by Wayson Choy
I not only shouted words I learned from play-boxing with Jung’s friends at the gym, but words like chink, nigger, bohunk, wop, jap and hymie quickly infiltrated my playground vocabulary. I knew enough not to say those special words in front of bigger boys, and never in front of an adult, but they somehow were overheard by neighbours and reported to Father and Kiam. Though Jung said “I don’t give a shit,” Liang pretended to be constantly outraged about my reckless phrases, especially about the expressions that described girl-parts and dog-parts. She always looked like she was going to faint but still managed to tell Father what I said.
ONE DAY, I got bored.
Alfred Stevorsky and the other boys had gone to sneak into a three-ring Barnum circus at Exhibition Park, but First Brother Kiam wouldn’t give me the few pennies for the Hastings streetcar to get there and back. Kiam was not as much fun as he had been in the summer; nowadays, he worried about the war, his school projects, his work at the warehouse, or his girlfriend, Jenny Chong. He told me not to wander too far away.
I took my cardboard carton of war toys and stepped outside the house.
From our porch, I noticed a jumbled row of bundled Sun and Province newspapers on our sidewalk, stacked along with other stuff to be recycled for the war effort, all waiting for the pickup truck. I could see the two- and three-foot-high paper stacks standing in for the haphazard mountains surrounding the Burma Road. The Japanese were attacking. I took out my favourite Curtiss P-40 Warhawk with the Flying Tiger teeth painted on both sides of its nose. First Pilot Sek-Lung was going to drop some bombs over the Burma Road. I snapped on my leather pilot’s cap.
The “bombing” was a neat game Alfred Stevorsky had invented with matches he borrowed from his house. First, you slightly dampened two matchheads with your tongue, just barely damp. Then you struck the thick, sulphurous head of one matchstick with the head of the other; and as one dampened match started to sizzle and smoke, you snapped it into the air with your middle finger. The “bomb” would quickly shoot skyward and then spiral downward, trailing circles of white smoke, before it burst into flame. If you timed things right, the “bomb” burst white-hot exactly as it “hit,” like the kind of smoke-and-fire incendiary bombs all of us saw in the newsreels. One afternoon, the gang pooled our pennies together and brought seven large boxes of matches to practise on in the alleyway. I got pretty good at it.
With the matches I “borrowed” from a distracted Kiam, buried in his schoolbooks and Canadian army recruiting pamphlets, I strolled off our porch and stood over the curb-side piles of newspapers and snapped away. I meant only to create smoke and sizzle, not flames.
I got each match to spiral down in a trail of smoke and sizzle out perfectly, just singeing the tops of the bundled newspapers. I flew over the whole mountain range, striking pairs of damp matchheads together, one expertly after another. With each one, I caught my breath, pursed my lips, and made the roaring sound of a diving fighter plane. Then, while I was busy bombing to death thousands of Japanese troops, out of nowhere descended Mr. O’Connor, swearing a blue streak, with a full bucket of water to douse the pile of papers burning wildly five stacks behind me.
It was the best bombing run I had ever seen, just as I had daydreamed. I wished all the boys could see this: hot white smoke and fire like molten gold swirled upward; waltzing grey ashes, like flak, suddenly enveloped my Warhawk. The sooty air burned my nostrils.
Even Mr. O’Connor’s endless choice of colourful phrases added immeasurably to the effect.
But after no more than three or four minutes, there was only the choking smoke and the sound of dripping water, and through the afternoon haze, Mr. O’Connor looking dampish in his wet trousers, his grey eyes like Miss Doyle’s looking piercingly at my bomber.
When Father and Liang came home, Father was not happy at all with the blackened sodden mess in front of our house. If you ask me, Mr. O’Connor did not have to use so much water, as I quietly explained to Father.
An hour later, Stepmother came home and Father gave her that look that said something happened. Father had Kiam take me upstairs to await my fate. Then Kiam left for his date with Jenny Chong.
“Tough luck, kiddo,” he said, and shut the door tightly behind him. I could hear him dancing down the stairs, exchanging some words with Father, then leaving the house.
