by Wayson Choy
People shook their heads at the bad sign. I knew if Poh-Poh had been there she would have snatched the evil words and torn them up and burned every scrap, and lit incense. I went to get the donation box and overheard Mrs. Leong tell one of the ladies that she was relieved to see Sekky with Stepmother. She half whispered that it was best for the boy to have a break from his grandmother. “The Old One behaving so strangely,” she said. “Saw her with young Sekky looking into garbage cans.” She tsk-tsked to the others, who all looked sympathetically towards me.
Father ignored the whispering. “Gloom-collector Mr. Lew!” He gave a little laugh, politely, so that Mr. Lew would not lose face. “Read out the date on that newspaper, Kiam-Kim.”
I read, first in English, and then translated in Chinese, “Nineteen thirty-seven.”
The yellowing paper was three years old.
“China not dead yet,” announced Father. “And you will soon see America fight with China.” He pointed to the large maps on the side wall. “Soon these evil flags will be defeated!”
“Soon? America!” A few of the elders on the bench laughed. “American soldiers! How soon?”
With a slap, slap, slap to his bald head, Mr. Kang shouted, “When no-more-profit soon!”
Father and I had only been the messengers in the Reading Room, shifting the pin-tags according to the most recent news. Stepmother signalled with a discreet nod that it was a good time for the family to leave, but Father did not make any move.
An elder hawked, drew everyone’s eyes to his queasy act, and spat a bull’s eye of slime directly into a corner spittoon. Father winced.
“This for your dog-shit writing!” the elder said.
Another said, “Good man, Mr. Chen! Write more!”
After an awkward pause, someone said, “Look!” and pointed to the two maps. “So many enemy flags! Look!”
The newcomers rushed to the wall. Necks craned. Stepmother held back Sekky and Liang. Father had given her a frown, as if he knew something was going to go terribly wrong. But he would not follow her eyes to the door and take the chance to exit.
Around the table the anxious murmuring began to escalate. People pushed forward and began to study the map of China. Whenever someone asked about their home village, Mr. Kang, carefully perched on the footstool, expertly pointed to provinces and counties, being careful not to dislodge any of the pins.
“Your village located here,” he would say like the schoolteacher he was. “By this river section.”
There were gasps. Mr. Kang’s finger rested right beside a deadly Rising Sun.
The names of other towns and villages were shouted out. A woman in a quilted jacket felt faint and had to be guided to a chair. I looked with confusion at Father. Truth had brought only gloom and despair to the whole room.
Stepmother looked over at the sullen men in their shirtsleeves sitting on the long bench by the windows. For a long moment, her eyes lingered on the woman in the quilted jacket whose soft, round face had frozen when Mr. Kang pointed out the Rising Sun, the pin like a bayonet pierced into the heart of her town district.
“My son and daughter—still there!” she said, and dissolved into tears.
The way the big woman shook, no one could doubt that the horrors of Nanking had flooded her mind.
Stepmother must have felt Father’s sudden loss of face before Mr. Kang and Mr. Lew and felt, too, the contempt of that old hawker. Even Mrs. Leong stared at the map, open-mouthed. An enemy pin was stuck right next to her birth city of Canton. No one even noticed when the sunlight swept across the tear-stained windows.
Stepmother surveyed the rays of dust-speckled gloom around her. All at once, she straightened up. Her eyes shone. She waved her knitted grocery bag, almost like a flag, to catch the eye of Mrs. Leong at the far end of the table. The bench-sitters turned their heads.
“Leong Sim!” Stepmother’s voice boomed across the long reading table. Leong Sim turned her attention from the map. Stunned by the sudden interruption, Mr. Kang’s polished head shot up. Everyone stared at the guilty party.
“Leong Sim!” Stepmother’s voice grew even louder. “The Old One now at American Steam Cleaners”—and louder still—“Poh-Poh and Gee Sook to alter the greatcoat of Mr. Yuen! To pin up the greatcoat for Jung-Sum!”
Mrs. Leong frantically fanned her palms, as if to say, “Chen Sim, I’m not deaf!” Mr. Kang frowned at Stepmother’s poor attempt to speak formal Cantonese.
