All That Matters

by Wayson Choy

  Poh-Poh directed Jenny and me outside, and the front door locked behind us. Voices trailed away back into the kitchen. Two cups of steaming tea had been placed on the porch railing for us. No doubt Poh-Poh had sent Jung and Liang sneaking around from the back. The cups were our special guest cups, too. Peonies curved around their rims. Jenny stretched her arms up into the air.

  The night air was cool, and the North Shore winds had chased away the tainted breezes from False Creek. The street lamps would be turned on tonight for an extra hour; the radio reported that the whole Pacific coast was free of any enemy planes flying towards us. Though bombs terrorized England every night, the king and queen refused to leave, setting an example. In Vancouver, people wanted to live as if the war, the recent curfews, the blackout curtains were merely a nuisance, just as the Royals had implied by staying home. And so tonight, in a defiant spirit, the city street lamps were to be left on for an extra hour.

  Jenny nudged me. “Jeff Eng’s thinking of enlisting in one of those towns like Kamloops.”

  “Why there?”

  “Father told me the recruitment offices in the Interior will fill their quota with any breathing body they can get.”

  “Why so desperate?” I asked. A shooting star crossed the sky, but we didn’t pause to make any wishes. Jenny didn’t notice. Her attention was caught by a car driving by, its headlights taped over except for a sliver of light.

  “His sister tells me he needs to get away from his father. He hates working in the garage.”

  “O’Connor does, too. I mean, wants get away from his parents.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “No reason to.”

  “Funny,” Jenny said, and bit her bottom lip. “I want to get away from Mother.”

  She rested her head against my shoulder. The sky was darkening rapidly; a full moon looked down on us.

  Behind the parlour window, I heard the muffled voice of Poh-Poh dramatically finishing her ghost story, Sekky calling out for more, and Liang racing Jung to use the bathroom first. Then I knew the two would take turns helping Sekky with his home studies. Stepmother would sit and knit and watch over them, making sure that they also did their own school work—quietly—while Father continued to write. The ordinary made the brutal wars in Asia and Europe seem remote.

  Jenny and I leaned into each other. The porch steps were hard, but I didn’t mind at all.

  “If you go, Kiam,” she began in a voice that I had never heard her use before, with an emphasis I sensed she had not known herself: “I’ll—I’ll miss you.”

  I shifted my rear so that my back pressed firmly against the porch column. Jenny shifted, too, and leaned her whole weight against me. I pressed my cheek against the top of her head and closed my eyes. Her drowsy weight slipped onto my chest, and her small hand crept between two buttons of my shirt and slid across my undershirt and came to rest over my heart. Strands of her hair played in the night breeze and brushed against my face. She smelled faintly of perfume. A comforting instinct led me to think I could slip a hand under the back of her blouse, too, just to rest my palm against her warmth.

  “Kiam?” she said. “Could you really kill someone?”

  The question surprised me. She gave a little shiver. The air was getting chilly.

  “Would you, Kiam?”

  “If I had to? Yes … I could.”

  Another little shiver ran up her back. I had no other answer, except to remove my warehouse-rough hand and make a show of taking off my school sweater and draping it around her. I wanted to keep her secure and encircled within my arms, safe from the war, from all the things that would divide us from this night. Her smooth fingers wove into mine; her other hand rested on my arm. I might have once felt just as deeply attached to another—surely, as a baby in my mother’s arms—but those were phantom memories. Then, I was protected and held on to; now, my arms reached out to hold on to someone of my own, shielding whatever it was that seemed so suddenly fragile.

  “I have to get home,” Jenny said, lazily pushing me away. “My mother will be anxious.”

  The street lamps switched on, and Jack’s long, whistling shadow came into view on the sidewalk below us. He had on a white shirt under his school cardigan, and his hair was combed back in that lady-killer style of Gary Cooper’s. He had also perfected the Coop’s lanky cowboy swagger that all the girls pretended not to notice. Jenny was always curt with Jack, once pushing his hand off her briefcase. “I’ll carry my own books, thanks,” she had told him and hurried to my side. That gave me a chance to return Jack’s noble gesture. I had given him a brush-off salute.

