by Wayson Choy
“Be careful, Kiam-Kim,” Father continued, with a small laugh. “Love too much, and love make you suffer.” He removed his glasses and pinched his nose, a gesture he always made when there was something too important or too personal to share. “Gai-mou and I,” he began, “we … like each other. Very much, of course.”
“Liking each other, is that enough?”
“Yes, all these years, that has been enough.”
“But you loved my mother?”
Stepmother came into the parlour. Father and I had not even heard her coming down the stairs. She sat down on the sofa close to Father and picked up her knitting from a basket at her feet. Poh-Poh’s blue sweater was almost finished. Father had stopped talking, as if he were wondering how much she had heard, though I didn’t think that he had said anything that was not true. He had assessed his twelve years with Stepmother, seen her raise the two children that were her own, watched her care for the Old One, and liked how she stood by him. When Stepmother began to talk, it became apparent that she had heard his every word.
“Yes, Kiam-Kim,” she said, “your father like me. Like me very much. That is true.”
Stepmother stared at the two of us, as if to decide whether to say more. She herself must have thought a long time about her own situation, accepted things as they were. She was Father’s helpmate; she was our gai-mou. The knitting needles began click-clicking. Her beautiful eyes focussed on her work; her long fingers moved rapidly, confidently, as if from those hands the voice would take strength, at last, to speak out.
“Your father love only First Wife, Kiam-Kim,” she said. Her head bent lower. “Some nights your father, half asleep, he call me by your mother’s name.”
And her tears fell.
Father gently reached for Stepmother’s hand. The blue sweater collapsed in a heap in her lap.
There was nothing I could have said that would have changed the situation. I left them alone and climbed the stairs to my room.
By some miracle, just before supper the next day we were all at home at the same time. Everyone was busy. Sewing supplies for uniforms and knapsacks were held up by shortages, so Stepmother was sent home from work that afternoon and was pinning up Liang’s school dress for her. Father was at his desk writing furiously to meet another deadline; the wastebasket was filled with his crumpled efforts. And I was home interrupting Father to show off my latest 90 in the weekly math test.
Father held the paper up for Jung to see.
“I got an Excellent last week!” he said, shadow-boxing with the lamp on the floor to help outline every imaginary blow. He bounced on the balls of his feet like his hero, Joe Louis. Sekky was in the parlour cutting out some newspaper pictures of tanks and planes to paste into his scrapbook. Poh-Poh was busy in the kitchen.
Liang said how she wanted her dress hemmed closer to her knees.
“Not possible,” Stepmother said. She was rushing to finish so that they both could join the Old One in the kitchen and help prepare dinner.
I looked up from my math book and watched everyone and imagined how Jenny would fit in, and how, one day, she would have a big family with me. We had joked about having six kids, if I was capable.
The crash of garbage cans from the back porch startled us. An alley cat screeched, its cry almost halfhuman, and then another crash struck our ears as one of the galvanized cans fell over, spilling its contents, its lid, and store of empty tin cans clattering down the porch steps.
Father looked at me sternly, as if I had forgotten to set the cans up properly. More screeches. Father threw his papers down.
“Those damn cats!”
I sighed. Someone had forgotten again to lay the heavy plank over the two pails so the four-legged pests would not knock them over. I started to get up when I was hit by Poh-Poh’s intense cry: “Aaaiiyaah!”
Father ran past me. I rushed into the kitchen after him.
The Old One stood at the threshold of the back door, holding her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking.
“He’s come back!” she said. “I saw him!”
“Hai bin-goh?” Father asked. “Saw who?”
“Him,” she said, her Toishan words cracking with remorse. “He came staring at me with his eyes … and I cursed him!”
I pushed aside the curtains and peered out the back window and saw through the murky evening light the shape of a large white tomcat—the biggest one I had ever seen—crouched halfway down the steep steps, looking up at me. A foggy mist swirled at the bottom of the steps. The wily creature licked its lips, its hollow-looking eyes glowing like fire.
“It’s just that new alley cat,” I explained. “It’s been hanging around for days.”
