All That Matters (13 page)

I didn’t move.

Stepmother stood in the doorway, looking at me. Sister Liang was now clinging to her dress; her cloth doll hung upside down from her tiny fist.

When the Old One led my new brother into the parlour, I heard Father shouting out a welcome. He and Third Uncle were drinking Tiger Bone wine. Father’s voice rose above Poh-Poh’s laughter. “A toast to my new son—to Jung-Sum, who will be the Second Brother of my First Son, Chen Kiam-Kim, and Second Brother to their Only Sister Jook-Liang!” Glasses clinked. There was another toast to Poh-Poh and to her three grandchildren.

“I long for three grandsons,” she cried. “Then I die soon.”

Laughter rumbled up the staircase.

Sister Liang ran into the room and plunked herself down on the fold-out cot.

“Your new brother’s cot doesn’t take up too much room,” Stepmother said at last.

I sniffed.

“You hardly use all those drawers, and the closet is big enough for three boys.”

My mouth would not unbend.

“Why?”
I asked.

“Father and Poh-Poh wanted another boy in the family.”

“Why didn’t his own mother and father keep him?”

“They’re dead,” Stepmother said.

My fists tightened.

“Both of them?”

She took a deep breath to say it all at once. “Jung-Sum’s father drank too much. He came home and killed Jung’s mother, then he killed himself. Some men are driven by demons.”

I imagined the truth of that, but I wondered how that might happen, for one to be so driven by demons as to kill himself.

“You saw the marks on his back. He wasn’t lucky like you, Kiam-Kim.”

Father called for us to come join him. Stepmother went to my dresser and tossed me a sweater.

“You have a good father,” she continued.

I put my head under the sweater. Her soft voice penetrated my ears.

“You have a good
nai-nai
like your Poh-Poh. This boy has no one.”

“No one?” I pushed my arms through the wool sweater and wondered what it would be like to have no one.

Liang turned over on the cot and mimicked my voice: “
No one?”

“Unless we take Jung-Sum in”—Stepmother sat down beside Liang and began to retie her ribboned hair—“no other family in Chinatown will take him.”

Poh-Poh had come up the stairs to see what was holding us up. Liang clung to her Raggedy-Ann doll.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Some people think Jung-Sum is cursed,” Stepmother said. “Not lucky to lose a father and mother that way.”

A history, brief as breath. There were no more details left to tell a boy like me.

“Why us?”

“Father knew his father,” Stepmother said. “They were boyhood friends, students together back in the village.”

Everyone in Chinatown seemed to know everyone else. You only had to say your surname, mention any Kwangtung county—
Sam-yup, Sze-yup, Chungshan, Heungshan
—even mention
Canton, Hong Kong
, speak any of the city or village dialects—and smiling strangers would link you to a chain of kinfolk. In a hostile country like Canada, anyone having the same last name was enough:
we Chinese together
. But Father had known Jung-Sum’s father: before the time of demons, the two had been friends.

“Good to have another grandson,” Poh-Poh said. “He can grow up and work. Earn money.”

I tried another tack. “Do we have to take him … forever?
For keeps?”

Stepmother barely paused. “Yes, just as your father and your Poh-Poh took me in.”

I thought,
I, First Son, took you in, too
.

“Kiam-Kim.” Stepmother’s eyes were clear and firm. “What is the right thing for us to do?”

I unclenched my fists. I did not know what to think. At last she asked me what I did not want to be asked.

“What shall be Jung-Sum’s luck?”

I was not surprised when Stepmother reminded me that good luck was always connected to doing the right thing. She wanted us to be lucky, wanted Jung-Sum to be lucky. She told everyone that even when others did the right thing for her, even when she did the right thing for others, her fortune was often “a bitter luck.”

Whenever Poh-Poh would say “Luck is luck, however imperfect,” Stepmother would remain silent. Poh-Poh would remind her, “You lucky be in B.C. Plenty to eat in Gold Mountain.”

Stepmother closed her eyes.

When I asked Poh-Poh why she always insisted Stepmother was so lucky to be living in Chinatown, the Old One would tell me how there had always been so much starvation and famine, so many bandits and wars in Old China, that Old China we had left behind and could barely remember.

“Ten
times
ten thousand die,” she said, jabbing ten fingers into the air. At my bloodthirsty urging, Poh-Poh would tell me again and again of the bodies in the Canton laneways, the carcasses pushed into gutters, to be dragged away by coolies before sunrise. “Many
times, Kiam-Kim, I lifted you up, and you hold your baby nose like this.”

