All That Matters

by Wayson Choy

  “They all work hard,” Father said. “What do you expect?”

  When Poh-Poh repeatedly complained about the weekend noise and about the unwashed smells that drifted into the hallways, Third Uncle stepped in to speak with her.

  “Few have any family here,” he explained. “Some are even too poor to buy a decent meal. These wretches stay in their rooms so the landlord can’t lock them out. Others bring them food.”

  “Too much noise,” Poh-Poh grumbled.

  But soon she began to soften her anger.

  “Noisy ones eat,” she told me. “Quiet ones starve.”

  Many working nights when Father missed coming home for his supper, the Old One knew he would be taking the customary late meal with Third Uncle and his employees at the Pekin restaurant. Left with extra food, and because there was no icebox in our kitchen, Poh-Poh would huff up to the third floor with a dish in her hand. If I were not too sleepy, I followed her slow ambling in that dimly lit length of squeaking floorboards, along the row of single rooms numbered in the twenties, long-term rooms occupied by the oldest tenants. When she could hear any muffled hacking or hemming behind a door, she gave it a gentle but persistent knock. If the door opened, even a suspicious crack, the swinging bulb inside would make our shadows dance.

  “Such a shame to waste this,” Poh-Poh would say, and quickly explain to the bent figure peering out at the one-meal dish that she had just reheated how she had cooked too much for her grandson and herself. A hand would reach out.

  “Please to eat well, sir,” she taught me to say, slowly and clearly. “Then put the plate by first door … on second floor.”

  One morning I heard a tap-tap on our apartment door. I unlatched the hook, but no one was there. Just as Father stepped over me to go to Third Uncle’s office, I lifted up three empty dishes.

  “I must be rich,” he said. “Your Poh-Poh is feeding the world.”

  “Congratulations!” the Chen elders shouted to Third Uncle when they announced the news that a new woman would be officially joining our family. The tong officers patted me on the head, winked at Father, and laughingly spat their approval into spittoons. Third Uncle stuck his thumbs under his new suspenders.

  When told the news of Stepmother’s approaching arrival from China, Poh-Poh looked scornfully around the walk-up apartment and pushed her kitchen chair back. She knew from our walks and visits to other Chinatown families that there were houses with even bigger rooms along Keefer and East Pender streets, houses in whose comfortable parlours she had begun to play weekly rounds of mahjong. And where I played with other children and ran from room to room to room …

  “To have three grandsons before I die,” Poh-Poh said loudly, “we need a house like other Chinatown families.”

  Father flinched. He had already signed papers held between Third Uncle and the Chen Society that he would pay back a large portion of their sponsorship expenses. Monthly payments would begin after the second anniversary of our arrival and last for fifteen years. He looked downcast.

  “Why not?” Third Uncle said. “Why not live in a house?”

  Father shut his eyes; another lifetime of indentured payments rained down upon his shoulders. But Third Uncle did not hesitate.

  “No worry,” he said to Father, shaking his shoulder. “You be my family now.”

  That was true. The birth certificate and immigration documents that Father had used to come to Canada once belonged to Third Uncle’s dead brother. Dates had been doctored, of course, to fit Father’s age and circumstance, and the brother’s embossed picture had been expertly lifted off and carefully replaced with one of Father’s. Poh-Poh and I had separate sets of false papers made for us, and all these gai-gee, these ghost papers, bonded us as Third Uncle’s Gold Mountain family.

  Father and Poh-Poh honoured this paper relationship, but Father thought Third Uncle had done quite enough on our behalf. Only Poh-Poh did not think so, and she had the nerve to say this aloud.

  “We should have house,” she said directly to Third Uncle. “You want more nephews, Chen Bak?”

  Father started to say something to stop the Old One from speaking, but it was hopeless. The summer air was sulphurous, tainted by smog. Some freight cars thundered by. Father looked out the window as if lightning might strike him dead.

  Third Uncle enjoyed the fact that his paper brother did not take anything for granted. Third Uncle told others that he felt that Father would never exploit the situation. There were those agreements Father had signed, promising to pay back certain expenses; in fact, he had put away some salary to do just that. Third Uncle was impressed by Father’s resolve. Poh-Poh was not. She had been thinking of his recent savings, too.

