Disappearing Moon Cafe

by Sky Lee

  Obviously, if such a flash of defiance had happened, my great-grandmother’s steely stare would have crushed it in a second. More shrill curses would have rained upon my grandmother’s bent back.

  “And don’t believe for a moment, you foul female stench, with your modern-day thinking about rights and freedom-ah, that you’re too good for this bargain. What are you but just a woman!”

  But my great-grandmother was a woman too. What did she mean by that? Was she referring to the substance we as women have to barter away in order to live? In order to live with men? In the male order? Then, what was I referring to? How we turn on ourselves, squabbling desperately among ourselves about our common debasement? Branding self-hatred across our foreheads—I wonder how deeply it seared into Fong Mei’s flesh. And how willingly we fuel the white fire with which to scar other women. What choices did she have? Like so many hordes of women, didn’t my grandmother consent to give away her own destiny? Who but women would do that?

  A whole lifetime later, lying prone on a postpartum bed to rest my “female-bag,” I still wonder about . . . every thing, I guess. My mother has gone, and I am alone. I wonder too, about the volatile lunacy that wasn’t my great-grandmother’s alone, but lurks in our peasant backgrounds, in our rustic language. This craziness that drove many beyond the brink towards self-destruction. Agonizing passion worth more than life itself, then dragging still more along that black road of anguish and guilt after the suicide.

  An ache from the depths of my womb pulses through my body as I think back. Sadness washes over me from a deep, dark, secret pool. Staring at the ceiling—such an untouched white—I suddenly remember Morgan.

  MORGAN KEUNG CHI WONG

  1967

  “Do I have a choice?”

  I had asked Morgan that over the telephone. Nineteen years ago, I had just arrived home, dripping wet from school, when the phone rang. I was exhausted. I was piqued. My ski jacket hung heavy like lead weights, and my toes were frozen from my long trek through the snow and sludge. Having recently broken up with my steady, Terry Paling, I had lost my cosy ride home every day as well. And at that age, I was always starving, so I was not in a receptive mood.

  “Of course not!” he replied curtly. I could hear him crunching potato chips over the receiver. Morgan was actually my uncle, even though I wasn’t supposed to know that. The understanding between my parents and me was that Morgan was the notorious skirt-chasing black sheep of another branch of the family. And I was to under no circumstances have any contact with him. That was why he was calling at that particular time of the day. He knew no one would be home except me.

  To me, Morgan was quite simply a haunted man. I was seventeen at the time, and of course frightfully sentimental. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that it was Morgan who made normal guys like Terry Paling pale in comparison.

  “Gee . . . Well, I don’t know, Morg . . .” I tried to squirm out of this commitment as nicely as a nice girl could in those days, “I mean, I don’t feel like going out in weather like this just to spend another evening watching you sleuth in the university librarinth, you know!”

  How could I have possibly said what I really thought? “Morgan, at twenty-nine years old, you’re too old to be a perpetual student, and I don’t care how graduate! And besides, I just don’t feel like push-starting that stupid ancient Morgan you drive when it conks out in the god-damned snow . . .” a strong emphasis on “you know what I mean?” Cute! A Morgan driving a Morgan—both wounded, helpless dinosaurs.

  I went. My white patent go-go boots hopelessly inadequate against the elements. Miniskirted, with a rabbit-fur minicoat, my ass practically quivering right off the icy leather bucket seats. The Morgan had no heat. Sneaking sidelong glances at the munificently dashing man driving me to distraction. I just couldn’t believe that he was my uncle. I couldn’t believe his whole sordid story.

  “Well, you yourself said that my great-grandfather was supposed to have a reputation for fair dealing,” I argued in the library. “How could all this deviousness go on right under the big boss’s nose?”

  “Aahh yess! Great-grandfather . . .” Morgan replied, as if my great-grandfather was his great-grandfather. “The benevolent patriarch of Disappearing Moon. All Chinatown turns to him in times of trouble,” he murmured, seemingly to himself, while cranking the roller handle of the microfilm viewing machine. Shadows of old newspapers flew by. The air in the underground library was unbearably dry and hot, permeated with the smell of crumbling literary effort.

