Chocolate Cherry Chai

by Taslim Burkowicz

  Was this what love felt like, I wondered. Being held captive in someone’s arms while your heart raced erratically and you hoped they loved you enough to keep you safe? His eyes, such a light blue they looked like his mother’s crystal, were fixed on me. He seemed wild and out of control, like he was the one who needed saving. I could see places on his lips where the skin was chapped. Moments ago I had been kissing those lips, forgetting where I was in the world completely.

  “If you’re going to move again you’d better tell me now, Maya. I’ve gone and introduced you to my parents and I never do that shit … ”

  “Well, to be fair you still haven’t met my family … ”

  “Do they need to approve of me before you commit to Vancouver? Or should I be more afraid that your dad will hire a hit man and get me shot?”

  “He doesn’t need to hire a hit man. I have plenty of Indian cousins would do the job for free — oh, don’t look so annoyed! It was just a joke.”

  “It wasn’t a very good one.”

  “Look,” I had said, tracing my hand along the light hairs on his arm, “I am not going anywhere. Not yet, anyhow. I want to spend more time with my grandmother. And I’ve been cooking with my mom. I can’t just up and leave now. Plus, I have my cousin’s wedding soon … ”

  “That’s good. Because if you leave, you’ll miss out on all the crazy places I’m going to take you to see. And all the great movies … To think you fell asleep at the end of The Avengers. I mean, girlfriends aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing, are they?”

  Girlfriend. It had sounded better than I expected.

  7

  NANIMA ENTERED THE KITCHEN wearing a Pakistani shawl draped around her shoulders. She set down her thermos. “It smells like Uganda in here.” She dipped her spoon into the dhal. “Good choice — I always prefer mustard seeds instead of cumin in dhal. Your mom forgot the curry leaves, though.”

  “Don’t worry about fixing the dinner now. We should get you to the centre.” I led her to the front door and out into the fresh winter air. Today, she let me walk with my arm linked in hers.

  “Hi Maya!” the seniors called out to me as we arrived. I waved and smiled, feeling a bit like a local celebrity.

  Nanima took her chair at our table and immediately Eileen reached for the thermos and poured everyone a cup of chai. A man covered in liver spots at the next table craned his head to see where the smell of cinnamon was coming from.

  “I suppose it’s my turn then,” Lily declared, hiding the thermos under the table before anyone else came looking for a cup.

  “You start,” Nanima said, acting like she was master of ceremonies.

  “I am from Guangdong, where the most excellent Cantonese food in all of China comes from. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried our sister pigeons cooked in rosy wine sauce, or snake meat stirred, fried, and shredded, and served in five different colours. Making faces are you? You people from other countries are so soft. Even the Chinese here only want their lemon chicken and sweet and sour balls. Let me tell you the story of a real Chinese lady.”

  LILY

  I AM REALLY GOOD at making things grow. You should see my little balcony garden. My basil smells of Italy and my rosemary like your Thanksgiving holiday, or is it Christmas? In the morning, my neighbours ask me for mint for their tea and my tomato plants drop red globes on pedestrians walking underneath. Standing between my potted flowers, you feel you are in the emperor’s garden. The mums look like fruits, the roses like icy frosting on a wedding cake. I wouldn’t be exaggerating to tell you even the cars rushing below sound like a hidden waterfall.

  I am also a gem in the kitchen. Of course I know how to make Chinese dishes, but it is in Canada I learned how to bake breads and lasagna. I became addicted to cookbooks and their titles: Scrumptious Soups! Tasty Treats! Pasta Paradise! We Chinese have so many dumplings there aren’t enough words in the English language to describe them. But in Canada I discovered new things to put in them: Polish sauerkraut, Indian curry. I am not sure what you Canadians eat that makes you so big, because I love to eat everything I cook and it has never made me big.

  Someone like me should have made the most excellent mother. I looked the part, too, getting my hair done at Tom’s Hairstyling on Hastings Street every Saturday. Yet I failed at my job as a mother. Something that was born out of me should have been easier to get right than the most difficult recipe, don’t you think?

