by Sky Lee
“Dressed already!” exclaimed Bea. “Have you been waiting for us?”
“I’ve been looking forward to it, but I haven’t been waiting that long,” I said, smiling widely at her. My lipstick felt dried on. I didn’t stand up though. I hadn’t moved in five hours and was afraid I would collapse again. Still, I knew I would have to eventually, so I started to wiggle my toes to get some circulation going.
“Brrr! It’s cold in here.” Bea looked at my thick cardigan over my dress. I caught and held her eyes, my face unstained. I liked to dress thickly, to hide myself. Lots of underwear to give myself shape; no, depth. I smiled uncannily to myself.
“Do you like this dress?” I asked innocently, knowing full well that it was too fancy for Keeman’s crowd, that it was my mother all over again. My mother, long gone! Ran away and hid, she did, she did!
“You look nice. Now come on! A few of us are going to Ho Ho’s first.” Beatrice already marching on, anxious to get going. The house got on her nerves now, but she didn’t get beyond the front door. She came back with a pile of letters in her hand.
“Didn’t you notice the mail, Suzie?” she asked me, riffling through them. I suddenly felt defeated, real life just one step beyond me. “Look, a letter from Daddy!”
She tore it open, and read for a while. “Look at the dates, my goodness! He’s arriving on the twentieth.” She counted fingers. “Oh my gosh, he’s probably on the boat already.”
Now if that isn’t enough to throw a scare into anyone, I thought. Beatrice read on. “He doesn’t mention Mom though.”
Oh yes, Bea, let’s pretend that nothing happened! By now I was ready to wobble onto my feet. Take it easy, I said to myself; Bea in never-never land, but Keeman watching ever so closely.
“Oh Bea Bea,” I fairly gushed as I went for my coat and purse, “can’t we go to Keeman’s mom’s house and play with the baby first? We’ve got time, don’t we?” My voice sounded so normal; I looked back into the parlour, and there on the sofa, Suzie was still sitting. She looked startlingly fresh and relaxed, waiting in sweet anticipation. We both knew that once we got Bea together with her baby, she wouldn’t be able to tear herself away until the very last minute. Mrs. Woo would land up cooking chow mein for the whole bunch of us, and no one would notice if I didn’t eat very much.
“Can we, Kee?” Bea asked Keeman.
“Sure,” he agreed. I knew he would not deny me that.
LETTER TO HERMIA
February 12, 1987
My Dearest Hermia:
As they say, you’re the doctor! I will bow to your greater knowledge of these things. Funny though, all these years I thought Suzie’s “pneumonia” was a euphemism for that unspeakable crime of hers. Funny, all these years I have been obsessed with uncovering the truth. Yet one of the few facts I was given, I completely refused to believe. I suppose it’s natural to want to believe that she died with the same passion with which she lived. Who wants to know that she botched it, succumbing instead to a slow, ignoble, wheezy death. My uncle John still remembers telling her how to do it properly.
“Slit along the veins, all the way up,” he said in jest of course, “not across. Nobody’ll be able to save you then.” Of course, knowing Uncle John, he would have generously demonstrated as well.
He emphasized that he had said this when he was still in high school, years before the actual incident. I asked him as tactfully as I could how long she took to die, but he clammed up tight. Chi chided me for such disrespect; she said that John and Suzie were close in their own way. And she was right. It was an awfully sneaky thing to do, catching him unaware at a family dinner, flushed out with a couple of drinks. Good old Uncle John! He never quite forgave me for bringing Suzie up like that. I wonder if he’s as well adjusted as he claims to be. Three daughters, all in the various chrysalid stages of medical school! Aah, Toronto is far away, and he has conveniently forgotten.
Death is a great inspiration, don’t you think, Herm? Especially if you face it brutally. Well, for myself, I’d like to die with as much integrity as I have left. That’s all. Sounds simple, but let me tell you, sweetie, I think I have to be pretty inspired to come up with a constant like that for my life. Grand declarations like that are too easy when you’ve arrived at the end, but I’m only thirty-six (with a young child, no less). Especially these days, when there seems to be such a lack of moral choices. Lucky for me, I’ve been hoarding my integrity all along, the way children hoard candies. Good investment, ha, ha!
