All That Matters (23 page)

I looked down the narrow hallway.

“That way, Kiam-Kim.” Mr. Chong pointed out the curtained doorway with his glasses. “At the end of the hall.”

Someone started to play the piano. From behind the curtains, the notes stumbled. I pushed aside the curtain.

“Don’t snoop, you Nosy Parker!”

Jenny was sitting on a bench at an old standup piano, pretending to concentrate. Her close-cropped hair made her look like a boy. The last time we had passed each other at school, she had given me a cold stare, as if I should say something first.

Half a dozen framed pictures of the Chong family back in China lined the top of the piano: seven round, serious faces stared out through a haze of burning incense sticks. Some oranges and silver paper ingots sat in a bowl. Jenny was hitting a run of notes, in no particular order.

She had on a pink sweater that was too big for her. It bunched up on her back. If she wasn’t going to talk, I thought at least I might get back at her for always looking at me as if I was a nobody.

“So why didn’t you say hello to me when I saw you at school?”

“Why should I?”

I stepped around the piano so she had to see me.

“Your mother told Poh-Poh you can’t go back to that Catholic girls’ school. That’s why you were back at Strathcona.”

“So what?”

“She said you can’t because they found out you weren’t Catholic.”

I thought she was going to say something like “None of your beeswax!” or “Get lost!” Instead, she half turned to me, and the thin line of her mouth started to tremble.

“I’m going to … 
to die,”
she said. “I’m going to end up
in Hell
. That’s what Sister Marie told me!” Tears dribbled from her lashes. “I hate you!”

She turned back to the piano and started playing again. A big voice boomed down the hallway.

“Kiam!”

I stepped out and saw Father at the end of the hall shaking Mr. Chong’s hand, thanking him for the finished business and for his donation.

“Let’s go, Kiam.”

As I hurried down the hall, the piano began a complex tune.

I caught the scent of incense trailing after me down the stairs. With each step, the donation box rattled in my hand like a tambourine. At the front counter, Father folded an official-looking paper into a large envelope and began humming the same melody that Jenny had been playing. He looked cheerful. Jenny had looked terrible. It was a successful visit.

At the cash register, Mrs. Chong stopped serving a customer to smile at Father. She could see everything had gone well.

“Bring Kiam to visit again soon,” she said. “My worthless Jenny thinks the world of him.”

Like shit
, I thought.

I told Jack O’Connor about Jenny Chong not being Catholic and having to leave the girls’ school.

“One of the sisters told her she was going to die and go to Hell.”

“I hear that all the time,” he said, brushing back his tightly combed hair. His broad forehead gleamed with hair oil; his blue eyes suddenly flashed with knowledge. “You have to be baptized by a priest and be a Catholic to get into Heaven.”

“Yeah?” The information irked me. “Well, you have to be Chinese to get into
our
Heaven.”

“That makes sense.”

Jack had been lifting weights in the sun, shirtless, trying to build up his tan like those billboard ads. He said he wanted to look like Charles Atlas to attract the girls at school. I myself was getting dark brown, not at all like the ads; Jack’s freckled back and chest mostly burned. But there was a hint of tan on his face, which made both Jung and Liang refer to him as the cowboy.

“My mom says all the nuns in her old school in Ireland used to warn her about going to Hell,” he said. “Especially when she married my father. He’s a sort-of Protestant. But my Father says, ‘Not to worry about Hell. Probably more fun there.’ ”

“What does your mother say?”

“She just pokes my father and tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ‘Frank,’ ” he mimicked, “ ‘now don’t be confusin’ the boy!’ But I looked up Hell in our
Books of Knowledge
. There was a fold-out copy of a painting of Hell. It looked pretty gruesome.”

