All That Matters

by Wayson Choy

  In Poh-Poh’s version, told to Mrs. Lim and the mahjong ladies, stark references were made to every bruise that showed up on my legs and back, my arms and neck. Jung proudly included the detail of the razor-sharp blade that ripped through my trousers, nearly slicing off the family jewels. Each time he heard Jung’s version, Sekky grabbed himself at the crotch and fell down dead. Then I would pick him up and throw him in the air and bring him caterwauling back to life.

  Liang was more interested in Jack’s black eye, since it ruined his good looks for weeks, and she wanted his cowboy handsomeness back. When his puffy eye got better and the blue-black stain disappeared, she got up her nerve to ask Jen to get her father’s boxy Kodak camera and take a shot of her beside Jack’s spotless good looks. Of course, I had to ask Jack if he would mind. He didn’t at all. He lifted Liang onto the porch rail and sat with his arm around her.

  Jenny presented a framed copy of the picture to Liang on her tenth birthday. Jack even signed an extra copy for Jenny; he wrote, “Your hero,” and included a row of X’s, just as he had done on Liang’s copy.

  Other pictures were taken that day. Jack and me with our arms around each other’s shoulders. “Forever pals,” we wrote on each other’s copy and signed our names. Liang took one of Jenny standing between the two of us. But she didn’t hold the camera steady, so the shot was blurred and half of Jack’s head was cut off.

  Father spoke little about the Mafia Boys incident; he saw the whole episode as senseless. Third Uncle said that I was lucky that Jack was around that day. Stepmother didn’t think I should hang out with Jack so much, if only to appease Jack’s parents, who rightly thought that I was to blame for not watching where I was going. Stepmother reiterated that I spend more time with good Chinese sons.

  Joe Sing, Jeff Eng, Fat Wah Duk, and I would hang around in the alleyway under the rows of bachelor-room rentals behind the Chinese school, just at the back of the W.K. Restaurant. Our favourite spot lay below half-opened windows, beneath the crisscrossing shadows of a plunging fire escape. We were pumped up that day, Joe and I shoving each other around, dragging on cigarettes from our communal package of Exports. We clamped the fags between our lips like Hollywood gangsters, while Jeff and Wah Duk tapped the latest beat on some garbage cans. We pretended we were in the Benny Goodman band.

  The racket roused someone from a troubled sleep. A God-like voice boomed above us: “Shut the fuck up!”

  We looked up at the strip of sky caught between the alleyway buildings. One floor above us, an angry face stuck out between swirls of stir-fry vapours hissing from restaurant vents. The whites of two dragon eyes nailed us to the ground. The thick hair protruded like horns. The dark-tanned face twisted with rage, spewing out ancestral curses in Chinese, in broken Italian, in what we eventually came to be told was fractured Hebrew and Hindu, punctuated with some Indian phrases and highlighted with cries of Goddamn! Damn! Damn!

  Our hearts pounded.

  Right above the iron cage of the swing-down fire escape, the words were coming out of the cursing mouth of Chinatown’s Number One black sheep. All of Chinatown knew that sneer, that angular face perpetually black eyed and bruised. Respectable mothers and fathers made sure we knew that the nineteen-year-old menace was the single most notorious demon in Chinatown history.

  When the menace once staggered by us at Pender and Carrall, Grandmother sang out to him, “Drunk at noon, die soon.” And he turned his gaunt face, his thin lips contorting, and spat at her feet. Poh-Poh threw back some colourful curses, which made him shake with laughter; he tipped his hat to her, as if each of her curses were a blessing in disguise.

  Jeff and Joe traded nervous glances, hoping the other might make the first move. But we were rooted by a deep and attractive dread: no one wanted to be the first to run. No one wanted to miss what would happen next. We swallowed the stale alleyway air, our lit Exports burning inert, stuck to our dry lips.

  The dark head disappeared. Above the pounding of our hearts, we heard shuffling noises. Wah Duk and I chewed on our half-smoked butts; Jeff and Joe sucked away defiantly. What next?

  A door slammed. Before any of us could mount a four-way split, a body came vaulting down the echoing stairwell.

  “Whadda we have here?”

