All That Matters (33 page)

On the home front, Chinatown citizens were kept too busy to dwell on disastrous retreats and sad departures. By the summer of 1940, the fighting had brought a wartime boom to Third Uncle’s warehouse and to Chinatown itself.

Under the Georgia Viaduct, the factories and mills were humming twenty-four hours a day, attempting to fill quotas for finished lumber, for fuel and military goods, and no one dared to complain about the smells or the noise. Chinatown restaurants began to feed hundreds of workers and off-duty servicemen looking for a cheap meal or a night on the town at the W.K. to dine and dance, or just to listen to a live band. Tailor shops were selling fancy pants and suits again, though most materials were restricted. Downtown weekly-rental hotels and rooming houses rarely had vacancies. Every excuse for a basement suite had a lineup of young couples willing to move in.

“No room to die in,” grumbled one of the elders.

Third Uncle hired more men, and Father worked overlapping shifts to track the goods and supplies coming into and out of storage.

One Saturday, after working at the warehouse moving stock, I took a quick shower, dressed, and picked up Jenny at the Chongs’ store to bring her home for supper. I promised her parents that afterwards I would help her prepare for her new math class, set to start in September. Father would not let Ben Chong pay me any money.

“We all Chinese,” he said. “We like family in Gold Mountain. Kiam be happy to help your Jenny!”

And so I was. We met most evenings upstairs at the corner store, in that room with the stand-up piano. I borrowed Jack’s math book for the summer. Most Chinese girls took that class, just so they could enter commercial school with an extra credit and take a
four-month course in secretarial and accounting skills. Ambitious Chinese girls dreamed of office jobs in the sugar refinery or insurance and accounting firms. These large companies took on Chinese girls, at even lower wages than were paid to those they had replaced, to work not at the reception or front offices but in the back rooms, filing and bookkeeping. If any of the other workers complained, they were told that the war necessitated “this kind of hiring” and “cheap labour” permitted the company to pay the others a better wage. With a commercial-school certificate, a Chinese girl had a better chance of getting one of those positions, advertised as “Grade 10 starting position in large office. Now hiring.”

“Wear best clothes,” Mrs. Chong told Jenny.

Most Chinese girls and their families considered any office job outside Chinatown a
real
job, prestige employment that meant you were educated and more refined.

“Be together like family,” Mrs. Chong called out as we left the store. “Enjoy special dish!”

Outside, I asked, “What was that all about? ‘Be like family’? ‘Special dish’?”

“Father sent over a whole chicken to your house this morning. My mother has designs. Watch out.”

When we settled into the dining room, Poh-Poh insisted that Jenny sit right next to me. Liang sat across, and stared at Jenny, as she had told me she intended to do.

“Will she get dolled up for supper with us? What kind of makeup does she buy?”

I didn’t blame Liang for her interest in Jenny. When she got dressed up for any weddings our two families attended, she was very pretty. She would curl her long hair in that fancy way, and she had her mother’s taste for wearing the right dress. Jeff Eng said he could go for Jenny. I tried not to think too much about what I felt for her, but there were times when we sat together doing her math lessons that a hint of her perfume caught me off guard. Whenever my eyes drifted away from her pencilled notes to linger on the soft curves now pushing against her sweater, my throat would go dry, my palms a little wet. Even Jack noticed how Jenny had transformed from a bit of a stick to a real looker.

“Do you ever sit beside her and get a hard-on?” he asked me. “How can you stand it?”

“I focus on math,” I said. But Jack grinned. “Well, I do most of the time,” I added.

“That’s all?”

“We go out with the gang.”

Jenny and I hadn’t been on an official date together. An official date required the permission of the lucky girl’s guardians and that the two families burn incense to the ancestors and sacrifice three chickens—well, almost. You were at least expected to bring a gift to the parents, buy a corsage for the girl, and suit up in your best slacks, wear a starched shirt and fancy tie. It wasn’t my style.

