by Wayson Choy
“Are you sure, Sekky?”
“Maybe sure.”
“And that means?”
“Dai-goh,” he said, his tone changing, “Meiying says we all have alliances. Friends. We have to keep secrets if we’re friends.”
“When you go to Powell Street, what do you do there?”
“Nothing.”
“So you go there?”
“No.”
Sekky knew he had been tricked. His bottom lip started to tremble. I didn’t want to push things too far. I just wanted to know what was happening. The rumour that Meiying had a Japanese boyfriend was difficult to digest. Mrs. Lim would kill her. Father would cut her off from Sekky if he knew they went down to Little Tokyo. And Stepmother would be forced to end her friendship.
“I got to go,” Sekky said.
“You be careful. That’s all I want to say.”
He ran upstairs.
I should have been paying more attention to Father, who was tracking the news from China. But each time he swore against the Japanese atrocities and the “dog-turd Japs,” I shut my mind. There were all kinds of poisons in the world, all kinds of wars to be fought. It seemed we were all caught up in village gossip and in village hatreds. In a country as vast as Canada, people living in a few city blocks were divided from others inhabiting those same streets; divided by their colour and fears, their language and beliefs.
And then the news came one Sunday morning before any of us were awake. There was a pounding on our door. I threw on my kimono and ran to see who was there. Third Uncle pushed his way in to get to the radio.
“Open it,” he said. “Open it!”
I turned the dial and waited for the voice to come in clearly. There was some static, and then: “Pearl Harbor has been bombed … President Roosevelt has announced …”
Third Uncle jumped up from the sofa and grabbed Father’s hand. They danced about.
“America now on our side!” Father sang. “I told them so! I told everyone! Soon America fight, too!”
Catching their fever, Jung-Sum started to punch into the air for a knockout, and Liang hugged Stepmother. Sekky hopped up and down.
“Allies!” he said. “Alliances!”
Stepmother was holding on to Liang, but she looked at Sekky in the same way I did. We looked at him together and wondered. He caught my eye and turned away.
Secrets.
“Be happy, Kiam,” Father said to me. “Soon the war be over! America bring more men and more weapons to kill the dog-turd turnip-heads.”
I put my ear down to the radio. My heart began breaking out of my chest. What was happening in Hong Kong?
It happened on Christmas Day. The radio reported on a fierce battle. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Hong Kong defence collapsed. A list of Canadian soldiers reported killed or captured or missing was published the next day in the Sun.
Father had received an expensive tin of English toffee as a gift from one of the merchants in Chinatown, in appreciation of his editorial faith that the American forces one day would be fighting for China. Everyone agreed that Father should take the unopened box to the O’Connors.
At the door, Father and I spoke a few words with Jack’s father. I mentioned that Jack had vowed he would come home for sure. That his name was on the “Missing” list only proved that possibility. But when our brief visit was over, all I could remember was that Mrs. O’Connor never smiled once. And as we left the porch and started down the stairs, I saw her pulling shut the blackout curtains.
That first week of January, everything came to a head.
“Meiying sick too much with flu,” Mrs. Lim told Sekky when he went to show her his new storybooks. He wanted her to help print out the dialogue he had in mind. But Mrs. Lim stood fast. “Best for her to stay alone. You go play, Sek-Lung.”
Stepmother sent over some special teas from Poh-Poh’s pantry to help cool Meiying’s fever.
The next day, at Third Uncle’s, after working a hard midnight shift in the warehouse replacing someone who was sick, I sat in the small office, trying to catch up on the accounting entries that had piled up since the holidays, but I was making all kinds of stupid mistakes.
“Go home to sleep, Kiam-Kim.” Third Uncle passed along some extra money for my next semester. As he walked out to join a meeting in the larger office down the hall, he gave a little laugh. “You too young to work to death.”
