by Wayson Choy
“You go help him,” Father said to me, shaking his head. There was no going back. We were going to do what Sek-Lung wanted us to do. We would watch the Kitchen God, Tsao Chung, rise in the smoke to journey to the Gates of Heaven.
I lifted the heavy urn and carried it down the rest of the stairs. Sekky followed me to the back porch. He had dressed in his best shirt and new pants, and he wore the Buster Brown shoes he got for Christmas. Jung and Liang, in their pyjamas, rushed down to watch the event unfold. Stepmother ordered us all to put on our winter coats.
I went into the soggy garden and brought up a shovelful of loose dirt for the urn. Stepmother, curlers in her hair, found some sticks of incense in the pantry, lit them, and let Sekky push them into the urn. Father unstuck the picture of the Kitchen God and was ready to strike a match.
“No! No! Not yet!” Sekky grabbed Father’s hand. “We have to do everything right! You forgot the honey!”
That was true. Poh-Poh always smeared some honey on Tsao Chung’s lips so that he would report sweet things about our family to the Jade Emperor.
Stepmother came back with a honeyed spoon, and the task was done.
Father lit one corner of the picture. Liang and Jung stood back. The flames licked up the side of the colourful poster, which was made of a special paper so it would burn slowly and produce the greatest amount of smoke. Sekky watched the cartoon picture drop into the urn. We all watched as it curled gradually into fuming ashes, the white smoke mingling with the sandalwood incense. Father and Stepmother could not help smiling at the bright eyes following the trail of smoke as it rose and dispersed into the morning air. Everything seemed to have gone well. I had even momentarily forgotten the thumping in my head.
Then Jung-Sum said, “Shouldn’t we have waited until Chinese New Year?”
“Yes,” Liang said. “Poh-Poh only did this on Chinese New Year.”
Stepmother tried to shush them up.
I held my breath, counted each terrible second that went by.
The small head shook. Every vein and muscle on the slim neck strained to hold back the wetness now rimming his eyes, until the tide of heartbreak all at once sent him shuddering into tears. Father, distraught, picked him up and carried him into the house. Liang and Jung ran after him, trying to take back what they had said. But it was too late for Sekky, howling in the kitchen.
Stepmother held me back to whisper in my ear. “Very bad sign. Very bad, Kiam-Kim.”
“No harm done,” I said, with too little conviction even to convince myself.
“Yes, no harm,” Stepmother repeated with the same uncertainty, but looked hopefully towards the empty sky.
By March of that year, 1941, pressured by so many of the elders in Chinatown for the family to have a proper ceremony to exorcise Poh-Poh’s ghost, and deeply troubled by Sekky’s continued sightings of the Old One, Father relented. On the auspicious day selected by the exorcist, Father, Jung, and I moved Liang’s bed and things into the hallway.
With a bald-headed monk attending in the empty bedroom that had been the Old One’s, the bai sen ritual, the three-times bowing ritual, took place before the Old One’s portrait, an oversized enlargement that the Yucho Chow Photo Studios had prepared for Father. We dutifully lit some incense, and each of us, including Third Uncle and weeping Mrs. Lim, took our turns bowing before the Old One. The robed monk and his helper, a stringy-haired geomancer, had made sure the feng shui were in harmony. The curtainless windows were opened. Two large bowls burned with incense. The monk chanted blessings to set Poh-Poh’s spirit free. The smoke rose into the air, and the smell of jasmine permeated the room.
Sekky was impressed to see me fall on my knees and say a few words to Poh-Poh’s portrait. I thought of Jack O’Connor, who went to church even when, as we both knew, he didn’t put much credence in all that ritual, in the wafer and wine, the ten thousand miracles of the saints. But he did go at Christmas and Easter, and to mass, and even confession, when his mother wore him down, because he felt he had to for her sake.
It made sense to me. Poh-Poh had taught me, as she had instilled in Father himself, that duty to those we love must come first, before our need to please ourselves. And so I knelt before Poh-Poh’s stern eyes and barely smiling lips.
