All That Matters (30 page)

“Be free,” Jack always said. “Cop a feel when you can get it. Dip your dink in.”

When we joined the others back at the rink, some of the guys smiled at me in an expectant way. Jenny had a reputation. She caught their looks.

“Forget it,” she said. “With your equipment, you guys can’t even get to first base.”

Some of the girls broke into wild laughter. The slim figure skated away.

My heart began to race.

Most of the time, Chinatown girls were kept busy looking after their younger siblings, kept busy with mending, cooking, washing diapers or minding their elders as Liang was being taught to do, busy with the endless housework and homework. And with their girlish daydreaming, I imagined, reading moving-picture magazines, catching up on the latest starlets and their blue-eyed boyfriends, scouring the pages of sewing magazines, wondering how many quarters to save for the latest mail-order dress patterns. Jenny was a little crazy about clothes. Maybe she was a little crazy for me, too.

Jenny giggled and passed notes to her friends in class. After school, they mocked the boys, brazen with their Grade 9 lips, lips shiny from a shared tube of lipstick. From far corners, the quiet girls smiled or looked away if you approached them. They didn’t interest me.

But every Chinese girl, with few exceptions, was the concern of her Chinatown family. After our fifteenth birthdays, unless we were properly dressed up in a clean shirt and good pants and accompanied by someone much older—like an annoyed brother or perhaps a compliant sister—I noticed that boys were hardly allowed near any Chinese girls of a similar age. After a girl turned fifteen or sixteen, an older escort was always
present with a dating couple, or the pair was encouraged to go out with a group headed to a bowling alley, say.

“Safety in numbers,” Mrs. Pan Wong always said.

Chaperoned double- or triple-dating among “good” families, I realized much later, was Chinatown’s idea of birth control.

Our numbers could protect us from many dangers as we wandered together into areas where we didn’t really belong. When we went to a Granville Street movie house, or to theatres like the Orpheum and Capitol, we were usually expected by the management to sit in the very front rows or at the very back. There was less tension if Jack O’Connor happened to have joined up with us.

“What’s the problem?” he would bellow, his Irish blood rising with the beam of light that skirted back and forth across our faces.

“No problem, buddy.”

“You sure?” Jack would say.

And the once-authoritative usher would click off his flashlight and leave us alone. Then we would watch some British politician on the screen calling on all free countries to prepare for war against German aggression.

Jack nudged me. “I’m joining up.”

Beside me, Jenny bent forward to stare across at him. “We’re not at war yet.”

I put my two cents in: “Wait for it.”

“Yeah? Well, you Chinks are at war. How come you aren’t over there fighting the Japs?”

“Because he’s not stupid,” Jenny said.

I laughed agreeably. Jenny pulled her hand away from mine, as if she were suddenly shy. Perhaps she didn’t want Jack to know too much about us, though I had told him nothing myself. Jenny and I were a now-and-again necking couple, but nothing more. And if nothing really happened, there was nothing to tell.

As for going to fight in China, I had never seriously considered the idea, though the elders always said that one day every Chinese would go back to their home village. And many
had
gone back. But where would I go, with barely any memory of the old country? And where would my two brothers and sister go? Or Jeff and Jenny, who had also been born here? What world did any of us belong to? What world would we fight for?

SEVEN

DURING THAT FIRST SUNDAY
of September 1939—that Sunday when England declared war on Germany—all of Chinatown waited for word from Ottawa.

In the days after the declaration, Father went to the
Chinese Times
office after each shift at the warehouse to track the conflict. Stepmother instructed me to go to the office after Chinese school to tell Father to at least come home for supper, as he had promised to do the day before.

“Too busy,” he said, but he invited me to stay a moment so he could show me where the Nazi
Blitzkrieg
had struck. Father and two of the newspapermen had been comparing Chinese maps with the maps printed in
Time Magazine
and in the late-arriving journals from the States and overseas. Together the men drew arrows and carefully pencilled in new borders on fold-out maps of Europe. They compiled a master list of the
correct English spellings of towns and cities and wrote in their Chinese equivalents. The air smelled of fresh newsprint rolls and chemicals. Heavy black presses, greased and ready to run, stood silent behind the long counter; before layers of shelving loaded with printers’ trays, three typesetters wearing inky aprons stood waiting for their instructions.

“Here blood is spilled,” Father said to me at the large layout desk. The point of his pencil touched inside the borders of Poland. Arrows pointed towards a large circle. “The territory between here and here like China’s countryside. Towns one third the size of Nanking totally destroyed. Here the bombs fell day and night.”

“Shameful,” one of the editors said. He was the one Father called Grey Head, the one who had always considered Europeans the most civilized people in the world. As a young man, he had studied in England and travelled through Germany with a companion. “German music and art far superior to the Chinese,” he had once declared to me, pushing away my Chinese school book. Now he shook his greying head and shouted over and over again, “No better than anyone else—barbarians!”

Father circled a name on the map. “Kiam-Kim, look at this.”

I looked: W
A R S A W
.

“Listen.”

I wasn’t sure what Father meant. Grey Head turned up the volume on the shortwave radio sitting on his desk, and music burst into the newsroom. The martial notes sounded through the static like bold but desperate calls.

