by Wayson Choy
Third Uncle told Father that next year, when I looked older and stronger, and if business picked up, he would give me some real work to do. But just that week, he had had to lay off three of his best labourers, and it would be awkward, and shameful, to be seen bringing in a boy to do any of the men’s work. The men would lose face, as well as lose hope.
“Let Kiam be lucky for a few more months,” Uncle said. “Let him play like a rich man’s boy.”
But Father stared at the Free China poster hanging above Third Uncle’s desk. It showed a sturdy young marching boy, dressed like a soldier, the flag of the Republic of China clutched in one hand, a donation can in the other. In the distance, coming down ancient hills, marching past schools and hospitals, hundreds of smiling young people were following, carrying blankets, farm implements, books, tin goods, warm clothing, and medicines … the good things that such donations would buy. Father saw me staring at the poster, too.
“You’re thirteen,” he said. “Would you like to take on more duties?”
Earlier that spring, Father had shown me some pictures of Chinese soldiers sleeping on snow-covered ground, their trousered legs hugging rifles. And pictures of starving children from all over China, their skeletal arms outstretched, eyes sunken with hunger.
“These soldiers will need winter blankets,” he had said.
“These children need food,” added Stepmother.
Father would take me with him when he went around Chinatown to ask for donations for the New China Relief Fund.
I thought now of the soldiers freezing in the cold, the children without even a grain of rice to eat. I nodded; I would do what was right.
First, I had to look my best. Father showed me how to polish my shoes with my own spit, as he had observed the Negro shoeshine man polishing boots and shoes at the CPR station. Stepmother pushed my arms through a freshly ironed and starched blue shirt and buttoned it up to my neck. Poh-Poh encouraged me to put on my best woollen pants with my new suspenders. I shivered as the tweed material prickled against my legs.
“Itchy make you stand up,” she explained. “Make you taller.”
“Kiam-Kim, hold still,” Stepmother commanded. She rubbed her palms together with a dab of Father’s emerald-coloured pomade, which one of his appreciative readers gave him as a gift and which came all the way from France. Then she ran her palms and fingers through my hair and neatly combed a part in the middle. By the time I stepped out of the house, my shoes and my hair shone and I smelled of fresh lemons. My first trial visit would be to the warehouse, and then I would go to the rooming-house district.
“Kiam-Kim,” Third Uncle said, turning me around with a firm grip on my shoulders. “Let me see, front to back.” He adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses along his nose. “Yes, yes, very good!”
Father looked pleased. Uncle went to a shelf of small cardboard boxes and picked one out.
“Hold like this,” he said, showing me how my fingers should grip the box straight. The sides were covered with Chinese writing and official-looking paper stamps. At the top there was a slot. Third Uncle took some silver coins from his pocket and dropped them through the slot, one after another. He took my wrist and shook it. The coins jingled.
“That’s all you do, Kiam-Kim.”
Father waited a moment. “What do you say?”
“Thank you,” I said. Father slipped some coins in. I shook the box and said, “Thank you.”
“Yes, yes,” Third Uncle said. “When box heavy enough, you or Father bring back here.”
We walked down the long back staircase from Third Uncle’s mezzanine office, the coins clinking with my every step. In the warehouse, I passed some of the men who were unpacking large China bowls.
“Go ahead,” Father said. I walked up to the two men closest to me and shook the box. From the Saturdays helping with Father’s paperwork, I knew them by their nicknames.
“A soldier for the cause,” Father said. “My son, Chen Kiam-Kim.”
“Yes, yes, Mr. Chen,” Box Ears said, and dug in his pocket and put in some pennies. Long Arms, who could reach into the corners of any crate, quickly did the same thing, and I saw it was a nickel. I rattled the box and broke into a smile.
“Never forget to say—”
“Thank you, thank you!” I said, and ran down the back ramp of the warehouse and laughed to think how easy it was going to be to buy blankets for the soldiers and to feed the children of China.