  “Use money for house rent,” she told Father. To Third Uncle she said, “I work for you, Chen Bak. When Kiam-Kim go to school, I come work for you. Clean your rooms. Cook and wash for you.”

  “Me, too,” I said, catching the spirit.

  Third Uncle smiled at our earnestness. He had not made a mistake bringing us to Gold Mountain. His paper family knew their place.

  Before the end of our first year living in that second-floor walk-up, Father and Third Uncle came into the kitchen to announce that we would be moving into a two-storey house on Keefer Street, five blocks east of Main Street, and seven blocks away from the noise and smells of False Creek. And I would soon have my fifth birthday in a house with rooms to run in.

  The house belonged to the Chen Society. In exchange for a low rent, half the amount to be subsidized by Third Uncle, Father had also to agree to take on the job of the Chen Society’s monthly rent collector, as well as to record their list of membership loans and accounts.

  “Everyone work hard in Gold Mountain,” Third Uncle said. “No worry.”

  Poh-Poh and Third Uncle encouraged Father to think of the future. In October, when Stepmother would finally arrive from China, she would walk into a pine-board house with three bedrooms on the second floor and with front and back windows that looked onto a bit of property. Third Uncle said he would see that the house was furnished.

  “Never mind all that,” Poh-Poh interrupted him. “Make sure Gai-mou’s ghost papers not cursed.”

  If ghost papers came from a suicide, or were inherited from a family member who had suffered tragedies, wise people hired monks to exorcise the bad spirits, or risked taking on the ill fortune of others. If the big-nosed immigration demons had been aware, they could have sniffed out the truth, for such papers were deeply perfumed with the lemony smell of ghost-chasing incense.

  “You sure papers not haunted,” Poh-Poh said again.

  “Yes.”

  “Make sure she bear sons.”

  “Tell that to him,” Third Uncle said, pointing to Father.

  “Never mind, Kiam-Kim,” Father said, grinning for no reason that I could see. “Just a joke.”

  “Buy strong bed,” Poh-Poh said, poking Third Uncle in the ribs. His pipe went flying. The two broke into laughter. Poh-Poh couldn’t stop herself. “Aiiiyah! Buy small bed for me; big bed for Gai-mou!”

  Third Uncle enjoyed the Old One’s cajoling him to do the right things; he felt important, capable. He repeated again that Patriarch Chen had said the woman was twenty years old, healthy enough to fulfill Yook Mai-dang’s wish—that is, Poh-Poh’s wish—that my new stepmother be strong enough to bear sons. Father was more than ten years older, as he should be, a man of some maturity. It was a perfect match: there would be plenty of sons.

  “You soon have two tiger brother,” Poh-Poh told me. “And Madame Jing tell me I live to see Number Three Grandson!”

  Three was a lucky number, the Old One explained to me, especially where the birth of sons was concerned. In Old China, one boy child, even two boys, might suffer an early death, but surely the gods would not be so cruel as to cut down a third son.

  “Two more brother for you, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh said, chortling away with Third Uncle. “I boil water.”

  “This woman will take care of you
, Kiam-Kim,” Father added. “And she will work with Poh-Poh.”

  Poh-Poh bowed humbly, lowering her white head. “I die soon,” she said matter-of-factly.

  She had also spoken those three words before the Tong elders, and they quickly bowed back, their voices rising to waylay the bony hand of death. “No, no, you surely outlive us!”

  Everyone laughed. Outside, the B.C. Lumber Mill whistle blasted into the air. Shifts of working men were moving in and out of buildings and factories, tramping into Chinatown cafés and restaurants to dine on cheap meals, or with a numbered chit in hand to pick up their laundry packages. The noise of these labourers barely pierced the thick walls of the main Tong building, built like an Old China temple with a curving roof.

  Poh-Poh and Father had come in here to light incense before the sacred gods, to show our gratitude for all that had been given us. After I had made proper bows to each of the five elders, we walked out of the meeting room. At the end of the front hall, Father opened wide two large dragon-carved doors and stepped into the dimly lit assembly hall. At the far end stood a curtained platform with a low curving roof painted bright, lucky red. Long calligraphy scrolls hung down the two side walls. In front of the curtains Father took off his hat and lit two thick candles. Then he yanked on a rope.