  The voice caught us off guard: it was breathless, but calm. The quiet before the kill. The menace tilted forward from the third step and jammed his fists against the lintil to tower over us, daring us to make the next move.

  Those long legs could outrun a fox. His dark jacket was half hooked over bare muscled shoulders, his lean torso veined with sinew. I smelled a brute ready to pounce.

  Jeff Eng gulped. My eyes widened. Joe Sing looked as if he could wet his pants. We tried to look away. It was no use. We were doomed. The killer finished buttoning his fly, then casually jumped the three steps and landed in front of us. The black leather jacket, a match for his pants, shifted like a cape.

  Wah Duk took one step back, knocked against a half-empty garbage can. He stuttered the dreaded killer’s name: “F-f-frank Yuen.”

  A clanging bell echoed in our heads. Round one.

  Frank Yuen spat on my school bag, shoved Jeff, and snapped his fingers at Joe. Joe stumbled backwards.

  “What have you boys got to say?”

  He rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard, enjoying the fear written over my face.

  “S-s-sorry,” Jeff managed.

  Frank smirked, taking time to study the four fledglings cringing before him. We could see the legendary scars on his chest. Jeff Eng let out his breath. Maybe Jeff knew as much as I did.

  Frank’s oldest scars were from the belt beatings he received at the hand of Old Yuen. Frank’s mother had tried to escape with her son three times, but Chinatown dictated that she should return. Who will feed you and your boy? Finally, unable to endure any more abuse, she left with Frank for good and did the most menial jobs to survive. She cleaned out the spittoons and bedpans in rooming hotels, cleaned up the rooms after bachelor-men had died there of old age or illness, until she herself died of TB, coughing blood until she choked to death. Then Frank’s father fell ill and became too weak to beat his son, and Frank moved back. At fifteen, Frank took charge of his father’s rent, his food, and medicine. The old man was still alive, and Frank was still taking care of him.

  Father had sent me to collect the rent from Old Yuen a few times. I saw a man only ten years older than Father, a man too worn down to live but too stubborn to die. When I took the envelope of money Frank had left behind, I wondered why he did not walk out on Yuen, especially after all of his father’s abuse and the loss of his mother.

  Father said to me, “Nothing to think about, Kiam-Kim. Frank is First Son, Only Son.”

  Instead of defeating him, everything bad, even unlucky, just toughened up Frank Yuen. Grandmother told her mahjong ladies how she liked his tiger spirit. She called him “a good demon-boy.” Whenever Frank Yuen was sober, she would greet him with a grin; he would hold his palm out to her as if begging for coins. Once, she plunked down into his bandaged hand a bottle of her homemade cure-all lotion.

  “For fast healing,” she said. “Not for drinking!”

  Frank laughed, spun the slim bottle in the air.

  “Yes, yes,” Poh-Poh shouted after him. “Shake before use!”

  If he stumbled by in a drunken state, she would chant, “Frank Yuen die soon.”

  But today, confronting us in the laneway, he was very much alive, albeit hung over, leaning against the brick wall, still trying to focus. Drunk, he would have been deadly.

  “Get rid of those shitty-tasting butts,” he ordered. Four smokes hit the ground.

  “Good going, men,” he said. “Always obey your superiors.”

  Joe Sing snapped to. “Yes, sir!”

  Frank laughed. It was a genuine, persuasive laugh.

  The restaurant vents began to hiss again, sending out greasy aromas; someone above us was snoring, coughing; and in the fading light, sha
dows melted.

  I stepped on the butt burning at my feet. Jeff stepped on his, too. For something to do. Frank watched us. He reached into his inside breast pocket. I expected to see the gleam of a switchblade, or even a handgun. But the face didn’t register any killer’s instinct. I stepped closer, just to look. We all did.

  With a steady, practised hand, Frank slipped out a thick cigar. Then, as if he had considered everything about us, and liked whatever he had considered, he gave us a smile, his demon eyes suddenly human.

  “Try this Cuban,” he said.

