by Wayson Choy
Stepmother attempted to speak, then fell silent. She, too, was perplexed and somewhat ashamed. They all loved Grandmama, but she was inconvenient, unsettling.
As for our neighbours, most understood Grandmama to be harmlessly crazy, others conceded that she did indeed make lovely toys, but for what purpose? Why? they asked, and the stories she told to me, of the juggler who had smiled at her, flashed in my head.
Finally, by their cutting remarks, the family did exert enough pressure that Grandmama no longer openly announced our expeditions. Instead, she took me with her on “shopping trips,” ostensibly for clothes or groceries, while in fact we spent most of our time exploring stranger and more distant neighbourhoods, searching for splendid junk: jangling pieces of a broken vase, cranberry glass fragments embossed with leaves, discarded glass beads from Woolworth necklaces. We would sneak them all home in brown rice sacks, folded into small parcels, and put them under her bed. During the day when the family was away at school or work, we brought them out and washed the pieces in a large black pot of boiling lye and water, dried them carefully, and returned them, sparkling, to the hiding place under her bed.
Our greatest excitement occurred when a fire gutted the large Chinese Presbyterian Church, three blocks from our house. Over the still-smoking ruins the next day, Grand-mama and I rushed precariously over the blackened beams to pick out the stained glass that glittered in the sunlight. Her small figure bent over, wrapped against the autumn cold in a dark blue quilted coat, she happily gathered each piece like gold, my spiritual playmate: “There’s a good one! There!”
Hours later, soot-covered and smelling of smoke, we came home with a carton full of delicate fragments, still early enough to smuggle them all into the house and put the small box under her bed.
“These are special pieces,” she said, giving the box a last push, “because they come from a sacred place.”
She slowly got up and I saw, for the first time, her hand begin to shake. But then, in her joy, she embraced me. I buried my face in her blue quilted coat, and for a moment, the whole world seemed perfect.
One evening, when the family was gathered in their usual places in the parlour, Grandmama gave me her secret nod of warning: a slight wink of her eye and a flaring of her nostrils. There was trouble in the air. Supper had gone badly, school examinations were approaching. Father had failed to meet an editorial deadline at the Chinese Times.
A huge sigh came from Sister Liang. “But it is useless, this Chinese they teach us!” she lamented, turning to First Brother Kiam for support.
“I agree, Father,” Kiam began. “You must realize that this Mandarin only confuses us. We are Cantonese speakers...”
“And you do not complain about Latin, French or German in your English school?” Father rattled his newspaper, a signal that his patience was ending.
“But Father, those languages are scientific.” Kiam jabbed his brush in the air for emphasis. “We are now in a scientific, logical world.”
Father was silent. He wanted his children to have both the old ways and the new ways.
Grandmama went on rocking quietly in her chair. She complimented Stepmother on her knitting, made a remark about the “strong beauty” of Kiam’s brushstrokes which, in spite of himself, immensely pleased him.
“Daaih ga tohng yahn,” Grandmama said. “We are all Chinese.” Her firm tone implied that this troubling talk about old and new ways should stop.
“What about Sek-Lung?” Second Brother Jung pointed angrily at me. “He was sick last year, but this year he should have at least started Chinese school, instead of picking over garbage cans!”
“He starts next year,” Father said, in a hard tone that immediately warned everyone to be silent. Liang slammed her book shut.
The truth was, I was sorry not to have started school the year before. I knew going to school had certain privileges. The fact that my lung infection in my fifth and sixth years gave me a reprieve only made me long for school the more. Each member of the family took turns on Sunday, teaching me. But Grandmama taught me most. Tapping me on my head, she would say, “Come, Sek-Lung, we have our work,” and we would walk up the stairs to her small crowded room. There, in the midst of her antique shawls, the ancestral calligraphy and multicoloured embroidered hangings, beneath the mysterious shelves of sweet-smelling herbs and bitter potions, we would continue making windchimes.
“I can’t last forever,” she declared, when she let me in on the secret of the chime we had started this morning. “It will sing and dance and glitter.” Her long fingers stretched into the air, pantomiming the waving motion of her ghost chimes. “My spirit will hear its sounds and see its light and return to this house to say goodbye to you.”
