All That Matters

by Wayson Choy

  “Come closer,” Stepmother whispered. Her eyes were half closed. Her hair lay matted on her forehead. Poh-Poh gently pushed back the baby’s blanket to finish wiping its limbs with a wet cloth.

  Jung pushed me aside.

  We both stared at the tiny, wrinkled-faced baby. It looked scrawny and unhealthy, like a black-haired plucked chicken. Then Father came upstairs with Mr. Gu, the herbalist. Jung and I were ordered out of the room.

  Poh-Poh left with us. She had to change the pail of brownish water.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Too soon for name,” Poh-Poh said.

  When we were halfway down the steps, the baby’s wail rose into the air and turned the Old One’s head.

  “Name soon,” she said. “Very soon.”

  The wailing went on. Poh-Poh looked relieved.

  One month later, after considerable fussing by everyone, by Mrs. Lim with her potions and ointments, by Mr. Gu with his herbs, and by the mahjong ladies with their advice and with their share of special recipes for Poh-Poh to consider for Stepmother’s recovery, the baby boy had survived long enough to be given his official name. Third Uncle made sure that the herbalist approved. He even had the baby poked and prodded by a Western doctor.

  “Chen Sek-Lung,” Father said at last.

  All at once I thought of the stony pebbles that I had glimpsed sitting in that beautiful green box. Sek-Lung—“Stone Dragon.” Before I could ask anything about the name, Third Uncle was already thanking Father for considering his humble suggestion. The name had reminded him of the carved long-necked stone dragon at Prospect Point that looked across the sea towards China.

  Poh-Poh was asked if she approved of the name.

  “Of course, we discuss this name with you first,” Third Uncle told her. Father smiled.

  “Is Chen Sek-Lung acceptable, Old One?”

  Poh-Poh smiled back. “Yes,” she said.

  FOUR

  THROUGHOUT MY ELEVENTH AND twelfth years, everything focussed on English and Chinese school work, and I also grew busy with new duties—I now routinely went with Father for an hour or two on Sunday afternoons to Third Uncle’s Shanghai Alley warehouse, where, under the towering ceiling, I pulled along a handcart of account books. At every one of the three storage floors, I clambered over stands of huge boxes and shouted out their code numbers while Father checked off the inventory list. When we were finished, we would go to one of the noodle houses on Pender with some of his friends and some elders.

  Certain Saturdays, after I finished my morning Chinese classes, Jung-Sum and I met at Gore and Pender and took turns carrying the grocery bags for Stepmother. Poh-Poh would be home with baby Sekky, cooing over him every waking minute.

  Second Brother and I also took regular turns filling up the sawdust pails ready for feeding the chute on the side of the kitchen stove. Chopped logs had to be piled neatly beneath the back stairs, then covered with a large canvas tarp. We were also assigned to help Mrs. Lim with her load of logs when she couldn’t find anyone else who would, for ten cents an hour, carry them up the two and a half flights of precarious stairs to her little house. The money was paid in an envelope to Stepmother or Father, who always said, “For your school books.”

  Mrs. Lim fed us well during those lugging sessions, calling us good grandsons and telling Poh-Poh how we were building up our muscles.

  “Good for fighting,” said Poh-Poh.

  Though my time with Jack O’Connor was restricted, we still managed to meet up for sword fighting, acting out Robin Hood episodes in his backyard, or climbing over each other’s porch like Sinbad the Sailor jumping from one prayer tower to another.

  One morning, before a shopping expedition with Stepmother, Jack was showing off to Jung-Sum how he could swing like Tarzan from a thick rope we “found” near the ice house and which we had securely tied up to our porch. Jack now decided to tie the rope even higher. He climbed up to the roof and knotted it around one of the metal anchors bracketing the eaves.

  “See if it’ll hold,” he hollered down to us.

  Jung and I pulled down with our whole weight, and the rope held. Then I tossed the end of the rope to see if it would reach the O’Connors’ porch. It swung like a loose snake and easily crossed to the other side. I figured that Jack would have to fly through the air at a harrowing angle to avoid banging into our corner post. I leaned over the bannister and warned him about the angle.

  “Don’t wet your pants,” he said. “I can see that post from up here.”

