by Paul Yee
At the door, his mother greeted Little Lo. He wondered if she ever worried about Tommy playing with fire, but she seemed pleased that he was playing outside and not disturbing her.
“What’s nice today?” she asked.
“All n-n-nice,” he replied. He showed her cabbage and carrots, tomatoes and potatoes, green beans and peas.
“You have any spinach?” She always asked for whatever he didn’t have.
“N-n-no, s-s-spinach all finished.”
“How about lettuce?”
“No, none t-t-today. Maybe t-t-tomorrow?”
Suddenly Little Lo heard a screeching as shrill as a whistle. He paused. It was his horse. Then came loud crashing and splintering.
He rushed off. His animal lay half on the road, half on the neighbor’s lawn, surrounded by black smoke, its legs kicking. Flames licked at its back and sides. A bitter smell rose up. The wagon had tipped, spilling everything and oozing blood from flattened tomatoes. Little Lo smelled gasoline. Someone had poured it over the horse and lit a match.
He used his shirt to beat the flames, but couldn’t get close because of the horses panicked kicking. The neighbors came running as the horse made half-weeping, half-bleating sounds. Little Lo ran around the flames and smoke, wailing and moaning. In the background, he heard Tommy whimpering, “It was an accident! I didn’t mean to do it! Honest!”
Finally, several women hurried out with pails of water and doused the flames. But it was too late for the horse. It lay panting for breath. Wide strips of flesh were charred, and the glossy big eyes were dulled.
A man came out with a rifle.
“Quick, put it out of misery.”
Little Lo shook his head, but the man persisted. Little Lo had never held a gun before, let alone fired one. But somehow he stilled his shaking hands, aimed the barrel and pulled the trigger. The noise of the shot startled him, and the rifle flew from his grip.
The crowd pushed the stiffening horse onto the wagon and set the vehicle upright. Little Lo draped the straps over his shoulders and pulled it back home to the farm. He could not bear the thought of insects devouring the animal’s flesh, so he assembled heavy logs and the other peddlers dragged the horse on top of it. Then he set the pyre on fire and let the flames reduce his old friend to ashes.
He went back to that street only once, with another peddler who spoke better English. They confronted Tommy’s mother at the front door and demanded financial compensation. She snorted and slammed the door in their faces.
After that, Little Lo never returned again. No one on that street knew he died shortly afterwards, alone in the farm shed. A different man brought fresh vegetables around to sell, but he drove a truck fashioned from an old Model T Ford.
Soon after, Tommy’s family moved away and put up a For Sale sign. But the property never sold. Prospective buyers being shown through the house saw a thin bald man leading a horse through the rooms, right through solid walls. Real-estate agents pretended not to notice, but they, too, saw the phantoms clearly and were horrified. The horse’s hooves made no sound on the hardwood floors, but bits of mud and dung were always left behind.
Eventually, Tommy’s parents stopped paying taxes on the property and let the city seize it. The house was torn down and the lot was reshaped into a park with a sandbox and swings for children.
But nobody plays there at night, not even on hot summer evenings when the park is lit and children run around sweaty and restless. And on Halloween, nobody ever goes trick-or-treating on that street, even though the houses set out pumpkins with deep orange faces lit by candles.
SEVEN
The Brothers
IN CHINA THERE once lived a poor widow who had two young sons but neither land nor family to support her. Though frail in health, she solicited odd jobs from neighbors, crouched in their paddy fields during planting and harvesting, and sewed late into the night. And she relied on the kindness of clan members and fellow villagers. Without them, she would have had to beg for food and coins from strangers in the market town. She tried to raise honest boys, but villagers told tales about the younger son, Ping, that made her sigh with sorrow.
They said whenever Ping was given a dish of food to take home, he gulped down the choice pieces before his mother and brother ever saw the meal. When he ran small errands for neighbors, he kept the change by claiming the cash had been lost.