Shortly after that day, though both Sekky and Mrs. Lim swore to everyone that a stubborn old spirit had come back two or three more times, to say that things were fine, Poh-Poh finally left them alone.
“The Old One has gone,” Mrs. Lim reported to Stepmother. “Poh-Poh say a good ceremony, a good leave-taking.”
When Stepmother asked Sekky about this, he solemnly nodded. “Poh-Poh just said goodbye to me in the kitchen.” And then, matter-of-factly, “She just left.”
Late one night, restless from too full a day of playing war with his playground pals, Sekky came to my room and woke me up. He whispered that the Old One said she would never leave him. But she had.
He held in his hand the pinkish jade amulet that Poh-Poh had slipped into his pants pocket before she was taken to St. Paul’s.
“Would you like to give this to Jenny?” he said, in a hushed voice.
“No,” I said as calmly as I could. “You keep it safe.”
He looked doubtful.
“Poh-Poh gave it to you for safekeeping,” I reassured him. “She loved you very, very much.”
His small fingers clutched the carved peony. He climbed into my bed for warmth and quickly fell asleep against me.
I don’t know if Sekky believed that Poh-Poh was gone, but he did not mention her ghost again, at least, not to me. And that night, exhausted from a full day at the warehouse, I dreamed of the jade peony falling from the night sky into Jenny’s palm.
It was just a dream, like any other.
The war never left us, and through the spring of 1941, the newsreels would break up the Hollywood dream sequences that starred Astaire and Rogers, Rooney and Garland, Carmen Miranda, Hope, Lamour and Crosby with scenes of bombs dropping, of soldiers firing machine guns, of refugees fleeing and ships blown apart, jolts of reality that reminded us all that we had a duty to serve King and Country. But our talk was more about whether we could afford the latest tightly cuffed pants or the new shoes or buy the right suit for the graduation prom two months away.
Then, one April afternoon, Jack sat astride our porch rail, waiting for me to come home.
“Need to talk,” he said. He lifted his leg and swung himself around to face me. “Got some news.”
To keep my eyes from squinting at the sunlight behind him, I leaned against the wall of the house and fell back into the shade thrown by the porch roof. At first he glanced away from me, as if to check whether anyone might overhear our conversation.
“What’s the news, Jack?”
“You’re the first to know, Kiam,” he said. “Then I have to figure out how to let my mother know.”
He hesitated. I could tell the news must be serious, and that made me pull him off the rail to stand with me.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I’ve done it,” he said, stepping into the shadow with me. “Told the school that I was dropping out today, and next week I’m headed for Manitoba.”
“You got a job?”
“No. I’m leaving town in five days for Winnipeg. Joining up with the Grenadiers. Nice outfit. I checked out their history. Sign up. Go fight for the good guys. No matter what, it’ll take me as far away from my parents as I can afford. Got the bus ticket in my pocket.”
“Jeez, Jack, you’ve just got two more months till graduation. Look, I’ll help you with your chemistry. Everything will be fine. Get your diploma first.”
“I can’t concentrate too much these days, Kiam. Besides, the government’s going to call me up any day, and this way I can make my own choice.”
“But why leave so suddenly? I know guys that went to—”
“Not the same for me, Kiam.” He turned away from me and slammed his fis
ts on the porch rail. “I have to let you know something.”
“We can study together, Jack, you’ll ace the finals and—”
“Kiam!” He spun back to face me. “Jenny saw you in the library basement that day she and I— You saw us, goddamn you! An hour ago I went to tell her that I love her but she shut me down with these words: ‘Kiam was there.’ All this time you’ve let on that there was nothing wrong between you and me.”
I couldn’t fake that I hadn’t known. The same knife was stuck inside each of us, and the honed blade began twisting inside our guts.
“Best friends, eh? All this time, it’s been killing me, Kiam. I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. And you, you bastard, you could have said something to me! Made it easier for me!”