The young, they’re easily overwhelmed by the incessant waxing and waning of reality. I mean, reality (life, whatever you prefer) is sordid enough, but at least if it just stood still and allowed itself to be examined and cross-examined, then the young would be able to get a handle on it. They’d be able to take aim and hurtle themselves through life with some degree of accuracy.
How many people realize how we stagger about in life? Either emotionally overdoing, or emotionally half-baked. Shrinking from things or expanding. Like love makes us expand in our relationship to life, and to each other. An extreme case of how we shrink would be suicide. Let’s face it, Suzie went splat in a big way! But the young make beautifully tragic corpses.
Of course, I don’t mean to sound so callous. It’s my way of shrinking, so I won’t be overwhelmed by the same bleakness. Where did I read that suicide is a declaration of ultimate bankruptcy? Hey, something I understand very well! Who can feel immune to that kind of intense exhaustion of funds, so to speak? If I could, wouldn’t I have fun creating a stylish suicide scene with blood-red funereal roses and high-class despair. Nope, I am afraid that I am just as vulnerable as Suzie to having my first real creative expression thwarted. Aborted. Then, like her, where would I be but nowhere? Dead broke. Out of fortune cookies.
All my love
Kae
P. S. In case you’re wondering why I wrote to you instead of the usual phone call, especially after all my past mumbojumbo about hating to write letters and all that. Well, I’m trying to save money now that I’ve finally made up my mind not to take the job at the Howe Institute, now that I’m going to be a poor but pure writer, now that I’ve got a ravenous little mouth to feed, now that I’ve impetuously decided to blow the last of my own personal bankroll on a voyage to you at long last (maybe, just maybe, I’ll show you how big a-little-mouth in person). Anyway, sweetie, see you at the Kai Tak airport twenty-one hundred sharp, Hong Kong time, Tuesday, March fifth. Bring you’ limo!
And remember, don’t phone! I can’t afford to call you any more.
TELEGRAM TO KAE
20/02/87
ARE YOU KIDDING stop AM ECSTATIC YOU TAKE ADVICE AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS stop YES HAVE BEEN COUNTING stop YES HAVE BEEN WAITING stop PLEASE PLEASE BRING BOBBY stop WE COULD LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER TOGETHER stop AND SAVE ON PHONE CALLS stop IMPORTANT QUESTION NEED URGENT REPLY stop WOULD YOU RATHER LIVE A GREAT NOVEL OR WRITE ONE stop
OVERSEAS PHONE CALL TO HERMIA
I relent. I get her at her clinic.
“Dr. Chow here.”
“I’d rather live one,” I say. I hear wonderful, robust laughter over the phone. And click, she hangs up. That Hermia, she’s crazy as la lune!
EPILOGUE
NEW MOON
GWEI CHANG
1939
Gwei Chang didn’t have the energy to fight any more, nor the instincts for ducking and dodging. It was all too futile. Maybe it was an elaborate excuse after all, but when you are old, you see the grand plan all too clearly. Details become like the women who waste their entire lives chasing specks of dust.
Whenever he felt sorry for himself, he used to say, and it didn’t matter to whom, “You can be just sitting there, minding your own business, but the flow of time has a way of settling dust all over you, greying your hair, stooping your shoulders, bloating your stomach, clogging your lungs, until you choke.” He didn’t know how he’d got old. Maybe he wouldn’t have if he’d hung himself over a clothesline for women to beat like a smutt
y rug. But they don’t even do that any more. They use vacuum cleaners with more neurotic spite.
Why did he feel like this? There was nothing worse than being sick of life, unless it was feeling cheated at the same time. What had he done to accumulate all this remorse now, especially as the twilight of his life gathered? Where was the peace he had expected? When he opened his dim, old man’s eyes, he saw his garden was in order, everything as it should be. Summer warming his well-kept house. A sprawling lawn, covered with grandchildren who played, noisily self-conscious. Shaded women bent over servings of food. His son, middle-aged, dozing on the other recliner. But when he closed his eyes, he saw submerged violence. He had fought the hand on the back of his neck, pushing his face down into murky waters of memory, but he stopped struggling, his body preparing for the breathless impact.
