Paper Teeth

by Lauralyn Chow

  When she was a child, my mother followed the end of the Calgary Stampede parade to the fairgrounds. As an adult, she traps my friends in her spiral stories of the past. She speaks of chicken coops and candy her mother made from dried yams and fishing in the river from a raft. Entranced by these exotic revelations, inevitably, some pie-eyed innocent asks, “What part of China do you come from?” Mumma, so excited she almost jiggles the hook too fast, blurts out, “Calgary. Sixth Avenue, kitty corner to the old Firehall.” But the kitty corner stuff no one understands because her laugh uses too much breath.

  Chinese walls fit snugly against the papered drywall. Carl Thomas, a new lawyer in the office, came from a law firm that represents the company one of my clients wants to acquire. Carl may have confidential information that should not be revealed to me. I picture Carl, dossiers stamped “confidential” rolled tight into white paper perm rods suspended in the mousse and blow-dry of his remarkable big hair. Otherwise unremarkable Carl came to my office late this afternoon, with his remarkable big hair and his message: “Just wanted to say hullo. No hard feelings, Liz. Don’t say a word. You’re behind the Chinese wall.”

  Someone wrote a story, told a story to create Chinese walls, a legal fiction, but Carl put his hands up and felt along an imaginary border by my door. An unremarkable mime too, I thought, as he turned the imaginary key to his zipped lips. I picture Carl grasping the edges of a transparent artifice. I explained to my client that I would not talk to Carl. At the same time, to protect his former client, Carl would not discuss his work with me. Like dogs marking trees, our respective offices become off-limits to each other. Our assistants also cannot talk about work. Carl and I act as though we work independently, separated by physical barriers. The strategy is so much intellectual legerdemain, a little bit more the latter than the former. Chinese walls as transparent artifice. But Business. Is. Business as business. Does. And I am stuck with Chinese walls.

  Chinese walls? Taught in law school as a when why and how chapter, but nothing about the name. Too embarrassed to ask, I looked into the origin of the naming, discreetly. Nothing. Perhaps something to do with the Great Wall, so vast that astronauts photograph it from outer space. Or is the slant inscrutability?

  “So, you’ve brought out the old Chinese walls, eh?” Sharing one gypsum office wall with the lawyer next door is almost all I can tolerate of Rick Bulcan. He stands in my door frame, his pocketed fists fanning the pleats in his pants. “You’re lucky to have held onto your client,” he says, hands in constant motion, squeezing the brass out of the doorknob. “Although, I don’t know, maybe not so lucky. Deals like this always turn ugly. Blow up. Then, you just bury yourself in paper and hope the stuff flung by the fan doesn’t hit you.” He laughs, “But it will. Chinese walls. One day, you’re building them, and the next day, you’re being sued right down to bare bones. Disbarred. Scorched. Good old Chinese walls,” he says, slapping my doorframe. “Hey Liz, can you do this?” he says, flips a grill of imaginary burgers with several turns of his wrist, “You should practice. This has to come to you naturally, you know, like you’re eager to ask customers: ‘Do you want fries with that?’ Hah!” I hear the suckling pops his cigar-nursing mouth makes, and look up to see his back retreating in suspendered animation. “I’m outta here,” he calls.

  I know his smirk. Every colleague smiles when they say, “the old Chinese walls,” “bringing out the old Chinese walls.” Rick’s voice, earlier in the day, dragging his lunch buddy drift net through the hall, entangling his friends to go for lunch: “Yeah, pretty redundant all right — Chinese walls and a Chinese girl. Made in China.”

  The imaginary edifice transforms to a warning. Does it? Does it say: Chinese girl, shore up these walls. Check your materials. Use twice as many nails. And support beams. But if your walls prove unwieldy, or too strong, prepare for the mocking you’ll suffer. Chinese walls will never come down. Or do all imaginary walls come with anxiety wainscoting?

  What a name. In the United States, they now call the same device a screen, or a Cone of Silence. We may soon. I see a black- and-white image of Maxwell Smart, television secret agent, on his shoe phone sitting under the campish glass cone with a cardboard sign, “Cone of Silence.” I try to concentrate, tap code into the keyboard: special resolution, carrying on business under the firm name and style. Name and style. The naming of the daily special at the Oriental Moon Cafe.