I thought I had safely put away that day, put what I’d seen in some memory box that I could avoid, if not forget. I felt pushed against the wall by his guilt. I hadn’t thought that what happened with him and Jenny was of any consequence to him. But now I pushed back. How was I supposed to make things easier for him?
“How far did you get with Jenny?”
I could see him trying to figure out what to say. He didn’t have too many choices.
“Doesn’t matter, Kiam,” he said finally. “We stopped when she pushed me away a second after she must have seen you going up the ramp.”
“And that was the end of it?”
“You want to know what happened next?”
I shoved him against the rail. Jack jumped in front of me and blocked my way into the house.
“Hang on,” he said. “Goddamn it, Kiam, you’ve got to listen to me!”
I tried to push him aside. “Listen to all that bullshit? No, thanks!” I drew back my fist. My knuckles landed hard on his chin, stinging. Jack stumbled and fell onto the deck. Anyone with half his smarts could have seen my fist coming a mile away and blocked the blow. And Jack knew how to fight. But he had done nothing to stop me.
Liang’s face appeared at the front window. She must have heard him falling. She waved to me, and I signalled her to stay inside, smiled like an idiot Big Brother and made it seem that Jack had somehow tripped, tumbled, an accident. She frowned, suspicious. I put out my hand and Jack gave her his idiot’s grin, too, and we both gripped, and I yanked. He got up, putting his weight on my arm before he recovered his balance. We were leaning against each other like two drunks. Liang laughed and turned away from the window, went on with whatever she had been doing.
“I want to kill you,” I said. “It was your turn not to tell me anything, goddamn it. You tell me this now, and you’re fuckin’ leaving for the army! And you’ll get fuckin’ killed! Great! What does that solve?”
“Whatever happens to me, wherever I go, I want you to know, you’re the only friend I count on. And I … I …”
He roughly felt his chin. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t drilled him half as hard as I had wanted to. I wanted him just to piss off and leave me alone, but I couldn’t say anything like that. And I could sense he wanted to leave, too, but hung on. Like a couple of stunned fighters at rest, we both sat down on the porch steps.
We avoided looking at each other and stared across the street at Mrs. Lim’s old shack. She was outside, shaking out a large floor rug. She waved to us. I waved back. Meiying came out and took one end of the heavy rug and shook it with Mrs. Lim.
“Love is funny, isn’t it?” Jack started to say. “Meiying is thrown away by her real mother and someone crazy like Mrs. Lim takes her in. Remember when you told me her story, how I laughed and said that was stupid? I think we were ten years old then, and I thought only her real mother could love Meiying. Then you told me about Jung-Sum coming into your family. ‘We take care of our own kind,’ you said. I think your stepmother told you that. Remember? I thought about that for weeks.”
The April afternoon was warm, and everything was green and blooming and Jack kept talking. “She came to find me down in the morgue that afternoon. I don’t think she planned to take me on like that, believe me. And I was easy. Didn’t mind one bit. She said she was curious about making love with me. Something she had fantasized about. ‘A white boy,’ she said. Just once. Like that was the only reason. She didn’t want anything else from me.”
“Then I showed up.”
“You showed up, it turns out, and that’s when Jenny pushed me away. That shove jolted me. Then something inside me made me think of you—you were my only and best friend, Kiam. We grew up together. I thought of what I was doing with your girl, and I felt sick.”
“And Jenny?”
“She fixed her dress. Asked me if her hair was messed up, and she left.”
I swallowed. It was a bitter taste, like the tea that Poh-Poh and Mrs. Lim used to share. “Bitter life, bitter tea,” they would say. But something told me Jack was telling me everything as he understood it.
“The thing is, after Jenny left, I wanted her so badly. No, not just the way you’re thinking. All the times we ever met, she was the only girl that got me interested in talking and battling back with her. But I know now that whatever may have started is over. And so here I am, talking to you. Then I go home and tell my mother I’m leaving her. Unfinished business.”
“Wait until graduation. That’s all they want you to do. Just wait.”
“Waste of time. I’ve got to go, Kiam. Everything’s getting to me. I’m going to let the army tell me what to do. When to eat. When to sleep. When to march and when to shit.”