  When he was born, Vincent Chong looked just like the Buddha. Rolls of fat stacked themselves upon his belly like jelly doughnuts. Vincent was blessed with true Chinese good fortune. He would not grow up in a turbulent country ruled by a leader both strongly revered and hated. Now, I am not saying my childhood was all bad — I can remember a time when eating mooncakes at the Zhongqui festival made me the happiest girl in the world. I had Vincent when I was forty years old. The doctors had told me many years before I would never conceive. But I lit three incense sticks and knelt three times a day at the temple for fifteen years. Vincent was born in the year of the pig, which stands for fertility. As a boy his fat melted and no matter what we fed him, he remained stick thin. Vincent played the piano at five and was a star pupil. My husband was mighty proud of Vincent. He worked an awful lot and I was a stay-at-home mother; Vincent was my most important job.

  Vincent was in high school when the real trouble began. Suddenly, he wanted to be called “Vinnie.” He began stealing clothing. He fell so behind in math he could not even join the ordinary class; he had to go to the special class, filled with the slow kids who didn’t have to do algebra.

  On my balcony garden my roses still bloomed, their lacy buds sprouting up like tightly coiled ladies handkerchiefs. When all of my neighbours’ gardens had died down to patchy thorns, my garden would spring up like it was ready to host an English tea party. When Vincent entered the ninth grade, I found something under his bed that smelled like skunk cabbage. Now, Chinese kids don’t do drugs. I had no idea who I would go to see for help. I came to Vancouver when I was young enough to learn English easily, but not young enough to lose my accent or my Chinese ways. My Chinese friends had children who played the violin, sang in choirs, and entered chess tournaments. They were not the kind of friends I could turn to for help. In China, children live to serve their elders, so my problems with Vincent would not be understood. My husband himself did not recognize that Vincent was now Vinnie, a kid who skipped school.

  I had no choice but to beg Vincent he change his ways. I cooked his favourite meals: the belly of fish served in glass soup, and intoxicated shrimp — still alive, swimming in liquor. But now Vincent had become like all of you people. He said my food was disgusting. He only wanted to eat chow mein with pork, and all the other things people think Chinese food is. He no longer appreciated the chrysanthemum petals I would decorate his plate with. Finally, he stopped coming home for dinner altogether.

  When my husband had a heart attack, I hoped Vincent would change. But he did not. A few months after the funeral, I went to the mall looking for curtains to help return the balance and peace of my home. I saw Vincent smoking in the food court. I had imagined his new friends to be all white given his new disdain for my cooking. But Vincent’s friends were all Chinese! They had spiky black hair and torn jeans; when they laughed their mouths looked just like shark’s grins.

  Vincent came home, saying nothing about the fresh new blue curtains. I also said nothing of seeing him in the food court. I fixed him simple soup noodles with bok choy and wontons for dinner. I set him up a work station with a bamboo plant, placing sharpened pencils next to his favourite Bach and Mozart cassettes. He knew how to play works by these composers as a child, but now they were strangers to him. I handed him a tea-bowl of green tea. I held my breath and waited to see what magic my blue curtains would pour into the room. He took a sip. It had been so long since I had seen him just sitting still. Then the phone rang and he ran out the do
or. The heat rising from his forgotten tea fogged up the window behind it, temporarily blurring the clear vision of the newly blossoming balcony garden.

  I got a job at a French fry stand at the mall. Working such an entry level job was embarrassing for me, especially if I were to run into any of my Chinese friends. Vincent would see me there during school hours and ignore me — his very own mother. Some of his friends even ordered French fries from me using English. They never spoke to me the way you should when addressing an elder. The security guard told me Vincent and his friends were in a gang called One Hundred Snakes. Vincent was at the mall to steal — his closet was filled with shirts with labels he could never afford, like Huge Boss. When Vincent came home at night, I would beg him to go back to being the darling boy he once was.

  “You don’t even know who I am, Mom!” he yelled, sometimes leaving and not coming home for days. Food disappeared from the house, entire cartons of milk or eggs. I found bags of grassy weeds hidden inside the compartment of his speakers. And I found money too, and lots of it, tucked into shoes. When he came home, he found me sitting at the kitchen table with tears flowing down my face.