When market stall-keepers accused him of stealing, his mother beat him with bamboo, but he grit his teeth and showed no remorse. Within days, she would hear fresh reports of thefts.
Whenever Ping landed in trouble, his mother scolded the older brother.
“Where were you, you stupid thing?”
“Why weren’t you watching him?”
“Can’t you keep him out of trouble?”
Shek was two years older and always volunteered to do chores for the neighbors in return for a few coins. But the villagers told him, “You’re a good boy, but you should learn to talk fast like your brother. Sometimes he’s naughty, but he’s always quick and clever. He can sweet-talk his way out of any hole.”
Shek tried to follow Ping everywhere. He couldn’t stop all the mischief because his younger brother always managed to evade him. One day, he saw Ping topple the bamboo scaffolding as workers constructed a towering arch, causing one man to fall and break his leg. But he told no one, not wanting to bring more grief to his mother.
The two boys grew up. But young men who could neither read nor write had no future. They searched nearby towns and ports for work but returned home dusty and penniless. Finally, their mother decided to send them to Gold Mountain, desperately borrowing from money lenders and kinsmen to pay the passage.
At departure time, she reached out and seized Ping. “I can’t teach you about honesty any more,” she cried. “In the New World, you will have to follow the laws of the land. When you return to the village, come back as a good man. In the meantime, send money so I can hold my head high.”
Ping shrugged her off. He wasn’t pleased about leaving home and fending for himself. His mother had always washed his clothes and put food on the table.
Then she gave Shek a single piece of advice. “Watch over your brother. It’s your duty.”
When they arrived in the New World, the brothers split up. Shek joined a salmon-canning crew up north while Ping washed restaurant dishes in the city. Then Shek yanked planks off the chain at a sawmill in the coastal forests while Ping butchered hogs in the interior. Ping enjoyed the freedom of being away from his brother, but his slack work habits often got him fired from jobs, and then he would have to ask Shek to send him money.
Finally, the two ended up together in the city, where Shek borrowed money to buy a farm by the river. The farmhouse was built of logs held in place by plaster and mud, but the soil was dark, soft and fragrant. Shek joyfully flung handfuls of dirt into the air.
“I own land!” he exulted. “I own something that lasts forever.” He said to his brother, “Come work with me. Everyone has to buy food, because everyone has to eat. We’ll grow rich together.”
Ping shook his head. He sneered at the lopsided barn, beat-up truck and battered equipment his brother now owned. The rusty tin roof sagged and leaked, and there was no running water in the house.
“This place stinks of mud and dung,” he cried. “I didn’t come to Gold Mountain to roll in the dirt like a hog.”
He fled downtown and found a job in a laundry. There, great iron boilers roared to heat water and dry the wash. As he stirred sheets and shirts in vats of detergent, he would sweat all day even when it rained or snowed outside. Whenever his boss went to the front counter to serve customers, Ping sneaked out the back door to smoke cigarettes. When he was in a rush to leave, he would rinse the wash only once instead of twice. If customers complained, he always denied any wrongdoing.
As usual, whenever he had s
pare cash, he went gambling. He played fan-tan, mah-jongg and dominoes. His friends played for high stakes, and money slipped through his fingers like sand. He never sent a penny home because Shek handled the remittances.
Three or four times a year, Shek visited a Chinatown company and handed over an amount to be forwarded to China. Then he went to a letter-writer to have a message written, telling his mother to go to the company’s branch office in the market town to retrieve the money. To relieve her worries, Shek always claimed the funds were from the work efforts of both brothers.
Once, after the police raided a game-hall and arrested thirty gamblers, Ping slept on the concrete floor of the jail for three nights before Shek bailed him out. If Ping was lucky enough to win at the tables, he summoned all his friends to feast on bird’s nest soup, sharks fin and abalone. Song-girls entertained them, guests danced to the gramophone, and the banquet lasted all night. But he never invited Shek, who frowned on such carefree spending.