“Look, Jack, I’m— No, I—”
We both smiled at my stumbling. All the talk had been about the truth, and it had mattered.
“Don’t say anything, Kiam. This is just the way things are. Jenny loves you. You’re the only one for her.”
“Does Jenny know you’re leaving?”
“I’m counting on you to give her the news. Will you?”
We hadn’t noticed that Meiying was standing below on the sidewalk, waiting to get our attention.
“Can you help us put a rug down?” she said. “We’re having trouble.”
Jack and I looked at each other. The bastard’s jaw was turning a little purple. We got up, brushed off our pants and went with Meiying into Mrs. Lim’s cramped front room. The few pieces of furniture were outside on the porch. The rug was a heavy one, but she wanted it to lie flat on the floor, even though it was too big. And it had been too big all the years she had it.
She handed Jack a knife. “Cut, please,” she said.
Meiying explained to us what Mrs. Lim wanted done. Jack stabbed the blade into one end of the oversized rug. I held it up at an angle so he could slice as cleanly and as straight as possible. When the job was finished, the rug fell down flat. Perfectly. Mrs. Lim pointed to the boiling pot and a platter of savouries she had been making. Jack made a face, the same face he always made when he smelled Poh-Poh’s garlicky cooking coming through our windows. He suddenly looked like the kid I grew up with, all tousled blond hair and blue eyes. I was waiting for him to tell me how Chinese people eat all kinds of things that crawl.
“They do, you know,” he once said to me. “I read it in a book. And my mother says so.”
Mrs. Lim could see that Jack would not be touching any of her wonderful cooking. The black-bean sauce and the fermented soybean cakes were already causing him to wrinkle up his nose. He clearly just wanted to get out of there. We both laughed.
“Tea,” Mrs. Lim said to Jack. “Drink goot tea.”
And we were gone.
That night, in Third Uncle’s warehouse office, I phoned Jenny.
“Jack’s leaving in a few days. He’s quit school and he’s going to Winnipeg to join up. He wants to do his share.”
“I know. Moira told me in the store tonight. She’d just seen Jack and her eyes were red.”
I looked at the piles of account books on the desk, and then out the huge windows overlooking False Creek. The trains were pulling in long lines of freight cars, and they seemed like those fabled creatures Poh-Poh used
to tell me about.
“Jack told me everything, Jenny.” I let that sink in a moment. I needed time to reflect. Yet I wanted desperately to know that something was sure, beyond illusion. After a long pause, I could hear Jenny crying.
“I want to be with you, Kiam. Only you. Please understand.”
I did. But it wasn’t in me to let her know that I understood.
“Look,” I said, “someone wants to use the phone. I’ll see you on the weekend.”
I hung up.
I thought of a story I’d read, a Greek myth about a warrior who raised his knife in the air to kill this woman for revenge, and the woman, whom he had never met, looked up at him, and their eyes met, and in that second, the murderer fell in love. When the two were in the library, who was the murderer, and who the victim? I could not guess, but I felt as if I were the knife plunging down, and they looked at each other, and love happened.
I wanted things to be as they had been. What truths were being told between us, what I could understand of them, I did not think should take away everything that I found impossible to surrender. No, I did not want to surrender what was still good and decent among us. However unfair and unjustified things might appear to a stranger who was only skimming the surface of our lives, even the lives of strangers, I felt, should never be quickly judged. And not one of us were strangers.
When I got home, Liang handed me a note from Jack.
“Did you hit him?” she asked. “He looked like somebody really socked him one.”
The note was brief and was headlined with a sombre title: “LAST REQUEST.”
He said was leaving on the weekend, but just this once, he wondered if I would ask him over for dinner with my family.
“My mother’s fed you plenty of hot dogs at my place, pal,” he wrote. “Let me know. Just me and your family. Okay? I want to make sure I have the guts to swallow anything thrown at me before I go off to wrestle some Nazis with my bare hands in a shit-hole trench. Like my father did in the last war.”