“They play Chopin’s
Polonaises,”
Grey Head explained to me, “to let the whole world know that the citizens of Warsaw remain the defenders of Poland.”

“Not for long,” one of the printers said. He pointed his thumb down.

A BBC announcer interrupted, and then the king’s soft-spoken message to the Empire was rebroadcast: “In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself … We are at war.”

The idea that Chinatown was within the “household of my peoples” made me smile, yet everyone around me saw nothing funny about it. They were waiting for Canada to make an announcement of its own: we in Gold Mountain would soon be at war.

“Run home, Kiam-Kim,” Father said. “Tell Poh-Poh and Stepmother I’ll be working late. Maybe sleep over at Third Uncle’s again.”

As I walked out into the early-evening light, past the lineup of men reading the latest news posted on the office windows, the stirring strains of Chopin had their effect on me. I pictured myself as a soldier tearing through the streets of Warsaw while bombs exploded around me. Instead of the sky streaked with trails of chimney smoke from the False Creek refineries, I saw anti-aircraft guns fired into the sky at Nazi bombers. It was a vicarious thrill, but one that a growing number of boys and young men were beginning to manifest in their brave talk and open resolve to fight for England, for Canada.

Chinatown veterans of the last war merely shook their heads and coughed into their hands. They eked out their wounded days and nights sitting in the Hastings Street coffee shops and lived in those tiny rooms around Water Street, just below Victory Square, burdened with their painful memories. The men were forgotten already, but stories of that war’s great battles were now being retold in the English-language newspapers, told as adventures that had turned inexperienced boys into fighting men.

But all the articles featured white faces and white names. Jack especially was thrilled to read about those veterans, to imagine himself taking back a hill from the Germans. His own father had been in that war but said nothing except, “If you have to, you fight for your country.”

Like a bushfire, patriotism raged across Gold Mountain. The
JOIN UP
posters that began to show up on buildings and in hallways stiffened my resolve to see beyond those cheerless faces around Victory Square.

I thought of the thick packages with all our birth documents and travel certificates. On those documents I was designated “Resident Alien.” The rumour was that because of our alien status, our yellow skin, and our slanty eyes, the young men of Chinatown would be discouraged from signing up.

“Won’t be home for supper,” I shouted as I entered our front door and threw my school things into the corner.

Stepmother was in the parlour showing Liang how to finish her knitting project. They looked
disappointed to see me alone but got up and went into the dining room.

Jung-Sum was showing Sekky how to set up the oak table for dinner. As the two of them helped me to pull the round table away from the wall—but not too close to Father’s corner desk—Stepmother and Liang straightened out the plates and bamboo mats on the table. Neither Father nor big Mrs. Lim would be joining us tonight, so I set up five chairs. Poh-Poh hollered for us to watch out and slowly brought in the soup tureen; Stepmother and Liang followed with rice bowls and savoury dishes. I carried in the last plate of stir-fried greens and beef. I thought of all the fathers in Warsaw and wondered whether they, or their sons, would ever again sit together to eat dinner at the family table.

Sekky hopped onto the chair between Poh-Poh and me and hooked his feet behind the wooden legs.

All that week we waited for the news from Ottawa that would commit Canada to the war in Europe. Bombs fell elsewhere in the world. Each day brought more newspaper and magazine pictures of the battles in China and of the carnage in Poland. In the school hallways, we talked about those pictures, and our teachers pinned them up on boards. A great darkness began to close in on our Gold Mountain world.

One evening when Father did make it home for supper, Poh-Poh filled each of our bowls with his favourite soup.

Father began humming a fragment of one of Chopin’s
Polonaises
as he picked up a choice piece of leafy greens and put it on Stepmother’s plate. He
stood up, reached over and added a crisp stem of bok choy to Poh-Poh’s rice bowl, and then Liang decided to share a slim piece of stir-fried beef with Sekky. I pushed a chunk of pork into Jung-Sum’s bowl. I wanted somehow to make a gesture of gratitude for this family meal. Instead, I told Sekky to stop kicking the legs of his chair.

“Listen to your
dai-goh,”
Father said to him.

Father’s words made me suddenly feel that I mattered, that in some ancient way, order prevailed amid the growing darkness.

On the morning of September 11, I put on my kimono and sat down with Father as the radio tubes buzzed and hissed into life. A solemn CBC voice repeated the announcement from England: His Majesty the King had officially accepted that Canada was now at war.

“Difficult time,” Father said.

“Yes,” I said, but I thought of the dinner we had had a few nights before, though bombs fell around the world. Everything this morning looked as ordinary as any other day. The sun shone through the front windows, and above us, I could hear the family stirring awake.

Father adjusted his pyjama top and began to hum.

Poh-Poh was stricken with a nagging cough at the beginning of the Easter holidays in 1940. The phlegm she showed Stepmother, what little there was caught on a patch of paper napkin, was always clear, with no sign of mucus or, worse, of blood; no unusual heat radiated
from her wrinkled brow, no sweatiness, no wet palm, nor any sign of a debilitating exhaustion ever appeared; the Old One’s eyes remained clear, bright; her limbs and joints felt only the usual minor aches of a woman in her eighties.