All That Matters (12 page)

For a second, I wasn’t sure what to do.

“It’s me!” I called. “I made a funny joke!”

“A miracle,” I heard Poh-Poh say. “My grandson is clever enough to tell a joke.”

Mrs. Leong chortled. “Oh, they get along good, very good, those two children.”

Mrs. Wong laughed. But Jenny’s mother kept muttering. “Send her to strict Catholic school!
Useless dead girl!”

Her chair scraped again as she sat down.

The mahjong game continued, tiles clicking and crashing. Jenny sighed with relief. My quick thinking had saved her skin. She caught me looking at her and quickly made a little cough, covered her mouth, then reached down and roughly rinsed off another plate.

“Big hairy deal,” she said, and shoved the plate at me.

I decided to say something that would really catch her off guard. The wood stove crackled. “I’m getting,” I half whispered, “a
new brother.”

She looked around, as if someone might overhear us, and whispered back to me, “It’s a
secret
, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a big,
big
secret.”

She smiled for the first time. “You
mo yung say doi.”
Her lowered voice made each word sound triumphant, her thin, bloodless lips curled into a sneer. “You useless dead boy,” she said. “You
shouldn’t
have told me.”

The Kitchen God glared.

The Kitchen God must have laughed at Jenny Chong’s thinking she had tricked me into giving away the family secret and that I would be punished. The joke was on her. Nothing happened.

Within a week of the papers being signed, every one of the mahjong ladies knew all the details. Those agreement papers had been signed in Victoria, but my Second Brother was coming from Kamloops, far away in the Interior. I marvelled at how the papers and the boy were miles apart. I remembered that the immigration papers that brought Stepmother over were a whole ocean apart to begin with.

Stepmother said that we could not go to the train station to get Second Brother. A tong official would be with him on the train. With another mouth to feed, Stepmother told Father that they could not afford to stop working. The money mattered more than ever now. Poh-Poh and Third Uncle agreed. He had to work that afternoon, too.

“I pick him up at the station,” the Old One said.

“I’ll go, too!”

“No,” Father said. “Too much confusion for your new brother. Poh-Poh will go in a taxi. She knows the tong elder who will be with the boy.”

“You be patient,” Poh-Poh said to me. “I bring him home.”

Stepmother took me aside. “You forget something?”

“What?”

“You fix up your room for him. Move your bed over. We discussed this.”

In protest, I pushed my hands down to my side.

“That be your duty,” said Father.

Third Uncle tapped his pipe. “Don’t you want to be Number One Boss, Kiam-Kim?”

They all looked at me across the dining-room table. Beneath the tablecloth, I pushed my fingers out like a boxer in training.

“Yes,” I said, and tightly clenched my fists. Ready for anything.

THREE

POH-POH SAID, WHEN SHE CAME BACK
from the train station with him, “This is Jung-Sum, your Second Brother.”

She pushed a small, dark-skinned boy into our front parlour. His hair glistened and smelled of Wildroot. His shirt collar, starched, was encircled by a glimpse of blue sweater, both protruding above his ill-fitting dark jacket. Everything sagged over his bony shoulders. His big-eyed head stuck out like a scarecrow’s on a broomstick. All he lacked was a straw hat. I tried not to laugh.

Liang-Liang, with a pink bow in her hair, clung to Stepmother’s skirt. She stared at Jung-Sum and apparently liked what she saw. She smiled shyly.

Poh-Poh shot me a warning look. She had informed me the day before that there was no way to get rid of him once we called him family.

“You grow to like him,” she said, and looked at Stepmother. “Everyone soon like him, just the way we like Gai-mou. We family.”

When Stepmother removed his outer jacket, he looked even more puny, not the rough kind of
Our Gang
picture-show kid I had expected to get.

Though I knew he was only four, half my age, it was still a letdown to see that he barely stood a head above my waist. Below his short sleeves, his elbows stuck out like doorknobs. He looked back at the grown-ups with darting eyes, as if demons were going to pounce and gobble him up. I thought of Poh-Poh scolding the chicken man about his grizzled birds,
Too skinny for soup bones!
Or maybe he was looking for his mother and father. I wondered why they didn’t keep him, why they gave him away.

Liang shook her Raggedy Ann doll at him. He jumped.

Father pushed me forward. “Introduce yourself,” he said.

“I’m Kiam-Kim,” I said. “It means ‘proficient.’ I’m smart.”

He whispered something to Poh-Poh. She stooped down, and they began talking in a funny dialect. Then Stepmother showed him the kitchen, the pantry, and the dining room, with Father’s desk in one corner. He stopped to look at the Meccano Ferris wheel I had left there.