I did nothing more. I would have shouted at the animal to scat, tossed the other lid crashing down the stairs to scare the scavenger off, but the way Poh-Poh looked past the half-opened door, the way she shook her head slowly, sadly, left me unable to move. She patted her wrinkled forehead as if she wanted desperately to erase some memory. When the white tom bounded off the steps, meowing, Poh-Poh looked frantic: her dark eyes had seen more than a cat. She stumbled over to Father and put her small hand on his arm.
“Too late,” she said to him, her words quaking in her throat. “Too … too late …”
Father held her close and said, gently but firmly, “Tell me what you saw.”
Poh-Poh looked up at him. “I saw …” Her eyes were wet. She whispered to him, as if she were a child, “It had … pink eyes.”
The eyes of the pure white tomcat came back to me. Their glow was odd. Albino, I thought.
“Please clean up the mess, Kiam,” Stepmother said. “And close the door. Too cold for Poh-Poh.”
I looked down to the bottom step. Garbage was strewn everywhere. The cat had snuck back. When I bent to pick up one of the lids, it crept away and vanished into the mist.
The back door squeaked open, then shut. Stepmother had sent Jung-Sum out to help me. I pointed to the shiny lid at the bottom of the steps. He started down the first step, then turned around, as if he wanted to talk.
“What?” I said, impatient.
“Dai-goh, why did Poh-Poh look so scared?”
I shrugged. “Just a cat,” I said. “The size of the thing must have rattled her old bones.” Jung raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “Poh-Poh’s just a little confused,” I said.
“Kiam, she just told Father she’s going to die.”
“Oh, again?” I smiled. “It’s just her old way of talking.”
“Dai-goh.” His murmuring grabbed my attention. “This time it’s true.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Father believes her this time.”
“Go pick up the lid,” I said.
Peering through the window into the kitchen, I saw Father and Stepmother holding on to the Old One. Father was wiping his eyes with his sleeve. I pressed my ear against the back door: Poh-Poh was saying over and over again the same words, shaking her head—pink eyes, the cat, pink eyes. She pushed away and went to the sink and began rinsing out some greens. The crisis was suddenly over. Stepmother hesitated, then picked up the rice pot and went into the pantry. Father paused a moment, too, making sure that the Old One had settled down. When he saw the greens hit the colander, he went back to his desk as if nothing was wrong.
I picked up some tins and newspaper bundles full of food scraps and stuffed them back into the cans. I didn’t want to think about Grandmother’s breakdown.
When the dinner dishes were finally put away, and Poh-Poh had taken Sekky up to her room, closing the door behind them, I looked up from my Chinese brush work.
“Poh-Poh saw a ghost?” I asked Father, getting straight to the point.
“The Old One thinks she did.” He shuffled uneasily at his corner desk. “You know how it is with old people.”
“Jung-Sum heard her say she was going to die.”
“Yes … that’s what she says.”
“Do you think so?”
“Poh-Poh thinks that person she loved—that magician—has come back for her.”
I remembered his last words to her. When you are ready, I come back for you.
“She thinks the white cat—?”
“Yes.” Father put down his fountain pen. “The problem, Kiam-Kim, is that she cursed that cat and thinks she has cursed her own fate by chasing it away.”
“What kind of curse?”
“A very wicked Toishan curse to send it away.”
“How wicked?”
“The powerful kind she claims killed—you remember?—Mistress Mean-Mouth. She didn’t want the garbage spilled again.”
“It’s not logical, Father.”
“These things never are, Kiam-Kim, but they have power over Poh-Poh.”
Two glowing eyes pierced through the dark caves of my brain. I thought of Poh-Poh and Sekky upstairs behind the closed door. I took in a deep, deep breath and asked “Should Sekky be helping Poh-Poh with her last windchime?”
“It’s good for Sek-Lung to know about death, don’t you think?”