Upstairs in the bedroom I shared with Second Brother Jung, I could hear my parents’ voices against the clatter of dishes and the sound of my sister’s sudden laughter. Then I heard Jung come home, and minutes later, I heard him say, “Holy shit!” And there was more yelling. I spilled out my box of military toys and set up a war game with some soldiers and tanks. Jung knocked on the half-open door and came in.
“You’re grounded,” he said. “Father says you’re going to have to stay at Mrs. Lim’s house any time no one is home with you, if she’ll have you.”
MRS. LIM, who lived across the street, used to speak three or four shared dialects with Grandmama when the Old One was alive. Together, they always talked about Old China and Old China ways and traded Chinatown secrets. They also exchanged herbal remedies: Grandmama knew all about the che power, the essence, of roots and herbs, of crawling and swimming things; and Mrs. Lim knew all about the leaves and the healing parts of large animal organs.
Mrs. Lim habitually wore black, as if she still lived in the peasant world of Old China. Every time she came over to visit us, Mrs. Lim and Grandmama talked about how I should be raised in the old ways, the best ways, how I needed to address my elders properly and remember how to speak their names in the right way. She compared me to her daughter, Meiying, when the girl had been given to her years ago at the age of eight.
“Nearly same age as you now, Sek-Lung,” Mrs. Lim would say. “Meiying learn everything very fast.”
Some days, from our porch, we could hear Mrs. Lim yell at her adopted daughter, yell at the neighbours, yell at us boys if we played too loudly, yell at anyone who crossed her path. But mainly she yelled at her daughter.
Meiying never protested. Perhaps she knew that her own mother had not wanted her. Meiying’s mother, an actress once, and a gambler, so the talk went, did not know who of the many bachelor-men whose bed and food she shared was the father. Coming home with the day’s groceries one afternoon, Mrs. Lim met up with Meiying’s mother in front of the Fast Service Laundry.
“Take this bitch-girl from me,” she said drunkenly to Mrs. Lim, pushing her thin eight-year-old away.
Mrs. Lim took Meiying home, and people said Meiying’s mother disappeared with a man who took her to Toronto. She left her daughter some clothes, a couple of silk shawls and pieces of Chinese Opera costumes, and a small Chinese Opera doll with an exquisite white-painted head. The doll was styled and dressed as a princely scholar. Mrs. Chang said it was a doll given to Meiying’s mother by the Canton Opera Company when she left China. A fortune-teller told her the doll was her future husband, who would be a handsome man living in a royal household and who would always be studying a foreign language. “Wouldn’t you know it,” Mrs. Chang laughed, as she told the story to the mahjong ladies, “Mabel finds a man who studies the racing form every day and lives in Toronto on King Street! Oh, so royal! Such a scholar! Well, Tommy Fong’s certainly handsome, even when he gets as drunk as Mabel.”
MEIYING turned out to be a blessing for Mrs. Lim; she had a quick mind, shed few tears, and went gratefully from her own mother’s drunken chaos into the widow’s firm Old China ways. Grandmama repeated Meiying’s mother’s story many times to my sister, Liang. Liang always said, “We’re in Canada, not Old China.”
“We in Chinatown,” Grandmama said. “Things different here.”
Mrs. Lim and Grandmama would both shake their heads with frustration at my sister’s stone ear: “Aiyahh, ho git-sum! Aiyahh,” they exclaimed, how life cramped one’s heart!
Liang wondered how the beautiful Meiying, with her long hair and perfect set of grades in Chinese and English school, could tolerate living even
one minute in Mrs. Lim’s shack. Liang, many years her junior, admired Meiying from a distance.
“If only May,” Liang said to me one day, calling Meiying by her English name, “had a different mother than Mrs. Lim...”
The only good things we could say about Mrs. Lim were that she had the grandest climbing yellow roses in the neighbourhood and that she made the best noodles whenever we shared our flour and eggs with her.
“Stepmother is across the street talking with Mrs. Lim,” Jung said to me. “If old Mrs. Lim agrees to take care of you, you’d better wear your pilot’s cap. Flaps down.”
I PUSHED my largest tank over a row of soldiers.
