by Wayson Choy
Mrs. Leong chortled. “Oh, they get along good, very good, those two children.”
Mrs. Wong laughed. But Jenny’s mother kept muttering. “Send her to strict Catholic school! Useless dead girl!”
Her chair scraped again as she sat down.
The mahjong game continued, tiles clicking and crashing. Jenny sighed with relief. My quick thinking had saved her skin. She caught me looking at her and quickly made a little cough, covered her mouth, then reached down and roughly rinsed off another plate.
“Big hairy deal,” she said, and shoved the plate at me.
I decided to say something that would really catch her off guard. The wood stove crackled. “I’m getting,” I half whispered, “a new brother.”
She looked around, as if someone might overhear us, and whispered back to me, “It’s a secret, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a big, big secret.”
She smiled for the first time. “You mo yung say doi.” Her lowered voice made each word sound triumphant, her thin, bloodless lips curled into a sneer. “You useless dead boy,” she said. “You shouldn’t have told me.”
The Kitchen God glared.
The Kitchen God must have laughed at Jenny Chong’s thinking she had tricked me into giving away the family secret and that I would be punished. The joke was on her. Nothing happened.
Within a week of the papers being signed, every one of the mahjong ladies knew all the details. Those agreement papers had been signed in Victoria, but my Second Brother was coming from Kamloops, far away in the Interior. I marvelled at how the papers and the boy were miles apart. I remembered that the immigration papers that brought Stepmother over were a whole ocean apart to begin with.
Stepmother said that we could not go to the train station to get Second Brother. A tong official would be with him on the train. With another mouth to feed, Stepmother told Father that they could not afford to stop working. The money mattered more than ever now. Poh-Poh and Third Uncle agreed. He had to work that afternoon, too.
“I pick him up at the station,” the Old One said.
“I’ll go, too!”
“No,” Father said. “Too much confusion for your new brother. Poh-Poh will go in a taxi. She knows the tong elder who will be with the boy.”
“You be patient,” Poh-Poh said to me. “I bring him home.”
Stepmother took me aside. “You forget something?”
“What?”
“You fix up your room for him. Move your bed over. We discussed this.”
In protest, I pushed my hands down to my side.
“That be your duty,” said Father.
Third Uncle tapped his pipe. “Don’t you want to be Number One Boss, Kiam-Kim?”
They all looked at me across the dining-room table. Beneath the tablecloth, I pushed my fingers out like a boxer in training.
“Yes,” I said, and tightly clenched my fists. Ready for anything.
THREE
POH-POH SAID, WHEN SHE CAME BACK from the train station with him, “This is Jung-Sum, your Second Brother.”
She pushed a small, dark-skinned boy into our front parlour. His hair glistened and smelled of Wildroot. His shirt collar, starched, was encircled by a glimpse of blue sweater, both protruding above his ill-fitting dark jacket. Everything sagged over his bony shoulders. His big-eyed head stuck out like a scarecrow’s on a broomstick. All he lacked was a straw hat. I tried not to laugh.
Liang-Liang, with a pink bow in her hair, clung to Stepmother’s skirt. She stared at Jung-Sum and apparently liked what she saw. She smiled shyly.
Poh-Poh shot me a warning look. She had informed me the day before that there was no way to get rid of him once we called him family.
“You grow to like him,” she said, and looked at Stepmother. “Everyone soon like him, just the way we like Gai-mou. We family.”
When Stepmother removed his outer jacket, he looked even more puny, not the rough kind of Our Gang picture-show kid I had expected to get.
Though I knew he was only four, half my age, it was still a letdown to see that he barely stood a head above my waist. Below his short sleeves, his elbows stuck out like doorknobs. He looked back at the grown-ups with darting eyes, as if demons were going to pounce and gobble him up. I thought of Poh-Poh scolding the chicken man about his grizzled birds, Too skinny for soup bones! Or maybe he was looking for his mother and father. I wondered why they didn’t keep him, why they gave him away.
Liang shook her Raggedy Ann doll at him. He jumped.
Father pushed me forward. “Introduce yourself,” he said.