I thought of the times Stepmother, with two fingers, had held Baby Sekky’s mouth open when he could barely breathe; and Poh-Poh bent over the crib and with her own mouth forced air into his twelve-month-old lungs. I thought of the hours the two women cradled him and rocked him back to life, again and again. I thought of all the talk-stories Poh-Poh breathed into each one of her grandchildren, as if they were the air she herself depended upon. And I thought of that day when I turned fifteen and scorned to be at her side to listen to one more silly story.
“You listen again one day, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh had said to me. “I no be here then.”
When I went upstairs, I could hear the sharp crunch of pieces of glass being cut in the Old One’s room.
Poh-Poh began coughing badly, worse than when it had started six or seven months before. But this time she refused any medicine from Dr. Chu. “No use,” she said. Even Mrs. Lim could not persuade her to swallow the special herbal tea she had concocted. The mahjong ladies came and saw how hopeless things were. They patted Father’s hand, and Mrs. Chong urged him to send Grandmother to the Catholic Home for Chinese on Campbell Avenue. But Poh-Poh refused to leave her bedroom, and Sekky, who sat by her bed every night, refused to let her go. Father asked Third Uncle what else could be done.
“I ask Sister Fung,” he said.
Teresa Fung was one of the nuns who operated a dispensary and home for the Chinese on Pender Street. Sister Teresa often went around to the local gambling houses and stores, shaking a tin can and asking for donations. Once, Father and I ran into her at the Lucky Fortune Club when I was doing the same thing for the Free China effort.
“Wherever help is needed,” Sister Teresa said to me in excellent Cantonese, “that is where good people must go.”
One afternoon, I found the small woman in her nun’s black habit sitting beside the Old One. Before she arrived, Sekky had been sent over to Mrs. Lim’s house to fetch some herbal soup. The nun, nodding her caped head, and Poh-Poh, sitting against her pillows, spoke quietly and thoughtfully with each other, in a dialect that I did not understand.
Sister Teresa handed me a piece of paper with Chinese and English writing and, rubber-stamped in English, “Please Admit to St. Paul’s.” Then she prayed for a few minutes over the Old One. Poh-Poh shut her eyes and said nothing more. Sister made the sign of the cross and smiled at me. I watched her go soundlessly down the stairs, where Father opened the front door for her. The elders thought of nuns as crows or black ghosts. As she stepped out, she lifted her habit and seemed, quickly, to fly away.
When Father came upstairs, I handed him the sister’s note. Stepmother asked what it said.
“There’s no room left at the Catholic Home,” Father explained. “This note will allow us to take Poh-Poh to the basement shelter at St. Paul’s Hospital. They have a doctor there.”
Sekky arrived back with the soup and asked the Old One what was going on.
“Not much,” Poh-Poh told him. Father raised her pillow so she could talk more clearly. Sekky held the soup spoon inches from her mouth until she relented.
“A good spirit in the dress of a black crow came to pray for me,” she told him.
“What happened, Grandmama?”
“We talked, Little One, then I sent her away.”
Sekky looked up at me.
“Dai-goh, did you see a black crow?”
Against my better judgment, I nodded.
Neither Father nor Stepmother could make a difference. Jenny told me her mother said it was probably hopeless. No one could dissuade someone from dying if the person believed the time had come. Jenny brought the Old One some candy and kissed her forehead and held her hand.
Poh-Poh’s wrinkled complexion grew paler, her hacking and coughing at night more violent. Third Uncle sent over a herbalist, who told Father the illness was pneumonia. She had caught some very bad feng shui, he explained, and the house was too drafty. “Best to go to St. Paul’s,” the herbalist instructed.
Around two that morning, Father, with Sister Teresa’s note clutched in his hand, woke me up to help him carry Poh-Poh down the steps and into a taxi. I put on my kimono. Between us, her small body swayed on our crossed arms like a bundled sack. She was so light, so small in stature, I thought we were carrying only a wisp of her spirit.
“You tall as Father, Kiam-Kim.”