  “Let me go next,” Jung-Sum shouted up, just as Jack flew into the air with his Tarzan yell.

  For a few exciting seconds, everything was going aces. Jack’s lanky body came swinging down in a perfect arc, but suddenly he realized gravity had taken over, and he had only a split-second to jerk himself out of the way of the post. His foot lifted, his hips swung sideways, then his whole body angled out of kilter like a piece of lumber. He missed the post and went swinging down as planned. Jung’s mouth fell open. I was about to yell ‘Watch out!’ but before a single word could escape me, Jack went flying across and into his own porch and crashed through the front window.

  Afterwards, Jack told me that he wasn’t the one doing all the screaming, it was his mother. “She gets hysterical,” he said.

  She’d been sitting having tea with a friend when two feet came hurtling at them, followed by shattering panes of glass and Jack himself, thumping down hard onto the shards, his limbs entangled in curtain and rod.

  Jack required stitches just above his knee. That impressed Jung even more.

  The next day, the rope still tied to our roof, Father made me walk over with Jung-Sum and apologize to Jack’s parents. Father even offered to pay a share of the damage. But when Mr. O’Connor walked outside and saw Stepmother carrying diapered Sekky onto our porch, he told father to put away his wallet.

  “Jack’s big feet and thick head were the main problem,” he said. “My boy has absolutely no common sense.”

  Jack was not allowed out for two weeks, but later he had fun showing off to the gang at MacLean Park the Frankenstein stitches on his leg. I thought Jack limped a little more than he needed to, but his injury made us both the centre of attention.

  “Kiam was ripped up a bit, too,” Jack would boast for me in front of the gang at recess. He gravely indicated an area near my groin. “But his granny won’t let anyone see.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t sure whether I should have limped a little, too.

  “You have to give them some blarney,” said Jack when we were on our own. “Makes life interesting.”

  Later, I asked Father what Mr. O’Connor meant by Jack’s having no common sense.

  “That means,” said Father, “mo no!”

  That made me feel good. Jack and I both lacked the same thing.

  By 1935, shadowy men and darker events edged the ragged borders of our life in Chinatown. More and more hobo shacks and corrugated-tin lean-tos were being built in small enclaves along False Creek.

  “Very bad,” Father said as he and Third Uncle looked out from the third-storey warehouse window and observed the hut-like humps growing around the distant steam ducts and heating vents under the Georgia Viaduct.

  “Never go there,” warned Third Uncle.

  Mrs. Chong claimed that at least two hundred unemployed men were living in those hovels, cooking over open fires and sharing pots of gruel salvaged from the slop pails of Chinatown restaurants. Segregated areas were now populated by Chinamen who had lost their seasonal jobs and who could no longer afford sharing a shift-time room, often just a bed with three or four others taking their turn to sleep; dozens had already starved to death, their bodies found in the rooming houses in Canton Alley, in the weekly-rental hotel rooms along Hastings and Main Street, and in the deserted alleyways.

  “Those place stink with death,” said Third Uncle.

  He was on a committee of merchants and landlords, part of the Chinese Benevolent Associatio
n, who volunteered to open up their warehouses, basements, and backrooms to shelter and feed some of the homeless.

  The Vancouver Health Board was set to condemn Chinatown’s efforts. Men and women were coughing all night; many coughed up blood.

  Father and others from Chinatown joined a committee set up by a United Church preacher to organize some soup kitchens. Late at night, Chinatown restaurants brought out unsold soup and soon-to-be-spoiled food to serve to lineups of waiting men. The rule was quickly established that no one would come to the front of the Chinese cafés or restaurants and frighten away the paying customers. One came to ask for food only in the back alleys, and only after dark. Even the unwashed white faces came to understand that. No one was turned away.

  Father told me the Canadian government would offer the hungry men and some women their fully paid passage back to China, but only if they agreed to surrender their original documents and sign a contract that said they would never return to Canada.

  “They all come to Gold Mountain with hope,” Third Uncle said. “They work hard for ten or twenty years and leave with only what they can carry back in one suitcase.”