“Jung-Sum speaks Hoiping,” Father said.

“I speak
English!”
a thin voice squealed from the next room. “I speak
goot
English!”

“Take Jung-Sum up to your room, Kiam-Kim,” Stepmother said. “Take his suitcase with you.”

“Go with First Brother Kiam,” Poh-Poh said. “We call you down for
dim sum
.”

Dishes rattled behind us as he followed me upstairs. I threw his battered suitcase on his bed and motioned him to sit down. The springs squeaked. The iron fold-away cot smelled rusty. Father said Jung-Sum had to share the bottom two drawers of
my
five-drawer dresser and half
my
closet space. That was the way it was.

“Where you’re sitting,” I said. “That’s where you sleep.”

As he sat back, his trouser legs rode up. In summer short pants, his stick-thin legs, like a girl’s, would be embarrassing. At least he wasn’t a chatterbox. He didn’t even bounce on the cot to test the springs, the way I remember testing my big bed when I first got it.

“I’m your
dai-goh
, your big brother,” I announced. “You have to be tough to be my baby brother.”

He nodded.

Jung-Sum wasn’t what I wanted for a Second Brother. I had imagined getting a boy like me when I was three, standing by a moon gate in that last picture taken in China; I was big and strong, fed lots of good food to prepare for the weeks-long overseas journey to Gold Mountain. I wanted a chunky little boy to boss around, the way everyone bossed me around. But Jung-Sum looked so small, so hopeless. It would be like bossing around Baby Liang. Not much fun.

Still, I had responsibilities that I couldn’t avoid now. As Jung-Sum’s new
dai-goh
, I should set down
some rules, show the squirt right away who was boss.

His fingers slithered over to the worn suitcase handle, as if I might grab it.

“Let me see how tough you are,” I said. “Stand up.”

He sat there looking confused.

I put two stiff palms under his arms and stood him up. I made a fist in front of his face and waved it like the boss boy in the
Our Gang
pictures. I gestured like a shadow boxer so he’d know what was going to happen next: I punched him in the stomach.
Just hard enough
, I thought.

I expected him to cry like a baby, but he didn’t.

I picked up the red crayon I had taken from Liang’s toy box and drew a line across the linoleum floor. Told him to keep to his side. He nodded. I put crayoned X’s on the two drawers that were his. The bottom two. He understood.

He looked up at the torn calendar on the wall. It had a picture of cowboys rounding up cattle.

“You like cowboys?” I said.

He nodded. He opened his suitcase and pointed at a worn stuffed doll. I picked it up. It had on a darkly stained cowboy outfit, but only the broad brim of a hat clung to its stitched head. I looked closer. It looked as if someone had tried to cut off the hat but gave up halfway. The stained label said
Tom Mix
. I put it back down. Second Brother would need a lot of bossing around. I was about to tell him there were bad and good cowboys, when Poh-Poh called us down to eat.

Later that evening, when he was trying on one of my old undershirts, I inspected him some more.

He pulled away his sweater and yanked off his shirt. I was prepared to laugh at his exposed cartoon skeleton, but when he turned away, I noticed red lines running over his back, as if Long John Silver had tied him up and had lashed him a dozen times.

“Don’t move,” I said. I traced my thumb along one of the darkest lines. The thin, deep line began at his bony right shoulder and went diagonally across the tip of his spine.

He hardly flinched.

“What’s this?”

“Ba-bah hit me,” he said.

I shouted for Poh-Poh and Stepmother to come upstairs. The Old One took one look and said,
“Yes, yes, the belt,”
as if she had expected to see such marks. Stepmother stood by the doorway carrying Liang-Liang in her arms. Only Sister was alert to the newcomer and stared pensively at him.

“Jung-Sum,” Stepmother said, “Third Uncle is downstairs. He brought some dumplings just for you to eat later. Some friends left us clothes for you, too. Come down and see.”

“One minute,” Grandmother said. She had been studying the criss-crossing lines. “Wait.”

Stepmother and I watched in silence while Poh-Poh came back from her room and applied one of her special ointments on Jung-Sum’s back. No one had ever hit me like that, the way Poh-Poh had been hit when she was a slave girl in China. I only ever got
knuckled, and once at school, three straps on the hand for spitting.

I thought,
He’s tough
.

The Old One said to him, “Put on undershirt and your green sweater. We go downstairs now.”

Poh-Poh offered her hand, but Second Brother ignored it and waited for her to walk out first. Poh-Poh shrugged and gave Stepmother a pleased look as she passed. Their small footsteps on the stairs made the same sound, like an echo.