  Suddenly the fierce God of War, Kwan Kung, towered over me. Three other smaller gods stood behind Kwan Kung; they gleamed like living beings. Instead of bai sen, bowing, I darted behind Poh-Poh’s floppy black pants and hid my face. Father and Poh-Poh lowered their heads and mumbled some words.

  Dragging me out of the assembly hall, Poh-Poh said, “Gai-mou teach you not to be afraid.”

  “You teach Kiam,” Father said to her. “Tell him your village stories.”

  Poh-Poh looked disapprovingly at me. Her eyes seemed to say I had better start figuring things out, and her lips mouthed words already familiar to my ears. I repeated them aloud.

  “Poh-Poh die soon!”

  “No, no,” Father said, caught off guard by my audacity. “She live as long as Gai-mou live!”

  Poh-Poh, silent as stone, took my hand as Father began to pull shut the big doors to the assembly hall. I quickly looked back. On the temple platform, the two candles burned like tiger eyes. But from this distance, I now could tell they were only candles and stiff statues. This was something I would tell my new stepmother: candles and statues were just candles and statues. Nothing more.

  “When does Stepmother come?” I asked. “Is she pretty to look at?”

  “Grandson, if you be lucky,” Poh-Poh said, and pinched my cheek as her voice tightened into a burst of anger, “cross-eyed, pock-cheeked Gai-mou may come … before you die.”

  A dragon door swung towards my face. This dragon was vividly painted, its silvery scales carved so deeply that the crescent shadows shimmered. The bulging head with its sharp teeth seemed to plunge towards my neck. The Death Dragon had come for me! At my look of sudden shock, Poh-Poh yanked me aside until the two huge doors slammed shut.

  I felt no relief: the vision of an ugly, pock-faced stepmother hung stubbornly in my head.

  In 1928, when I was over five and a half—six in Chinese years—and could help Father put away his shoes and stand tiptoe high up on a stool to hang up his coat on the hall hook in our Keefer Street house, and even help Poh-Poh in the kitchen by using a wooden box to reach the lowest pantry shelf, the news came at last that Gai-mou was arriving from Hong Kong in three weeks on the Empress of Asia.

  I had been attending a kindergarten class in the United Church basement on Dunlevy and could now speak English sentences. At least, I could speak better than half the children there who spoke no English at all. Some jabbered away in such mysterious languages that even Miss Lowe’s best English could not reach them with the simplest of requests like “Sit down!” Their broad faces would turn away until she gestured at her own bum, wiggled, and then sat down. We all sat down.

  I had told our neighbours’ boy, Jack O’Connor, that my new mother was coming to stay with us. Jack was bigger than me, but I didn’t think he was as smart: he couldn’t speak a word of Chinese.

  “What’s wrong with your old mother?”

  I knew he meant my Poh-Poh.

  “I have new mother,” I said.

  His blue eyes said, So what! I didn’t know why he wasn’t impressed; he himself had only one mother to talk about.

  “You’re a big fat liar,” he said.

  I told Poh-Poh that Jack wouldn’t believe that Stepmother was coming.

  “What!”

  Poh-Poh was shocked that I had mentioned anything to our neighbours’ boy. She barely acknowledged the O’Connors’ existence, barely recognized any of the other pale-skinned outsiders, the lo-faan, that shared the ragged Keefer Street boundaries of our ghettoed Chinatown. To her Old China eyes, they were all the same: white barbarian ghosts with big noses and funny names like Oh-kan-nagh.

  The wives of the tong elders had told her the history of white brutes in 1907 yanking the braided queues of the first elders and kicking them down Hastings Street, their white hands bashing Chinese heads and tearing down the shops and laundries of Chinatown. She also knew the kindness of some white faces, of those few who tended the sick of Chinatown, but they were church people, like the China Mission House lo-faan, a rare breed of white foreigners who could sometimes speak perfect Cantonese. Then there were those others, so many of them in China, those white foreigners selling opium and taking away Chinese territory.