  I remember going with Father to the docks to wave goodbye to a group who had accepted the free passage. Hundreds of men and the few women who saw no more future in Gold Mountain, carrying no more than a smelly duffel bag or a battered suitcase, often dressed in second- and third-hand coats, all of them sadly pushing their way up the gangplanks.

  “Why not starve and die in China?” said one old man to Father. He bent down and shook my hand and wished me well in Tin-Pot Mountain. His stumpy hand felt funny, but I knew better than to back away. Father had warned me about such hands. Old Beard had first helped to clear the forest for the railroad tracks; he lost a few fingers in the shingle mill, yet with his hooked fists he had hauled nets on salmon boats until he could do so no more. Jobs vanished from the West Coast, and jobs fit only for the labouring Chinese were the first to go.

  “Why not die in Toishan?” asked Old Beard. “Why not be buried back home? You remember that, Kiam-Kim. You Chinese.”

  Poh-Poh understood. Old Beard’s bones would not have to wait their proper return to ancestral burial grounds. His ghost would not have to wander in Gold Mountain crying out for his Old China ancestors.

  Elderly men that Poh-Poh once fed at our second-floor apartment came to our Keefer Street house to say goodbye.

  “I never to forget you, Kiam-Kim,” one said to me. “How tall you be now!”

  “Take care of Poh-Poh,” another said. “Listen to your good father!”

  When Stepmother invited them in, pushing Only Sister aside to make way, they shook their heads.

  “I not too clean,” some would say, perhaps catching Liang-Liang wrinkling her nose at the smell of their unwashed bodies.

  Stepmother told me that it might break their hearts to see how all of us lived in a house, how we were living as a family in Gold Mountain. Some of the men patted Jung-Sum on his head and gave him and Liang-Liang a handful of candies. I sometimes got a red packet with their last coins enclosed.

  “For school,” a few would say.

  I would refuse, three times, and three times the lei-see would be pushed back into my hand. Then they would turn from our door and walk slowly away, or Father would walk with them down the porch steps, promising to see them one last time at the docks.

  “I say goodbye now,” Poh-Poh would say from the front door, carrying Sek-Lung in her arm. “I die soon.”

  The men would protest, but then they would laugh along with Grandmother, shaking their heads sadly at the same time; after all, whether young or old, they joked, who could live forever?

  Later, I was told that some sickened and died in the fourth-class hold of the slow steamers that took them back. Others jumped into the ocean, unable to bear the shame of going home with less than nothing in their pockets.

  Beside a few obituary lines published in the Gold Mountain newspapers, some formal names were noted under the heading “Missing at Sea.”

  “Who’s that name?” I asked Father, who was reading the list aloud to Poh-Poh. They were both commenting on the last formal name, as if they had known the person very well.

  “Old Beard,” said Stepmother. “Do you remember him?”

  If I hadn’t been so busy being protective of him, I would almost have been proud of Jung-Sum.

  Father constantly emphasized that we all had to take care of one another, and the oldest son would always be the one the family members would most depend upon. Stepmother taught me that Jung-Sum and Liang would pay attention to my example, and so I was to do my very best in school.

  As First Son, I had a responsibility that weighed heavily on me: to set an example, to never let the family down, to never give them cause to be ashamed of me.

  “What’s ashamed?” Jung-Sum asked me.

  “It’s when you do something bad and—and …”

  “And everyone wishes you weren’t part of the family,” said Poh-Poh.

  Second Brother shivered.

  “No worry,” Poh-Poh said. “We raise you up to be good. Never to shame the family.”

  But Jung-Sum insisted on hearing examples of shameful behaviour.

  “You murder someone,” explained the Old One. “That very shameful to family.”

  “How about stealing?”

  Poh-Poh thought a moment. She guessed what Second Brother was thinking: the Old One often put extra “samples” into her shopping bag at Mr. Lew’s vegetable stall when he put out dried fruits, salted greens, or fresh peas for customers to taste or sniff.

  “Big stealing,” she said finally. “Big stealing very bad.”

  “How big?”

  “Too many questions!”

  Stepmother smiled at the Old One’s impatience. Wrinkled eyes caught her looking too comfortable.

  “What do you say, Gai-mou?”