I had always been glad I was not a girl-child. When Jung told me that I was to be put under the thumb of Mrs. Lim because Stepmother and Father had had enough of my war games and of the neighbours’ complaints, I envied my sister Liang for the first time. Liang was lucky. She could work sometimes and also go with Father anywhere she wanted. Mainly, Liang dried and stacked dishes at Hon Lee’s Cafe (and would get ten cents for that, too) or stuck on address labels at the Chinese Times. She liked being with Father, and sometimes she even got to stay at the newspaper office as he struggled to finish a piece of writing to meet the deadline.
Father worried about China, about the civil war there between the Communists and the Nationalists; he worried about our schooling and worried about the Japanese; he worried about Kiam wanting to fight for Canada when Canada did not want the Chinese. He worried about Stepmother, always angry. And then, of course, he worried about Jung working instead of going to school, and about Liang wanting to wear oversized sweaters like a clown, and he worried about me. There was nothing, it seemed, that Father did not worry about. And things he worried about, he wrote about in the newspaper, and then worried about what others would think.
I liked going to the newspaper office with Father, but on the third visit I accidentally knocked over a small tray of English type while reaching for the capital letter S. The tray of letters was used to print up English names and Vancouver streets. Not all the metal pieces spilled onto the floor and disappeared under the printing machines, the editing desk and the front counter, but the owner said I was not to be found there again. I think he meant that I could not go near the trays of type again, but Father would not listen to my argument.
Any place Father took me, shortly after the second or third visit, someone didn’t want me around again. Once I sat on a glass-topped counter at Ming Wo’s, and it broke. I wasn’t hurt, but half a sack of rare dried shrimp was wasted. The owner himself had sat me up on the counter so I could see how he worked an abacus; it wasn’t my fault. But Father said that was that.
Mrs. Chang said that Liang should be old enough to handle me, but Liang refused to think about it. Besides, Father and Stepmother didn’t trust Liang to be home by herself with me. My sister and I didn’t exactly get along.
Eleven months after the Old One’s death, my sister insisted that I still had not returned to the world shared by everyone else in the family—“the real world,” as she pointed out, with twelve-year-old wisdom. To frighten her, I pretended I saw the ghost of Grandmama.
“Poh-Poh’s dead,” she said, indifferently turning over a Movie Story page with a big picture of Sonja Henie on skates. “It’s time you grew up, Sekky.”
I made a crash landing with my Spitfire.
“And stop playing all those stupid war games. You don’t know anything about war.”
I was in Liang’s room, which had been Grandmama’s room before she died.
I sniffed the air and said, “I can still smell the Old One.” Liang shut her eyes in disbelief.
“Will you get out of here?” she said. “It’s my room now.”
I looked around. The room was freshly wallpapered, in a design of white and pink roses. There was a small dresser, the trunk she had been given by her friend, monkey-faced Wong Suk, who had returned to Old China years ago, and a desk rescued from the dump and painted sky white. The desk was missing a bottom drawer. A wooden chair, also painted white, sat on a little rug.
“It’s a boring room now,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else.
“Get out,” Liang said and started to write secrets into her diary, making sure that I could see the letters of my name being capitalized across the page, waiting for a wicked entry. I didn’t care. With Grandmama gone, everyone was my enemy. I went downstairs to lock myself in the pantry’s cool semi-darkness.
Only a week before, I had accidentally had thrown one of my fighter airplanes into the pantry. When I climbed up to retrieve it, I found a whole shelf of Grandmama’s herbal remedies. Familiar fragrances, sharp and bitter flavours, made my tongue and nose go moist with anticipation. Stepmother had put all these “dangerous medicines” on the highest shelf she could find. Mrs. Lim had helped her put aside the valuable dried sea horses, the rare hard black nugget of bear spleen, the squat bottle of ground deer antler; she named the powdered herbs and brown ointments no one else could guess. On the shelf were these: the still mysterious seeds like peppercorns with tiny spikes, the packets of bitter thick-veined leaves and mandrake roots, the tubes of BB-like pills, the tiny cosmetic pots of sweet-smelling ointments, a tin or two with half-torn labels. And a small tin of Bayer Aspirins. Nothing was to be thrown away; nothing to be wasted. Roots and leaves. Dried things that once had crawled and hopped in the moonlight.
“With the old one gone,” Mrs. Lim told Stepmother, “I only can know half as much.”