After I’d spent five days going from shop to shop, door to door, shaking the New China donation box, Father told Stepmother that everyone seemed to enjoy giving me their attention. In fact, that was why the three-day assignment took us two extra days.
“People like his enthusiasm,” Father reported to Third Uncle. “They like Kiam-Kim’s cleverness.”
“And people like to laugh,” he told Box Ears.
It was true. Many times the elders and ladies would ask me what the money was for, and I would say in my excitement, “Blankets for rice!”
Father corrected me. I was to enunciate my short speech clearly, stand with my back straight, like a nationalist officer of the Kwomintang.
It wasn’t easy. Cantonese tones were as complicated as the guttural Sze-yup dialects. Liang-Liang and Jung-Sum, after they stopped making faces, and Stepmother would sometimes sit on the sofa as my spectators. Poh-Poh ambled by the parlour during one of my final practices. I harrumphed, then began:
“Generous donations benefit our soldiers of Free China with blankets for winter. Spare coins fill the empty rice bowls of our starving countrymen. A New China will rise from the old. Every penny helps. Every dollar matters. Thank you, kind sir, kind lady.”
And with my arms straight at my side, I bowed.
“Much better,” the Old One said to Father on her way to the kitchen. “Sound like a smart parrot.”
Father said I was ready to try again, and this time I would wear a new white shirt and double-polish my shoes.
After giving that short speech, I was to rattle the box—“not too loudly”—and Father would point to someone sympathetic I should head towards. Then I was on my own. Of course, I had to remember, if there were no ladies present, to stop the speech at “kind sir.” I was also to take a breath after “countrymen,” raise my voice on “dollar,” and not rush myself.
“Think of the soldiers and those hungry boys and girls,” Father said. “You speak for them.”
We collected on the few blocks around our house where we knew Chinese families lived, and then we went into Chinatown to knock on doors in the rooming houses along Shanghai and Canton alleys. I hardly had to say my speech at all, because Father would just ask for a donation and I would rattle the box, and that was all it took. We stood in smelly hallways so dark that I could never make out whether pennies or dimes were being dropped into the box. If an old man came to the door, someone so obviously poor, his clothes ragged and patched, Father would say at once, “Mh’koi, Senshaang! Excuse, sir! Sorry, sir!—Looking for someone else.” Father would push me aside before I could rattle the box.
Quite a few times a door would slam shut because we had disturbed someone’s sleep. Or window blinds cut off Father’s attempts to peek through the gloom. He couldn’t figure out who was on shift-work sleep and who wasn’t, who was hung over again and who was truly sick. But some opened their door a few inches and dropped coins into my donation box. A few lonely men begged us to visit with them, offering Father tea in stained cups, but he politely told them we were in a hurry.
I glimpsed entrances with stained walls and decaying litter piled under stairwells; stumbled in the murkiness past windowless chambers, tiny rooms with only soiled mattresses in the corner and wooden crates for tables or chairs. Wet clothes were hung across strings tied to nails. I heard coughing and hacking, the noise of shifting bodies and snoring. Most of the barely lit hallways stank like unflushed toilets.
After the third rooming hotel, Father, choking from the smells, said that from now on w
e would visit places where people were wide awake. As we walked down the steps into the bright sunlight, I noticed that my shoes were sticky. I hurried over to a patch of grass and rubbed the soles back and forth, back and forth. Coins rattled at my side. The poorest gave what they could.
“Did you say thank-you?”
Stung by the odours and by the sight of such poverty, I couldn’t remember if I had said anything. It seemed to me Father hardly spoke himself but rather nodded as he pinched a handkerchief over his nose.
“Where do we go next, Father?”
“We go for more money,” he said and signalled me to follow him. “March like a soldier, Kiam-Kim.”
I thought of newsreel pictures, those grainy images of uniformed men trooping into jungles. I marched like a soldier.
Thereafter, Father and I spent all of our soliciting time at the all-day gambling houses, at the big and small family associations, the bachelor-men’s clubs where the old men and the unemployed men wanted to hear from Father the latest news from China. In those places, I was always asked to recite my piece.
