by Wayson Choy
The Old One lowered her head. She looked as if she were deep in prayer, like the ladies at the Good Mission Church.
“Are you praying, Poh-Poh?” I asked.
The Old One covered her mouth to stifle her laughter.
For the first two months, Second Brother didn’t say very much. He listened, the way Liang did, open-mouthed to Poh-Poh’s stories about the Monkey King and Pigsy, and played with Only Sister in the backyard under our watchful eyes. He sensibly obeyed Father and Stepmother, but he always studied me from the corner of his eye.
By the time he was five, I realized he wanted to be what his First Brother was: tough. I let him slug me a few times and told him not to hold back. But he was too scrawny to hit with any force. I told him if he was going to be as skinny as an alley cat, then he had to learn how to fight like one.
“I’m tough!” he said, wildly throwing up his fists for a fight.
As he slugged away, I hauled him up in the air and spun him, squealing, like a propeller while Liang jumped up and down shouting for her turn. Then we all got scolded by Poh-Poh for waking her up from her nap in the rocker. I told her we were being tough.
“Tough not noise!”
Jung and Liang-Liang tolerated my bossy ways when I followed Stepmother’s and Poh-Poh’s instructions to tell them to tidy up their toys or, whenever we went walking down Pender, to stick by me while the women went into the shops. Liang always wanted to hold Father’s hand if he were walking with us, but otherwise she reached for my thumb and yanked on it for me to slow down. Other times, at home, when Jung decided to make monster faces and chase Liang giggling down the hall and through the parlour and back into the dining room where Father or I were working with our pencil or brush, with a quick glance up at me and then at the two romping through, Father indicated my duty.
“Father and I are working,” I would say, taking on as best I could Father’s solemn tone.
“We’re having squealing matches!” Jung would protest.
Often I would have to catch Liang and toss her hollering and laughing onto the sofa. Jung would climb over me to save her, and we all three would end up in more horseplay. But that didn’t last. Father gave me a stern lecture on setting an example.
“How can they be well mannered when First Son behave badly?”
Poh-Poh said, “Maybe Jung-Sum take charge.”
Jung jumped to attention.
“No, no,” he said, “Dai-Goh stay Number One. He take care of us all the time!”
I had been teaching him how to take on the two playground bullies that had started teasing him for being a “skinny Chink.”
“Hit or run,” I told him. “Or just run. No use being a fool if you’re outnumbered.”
Jack was in the backyard with us and put in his two cents.
“If you’re outgunned,” he said, “first kick them in the balls and then run!”
It didn’t sound fair to me, but from the street games we played, Jack knew that Jung was a fast runner.
“What do you say, Dai-Goh?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to sound weak in front of Jack. “You figure out what you can get away with.”
Jack elbowed me out of the way. He looked Jung squarely in the eye. “Can you kick as quickly as you can run?”
“Sure,” Jung said.
“Kick high to the balls?”
“I guess so.”
“There’s your answer, pal! No one chases after you when you kick them there.”
After supper, Jung took me aside. “Was Jack right, Dai-Goh?”
As Big Brother, I knew I had to give him a good enough answer. I sucked in my cheeks the way Third Uncle would do whenever he was thinking about something.
“The bully picked on you first,” I said, “so I think you should kick and run—if you can. You decide.”
Liang overheard us.
“I bite,” she said.
We asked Father what was the right answer.
“Run away is always better,” Father told us. “No one hurt and no one in any more danger.”
“But what if I feel hurt?” I said.
“In Gold Mountain outside always hurt. But inside”—Father patted his heart—“no one can touch if you strong and proud. Inside matter more. You decide.”
Jung nodded. I thought of the scars on his back. The outside. Second Brother’s inside smiled up at me.
“Yes, yes,” he said, in the enthusiastic way Poh-Poh always repeated herself if she was in agreement. “I decide.”
By chance, Father had used my words. Jung looked up at me as if I were the smartest boy he knew. Liang came running at him again, trying to make him chase her.
“Play quiet,” he said. “Dai-Goh and I talking.”