The pantry now held all of Grandmama’s herbal knowledge. My sister’s secrets, even if she was scrawling my name into her private diary, could not compare with the Old One’s secrets. Revitalized by the medicinal scents, I returned upstairs. Liang was still scribbling away in her diary.
“Boring,” I commented.
“You’re boring, Sekky,” she said. “Why can’t you just go to your room and think of—Mrs. Lim?”
FATHER and Stepmother told me that Mrs. Lim would probably strangle me after my first day over there.
“This is going to be fun,” Liang said. “I can hardly wait for next week.”
On the Monday before I went to Mrs. Lim, Miss Doyle noted that my voice was snappy. At recess, I foolishly picked a fight with Jack McNaughton and lost. I couldn’t even concentrate on my war games.
Mrs. Lim had been invited over for tea so that I could get used to her. Stepmother and Mrs. Lim chatted. I pretended I had polio and couldn’t move. They paid no attention.
By Wednesday, I had grown stubborn and hostile, angry that I was not yet as strong and independent as Jung nor as smart and grown-up as Kiam. At least I wasn’t as ugly as Sister Liang. I did everything to ruin their time with me, if they stayed around at all. I was a brat. I whined and sulked and fought, except of course, with Father. To cross him would be dangerous. Father became louder and angrier with each report from China. Territories, counties and provinces fell to the Japanese. The BBC announced the arrival of Commonwealth soldiers in Hong Kong. Soon Canadian troops would be there, too. Father was sure Hong Kong would be the next to fall. How could the British, two oceans away, direct the defence of Hong Kong? The Burma Road, China’s lifeline, had been lost. The Flying Tigers had failed to halt the enemy. Japanese troops drove deeper and deeper into southern China.
By Thursday, Stepmother was trying her best to prevent Father from ruining our dinner with his spluttering rage against “the dog-shit Japs!” She stopped him from detailing the horror stories about the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese population.
“But the children should know what kind of dog-screwing bastards those Japs are!”
“They know too much already,” Stepmother said. “You think they don’t know? Ask them if they know nothing!”
“They bayonet pregnant women!” Liang volunteered, her eyes wide with terror.
“They bury alive villagers and nuns,” Jung joined in.
“They cook up Chinese babies,” I said, with dark authority,
for all of us at recess had traded stories and begun to turn away from the Japanese boys and girls in the schoolyard. In the older grades, there were already fights between gangs of “good guys” and “Japs.”
Around all the tables and cafe counters of Chinatown, people wailed or whispered the news of family losses, an aunt here, a friend there, a father, a mother, a sister. There were tales of incredible enemy cruelty. A cousin wrote from Shanghai how the Japanese army were burying people alive, women and children. Another wrote how she witnessed living people, tied to posts, being used for bayonet practice. There were even darker rumours: the Japanese had camps for medical experiments, there were special camps for women hostages. A dozen incidents of mass slaughter were exposed in the newsreels: machine guns ripped across a line of defenceless citizens; bombs fell on civilian targets; starving refugees poured into the ravaged countryside; the sanctuary of churches and temples and hospitals were all violated; in one newsreel of captured enemy film, a Japanese bayonet lifted up what seemed to be a woman’s head, her long dark hair matted with blood.
“I want to join the Canadian military,” Kiam said.
We all turned to see what Father would say.
“You’re not a citizen of Canada,” Father said, calmly. “You were registered in Victoria as a resident alien. We’ve had this talk before. When the Dominion says we are Canadian, then we will all join up!”
Kiam closed his chemistry book. I knew he had been talking to his friends again, and to Jenny Chong. Father would not say another word. Father and Jenny Chong’s father did not agree on many things.
On Friday, three days before I was to go to Mrs. Lim’s, Third Uncle came to visit with us. Whenever he came, Stepmother said very little so that Father would not lose face. If things became too heated because Third Uncle and Father could never agree on the politics of the Old China and the New China, she interrupted sweetly with an offering of more rice or soup or another cup of tea. About one thing, however, the two men were in absolute agreement: the Japanese demons must be driven out of the Middle Kingdom. Third Uncle and Father were working on the script of a Chinese Opera to raise Save China War Bonds.