But the eyes of all the elders on the bench were riveted on Stepmother. And the last face, wiping away tears, turned away from the map of China to focus on her, too. Everyone wondered what was wrong with the slim woman with the two children, speaking so wilfully about fixing up a greatcoat. So mad! So unbecoming! Father furrowed his brow, suggesting Stepmother lower her voice, but she—bristling—faced Mr. Lew, the brittle Sun headline still dangling from his hand.
“Our boy just thirteen, Mr. Lew!”
Abruptly, Stepmother’s volume dropped. I heard a familiar gentle tone; her softly spoken words began to fill the stillness of the room. “But my young man in that tailored coat … oh, such a coat …” Her voice fell almost to a whisper. People tilted their heads to catch her words. “Our Jung-Sum stand like a soldier …”
Father quickly caught on; after a moment, I, too, understood Stepmother’s motives. Jung-Sum’s name meant “Loyalty,” “To Remain Loyal,” “To Remain Faithful.” Still keeping her voice low, Stepmother let her final words rise to a ringing clarity.
“Our Jung-Sum, he stand like a soldier!” She stared directly at the round-faced woman who had been crying. “Never to surrender! Never!”
Someone applauded. It was bald Mr. Kang. Mr. Lew tore up the strip of newspaper headline he had saved for three years. Others began to applaud. The old men on the bench broke into toothless smiles. Mrs. Leong looked at the women about her and sternly pointed at the donation tin. Purses snapped opened, and I heard coins clinking down. In the hubbub that followed, Father rushed his family out the Reading Room doors. My feet hit the wet pavement last.
The afternoon sun skated over pools of gold. Stepmother took some quick steps ahead of us so she could shake out her shawl and jiggle loose her knitted grocery bag. Each of us took a long, deep breath. The air tasted of salt.
“We buy a fresh chicken,” Father said to the slim figure walking ahead of us. “Third Uncle give me a raise today.”
Sekky shouted, “Gum cards!”
“I’ll buy you some,” I said, and remembered too late that all my spare change had gone into the donation box back at the Reading Room.
“Don’t spoil that little brat.” Liang pulled at my shirt and latched on to my warehouse-callused hand. With a proud authority, Only Sister shook her Shirley Temple curls at Little Brother. “He only wants, wants, wants.”
“Do not!” Sekky said and pushed her aside.
Father gently knuckled him and took him by the hand before Sekky could swing his fist at Liang.
With Stepmother leading the way, we headed east to Sing’s Poultry, where Father said that Sekky could help him pick out the fattest bird. Liang skipped ahead of everyone. She stopped and waited to take her mother’s hand, which she had not done for a long time. As the two walked before us, deftly avoiding the puddles, damp flowery patterns clung to Stepmother’s shoulders.
“I learned something today,” Father said to me.
“What’s that?”
“Pins.”
Father smiled to himself. A dozen questions crowded into my head, but we walked on in silence, content to follow the prancing edges of a shawl.
Father was right. The war was at our doorstep.
At King Eddy, more and more of the senior boys discussed enlisting. Over their boxed lunches, some declared that right after graduation, they would join the Royal Canadian Air Force; others said they wanted the navy life. I noticed that, like me, most of the boys from Chinatown, and some of the Japanese guys from Powell Street, were silent.
Our
classroom bulletin board was crowded with clippings about the men and women from Vancouver who were fighting in Europe. Thumbtacked under THINGS TO DO were reminders to collect tins of lard and pieces of scrap iron and to bundle up newspapers. Another sheet reminded us of the proper procedures to follow in case of an air-raid exercise. I was responsible for seeing that all the lights were turned off, and Jeff Eng that the plug of Mr. Waites’s fish tank was pulled out.
Announcements about food drives, victory dances, volunteer work with the Red Cross all became a part of our weekly assembly. At the end of each month, the names of former staff and students missing or killed were read out to us. During the two minutes of silent prayer, we bowed our heads in Christian fashion. Throughout the world in many other school assemblies, there must have been longer lists of names being read aloud, like the list Robert Donat read in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. I wondered how many boys had whispered to their best pal—as Jack had whispered to me in the theatre and in the school auditorium—“No guts, no glory!”