  It was a history that Poh-Poh tried to pass along to me. I listened, but still could not see anything bad in the lo-faan that came my way in kindergarten. Even Poh-Poh relented and thought lo-faan Jack could play with me. She had accepted that children were not yet like their parents, but would soon grow up and prove their roots to be from one or another kind of tree.

  “White come from white tree,” Poh-Poh warned me. “Chinese come from Chinese tree.”

  “White belong to white tree,” Third Uncle explained. “Chinese belong Chinese.” He also told me about cherries belonging to cherry trees, and oranges to orange trees.

  Now I looked carefully at Jack’s mother and father. I decided Jack’s mother belonged to a bitter tree. Thin-lipped Mrs. O’Connor rarely smiled, but Mr. O’Connor would at least say something about the weather. If they happened to meet, both our fathers would smile and tip their hats and chat for a few moments. They must have come from the same tree.

  “Looks like rain,” Mr. O’Connor would say.

  “Yes, yes,” Father would answer. “Rain like yesterday.”

  Courtesy mattered, Father told me. After all, our neighbours were here long before we Chinese moved up this far east on Keefer. All these rows of pine-box houses, Father explained, were built by white carpenters. He had been reading picture books about Vancouver and showed me the funny people in cowboy hats. There was a time when nearly every Keefer Street house was occupied by an Irish family or by white people who spoke no English at all. But I didn’t care about history lessons. “Why is Poh-Poh mad at me for talking about Stepmother?”

  “What did you tell little Jack?”

  I hesitated. Poh-Poh picked up her chopsticks. Using my best English so that only Father would understand, I half whispered, “I tell him my new mother coming.”

  Before I could stop him, Father translated my words. And before Father could stop her, Poh-Poh’s chopsticks snapped, stinging, against my head. The voice grew stern and hard:

  “Tell white ears nothing!”

  I bit my lip. Father patiently explained to me that white people did not understand Chinese ways. In English, I should refer to Gai-mou as Stepmother.

  “Say nothing more,” he continued. “Say nothing about our being Third Uncle’s paper family.”

  “Not one word,” Poh-Poh stressed. “Or we go back to China on next boat. Starve to death in China!”

  I knew that many people in China were starving; that was why I was always told how lucky I was to be able
to eat up every grain of rice, how fortunate to be able to chew up every morsel of black-bean chicken and swallow every piece of leafy green.

  The next time I saw Jack, he had a few more things to say.

  “My mother says Chinamen can have as many mothers as they want, like Solomon the Jew.”

  I had no idea what any of those words meant. I sensed he, too, had no idea what he was saying. We both shrugged, knelt down, and went on with our serious game of road building.

  Having stood for a week watching trucks of all kinds widening Keefer Street with cobblestones and cement, Jack came up with make-believe construction trucks of his own. He showed me how he used the chunks of waste wood that Mr. O’Connor had cleaned out from one of the freight cars to burn in their fireplace. The half-dozen wooden blocks plowed imaginary roads for us, and the triangular ones made zigzag furrows in the small mixed piles of dirt and cement dust. Clouds rose into the air, inspiring Little Jack and me to make louder and louder engine roars. We bellowed out our version of truck horns until we grew hoarse. The thick greyish dust drifted down and clung to our damp faces.

  Standing at our front door to call me in to wash up for supper, Father shouted to Poh-Poh in the kitchen that he thought that he was looking at two lo-faan boys playing down on the sidewalk. For a moment, he laughingly told the Old One, he wondered where I had gone to.

  “I’m here,” I shouted, using my English words.

  Jack took back the blocks of wood. His mother was stiffly calling for him to come into the house.

  With a face as grim and bitter as Mrs. O’Connor’s, Poh-Poh threw Father a wet towel to wash me off.

  “Not funny,” she snapped.

  As the Old One stomped back into the kitchen, I struggled against the impossible thought that Poh-Poh and Mrs. O’Connor must have come from the same tree. I pushed away Father’s hand and took the wet rag from him to wipe my own hands. The cloth was streaked with dirt, but I hardly cared that Poh-Poh would complain about it. Instead, I kept asking myself what kind of tree would Stepmother be from?