by Wayson Choy
There were a few scummy Irishmen labouring in those work camps, Frank had told him, and they looked like Jack. They had the best swear words, in a language you could hardly bear to listen to, but when they sang, everyone stopped. Frank had O’Connor sing one of the old songs his parents taught him. But he sang in English, which disappointed Frank.
“Where’s your blood language gone? Why sing in Limey talk? Who the hell are you?”
Jack swore in the choice Chinese words Jeff and I had taught him, blistering phrases the elders used about smelly women’s parts and loose-limbed mothers. He even repeated one of Poh-Poh’s curses.
“Goddamned Chink,” Frank said, slapping him across the head. “You’re a fuckin’ Irish Chink!”
Three tables away, people were laughing.
The more we hung around Frank, the more we came under his care. He concluded that we Chinatown boys, including Jack whenever he was with us, shouldn’t grow up ignorant about real life; he said he was going to give us an education, and he began by taking us around to his favourite hangouts. Sometimes he opened the door of a bar to let us peer inside. We ducked our heads in, looked at the long row of chairs and tables, at men laughing or swearing, slugging back beer. Through the doors marked “Ladies and Escorts,” we could never get a proper look.
Whenever he grew tired of his three or four donothing boys, he tossed back his thick locks, brushed his tailored cuffed pants, and said, “Piss off.”
We did.
Some of our lessons with Frank were far more interesting. He would bend a discarded coat hanger and draw anatomical pictures in the alleyway dirt, thrust his hip back and forth, laugh to see some of us amazed.
“That’s how babies are made,” he said. “You knew that, didn’t you, Kiam?”
I nodded, in my head comparing the wealth of details and guesses that O’Connor and I had thrown each other’s way: Father and Stepmother, and her swelling belly.
“You boys get hard, don’t you?”
With everyone else, I blushed. I couldn’t help it: I thought of Jenny, of my two hands rubbing against her, of the smell of talcum and the feel of her breasts.
“Right,” he said, looking directly at me. “You do.” His face darkened.
Frank said we shouldn’t play with our dicks or we’d be totally useless where women were concerned. He told us what desperate men did; he warned us we were always in danger of becoming pansies. Like some of those bachelor-men who went crazy or queer, stuck in wretched run-down rooming houses, worse than the one he and his father shared; those elders torn apart from their wives in China for far too many years, their “bachelor” tag, their madness following them into their graves.
“I want you guys to grow up properly,” he said. “That’s my job. So I’m going to tell you everything. You sure you know about sex?”
Frank said it was better to pay for good sex than to stay pure for a woman you weren’t going to see for years. Men who kept to themselves like that gambled everything away, clutched at other men in the night, drank themselves to death.
Frank said, “A woman’s juices keep a man sane. And a woman needs a man’s juice, too.”
It was female yin and male yang, he said. Balance. Harmony.
One summer evening, walking with Jeff and me, Frank stopped in front of the Jazz Hut, where he said he took certain girls, danced with his sweetheart of the night, warmed her up for later. This was a certain class of girl, he said, not your regular three-buck whores.
“Tell that to your Irish pal,” Frank said. “Tell him to wear a rubber.”
We toured the back rooms of the Hastings Gym where he worked out and where even boys like us could buy emergency Frenchies for a quarter from the towel boy, who was a Ukrainian man as old, I thought, as Poh-Poh. Frank boasted about the sweethearts he visited upstairs in the East Hastings Hotel. Sometimes Jeff and I gulped some of Frank’s beer on the alleyway steps, eyes wide, catching every detail of his grown-up world. He drank in clubs where only twenty-one-year-olds could order a drink. After hours, like at the Jazz Hut, it cost underage Frank a wink of the eye and extra folding money pushed into the right palm to get in. I thought of O’Connor, tall enough, like Frank far ahead of me, getting whatever he wanted before I even knew such wanting existed.
