All That Matters (25 page)

JEFF ENG ALREADY WORKED AT
his family’s garage, learning a trade. Fat Wah Duk washed dishes and chopped vegetables like a real chef in the kitchen of his family’s restaurant. At their market store, Joe Sing helped his parents, too, and not just with household chores or with rattling donation cans. Even Jenny Chong worked behind the counter at the corner store.

Father said we couldn’t do fundraising as much any more. Third Uncle said everyone was too used to me now. New boys were rattling the cans, a few for rival charities and with different political names. Instead, I was to devote more time to my Chinese lessons.

But I did have one consistent job. Stepmother and Poh-Poh both said, “Take Jung-Sum with you.”

“You be
dai-goh,”
Father said. “That’s your duty.”

As Jung was now stronger and taller, I talked my pals into letting him play soccer with us. Whenever we
were short of team members, Jung was appointed our goalie. At first, he didn’t block that many goals. He grew increasingly frustrated, madly dashing to block the speeding ball with his feet and missing his target by a mile. But he soon figured out another tactic: he hurled his whole body at any human trunk charging towards the goal. He never missed, his feet kicking up dust before they flew into the air, his lean torso crashing like a battering ram into his opponent, sending legs and arms and head smearing into the ground.

“Your goalie’s crazy,” one white boy said to me, wiping at his bleeding lip. “He thinks nothing can kill him.”

We each got our share of scrapes and cuts. Jung just got more than most. I told Poh-Poh he was crazy.

“Boy-fever,” Poh-Poh said.

Stepmother shook her head in amazement: why would anyone choose to injure himself? Poh-Poh and Father, however, admired our warrior wounds. In China, Father said, we would make good soldiers. We could do anything.

Stepmother looked away. I remembered Poh-Poh telling me about Stepmother’s tragic time. How her child’s eyes once peeked out from beneath a stack of clothing, how they had witnessed bandit soldiers raising their swords; how Stepmother had heard and seen, unblinking, five blades hissing in the air to strike at her trembling family. One blow for each of them.

“Teach Jung-Sum how to kick and pass the ball,” Father said to me. “Canada never need soldiers.”

“Need soldiers in China,” Poh-Poh said, slapping the last bandage on my arm. She poured her stinging
homemade lotion on one of Jung’s battle wounds. “Fight the warlords! Fight the Japanese!”

He barely flinched.

I felt a thrill to think that I might one day be a soldier in China, too. A good soldier fought in the battlefield, or sat bravely waiting for his execution, faithful to his country, not like one of those warrior-scholars from the Cantonese opera who wrote poems and fought or died for love.

Jung-Sum flexed his arm. The pain was nothing.

After every soccer game, we would break up, winging back to our own flock, chattering in Italian, Polish, Chinese, or whatever language we spoke at home. We took it for granted that every Vancouver family, in their own household language, had endlessly recited the same edict that Poh-Poh and everyone in Chinatown had repeated to me,
Stick to your own kind
. And for the most part I did.

However, Jack O’Connor and I remained best pals. But Poh-Poh tested our friendship.

One day, when we were out on the porch working through a Grade 8 history project together, the Old One came out with a plate of lunch for me. Jack grimaced at the Chinese sausages and red-bean-paste buns. Poh-Poh wafted a steamed bun under his nostrils. He curled his lips and pinched his nose.

“How can you eat that stuff?” he asked.

Another time, undeterred, the Old One pushed up the porch window and offered him a steamed
black-bean sparerib. I wasn’t surprised when Jack jumped back from the garlicky smell. His family lived on boiled meat and potatoes, beans and wieners and bologna sandwiches.

Poh-Poh shouted at him, “Demon boy no know-how! No sabby!”

“Kemo-sabe!” Jack shouted back. He looked at me in surprise. “She knows
The Lone Ranger!”

I was impressed that Poh-Poh had tolerated all these years my barbarian playmate, even after she caught him mimicking her Chinese speech and threw a broom at him. Years ago, when we were first neighbours, she and Stepmother saw Jack with his mother beside him hanging out the laundry in the backyard, turning up their noses at the cooking smells drifting from our window. But our household had some judgments to make, too.

