Seid Quan is scanning the room, looking for anyone he knows, when he feels a gnarled hand on his shoulder.
“How are you, young man?”
“Mr. Yip. I’m very well. How about you?”
The tailor grunts. “Not so great. The arthritis is getting worse, and I haven’t been working as much as I used to. I’m sorry I haven’t been around to see you when you come in to clean. I’ve been relying on my brother to do most of the work.” He smiles. “But I hear you’ve been busy. Your wife had a baby?”
He blushes. “Yes. A girl—Yun Wo. Everybody is healthy.”
“Good. Good.” Mr. Yip cranes his neck for a look around the room. “Ah, it’s old Mr. Wong. I should say hello before he decides to get his shirts made somewhere else.”
Seid Quan walks over to the mah-jong table and peers at the players’ tiles. He hears a familiar voice behind him and turns around.
“I can get you anything you want, brother!” Lim waves his arms at a man standing in front of him. He blinks his eyes twice and shakes his head before continuing. “You and me and these useless drunks, we’re family. You just need to ask. How do you think I can afford all this?” He gestures down at his shiny black shoes, the perfectly sewn cuff of his glen plaid trousers. “I can get you fellows everything you want: women, Scotch whisky, even some of the good stuff.” He pauses as he looks into the stony eyes of his companion. “You know,” he whispers loudly, “dope. Don’t ever sell anything you don’t use yourself, that’s my motto.”
Seid Quan looks around, wonders if anyone else has heard Lim’s speech. He hurries over and grasps his friend by the elbow.
“Lim. Good to see you. Let’s go for a walk, get some fresh air.”
“I don’t want to leave. This is a great party. Just great.” Lim smiles widely at the room.
“Maybe you just need some sleep, maybe something to—”
The butcher has overturned the mah-jong table, sending tiles sailing through the air and skittering across the floor. Someone pushes someone else, and men start shouting obscenities, throwing glasses, shoes, anything at each other. Other men push past and pour into the street.
“All this noise, the police will surely come now,” someone shouts as Seid Quan runs down the stairs, losing his grip on Lim’s sleeve. He slips into an alley, pokes his head around the corner to see if Lim is anywhere in sight. Men are running into every alley and street, but in this dark, it is impossible to see if one of them is Lim. He turns to walk home and breathes the night air. Into the blue light.
He has come to understand the movements of the boats, the sway that means a storm is coming from the west, the rocking that means another ship, miles away, is slicing through the water at the same time. He lies on his bunk, listens to the breathing of the three other men in his cabin. He places his hand on a pocket in his pants, feels for the wad of papers he will need to re-enter Canada. At the port, they will look him over, ask him questions about where he has been and why. They will mark his return on a piece of paper—one more little check mark on a list of comings and goings.
This last trip, he played with Yun Wo, a serious-faced three-year-old who asked him alarmingly adult questions about his life in Vancouver. “Do white men treat you badly? How many hours a week do you work? Why do you stay?”
He helped his wife cook meals (she laughed at the clumsy way he chopped vegetables and claimed she could do better with her bare hands), poked around in their garden. He showed her the pile of bills he had brought back, and she went with him to his great-uncle’s house to pay the rest of his debt to the village. As they left, he whispered in her ear, “It’s all going to be better now. You’ll see.”
He held her at night, his hand resting on her solid hip. He watched her sleep, noted the way her mouth fell open as she exhaled, the movement of her eyeballs beneath the lids. It was warm, as he remembered, and he shed layers of wool, relishing the lightness of linen and cotton, sun on skin.
He sits up in his bunk, hitting his head on the low ceiling. He feels around in his bag until he pulls out a knitted grey scarf—Shew Lin’s goodbye present. He wraps it around his neck and over his chin and lies back down, noting the tilt of the boat to the left and wondering what it means.
“Congratulations, little brother! This surely predicts a long, lucky life for you!”
“You’re a good man.”
“I’ll never get my hair cut anywhere else again.”
“Hey, he gives a good shave, too!”
Seid Quan stands in the middle of a crowd of men at the clan association offices, now located in a newly purchased house on Keefer north of Gore, shakily holding a glass of rye. He knew before he arrived that everyone had heard about his new ownership of the barbershop and that even more knew about the birth of his second daughter in China, but he did not know they would hold a party for him, complete with food supplied from the Bamboo Terrace.
“Seid Quan, we need a speech!”
He blinks rapidly, wonders what he will say when, usually, he says so little. Perhaps, I fear I will forget what my wife looks like or I am so lonely that I stay in my barbershop after closing until late at night, pretending that I am still cutting hair. He walks to the front of the room, turns and faces the crowd of eager, half-drunk men staring at him, waiting for the words that mean time here is not wasted and their lifetimes spent chasing success will count for something in the end. Seid Quan opens his mouth to speak.
“I am only a man. I don’t feel successful, and I’m not sure I ever will. This,” and he waves his hand around the room, at the streets of Chinatown beyond the windows, “is what I’m living. I make the best of it, as you do, and I don’t think I deserve a party all to myself just for that.”