  He finally answered, “Well, Great-grandfather is as famous as your great-grandmother is infamous. Even after she had gotten the word loud and clear from above, she still went ahead with her secret plot. I mean she really thought she could pull it off.”

  “Oh, I still can’t believe that! There must have been easier ways to come by a baby,” I maintained. “Lots of those rich, old Chinatown guys had several wives. You know the Kees and the Chens. They had lots of local-born daughters too. If you ask me, she could have easily gotten rid of my Poh Poh, and good riddance! Even if she didn’t, in those days Gong Gong would still have been free to marry any one of them.”

  “Yeah, well, the old broad was definitely a bit of a cheapskate. Still, the family was nowhere near as rich as the Kee family. Great-grandfather was too public-minded. And what rich little local-born girl would want to be a number-two wife, when she could have had her pick of horny bachelors? Six males to each little girl in those days!” he whistled meaningfully at the impossible odds. “I hear your Gong Gong was no prize either.”

  Uh oh, another little dig, a less than kindly shove perhaps, and I pretended I was too polite to notice. Of course, I didn’t trust Morgan. Him and his sly little pen scratches on paper! Was his story the same as my story? Or should I have said, is history the same as mystery? If I had had any savoir faire at all, I would have headed for the hills, saved my skin, but this kind of scenario is exactly what keeps me glued to my seat, even today.

  Too bad for my family that money couldn’t buy long life (prosperity couldn’t buy posterity either); too bad for me, I could have simply asked. Instead of dead, silent ancestors who kept me hanging by a million possible threads, someone would have told me—I’m sure. Instead of Morgan busy fraying the tapestry, I could have claimed my righteous inheritance to a pure bloodline. I wouldn’t have fallen in love/hate with his/ my truth and wasted all these years trying to answer him.

  “O.K. Now listen!” Morgan cut in. “You want to know what I found out? It’s 1924 . . . in the heat of summer, the news rips through Chinatown like wild fire! A white woman is murdered! The prime suspect is a chinese houseboy named Wong Foon Sing! Chopsticks drop and clatter in surprise! Clumps of rice stick in throats . . .”

  “Morgue, what are you sputtering about?” I couldn’t bear to hear any more. I cringed and glanced nervously around the stacks, hoping no one had heard his embarrassing comments. Chineseness made me uncomfortable then.

  “Listen!” he repeated. “This Janet Smith murder case kicked up a lot of fuss in Vancouver. Don’t you want to know more about it?”

  “What for?” I was beginning to wonder if this vacuous pursuit of still-life wasn’t unbalancing his mind.

  “Summer! 1924 . . . remember why your great-granny had a free hand at plastering your grandma’s face against the floor whenever she felt like it? . . . Come in Manila!” Morgan had such an irritating way about him, as though on some subconscious level he was out to punish me. What had I ever done to him? Still, I crumbled like a cupcake in his hands, because I let him go on.

  “The old patriarch was too busy becoming a big-shot, muscling in on all the action to worry about daughters-in-law. Hey, when old guys in Chinatown tap you on the shoulder, and say, ‘I once shook your great-grandfather’s hand. He was a good man,’ it’s precisely because of those bizarre times. Let me tell you, the whole town went nuts! The Chinese Exclusion Act—the Day of Humiliation—and then this killing.”

  I smile
d ever so sweetly and chose not to tell him that I didn’t ever go down to Chinatown except for the very occasional family banquet. And I certainly wouldn’t ever let any dirty old man touch me! Those little old men were everywhere in Chinatown, leaning in doorways, sitting at bus stops, squatting on sidewalks. The very thought gave me the creeps.

  I looked over at Morgan to see if he had any inkling of me, but he was already in midair, springing into a high-pitched performance. The bitterness of it surprised me.

  “People became openly obsessed with splattered brain matter. At dinner tables, they might as well have been eating coagulating blood pudding. Newspapers egged them on at breakfast. More lovesick but banal diary tidbits for tea, dear?”