Father and Stepmother were rarely home long enough to entertain the three of us. Stepmother left the house at five each morning, picked up by a co-worker in a truck and taken to Keefer Wholesale Grocery. There, alongside other women, she sorted and trimmed vegetables and rinsed countless heads of lettuce and cabbage before they were sent to over a hundred Chinese greengrocers. When she came home, Poh-Poh would rub Stepmother’s water-wrinkled hands, and every two weeks she would treat them in a pan of warm paraffin. Father massaged her neck and back. And big Mrs. Lim taught me how to wrap the teapot with a towel when she made a special herbal tea for all of us, a revitalizing tonic she used to make for her one-eyed husband. Sometimes Poh-Poh added a little bit of grated ginger.
“Good for che energy, Gai-mou,” Mrs. Lim told us as she placed two fingers on the nape of Stepmother’s neck. “Need heat inside here.”
Che was important for good health. I took a sip or two of the bitter stuff with a spoonful of honey and could feel my muscles growing. Jung-Sum took a sip, too, and made a face. Liang stuck out her tongue and ran away from any attempt to give her a taste.
Father could have engaged us with many of his stories of Old China, but he was always busy in pursuit of one part-time job after another. He was helping small storekeepers with their accounts, waiting on tables when he had the time, and writing letters for the uneducated elders and unemployed labourers who sent lies back to village families, often evading the truth about their despair and sinking funds. Father was also kept busy at Third Uncle’s remaining warehouse, filling in customs documents and invoices and always dealing with Third Uncle’s panic over the account books and their diminishing numbers. Between jobs, Father wrote a few articles and filed interviews for some of the Chinese-language journals. He and Stepmother used every earned dollar to keep us fed and clothed, and saved the pennies because one day, he told me, I would have to finish my education and take over as First Son and do my share. How hard he worked and studied his English books was how hard I should always work.
Father often came home too exhausted to think of telling fables to us. When we asked for them, he laughed and said he counted on Grandmother to be the family storyteller. Then he winked at Stepmother, who always protested that she knew only some Christian Bible stories preached by Patriarch Chen.
“Impossible to believe,” she said. “Whales swallowing up people and spitting them out alive!”
And so there was only Poh-Poh to be counted on to tell the Old China tales to us. They were the stories she had told Father when he was a small boy and Father said they would be the same stories we would one day tell our own children. I didn’t think that would happen: if Stepmother found the Christian stories too farfetched, and Father didn’t think the Old China stories were worth his own time to tell, then why would I tell anyone, Jack O’Connor or stubborn Jenny Chong, let alone my own future children, about the dragons and devious Fox Lady and the talking pigs and monkeys on sacred treks that once lived in Old China.
When I was almost ten, I stood with one foot deep in the rippling waves of Poh-Poh’s storytelling while my other foot stood firmly on dry ground. I would watch over my siblings, catch them if they slipped into Poh-Poh’s beguiling waters, as I had often slipped in my dreams, half believing trains to be
iron dragons. I decided that one of my duties would be to explain to Jung and Liang what was real, what was true, in Gold Mountain, just as Father had done for me, taking me to the echoing CPR Roundhouse where the ear-shattering train engines were shunted and turned around to head back east. I would turn my siblings around to see the world as it truly was. Show them at the proper time that the world was scientific and solid, just as Miss Kinny, with her chemistry demonstrations, had confirmed to us at school. Yet when the talk-story mood entered into our day, it was hard even for me to resist.
“This story true … oh, so long ago …,” the Old One always began.
“Dragons and talking monkeys!” I demanded. “They really true?”
“Not so true today,” Poh-Poh would say, a little disgruntled at my challenge. “But very true a long, long time ago in Old China.”
Jung-Sum crossed his legs and pushed me aside. “When was that time, Poh-Poh?”
The two at her side wanted so much to hear the story, they shifted restlessly on their bums.
“When?” Liang repeated.
“When ancient dragons and talking monkeys ruled the world, oh, way even before I was born … just ask Mrs. Lim.”
Jung-Sum’s eyes shone with amazement. I knew it was useless to argue over details at such a moment. Besides, I still wanted to hear the stories, so that, late in bed, as Jung-Sum tossed about and the flimsy curtains shifted gently with possibilities, I could sense the wonder that must be visiting him in his dreams, the time during which fierce dragons and birds of paradise all had appeared before me, too. During those years of my dreaming, Father said that from his own bedroom he could hear me shouting in my sleep.