He looks around him. The men are crestfallen, so disappointed with his speech that their mouths are gaping open. Some shift uneasily from foot to foot. Others cough.
“But,” he begins again, loudly, “here we are, together despite all the bad things we have experienced in this country: washing dirty laundry, poor wages, living with these white ghosts.” The crowd snickers. “And yet we still succeed. We have improved our villages, fed our families and helped tame this wild place. We will go on and conquer anything in our paths, brothers, I promise you that. Thank you.”
The applause crashes over Seid Quan, and he steps backward, as if pushed by the sounds of clapping hands and uninhibited hoots. The men surround him until he can see nothing more than their blurred faces, the movement of their hands slapping him, shaking his hands, like birds. He begins to laugh. He sucks his stomach in, stands up straight and plunges forward into the crowd, allowing the pull of the party to lead him farther into the throng.
A weathered wood house. Five small bedrooms, three up and two down. A fireplace in the living room, where the men gather and burn newspapers, scrap wood from construction sites, pieces of things they find and do not need.
Seid Quan’s room is upstairs, in the back, its window facing the vegetable garden they once tried so hard to keep going. When Jimmy, a younger man from the clan association, told Seid Quan about the empty room in his rented house, Seid Quan immediately thought it was an extravagance. But then, he realized that he needed to leave his room in the boarding house on Pender Street (a room where he had tried to accumulate nothing, where he only slept and, sometimes, when he couldn’t help it, thought). This place, even though the floors are bare and the siding is beginning to rot, is still a house where he can do as he pleases and where no strangers peer at him as he moves down the hallways. It is more expensive here, but he can still save some money, as the profits from the shop are growing. He splits expenses with Jimmy and the others, each shopping and cooking in turn.
None of the men have had much time, and the yard has grown over with weeds and grass. The vegetables are still there, lurking, half-unseen, among a riot of plants that no one knows the names of. Five old kitchen chairs are set out in a circle, and a full ashtray sits on a tree stump in the middle. Seid Quan’
s chair is the farthest from the house.
Even on sunny days, the ground squelches underfoot, and their trouser hems are always wet.
Seid Quan has just received a letter from his mother. Without wasting words, she suggests that he might want to plan on coming back once more, or perhaps twice, to see if he can conceive a son before his wife grows too old. “Shew Lin is twenty-five now,” his mother writes, “and you must come back soon, for she will have only so many chances before she becomes dried up.” She writes about Shew Lin as if she were a breeding pig.
He counts his money and writes back. “I cannot afford the trip home for a long time, Mother. I would have to close the store while I’m gone, and we would all lose money. Coming back cannot be my first priority.”
He smells the odour of preserved dace and rice, hears the sound of a crowd of men cooking together in one kitchen, on one coal-burning stove. He steps into his slippers and places the letter into the pocket of his work pants so he will not forget to take it to the post office in the morning. He glances out the window, sees a red-haired child in a striped sweater cycling slowly up and down the dirt alley.
“Brother, come eat!”
He pulls his chair up to the table and sits down. His roommates are laughing, teasing each other, making faces behind each others’ backs. Another trip, he thinks, and another child I will never see.
Seid Quan wonders if he will ever go home for good, or if he will always be stuck in this land that shimmers with rain and is not quite dream, not quite day. He looks behind him at his empty shop and then out the big front window at the sheets of almost opaque rain.
“No one will be out today,” he says to himself. He listens for the echo of his own voice bouncing off the walls. “Not even to go to the barber.” A stray dog lopes across the street, pausing to sniff the wet air with its even wetter muzzle.
He thinks he will count the combs, maybe dig out the old hairballs that collect in the corners and between the tiles. As he turns to walk to the back, he hears the bell on the front door.
A tall white man, dressed in a dark grey raincoat and hat, stands in the doorway, water streaming off his shoulders and pooling around his rubber boots. He shakes his head, and tiny drops spray across the room, hitting the mirrors and Seid Quan right between the eyes. All Seid Quan can see of his face is his jutting and pointy chin, clean-shaven.
In English, Seid Quan says, “Here for a cut, sir? Have a seat.” He gestures to the chair closest to the door.
The man stands still and breathes heavily.
“What can I help you with, sir? I do a good shave, too. But I don’t think you need one.”
The dripping man steps forward and holds out his hand. “You should leave now, lock up and go home,” he whispers. “There’s no point in boarding up the windows. Don’t even try to warn the others. There’s no time.”
Seid Quan steps backward. “What do you mean?”
“A mob is coming. They want to scare you and make you leave. Get out. Hide in your cellar. Just run away.” He backs out, pushing the door open with his hip. He walks out into the waterlogged street, turns the corner and is gone.
Seid Quan blinks nervously. He has heard stories of the 1907 riot many times and wonders if this could be something just as destructive. However, this warning from a stranger could be a joke, or a way of luring him out of his shop so that goons can drag him into the alley and beat him. But he’s not sure, so he runs to the safe in the back room and stuffs his trouser pockets with cash. He throws his barber’s coat on a chair and leaves, turning the lock as far as it can go. He runs down the wet street, thinking that all the others who can see him through their windows must think he’s mad. He slows to a walk, his face flushed with embarrassment, until he hears the sound of breaking glass. Not daring to look behind, he throws himself through puddles until he arrives at the rented house. He locks the front door carefully behind him and stands in the corner by the window, hidden by the curtains from the street.
