All That Matters

by Wayson Choy

  “But he hates Chinese food,” Stepmother said, her Chinese words snapping to life. “Poh-Poh used to say, ‘The brat make pig noise, puking and farting noise.’ ”

  “Are you kidding?” Jung said. He laughed at the idea that O’Connor would even sit near our everyday food.

  “Will he really puke?” Sekky asked, excitement in his eyes.

  I explained that he was only a boy then. And Jack didn’t think he would be coming back to Vancouver after the war was over. Plus, he was my friend.

  Stepmother sat back in her chair. She had been studying me. “I make something only for Jack to eat,” she said. “I know what he like.”

  Father objected. “He eat what we eat.”

  “Yes,” said Stepmother. “But I make for him special dish.”

  The next day, Jack knocked at the door, right on time. And with a bunch of his mother’s flowers in his hand.

  For the first time in the almost fifteen years we had lived as neighbours, he walked into our front hall. I noticed all our coats were neatly hung up. I led Jack through the parlour, which Liang and Jung had swept and tidied up. Stepmother arranged the long-stemmed flowers in one of Poh-Poh’s favourite vases, the one with the dragon crest. I put the vase on a corner of Father’s desk.

  The table was set. A red tablecloth, for luck, covered the round oak surface. Two dishes were set out already, steaming. But others were waiting to arrive.

  Stepmother said, “Sit here.”

  Jung pulled out Jack’s chair. His place at the table was obvious. A metal soup spoon, a metal knife, and a metal fork surrounded a large empty plate, just like in a western-style restaurant. Finally, one after another, the dishes arrived. But the special dish that Stepmother had promised to make for Jack would, of course, come last.

  Sekky grabbed his chopsticks, and Jack asked if he could try them. He did, expertly. He had obviously been practising.

  “Kiam, would you ask if I could have some chopsticks, too?”

  I translated the request. Stepmother looked disconcerted, but Father said, “Of course, of course,” and quickly the metal “weapons” were removed and a set of chopsticks was laid across Jack’s plate. They were Poh-Poh’s special ones, carved from ivory.

  “Good friend,” Stepmother said with a smile. “Get best.”

  Then she went out to the kitchen and we all waited for the special dish for Jack. We listened to the quick chopping rhythm of the cleaver. Finally, Stepmother proudly carried in the special dish and set it down before Jack.

  The whites of his eyes widened.

  A complete whole-wheat peanut butter sandwich sat majestically in front of him. It was perfectly sliced into bite-sized cubes, for the use of chopsticks. Two hot dogs tucked in bread rolls had also been chopped into two-inch segments, each part held together with toothpicks. The thick pieces rolled against each other.

  “No, no,” said Stepmother. “One wait!”

  She came back. A new bottle of Heinz ketchup was presented to our guest of honour.

  “Oh,” Jack said. “You really shouldn’t have.”

  “Eat,” Father said.

  “Father.” I smiled. “Perhaps Jack wants to say a prayer first. That’s what he does at his house.”

  Jack gave me a look. “No, that’s okay.”

  “Pray! Pray!” Sekky said. “That’s good luck!”

  Everyone stared at the guest. The cornered look that those blue eyes gave me began to melt away. He bowed his head, but the words he spoke for those few seconds we could not hear. Then we heard, “Amen.”

  Liang and Jung said, “All Men,” as they did at morning prayer at Strathcona.

  Jack picked up his chopsticks and offered Liang the first piece of hot dog. He saw my look of surprise.

  “Moira,” he said. “She knows about Chinese etiquette.”

  I lifted up the best piece of steamed chicken and offered it to Jack. Stepmother began spooning the golden chicken broth into his soup bowl. Father told me to bring Jack his own rice bowl and a porcelain Chinese spoon.

  “You come back safe,” Father said to Jack, carefully enunciating his best English.

  Jung-Sum handed me the note that Mr. O’Connor had left for me.

  On October 27 Jack will be coming by train to Vancouver. Winnipeg Grenadiers and Royal Rifles are headed for the front some place in Asia. Can you and Jenny meet him that day?