  I am eight years old, walking to the Dan Dee Confectionary for a pop, and to wait for Dad. Only six days and twenty-three hours until my next lesson with torturous Mrs. “pree-tend like thee feengers go float-ting over that pee-ano” Vichalsky. As I round the corner, I check out the daily special at the Oriental Moon Cafe. Not again. I walk next door and pull on the metal bar running diagonally across the screen window, “Drink 7-Up,” it says, but that’s not my drink.

  “Hey Gao Buck, you got the sign wrong. Again.”

  I call him Gao Buck because Ah Bahk means respected uncle, and Gao is the closest thing to his Chinese name that he and Dad think I will remember. He wears a long grey smock with “Dan Dee Confec.” embroidered in red cursive on the chest pocket, and has impossibly black hair for his age that falls in a gentle poof over the edge of his right-eye glasses frame. I smell his smell of cold cream and sugar.

  “Gao Buck, it’s sweet and sour pork, not sweat and sour. Sweet and sour. No one would order sweat and sour pork.”

  Gao Buck writes the sign for the Daily Special, in English, for Norman Tsai who runs the Oriental Moon next door. Every day, he prints the special in block letters on a piece of paper, and tapes it onto a plywood sandwich board that stands on the sidewalk. Norman Tsai has terrible printing, worse than a Grade 1 kid. But I’ve watched him write the daily specials in Chinese on pink pieces of paper he puts into the pockets inside the menus, and he writes those neatly and very quickly. I don’t know what the specials are, but I know good penmanship.

  Last week, I dragged Gao Buck out to the sidewalk to show him that week’s mistake. He bent down, shading his eyes from the sun, and read, “Daily Special — Chop Suey.” Before I could reply, a young couple got out of a van in front of the restaurant. She craned her head over the strip of stores like it was the last place in the world she wanted to be, especially doubtful of the restaurant window.

  “Are you sure this is the place?” she asked out of the side of her mouth.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, pointing at the sign. “This has got to be it. Look. Daily Special — Chop Suzy.”

  He let out a hoot, and throwing his arm around the woman, they sailed into the Oriental Moon.

  “Seeee?” I said, stretching that one syllable into an aria of righteous indignation. Gao Buck stood with his arms crossed as I stood in front of him, my finger pointing at the sign, the other hand balled into the non-existent curve of my hip.

  “Oh well. Poor Suzy,” he said and walked back into the Dan Dee Confectionary.

  There is a moist sugary aroma in the Dan Dee Confectionary, like The Old Store. Wooden floorboards wince under the linoleum floor tiles as I walk slowly to the pop cooler. There’s no one else in the store, so I won’t be rushed. I turn to face Gao Buck, who must smile in his sleep. The idea of sweating, sour pork makes my stomach flip flop.

  “You’re not gonna change the Sweat and Sour sign. Are you,” I say.

  “That’s right. I’m not changing. Uncle Norman decides on the daily special. People come. They like it. Pineapple chicken ball, egg roll, deep-fried shrimp. You have to give them what they want. I don’t decide. Uncle Norman decides.”

  I turn my back on him and roll my eyes up until my eyeballs hurt.

  The lid of the enormous soda pop cooler feels heavy, opens like a casket on hinges that sound like question marks. Near the top, narrow rows of steel with rounded edges suspend glass bottles by their ridged necks. The motor chugs loudly to keep cold rivulets of water running down the bottle sides. The cooler hasn’t been filled up, so there’s some play in the bottles. I lift t
hem, ever so slightly by the top of their necks, move them around the steel maze. Two orange pops to the very top, a cream soda and a root beer to the middle, one ginger ale to the row of Pepsi-Cola Gao Buck arranges so carefully. Add to that row three grape pops that only dorks and babies drink, for the sweat and sour pork thing. There. A clear path for my bottle, the bottle cap with the pretty picture, the one that calls my name. I move the bottle to the launching pad over on the left, its steel sleeve wrapping three-quarters of the way around the neck. I dig in my jeans pocket as I focus on the coin slot, a round hole mounted vertically against a matching piece of solid metal. I put my quarter up to the coin slot, hold it there for a second with my thumb. I barely move my thumb, the magic tone of coin slotting hollow down a metal slit. Klek, klek. I grasp the cold, wet neck of the bottle. Heave, I hear the scrape of glass on metal. The sleeve falls back to earth. Kchunk. Presto. A Tahiti Treat rabbit.