  He flung his arms about and squeaked out a female stereotype, “Inflammatory rumours all over this hot little town! How did our dear little Janet meet her demise? B.C. Telephone operators wore their dear little fingers to the bone, incessantly plugging in first the fantastic, then the freakish, finally the fanatical. They began to swoon on courthouse steps.”

  Then his voice turned sinister. “The crowds began to get restless and ugly. All over the land, men on soapboxes cried out, ‘It is our God-given duty to protect our poor, white, working-class maidenhood from those filthy minded, slant-eyed vermin, even if we have to string a few of ’em up by their ten-inch finger-nails. . .’”

  “Morgan,” I gasped again, my ears burning red-hot. Until then, I had been laughing nervously. I mean what else could I do? He was mad! “Pipe down, will you!” I begged.

  He had been scribbling furiously as he talked. He suddenly looked at me and grinned blithely. “How do you know,” he asked, “which of the two were going to get strung up? The poor white maidens? Or the slant-eyed vermin?”

  Morgan calmed down, but he continued to lecture at me, as though there was an entire classroom full of adoring students (female, I would imagine) behind me. In fact, I had to keep looking over my shoulders to make sure there wasn’t.

  “You know, there was once a law prohibiting chinese men from working too closely with white women, and vice versa, I suppose. But it backfired in the end because, given a choice, employers tended to hire the cheaper, more-for-their-money chinamen; and as a result, white women got protected right out of a job. By and large, this masterful bit of law-making was successfully ignored until some of the more upstanding white citizens tried to pursue it again, over Janet Smith’s corpse. This time, as you know, it was our very own great-grandfather, Wong Gwei Chang, who had a big hand in stepping in and stopping it.”

  “It was a historical landmark in British Columbia’s usual pattern of interracial relations,” said Morgan. “Chinatown fought back the rising tide of virulent hatred headed their way, and for a change, they won!”

  “The ‘murder’ itself was a simple, though unsolved ‘hole in the head’ story, but it told a lot about Vancouver then. The intrigues and plots, the coverups and scandal, which flourished as a result of a young white female body, clearly revealed the seething hysteria that, up until then, had successfully remained the suppressed sexual undertones of Vancouver’s church-goers. The story had something for every kind of righteousness. For those who hated chinese and thought they were depraved and drug-infested. And for those who hated the rich and thought they were depraved and drug-infested.”

  “And Chinatown in 1924,” Morgan continued, “seventeen years after the race riots of 1907, had become quite the thriving, respectable little establishment. The streets were clean. Mostly paved. They even had street lamps. It was a self-contained community of men: sold its own suspenders, had everything from its own water pipes to its own power elite. There were a few things in short supply once in a while, like when registration cards for chinese were suddenly deemed necessary. So tempers were short, for instance. And only one thing missing—women!”

  “Oh,” I sighed, “is that all?”

  “Yeah,” he piped in, “who needs ’em!”

  I had been listening, draped over the desk, my chin cupped in my hands, idolizing his face, breathing in his after-shave lotion. It certainly wasn’t what Morgan said which interested me. After all, this private inquest could have only impressed him, since he actually lived in the very basement where this murder had taken place. A bright Sani-Queen washer and dryer now blocked the exact spot where illustrious legs once littered the floor. Morgan grew up there, and after his mother remarried, she left him the fading glory of this notorious Shaughnessy address, 1414 Osler Avenue. Ubiquitous irony? Well then, life must be full of vexations! But again, I bet there was a simpler explanation for this too.

  Like, I’m willing to bet that Morgan’s father, Wong Ting An, who was a pure businessman at heart, really did pick up the house for a song, regardless of its history, when real estate was real depressed towards the end of the Depression. Now, whether he got sentimental about the good old days, who can say?

  Yet Morg has always maintained that his dad acquired it from a german family with four children, who couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, even to a chinaman, because it was haunted by a willowy, tuneful scottish nightingale.

  I had to ask, “Why didn’t she haunt you guys, Morgue?”

  “Why?” he echoed, and I waited. By the tilt of his head, I could almost see him pluck a suitable explanation right out of the air. “Because . . . ah, because she and the chinese houseboy were actually friends. And we’re chinese too, you see.”