He sucked on a blade of grass. Jack knew Jenny. Like everyone in the neighbourhood, the O’Connors shopped at the Chongs’ corner store. And the three of us had sat together a few times on our front porch when Jenny had visited with her mother. But Jack thought she looked too skinny to be a real girl. He said her legs were like toothpicks, and he didn’t like her Catholic school chopped-up haircut. That’s why he was happy he didn’t have to go to a church school. All the boys there had the same crewcut. Jack noticed people’s hair. He liked the way all the up-to-date girls had curls.

“She’s a chatterbox,” he said.

My eyes must have bugged out, but Jack didn’t notice.

“Hell must be confusing for Miss Bones,” he said. “Being Chinese and all.”

“Great deduction, Sherlock!”

“I don’t even think Chinese people go to Hell. There’s some Chinese nuns at St. Joseph’s.”

I thought of Mrs. Chong in a nun’s habit, with her fierce eyes and shrill voice, telling Jenny about Hell, the Chinese Hell that the foreman at Third Uncle’s warehouse had told me about to warn me away from playing with any of the bad boys in Chinatown. Third Uncle said it was a far worse place than any Christian Hell. He said that evildoers were boiled alive in huge vats until their fingernails and toenails melted and their eyes popped out, only no one ever dies. He told me about the Temple of Horrors he visited in Canton when he was a boy. There, lit by glowing lanterns, life-sized statues depicted what could happen to evildoers in
the Buddhist Hells. There were different Hells for different kinds of sins. And the more you sinned, the more levels you were thrown into. Each level exacted ten thousand years of pain. And being boiled alive for ten thousand years was one of the lighter punishments.

“Each level more painful than the next,” Third Uncle concluded, shivering at the thought. “You can ask your Poh-Poh. She knows about that place in Canton.”

Jack began to tell me about the picture of Hell he saw. Every kind of torture was depicted.

“Chinese Hell is even more horrible,” I said, thinking how Jack would look with his eyeballs popped out. “They boil you until your fingernails melt off, but you never die.”

“Well,” Jack said, “that’s one lucky strike for bein’ shamrock-green.”

Jack picked up his dumbbells and began doing some exercises. I took up a blade of grass and fell into thinking about what had happened the day before at the Good Luck Barbershop.

One of the elders was upset with something Father said about the civil war in China. He had challenged Father, asking him which “political gang” would kill and torture the least number of Chinese people.

I didn’t understand much of their talk until the old man flipped open a
Life
magazine.

“Look,” he said. “This be war. This be patriotism!”

He held up the double-page spread of pictures for everyone to see. Some of the men laughed nervously.

“Here, look, Son of Chen,” the old man said. “You be old enough to see, too.”

I stared at the black-and-white picture of weeping Chinese women and children, their faces twisted and dust stained. But what held my attention was the sagging corpses at their feet. One had no head. Another’s stiff arm stuck into the air, palm opened and fingers stretched out as if to stop a sudden blow.

In the next picture, an old soldier grasped at his side the handle of a long sword. A few feet away, another Chinese soldier, his arms tightly bound behind him, knelt waiting his turn to meet the executioner’s sword. His eyes were opened wide.

The third picture held my attention even longer. Another tied-up man waiting his turn, his eyes tightly shut, his lips frozen with fear. He looked like David Ang, the grocer’s oldest son who always joked with Stepmother about which vegetables were fresher, which a better buy. A gust of wind had lifted up the front of his open army jacket. I could hear and feel that wind, the parting of the drab tunic like broken wings. When the soldier was a boy running freely down a hillside, he must have felt such a wind.

All at once, the sad and terrible stories I overheard the men tell of Old China seemed more real than anything I had imagined. My heart raced with a cold I had not felt before.

“This captured prisoner fights for China, too,” the elder shouted.

“Yes,” someone said, “but for what side?”

“Damn
what side!”
The elder threw the magazine on the floor. “Isn’t he a patriot? Which side is
not
patriotic?”

“Of course,” the barber agreed, “he wears a soldier’s uniform.”

“Well,” someone else said, “they all wear some kind of uniform.”

