All That Matters (31 page)

“Throat too dry,” she would tell Mrs. Lim. “Spring air too heavy.”

But drinking cups of tea or sipping glasses of hot water did not put an end to Poh-Poh’s daily hacking. Finally, Father insisted she get some medical attention.

In Dr. Chu’s office in the Holden Building on Hastings, Father told me, the doctor had Poh-Poh raise both her arms high above her head so that her outer- and underclothing rose and gave him some access to her thin frame. It was a trick he used with all the old village women; their modesty sometimes left them vulnerable to certain womanly diseases allowed to progress undetected until they proved fatal.

“In China,” Father explained to me, “a sick woman would point to a porcelain doll to indicate the location of her pains and symptoms. Of course, Dr. Chu was referring to women of the upper classes, those with bound feet who were cocooned by their great wealth and trained to do nothing important and know even less. Unable to run away from the Japanese, Kiam-Kim, they have been raped and slaughtered by the tens of thousands.”

Dr. Chu peered over his glasses and agreed with the Old One when she mumbled that her lungs were wearing out. When the doctor pushed against her chest, she had cried out,
“Ho git sum.”

The Old One’s heart, Father told me, was cramped up with decades of bitter history and unspeakable frustrations. That was what she, as a matter of course, told the doctor herself.

“For your age, Chen-mou, I have great respect,” responded Dr. Chu. “But there are no cures for either old age or a cramped-up heart.”

They both laughed, and Dr. Chu began to fish for more information. “Some like your friend Mrs. Lim and certain tong elders might say otherwise.”

Father said Poh-Poh nodded in agreement, hiding the fact that she was among those who always thought otherwise. Perhaps she remembered Mrs. Lim’s rueful comment about Dr. Chu’s Westernized ways: “Why shout truths at a stone ear?” And Poh-Poh would say, knocking her palm flat against her forehead, “Stone ear, stone brain!”

For the Old One’s coughing fits, there was at least some relief. Dr. Chu gave her a bottle of a greenish liquid: one tablespoon to be swallowed three times a day.
Yes, of course
, she might also try whatever Chinese herbs were still available; that is, if Father could afford them. The price for the best ginseng root from Korea, the kind Dr. Chu himself preferred, had increased more than twenty times since the war began. He heard that the rich merchant families had been buying up every single root left in Chinatown.

We were all relieved when Dr. Chu said that the Old One’s coughing was definitely not contagious. Samples of her phlegm had been tested in a laboratory and had come back negative. Papers were signed
by the doctor and mailed to the school board declaring that no family member had any suspicious signs of TB.

“Only a nuisance for now,” Dr. Chu cautioned Father, “but if it persists, this dry hacking, it might weaken the Old One’s ability to fight off colds and flus later in the fall season.”

He told Father that the Old One needed to rest, to finish the medicine and stay at home until the coughing stopped.

But Stepmother had been offered work sewing in a factory that made uniforms; they were actually hiring Chinese women to take on some of the work left behind by the men and women who had gone to fight in Europe, or gone to Ontario to earn higher wages. Grandmother and Little Brother would have to be left by themselves. Stepmother suggested she might reject the offer of work, but Poh-Poh wondered aloud how the family would survive without the money. She counted on her fingers the Western medicine for herself, Sekky’s two regular pills and vitamins, his monthly visits to the specialist, and her last visits to Dr. Chu. And all the children were growing up so fast, there were more shoes and clothes to buy—everything cost so much money. Stepmother must keep working. Even Liang would soon need to look for some parttime work. Jung had already done a few hours at the warehouse and was also a volunteer “villager” being trained by Master Ying of the Sing Kew Opera Company to perform a new sword dance for the latest Free China drive.

“No more worry,” said Poh-Poh with a stubborn shake of her head. “Grandson and I get stronger. We rest at home.”

Sekky grinned. Though he himself was forbidden to attend public school because of his own lingering cough, Little Brother now felt himself to be in charge of Poh-Poh’s welfare.

“We’ll be okay,” he assured all of us.

But to Poh-Poh, he fretted. “What will we do all day?”

“Maybe take short walk. Maybe stay home and I talk-story. You help me make
jook
. We make Old China toys. I teach you.”

“Teach him what?” Father said when he heard of the Old One’s plans.