  “Had to try,” he told me later.

  When Jack spotted Jenny and me on the porch, he opened wide his arms as if to catch the moon and stars and throw them back into place again.

  “All this,” he laughed, whirling like Fred Astaire, “these stars and this paper moon, just for you two lovebirds.”

  “How come you’re not with Moira?”

  “Left Moira Williams steaming at her front door,” he said. “Here I have a willing dick, she has the greatest tits, but we’re going to end nowhere.”

  He paused, waiting for an outraged reaction from Jenny. She only stiffened a little. Perhaps the wind again. I put my arm around her and she leaned back. Her indifference was like a red flag being waved before a bull. Jack marched up and sat two steps below us. Jenny pushed closer against me.

  “You and Jenny look perfect together, Kiam. Am I intruding?”

  Jenny put her chin down on her knees, as if she hadn’t heard him. Jack must have followed her eyes, for he turned his head slightly to look up behind him. Because of his blond hair and pale skin, the glow from the streetlamp reflected back from our front windows heightened his good looks.

  The night was beautiful. The moon seemed closer and the North Shore mountains were topped with new-fallen snow. The starry air was momentarily still. I thought even Jack must have been held captive by the quiet. And then he glanced at me uneasily, as if he didn’t know whether to get up and leave or stay seated. As he turned awkwardly, he bumped the two of us, and Jenny and I shifted ourselves to make some more room for him on the lower step; she didn’t seem to mind that his left side was now half leaning against her, just as she leaned back against me. And for some reason, I didn’t mind either. For so many years, we had known each other: our being together like this on a beautiful night seemed inevitable.

  After some minutes, I felt the urge to rub the back of Jenny’s neck. She felt tight.

  “Kiam tells me you’re going to leave B.C.”

  Jack’s life held no secrets. He was proud of that. Ask him anything and he would tell you.

  “Are you really going, Jack?” Jenny asked, and gently pushed away my hand. She straightened up, pulled at her skirt so it hugged even tighter below her knees. The wind was rising. He brushed back a shock of hair.

  “Have to, Jenny,” he said at last. “My dad’s been drinking again—and so have I, for that matter—and my mother’s been falling back into her black moods worrying about my soul.” He snapped his fingers. “Got to get as far away as I can and—”

  “And?”

  “—and save myself.”

  “From what?” I asked.

  “Everything.”

  Jenny again broke the silence.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because no one else can save me.”

  Jenny folded her hands beneath her knees. My sweater slipped off her shoulders.

  Jack looked steadily at her. “I could just run away from everything tonight.”

  He waited for a response, but clearly not from me. I felt as if I were not right there beside the two of them. I reached up and began to rub Jenny’s back; she didn’t seem to mind, but she could not look away from Jack.

  “Whatever you do,” she half whispered to him, “just don’t … get … killed.”

  “Why not? Everything would be over with.”

  Jack le
aned unsteadily forward; he put his hand on Jenny’s knee. His downcast look was genuine. He had had a few beers too many.

  “Too many great-looking girls will miss you, Jack,” I said, too casually.

  He didn’t react at all, didn’t even smile at the joke. “Think of poor Moira Williams and her big tits,” I said.

  I expected Jack to rag me, Jenny to rip away my pitiful remark and put me in my place, but neither said anything. Instead, their silence caused me to hold my breath and close my eyes. My clumsy attempt at a joke had trampled over a scary possibility: like any other soldier, Jack could be shot and killed, or blown to bits and erased from the planet. When I opened my eyes, Jack’s hand was still lingering on Jenny’s knee, as if he could not let go.

  The catch in Jenny’s voice had unexpectedly grazed something in me, awakened some deeper meaning; and it had also touched something in Jack. That’s why not one of us had moved; not my palm warmly against her back, nor his hand on her knee, nor Jenny’s eyes from his.

  I meant to speak up, to break the spell with an apology for not stating my own fears for his safety, when Jack lifted his big hand away from Jenny’s knee and bounced it roughly onto my leg, as if his hand lingering so long on her knee had somehow been a carefree moment, or even a joke. But it was neither, I knew.

