All That Matters (6 page)

Stepmother found things confusing at first, though Mr. Ben and Mrs. Annah Chong came to her rescue many times. The couple ran a corner store at Princess and Keefer, two blocks east of us, and Poh-Poh had known their elderly cousin back in a Toishan village.
Mrs. Chong made it a point to drop by between her visits to wholesalers on East Hastings Street. She did most of the ordering for their store. Ben Chong did the books and stood by the cash and watched over their daughter Jenny, who was my age.

The majority of those who settled early in Vancouver’s Chinatown came from the same Sze-yup, Four County village district, or spoke related dialects from the Samyup, Three County areas, closer to Canton and were therefore considered superior members of Chinatown. Everyone seemed to know someone in Old China who knew someone else closely related to them.

Poh-Poh helped Stepmother to quickly settle in with a group of ladies who, like Poh-Poh, loved to play mahjong. “Get to know others this way,” Mrs. Pan Wong told her. “Get to know everyone!” They showed her how Vancouver ladies dressed for different occasions and gave her dresses they no longer fit. They oooohed over Stepmother’s slim hips, and their laughing husbands made remarks about Father being seen leaving work earlier than usual to rush home—with Third Uncle’s blessings.

As they had done for Poh-Poh, the mahjong ladies gradually introduced Stepmother to everything know-able in
Tohng-Yahn Gaai
, China-People Street—or at least as much as the women were permitted to know. They told her she would soon not notice the bad smells from the mills and refineries when she came into town. Soon she would not even hear the banging trains and whistles. Part of life, they said. Canton and Hong Kong were far worse.

“Buy meat here,” Mrs. Annah Chong advised her, pointing to the open counter of Chong Lung’s Meat Market. “My cousin never cheat you.”

“Fresh vegetables,” Mrs. Sui Leong sang out, “best to buy in the morning at Keefer Market.”

Mrs. Pan Wong named the best tailors in town, but suggested how clothes were cheaper to buy at American Steam Cleaners. “Left-behind clothes best buy.”

The Chinatown clothing, dry goods, and grocery stores were often musty from ceiling-high bales of English cloth and China silks, or pungent with sharp odours of ginger root and herbs and dried shrimp. Carved hardwood-handled scoops crunched into eye-level barrels filled with rice and grains. The scoops made
zzzzz
sounds and spilled their contents onto curving copper pans that hung on balances and swayed like floating sampans above my head.

In Ming Wo, the long, dark counter stretched beyond me. Oak casks of vinegars and soy and wine sat around me like steps, and I stuck out my foot to mount them.

“Don’t climb,” I was told by one storekeeper. “This morning a boy just like you drowned in a vat of my best liquor!” As proof, he lifted up a small open-tongued shoe tied to the lid. “His mother pay lots of money for damages.”

Stepmother sighed, but not as deeply for the drowned boy as for me: I had forgotten my manners.

“Shoe for cats to play with,” Poh-Poh told me later. “Cats keep away mice.”

Poh-Poh’s complaining voice dominated those shopping trips. Later, when I was old enough, she told
me how useless it was to argue prices with the Gold Mountain merchants, so unlike the way things were done in Old China. Winning no monetary advantage, she admitted to anyone who would listen how hard it was for an Old Head to get used to new ways. But Stepmother told me Poh-Poh always managed to buy the choicest cut of pork, the fattest chicken, or the last clear-eyed fish in the pail. We ate well.

That year, Third Uncle’s stock-and-bond investments had doubled in value. He gave Father an increase in salary.

“You know my accounts,” he boasted to Father. “I buy another warehouse with no problem. No worry.”

Poh-Poh looked up, fearful that the gods had heard such arrogant talk.

Within a year, our household had found its rhythm. Poh-Poh could lie longer in bed after Father left for work. And Stepmother, already trained from Patriarch Chen’s service, did the housework without complaint. Father worked later and later at the warehouse, and I started first grade at Strathcona School. But even though my schooling interested Father, everyone in the family, as well as Third Uncle and the mahjong ladies whenever they visited us, began to turn their focus on Stepmother. She had fainted one afternoon, and had been throwing up in the mornings. Poh-Poh did not take her naps, but kept an eye on Stepmother.

Even big Mrs. Lim, almost as old as Poh-Poh, crossed the street every other day from her rock-perched
shack, bringing soups, a mix of boiled herbs and greens to feed Stepmother, she said, to help balance the wind-water humours that seemed to trouble Gai-mou’s digestion. For months Gai-mou needed special foods. Poh-Poh told me it was hard for some people’s digestive tract to adjust to Gold Mountain water. That seemed true to me, for Stepmother soon grew very big in her tummy and was often sick in bed.

“Soon she be better,” Mrs. Lim told me. “Be patient.”

“New baby soon,” Jack told me, throwing back his blond head as if in great agony and slapping his puffed-up tummy. “Pops out of the belly button.”

Jenny Chong was with us that day. She was our age, but pretended she knew so much more than we could know.

“Not from the belly button!” she said. “From the pee-pee!”

I missed the event by sleeping through the whole night. After the girl baby was born, I thought Stepmother would now be a real mother. But she was still to be called Stepmother.

Poh-Poh had heard the church bells ringing during the first morning of the baby’s birth. The church people helped the poor in Chinatown.

“Listen,” the Old One said, bending her ear to hear better. “Good sign.”

And so the chimes partly inspired my sister’s birth name, Jook-Liang, “Jade Bell.” Father told me the last sound,
liang
, could also mean “bracelet,” the name Stepmother herself had desired, Jade Bracelet.
Whether “Bell” or “Bracelet,” or both, even baby sister would be raised to call her own mother Stepmother.