  As I line up the neck in the bottle opener, I read, “Gray Beverages. Bttld. in Canada.” I pivot on my heels.

  “Hey, Gao Buck. Look at this.” I show him the bottle. “If this stuff is made in Canada, how come they call it Tahiti Treat? Do they drink this stuff in Tahiti? Do they really think it’s a treat?”

  “I don’t know, Lizzie.” He pauses for a moment. “Maybe. Do you think they do?” He leans on the glass counter top and peers down at the small case boxes of chocolate bars on the shelves inside the counter. “Look at that, eh?” He points to one box of chocolate bars. “Do you think Cubans eat that block of chopped nuts and chocolate for lunch? Do you think that’s what they call, Lunch, in Cuba? And look, you eat that,” he says, pointing to the brightest box, turquoise, with red letters on a white background, “Do you think pink jelly candy covered in chocolate is what little girls like you in Turkey call, Delight? ‘Oooo, gimme a piece of Delight, please!’ Do you? Is that what you think they say?”

  Gao Buck cups his elbows with his hands and leans on the counter towards me, giving me his “I think you should pay attention” face. My lips press against each other, just like they do when Mumma feels the need to lecture me. “It’s just a name, Little One. Tahiti Treat. Cuban Lunch. Turkish Delight. Use your head. It’s just a name.”

  Hmmm, I think, then ask, “Gao Buck, are you coming back to church?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Why you ask?”

  “You should come back. You know, those people haven’t shown up in ages. I don’t think they’re coming anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nope. They stopped coming. Well, not before they keyed Uncle Malmo’s car, and not before they said some really bad stuff, but they’ve stopped showing up now. But then lots of people like you stopped coming. You should come back.”

  “We’ll see, Lizzie.”

  “You know what made them stop? Benny Pon’s grandma. Yeah, Benny’s grandma stood up, one Sunday, right in the middle of the service, just after those men called our dad some really Bad Names when he went to the back to talk to them. She stood up and turned around, and said something to them in some language I don’t know. Not Chinese. She pointed her cane at them, and she yelled something, I dunno what. Not many words though, and they took off, like, bam. They just took off, and haven’t come back. So you should come back.”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  Benny Pon’s grandma, I haven’t thought of her in the longest time, white hair in a bob, and the bluest eyes, as the office air conditioning shuts down for the night. She spoke Chinese, wrote Chinese, was a regular at church. She was just one of the other kid’s grandmas. I thought she was an old Chinese woman with white hair and blue eyes, never thought otherwise, but now I don’t know. Now, Chinese walls obscure everything.

  With the air conditioning off, the heat of the day bleeds through the walls and floor of my office. I better not forget to throw out my Styrofoam-plated chef salad on the credenza before I leave. I pull my silk scarf off the coat hanger and tie it loosely around my neck, stiff from sitting all day and most of the night. Is Chinese wall just a name? Is the wall made of rundle stone from a quarry near Canmore, Alberta but covered in tapestries embroidered with Chinese dragons, much the same as souvenir snow globes of Mount Robson are Made in China? Use your head, I think, Is it really just a name? What do I know about Chinese walls? What do I know about China?

  “That’s a funny question,” I hear Mumma saying to me twenty-five years ago. I pick raspberries, try not to get too many scratches on my arms. On all fours, she thins the carrot patch. She kneels back on her haunches and rubs the back of her yellow and green gardening glove gently across her forehead. “What do I know about China? Well, aren’t you learning about China in school? You should ask your teacher. Or look China up in the encyclopedia. I don’t know anything about China that I wouldn’t have to first read about in a book. Nothing important, anyway. What you need to know about China, I’m sure you will learn at school. Go ask your father.”

  “Dad?”