  Jack jumped up. He regained his familiar gruffness.

  “Keep her warm, buddy,” he said. “I hear it could rain later tonight.”

  He stepped over Jenny and me. And the porch creaked with his sudden weight. He bent down to slap my shoulder and bump my head with the heel of his palm, the way he did when we played soccer and I had taken a pass and scored. A few more steps and he leaped over our porch rail. I heard his keys rattle and the door shut.

  Jenny picked up my sweater and wrapped it around herself.

  “Walk me home now,” she said. “It’s late.”

  Under the same night sky, Jenny and I hardly spoke more than a few sentences. Small talk, empty words to keep the quiet from growing between us. She huddled in my sweater to stay warm. Sudden gusts of wind were already edged with the smell of the early snow falling on the distant peaks. We started to walk faster.

  In the Chongs’ back-door alcove, lit by the moonlight, Jenny removed my sweater and put her key in the lock. Then she turned and fell crushing against me. My back hit the wall. She threw my sweater around my neck and firmly, gently, pulled me against her. She lifted her blouse. Under the thin fabric her fingers guided mine to caress the tips of her nipples. We kissed. Jenny forced her wet tongue between my lips, and I gasped at the thick, moist sensation of flesh. My tongue eagerly pressed back, licked and curled and longed for more. Someone started to clump down the back steps. Breathless, Jenny turned the key in the lock, and left me, abruptly, wounded beneath the stars.

  When I was in bed that night, something more than passion began to entangle me. Subdue me. Defeat me. Earlier, I thought I had heard Father crying at his desk. Now I wondered at my own tears.

  By the end of July, the show Sekky and Poh-Poh had promised us was ready. Everyone in the family was invited to come up and see the finished chimes.

  A spray of colours greeted my eyes: a wall-to-wall length of windchimes hung from a sturdy rope stretched taut and high across Poh-Poh’s double bed. I stared at the array of glass glittering before me.

  Working meticulously, the Old One had neatly cut the pieces so that half a dozen or more of these pane-weighted threads, each perfectly balanced, swayed and dangled from a cross of thin bamboo.

  Happily stretched out on the bed in his short pants, Sekky was staring up at their shifting stillness. With just enough of a draft, each strand would strike a single note. But Little Brother, barely able to hold in his excitement, wanted me to experience something more spectacular.

  “Dai-goh,” he proudly commanded, “pull the rope.”

  I did. The dangling fragments of cheap jewellery and glass bits wildly spun and hit, and sang. Finally, with a pinging echo, the last note was struck, and like fragments of prayer, like those messages Poh-Poh still set afire to the Kitchen God, the smoky colours on the wall wavered in the stillness. First the chaos, I thought, and then the stillness before questions can be asked. Sekky called me back to earth.

  “Did you like that?”

  I rubbed his tousled head in answer and lifted him up so he could give the rope a jerk. Then I sank back on the bed alongside him. Lying there, looking up, I mused over what had been created from discards and scraps. When the last note was struck, I listened to Sekky breathing beside me and closed my eyes. Stepmother was right: there was no harm done.

  Jenny came over with some soup her mother had made for the Old One, and she gushed over the display. Sekky and Poh-Poh gave her a windchime of her choice.

  “I’ll hang it next to my bed,” she said.

  Lucky chimes, I thought.

  I asked Father how Poh-Poh could have learned such a skill, and he told me she had been taught when she was just a young girl in Old China, before she was sold during the famine to a rich family.

  “She told this story to you before,” Father said. “That’s how she got that small piece of jade she never tires of showing Sekky.”

  I remembered. The jade was unusual for its colour, and a peony was carved on its quarter-sized face. Poh-Poh had told the story to me when I was even younger than Sekky: the pinkish jade was exactly the colour of the eyes of her first love. He himself was a magician of sorts, a performer of street magic, who stayed some time on her father’s farm. In her words, “he was as pale as a ghost,” which alone would have fed a lifetime of her fantasies about him. Of course, I now realized that he was an albino.