A few years later, the Great Depression descended. Factories and mills closed, and workers across the continent lost their jobs. Long lines formed at soup kitchens, and homeless men slept in shantytowns under bridges. Many Chinese booked passage back to the homeland.
When Ping’s laundry went bankrupt, he had no choice but to go and live with Shek, who was glad to get a helper and have his brother nearby.
Ping soon discovered the rigors of farm work. When he met his buddies in Chinatown, he complained at length.
“I start at daybreak, work until dark, swallow some rice, and then sleep a few hours until it’s barely bright enough to see my hands in front of me. Chores are always waiting. A second seeding has to go in, seedlings need to be transplanted, or crops must be harvested before insects eat everything. I can never scrub myself clean, my fingernails are permanently black, and my back aches all the time. I am nothing but food for mosquitoes to feast on.”
He hated the farm a hundred times more than the laundry. The outhouse was a long walk away, and when it rained, his bed became soggy. He looked for ways out, but Shek did not pay him wages, so there was no opportunity to win at gambling or to buy a train ticket out of town.
So he decided the only way to get money was by improving the farms income. He challenged the way his brother grew many different vegetables. Shek had reasoned that if carrots didn’t sell, then the lettuce would. And if the radish crop turned brown and mushy, then tomatoes would reduce the loss.
Ping noticed that potatoes always sold well, and argued the farm should grow nothing but that one crop.
“It’s too much work with different vegetables,” he insisted. “Too many plantings, too many diseases, too many things to remember and worry about. With potatoes, you plant them and dig them up, bag them, ship them out, and you are all done. And we can get rich, since the whites eat them every day.”
Shek’s brow furrowed as he thought about the proposition. Every day, Ping would reframe his arguments and add new information.
“Look at Chung Chuck! He grows only potatoes and has built a new farmhouse and owns three trucks. Even white farmers and politicians call him the King of Potatoes.”
“Did you hear? The wholesalers raised the prices paid to potato farmers by five cents a sack! It’s the third raise this season.”
“Have you seen this? The Marketing Board is giving every housewife in town a free cookbook with a hundred recipes for cooking potatoes! Sales of potatoes are sure to go up.”
Gradually, Shek gave in to his brothers position, so next spring, they seeded the fields with only potatoes. There was a bit less work that summer, and a good harvest followed. With the extra income, Ping had money to play with, and Shek sent extra funds home and paid down his debt.
Then Ping had another idea. “You should sell the farm! That way, we can both return home and retire in comfort. We wont ever have to work again!”
“No!” cried Shek. “I’ll never find a piece of land so fertile and large in China.”
Ping knew his brother was right, because the ancient soil back home had supported crops over many hundreds of years. And the families owning tracts of good land would never sell, no matter what amount was offered. But that didn’t stop Ping from insisting on leaving.
The following spring, when the tax inspector visited the farm, Shek was gone. Ping said he had left for China to care for their sick mother. As before, he put in a crop of potatoes, and all summer he weeded and hoed and picked hungry bugs off the young plants. Then he visited a real-estate company and announced he wanted to sell the farm.
One hot day, two men drove in: a sales agent and a buyer. They wandered around, kicked the dike to test its strength and inspected the equipment. They complained about rusty hinges and the mucky puddle at the front door of the barn. Then the buyer went to the outhouse.
Suddenly Ping heard the big fellow scream and saw him flee from the outhouse. His hat flew off, but he didn’t bother to stop. When his agent came running, he shouted, “Get me out of here!”
A week later, Ping saw the sales agent at the bank. “What happened that day?” he asked.
The agent drew close and lowered his voice. “That buyer said the outhouse was cold, which he found unusual because the sun had been shining all day. He said when he leaned over the hole to look out the window, someone grabbed him from behind and tried to push him down the hole. He shouted and screamed, braced his arms and legs against the walls. It took all his strength to keep from falling into the muck. When the pushing stopped, he turned around. Nobody was there, and the door was latched on the inside!”