Grandmother laughed when I pinched my nose to keep her company; yet something of that time would come back to haunt me. Her vivid retelling made me feel again how my face had been swathed with thick cloth, and I would see myself toddling down crowded Canton streets, and just as Poh-Poh would put her hands under my arms to pretend to lift me up over imaginary, smoky debris, a remembered smell of cadavers in the summer heat, an acrid, putrid aroma, would suddenly burn the back of my throat. “That smell I never to forget, Kiam-Kim,” the Old One would say. Though I always swallowed at the end of these talk-stories, my small ears were eager for more.

“Tell me again about you and Father!”

“Aaaiiyaah
 … I tell!”

And she would begin long before my own history, in an even more terrible, tragic time, when she gave birth to a boy-child who was to become my father.

Poh-Poh always bit her lower lip when she told me these stories of her raising father in Patriarch Chen’s household, of their survival together in the Chen family compound. And to show me how desperate those times were, she tongued her lower lip to show how the taste of her own blood nourished her and the baby, my father, when there was barely enough to feed all the Chen family members. Fortunately, Patriarch Chen had three farms back in Toishan county. All the clan and their servants went back, and they all toiled and grew what little would
grow in the greyish soil, and servants like herself survived mainly on shrivelled root vegetables. After many years, Father became a man and married the tiny woman who would become my mother. “She so beautiful,” Poh-Poh would say.

Only two photos remain of those times. One Father had kept by his bedside—Mother’s wedding photo. The other, Poh-Poh had kept for me. It shows a small woman with a baby in her arms, sitting on a bench before a moon gate garden. The Old One would only say, “Here is your mother and you.”

In the sepia-tone picture, my mother’s bound feet are lifted behind her
cheongsam
, as if she were floating on air.

I remember rummaging through the Old One’s trunk one afternoon and finding a pair of tiny flower-embroidered cloth shoes, barely three inches long, like boots for a toddler.

Poh-Poh said, “Your mother wore those lotus shoes.”

She tenderly took them from my hands and tightly closed the lid. From the way Grandmother held her bent head over the wooden trunk, and from the look in her eyes, I sensed enough darkness not to ask any more questions.

Even Stepmother knew not to ask too much. At the end of these talk-stories, she stayed silent, as if whatever she herself knew could not matter much. Her silence made me think that only Grandmother kept all the stories of our family, and only the Old One decided which were to be told.

Among the elders of Chinatown, there was always an understanding that some things could never possibly be told, that what mattered was that one had done whatever had been needed to survive. Doors and windows were shut on the past and should not be opened. In the end, even Poh-Poh agreed, only luck truly mattered.

“Better be lucky than smart,” she said.

Stepmother saw my confusion. “Just do the right thing, Kiam-Kim. Remember to do what is right.”

“Oh, yes …” Poh-Poh’s voice quavered as she shut her eyes. “Only … the right thing.”

The Old One lowered her head. She looked as if she were deep in prayer, like the ladies at the Good Mission Church.

“Are you praying, Poh-Poh?” I asked.

The Old One covered her mouth to stifle her laughter.

For the first two months, Second Brother didn’t say very much. He listened, the way Liang did, open-mouthed to Poh-Poh’s stories about the Monkey King and Pigsy, and played with Only Sister in the backyard under our watchful eyes. He sensibly obeyed Father and Stepmother, but he always studied me from the corner of his eye.

By the time he was five, I realized he wanted to be what his First Brother was: tough. I let him slug me a few times and told him not to hold back. But he was too scrawny to hit with any force. I told him if he was going
to be as skinny as an alley cat, then he had to learn how to fight like one.

“I’m tough!” he said, wildly throwing up his fists for a fight.

As he slugged away, I hauled him up in the air and spun him, squealing, like a propeller while Liang jumped up and down shouting for her turn. Then we all got scolded by Poh-Poh for waking her up from her nap in the rocker. I told her we were being tough.

“Tough not noise!”

Jung and Liang-Liang tolerated my bossy ways when I followed Stepmother’s and Poh-Poh’s instructions to tell them to tidy up their toys or, whenever we went walking down Pender, to stick by me while the women went into the shops. Liang always wanted to hold Father’s hand if he were walking with us, but otherwise she reached for my thumb and yanked on it for me to slow down. Other times, at home, when Jung decided to make monster faces and chase Liang giggling down the hall and through the parlour and back into the dining room where Father or I were working with our pencil or brush, with a quick glance up at me and then at the two romping through, Father indicated my duty.