“I’m Kiam-Kim,” I said. “It means ‘proficient.’ I’m smart.”
He whispered something to Poh-Poh. She stooped down, and they began talking in a funny dialect. Then Stepmother showed him the kitchen, the pantry, and the dining room, with Father’s desk in one corner. He stopped to look at the Meccano Ferris wheel I had left there.
“Jung-Sum speaks Hoiping,” Father said.
“I speak English!” a thin voice squealed from the next room. “I speak goot English!”
“Take Jung-Sum up to your room, Kiam-Kim,” Stepmother said. “Take his suitcase with you.”
“Go with First Brother Kiam,” Poh-Poh said. “We call you down for dim sum.”
Dishes rattled behind us as he followed me upstairs. I threw his battered suitcase on his bed and motioned him to sit down. The springs squeaked. The iron fold-away cot smelled rusty. Father said Jung-Sum had to share the bottom two drawers of my five-drawer dresser and half my closet space. That was the way it was.
“Where you’re sitting,” I said. “That’s where you sleep.”
As he sat back, his trouser legs rode up. In summer short pants, his stick-thin legs, like a girl’s, would be embarrassing. At least he wasn’t a chatterbox. He didn’t even bounce on the cot to test the springs, the way I remember testing my big bed when I first got it.
“I’m your dai-goh, your big brother,” I announced. “You have to be tough to be my baby brother.”
He nodded.
Jung-Sum wasn’t what I wanted for a Second Brother. I had imagined getting a boy like me when I was three, standing by a moon gate in that last picture taken in China; I was big and strong, fed lots of good food to prepare for the weeks-long overseas journey to Gold Mountain. I wanted a chunky little boy to boss around, the way everyone bossed me around. But Jung-Sum looked so small, so hopeless. It would be like bossing around Baby Liang. Not much fun.
Still, I had responsibilities that I couldn’t avoid now. As Jung-Sum’s new dai-goh, I should set down some rules, show the squirt right away who was boss.
His fingers slithered over to the worn suitcase handle, as if I might grab it.
“Let me see how tough you are,” I said. “Stand up.”
He sat there looking confused.
I put two stiff palms under his arms and stood him up. I made a fist in front of his face and waved it like the boss boy in the Our Gang pictures. I gestured like a shadow boxer so he’d know what was going to happen next: I punched him in the stomach. Just hard enough, I thought.
I expected him to cry like a baby, but he didn’t.
I picked up the red crayon I had taken from Liang’s toy box and drew a line across the linoleum floor. Told him to keep to his side. He nodded. I put crayoned X’s on the two drawers that were his. The bottom two. He understood.
He looked up at the torn calendar on the wall. It had a picture of cowboys rounding up cattle.
“You like cowboys?” I said.
He nodded. He opened his suitcase and pointed at a worn stuffed doll. I picked it up. It had on a darkly stained cowboy outfit, but only the broad brim of a hat clung to its stitched head. I looked closer. It looked as if someone had tried to cut off the hat but gave up halfway. The stained label said Tom Mix. I put it back down. Second Brother would need a lot of bossing around. I was about to tell him there were bad and good cowboys, when Poh-Poh called us down to eat.
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Later that evening, when he was trying on one of my old undershirts, I inspected him some more.
He pulled away his sweater and yanked off his shirt. I was prepared to laugh at his exposed cartoon skeleton, but when he turned away, I noticed red lines running over his back, as if Long John Silver had tied him up and had lashed him a dozen times.
“Don’t move,” I said. I traced my thumb along one of the darkest lines. The thin, deep line began at his bony right shoulder and went diagonally across the tip of his spine.
He hardly flinched.
“What’s this?”
“Ba-bah hit me,” he said.
I shouted for Poh-Poh and Stepmother to come upstairs. The Old One took one look and said, “Yes, yes, the belt,” as if she had expected to see such marks. Stepmother stood by the doorway carrying Liang-Liang in her arms. Only Sister was alert to the newcomer and stared pensively at him.