Poh-Poh laughed. “Teach everything. Teach Old China ways. Teach Sek-Lung lots and lots of things.”

Father looked alarmed. Stepmother whispered in my ear,
“Things
not always good.”

Late that evening, when everyone else had gone off to bed, the two of them sat me down. Stepmother was knitting a dark blue sweater for Poh-Poh.

Father started at once.

“Think of those women back in Old China, Kiam-Kim. Look what happened when they became diseased. Or worse, what happened to them when the war came. Gold Mountain is not Old China. You watch out for Sekky.”

Would Sekky listen to me if I challenged the Old One?
Stone ears, stone brain!
The knitting needles click-clicked with life.

“Kiam-Kim,” Stepmother began, her fingers working swiftly. “Make sure Sek-Lung not believe everything the Old One tell him.”

Father let out a heavy sigh, perhaps thinking of his own growing up. “Very awkward. Too many ghost stories! Sek-Lung has no Strathcona School to teach him Canada ways.”

“Sekky listen to you.”
Click-click!
“Need to balance old with new, Kiam-Kim.”

“New better,” said Father, and looked hard at both of us to make sure his was the final word. With a quick adjustment of his glasses, he snapped open the
Chinese Times
.

Stepmother stared at me as if she did not mind. And neither did I. Her eyes told me more than the back of the
Times
ever did.

Instead of staying home or just going out for short walks as she promised, Poh-Poh started an odd routine of putting on her favourite quilted jacket and taking Sekky out on lengthy excursions to collect junk from alleyway trash bins.

Strengthened by the herbal teas and soups made for her by concerned Mrs. Lim and Jenny’s mother, and by Stepmother’s special stews left simmering half the day, the Old One felt steadier than ever. Most days, if she remembered to take the full dose of Dr. Chu’s medicine, she rarely coughed. Each additional tablespoon seemed to give her more and more hours of relief, though she complained about fighting off
drowsiness. If she fell asleep, she told Stepmother, how would she keep her eye on Sekky? No, sleep was for others. At the end of life, she joked, there would be more than enough sleep.

She felt herself strong enough that she had Third Uncle deliver to her an unused old table from the warehouse. She asked Father to buy her two dozen sets of bamboo chopsticks and told Stepmother to pick up some spools of the strongest thread from Gee Sook at American Steam Cleaners. No use to argue that she should be resting. She had already paid for the thread. She even boiled together a special recipe to make pots of glue.

Her bedroom door would be shut to all of us except Sekky. After supper, if we pressed our ears against the door, we could hear them tinkering away. Every morning around ten, when we had all safely gone to school or to work, she would bundle up Sekky and herself to start their late-morning tour of the back lanes.

We soon discovered that she and Sekky were collecting coloured glass, fragments of dime-store jewelry and pieces of broken mirror. Anything that reflected light was wrapped in small bundles of old flour and rice sacks and stored in cardboard boxes under her bed. Eventually, all these materials were to be shaped with a glass cutter, then glued and crafted into toy windchimes.

Grandmother patiently taught Sekky how to handle the shards so that he never suffered a single cut. She told him that each raw piece, rescued from the trash,
was now more precious than any fiery diamond or glowing emerald, more priceless even than thin slates of Imperial jade that might easily shatter.

“That was why I never hurt myself,” Sekky told us in the parlour one evening. Poh-Poh sat in her rocking chair watching over him carefully. Liang and Jung were on the floor waiting for the show to begin. Father and Stepmother sat on the sofa and watched as Sekky held two fingers in the air, dipped them down, and pretended to lift up a fragile fragment from a pile. Then he very gently laid it on the ground. He picked up a shard, wrapping up the piece, as Poh-Poh had shown him, “like the wing of a butterfly.” He stared at me to see if I could tell he would never,
ever
crush its delicate wings.

Poh-Poh smiled at all of us. “Smart grandson,” she said. Then, remembering that the gods might strike,
“Aaaiiyaah!
Not too smart.”

Father applauded the demonstration, and we all joined in. Since the activity seemed to be well taught, and there seemed to be no excessive dangers involved, none of us could have any objections.

“When do we see these windchimes?” Stepmother asked. “What do they sound like?”