  Poh-Poh fell in love with this much older man, and he became, to her, a kind of phantom lover, a young girl’s first infatuation. He avoided sunlight, she told me, and did his magic only in the half-light of dusk. But the magician went away and never came back, though he left in her care the jade peony and promised that he would return for her.

  As a boy, I had no mind to remember such tales of unrequited love, nor did I think too much of windchimes and jade carvings when I most longed for swords and guns and for stories of the Monkey King and the River Dragon. But to Sekky, who had spent so much time alone with her, and who always listened, enchanted, the story of her past returned.

  It was only to be expected that Poh-Poh was now making chimes to bring back all the details of that fairy-tale prince. Like many of the elders I had observed, she was returning to her youth, a time now more vivid to her than the coming end.

  EIGHT

  I GOT PERMISSION FROM Third Uncle to leave the warehouse at three o’clock, instead of four, to meet Jenny and walk with her to the Carnegie Library, carrying with us our Senior English books.

  When Jenny and I walked into the Carnegie that Indian summer Saturday, there were no wheelchair veterans promoting Victory Bonds, there were no community volunteer displays blocking our way to the study tables. Most people were already doing their share. Even the mahjong ladies were holding knitting parties and spending hours wrapping up cotton bandages for the War Relief Campaign.

  In our classrooms, we were urged to become involved, to study hard, to exercise every day, to be fit and prepared to use both our brains and our brawn to fight the enemy. There were stories of spies lurking among the Japanese fishermen making their living along the B.C. coast, and even darker suspicions fell upon the owners of the Little Tokyo shops and those living in the three-storey hotels along Powell. To avoid the growing racial harassment of anyone who looked Japanese, and to stop the bullying of Chinese kids too young to defend themselves, Chinatown elders were talking about making up buttons that would read “I AM CHINESE.”

  People with German-sounding names and anyone with an Eastern European accent was highly suspect. Volunteers, among them Jack and his father, recorded the shape and formation of planes flying overhead, ready to report by phone any suspicious silhouettes. Even Sekky put away my old clippings of Man
drake the Magician and Prince Valiant for the more serious fun of collecting candy and cigarette cards that taught him the names of weapons and tanks, that illustrated the uniforms and the flags of dozens of countries. He taped his airplane cards in flight formation above his cot. All of us were growing aware that on sea or on land, and always in the sky, enemies were ready to attack.

  I had given up a late-afternoon soccer practice to do some serious studying for Mr. Eades’s first English test. There were plenty of others like us, books opened, eyes focussed. Jenny pointed to the seat across from hers, and her eyes said, No fooling around!

  As she pushed my books across the table, I thought that she and I should have, two months ago, declared ourselves an official couple, especially after our fifth double date together. But Jenny didn’t want that.

  “Too showy,” she had told me. “Maybe after we graduate. Next year.”

  She folded both our school sweaters together and neatly draped them over one of the empty chairs.

  It felt good to be sitting across from Jenny. After reading a few thousand words of Pride and Prejudice, I nudged off one of my shoes, stretched out one leg, and rubbed against her ankle. Like a tomcat, I began to purr.

  She rapped her pencil on the table like a librarian. “Read,” she said. Her foot gently pushed mine aside.

  A few chapters after the Netherfield Ball, my eyelids began to feel the weight of serious literature. The book suddenly slipped from my hand, or it was pulled away. Jenny was staring right at me.

  “What?” I shook my head, wide-eyed, suddenly alert. “What is it?”

  “Time for a break.” She kept her voice low. “Are you interested in Meiying?”

  Meiying was Mrs. Lim’s adopted daughter, a girl the same age as we were. She kept to herself and went to Britannia High and was mostly a mystery to me. Beautiful to look at, for sure, with her long hair and long legs, shapely like a runner’s; but she never paid too much attention to me.

  “What does Meiying have to do with anything?”

  Jenny pointed to her novel. “Something Austen says about life made me think of Meiying. About Mrs. Lim, too. About couples.”