Against the white bedsheets, the bright sun made Jack and his mother seem even more chalky and wan. In their veins, Poh-Poh said, there ran no soy sauce, no hot sauce,
no sauce at all!

“Aaaiiyaah!”
Stepmother said, with some pity, “They so pale!”

“They die soon!” said Poh-Poh.

But from the beginning, Stepmother thought Jack’s and my friendship was probably best for me: from my new friend I would pick up more English words. Father agreed.

Our two fathers got along reasonably well, and always greeted each other over the porch rails. When we were younger, we often spent time on each other’s
porch and our toys often lay scattered together where we left them, warriors and cowboys side by side.

Nevertheless, “Don’t let the demon boy in the house,” Poh-Poh warned me. “He not Chinese!”

And so the rule was set. Throughout Chinatown, in fact, it was rare to have any outsiders visit our homes. There didn’t seem to be any good reason to have foreigners come into our places and have them judge what we ate or complain about how we lived or have them ask too many questions.

Although inside the O’Connor house I would listen to the radio or work on a project, Poh-Poh made it clear that Jack would not be welcome to step inside our door.

“Chinese air kill him,” she said.

“But I’ve had hot dogs at his place,” I protested. “Why can’t you make hot dogs?”

“Hot dog, no head, no tail. Not real food,” Poh-Poh said, rolling up her sleeve to tear the feathers off a freshly killed chicken. She lifted its sagging head.
“This
real food.”

The beady eyes of the dead chicken stared me down. What would Jack say if he saw the chicken when it was finally cooked, with its head and beak lolling on the platter? Or what would he think if he heard the scratching noises coming from the crate under our sink? Uncle Dai Kew had brought Poh-Poh a live turtle to make them both a special soup for longevity. Even I had to shut my eyes as the cleaver fell and split apart the wiggling creature. And what if he came upon the dried-up sea horses, the clump of costly bird’s nest, or the dehydrated black-bear paw?

Perhaps it was better that Jack never set foot in our house.

Stepmother was not so antagonistic towards the O’Connors. One day I had spilled some groceries on the sidewalk after a bully ran by and knocked me down. The eggs were smashed and the bags were torn, and goods lay strewn about me. Stepmother had fallen behind to gossip with Mrs. Leong. I could see her half a block away just as Mrs. O’Connor came down from her garden to help me pick up the groceries.

“Why, this is parsley,” she said. “And it’s all covered with egg.”

She told me to wait. It wasn’t long before she came back with some fresh parsley in her hand and some grocery bags. By then I’d gathered up as much as I could, and Mrs. O’Connor went back into her house.

Stepmother caught up with me and I told her what had happened.

“Jack’s mother,” Stepmother asked, “does she like anything Chinese?”

I told Stepmother that according to Jack the only thing the thin woman liked about Chinamen was China tea. That evening, Stepmother wrapped a small packet of tea and gave it to Jack to give to his mother.

“We say thank you,” she said, which I translated for Jack, who bowed his head as if he were in a Charlie Chan picture.

Next day, Jack’s mother sent over a folded handwritten note with flowers on one corner. I glanced over it and told Stepmother it was a thank-you note. But
Mrs. Chong took it from me and translated every word for her: “ ‘Thank you for the peasant tea.’ ”

“Not
peasant
tea!” protested Stepmother. “First-class oolong!”

Doubting that Mrs. O’Connor would mean to insult her, Stepmother had Mrs. Leong’s oldest daughter retranslate the sentence:
Thank you for the pleasant tea
.

Stepmother had often looked with envy at Mrs. O’Connor’s small front yard crowded with flowers. There were no flowers on our side; Grandmother had planted rows of beans and vegetables to catch the long and late afternoon light.

One afternoon, after observing Stepmother staring again at her front yard of blooms, Mrs. O’Connor sent over some roses. Later that week, she told Jack to pick some daisies and snapdragons for me to take home.

I carried back packets of tea. The two women smiled at each other.

“I should give garlic bean paste,” declared Poh-Poh. “Finish things up!”

“Leave them alone,” Father said. “No one troubling you.”

“No trouble,” said the Old One. “No taste.”

Jung-Sum and Liang, and now Sekky, too, got the same warning that I had been given.

“Stick to Chinese,” Poh-Poh said to them, clipping Mrs. O’Connor’s fresh pink roses to fit the vase Stepmother gave her. “Don’t play too long over there.”