Ping shrugged. “I use the outhouse every day, and nothing has ever happened to me.”
Unfortunately, word about this strangeness leaked out, and no other buyers came by.
That year, Ping had a bumper crop of potatoes. He was willing to sell them cheaply to wholesalers, but the Marketing Board ruled that wholesalers could only buy potatoes tagged by the Board and set at a higher price. Moreover, each farmer could only sell a limited amount of potatoes. This benefited white farmers who grew smaller crops.
To Ping, this meant that no matter how many potatoes he grew, he could only sell a small amount. He and the other Chinese farmers rebelled and kept selling large quantities of potatoes at lower prices. Then the police and white farmers blocked the bridges and inspected all the Chinese trucks trying to pass. If the Board hadn’t put tags on their sacks of potatoes, they weren’t allowed through. Fights broke out every day.
One evening, Ping loaded his truck with potatoes and sprinted for the wholesalers in town. The roads weren’t lit and he had left the truck lamps off to avoid detection. He knew the route by heart and thought no one would spot him. But near the bridge, two cars roared out of a hidden curve and forced him off the road. Ping bounced to a stop, and white men rushed out smelling of whiskey and waving flashlights.
They grabbed Ping and threw him to the ground and kicked him. Ping fought back but he was outnumbered. He felt his nose break and his cheekbone crack as he screamed in pain.
Suddenly he heard his truck engine being fired up, and then the vehicle rolled toward him. One of the white men aimed a flashlight at the steering wheel, but no one was there. Everyone jumped back, shouting and cursing.
The truck stopped and a voice shouted in Chinese, “Get in! Hurry!”
Ping clambered on. It wasn’t until the truck reached the main road that he saw that Shek was driving.
Ping gasped and his hands started trembling.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Shek braked and said quietly, “Little Brother, I promised our mother that I would watch out for you.”
Then he opened the door, hopped out and vanished into the night.
Ping took a deep breath and dropped his head onto the dashboard and wept bitterly. When he recovered, he drove into town without a word. He delivered his shipment of potatoes,
took the money to the steamship agent and bought passage on the next ship to China. He landed in Hong Kong and then a ferry slowly took him up the muddy river to his village.
On reaching home, he fell onto his knees before his mother and knocked his head against the floor.
“Mother, I have committed a terrible wrong,” he said in a pained voice. “I pushed Shek into the river when it was running high from the winter meltdown. I thought I was smarter than him, but he wouldn’t let me sell the land, not even when he was dead. And when angry farmers almost beat me to death, Shek’s spirit rescued me in the nick of time. He was a better man than me.”
Ping expected his mother to be angry. Instead she leaned back and sighed.
“What good sons I raised,” she said. “Shek looked out for his younger brother even in death, and you came back an honest man. Now I can die with a clear conscience.”
EIGHT
Alone No Longer
IN 1914, THE Year of the Tiger, a man named Ko made the most difficult decision of his young life. He said farewell to his sweetheart and journeyed alone to Canada. They had loved each other since their village childhoods, and he promised to return and marry her. In the meantime, his pocket held a photograph. It was black and white, but had been tinted to give her pink cheeks and red lips. They had exchanged studio portraits, and he imagined she studied his picture every day, the same way he worshiped hers.
In Canada, he paid the head tax with borrowed funds, approached a Chinatown job broker, and landed in the kitchen of a downtown restaurant. Day after day, he peeled potatoes, carrots and beets. Week after week, his knife reduced bushels of onions and cabbage to thin slices. His hands grew chapped from cold water, but soon he learned to season roasts of meat, make savory gravies and bake lightweight cakes that could be iced and decorated. It took ten years to clear his debts, but Ko thoroughly mastered the Western kitchen.
During this time, Canada changed its laws and banned Chinese from entering. Chinatown was furious, for no such rules applied to any other immigrants. But men such as Ko who had already paid the head tax could visit China and re-enter Canada if they had the proper documents.