Liang had told me that Jenny had been on her first “official” date with Al Sen, the son of rich merchant Sen Kwok. I knew about that date: it was a kind of business
obligation on the Chongs’ part. The chaperoned date was just a social courtesy—at least that was what Mrs. Chong told Stepmother and Poh-Poh. Al was reluctant to go to the party welcoming his father’s new companion from San Francisco—“a lady of a certain age,” as Mrs. Chong put it, who had once danced in the chorus line at the old Pantages vaudeville house—so the Chongs volunteered their Jenny, who, nevertheless, was dying to go to the W.K. to dance with a full orchestra playing and all the women and girls in formal gowns. The two dined and danced, and Liang—who stated bluntly, “Al Sen is nothing to look at”—was impressed that Jenny had on a long black dress and her mother’s pearls.

“Like a real princess,” Liang said. “I’m going to ask to see the dress. Will she let me try it on?”

“When you grow up,” I said.

At the dinner table, I could see that Liang was disappointed that Jenny wasn’t wearing a corsage and had on only a touch of lipstick, but she was happy to see Jenny with me. It would make for some good gossip with her girlfriends: “Guess who sat
real close
beside my brother at dinner on Saturday?”

Jung carried in the soup tureen. He didn’t have much interest in girls. At thirteen, he was focussed on sports and building a reputation with a growing gang of his own. He set the bowl down and shouted for Father to come to the table. Poh-Poh and Stepmother came out of the kitchen, and everyone sat. Mrs. Chong’s words came into my head: “Be like family.”

Even though Father happily greeted Jenny, he turned at once to a subject that had been troubling him.

“The war very much now in Chinatown,” he said. “You think about that, Kiam-Kim.”

Father reached for a fine piece of chicken and lifted it onto Jenny’s plate. She waved her hands at the generosity.

“We thank your
fuh mouh
, your parents,” Poh-Poh said. “Tell them Number One bird. Fat and tender.”

The Old One filled her soup bowl with a ladle of bean curd and broth, and Stepmother scooped some steaming rice into her other bowl. Poh-Poh urged Jung to pass some greens into Sekky’s bowl. Sekky made a face.

“Be aware,” said Father to the two boys. “Every day so many young men fight in the war. People soon wonder where are the Chinatown boys? Why your
dai-goh
not in there? Tell them very soon we all be there.”

“When?” asked Sekky.

“Not yet,” Father said. “Chinese not yet needed.”

“Not
wanted.”
I couldn’t let Father be misunderstood. He and I both knew that some of the older Chinatown boys who attempted to join up had been turned away. “There’s a big difference—isn’t there, Father?” I said, carefully adding the question so Father would not lose face “—between being not wanted and being not needed.”

Father thought a moment. His authority would be the final word on the matter. “Yes, Kiam-Kim, as I was saying, the Chinese are
not wanted.”

“Yes,” Stepmother said, but her eyes twinkled, “that’s what Father said.”

Sekky didn’t quite get the point. He sailed his palm in the air. Number One Fighter Pilot. “When can I go?”

“Not yet,” I said. He bit his lip. “We go together when you are as tall as I am. How’s that?”

“A pilot, Dai-goh!”

I had told him the story of Robert Shun Wong, who had hand-built his own single-seat Pietenpol airplane in his family’s upstairs apartment overlooking Market Alley. Three years ago he had gone east to sign up with a flight school. Maybe he was in the sky now, flying over Nazi territory. Sekky said he was going to build an even bigger plane. Our house, he insisted, had to be bigger than any apartment in Market Alley.

“Can we both be pilots and fly over the Burma Road?”

“If we win this war,” Father said, “anyone here can be anything they want.”

“End of school next year,” Stepmother broke in. “What do you want to be, Jenny?”

“I think I want to be with Kiam-Kim,” she said, breaking into a giggle. “Would you mind?”

Liang gave me a quick look. I winked at her.

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll make it official.”

“Yes, yes—when?” Poh-Poh said, coughing a little but joining in the laughter with everyone else, except Sekky, who looked up scornfully, annoyed that he might have to give up his co-pilot.

Liang reached for some soup and pointed out that Jenny’s lace blouse was tied at the collar with a pink ribbon, just like her own.

“We’re in style,” Jenny said. “We girls know how to dress.”

Liang beamed. Hers was actually an old blouse from the Mission House Bazaar that Poh-Poh had altered. Father said the two of them looked liked sisters. Of course, Liang looked little like Jenny. My sister had Father’s round face, Poh-Poh’s small eyes. But her lips were like Jenny’s: perfect.