“What did I say?”
“You said, ‘Poh-Poh, talk-story!’ ”
Stepmother smiled when she was told this. She must have thought that was my Chinese brain starving for more stories.
No, I would be patient with Second Brother and Only Sister: they, too, would need a Chinese brain, or be forever mo no.
Late one afternoon, as the skies darkened, gossiping Mrs. Lim said that her back was telling her that a rainstorm was headed towards us. Though we might be scattered with our toys and books in separate rooms, Liang and Jung could be summoned at once for talk-story time like hungry dogs to dinner.
I took my time.
“Fa-dee lah! Fa-dee lah!,” Poh-Poh called out to me. “Hurry! Hurry! I talk-story now.”
The Old One’s clearing her throat and shifting in her seat would quickly settle down the two youngest beside her in the kitchen, knee-clinging Only Sister and stool-perching Second Brother Jung. Then came stand-alone me. I leaned against the doorway, as if I was not going to be fooled like Liang and Jung, who would be swallowing every word Poh-Poh spoke.
Our largest teapot sat between big Mrs. Lim and Grandmother. This was going to be a long story.
“I tell story about Mistress Mean-Mouth,” Poh-Poh began, making a shuddering gesture as if a demon had just walked into the room.
A wild wind knocked against our kitchen window. Mrs. Lim rubbed her back and sighed.
Slam!
Everyone jumped. I had left the front door unlocked again.
“A house that welcomes thieves,” Mrs. Lim said. “Get me a cushion from the sofa, Kiam-Kim.”
“I talk-story,” Poh-Poh said again, ignoring me. I rushed out to lock the front door and came back with the cushion.
Mrs. Lim pulled in her chair and settled down on the cushion. “I listen.” With her thick palm she pushed aside the flour sack of carrots and turnips on the table, moved the bottle of pickled cabbage, and reached into the half-filled bucket of unshelled peas picked from her garden. She and Poh-Poh both began shelling the peas, dropping them into a porcelain bowl. The Old One tossed aside the green shells, working quickly. Mrs. Lim picked out a thick carrot from the sack, wiped it clean with the dark sleeve of her wool sweater.
“Fatten up, Jung-Sum,” she said.
Jung caught the carrot in mid-flight. At six, Second Brother was now more lanky than thin. He bit into the carrot like one of those cartoon rabbits. Mrs. Lim wiped a smaller one for Liang to chew on, but she saw nothing to offer me. I hated raw carrots anyway.
All this delay and settling down was meaningful. The story was to be a very special tale and required dawdling about to build up the suspense. An old trick.
Poh-Poh sighed, her mind settling in to talk-story. Only after the third and final sigh would she begin. But we were to sit still and wait respectfully. Even Mrs. Lim, whose very breathing grew quiet, slowed down the shelling. We sat while the Old One tilted her small head and brushed back the white strands. She gave the two youngest a sidelong glance, a warning to sit still, or absolutely no three-sigh-story would be told.
Big Mrs. Lim picked up the teapot and filled two china cups for herself and Poh-Poh.
I was growing impatient. From the corner of her eye, Poh-Poh caught me squirming and smiled.
In China, Father had explained to me, storytellers rattled noisemakers or knocked wooden clappers together, but even when a good crowd had gathered around them, there was always the waiting. The more famous the storyteller, the longer the wait. And three-sigh storytellers were the most desirable. With the loud second sigh, the hushed crowd understood more coins were required. Coins clinked into his cap to encourage the third sigh. With a satisfied glance at his cap, and only after the last exhalation, he would begin the story. Father said that a poor teller of tales would need to begin right away, even before he sat down, or everyone would depart. Poh-Poh was a three-sigh storyteller, and our coins to her were our squirming impatience for her stories of Old China.
Poh-Poh sighed a second time. Mrs. Lim put down her teacup. Both women studied us to see whether we were ready.
Excited, Jung snapped at his carrot. Liang pretended to chew, merrily displaying her missing tooth. The Old One looked at each of us. Satisfied, she gathered her breath, summoning up the third, crucial sigh. I sank back against the doorway.