  The Grenadiers came into Vancouver to board the reinforced freighter Awateau, and Jack managed to slip away from the station and taxi home to say goodbye to his mother and father.

  There was a loud rap on our front door. Liang got there first. She waited for Jenny and me to stand behind her before she would open it. Jung and Sekky came halfway down the stairs and stopped for their bird’s-eye view. Sekky had one of his tanks in his hand, ready to storm down the wooden rail and attack. I nodded for Liang to open the door.

  It was noon, there were clouds in the October sky, but the light was bright enough to silhouette the tall, gallant figure standing on our porch.

  “The Chen family, I presume, and the lovely Miss Jenny Chong,” said Jack, and gave a heel-snapping salute.

  “You look,” I said, “like you belong in that outfit, Jack.”

  Sekky raced down the stairs with his tank. “Jack, do you get to drive one of these?”

  “Not yet,” said Jack. He raised his fists at Jung. “But I get to box a round or two, how about that?”

  “Show me!” Sekky said. Jack kept his dukes up. Sekky attacked with his metal tank.

  “Hey,” I called, “how about you all leaving Jenny and Jack and me by ourselves for a few minutes?”

  The three resisted for a moment, wanting to take in the shiny boots, the thick lapels, the brass buttons … and the man that was now the Winnipeg Grenadier Jack. Then one by one, they left us alone.

  We sat ourselves down in the parlour.

  “So how are things?” I asked. “The training go well?”

  “Fast and furious, Kiam. But there’s been more damn marching than shooting.”

  Jenny asked him how he was, and I watched him answer her as if nothing had ever gone on between them. With his blond hair shorn, he looked older than his eighteen years. I had just turned eighteen myself, was attending Western Commerce, preparing for my future. But unlike the soldier in front of me, I still wondered where my duty lay.

  “Should I be there too, Jack?”

  “No, don’t even bother signing up,” he said. “I’ll be back by Christmas. You won’t even get your turn.”

  But Jack had been too ready with his answers. He looked at his watch. “The taxi’s waiting outside.”

  Jenny said, “What aren’t you telling us, Jack?”

  He sat up, pushed back his shoulders. “Not enough training for the most recent ones of us that joined up.” His jocular manner had disappeared. “We’re being pushed into this fight without enough thinking from the top. At stops during the night, some of the guys just hop off the train and disappear.” He slammed his fist into his palm. “Gone! Just like that. I counted at least a dozen of them. But I believe in defending King and Country. And I haven’t got any excuse not to be in this uniform.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was making a dig at my situation, but there was no malice in his tone. In fact, something in me envied Jack, that much I knew.

  “I’m shipping out to Hong Kong. Looks like I’ll end up being more Chinese than Irish after all.” He looked at his watch again. “One thing I came back to say to you two was to wish you well. And I’m glad to know we’re still friends.” The words were rushed, but it was clear he had thought about them.

  When we stepped outside, his mother and father were waiting on the sidewalk, their autumn coats tightly buttoned against the cold. It was a brisk day, and leaves rustled as they gathered in piles against the curb.

  “Keep my place on the soccer team, Kiam.”

  In the rising wind, Mrs. O’Connor adjusted her kerchief and pressed her thin lips to stop the t
ears. Jack held the car door open for her and respectfully saluted as she got in.

  The car coughed, and then it began to move forward, crunching the leaves as the driver slowly, slowly, pulled away from us. Jack stuck his head out the window and shouted back, “Ulysses gotta go look-see!”

  Jenny said softly, “Come home.”

  The North Shore mountains glistened with snow. Not knowing any better, I imagined it would be hot where Jack was going. Sekky started roaring about with his tank, shoving it against a pile of leaves in front of us. I began to talk nonsense.

  “It’s semi-tropical where he’s headed. Jack’s lucky to get his chance to fight. He’s—”

  Jenny bent over Sekky and snatched the toy tank from his hand. She threw it, bouncing, into a patch of dead grass. Jung quietly went over and picked it up, and Liang took her little brother by the hand, and the three of them climbed back up the stairs and went into the house.