It starts so quickly that Seid Quan does not even have a chance to take off his wet trousers. He stares down the hill through a crack in the curtains, his arms wrapped around his body as if he is afraid that he will crumble. He holds his breath.
Outside, a dozen white men are throwing bricks and stones through the windows of all the shops, dragging boxes of produce and bags of laundry out onto the sidewalk, where they overturn them into the mud. Seid Quan can see Chinese men running away, ducking into the alleys only they know so well, disappearing into skinny gaps between buildings. Some of the white men chase them, but the Chinese always manage to slip away from the crowd and vanish. Seid Quan sighs with relief.
He cannot see his barbershop from here, only the storefronts of Canada Produce and Yip Tailors. Seid Quan has never seen such violence first-hand and is afraid that Chinatown will fall, be flattened to its very foundations. The windows are all broken, and the white men have started to laugh and pound each other on the backs. Seid Quan closes his eyes and slides down the wall until he is sitting on the unfinished wooden floor. There’s no point in watching anymore.
When the white men leave, chests puffed out, he and the others run into the streets. Seid Quan searches for any hurt men, poking his head into doorways and alleys. He can see overturned furniture and graffiti through broken windows. Rain falls steadily, soaking the men who are returning to their shops. Seid Quan wipes off his dripping face with his sleeve and looks up at the grey sky, now somehow greyer than it’s ever been before. No one speaks.
An hour later, when Seid Quan and the others have determined that there are no casualties, he finally walks down the street. He is afraid to see what has happened to the shop. Mr. Yip weeps on the sidewalk at the sight of his smashed sewing machine. Seid Quan turns away. Better to pretend he has not seen.
He stares at the barbershop. The big front window is smashed. One of the chairs has been wrenched from the screws holding it to the floor, and the front of his safe in the back has been dented. The money is safely hidden in his room at the house, and all his razors and scissors are unharmed. He leans against the counter and sighs. It could have been worse, he thinks. But why should I be thankful for that?
Mr. Mah, who owns the café across the street, pokes his head through the broken window. “Is it bad?”
“Just the windows and this chair.”
“Good. They took my whole cash register and tried to get into the apartment.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, me too. Listen, we’re going to have a meeting in the morning at church. This isn’t even half as bad as the last big riot, but still. Old Mr. Wong says we should lobby the city to pay for the damage. The others will need you if we have to write a letter.”
Seid Quan nods. “I’ll come.”
“Good. I’m going to the lumberyard to see if there are any boards. I’ll grab you some.”
Mr. Mah hurries off. Seid Quan begins to sweep up. He can hear the fall of hammers and the sawing of wood. No one will even notice, he thinks, because they just want Chinatown to disappear.
He sits in the Hong Kong Café, drinking his coffee and looking at the cracked mirror behind the counter. One month after the riot, he thinks, everything made of glass remains broken, even now. He sees himself, a man with large ears and thin, upright shoulders. He sips his coffee and takes a bite of his apple tart. When he looks up again, he sees that his face looks different, but right then, amid the noise and commotion of the café, he cannot put his finger on it. He finishes his snack, nods to Mr. Mah behind the counter, and returns to his barbershop.
Later that night, as he is sweeping up the last of the hairs on the floor, he looks up into one of his own mirrors. He suddenly sees what has been confusing him all day: his eyes, once dark brown, have begun to turn grey.
The rumours start as whispers that snake their way through the streets of Chinatown, bouncing off the walls of buildings and ending as suspicions, not quite groundless, in the heads of men who have learned to fear
the worst.
They’re sending us all back.
The illegal ones are going to be thrown in jail.
There are spies everywhere.
Seid Quan is not immune. He has heard many rumblings over the years, but this time, it is getting worse. There is no labour shortage anymore, and the whites want the jobs they once rejected and threw to the hungry masses of Chinamen, who still work for half-price. The Chinese men, sitting in his customers’ chairs, their heads tilted precariously back as he shaves them, ask him for information, ask him what the newspapers are printing, what the radio declares. To them, he seems to hold a golden key that unlocks the long words, the sounds that seem to flow into one another with no pause for breath.
Men mobilize, hold protests and march down Pender Street. The grocers strike, and the wives of the West End and Shaughnessy find themselves without lettuce and onions. But this, as Seid Quan knows, is futile, for none of these Chinamen is of any consequence to anyone. They are not citizens and they do not vote, so, like the generation before them who died, weathered and forgotten, on the cold rail lines, their suffering is barely noticed. The Chinamen have families—mothers, wives, children—but they are unseen, hidden away in small houses in China, where politicians can ignore them and disregard their well-being. Seid Quan writes letters to the mayor, the prime minister, even the papers.
“If only you could live as we do for one whole day,” he writes, “you would see what we suffer. After the riot in 1907, the government promised us protection. Now is the time for that protection. Let us live as freely as white men.”
End of East, The Page 4