Sticking out from a shroud of blankets, strands of the Old One’s white hair lifted in the night wind. She was not coughing any more; with each descending step, she wheezed, half-in, half-out. Before the taxi pulled away, her trembling hand touched my arm. I wondered what she was thinking about. I had been thinking of Jenny, wishing she was here with me. A light turned on at the O’Connors’. I could see Jack’s silhouette in the upstairs window. I had forgotten to thank his mother for the vase of flowers she had sent over. I waved at the shadow looking down at me; the shadow waved back.
Father, Stepmother, and I took turns staying with Poh-Poh in the basement clinic of St. Paul’s. She lay in one of the emergency cots, in a segregated area with three other women, separated from the men’s side by drawn grey curtains. The fold-away sat directly under a long rectangle of window. Indians and blacks, Asians of every variety—all those who were not permitted entry into regular hospitals—ended up, if there were any spaces available, at the segregated Home for Chinese, or at St. Joseph’s Oriental Hospital, or in the grey-painted basement of St. Paul’s.
In the October light, pouring down from a bank of basement windows, the tall trees growing along the sidewalk threw fragments of shadow across the cement floor. After I relieved Father, my nose quickly adjusted to the antiseptic smell—a chlorine smell like the chemistry lab at school—and my ears soon grew deaf to the loud hacking and constant coughing throughout the ward.
On the second day, Poh-Poh told Father that Stepmother and I must go to her. “It is time,” she said.
I sat in the wooden chair with my homework on my lap. Hoping for the best, I called, not too loudly, “I’m here by your side, Poh-Poh.”
She stirred. One of the nuns came over to me.
“Rub her hands, son. Get her blood circulating.”
I did, gently.
Just when I had almost given up believing that she had enough energy to stay awake on my shift, the Old One opened her eyes. Her hand felt so fragile and bony, but the smile was familiar, encouraging. I smoothed the wrinkles on her brow.
“That cat with the pink eyes came back to the house, Poh-Poh.”
“How so?”
“He came back three times. Sekky even told the cat you were at the hospital.”
“Not … not possible.”
“Third Uncle said he saw it, too, when he came to find out how you were doing.”
I wasn’t making it up. Third Uncle had seen the cat hop off our front porch and run down Keefer Street. I knew Poh-Poh was thinking of the curses she had spewed in rage upon the white cat.
Foul curses she knew she could not take back. I kept telling her how clearly I, too, had seen its pink eyes.
“My juggler …,” she said.
“Perhaps your curses do not work in Gold Mountain.”
“Perhaps …,” she said, as if she did not hear the lightness in my tone, “perhaps for me, Kiam-Kim, he has come back …”
A wetness brightened her eyes. Her head seemed to lift from the pillow, then slowly fall back. I had not the heart to tell her how foolish she was to think about such things. She caught my doubting look.
“You wait,” she said, and her voice sounded stronger. She pointed at my textbook. “Work,” she said and closed her eyes to nap.
I rustled the pages of my biology book and loudly shuffled my notes so Poh-Poh could hear how hard I was working as she fell asleep. After a few minutes, when I happened to catch the shadows dancing from the window above us, a white cat pushed its face against the pane. Of course, I said nothing. Its eyes were clearly not pink.
After an hour, Stepmother showed up, wearing her factory smock. An oversized envelope stuck out of her handbag. My mind went back to the time she arrived to be with us and pulled out a similar envelope to hand over to the Old One. I recalled the tiny silver butterfly she had given me that day. Stepmother still looked the same to me, her delicate features unblemished by the years.
Poh-Poh gestured for Stepmother to help her sit up. I pushed the cot close to the wall and placed the Old One’s pillow at an angle so she could lean against me as well. The grey hospital gown heightened the lack of colour in her cheeks, but I was happy to see her effort and the way the cloudiness in her eyes seemed to diminish.
“Let First Son see,” Poh-Poh said.
Stepmother hesitated. I wondered what was going on. Reluctantly, Stepmother slipped out from the large envelope a photograph I had never seen before. Stepmother held it up. It was a formal picture of a middle-aged man dressed in a mandarin coat. The picture was cracked with age, but every feature was clear. Stepmother handed me the photograph.
“Look at that face,” Poh-Poh said.
The man looked like Father, but was not him.