From the stage, Principal Sanderson tapped his knuckles on the microphone and waited for us to settle into quiet. The flowers on the stage and his black armband reminded everyone that today was another solemn occasion.
“At this time of war,” he began, “the world has no use for a quitter, another name for the fellow who feels sorry for himself. A teacher familiar to all of you has asked that he be allowed to commemorate two names this month. I am sure you are aware of his own loss.”
Moustached Mr. Fry took the stage. His hands clenched the lecturn. As he related a funny incident involving Mr. Thompson, his delivery was flawless. Some of us even laughed.
“That is why we will fondly remember Mr. Robert Thompson,” he concluded, “who was a friend to so many and a respected member of the Science Department. And last … my son, Collin Jonathan Fry.”
We all sat up.
The gravel voice carried on. “Six years ago, Collin graduated from King Edward. My colleagues might well recall how proud I was that he was chosen to be his class valedictorian. But I remember how much more proud Collin was to have played offensive tackle on the senior football team. May God grant them both His merciful and eternal peace.”
“Amen” echoed up and down the rows of bowed heads. Mr. Fry adjusted his glasses and sat down.
This time, Jack did not poke my side: the war was too real and too threatening. Or was it that we had glimpsed another kind of glory, another kind of guts?
On the home front, Chinatown citizens were kept too busy to dwell on disastrous retreats and sad departures. By the summer of 1940, the fighting had brought a wartime boom to Third Uncle’s warehouse and to Chinatown itself.
Under the Georgia Viaduct, the factories and mills were humming twenty-four hours a day, attempting to fill quotas for finished lumber, for fuel and military goods, and no one dared to complain about the smells or the noise. Chinatown restaurants began to feed hundreds of workers and off-duty servicemen looking for a cheap meal or a night on the town at the W.K. to dine and dance, or just to listen to a live band. Tailor shops were selling fancy pants and suits again, though most materials were restricted. Downtown weekly-rental hotels and rooming houses rarely had vacancies. Every excuse for a basement suite had a lineup of young couples willing to move in.
“No room to die in,” grumbled one of the elders.
Third Uncle hired more men, and Father worked overlapping shifts to track the goods and supplies coming into and out of storage.
One Saturday, after working at the warehouse moving stock, I took a quick shower, dressed, and picked up Jenny at the Chongs’ store to bring her home for supper. I promised her parents that afterwards I would help her prepare for her new math class, set to start in September. Father would not let Ben Chong pay me any money.
“We all Chinese,” he said. “We like family in Gold Mountain. Kiam be happy to help your Jenny!”
And so I was. We met most evenings upstairs at the corner store, in that room with the stand-up piano. I borrowed Jack’s math book for the summer. Most Chinese girls took that class, just so they could enter commercial school with an extra credit and take a four-month course in secretarial and accounting skills. Ambitious Chinese girls dreamed of office jobs in the sugar refinery or insurance and accounting firms. These large companies took on Chinese girls, at even lower wages than were paid to those they had replaced, to work not at the reception or front offices but in the back rooms, filing and bookkeeping. If any of the other workers complained, they were told that the war necessitated “this kind of hiring” and “cheap labour” permitted the company to pay the others a better wage. With a commercial-school certificate, a Chinese girl had a better chance of getting one of those positions, advertised as “Grade 10 starting position in large office. Now hiring.”
“Wear best clothes,” Mrs. Chong told Jenny.
Most Chinese girls and their families considered any office job outside Chinatown a real job, prestige employment that meant you were educated and more refined.
“Be together like family,” Mrs. Chong called out as we left the store. “Enjoy special dish!”
Outside, I asked, “What was that all about? ‘Be like family’? ‘Special dish’?”
“Father sent over a whole chicken to your house this morning. My mother has designs. Watch out.”
When we settled into the dining room, Poh-Poh insisted that Jenny sit right next to me. Liang sat across, and stared at Jenny, as she had told me she intended to do.