  Dad came to Canada as a little boy, after the first World War. What he remembers about China parallels what I know about Canada at age eight. My house, my dog, my friends. He had a boxer dog, he says, but he doesn’t remember its name. Maybe it didn’t have a name, he says. “We didn’t treat animals the same way you treat Pom-Pom.” He remembers being told by Uncle Sonny’s mother to follow Uncle Sonny home from the market and school because he could be distracted in an instant, so absent-minded, he left a trail of belongings behind him wherever he went. Dad laughs, “I picked up Sonny’s things for ages. One week his books would be on the road, the next week, I’d be picking his sandals out of the gutter.” This is not a stretch to believe, as I picture Uncle Sonny sitting on his veranda in the summer, listening to American baseball on his transistor radio, a half-eaten sandwich, paper notes scattered like confetti, and a homemade paper dragon marionette needing to be re-strung lying on the chrome-sided Formica table beside him.

  “What about your mom?” I ask. Dad came to Canada to join his father, but his mother stayed in China. “What did she look like?”

  He pauses. “I don’t remember,” he says. “I don’t remember what she looked like.”

  “You don’t have a photo?”

  “No. I suppose if I did I would remember. I remember her voice, and a birthmark she had on her palm, her left hand, but not her face. Why do you want to know about China?”

  “What happened to your mother?”

  “Well, a little while after I came to Canada, she died. My father told me she died of a broken heart.”

  “What does that mean, broken heart? Did she have a heart attack?”

  “They told me she died of a broken heart, that’s what they told me. But let me tell you about being in Canada.”

  I hate this part. He always wants to talk about how his father and the uncles came to Canada and went to southern Saskatchewan. After Dad arrived, he went to a parochial school, the only school in town, for the better part of a year, finished one school year, then stopped to work in the restaurant they ran in White Rose. He tells me he had two shirts, one to wear and one to wash. He tells me about the men wearing robes and their polished leather oxfords, with square toe caps, the same shoes that would imprint the floors of the town church, and the fields for the picnic box socials. He tells me about their rallies in Regina, outside Moose Jaw, all over southern Saskatchewan to sell memberships, the fires, and a friend of Uncle Sonny’s dad, deaf, trapped one night in an abandoned rail car, waiting for the fire to die down. He tells me that after that night, the deaf man feared the stars in the sky at night, but became even more afraid of being alone in daylight, and square-toed leather oxfords. Dad’s tongue and breath can’t pull the sound, “kl,” particularly in succession, through the chords of his voice box. Instead of listening, I focus on what cookie dough tastes like, smashed windows in the restaurant and the Chinese laundry, sugar and butter, people being attacked in the middle of the day with the irons from their own laundry business, soft raisins and chocolate chips. An
d the men coming into the restaurant, trying to bait Dad’s dad and the uncles into a fight so it could be self-defence, toasted coconut and walnuts.

  The bony elbow of eight-year-old me, resting on the table, my hand covers my mouth and my nostrils. I can hear myself breathing. Then Dad winds down, like he always does, and talks about coming to Alberta and meeting “your mother the angel” in the basement of the Chinese United Church. How Grandma, when she met him, wanted to fatten him up with pastries and cream. How he has his own store, but he’s concerned that pretty soon, people won’t shop that way anymore, so he will have to look ahead for something else. How hard, how very hard you must work, like he does, to get ahead.

  “So I don’t remember much about China, Little One. But, a song that men building bridges, or temples, or big buildings used to sing. It went, ‘Hey-ah, Ho-ah, Guey gum nay koang-ah.’ Without big machines to do the work, no cement trucks, no excavators, no cranes, they used manpower, in groups, to do the heavy work. The song gave them the rhythm they needed to pull together. Like tug-of-war.”

  “What does that mean, that hey-ah ho-ah stuff?”

  “Well, that first part is just like ‘hey you’. The rest means, ‘Did the devil make you poor?’ you know, Stupid. Unlucky. Did the devil make you so poor that you have to work so hard?”

  Outside my window, in the building across from this one, the last floor lit by a row of lights, darkens. I turn to the computer screen and tap, In witness whereof, the parties hereto set their hands and seals. I think, when this file is over, it’s over, and I won’t have to think about Chinese walls. What I remember about China from school is the Boxer Rebellion, just the name, which always calls to mind my dad’s boxer dog and Uncle Sonny’s sandals. I set the dredgers a little deeper on the floor of my mind. Studying China in Grade Three meant an afternoon party where the students walked around the classroom in white ankle socks, eating Chinese take-out, with fortune cookies for dessert. And making dragons, gluing elbow macaroni scales, gilt with spray-paint, to an outline of a construction paper dragon.