  “When you do something bad,” she answered, “something inside will tell you.”

  “That’s what Miss Schooley tells us,” I said. “Except very bad people don’t know how to tell right from wrong. Miss Schooley says they don’t have education.”

  Poh-Poh nodded, grateful for the change in subject. “Study hard like Kiam-Kim,” she told Jung and Liang, then set down a cup of tea beside me as if I were to be respected as much as Father was respected behind his pile of notebooks and invoices.

  “The oldest branch bear the most fruit,” Mrs. Lim once said to me.

  I thought she meant to compliment my stature as First Son, but as was the way of village women, the saying was to warn me of the unspeakable burdens that lay ahead. Third Uncle later revealed to me that when Mrs. Lim’s only brother, many years older than her, was in his thirties and none of his three brides had produced a single child, he hanged himself from a courtyard tree. Then her family sent Mrs. Lim away to be a mail-order bride to a desperate stranger in Gold Mountain.

  I asked Poh-Poh why Mrs. Lim’s brother didn’t pick up a son like we had Jung-Sum. After all, children were bought and sold in Old China.

  “Too proud,” she said, turning away from me with a look that disturbed Stepmother and puzzled all of us, especially Jung-Sum. Poh-Poh reached out to him and took his hand. “Never worry. You be family with us,” she said. “You hear what I say, Kiam-Kim?”

  I nodded, sipped my tea, and turned back to my textbook.

  The Depression soon set me free from my work duties at Third Uncle’s warehouse; it was considered inappropriate for children to be doing work that an unemployed man might do. Children in Chinatown never starved, for the Benevolent Society kept track of the Tong families. And Father and Stepmother had part-time work offered to them, however menial.

  I was at liberty to play.

  Jack had started to go to the Hastings Gym for boxing lessons. He was a few months older than me, taller and heavier than I was, and he qualified for the twelve-to-fourteen Second Junior Level.

  I took Jung to the gym to watc
h Jack. At night, I would walk into our bedroom and catch him boxing with his shadow. Skinny arms flailing, he looked comic in the beginning, but he quickly caught on. At first his fists thrashed away at the air. Jack and I would position his elbows to stick out at a certain angle. Tell him to punch from there.

  “Imagine a guy in front of you, Jung,” Jack said. “See his ugly nose?”

  Jung-Sum nodded. Jack pointed in front of him. Gave me the signal.

  “Ready,” I said. Jung shifted his weight. “Aim.”

  Jack put his lips right next to Second Brother’s ear and barked: “FIRE!”

  Battering rams slammed into the air. One-two, one-two. Jung’s eyes lit up; his bony shoulders heaved with every whiplash wallop until finally Jack grabbed his wrists and shook one tiny fist into the air.

  “Knockout!”

  Jung collapsed into Jack’s side.

  Jack’s father got him started at Hastings Gym, in tribute to his pal, Jimmy McLarnin, the gallant neighbourhood boxer who knocked out Young Corbett III in 1933 and took on the title of World Welterweight Champ. A picture of Mr. McLarnin even hung on one of the walls at Strathcona School, where he was once a student. At the Hastings Gym, the champ’s newspaper pictures were prominently displayed in the manager’s front office. Every one of them caught McLarnin’s left fist poised to strike the final, skull-cracking blow. But Mr. O’Connor had a special photograph.

  “That’s Jimmy McLarnin,” Jack said, pointing to a picture in a frame that he took from his father’s dresser. “And that’s my dad.”

  Mr. O’Connor looked much younger in his sharp fedora, and proud, as if he knew he was standing beside a future champion boxer.

  Jack put their RCA in the front parlour window so Jung and I could hear the Saturday games: baseball in the daytime and boxing matches sometimes at night. His father listened to them at a Hastings Street pub and would discuss the highlights with Jack later in the evening.

  We crouched down and strained to catch the fadeaway American baseball broadcasts, three heads bumping like coconuts. Sometimes Jack and I did push-ups during the commercials for Burma Shave, pushing up and down with the rhyming jingles. Jung would stoop and count with us, pumping himself up and down like the heroes who ate Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions. Jung begged Father to buy Wheaties instead of the oatmeal Poh-Poh would boil for the family.