  The voice sounded easygoing, an amiable spirit willing to take us in. Our anxiety almost vanished. We had become an exclusive mob, a gathering, a club. We were desperate to be taken in. We looked at each other, our fears sinking away, our sense of adventure surging. Jeff Eng broke into his first smile. I relaxed, too. We all grinned. Frank Yuen didn’t seem so bad, up close, with his tousled hair. Fat Wah Duk had boasted before how Frank the Hood always tipped his mother well at their restaurant. Maybe there was a good Frank, a generous Frank, a kind Frank for mothers and boys. We let out a collective sigh.

  Frank began to roll the thumb-thick cigar between his palms. It crinkled in its brown-and-gold wrapper. The warmth of his hands teased out the delicious aroma. He passed the six-inch Cuban under each of our noses.

  “I’d like to try,” Joe Sing said.

  “Yeah?” Frank said. “And you two punks?”

  We nodded.

  He tore off the paper ring with its embossed gold crest, slowly unwrapped the stogie like an elder unwrapping a rare ginseng root.

  “Any objections to this torpedo?”

  No one objected.

  Frank licked the sides of the cigar until it gleamed, then bit off one end, spat it out, and smartly, struck a wooden match. Gently, puffing softly, easily, he lit the thing. The tip glowed, and a quarter inch of pure white ash curled into life.

  I thought of the thick red candles Father lit before the gods in our family tong temple, the candles burning in the two Chinese theatres in Chinatown. How the candlelight glowed and the porcelain faces of the Smiling Buddha, the Gods of Good Fortune and Luck, and the fierce God of Theatre flickered with life. In the growing alleyway darkness, our boyish faces gained new life.

  Frank twirled the thick cigar in his manly fingers. He took one last drag. Phantom smoke hung above our heads. It smelled as sweet as the first taste of rum I ever had, just the few seconds before the alcohol burned up my insides and snapped off my head.

  “Ready?”

  We nodded.

  “Take three deep breaths,” Frank said, handing the cigar first to Jeff, “then inhale deeply—one, two, three times—without exhaling. Hold the smoke in your guts as long as you can. Do it.”

  Our fingers itched to take a turn.

  Jeff Eng put his school case down, held the cigar in as manly a way as he could and stuck it in his mouth, inhaled one, deeply, two, deeply, three.

  “Hold it in, champ,” Frank said. “Next. Hurry up, guys.”

  One after another, we took three deep breaths and held. Then, as the sickly-sweet smoke threatened to implode and eat away our semi-virgin lungs, Frank said, “Let go!”

  We exhaled. Jeff gagged and spilled out his guts. Wah Duk spewed the Oh Henry bar he’d eaten ten minutes before. I grabbed Joe, and we both doubled over and retched, but nothing came out except trails of smoke. When we doubled up with spasms, Frank doubled up with laughter.

  I don’t know how many minutes went past, but when I looked up, three of us were splayed against the wall; Wah Duk was still heaving into the garbage can. Frank surveyed the disaster.

  “Never inhale cigar smoke. Only suck-ass kids with something to prove inhale cigar smoke.”

  Jeff groaned. “You should have told us.”

  “Why?” Frank said. “So I can save you the trouble of learning something? You don’t learn this shit in school books.”

  “Learning—?” I asked, fighting my nausea.

  “Learning that you don’t have to grow up so fast.” Frank slammed a fist into a garbage lid and sent it flying down the alley. “Not everything has to be learned first-hand. Catch?”

  Oddly, I didn’t feel tricked. My stomach churned; my mouth tasted like a sewer.

  “By the way, gentlemen,” Frank said, “did any one of you little fuckers know that you don’t inhale cigar smoke?”

  Jeff weakly raised his hand.

  “Then why the hell did you do it? Why didn’t you warn your buddies?”

  He looked down at the ground.

  Wah Duk stood up straight at last and started to walk home. Joe Sing followed him. Jeff wiped his mouth on his sleeve and tugged at my arm to go. I wanted to stay, to hear more. But Frank slapped me on the back, as if to say, Get going, there’s nothing more.

  “Tell your Poh-Poh I need some more lotion. Got in a bad fight yesterday.”

  He showed off his fists. The knuckles were bruised.

  After that evening with the cigar, Frank Yuen didn’t seem to mind that Jeff and I liked to hang around him. Whenever we heard he was back from the lumber camps, we called up to his rooming-house window and waited to see if he would come down to join us. Sometimes he told us to fuck off, he had had a hard night; most evenings, though, he came down in his best clothes, scented with aftershave, ready to embark on a visit to a favourite sweetheart or to meet his friends at the Jazz Hut, an all-night hangout.