“Don’t stand like useless boy,” Poh-Poh said to me instead of sighing. “Sit. Clean turnips. Grown-up job, Kiam-Kim.”
She plopped into my hand her favourite rasp, a curved blade with a rough sandpaper surface that she wielded like a weapon. Until that day, I had never been allowed to touch it. Too sharp, too dangerous. She shoved a large tin bucket my way and upended the flour sack with a bang. Liang jumped. Head-sized turnips and thick carrots tumbled out, rattling the sides of the galvanized bucket. Dust rose in the air.
I sat myself down on the extra crate.
“You know what to do?”
“Yes,” I said, having seen her use the razor-sharp weapon with a sculptor’s ease, carving a winter melon. Jung-Sum looked at me with envy. I had almost forgotten there was a story to be told. Poh-Poh’s third sigh came at last. She had been waiting for me to do my part.
I reached for a large turnip and leaned it against the lip of the pail between my knees. The hardened dirt from Mrs. Lim’s backyard flew off the root. The kitchen smelled of earth and pods. I was doing a man’s job. Everyone watched me. Then Liang shuffled restlessly in her chair and cried out for the story to be told. Jung chewed on the end of his carrot and nodded, yes, yes! Mrs. Lim laughed and said I was doing a good job on those turnips: “Just like my dead one-eyed old man used to do.” All this talk teased us into unbearable anticipation.
Finally, Mrs. Lim poured more tea and urged Poh-Poh to begin.
Silence.
We heard an incredible fourth exhalation, Poh-Poh’s signal that this story, rare and surely to be fantastic, was a most important one. Liang and Jung stopped wiggling. Distant thunder sounded. The room darkened. We held our breath. Mrs. Lim reached over and snapped on the light. Shadows darted away. Unable to stop my Chinese brain, I thought of ghosts.
With eyes closed, her head titled back, the Old One began.
“Once upon a long ago in Old China, in the time of my slave years …”
She put down the bow
l of peas and lifted Liang onto her knee. She turned Liang around to show Jung and me how she was taught to comb the waist-length hair of the young mistress, who lived like a royal princess.
“Hair down all the way here,” she said, patting Liang-Liang’s bum. “Face like pie plate. Every time I be with her, I see the two corners of her mouth go one way, down-way. Like this.” Poh-Poh pulled at the corners of her mouth. “When she carp at me, her words so mean to me, so cruel, the words drop like stones into my heart.”
Poh-Poh was warned not to pull at hair tangles or she would be beaten with a slim bamboo cane.
“Mistress Mean-Mouth, oh, she always yelped if I tug too hard,” Poh-Poh said, tugging gently at Liang’s hair. “My little hands carefully, very carefully, pull down the long comb, one slow, gentle stroke after another. Pull comb, once, twice, my hand shake. Tremble.”
But the comb was magical, we knew.
“Tell about the comb,” Mrs. Lim prompted.
I could see Liang’s eyes light up. Jung held his breath.
Decorative carved creatures were entwined around the rosewood handle of the oversized comb—two lifelike serpents with fierce dragon heads, with inlaid pinpoint gems for shiny eyes. Most marvellous of all, in the night, when everyone was asleep, these serpents moved about, their tails slithering.
“Oh,” Poh-Poh said, catching the tilt of my doubting head. “I tell you how I know this.”
In a dream one night—one of those nights when she had been beaten and sent to bed without food—one of the two serpents spoke to Poh-Poh and granted her a single wish. With a child’s hopeless misery, Poh-Poh clutched her stone pillow and wished the Mistress a terrible death, never to bother anyone again.
“I wake up and grab the comb. I look—” The Old One barely smiled, wetting her lower lip. “One serpent tail now over here, the other one over there. Not by the end of the handle. Both tails inches away from where they once reposed.”
“How come, Poh-Poh?” Jung asked, his eyes wide.
“Yes, yes, I asked that, too,” the Old One said. “I asked the Number Two house servant. He tell me the rare rosewood comb once carved by a magician. Fine teeth sliced from ancient turtle shell. ‘You get your wish,’ the old servant told me. ‘The Mistress will die.’ ”