Someone was always willing to talk to me after my rattling.
“How many blankets will this one box buy?” Yim Sook the barber asked me in Toishan, in front of five old men waiting their turn to test his hand-operated clipper.
“Lots,” I would answer back in dialect, “but none if you don’t help.”
“Gentlemen,” Yim Sook announced, “free haircuts for your donations.”
Money clinked into the box.
On my rounds, I shook some hands, smiled at everyone, and earned some pats on my back. Some people even gave me candy bars or Wrigley’s gum, which I would take home for Jung-Sum to share with Liang and Sekky. At the B.C. Royal bakery, someone bought me a syrupy-sweet butterhorn and a tall glass of milk. Nickels, dimes, and quarters, even fifty-cent pieces, and two or three times silver dollars dropped into the New China donation box.
Everyone seemed to enjoy my cleverness.
“Ho! Ho!” they said “Good! Good!” and put in extra coins. I filled up five donation boxes, and Father signed up almost double his quota of pledges.
Father and Stepmother said I should teach Jung-Sum my little speech.
Only Poh-Poh resisted.
“You were born a clever boy, Kiam-Kim,” she said. “But you not as smart as you think.”
She was not happy with talk of a New Republic of China, not even of a New Reform People’s China, as if the old Imperial China was beyond useless. Poh-Poh wanted me to respect the Old Ways, to believe in the forces of feng shui, the forces of wind and water, of luck and fate, and of Kitchen Gods and ghosts. She said that Father was a dreamer. But I wanted to be more like Father, who seemed to understand how, in Canada, everything was scientific and modern. Poh-Poh caught me scoffing once as she was telling one of her stories; after that, the Old One did not have much more to teach me.
The men of Chinatown became my teachers.
Third Uncle even encouraged the elders to show me how to fill a water pipe with tobacco, but not to smoke it. I just wanted to see how the thing worked. Others taught me how to pick up wood from the mills along False Creek and, with a paring knife, whittle them into small boats for Sekky to float in his bath. At MacLean Park, some of the younger men encouraged me to put up my dukes and box with them, show them every punch I had learned at the Hastings Gym.
And if my pals and I were playing soccer, someone like champion Quene Yip would step up and teach how to side-kick the ball, jockey the pursuing opponent to the left, feint a swift pass sharply to the right, change direction as elegantly as a gazelle, and kick straight ahead to score. Victoria, his beautiful lady, would cheer us on.
Some of the older men had not seen their own China families for five, ten, or twenty years. The lucky ones, the ones with enough money, started second families in Vancouver. But the men who indulged me must have longed for some semblance of family life. While Father went about his business of signing up pledges, some of the bachelor-men took me with them as if I were a favourite nephew into their gathering places, the community rooms in the gambling clubs, the narrow smoke shops, the poolrooms and Tong Association reading rooms. They let me listen to their stories of Old China and gave me advice about growing up.
“You finish school,” they said in Toishanese, their voices raised against the din. “Then you go back to China and help your own people.”
“No, no,” another would say, “Kiam-Kim marry a good Chinese girl first! Then go back!”
“No, no,” another said with a laugh, showing off his Chinglish. “Kiam go China. Find goot Chinee gurlee there—my bessee daughter wait see you, Kiam-Kim!”
“Never mind who,” Lau Sook, the pool hall owner, said, “as long as he marry Chinese!”
No one said anything. Everyone knew that Lau Sook had disowned his second son for marrying a white girl whose father was a church minister. “The pair went into the mountains. I think to Kamloops,” I heard Mrs. Leong tell Stepmother. “Had to.”
Lightning flashed and thunder shook the windows as I stood outside another store waiting for Father to finish some business. Old Wen urged me to take shelter with him inside the Hong Kong Café. We sat on stools that could swivel.
“I buy you tea and butterhorn,” he said.
As we waited to be served, Mr. Wen stared a long while at me. The lights hanging over the counter flickered. Finally, the old man reached into his wallet and slid out a photograph.