“Jung-Sum,” Stepmother said, “Third Uncle is downstairs. He brought some dumplings just for you to eat later. Some friends left us clothes for you, too. Come down and see.”
“One minute,” Grandmother said. She had been studying the criss-crossing lines. “Wait.”
Stepmother and I watched in silence while Poh-Poh came back from her room and applied one of her special ointments on Jung-Sum’s back. No one had ever hit me like that, the way Poh-Poh had been hit when she was a slave girl in China. I only ever got knuckled, and once at school, three straps on the hand for spitting.
I thought, He’s tough.
The Old One said to him, “Put on undershirt and your green sweater. We go downstairs now.”
Poh-Poh offered her hand, but Second Brother ignored it and waited for her to walk out first. Poh-Poh shrugged and gave Stepmother a pleased look as she passed. Their small footsteps on the stairs made the same sound, like an echo.
I didn’t move.
Stepmother stood in the doorway, looking at me. Sister Liang was now clinging to her dress; her cloth doll hung upside down from her tiny fist.
When the Old One led my new brother into the parlour, I heard Father shouting out a welcome. He and Third Uncle were drinking Tiger Bone wine. Father’s voice rose above Poh-Poh’s laughter. “A toast to my new son—to Jung-Sum, who will be the Second Brother of my First Son, Chen Kiam-Kim, and Second Brother to their Only Sister Jook-Liang!” Glasses clinked. There was another toast to Poh-Poh and to her three grandchildren.
“I long for three grandsons,” she cried. “Then I die soon.”
Laughter rumbled up the staircase.
Sister Liang ran into the room and plunked herself down on the fold-out cot.
“Your new brother’s cot doesn’t take up too much room,” Stepmother said at last.
I sniffed.
“You hardly use all those drawers, and the closet is big enough for three boys.”
My mouth would not unbend.
“Why?” I asked.
“Father and Poh-Poh wanted another boy in the family.”
“Why didn’t his own mother and father keep him?”
“They’re dead,” Stepmother said.
My fists tightened.
“Both of them?”
She took a deep breath to say it all at once. “Jung-Sum’s father drank too much. He came home and killed Jung’s mother, then he killed himself. Some men are driven by demons.”
I imagined the truth of that, but I wondered how that might happen, for one to be so driven by demons as to kill himself.
“You saw the marks on his back. He wasn’t lucky like you, Kiam-Kim.”
Father called for us to come join him. Stepmother went to my dresser and tossed me a sweater.
“You have a good father,” she continued.
I put my head under the sweater. Her soft voice penetrated my ears.
“You have a good nai-nai like your Poh-Poh. This boy has no one.”
“No one?” I pushed my arms through the wool sweater and wondered what it would be like to have no one.
Liang turned over on the cot and mimicked my voice: “No one?”
“Unless we take Jung-Sum in”—Stepmother sat down beside Liang and began to retie her ribboned hair—“no other family in Chinatown will take him.”
Poh-Poh had come up the stairs to see what was holding us up. Liang clung to her Raggedy-Ann doll.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Some people think Jung-Sum is cursed,” Stepmother said. “Not lucky to lose a father and mother that way.”
A history, brief as breath. There were no more details left to tell a boy like me.
“Why us?”
“Father knew his father,” Stepmother said. “They were boyhood friends, students together back in the village.”
Everyone in Chinatown seemed to know everyone else. You only had to say your surname, mention any Kwangtung county—Sam-yup, Sze-yup, Chungshan, Heungshan—even mention Canton, Hong Kong, speak any of the city or village dialects—and smiling strangers would link you to a chain of kinfolk. In a hostile country like Canada, anyone having the same last name was enough: we Chinese together. But Father had known Jung-Sum’s father: before the time of demons, the two had been friends.
“Good to have another grandson,” Poh-Poh said. “He can grow up and work. Earn money.”
I tried another tack. “Do we have to take him … forever? For keeps?”
Stepmother barely paused. “Yes, just as your father and your Poh-Poh took me in.”
I thought, I, First Son, took you in, too.
“Kiam-Kim.” Stepmother’s eyes were clear and firm. “What is the right thing for us to do?”