THE HOUSE BOY
1924
“Lift him out!” someone yelped, his voice thrilled by the savageness of what they were doing. Hands reached over the wet shirt, and the houseboy crumpled onto the sopping floor, but he did not start to breathe again. Not right away. Someone kicked him in the stomach, and then Foon Sing coughed and sputtered, wheezing long and hard for air. He couldn’t get up, not with his elbows and wrists tightly strapped behind him. Instead, he was forced to press his face harder against the floorboards, like a hurt child against an unrelenting mother. He still looked blurred, as he had when his face was just under an inch or two of water. Nice touch, plunging his head backwards into the tub so that Gwei Chang and his men all had a good view of his tortured face. But more importantly, he could gaze up at his own mortality, the tip of his nose just below the surface of subsistence, his mind rapidly seeping away.
Gwei Chang could have stopped it. One word from his mouth would have absolved them all, but even by then the dark state of his anxious mind was not opposed to murder. They were like cornered animals, bent on their own survival. The young upstart had become a mere pawn.
Of course, they persecuted the dog, although Gwei Chang doubted very much that his men would have actually allowed him to die, but then who can hold back wild boars? Gwei Chang watched him pant, his legs pulled up to protect his underbelly. He knew the boy’s pathetic little story. He was young, and she was young. And who can keep young people apart? They attract like magnets, don’t they? The gun went off by accident. And the boy was caught next to her. Nothing very interesting, except the boy turned out to be one of Chinatown’s. At first, the chinamen could only sit very still and wait. At first, nothing happened, then they heard of the girl’s clans rising up. There was nothing they could do except prepare themselves for battle.
The boy’s guilt? Of course, Gwei Chang was interested in whether or not he was guilty of taking human life. If accidentally, then Gwei Chang would have asked how accidentally. But tang people’s defence came first, and one of the weapons that they absolutely had to use was the boy’s pure and naked innocence, regardless of the truth. Foon Sing was not a stupid boy. Under the circumstances, he learned the version of the one and only story that he was to repeat rather quickly, even under torture.
“Foon Sing, you are our soldier,” the elders taught him, when he was ready, soaked and softened enough. “You fight for all of us.” By then, he was terrified of them.
Hah, Gwei Chang laughed when he thought back. They’d been coolies all of their lives, dogs of famine. But in the freedom of this young land, old coolies could almost make-believe that they were generals. As though they had a say in their destinies. As though they could throw numbers onto the table and challenge them against the odds. As though they could win.
Just as the chinamen suspected, as soon as they let Foon Sing go, some white men grabbed him off the street and pushed him into a car. At first they thought he was a dead man at the hands of vigilantes, then rumours filtered through that it was police-ghosts who had taken him.
What would Foon Sing say? That first night of his abduction was the most perilous. All Chinatown mobilized; information came rushing back to the elders, as they sat up all night at the back tables of Disappearing Moon. They knew that if the houseboy broke down under pressure, he would seal not only his own fate but the fate of Chinatown. Yet what could they do but wait and discuss strategy to while away the darkest hours?
The morning found Foon Sing still alive. His kidnappers turned out to be a couple of half-hearted cops out for a little “third degree.” Foon Sing had done well.
“At least, we know now that we’ve got a chinaman’s chance,” they told each other.
THAT MORNING, Gwei Chang sought out Ting An. He was sleeping on one of the lower shelves of the storeroom. He had been up all night, overwrought like everyone else, running here and there, on the lookout for mobs with torches. In his memory, Gwei Chang could see Ting An clearly—a grown man, tall and lean, slightly underfed—but at the time Gwei Chang couldn’t really see him for the life of them.
“Hey, half the morning’s gone already. You gonna sleep all day?” Gwei Chang nudged Ting An and watched him stir, grunting, long limbs unfurling. He had his mother’s strong, beautiful face. Gwei Chang used to watch for her shadow on his face, like a witch haunting.