Although none of us boys could understand everything Frank said, we would exchange knowing looks. Then one day, Wah Duk, who was the youngest among us, boldly announced, “I can shoot juice now.”
And Frank said, “Hey, schmuck, I told you not to play with yourself!” He looked at each one of us. “Anybody else going to go crazy? Anyone else turn into a pansy?”
Our eyes shied away from his chuckling, piercing scrutiny.
When Frank wasn’t around, the gang of us stood in front of Ben Chong’s corner store on Princess Street, drinking pop or talking baseball scores, often repeating the sexy things Frank told us about girls, over and over again, as if talking was just like doing it, the bulge in our pants proud proof of our manhood. Desperate, playful, we grabbed each other, bashing each other with our school bags, laughing like clowns, then holding back, looking as innocent as we could, if we spotted a dress sauntering haughtily past. One day, Mrs. Chong stepped out of the store.
“You boys be good!”
We looked around, as if she meant some other boys.
“Kiam-Kim,” she said, “you come in, please.”
The others scattered. I walked into the store.
“Jenny need more help with her school work. Maybe you help a few minutes every day?”
Taught to comply with the requests of family friends, I nodded. Jenny was at the back shelving some tins. I could see her back stiffen.
“Maybe start today?”
Upstairs, Jenny and I settled in chairs facing each other across a small table. Her sweater fit her perfectly. She opened a textbook and looked up at me as if she had a serious question to ask. I picked up a pencil.
“Are you,” she began, “going to the roller-skating party?”
“If I get away from the warehouse,” I said. “You going?”
“A bunch of us are showing up around four.”
And so Jenny and I skated together, bumping into other couples who whirled past with confidence. After, she took me into a narrow hallway behind the benches. It was a narrow hallway that seemed to go nowhere. We pushed against each other and kissed. She let me lift her sweater, and my palms eased over her breasts. She could feel my hardness against her and she responded by pressing her thighs together. Then someone started coming down the hall and we broke apart.
“You make my mother happy, Kiam,” she said. “I want to know what she sees in you.”
Mrs. Chong and Poh-Poh wanted to see us together. I didn’t mind. We could conveniently play along, let the blind hope of our families see whatever it wanted to see. Maybe one day I would love Jenny and she would love me. For now, I knew only that my hands, my body, felt a need that responded to Jenny’s hands, Jenny’s body.
“Be free,” Jack always said. “Cop a feel when you can get it. Dip your dink in.”
When we joined the others back at the rink, some of the guys smiled at me in an expectant way. Jenny had a reputation. She caught their looks.
“Forget it,” she said. “With your equipment, you guys can’t even get to first base.”
Some of the girls broke into wild laughter. The slim figure skated away.
My heart began to race.
Most of the time, Chinatown girls were kept busy looking after their younger siblings, kept busy with mending, cooking, washing diapers or minding their elders as Liang was being taught to do, busy with the endless housework and homework. And with their girlish daydreaming, I imagined, reading moving-picture magazines, catching up on the latest starlets and their blue-eyed boyfriends, scouring the pages of sewing magazines, wondering how many quarters to save for the latest mail-order dress patterns. Jenny was a little crazy about clothes. Maybe she was a little crazy for me, too.
&nbs
p; Jenny giggled and passed notes to her friends in class. After school, they mocked the boys, brazen with their Grade 9 lips, lips shiny from a shared tube of lipstick. From far corners, the quiet girls smiled or looked away if you approached them. They didn’t interest me.
But every Chinese girl, with few exceptions, was the concern of her Chinatown family. After our fifteenth birthdays, unless we were properly dressed up in a clean shirt and good pants and accompanied by someone much older—like an annoyed brother or perhaps a compliant sister—I noticed that boys were hardly allowed near any Chinese girls of a similar age. After a girl turned fifteen or sixteen, an older escort was always present with a dating couple, or the pair was encouraged to go out with a group headed to a bowling alley, say.
“Safety in numbers,” Mrs. Pan Wong always said.