  “Your mother’s not. She’s french-canadian.”

  “You know, Ying, for a supposedly intelligent girl, your thinking is awfully one-dimensional. No matter where you turn, we’re all related in the end.”

  Morgan implied that since he had both proximal and apparitional insights into this murder, he was going to make “a killing” by naming the person who had committed the most spectacular, unsolved scandal-page murder in Vancouver. Fascinated, I rested my chin on my interlaced fingers and coyly sighed again. He said it was a risky business though. If word got out, there were still plenty of people who’d take drastic measures to keep their grisly secrets.

  I wonder if Morgan ever realized that he didn’t need to embellish his task with romance to keep me at his side, evening after evening, in that library. It occurred to me perhaps he needed these flights of fancy to keep himself there. But as for myself, I only needed to stand close to a heroic man, with an upturned collar and a burning cigarette, who’d smile down on me tenderly. After all, it’s written: “When placed face to face with one’s superior, one’s ego can do nothing but declare love!”

  JANET SMITH

  1924

  When the scottish nursemaid died in a most unnatural way, and the only other person who would admit to being with her in the stately manor was a chinese named Wong Foon Sing, patriarch Wong Gwei Chang and his cigar-puffing clique in Chinatown immediately saw the writing on the wall. They were only too aware of the obscene implications of this situation. Those whites who hated yellow people never needed an excuse to spit on chinese. So the idea of a young, lone, yellow-skinned male standing over the inert body of a white-skinned female would send them into a bloodthirsty frenzy. The first instincts of the chinese told them to board up their businesses and barricade Pender Street, with enough rice and salted fish stockpiled to outlast a siege.

  “Victims,” said Morgan, “always being the first to consent to being victimized.”

  Late that August night, nervously huddled at the back of Disappearing Moon, the old men’s memories kept flickering back to the white mobs of 1907. Back to the rioting with clubs, the rocks hurled through the air, the sound of splintering glass. If that happened again, they’d have much more to lose. Many of them had already passed many-times-ten years over here. No more could they say, “I’ve seen too much of their white hate,” pack up, sell out and move back like so many others before them. More and more, memories of the old villages had faded into a vague distance, too far to retrace now. And their roots had sunk deeper in this land, so deep that to pull up stakes w
ould mean death.

  Old Chu, once a miner, hunched in the corner, wheezing like a wounded bear. After a slurp from his coffee cup, he suddenly yelped, “We tang people will fight. We won’t be pushed around this time. The best defence is to show our strength now. They wouldn’t dare come to bother us. Damn their mother’s cunt!” However, even this effort seemed too much for the old gent. He fell back coughing, his face a cooked-shrimp pink!

  Wong Gwei Chang puffed on his havana like an irrepressible volcano, his eyes guardedly neutral. His starched collar stood valiantly at attention against his massive, perspiring neck.

  “Umph,” the patriarch cleared his throat, “we don’t need to be so hasty. Panicking at the mere mention of rumours. Let’s not overreact, at least until we find out the real story!”

  The heavy veil of cigar and cigarette smoke swirled around the back booth in silence for another few minutes. Everyone looked worried and grey.

  Then, Mr. Niu, the editor of the local Great Han newspaper, offered up some more information. He said, “There’ve already been some reports of . . . of discord . . .” The men shrivelled noticeably. They all leaned over towards Mr. Niu, who was slight of build; a studious man with glasses and a nervous squint. He piped out, “. . . from a japanese fruit and vegetable pedlar. I understand his story to be as follows. One morning, his truck breaks down on the south end of the Connaught bridge. So he climbs out to fix it, thereby slowing down the traffic. As he is kneeling beside his truck, this huge white woman in a green dress with big flowers suddenly jumps out of a car. She starts beating him with her heavy purse even before he can get up. She yells out something like, ‘Yeurr stunkee, yeller, slimee snake! Marrk me werrds, yee willna’ gitawa witit!’ The driver of the car, perhaps her husband, just sits behind the wheel and watches. Then she jumps back in, and they drive off, just like that.”