t disturb ’em if you know what’s what.” All eyes were on Mouse.
“After days of using our sledgehammers, we came to the first one. Big Mama of all mountains. We were already exhausted from the back-breaking work. I couldn’t even stand up straight! And that sun! The sun in this new world hated us, man! It beat on us, shouting for us to get up when we fell down. It raked through our skin, and burned into our heads. It blinded our eyes so we made mistakes. Even our tears boiled!” Mouse wiped his brow for emphasis.
“When we got nearer to the mountain, we got more fucked up. Some brothas went apeshit crazy. We had to drag them by the legs along the tracks as we worked because they started mumbling like babies. The foreman gave us a pep talk, seeing that we were getting all squirrelly. ‘One of you,’ he said, ‘has to crawl into a small hole we will make in the mountain and light a dynamite to blast the rocks apart. Big money,’ he said, rubbing his fat caterpillar fingers together. We knew what dynamite was. It was like a firecracker we had set off on the New Year but many, many times more powerful. No one wanted to do it, so I did it. The job required someone small and nimble. I was the ideal candidate.” Mouse paused to take a drag off his cigarette, his eyes squinting in the sun. Everyone waited, breathless, including me.
“I had to, right? The other guys had wives and children back home.” Along the picnic table, everyone nodded in understanding.
“So, before I did it, I kneeled in front of mother mountain and asked forgiveness. Punish me later, I said. But not today.” Mouse bowed his head.
“The first time I lit the stick, I waited too long. I wasn’t sure it was lit. But then, I ran like a motherfucker. As I ran away, I felt small rocks running after me, breaking the skin of my calves. When I got out, I thought it was weird that I could see the other men’s mouths moving, but no sound was coming out. Blood was pouring out of my ears. The explosion made me deaf for two days.”
Sheena wiped away a tear. Mouse slapped his thighs. “But the foreman decided I was good at it, and that, my friends, is how I got my name. They called me Mouse because I was small and fast. I outran the fire.”
“What about the mountain spirits?” one of the hippies asked. She was wide-eyed and her frizzy red hair was a golden halo around her face, making her look like a fairy.
“Haven’t got to me yet!” Mouse gave her an ironic grin.
Everyone erupted into applause and pats on the back for Mouse. Al, from behind his grocery cart hollered, “Damn good story!”
I stood back and watched the happy scene, thinking of how much Ba would have liked Mouse. He had always enjoyed a well-told story.
Chapter 27 ~
Zhi was told again and again she was nothing without her family. “Our name is our honour!” her mother repeated a million times. Zhi walked a straight line, never wanting to lose face for her family. But then they all died, and she did not know what that meant for her face or her name.
THAT NIGHT I DREAMED about the house in Scarborough. It was spring and cherry blossom petals were raining onto my head as I walked around the familiar streets. In place of the playground where Sophia and I used to love to ride on the squeaky see-saw, there was a pagoda instead, a sweet stream of incense wafting out of it like a long, lazy finger. Where the road should have been, a river meandered, transparent like glass and filled with gold and red koi. The fish swam beside me as I walked towards home. Our house was cast in an enormous shadow. The old maple tree towered above it, encircling everything in its shade. Its trunk was double the size of the house. As I drew nearer, I realized the house no longer sat on the ground, but that the tree was carrying it up into the sky as it grew. Its green leaves fluttered high above my head, a sign I took to mean it was welcoming me home. In the dream, I felt really happy, but I awoke with tears on my face.
One night in early August, Mouse and I were drafting yet another kung fu story in my apartment. The day had been a steamy one, and we sat at my kitchen table with a fan blasting wind at us. The head moved back and forth from me to him and back again. We had sent three scripts to The Shaw Brother Studios already, paying hefty postage for the two-hundred page manuscripts to Hong Kong. This one was going to be a contemporary tale set in a Chinatown somewhere in the West. We would keep the conventional storyline — vengeance, good against evil — but with an urban twist.
“So I was thinking we could do a large family — lots of brothers and sisters. Mother and father are in exile from China for some reason — probably political. They are actually martial arts experts who secretly train their kids in the basement of their house, preparing for the day when they will go back and liberate the people from military rule. Cool, eh?” He was smoking cigarette after cigarette, the smoke shattered by the blasts of air from the fan. There had been a mass uprising in Beijing that summer. Students had occupied Tiananmen Square, pushing the government for democracy. Mouse and I had watched the TV in disbelief when the tanks were sent in and bodies fell in the streets. Mouse had fallen into a heavy mood for a couple of days as if his own family had shed blood in the square. I wondered whether his family was actually there, but I didn’t want to ask. I did not want him to make up another story. I needed either the truth or nothing.
“Nah. Orphan. That works better. Alone in the world, that kind of thing,” I said, gnawing on the end of my pen.
“Again with the orphans! We’ve already written two stories with orphans.” Mouse jumped to his feet, pacing between the stove and the fridge. “No. A family of warriors. Each person with his own specialty. Crane dance. Drunken staff. Lion fist. First, they encounter skinheads who have been extorting money from Chinatown, see, then…”
“Orphan, Mouse.”
“Jesus H. Christ! What’s your obsession with orphans? Are you one?” He pointed his cigarette at me like an accusation.
I paused and felt my heart drain. I was not an orphan, entirely, only by half. Ma was still alive. And I still had my sibl
ings. I just didn’t know if they all hated me for leaving them. Maybe they did and I was actually all alone in the world. Maybe that was what I wanted, why I could not make myself rejoin my family, the family I still had left.
“Hellooooo. Earth calling Miramar Woo?” Mouse waved a hand in front of my face.
I blinked. “No, Mouse. I am not an orphan.”
“But you had to think about it? What is it with you?” He sat back down, tapping cinders into the soy sauce dish I let him use as an ashtray.
I got up from the floor and went into my bedroom. What I wanted to do was shut the door and go to bed, but instead I went to the bottom of a pile of textbooks where I had put the scrapbook. I went back out to the living room and handed it to him.
He opened it to the first page where I had written in bold black marker: SOPHIA AND DARWIN WOO. He turned the pages slowly. There were black-and-white photographs and newspaper articles documenting their appearances and performances. Toward the middle, I had also clipped the glossy colour feature published in Maclean’s Magazine a year earlier. There was a photo of Darwin giving the peace sign on a stage. Another was of Sophia, smiling into the camera as a group of white-haired professors surrounded her in a semi-circle. There was also a photo of Ma, with one arm around Darwin in front of Carnegie Hall. Much smaller, beneath this, was an image of all of us at Niagara Falls. Ba was wearing his fishing cap and we were all smiling broadly.
“This is your family?” Mouse asked me, looking up from the pages.
“I’m no orphan,” I said.
“But it says here that your dad died.” He traced the line in the Maclean’s article with a finger.
“Ba got hit by a car.” He looked up at me again. I did not feel anything when I said it.
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