I unclenched my fists. I did not know what to think. At last she asked me what I did not want to be asked.
“What shall be Jung-Sum’s luck?”
I was not surprised when Stepmother reminded me that good luck was always connected to doing the right thing. She wanted us to be lucky, wanted Jung-Sum to be lucky. She told everyone that even when others did the right thing for her, even when she did the right thing for others, her fortune was often “a bitter luck.”
Whenever Poh-Poh would say “Luck is luck, however imperfect,” Stepmother would remain silent. Poh-Poh would remind her, “You lucky be in B.C. Plenty to eat in Gold Mountain.”
Stepmother closed her eyes.
When I asked Poh-Poh why she always insisted Stepmother was so lucky to be living in Chinatown, the Old One would tell me how there had always been so much starvation and famine, so many bandits and wars in Old China, that Old China we had left behind and could barely remember.
“Ten times ten thousand die,” she said, jabbing ten fingers into the air. At my bloodthirsty urging, Poh-Poh would tell me again and again of the bodies in the Canton laneways, the carcasses pushed into gutters, to be dragged away by coolies before sunrise. “Many times, Kiam-Kim, I lifted you up, and you hold your baby nose like this.”
Grandmother laughed when I pinched my nose to keep her company; yet something of that time would come back to haunt me. Her vivid retelling made me feel again how my face had been swathed with thick cloth, and I would see myself toddling down crowded Canton streets, and just as Poh-Poh would put her hands under my arms to pretend to lift me up over imaginary, smoky debris, a remembered smell of cadavers in the summer heat, an acrid, putrid aroma, would suddenly burn the back of my throat. “That smell I never to forget, Kiam-Kim,” the Old One would say. Though I always swallowed at the end of these talk-stories, my small ears were eager for more.
“Tell me again about you and Father!”
“Aaaiiyaah … I tell!”
And she would begin long before my own history, in an even more terrible, tragic time, when she gave birth to a boy-child who was to become my father.
Poh-Poh always bit her lower lip when she told me these stories of her raising father in Patriarch Chen’s household, of their survival together in the Chen family compound. And to show me how desperate those times were, she tongued her lower lip to
show how the taste of her own blood nourished her and the baby, my father, when there was barely enough to feed all the Chen family members. Fortunately, Patriarch Chen had three farms back in Toishan county. All the clan and their servants went back, and they all toiled and grew what little would grow in the greyish soil, and servants like herself survived mainly on shrivelled root vegetables. After many years, Father became a man and married the tiny woman who would become my mother. “She so beautiful,” Poh-Poh would say.
Only two photos remain of those times. One Father had kept by his bedside—Mother’s wedding photo. The other, Poh-Poh had kept for me. It shows a small woman with a baby in her arms, sitting on a bench before a moon gate garden. The Old One would only say, “Here is your mother and you.”
In the sepia-tone picture, my mother’s bound feet are lifted behind her cheongsam, as if she were floating on air.
I remember rummaging through the Old One’s trunk one afternoon and finding a pair of tiny flower-embroidered cloth shoes, barely three inches long, like boots for a toddler.
Poh-Poh said, “Your mother wore those lotus shoes.”
She tenderly took them from my hands and tightly closed the lid. From the way Grandmother held her bent head over the wooden trunk, and from the look in her eyes, I sensed enough darkness not to ask any more questions.
Even Stepmother knew not to ask too much. At the end of these talk-stories, she stayed silent, as if whatever she herself knew could not matter much. Her silence made me think that only Grandmother kept all the stories of our family, and only the Old One decided which were to be told.
Among the elders of Chinatown, there was always an understanding that some things could never possibly be told, that what mattered was that one had done whatever had been needed to survive. Doors and windows were shut on the past and should not be opened. In the end, even Poh-Poh agreed, only luck truly mattered.
“Better be lucky than smart,” she said.
Stepmother saw my confusion. “Just do the right thing, Kiam-Kim. Remember to do what is right.”
“Oh, yes …” Poh-Poh’s voice quavered as she shut her eyes. “Only … the right thing.”