“Father and I are working,” I would say, taking on as best I could Father’s solemn tone.

“We’re having squealing matches!” Jung would protest.

Often I would have to catch Liang and toss her hollering and laughing onto the sofa. Jung would climb over me to save her, and we all three would end up in more horseplay. But that didn’t last. Father gave me a
stern lecture on setting an example.

“How can they be well mannered when First Son behave badly?”

Poh-Poh said, “Maybe Jung-Sum take charge.”

Jung jumped to attention.

“No, no,” he said, “Dai-Goh stay Number One. He take care of us all the time!”

I had been teaching him how to take on the two playground bullies that had started teasing him for being a “skinny Chink.”

“Hit or run,” I told him. “Or just run. No use being a fool if you’re outnumbered.”

Jack was in the backyard with us and put in his two cents.

“If you’re outgunned,” he said, “first kick them in the balls
and then
run!”

It didn’t sound fair to me, but from the street games we played, Jack knew that Jung was a fast runner.

“What do you say, Dai-Goh?”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to sound weak in front of Jack. “You figure out what you can get away with.”

Jack elbowed me out of the way. He looked Jung squarely in the eye. “Can you kick as quickly as you can run?”

“Sure,” Jung said.

“Kick high to the balls?”

“I guess so.”

“There’s your answer, pal! No one chases after you when you kick them there.”

After supper, Jung took me aside. “Was Jack right, Dai-Goh?”

As Big Brother, I knew I had to give him a good enough answer. I sucked in my cheeks the way Third Uncle would do whenever he was thinking about something.

“The bully picked on you first,” I said, “so I think you should kick and run—if you can. You decide.”

Liang overheard us.

“I bite,” she said.

We asked Father what was the right answer.

“Run away is always better,” Father told us. “No one hurt and no one in any more danger.”

“But what if I feel hurt?” I said.

“In Gold Mountain
outside
always hurt. But
inside”—
Father patted his heart—“no one can touch if you strong and proud.
Inside
matter more. You decide.”

Jung nodded. I thought of the scars on his back. The outside. Second Brother’s inside smiled up at me.

“Yes, yes,” he said, in the enthusiastic way Poh-Poh always repeated herself if she was in agreement. “I decide.”

By chance, Father had used my words. Jung looked up at me as if I were the smartest boy he knew. Liang came running at him again, trying to make him chase her.

“Play quiet,” he said. “Dai-Goh and I talking.”

Father and Stepmother were rarely home long enough to entertain the three of us. Stepmother left the house at five each morning, picked up by a co-worker in a truck and taken to Keefer Wholesale Grocery. There, alongside other women, she sorted and trimmed vegetables and rinsed countless heads of lettuce and
cabbage before they were sent to over a hundred Chinese greengrocers. When she came home, Poh-Poh would rub Stepmother’s water-wrinkled hands, and every two weeks she would treat them in a pan of warm paraffin. Father massaged her neck and back. And big Mrs. Lim taught me how to wrap the teapot with a towel when she made a special herbal tea for all of us, a revitalizing tonic she used to make for her one-eyed husband. Sometimes Poh-Poh added a little bit of grated ginger.

“Good for
che
energy, Gai-mou,” Mrs. Lim told us as she placed two fingers on the nape of Stepmother’s neck. “Need heat inside here.”

Che
was important for good health. I took a sip or two of the bitter stuff with a spoonful of honey and could feel my muscles growing. Jung-Sum took a sip, too, and made a face. Liang stuck out her tongue and ran away from any attempt to give her a taste.

Father could have engaged us with many of his stories of Old China, but he was always busy in pursuit of one part-time job after another. He was helping small storekeepers with their accounts, waiting on tables when he had the time, and writing letters for the uneducated elders and unemployed labourers who sent lies back to village families, often evading the truth about their despair and sinking funds. Father was also kept busy at Third Uncle’s remaining warehouse, filling in customs documents and invoices and always dealing with Third Uncle’s panic over the account books and their diminishing numbers. Between jobs, Father wrote a few articles and filed interviews for some of the
Chinese-language journals. He and Stepmother used every earned dollar to keep us fed and clothed, and saved the pennies because one day, he told me, I would have to finish my education and take over as First Son and do my share. How hard he worked and studied his English books was how hard I should always work.