Deftly, she reached into the carton she had placed on the chair beside me. She picked out a fish-shaped amber piece, and with a long needlelike tool and a steel ruler, she scored it. Pressing the blade of a cleaver against the line, she lifted up the glass until it cleanly snapped into the exact shape she required. Her hand began to tremble, the tips of her fingers to shiver, like rippling water.
“You see that, Little One?” She held her hand up. “That is my body fighting with Death. He is in this room now.”
My eyes darted in panic, but Grandmama remained calm, undisturbed, and went on with her work. I got out the glue and uncorked the jar for her. Soon the graceful ritual movements of her hand returned to her, and I became lost in the magic of her task: she dabbed a secret mixture of glue on one end and skilfully dropped the braided end of a silk thread into it. This part always amazed me: the braiding would slowly, very slowly, unwind, fanning out like a prized fishtail. In a few seconds, as I blew lightly over it, the clear, homemade glue began to harden, welding to itself each separate silk strand.
Each jam-sized pot of glue was treasured; each large cork stopper had been wrapped with a fragment of pink silk. We went shopping at the best stores in Chinatown for the perfect square of silk she required. It had to be a deep pink, blushing towards red. And the tone had to match, as closely as possible, her precious jade carving, the small peony of white and light-red jade, her most lucky possession. In the centre of this semitranslucent carving, no more than an inch wide, was a pool of pink light, its veins swirling out into the petals of the flower.
“This colour is the colour of my spirit,” Grandmama said, holding it up to the window so I could see the delicate pastel against the broad strokes of sunlight. She dropped her voice, and I held my breath at the wonder of the colour. “This was given to me by the young acrobat who taught me how to juggle. He had four of them, and each one had a centre of this rare colour, the colour of Good Fortune.” The pendant seemed to pulse as she turned it: “Oh, Sek-Lung! He had white hair and white skin to his toes! It’s true—I saw him bathing.” She laughed and blushed, her eyes softened at the memory. The silk had to match the pink heart of her pendant, for the colour was magical for her: it held the unravelling strands of her memory.
Six months before she died, we began to work on her last windchime. Three thin bamboo sticks of varying length were steamed and bent into circlets; twenty exact lengths of silk thread, the strongest kind, were cut and braided at both ends and glued to pieces of the stained glass. Her hands worked on their own command, each hand racing with a life of its own: cutting, snapping, braiding, knotting. Sometimes she breathed heavily, and her small body, growing thinner, sagged against me. Death, I thought, is in this room, and I would work harder alongside her. For weeks Grandmama and I did this every other evening, a half-dozen pieces each time. The shaking in her hand grew worse, but we said nothing. Finally, after discarding a hundred, she told me she had the necessary twenty pieces. But this time, because it was a sacred chime, I would not be permitted to help her tie it up or have the joy of raising it.
“Once tied,” she said, holding me against my disappointment, “not even I can raise it. Not a sound must it make until I have died.”
“What will happen?”
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p; “Your father will then take the centre braided strand and raise it. He will hang it against my bedroom window so that my ghost may see it, and hear it, and return. I must say goodbye to this world properly or wander in this foreign land forever.”
“You can take the streetcar!” I blurted, suddenly shocked that she actually meant to leave me. I thought I could hear the clear chromatic chimes, see the shimmering colours on the wall: I fell against her and cried, and there in my crying I knew that she would die. I can still remember the touch of her hand on my head, and the smell of her thick woollen sweater pressed against my face. “I will always be with you, Little Sek-Lung, but in a different way... You’ll see.”
Weeks went by, and nothing happened. Then one late September evening, Grandmama was preparing supper when she looked out our kitchen window and saw a cat—a long, lean white cat—jump into our garbage pail and knock it over. She ran out to chase it away, shouting curses at it. She did not have her thick sweater on and when she came back into the house, a chill gripped her. She leaned against the door: “That was not a cat,” she said, and the odd tone of her voice caused Father to look with alarm at her. “I cannot take back my curses. It is too late.” She took hold of Father’s arm. “It was all white and had pink eyes like sacred fire.”
Father started at this, and they both looked pale. My brothers and sister, clearing the table, froze in their gestures.