  “Vincent, I am calling the police.”

  “My name is Vinnie. And what are you talking about, Mom? You’re always on some trip.”

  “I won’t have you dealing drugs in my house. Do you think because I was born in China, I am stupid? I flushed them down the toilet where they belong.”

  “You what!?”

  I winced. I realized then that I was frightened of my own son. But I didn’t move to get up and protect myself. He came up behind me and shook my chair. The Chinese ceramics pigs on the shelf trembled. The teapots with the blue dragons danced. “Mom!” He grabbed my shoulders with his hands, and I thought he was going to kill me.

  Instead, he sank into the chair beside me. The worn vinyl padding made the sound of a balloon deflating slowly. “Mom,” he said in a smaller voice. “There was $1500 of weed in my room. They are going to fucking kill me.”

  “Who is going to kill you? I should call the police on you, Vincent Chong,” I said in English, my voice sounding like a shrill whistle to my ears. But I had stopped talking to him in Chinese a long time ago.

  “The motorcycle gang I sell weed for. They will call me a good-for-nothing, an Asian pipsqueak. They will kill me! You did this to me. Since when do you care about some herbal plants, anyway? You’re always going to those weird medicine shops in Chinatown, buying fungus mushrooms and disgusting snake skin from jars, telling me to eat them to restore my balance. Shows how much you care, Mom. You just put a death warrant out on your only son.”

  Shocked, I withdrew money from my account to pay back the motorcycle gang, making him promise he would stop selling drugs. On the last day of high school, he came home wearing a silk jacket embroidered with the words “One Hundred Snakes.” He had his body tattooed: snakes intertwined up his forearms and Chinese calligraphy characters were stamped on his wrists. I thought he couldn’t have known the meaning behind these words and symbols. If he had, he never would have defaced his body with them.

  He started bringing home drugs that looked like baby powder packaged in compact squares. Images of the goddess Ma Gu with her satin complexion danced in my head; I imagined her ivory body being crushed into powder and then sold to pleasure seekers, people who shoved this stuff up their noses and paid good money to feel empty.

  Soon after, Vincent didn’t come home for weeks. My house became a hotel. I realized then that things were going missing. First it was his father’s wedding ring, then my jade necklace, and finally, money from my bank account. One day, when I should have been wiping down counters and restocking napkins, I came home to nurse a headache on my sofa. I shut my ocean blue curtains. But the sun still managed to shine through the cloth, making a reflection of water waves bouncing on the floor.

  Vincent turned his key in the lock and looked surprised when he saw me, like he had seen his father’s ghost.

  Right there and then, I dropped to my knees, pleading he change his ways. Vincent didn’t say anything. He just closed his bedroom door, leaving me rubbing my temples. He took ridiculous things no one in their right mind would want: the porcelain pigs and my china set, which wasn’t even made in China, but in Vietnam. I had to do the unthinkable. I had the locks changed.

  Four in the morning. Vincent was banging on the door. “I only want my things, Mom!”

  Shaking, I let him in. He grabbed a garbage bag from the kitchen and threw all of his possessions in the bag. The bag shone under the oven light, looking like my husband’s old records, plastic and smooth.

  “I don’t need you! I have the One Hundred Snakes!” he shouted, thumping the bag down the steps like it was a dead body being dragged to a river.

  Naturally, I gave up cooking. I made bland foods which barely saw me through another day. We Cantonese, we don’t use boring spices to make meals like you Canadians do, with your salt and your pepper and your liquid catsup. We Cantonese, we use Shaoxing wine made from fermented rice, spicy licorice root, and Chinese cinnamon bark. We use fragrant star anise, crystallized sugar so fine it glimmers like crushed diamonds, and the skin of premium tangerines.

  I developed severe migraines. I even stopped going to drink yum cha with my Chinese friends. Despite neglecting my own health, I felt sorry for my balcony garden. I don’t remember actually stepping out to water the plants or weed the garden, yet I must have done so, for my parsley multiplied and my flowers grew tall.