“Tell me,” the elder said to Father, then turned to everyone in the barbershop, “how many
patriots
would the Reformers execute? How many will the Republicans kill? How many will Socialists dispatch? And the Communists?”

No one answered.

The old man turned back to Father and took out his thick gambler’s wallet. “You tell me who kills no one—which side will not kill a single man, woman, or child …” Some bills fluttered in the air as he waved his bulging wallet. “Tell me which side and I donate two hundred dollars to their side. Right now!”

“No political change without sacrifice,” Father said.

The elder laughed and put away his wallet. “Then I say hellfire on all of them!”

“Gentlemen,” Father said. “We collect for blankets and food.”

I forgot to say my speech.

Some of the men turned away from Father, refusing to debate with him; some gave reluctantly after I shook the donation box in front of them.

Sitting on the grass with Jack, thinking of all this, of Jenny crying in fear of ending up in Hell, of a young man, who looked like the grocer’s son, waiting to be executed, of Chinese killing Chinese, suddenly I felt Hell was all too real.

Jack set down his weights and sat next to me. “I’m not afraid of Hell,” he said. “Are you?”

“No,” I said. “Just spooked.”

Jack laughed. “My mom says all those loose women trolling the East End—they’ll go to Hell for sure.” He licked his lips. “If some of those really big-chested good-lookers were there, I wouldn’t mind visiting Hell for just a look-see. How about you?”

“No Dogs, No Chinese Allowed,” I said.

“Oh, yeah! Those White Labour Only signs.”

“Don’t forget, No Fuckin’ Irish!”

“No Jews!”

We shouted out all the signs that both our fathers told us had once been stuck up on the front gates of big estates and on the doors of private clubs and theatres. If you went up to the British Properties or near the golf courses at Shaughnessy or Marine Drive, if you walked along Granville Street and looked into certain entrances, you could still run into those signs.

Would Hell be divided up, too?

For a while, the world around me seemed a swirl of dire news about the war and the famines in China, the Depression and the jobless in Gold Mountain, and Father’s and Stepmother’s struggles with meeting the rent and buying enough decent food. We weren’t poor, thanks mainly to Third Uncle and a new loan Father got from the Tong Association, but we seemed to be broke.

Sitting at Father’s desk early one evening, my
brain darting from a math problem to the world’s problems and whether or not I would end up in Hell, I tossed aside my pencil and began fiddling with the Chinese brush. I dipped its soft tip into the soot-smelling ink pot. Delicate strands of the brush reminded me of the colour of Jenny’s close-cropped hair, the way she turned her head away from me and how the blackness shone as if dipped in fresh ink. Or wildly lit by hellfire.

The desk lamp went off, then flashed on. A violent rumble shook the house.

Stepmother called out from the parlour. “Go upstairs and close the bedroom windows, Kiam.”

In the parlour, Poh-Poh was sorting out her small collection of old silk shawls and dresses she had long ago salvaged from the two wives of Patriarch Chen’s no-brain sons. The wives had decided to dress like Westerners, Poh-Poh had told me, so she took from their tossed-away habits the very best items. Stepmother held up a richly embroidered
cheongsam
against herself, and Poh-Poh’s slave-trained hands began pinning where alterations were required. The blood-red silk shimmered with leaves and ornate blossoms.

I walked past Jung sprawled on the linoleum floor, trying to make something out of the leftover Meccano pieces from my original second-hand set. Sekky chattered away beside him.

Upstairs, I found Liang quietly dressing up three dolls at her small orange-crate table beside her pallet. My only sister, humming a nursery song about a
tipping teapot, was far away from any thoughts of Hell.

In the front bedroom, I paused before the open window to look over at the Douglas fir across the street; the wind was stronger now, and its branches swayed, rattling the needles. Though the tree shook, its trunk remained strong, unmoving. I wondered if Father had taken his umbrella with him that morning, and if cool winds ever blew in Hell. I thought of the young soldier caught in a gust of wind, waiting for his death, how the wind threw open his jacket. I pushed the window shut. Rain fell.