“The fog has confused you,” Stepmother said. “It was just a cat.”
But Grandmama shook her head, for she knew it was a sign. “I will not live forever,” she said. “I am prepared.”
The next morning she was confined to her bed with a severe cold. Sitting by her, playing with some of my toys, I asked her about the cat: “Why did Father jump when you said the cat was white with pink eyes? He didn’t see it, you did.”
“But he and Stepmother know what it means.”
“What?”
“My friend, the juggler, the magician, was as pale as white jade, and he had pink eyes.” I thought she would begin to tell me one of her stories, a tale of enchantment or wondrous adventure, but she only paused to swallow; her eyes glittered, lost in memory. She took my hand, gently opening and closing her fingers over it. “Sek-Lung,” she sighed, “he has come back to me.”
Then Grandmama sank back into her pillow and the embroidered flowers lifted to frame her wrinkled face. She placed her hand over mine, and my own began to tremble. I fell fitfully asleep by her side. When I woke up it was dark and her bed was empty. She had been taken to the basement of St. Paul’s Hospital, where the sick Chinese were allowed to stay. I was not permitted to visit her.
A few days after that, Grandmama died of the complications of pneumonia. Immediately after her death, Father came home. He said nothing to us but walked up the stairs to her room, pulled aside the drawn lace curtains of her window, and lifted the windchimes to the sky.
I began to cry and quickly put my hand in my pocket for a handkerchief. Instead, caught between my fingers, was the small, round firmness of the jade peony. In my mind’s eye I saw Grandmama smile, and heard, softly, the pink centre beat like a beautiful, cramped heart.
ten
IN SEPTEMBER, A MONTH before Grandmama’s death, everyone was worried about me. I was desperate to start school again, anxious to prove that I was now grown up like my older brothers, Kiam and Jung. But the school doctor rejected my attempt to get back into the classroom.
“Sek-Lung still has breathing problems,” he told Kiam to explain to Father. “I recommend he stay with his home studies and try again next year.”
Father gently nodded his head, and First Brother shrugged his shoulders. There was no argument against the science of medicine. My two older brothers and my older sister Liang were instructed to tutor me at home for another year. The school sent Kiam home with a pile of books and mimeographed worksheets to keep me busy.
Grandmama could tell I was deeply disappointed.
“No cry,” she said, opening a series of jars filled with sharp-smelling powders and stems. “I make you better. Make your lungs stronger.”
“No more herbs!” I protested.
BEING SENT HOME from school the first time, in Grade One, had been all my fault. Jung had warned me to keep to myself, to mind my own business; and for the most part, Jung’s tough-guy reputation protected me from the school bullies. But after the second week of classes, I forgot Jung’s warning and cheerfully waved my hand in the air to earn a Good Deed Star from Miss MacKinney for cleaning some blackboard brushes during recess.
On the school steps, I stood proudly in my new short pants and clapped the brushes together in the chopping-board rhythm Stepmother used with her cleavers. There was no wind that day. Chalkdust clouds rose in the air and hung thickly about me. Chalk particles rasped my nose and throat, sent me gasping in wild alarm. Two older girls ran to help me. I began to sneeze. Blood poured out of my left nostril. Worried about staining my new short pants, I bent forward and pinched my nose to stop the bleeding, then very quickly doubled up for lack of oxygen.
“Cripes!” one of the big girls said, looking incredulous. “Breathe through your mouth!”
I did.
The two panicked girls pushed me up the wooden stairs and into the school hallway towards the Main Office. When I tripped, both of them grabbed me by my suspenders and dragged my blood-streaked body into the nurse’s office.
Finally, propped against a leather chair, I calmed down enough to gulp down air reeking of iodine. The school nurse put a cold compress on my nose and efficiently wiped the blood off my bare legs. My grey flannel short pants were ruined. She knelt down and made me gargle some blue-tinged, mint-tasting water, but nothing stopped my lung-rattling wheeze. My sister, Liang, was called out of Miss Dafoe’s manual training class to take me home to recover. I knew Liang wouldn’t mind that much; she hated Miss Dafoe, who taught everyone how to read a ruler by whacking their knuckles if they couldn’t point out the quarter-inch mark.