When I finished correcting my last entries, I put on my coat and walked down the hallway to leave by the shaft elevator. Some of the merchants were in the big room loudly talking about the camps being set up to intern all of British Columbia’s Japanese people. I stood by the doorway and listened. Since Pearl Harbor, there had been demands that all citizens of Japanese heritage be moved away from the coast. Partisan posters were showing up all over the city. LOCK THEM ALL UP, read one; GOOD-BYE JAPS! And a cartoon buck-toothed Japanese soldier was depicted burning up the forests of B.C. The rumour was that the properties of all Japanese, whether Canadian citizens or not—their houses and stores, all their goods, their farms and fishing boats, everything—were to be seized and sold off at auction. Mr. Wong suggested that all the tongs, the wealthier family associations, should be asked to put up some money to invest in the properties along Powell Street.
“Everyone at city hall debating these matters now,” Mr. Wong said. His political connections kept him well informed. “We need to invest wisely.”
Third Uncle looked up to respond, no doubt favourably, when he spotted me. He got up to shut the door.
“Go home, Kiam-Kim.”
At home, I rushed in and interrupted Father talking to Stepmother to tell him what I had overheard at the office. He said he knew about all this, and he was just now writing something to support the merchants’ grasp of the financial potential. At the other side of the dining room, Stepmother sat knitting in her chair and said nothing. But her tight lips warned me that I should not have interrupted them.
“I write three articles, Kiam-Kim,” Father concluded, “to be published in a series.”
He spoke so specifically in Stepmother’s village dialect that I knew it was all said for her benefit. But she kept knitting, as if she were deaf.
“Look at all the land the Japanese have taken from China! Now it is our turn, don’t you understand?”
“We don’t want any of it,” cried Stepmother.
Father glared at her. The atmosphere between them was explosive. The argument I had interrupted was obviously a heated one. I expected that she had held her ground.
They each retreated to work. Father tore up sheet after sheet and angrily threw the crumpled balls into the wastebasket. Stepmother kept knitting in a fury, the needles clicking loudly. Jung slowly came down the stairs, testing the quiet. But perhaps sensing the storm gathering in the calm, he stopped midway and turned around. Liang sat down at the table with Stepmother and pretended to read her library book. Sekky began to play quietly on the floor at the foot of Father’s big desk.
I fiddled with one of Father’s brushes. I wanted to take my head away from the crush of tension in the air. Stepmother’s abrupt dismissal of the idea that Powell Street should be taken over by Chinatown must have boiled inside Father. As if men like him could afford to turn their backs on such an opportunity.
“You should have chosen a damn rich man!”
The needles went silent. Stepmother’s face reddened with pain. I remembered the night Father had told me he liked Gai-mou but that he loved my mother. Though she wept that night, I assumed that Stepmother had accepted her position, accepted that she belonged to the family in the only way that was possible. But her whole being protested.
“I chose? I was bought! Even my own two children call me Stepmother!”
Both Liang and Sekky averted their eyes. They must have sensed that their mother was battling against invisible and entangled ways. Against their ancient powers, she was as helpless and defenceless as I was.
“The Old One decided,” cri
ed Father. “You accepted!”
I saw now that Father had taken for granted the Old China ways without realizing how Stepmother had been pushing against them. Stepmother’s eyes flashed in the same way that Jenny’s did whenever she felt cornered. I thought of Stepmother’s Three Flowers perfume, which I smelled on Meiying when I happened to bump into her coming down our stairs, rushing away from our house to go where? To meet whom? Did Stepmother dab some perfume on Meiying and say, “Go meet the boy tonight”?
And what had they been talking about under the ruse that Stepmother was teaching Meiying her household skills, helping Mrs. Lim’s adopted daughter to become sensible? And did Meiying push her Gold Mountain way into Stepmother’s thinking? Sensibly, did Meiying ask, “Why do your own two birth-children call you Stepmother?”
I thought of Poh-Poh’s old story about the tyrannical mistress who had whipped her, how even a lowly servant girl could fight back against all those days and nights of injustice. But Stepmother needed no magic combs to turn into river dragons; she had her silence. This time, I could see, she would not weep a single tear.
Father must have known he could not simply reach out and take her hand as if nothing had changed. He looked around the room and sought to re-establish his place.
“One of you, make some tea,” he said. “Should be making lunch by now.”
Everyone, including Father, held their breath. Her knitting needles clicking away, Stepmother refused to move. I knew what I had to do. I got up and went to the kitchen. Father went on writing, as if it were not unusual for First Son to make him his tea. He would not lose face.