  He would spend twenty or thirty minutes with Jeff and me, telling us stories about fights at the camps when someone called him a Chink, about his three near-death accidents with shingle-mill saws, or about the time when the two tractor pull-chains swung towards his head in the sawdust air.

  He lifted his shirt and pointed out his scars, tracing the deep cuts where a ripsaw had torn past his sleeve and grazed his shoulder; where a fight with a knife ended with a slash across his back; where, on his left arm, he’d been splashed when his father had thrown boiling water at his mother while she held young Frank, trying to comfort his crying in the night. About some scars Jeff or I pointed to, he had nothing to say. Only remembered waking up in the first-aid shed cut up badly.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I lose a few, too.”

  I thought of my life at home, how easy everything was. Father would never throw boiling water at any of us. After our first taste of alcohol, Jeff Eng’s father had beaten him with a razor strop, but even Jeff knew that he had pushed his father too far that night.

  Poh-Poh asked me if I had taken the medicine to Frank.

  “Yes,” I said. “He wants to know how much for the bottle.”

  Instead of answering me, Poh-Poh said, “Tell Frank Yuen I say war come soon.”

  For weeks she had listened silently to Father and the elders debate the war news from China. The Imperial Japanese troops were amassing, aiming to march southward into central China.

  “Poh-Poh, how much for the tonic?”

  “Frank teach my Kiam-Kim everything. That the cost for Frank Yuen.”

  No one in the family said anything to me about Frank. Poh-Poh told Stepmother not to worry, to leave me alone. “Frank Yuen,” the Old One said, “good demon-boy, not bad demon-boy.”

  Jeff Eng’s father didn’t like his son hanging out with a boy like Frank Yuen, but Jeff snuck away to join up with me and the demon hood.

  One night Frank wrestled away Jeff’s and my pack of Player’s and crushed it in his fist.

  “You two look like you’re sucking on a tit,” he said.

  We boasted about our third round of drinking. He spat.

  “Try growing up first,” he said. “That’s the tough part.”

  If he was suspicious, he would smell our breath for a whiff of tobacco or alcohol. We were slapped for our efforts to cover up with bits of licorice Sen-Sen. I didn’t mind. Being seen with Frank Yuen made us feel like big shots. We expected him to slap us around to smarten us up. To make his point, he stopped smoking in front of us.

  One even
ing, Frank’s father, drunk again, stumbled down the rooming-house steps and pushed his way through the gang of us.

  “Frank, tell them everything,” he said in Toishanese. “Just like I tell you.” He was on his way to one of Chinatown’s gambling dens. “You be their dai-goh.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Frank said. “Make sure they get into trouble.”

  “First Son,” the old man said, “tell them everything.”

  Jack had been working on the docks on weekends, piling goods onto lifts, shift-work that his father’s union boss got him to keep him out of trouble. That was okay with Jack: the extra money impressed the girls. I wanted him to meet Frank Yuen.

  “He’s as tough as those Mafia guys,” I said. “Got more scars on him than a road map has streets.”

  “Is he the guy that hangs out at the Jazz Hut? Has this scar just below his lip?”

  “How’d you know!”

  “Look,” said Jack, “anyone who can give a ten-spot to the guy at the door gets in. Inside, everyone thinks I’m one of the busboys.”

  I was impressed.

  “You should meet him,” I said.

  “Already have. He asked me to clean up his table.”

  “Did you?”

  “What choice did I have?”

  When I told Frank that he had made my best friend clean up his table, he laughed. He liked a kid who would show up at the Jazz Hut just to be there. The music was hot. The girls were hotter. Frank remembered O’Connor.

  “Looks like a choirboy,” he said. “Did he like my tip?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Bastard!”

  I arranged for the two to meet again one Saturday at the Blue Eagle. Jack rushed over from the docks during his lunch hour. I made it out of Chinese school with an hour to spare before I had to go to the warehouse. And Frank had said he would be nursing a hangover at the back table.

  Jack was already there, turning his blond head to grin at me.

  “Been listening to stories,” he said.