Chaperoned double- or triple-dating among “good” families, I realized much later, was Chinatown’s idea of birth control.
Our numbers could protect us from many dangers as we wandered together into areas where we didn’t really belong. When we went to a Granville Street movie house, or to theatres like the Orpheum and Capitol, we were usually expected by the management to sit in the very front rows or at the very back. There was less tension if Jack O’Connor happened to have joined up with us.
“What’s the problem?” he would bellow, his Irish blood rising with the beam of light that skirted back and forth across our faces.
“No problem, buddy.”
“You sure?” Jack would say.
And the once-authoritative usher would click off his flashlight and leave us alone. Then we would watch some British politician on the screen calling on all free countries to prepare for war against German aggression.
Jack nudged me. “I’m joining up.”
Beside me, Jenny bent forward to stare across at him. “We’re not at war yet.”
I put my two cents in: “Wait for it.”
“Yeah? Well, you Chinks are at war. How come you aren’t over there fighting the Japs?”
“Because he’s not stupid,” Jenny said.
I laughed agreeably. Jenny pulled her hand away from mine, as if she were suddenly shy. Perhaps she didn’t want Jack to know too much about us, though I had told him nothing myself. Jenny and I were a now-and-again necking couple, but nothing more. And if nothing really happened, there was nothing to tell.
As for going to fight in China, I had never seriously considered the idea, though the elders always said that one day every Chinese would go back to their home village. And many had gone back. But where would I go, with barely any memory of the old country? And where would my two brothers and sister go? Or Jeff and Jenny, who had also been born here? What world did any of us belong to? What world would we fight for?
SEVEN
DURING THAT FIRST SUNDAY of September 1939—that Sunday when England declared war on Germany—all of Chinatown waited for word from Ottawa.
In the days after the declaration, Father went to the Chinese Times office after each shift at the warehouse to track the conflict. Stepmother instructed me to go to the office after Chinese school to tell Father to at least come home for supper, as he had promised to do the day before.
“Too busy,” he said, but he invited me to stay a moment so he could show me where the Nazi Blitzkrieg had struck. Father and two of the newspapermen had been comparing Chinese maps with the maps printed in Time Magazine and in the late-arriving journals from the States and overseas. Together the men drew arrows and carefully pencilled in new borders on fold-out maps of Europe. They compiled a master list of the correct English spellings of towns and cities and wrote in their Chinese equivalents. The air smelled of fresh newsprint rolls and chemicals. Heavy black presses, greased and ready to run, stood silent behind the long counter; before layers of shelving loaded with printers’ trays, three typesetters wearing inky aprons stood waiting for their instructions.
“Here blood is spilled,” Father said to me at the large layout desk. The point of his pencil touched inside the borders of Poland. Arrows pointed towards a large circle. “The territory between here and here like China’s countryside. Towns one third the size of Nanking totally destroyed. Here the bombs fell day and night.”
“Shameful,” one of the editors said. He was the one Father called Grey Head, the one who had always considered Europeans the most civilized people in the world. As a young man, he had studied in England and travelled through Germany with a companion. “German music and art far superior to the Chinese,” he had once declared to me, pushing away my Chinese school book. Now he shook his greying head and shouted over and over again, “No better than anyone else—barbarians!”
Father circled a name on the map. “Kiam-Kim, look at this.”
I looked: W A R S A W.
“Listen.”
I wasn’t sure what Father meant. Grey Head turned up the volume on the shortwave radio sitting on his desk, and music burst into the newsroom. The martial notes sounded through the static like bold but desperate calls.
“They play Chopin’s Polonaises,” Grey Head explained to me, “to let the whole world know that the citizens of Warsaw remain the defenders of Poland.”
“Not for long,” one of the printers said. He pointed his thumb down.
A BBC announcer interrupted, and then the king’s soft-spoken message to the Empire was rebroadcast: “In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself … We are at war.”
The idea that Chinatown was within the “household of my peoples” made me smile, yet everyone around me saw nothing funny about it. They were waiting for Canada to make an announcement of its own: we in Gold Mountain would soon be at war.