“See, Kiam-Kim, my First Son. He be my only boy.” Mr. Wen pointed to a grown-up man standing behind an old lady. “Last time I saw him, he be twelve or thirteen, just like you. Maybe taller. My boy liked to play ball, too.”
People at the counter gathered around, squinting at the creased picture and commenting on how strong the man standing with the hoe looked. A thunderbolt rumbled across the sky and the lights flickered again. I studied the bent, worn picture and wondered if I would grow up as big, or even taller.
“Yes, yes,” Old Wen said to everyone around him. “My own boy.”
“This not a boy, Mr. Wen,” I said. “He’s old now.”
“You lucky, Kiam-Kim.” He pushed back his grey hair and stared at the photograph. “You have father and your Poh-Poh and Gai-mou.”
Old Wen brushed the picture with his fingers, as if he might brush away all the years he had struggled in B.C. and sent home his money; brush away all the lost years while his boy grew into this frayed photo of a grown man.
Father came in and sat beside me. He took off his hat and wiped a few raindrops off his glasses.
Mr. Wen showed him the picture.
“My only boy,” he said to Father, then carefully put it back in his worn wallet.
“He’s not a little boy,” I insisted.
“Very fine boy,” Father said, pushing me aside. “Number One Boy!”
No one looked at me, and everyone was quiet. The April rain had just started to fall.
There was a big map of China at one of the Tong Association reading rooms. Men would gather around it when Father showed up. He used the glass magnifier hanging on a string to read the tiny print.
“My little village?” someone would ask. “Dog-shit Japs bomb there?”
Father pointed out where the enemy was located. Pointed out the village. Explained that Japanese planes could fly anywhere and drop their bombs at any time, just as they had done in Manchuria. There were now rumours of a road being built in Burma to supply the Nationalist military with food and munitions.
Father always asked if the person had received any news from their village district.
“No letters for six months,” someone answered.
At the social clubs Father and I would visit with our collection boxes, Father would be confronted about his writings.
“Chen Sen-shaang, why don’t you come right out and say ‘Kill the bastard Communists’?” Mr. Lam, the Main Street herbalist, asked him. “You too soft.”
“All the same dog shit
to me,” another would say.
Father refused to give up.
“Your village and all of China,” he said, “need a stable government. Look how the Americans support Chiang Kai-shek. Why don’t you donate a few coins, maybe even pledge a few dollars a month? Here, my son will recite the Three Principles of Dr. Sun for you.”
And I would chant with thirteen-year-old confidence “San Min Chu Yee …,” repeating three minutes of rhythmic sounds I had memorized, understanding the Principles about as much as I had understood every morning at Strathcona the ritual words I mouthed, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Harold be Thy name.”
Loose change clinked into the donation box to save the homeland.
“Teach Kiam to read omens,” an Elder would say. “Old sayings much better than new ones.”
But as many times as some Elders would remind Father that forces such as Fortune and Fate influenced the future, Father politely and patiently spoke to them of economic forces, the Japanese invasion of Northern China, and the secret backing of the mighty United States for the New Republic of China. But every overseas political group said they loved China, it was explained to me, and that was why, in China itself, every Communist or Nationalist, Reformist or Socialist party had to destroy the other groups who also loved China.
And Father would tell me that killing was wrong, and worse, yes, that the Chinese in Old China were now killing each other, even blood brothers and same-village families. But soon everyone would focus on the real enemy, the Japanese, and China would be united again. No more Chinese killing Chinese.
“We all need to sit down and discuss these things,” Father said. “Meanwhile, Kiam, we collect money for peace.”
Third Uncle had promised Father that the money he was collecting was not for bullets or guns but for blankets, medical supplies, food for orphans—the ho sum things, the good-heart things. Other fundraising efforts were started, and those were for buying China bonds, for building planes and tanks, for guns and munitions to fight the Japanese menace.
“But we collect for the heart, Kiam-Kim,” Father said. “We help all the people of China.”