After filling the kettle, I turned my head as Poh-Poh might have and looked for the Kitchen God. But Father and Stepmother had decided not to remind Sekky of last year’s ritual burning. The Kitchen God would not come into this house again.
While waiting for the kettle to boil, I stood at the back door and looked out at the wooden fence dividing the O’Connors’ backyard from ours. If I shut my eyes, I could go back many years and see Jack playing there that first winter in this house, when we were just getting to know each other. He had seen me on the back porch and waved his mittened hand and pointed at the half-made snowman.
Tall Mr. O’Connor, who came out from their small shed with two pieces of coal, was waving at me, too, to come down and join Jack.
“Snow not good for you,” Poh-Poh said, calling me to come in. I had already been coated and sweatered up for the cold, ready to go out with Stepmother and Poh-Poh to shop at Market Alley. The snow and building a snow creature was too tempting. I had seen the snow pile up that winter and envied the other boys playing outside, building forts and snowmen with coal eyes and carrot noses, which they knocked down with glee. I broke away from the Old One and ran out the back door, plodded through the foot of snow and attempted to climb over the fence. Mr. O’Connor lifted me up out of the deep snow and put me down beside Jack.
Poh-Poh told Stepmother to call me back, but Father and Third Uncle, meeting over business, must have been watching from the dining-room window. Later, Stepmother said Father had told her and Poh-Poh to leave me alone. Third Uncle said to them, “In Gold Mountain, First Son must learn other ways.”
Jack and I babbled at each other as if we were using the same language. We finished the snowman, and with Mr. O’Connor guiding us with shovelfuls of snow, we constructed a fort. Finally, Mr. O’Connor lifted Jack and me back over to our yard, where the snow lay pristine, unbroken except for the trail I had left behind. He directed Jack with a torrent of words, and I watched as Jack fell backwards into the bank of snow. Then the tall man pointed at me. I threw myself onto the deep snow, and pushed my arms up and back along my side. Then Jack carefully stood up to see what impression he had made. I did the same thing. My eyes widened at the wonderful sight. Butterfly creatures were pressed into the snow. Mr. O’Connor flapped his arms as if they were wings and called out, “Angels.”
Stepmother clapped her hands at the snowy creations, and Father laughed with delight, but the Old One shook her head.
“Soon all gone,” she said.
“No matter, Kiam-Kim,” Third Uncle commented. “Still beautiful.”
The kettle rattled me back to the present. A different winter now stared at me from the backyard—dead vines tied up with string, brown stalks of dead plants and grass, patches of bare earth, and the leaning slab fence. I picked up the pot holder in one hand, and with the other I lifted the teapot from the warming shelf and shook in some tea leaves from the old caddy.
Just as I was reaching for the boiling kettle, there came a loud banging on the front door. Father quickly unlocked the door. Mrs. Lim barged through, shouting to Stepmother.
“Chen Sim! Chen Sim! Aaaiiyaah! Lim Meiying! Meiying!”
Mrs. Lim did not have her winter coat on. Father led the big woman into the parlour. She was almost incoherent. Then, with chilling effect, she screamed to Stepmother, “In her room! Meiying in her room!”
Father and I looked at each other.
“You and Jung take Liang and Sekky to Third Uncle’s,” Father said, “and wait for me to come for you.”
I grabbed their coats, but Sekky was gone.
Looking past the open door, I saw him across the street, chasing after Stepmother, climbing up the two rickety flights of stairs as fast as he could to catch up with her. As we rushed to Third Uncle’s, I could not shut out Mrs. Lim’s cries: “Aaaiiyaah! Lim Meiying! Meiying!”
Overnight, the news ran through Chinatown. Perfect Meiying had given herself to a Japanese boy. She had to do something and failed terribly. She had bled to death. Two ambulance men arrived, and a crowd gathered to watch them take away the bundled body. Word had been sent to Meiying’s mother in Toronto. And a Buddhist monk arrived right away to chant and perform special rituals to expunge the bad luck such a death would surely leave behind. Yes, yes, a terrible, terrible loss.
The third day after Meiying’s death, and the day before the private burial, Jenny agreed to see me. I had tried twice before, but whenever there was a visitor for her, whether her other friends or me, Mrs. Chong said she would lock herself in her bedroom.