“You’re a damn mess,” Liang said, pulling me along the street. “I’d better not have to wash you up, too.”
Grandmama began boiling up some bitter herbs for me to drink; she held my head back, rubbed my chest with Tiger Balm and made me breathe in a haze of eucalyptus vapours.
Three days later, the Vancouver City Medical Officer visited our home. He undid my shirt and sniffed the air. The Tiger Balm made his nose curl up. He poked about our rooms.
“Is it always this damp?” he asked.
“Only rich not damp,” Father said, in the broken English that he used with white authorities.
The doctor checked all of us for TB.
Everyone passed the tests. I didn’t have TB but my lungs were tight. I had night fevers.
“Sek-Lung must stay home until he can breathe clearly,” the doctor said.
When Grandmama was alive, I told her how desperately I wanted to go to school and be grown up like First and Second Brothers. Kiam and Jung came home and opened impressive books, made handwritten notes using long wooden nibholders to scratch out inky words and formulae. Then they dipped the nibs in a screwtop bottle of Bluebird ink. Sometimes Kiam let me press a sheet of blotting paper over his writing, and hold it in front of the hall mirror to see if I could read the words reflected back.
Liang impressed me with her ability to read rapidly, turning the pages of Beautiful Joe and Little Women with sudden smiles or tears. Sometimes she read aloud to me, simplifying passages for my benefit. I liked the dog story the best.
Watching them all go to school in the morning, I wanted to be taught my lessons by a real teacher like Miss MacKinney, with her shadow of a moustache and her steel-rimmed glasses, whose class I’d been in for those first two weeks. I liked the way she broke into a smile and her blue eyes lit with laughter when she discovered I could read English words (though I could not pronounce the words exactly right). To her I wasn’t any different from the Japanese, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish and Italian boys and gir
ls in her class.
“Nivver mind, Sek-Lung,” Miss MacKinney said. “Ah’ve an accent as weel.”
A year of tutoring me had made my sister and two brothers impatient and touchy. Second Brother Jung pounded the table to get me to spell properly; Sister Liang slammed the Third Reader shut if I asked her to slow down, and First Brother Kiam groaned each time he had to repeat, and repeat, the seven-, eight- and nine-times tables with me. Liang complained that it was unfair that she had all her Chinese School homework, too, because I had only to do English homework. Sometimes Kiam or Jung were cheered by my progress, but I always felt cheated, locked out from the mysteries of Strathcona’s monumental red-brick edifice. On warm days, strolling past the long rows of opened windows, I would turn to Grandmama with earnest longing.
“Listen,” I told her, “they’re singing.”
A piano would pick out a lively tune and a chorus of voices followed like a happy army. The broadleaf maples would rustle in the wind. Grandmama and I would sit down on some steps for a few minutes and look at the North Shore mountains, listening to the trees and the music.
Going to school meant a lot to me.
“You go next year,” Grandmama promised, even as she was weakening under her eighty-third year. “You get stronger.”
“How?”
“We find way.”
AFTER GRANDMAMA’S funeral at Ocean View Cemetery, I began to look to the ghost of my ancient guardian for help. I knew that Grandmama, though dead and buried in her pine coffin, would never desert me. She would see that I started school next September. I only needed to see her, in spirit, to know everything would go well next time. I did not doubt that the Old One had died. I saw Grandmama laid out against the white sheets lining the pine casket, her eyebrows pencilled in, her face waxed. But I did not cry because I knew the Old One would never leave me.
I wandered about the house, absent-mindedly; opened Grandmama’s bedroom door and stared hopefully into the silent cluttered room. Her last windchime caught the morning light and barely moved. Stepmother promised to clean out Grandmama’s room after the Chinese New Year in February. Sister Liang was to have the room for herself. I resented Stepmother’s promise and began a campaign of sulking: how could she give Grandmama’s room away? I refused offers to go to the picture show with Third Uncle and ate barely half my bowl of rice at meals. I grew thin and sulked. I had to be pushed to do anything beyond my solitary make-believe war games. Any time I was taken out of the house, I put on a strange, open-mouthed look and whispered openly to Grandmama.