“Do they really work, Sekky?” Liang wanted to be impressed. “If they’re really pretty, can I give one to my teacher? And Kiam can give one to Jenny, too.”

Using the pantomime skills Master Ying had taught him at the Sing Kew Theatre, Jung-Sum mimed lifting himself to his feet with two fingers by gripping a tuft of his own hair: a loose-limbed human windchime. He
stood a moment, swayed as if a wind had hit him, shook all over, and made rattling noises.

“Sound like that, Sekky?”

“Be patient,” Poh-Poh said, and she laughed to see how fine a reception her youngest grandson had been given.

“The chimes are really beautiful,” said Sekky. “Takes hours and hours just to make one small one. We show you soon!”

Poh-Poh nodded. It was time for her and Sekky to return to their work table upstairs and to shut the door against the world.

“No harm,” Stepmother said, but Father gave us all his worried look. Acquaintances, neighbours, all sorts of people had spied the Old One with Sekky rummaging through bins of waste in the alleyways, shaking out discarded purses and opening up promising shoe boxes. Friends and strangers wondered at her sanity. Word got around. Jenny warned me that among the Chinese students at King Edward High School, the two scavengers were a hot topic.

When I complained to Father, Stepmother interrupted me.

“No harm done, Kiam-Kim. I speak to the Old One.”

Whatever Gai-mou said to her had some result. Poh-Poh now insisted she was only taking Sekky out for short walks. Letting her grandson take in some fresh air. Exercise her creaking joints. “And ease my cramping heart,” she claimed. Nothing more.

Then she and Sekky would disappear into her
bedroom and shut the door. We knew they would be bent over her large table, working away with the day’s accumulation of junk. I came home early one afternoon and found the two of them washing their small haul in boiling water. Both of them wore flour-sack aprons.

“Cleaning up,” Sekky said. “We always clean up.”

Poh-Poh threw in a kitchen towel to help absorb the bits of scum floating to the surface and to settle the dancing few inches of debris. The towel sank into the mix. The kitchen smelled of sweet lye and melting Bakelite.

“Safer to be clean,” I said. “You don’t want to catch any germs.”

“Poh-Poh says I’m getting stronger.” He flexed his short-sleeved arm to show off a tiny bump of muscle.

“You bet. I can see that.”

Poh-Poh laughed, then began to double up with coughing. She had forgotten to take her medicine. I stepped forward, but she waved her hand at me to stand back.

Sekky said, “And I’m not coughing so much.” He grabbed the Old One’s waving hand and held on tightly. “And neither does Poh-Poh.”

With the strain showing in her stooped back and half-shut eyes, the Old One willed herself to stop hacking. The large veins at the side of her neck protruded from her effort. In those scant seconds, Little Brother looked at her with such haunted eyes that my own need to do something fell away.

The pot rattled for attention.

Grandmother shook off Sekky’s grip and wiped her hands on her apron. She opened the bottle and tossed back the medicine. It was more than a tablespoon, but there was nothing I could say. Colour settled into her cheeks. She was breathing easily again.

“See?” Sekky said. “Nothing wrong!”

Poh-Poh pointed to the kitchen tongs on the table. Before I could reach over, Sekky grabbed them.

“Dai-goh! Watch me! I get to pull out the biggest pieces.”

As he pulled over a chair to stand on, Poh-Poh gave him a big smile. But the strain on her face was too obvious, even to Little Brother. As if he hadn’t noticed this, Sekky—using both hands—dipped the long metal tongs into the pot. He pushed aside the soaking towel and he twisted and gripped the tongs to fasten on to the biggest piece. It looked so simple, but I knew that he had to balance the object’s size and weight, had to judge exactly the tension he would require to pull the piece away from the dancing clutter, to yank it firmly from the metal sides of the pot, to do all this with the skill of an engineer, without the piece cracking or shattering.

I smiled at Sekky’s skill. After he set the piece down on a towel spread on the kitchen table, he grinned back at me.

As the war advanced, and events grew even more complex, one of my monthly duties was to help Father shift or add pin-tags on the large maps of China and
Europe hanging at the Chinese Benevolent Association Reading Room on Columbia Street. The tags were little flags, with symbols or words representing the Allies and Axis powers. It was Father’s idea that every citizen should understand clearly what was happening in the world conflict. After all, the war was coming closer to our doorstep.