  I thought of a poem Jack and I had committed to memory when we were in Grade 7. We had played some clubhouse game in the back shed and had promised each other we would live by those words spoken by Tennyson’s Ulysses: “to strive, to seek, to find … and not to yield.”

  In the fall of 1941, Little Brother was discovering his freedom, and was proving a discipline problem. Left by himself after school, he began to play with matches and hang out with the rowdy Han twins, tearing up and down the street playing war games, hopping into neighbours’ backyards and gardens. Jung or I would have to race down to MacLean Park and drag him home, muddy and wet and late for his supper.

  After some discussion, Mrs. Lim agreed that she and Meiying would take on the task of looking after him. She had thought it over and decided that Meiying could also use some help herself. She wanted Meiying to be more like the other young women of Chinatown. There was way too much talk, she thought, about “the perfect Meiying.”

  “What to do?” Big Mrs. Lim said in dismay. “Meiying read all the time. Can’t even boil rice! I keep her home this year. Teach her important womanly ways. You help me, Chen Sim.”

  “Or the gods will punish her.” I heard Poh-Poh’s voice in hers.

  “Meiying too smart and too beautiful,” Mrs. Chong told Stepmother at the mahjong table. “Better be smart and plain like me.”

  The Chinatown ladies who came from the old villages as mail-order brides or wait-on-table “hostesses” saw no future for such a bright girl. What Chinese boy would want her if she outsmarted him in every way and was so restless?

  “Better she stay home for now” was the conclusion of all the mahjong ladies. “Make her good wife material.”

  “Meiying should have been a boy,” said Mrs. Chang, the butcher’s wife, who waved her straw fan to chase the flying insects away from the meat. “What a waste!”

  Since returning from Victoria, Meiying had regularly stopped in to visit with Stepmother. Seeded by these earlier, more casual meetings, their companionship now grew into something more. Stepmother taught her young friend the household skills that she had had to learn before she was sent over to become Father’s helpmate.

  Mrs. Lim was happy to see some of the results of Meiying’s “education.” In her tiny shack the bedsheets were folded down at night and tucked in neatly in the morning. Pillows were fluffed. Small savoury dishes, dainties, were added to the coarse recipes that Mrs. Lim always made. Meiying paid attention to Mrs. Lim’s hair, helped her to wash her back in the iron tub, added special soaps to the water and perfumed the air with Three Flowers. She began to fuss over her guardian as if she were a rich lady.

  By the second day of his first week with Meiying, Sekky stayed up late to tell me the news: “May knows the flying range of all the bombers!”

  It turned out that Meiying knew more about Zeros, Spitfires, and Messerschmitts than she did about laundry and cooking. She had written a paper on the Great War for her history class in Victoria, had delved into the subject of old and new planes and their advantages in modern warfare. Part of her essay was even published in the Colonist newspaper. All the Chinese papers reported on her success.

  Within days, half Sekky’s tanks and toys were at Mrs. Lim’s house. Father was reassured by Mrs. Lim that everything was going to be fine. The beautiful Meiying might even inspire his son to study harder. I noticed Sekky straining to make out the long words in the Life articles that Meiying had cut out for his scrapbook.

  Sekky had found someone to fill the space left by his Poh-Poh. He loved stories, and stories were told. He wanted to learn a song that Meiying was humming, and he came home singing the folk song that Meiying’s mother had once taught her. They went out on crisp days to get some fresh air, to run through MacLean Park, Little Brother pretending that he could shoot down her enemy planes. She ran from Sekky with arms outstretched so that her silk shawls floated like wings.

  “Beautiful to see,” Mrs. Leong told me. “People stop at the edge of the park to watch the two of them.”

  About the perfect Meiying, who stayed away from the usual Chinatown gang, speculation grew.

  “Maybe she’s going to be one of those volunteer spotters,” Jenny argued, “learning all that stuff about Jap planes.”

  We were at the Blue Eagle, and I was trying to get Sonny to hurry up with my double-decker clubhouse special. We were with Susan and Cindy and their boyfriends, who had disappeared into a back booth to play a round of poker with some China-borns.