“Run home, Kiam-Kim,” Father said. “Tell Poh-Poh and Stepmother I’ll be working late. Maybe sleep over at Third Uncle’s again.”
As I walked out into the early-evening light, past the lineup of men reading the latest news posted on the office windows, the stirring strains of Chopin had their effect on me. I pictured myself as a soldier tearing through the streets of Warsaw while bombs exploded around me. Instead of the sky streaked with trails of chimney smoke from the False Creek refineries, I saw anti-aircraft guns fired into the sky at Nazi bombers. It was a vicarious thrill, but one that a growing number of boys and young men were beginning to manifest in their brave talk and open resolve to fight for England, for Canada.
Chinatown veterans of the last war merely shook their heads and coughed into their hands. They eked out their wounded days and nights sitting in the Hastings Street coffee shops and lived in those tiny rooms around Water Street, just below Victory Square, burdened with their painful memories. The men were forgotten already, but stories of that war’s great battles were now being retold in the English-language newspapers, told as adventures that had turned inexperienced boys into fighting men.
But all the articles featured white faces and white names. Jack especially was thrilled to read about those veterans, to imagine himself taking back a hill from the Germans. His own father had been in that war but said nothing except, “If you have to, you fight for your country.”
Like a bushfire, patriotism raged across Gold Mountain. The JOIN UP posters that began to show up on buildings and in hallways stiffened my resolve to see beyond those cheerless faces around Victory Square.
I thought of the thick packages with all our birth documents and travel certificates. On those documents I was designated “Resident Alien.” The rumour was that because of our alien status, our yellow skin, and our slanty eyes, the young men of Chinatown would be discouraged from signing up.
“Won’t be home for supper,” I shouted as I entered our front door and threw my school things into the corner.
Stepmother was in the parlour showing Liang how to finish her knitting project. They looked disappointed to see me alone but got up and went into the dining
room.
Jung-Sum was showing Sekky how to set up the oak table for dinner. As the two of them helped me to pull the round table away from the wall—but not too close to Father’s corner desk—Stepmother and Liang straightened out the plates and bamboo mats on the table. Neither Father nor big Mrs. Lim would be joining us tonight, so I set up five chairs. Poh-Poh hollered for us to watch out and slowly brought in the soup tureen; Stepmother and Liang followed with rice bowls and savoury dishes. I carried in the last plate of stir-fried greens and beef. I thought of all the fathers in Warsaw and wondered whether they, or their sons, would ever again sit together to eat dinner at the family table.
Sekky hopped onto the chair between Poh-Poh and me and hooked his feet behind the wooden legs.
All that week we waited for the news from Ottawa that would commit Canada to the war in Europe. Bombs fell elsewhere in the world. Each day brought more newspaper and magazine pictures of the battles in China and of the carnage in Poland. In the school hallways, we talked about those pictures, and our teachers pinned them up on boards. A great darkness began to close in on our Gold Mountain world.
One evening when Father did make it home for supper, Poh-Poh filled each of our bowls with his favourite soup.
Father began humming a fragment of one of Chopin’s Polonaises as he picked up a choice piece of leafy greens and put it on Stepmother’s plate. He stood up, reached over and added a crisp stem of bok choy to Poh-Poh’s rice bowl, and then Liang decided to share a slim piece of stir-fried beef with Sekky. I pushed a chunk of pork into Jung-Sum’s bowl. I wanted somehow to make a gesture of gratitude for this family meal. Instead, I told Sekky to stop kicking the legs of his chair.
“Listen to your dai-goh,” Father said to him.
Father’s words made me suddenly feel that I mattered, that in some ancient way, order prevailed amid the growing darkness.
On the morning of September 11, I put on my kimono and sat down with Father as the radio tubes buzzed and hissed into life. A solemn CBC voice repeated the announcement from England: His Majesty the King had officially accepted that Canada was now at war.