He should have told Ting An then. He was feeling good and expansive that morning. The sun was already high in the sky. What made him let another opportunity go by?
Two cowardly, too scared to tell him, if the truth be known. How could Gwei Chang tell Ting An that he was his father, that he had abandoned the woman who was his mother? All these years had passed, and one day—the day Ting An left—it dawned on Gwei Chang that, whenever he looked at Ting An, he never saw a son, only a sore reminder that she was gone, and maybe he just kept Ting An around to torture himself. If only he hadn’t been so full of self-pity, he would have seen the hurt on Ting An’s face, and the knots of anger that hardened around the hurt, year after year.
Maybe Ting An knew Gwei Chang was his father, but for sure Ting An refused to be Gwei Chang’s son. That realization was what finally broke Gwei Chang in the end. He threw a pile of guilt money after him, just so he could die with some face left. If only he had said to Ting An right from the start, “You are my son.” Excuses after all! And life is but a dream, right?
Instead, he said, “A Ting-ah, lots to do today.” Every day he made Ting An work for him all those years for nothing after all. That particular morning, it was, “We’re going to have to find someone who knows how to deal in their laws to defend the houseboy. Maybe you can look into that for the associations. Also today you can drive a few of us over to have an audience with the consul. But we’ll have to see how the day turns out. Don’t want this trouble to take too much time away from the business. The new warehouse gets its roof started today. Someone has to see that that’s done right.” Every day, every day, too busy being the big gun!
THERE IS NEVER any way to know what lies in the heart of any human being, and that is how Gwei Chang knew that the secret of the white woman’s death would never be fully revealed. How could it be, when it sailed away with the houseboy? As for Gwei Chang, he’d lived in a belly full of doomed, deserted chinamen long enough to know what had always crouched in their hearts.
Under the strain of bigotry, they were outlaws. Chinamen didn’t make the law of the land, so they would always live outside of it. In fact, it was a crime for them just to be here. The result was submerged, but always there: violence, with the same, sour odour of trapped bodies under duress. That could be why the whites complained that chinamen were unclean. Sinister, they said. But imagine their fresh-faced, thoughtless innocence beside the seething rage and bitterness in chinese faces! They grew uncomfortable in the presence of chinese, without even knowing why.
The houseboy had paid five hundred dollars, head tax, to enter the numbing, claustrophobic world of single, chinese men. He was thirteen years old, much the same age as most who came around 1912. Shy and tender, torn from their adoring mothers’ skirts, they knew about stark poverty and hard work, but that was just abou
t all they knew.
What boy wouldn’t have dreams to sustain him while he toiled in the filth and stench of a laundry? Wonderful dreams of adventure and prosperity in a big land; maybe a smart-looking, pointy moustache and a few other frivolities. He had meant to learn proper english right away, but when he arrived he found everything too overwhelming. He spent months staring into space, at the same time able to wander about only in “safe for chinamen” areas. Beyond his grinding work routine, the most he could do was loiter on the outer reaches of Chinatown and stare at caucasian pedestrians. Sometimes, he felt flattened like an insect on the limited horizons of Chinatown.
He grew older. And Foon Sing was the stylish type who picked up manners very quickly, so he did well as a houseboy. The trouble began when he was still a houseboy at twenty-five, with each year of smiling servitude stitched deeply into his face. Each hoarded dime! What he must have found utterly sickening was how much of his life and dreams he had had to give up! Worse still, each year got harder and harder. He wasn’t allowed to have his wife or his family with him. He was only allowed to sink deeper into the mire when he tried to support a wife and family in China. Not even the most modest dreams of happiness could come true for the houseboy.
Then one day, into his futile existence came a fair-haired demoness, a perfect example of their fresh-faced innocence. To him, she must have been dazzling. And why not? Her life full of human promises, she would have everything that he was denied. She was careless with her freedom; she smiled widely, even at a chinaman. He must have noted that she took everything that she was given, like a child, without forethought or after. She was also lonely, uprooted as he was once. He understood this and could manipulate it for her attentions.