  “Interesting you should say that,” Susan Eng said. “Does Kiam know where Meiying and Sekky have been seen together?”

  I didn’t like the tone.

  “Yeah,” I said. “At MacLean Park, if they go out.”

  “Really?” Susan was playing coy, as usual. “They’ve been seen near the Powell Grounds, you know, that park in Little Tokyo.”

  “So? Probably watching baseball. That Jap team is made up of championship players.”

  “Well, it seems that one of those younger players is a close friend of your Miss Meiying.”

  “Get to the point, Susan!” Jenny said. “We’re not our mothers dragging out the news over a mahjong game.”

  Susan smiled. “Kiam? Ask your little brother where he goes with Meiying sometimes.”

  “Why don’t people just stick to their own places and be happy? Stick to their own kind,” said Cindy. “Japs stay in Japan. Indians stay in India. Chinese stay in—never mind.”

  “Stay in the Powell Grounds,” said Susan, laughing. “My boyfriend, Alex, works at the docks and he walks by there to get to work. People always mistake him for a Jap, can you imagine? He’s sure he’s seen Meiying down there a few times.”

  Jenny said, “That’s exactly what Meiying told me.”

  Cindy looked surprised. She began tapping her spoon on the saucer.

  “You talk to her?”

  “She comes into our store. And I like her,” Jenny said. “So does Kiam. She says she likes to watch baseball. Maybe she likes to watch your gorgeous Alex walk by, too. So what’s the problem?”

  Susan gave up. Her little bit of news was not going anywhere. I knew that Sekky had been told never to cross Hastings Street. And never to go down to Little Tokyo. Gangs were picking fights with anyone they thought was Japanese. But he was with Meiying. What could go wrong?

  But if the rumours were true, everything could go wrong.

  In Chinatown, those whose families had been murdered by the forces of the Rising Sun, and people like Father and Third Uncle and the elders who knew the extended history of Japanese aggression in China, people like these long believed that anyone too friendly with a Japanese person was consorting with the enemy. By the winter months of 1941, British and Commonwealth soldiers were fighting Japanese intrusions in India, Malaya, and Burma. And losing. All along the West Coast, Japanese people were being viewed as dangerous and potentially traitorous citizens.

  So the growing talk about Sekky and Meiying being seen at the Powell Grounds worried me. During exam week, in mid-November, I finished early and took the H
astings streetcar to Jackson. The Powell Grounds were just one block north. The streets were overrun with small kids getting out of school, rushing past me in waves.

  My walk took me right down Powell Street. Some elderly people stared at me, and I wondered if they could tell whether I was Japanese or Chinese.

  The stores were cleaner and neater along this street than most of our cluttered Chinatown stores. Window displays were so unlike the haphazard piles I was used to seeing on Pender. A single flower in a vase stood on a pedestal in one shop selling cloth. And the bolts of cloth were arranged like a huge fan of many colours. In Chinatown, you could barely see an inch of any bolt, except their stock ends peeking out of piles rising from sewing table to ceiling. Another window displayed some exotic fish in a large glass bowl. A single pair of chopsticks leaned against the glass. It was a pleasure to see one window after another treating housewares and ordinary goods like art pieces.

  I wondered how the Japanese scurrying by me would feel in Chinatown, with our loud chatter, the hawking on the streets to get rid of bad waters, our rough village ways, and the insistent jostling.

  A reflection caught my attention. In the tilt of a window, a young boy who resembled Sekky was walking towards me. When I turned around, he was gone.

  That night, Sekky showed me his scrapbook. It was a storybook that he and Meiying had created. The pages were blocked in comic-strip fashion, and Sekky and Meiying had cut out magazine pictures to tell a story of a young boy who fell into a magical land and had to fight monsters to save the people. The cutouts were shaped to resemble the monsters. Parts of tanks with fish heads lumbered over green landscapes.

  “Do you do this all the time with Meiying?”

  “Only when it rains.”

  “What else do you do?”

  “We go to MacLean to play.” Sekky gave me a look that suggested he had been through this third-degree before. Father or Stepmother must have queried him.

  “Do you ever go to the Powell Grounds?”

  “No.”