  Months later, as the wind rushed past my blue curtains, I got a phone call from Vincent. I could hear the neighbourhood children laughing and playing below. When he spoke, I remembered the jolly baby with driblets of spit falling from his gummy mouth. I began to speak in Chinese. Come home, sweet Vincent. Come home.

  Vincent asked me to meet him with a sum of cash in Eastside downtown, where Chinatown melts into the district of drugs and poverty. Only two kinds of people are safe in this area: Chinese people, who have no trouble earning a living and functioning amidst the squalor, and the street people themselves. By street people, I mean druggies, dealers, the homeless, prostitutes, johns, police, and all of the mentally ill people that end up hanging out by the mini marts with the bars on the window. Vincent had gone from column A to column B. He was no longer Chinese. Vincent was a street person now.

  Vincent had me meet him in front of a Chinese butcher shop with a neon pig blinking outside. The illuminated sign zapped like it was lit by a family of fireflies. Dead suckling pigs hung from the window, their scrunched up baby faces on display for the world to see. I wondered briefly if my husband’s wedding ring was inside the pawn shop next door. Vincent’s face glowed a sickly pink, courtesy of the neon pig. He had deep trenches of blackish-red welts and scratches in the shape of crescent moons on his face. He couldn’t meet my eyes — they were searching the floor, back and forth.

  I was scared he would disappear into the corner etched between two busy streets, Pigeon Park, I think it is called. Strange such a place could be called a park, being it had no grass to speak of. I took the envelope from my purse and handed it to him, looking out at the park’s namesake pecking on the ground for scraps. A homeless man hauling pop bottles in a rusty shopping cart saluted us. Vincent’s eyes began searching the crowd. They settled on a man wearing a black hoodie rubbing his hands together anxiously and blowing on them. He gave Vincent a joker’s smile, yellow and spread like a deck of cards. A rake-thin woman wearing only a bra and shorts and with scars all over her face ran by us, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  “Vincent, come home. Please. You don’t belong here,” I said in Chinese. I was used to saying all sorts of positive things even when I myself had little faith in my own words. Don’t all mothers do the same?

  Vincent shuffled in his high-top sneakers, stained with street urine, and said something I could not believe. He said, “Okay.”
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br />   Vincent came home. I opened the blue curtains. Outside it was raining, and I imagined the curtains to be sheets of rain falling inside the house. I cleaned the windows so Vincent could see all the new greens shooting out from the garden soil. He came home with nothing, so I purchased bubble bath, new clothes, and moisturizer. I borrowed library books on drug rehabilitation, which Chinese people need never be caught taking out on loan. But Vincent refused to look at them. He said he would just stop seeing the people from the Eastside. I wondered if this included the One Hundred Snakes members. Talking about drug use was as painful for him as it was for me, so we opted for a silent dialogue, signalling with our eyes that the worst was behind us.

  I made banquet feasts better suited for ten people than just the two of us. This was the only way I knew how to heal him. Sometimes I mixed Western dishes with Cantonese cuisine, serving salted duck eggs on homemade pizza. Other times, I cooked traditional meals conjured up by memories of my own youth. I made the legendary snake and wild cat dish infused with the rarest of spices, which myself I had only eaten once before, at a wedding back in Guangdong.

  Vincent sat at the dinner table with me without his usual complaints about eyeballs in his food. I made him my mother’s winter melon soup and used my aunt’s recipe for deep-fried frog legs on lotus leafs. I treated him to the luscious egg tarts and scrumptious coconut pudding that tasted exactly like the ones I grew up on.

  But Vincent was hardly even present. There was only a boy pretending to be my son sitting at the table. After bathing in bubblegum bath foam, he smelled like the little boy I knew — his face returned to its previous creamy milk texture — but he was still different. All I wanted to do was reach across the table and hug him, but there were lines between us I knew I could not cross and would never be allowed to again.

  One by one, his friends from high school reappeared. Now they had shiny haircuts and polished cars. Some even had wives and children. Vincent never brought home a girlfriend himself. One Hundred Snakes never went away, but Vincent sharpened up his act and stopped doing drugs. But he didn’t drop them completely. He told me he worked with cars, but I knew the truth: Vincent was a drug lord. I pretended to believe him, and this lie kept us both afloat.