“Will she get dolled up for supper with us? What kind of makeup does she buy?”
I didn’t blame Liang for her interest in Jenny. When she got dressed up for any weddings our two families attended, she was very pretty. She would curl her long hair in that fancy way, and she had her mother’s taste for wearing the right dress. Jeff Eng said he could go for Jenny. I tried not to think too much about what I felt for her, but there were times when we sat together doing her math lessons that a hint of her perfume caught me off guard. Whenever my eyes drifted away from her pencilled notes to linger on the soft curves now pushing against her sweater, my throat would go dry, my palms a little wet. Even Jack noticed how Jenny had transformed from a bit of a stick to a real looker.
“Do you ever sit beside her and get a hard-on?” he asked me. “How can you stand it?”
“I focus on math,” I said. But Jack grinned. “Well, I do most of the time,” I added.
“That’s all?”
“We go out with the gang.”
Jenny and I hadn’t been on an official date together. An official date required the permission of the lucky girl’s guardians and that the two families burn incense to the ancestors and sacrifice three chickens—well, almost. You were at least expected to bring a gift to the parents, buy a corsage for the girl, and suit up in your best slacks, wear a starched shirt and fancy tie. It wasn’t my style.
Liang had told me that Jenny had been on her first “official” date with Al Sen, the son of rich merchant Sen Kwok. I knew about that date: it was a kind of business obligation on the Chongs’ part. The chaperoned date was just a social courtesy—at least that was what Mrs. Chong told Stepmother and Poh-Poh. Al was reluctant to go to the party welcoming his father’s new companion from San Francisco—“a lady of a certain age,” as Mrs. Chong put it, who had once danced in the chorus line at the old Pantages vaudeville house—so the Chongs volunteered their Jenny, who, nevertheless, was dying to go to the W.K. to dance with a full orchestra playing and all the women and girls in formal gowns. The two dined and danced, and Liang—who stated bluntly, “Al Sen is nothing to look at”—was impressed that Jenny had on a long black dress and her mother’s pearls.
“Like a real princess,” Liang said. “I’m going to ask to see the dress. Will she let me try it on?”
“When you grow up,” I said.
At the dinner table, I could see that Liang was disappointed that Jenny wasn’t wearing a corsage and had on only a touch of lipstick, but she wa
s happy to see Jenny with me. It would make for some good gossip with her girlfriends: “Guess who sat real close beside my brother at dinner on Saturday?”
Jung carried in the soup tureen. He didn’t have much interest in girls. At thirteen, he was focussed on sports and building a reputation with a growing gang of his own. He set the bowl down and shouted for Father to come to the table. Poh-Poh and Stepmother came out of the kitchen, and everyone sat. Mrs. Chong’s words came into my head: “Be like family.”
Even though Father happily greeted Jenny, he turned at once to a subject that had been troubling him.
“The war very much now in Chinatown,” he said. “You think about that, Kiam-Kim.”
Father reached for a fine piece of chicken and lifted it onto Jenny’s plate. She waved her hands at the generosity.
“We thank your fuh mouh, your parents,” Poh-Poh said. “Tell them Number One bird. Fat and tender.”
The Old One filled her soup bowl with a ladle of bean curd and broth, and Stepmother scooped some steaming rice into her other bowl. Poh-Poh urged Jung to pass some greens into Sekky’s bowl. Sekky made a face.
“Be aware,” said Father to the two boys. “Every day so many young men fight in the war. People soon wonder where are the Chinatown boys? Why your dai-goh not in there? Tell them very soon we all be there.”
“When?” asked Sekky.
“Not yet,” Father said. “Chinese not yet needed.”
“Not wanted.” I couldn’t let Father be misunderstood. He and I both knew that some of the older Chinatown boys who attempted to join up had been turned away. “There’s a big difference—isn’t there, Father?” I said, carefully adding the question so Father would not lose face “—between being not wanted and being not needed.”
Father thought a moment. His authority would be the final word on the matter. “Yes, Kiam-Kim, as I was saying, the Chinese are not wanted.”