When I turned to give Jenny a choice piece of chicken, I saw that she had a profile like Kwan Ying, the Goddess of Mercy. Like the familiar statue sitting on Stepmother’s dresser, Jenny was actually beautiful. The food was exceptional that night: the dining table was rich with savoury dishes.

“Maybe Ben talked to you about this already,” Father said to Jenny, and he explained that the Chinatown boys, supported by men like Jenny’s father, were holding meetings to encourage others to enlist.

“What for you fight a white man’s war?” some of the elders challenged the younger men. The old men reminded everyone not to forget the 1911 demonstrations along Hastings against the Chinese vegetable sellers. Then there was the famous strike by the white waitresses after the city council said it would not permit them to work in Chinese-owned restaurants. Any restaurant owner would be fined and lose his licence if he hired a white woman.

“And what about the goddamn city council?” demanded someone else. “They pass a motion to tell Ottawa not to offer the vote to Orientals. We fight. We die for nothing!”

I thought of the boy-soldier who knelt on the ground with his hands tied, waiting for the executioner’s sword, the torn flaps of his jacket lifting in the wind like broken wings.

“Go back to China,” the elders said to the Canadaborns who wanted to join the Canadian forces. “Fight for China. You Chinese! Look in the mirror!”

Father sniffed. “What’s that smell?” A sudden taint of chemicals had fumed the dining-room air.

“It’s”—and with seven-year-old dramatics, holding his nose and covering his mouth, Sekky squealed “—yes … eww … it’s
a fart!”

“False Creek,” I said. “The wind must have shifted.”

As if to listen for the changing current, everyone grew silent: a slight popping and a rattling-tin sound came from the back of the house.

“Go check, Kiam-Kim,” Stepmother said. “Sit down, Sekky.”

I got up and shut the small window by Father’s desk and went to the kitchen to make sure everything was shut there, too. The back door was open. Through the screen, I could see Jack holding a pellet rifle, aiming at a row of tin cans set up in front of their shed. The tins went flying, one after another. With beer in hand, Mr. O’Connor stood on their back porch watching quietly.

Jack had joined the Rifle Club at King Ed. As he reset the cans on his makeshift platform—two old saw-horses with a pair of flashlights tied from the shed to shine down on them—I wondered about his father,
standing stock-still. Mr. O’Connor had spent two years in the Great War, but it was a war he spoke very little about. When I switched on the dangling porch light, his shadow quivered in the bluish dusk.

I called out to Jack, asked him what he was doing later that evening. As he turned, his blond hair danced against the growing dark of the yard. I thought,
What an easy target
.

“Have a date with Moira,” he called back, holding his gun as though he were Hemingway. Then he whipped himself around, and the final tin bolted into the air.

I realized that the sulphurous smell of gunpowder could not have come from Jack’s target practice alone. It was definitely blowing in from False Creek. The huge refineries there had been cooking up new chemicals for the military. Bright yellow warning signs were now posted on chain-link gates under the Georgia Viaduct:
DANGER—NO ENTRY
. Armed guards kept watch in one-man booths. The
Province
and the
News-Herald
had reported that some Victory Gardens in backyards a few blocks away from the viaduct underpass grew thick vines that suddenly withered and died. The day before, a brownish fog had saturated the area. People still complained of brown spots ruining their clothes and bedsheets. Gasping lungs and short breath marked lives lodged too near the viaduct. The summer breeze smelled of deadly secrets.

When I returned to the table, Father was still talking.

“Maybe,” he was saying, “even go back to China to fight.”

“Aaaiiyaah!
More fighting!” said Poh-Poh, raising her eyebrows. “Everyone die.”

Jenny started to protest but caught my look. Playing host, I lifted some snow peas onto her plate. Poh-Poh coughed again. With concern creasing his brow, Father asked the Old One, “Did you take your medicine?”

Poh-Poh nodded—
Of course! Of course!
—but Father exchanged doubtful looks with Stepmother and me. The rest of us kept quiet while Poh-Poh went on about the dire news arriving every day from all fronts.

The war news had been so discouraging, old village people like Poh-Poh became the
lao naauh
, the Old Scold, to heckle and mock away the curse of bad news. In threatening times, the elderly of Chinatown would blurt out the worst thing they feared could ever happen—
All soon die in China! All die!
—then a lightning-swift smirk would cross their lips. To be sure to disarm ill fortune, they shouted out the worst.