Then she wrapped up some ordinary tea and sent Jung-Sum over the porch.

“Why did you send her
English
tea?” I asked. “They must have lots of that.”

“Best for pale skin,” Poh-Poh said. “No flavour.”

Jung said Mrs. O’Connor told him she hadn’t brewed that brand for a long time.

The Old One smiled. “She more Chinese now.”

Although the O’Connors and the Chens had lived side by side for more than ten years, Jack and I took for granted that both our families were too familiar and too strange to explain. What mattered to us was that, as a team, fair or not, we bloodied the noses of Strathcona recess bullies and earned a reputation for sticking together.

Of course, having to attend Chinese classes meant that more and more I hung out with Chinese boys my age who went to the same school, or who wanted to play hooky as badly as I did. We learned by rote, attempting to follow the basic discipline of a thousand years of writing history. We needed to train our young eyes and inexperienced hands to coordinate our fingers, to make the ink-wet brush move into the dips and dashes of Chinese script. Reading lessons were shouted back and forth between teacher and students, repetitions of one boring edict after another, as if by repetition they would sink into our hearts if not our heads:
Respect the elders first. Always obey your parents. Study hard. Do your homework every day
. Because of the strict way everything was taught to us by the male teachers, with bamboo rods slamming down on tables or palms, we
mimicked the lessons like trained seals. Chinese school was always heads down, concentrate, recite and copy, copy and recite. The more restless of us did everything to get out of going to classes; a few, like me, who sometimes earned some praise because all the teachers knew of Father’s writings and saw in me a little potential, or the few whose merchant family connections were powerful and known, did nothing to shame our families. I came to see the serious need to focus and accept the discipline that had given Father his pride in his work, whether with accounts or with essays: Father had endured school himself, and his discipline with brush and pen helped him to earn a living in Chinatown. When he had time, I would read him back the week’s lessons, and Father would illustrate an aphorism with a story he himself had learned in his school days.

“Yes, yes, study hard!” he would begin, then tell me the story of the young student—“a boy like you”—who kept a jar of fireflies so that their collective fire would allow him to study through the night to pass the Imperial Exams. But two weeks later, the Chinese words would fade from my brain, and the order of dips and dashes would be lost to my brush, and I would be left wondering,
What do fireflies eat to keep them burning so bright against the night?
Father complained about my constant slippage with my Chinese writing and reading, though I was an excellent writer and enthusiastic reader at English school.

“Not enough time for both,” Third Uncle told Father. “Too much English school.”

“Let Kiam-Kim learn what he can,” argued Stepmother. “Impossible to do much more.”

“Keep my grandson Chinese,” Poh-Poh urged one of my teachers at the school, and Teacher Sing smiled politely to ease her concerns. But for the majority of us Gold Mountain children, it was a smile against futility.

I went to Chinese school every weekday, and on Saturday mornings until half past noon. I spent a lot more time with my studies than Jack ever did. And Jack himself, free from the extra burden of memorizing and deciphering dips and dashes, soon fell into happy companionship with a roving gang of blue-eyed, red-headed Irish boys. Then, as the years claimed our days, though our proximity to each other as neighbours assured that we remained best friends, I fell into step with a Chinatown crowd and Jack moved from one gang to another, but mostly with those like himself, white-skinned and sports-minded. Each to his own kind.

“I get the best deal,” Jack told me one day when I rushed past him with my leather case filled with copybooks, texts, ink, and writing brushes. “I don’t have to go to any Chink, Jew, or Wop school like all you other guys.”

Sometimes in the hour between the end of English school and the start of Chinese school, Jack, Jeff Eng, and I met behind the sheltered bathrooms at MacLean Park. In that dank, echoing chamber, next to a row of stained urinals, we inhaled, along with the flavour of stale piss and ammonia, the Player’s or Exports we had cadged from older boys.

Once, one of Jack’s pals turned up with an almost full bottle of hard liquor, filched from a wedding. We dared each other to take a swig. Jack tossed his head back like the pirates in the picture shows we saw; we each threw our head back, coughed and gagged at the burning alcohol, and wiped our eyes without shame. After another dare or two, a big second gulp followed.