“I never see her like this before, Kiam-Kim,” she said. “Her heart so broken over Meiying.”
But this time Mrs. Chong noticed the door unlock, and she led me upstairs and knocked gently.
Jenny’s eyes were swollen from crying, and she could barely speak. Her throat was parched. We were alone in her small bedroom upstairs, and she seemed unable to sit up.
She looked at me, her eyes dark with pain.
“First Jack … then poor Meiying. They’re both gone now.”
I guessed at Jenny’s thoughts. She and Meiying had both crossed the line with someone not of their own kind. “No, not both gone,” I said. “Someone missing is not dead.”
I picked up the glass of water on her bedside table, lifted her head, and encouraged her to drink.
She swallowed, and sat up against her pillows. “Don’t stay with me, Kiam,” she began. As I held the glass, she took another sip of water. Then another, until the glass was empty. “Break off with me, Kiam.”
I answered the only way I knew how.
“Marry me,” I said.
She grabbed the glass from my hand and smashed it against the wall.
Mrs. Chong came running up the stairs.
“What is happening, Kiam-Kim?” she cried, wiping her hands on her blue smock. “What’s wrong, Jenny?”
“Nothing, Mother,” Jenny said. “Kiam just asked me to marry him.”
Mrs. Chong jumped. “And how did you answer him? What did you say to Kiam-Kim?”
Jenny looked at me as if she had thought of this moment many times before.
“Aaaiiyaah,” said Mrs. Chong. “What did you answer him?”
Jenny’s eyes did not move from mine. “Why not?” she said. “My heart answered him, ‘Why not?’ ”
“Yes, you mean yes!” Mrs. Chong leaned against the doo
rway. Jenny and I turned to see triumph gleaming in her eyes. “Kiam-Kim, your Poh-Poh will have many great grandsons!” She took a deep breath and began shouting, “Ben! I have news for you!” She disappeared down the stairs.
Jenny held my hand. In the haunted quiet between us, I surveyed the fragments of glass reflecting the sunlight.
ENDINGS
WAITING ON THE RAISED station platform, impatient for the arrival of the Red Cross train, I looked at my watch and said, as much to myself as to Jenny, “He’ll be here soon.”
I followed a flight of gulls as they swooped over the dark waters of Burrard Inlet and soared over the Second Narrows Bridge, and felt lost. Jenny, too, seemed disoriented. She leaned against my shoulder, her arms resting on her swollen belly; it was 1947, and our first-born was due in less than a month. But for now, with the taste of soot on my tongue, we waited anxiously for another arrival: Jack was coming home.
Families wandered about us, smiling bravely. People clutched each other for support. Volunteers and Red Cross nurses in dark capes paced attentively. The temperature felt mild for December, and the air smelled of wet hay.
We were all waiting next to a fenced-in yard with chutes usually used for transferring prize livestock to the Exhibition grounds. The long platform built alongside the tracks next to the station office had been swept clean, and wide wooden ramps were lined up, ready to be lifted into place. Severely wounded veterans—amputees, paraplegics, burn victims—were returning to their homes in Vancouver. High above the flat roof, a flag flew for King and Country. There were no news photographers or politicians.
I had been meditating on what had brought us to this station platform. Deep in thought herself, Jenny did not mind my seeming indifference. Invisible forces, like luck or fate, and like the ghosts of Old Chinatown, had come back into our lives, if they had left us at all. Jack, too, must have had such hauntings.
Mr. O’Connor had not been told how his son had escaped the Japanese. Jack himself recalled nothing. The official report stated that during the defence of Hong Kong, Jack had been trapped in a firestorm of burning buildings, and it was only the fragments of his uniform—labels stuck to his skin—that enabled the Chinese underground to identify him as an Allied soldier and smuggle him onto an American ship. Months later, he woke up in Winnipeg, in the burn ward at Deer Park Veterans’ Hospital, with his arms tied to a special bed. And then after years of intensive care, refusing to see any visitors, after his massive wounds had healed into scars and his memory had slowly returned, he asked to be transferred home. His father was too sick to leave the house, and so his mother had come to our apartment one evening.