Poh-Poh was our family elder, and Stepmother was expected to remember her place as a
gai-mou
in the family; otherwise, Stepmother was warned again and again by Poh-Poh and Third Uncle, First Wife’s ghost would take her revenge upon the family. Father did not protest, but some days I saw him pacing back and forth, wringing his hands.

“Say nothing,” Mrs. Lim told him. “Let Poh-Poh handle things.”

And so she did.

“We lucky to be family here,” Poh-Poh said to Stepmother at the one-month birthday dinner Father held at home for the birth of his daughter. The birth was considered a
siu hay
, a little joy, and not the
dai hay
, the great joy a boy baby would have inspired. Poh-Poh sighed. “No one starve here,” she said, which meant that we did not have to get rid of the girl child, as was done in Old China. The Old One looked confident. “Next baby be boy child.”

Stepmother nudged Jook-Liang closer to her breast.

When Third Uncle was finishing his supper with us in the dining room one evening, and Stepmother was upstairs breast-feeding Liang, I asked Father why Gai-mou sometimes wept at night. Even when she was so tired, why did she clutch at the little baby and seem so reluctant to surrender her to Poh-Poh? Father ignored me.

“Why?” I pestered.

The tears of others had always provoked my curiosity.

“Tell,” Third Uncle said, and sucked at his unlit pipe.

“Why not?” Poh-Poh said. She stopped piling up some plates and sat quietly. “Tell First Son.”

All this I recall, because for years thereafter, Poh-Poh would remind me of the day that I first understood how certain ghosts had pursued her from Old China. Father shifted uneasily. What, after all, might a six-year-old properly understand?

As if to keep Stepmother, who was still upstairs, from hearing a word, Father lowered his voice. I bent my head towards him.

“Gai-mou knows that a poor family in China, one just as poor as her own family had been, would have snatched baby Jook-Liang from her, and the tiny thing would have been quickly sold or given away to another family. And you, Kiam-Kim, would never have known that she had once been your sister.”

“Never?”

“She would never have been given a name,” Third Uncle said. “And without a name, she did not exist.”

“Aaaiyaah!”
Poh-Poh interrupted. She looked at the two men before she decided to speak further. “And if baby unlucky, someone palm her mouth and clamp her tiny nostrils.
Like this.”

My eyes widened as the Old One’s palm pressed against her own wrinkled mouth, and her gnarled thumb and slender forefinger pinched shut her nostrils.

“And then?” I asked.

Poh-Poh’s black pupils rolled up into her head, and a huge gasp escaped from her.

“Baby die,” she said.

I jumped off my seat and ran to Poh-Poh’s side. She shifted her knee and let me jump up. A bloodthirsty thrill electrified me.

“Show me how,” I said.

Poh-Poh had just raised her palm over my mouth when Father slammed his fist on the kitchen table. The plates rattled.

“Let him know,” Poh-Poh commanded. “Life is bitter and hard.”

“No!” Father shouted. “This is Gold Mountain. Not necessary for Kiam-Kim to know such things!”

Poh-Poh pushed me off her knee.

It was the only time I had ever heard Father raise his voice against the Old One. Third Uncle started to say something but decided to keep quiet when he heard Stepmother coughing and starting down the stairs. When she stepped into the kitchen, looking famished for her share of dinner, Poh-Poh was piling up the empty dishes. Third Uncle lit his pipe as if nothing had happened. Father looked sternly at me to keep quiet.

I kept quiet.

Stepmother looked too exhausted to notice that anything was out of sorts. “Jook-Liang is sleeping at last,” she said.

Father signalled me to offer Stepmother my chair. I jumped off the seat to help clear away the used dishes.

“I bring you hot soup,” Poh-Poh said. “Take this, Kiam-Kim.”

When I took the large serving plate from her old hand, I wondered at the long finger and scarred thumb, the way they pressed so firmly against the plate’s edge. I wondered at Father’s scowling face that suddenly turned away from the Old One to look so tenderly at Stepmother in her plain dress. He got up and pulled the chair back for her and pushed it in as she sat down. His ink-stained fingers brushed aside wisps of her hair that had trailed across her damp forehead. The sweet aroma of Poh-Poh’s thick, meaty stock drifted in from the kitchen. Stepmother took a deep breath.

“Very good soup,” Father said to her. “The Old One make you blood-strengthening oxtail soup.”

“Excellent soup for women,” Third Uncle said. He puffed at his pipe and shouted in the direction of the kitchen: “Very fine dinner tonight.”

Father sent me into the kitchen to help. I could see Poh-Poh had pricked up her ears to hear every word of praise. It was my turn to say something to the Old One, such as “Thank you for the good food,” but so many thoughts tumbled through my head that I, instead, silently studied the Old One rushing about, watching as she shuttled plates into the sink. Then, with a deft finger and thumb curving around the bamboo ladle, the same finger and thumb that made Father shout at her, she swiftly poured simmering broth into Stepmother’s bowl. My blatant staring at her hand, at the open palm that lifted the porcelain bowl like a baby’s
head, lifting without spilling a drop, must have trapped her between thoughts.

“Grandson,” she said, and staggered against the sink. “Ghosts have followed me here.”

As she squeezed her eyes to shut in the tears, pausing a moment before we would step back into the dining room, I somehow understood what the Old One had meant:
life was bitter and hard
. Taking my own small steps beside her, I stared at the steaming blue bowl, the hot blood-strengthening liquid swaying inches above my head.

“Are we poor?” I asked.

Third Uncle laughed. “Not yet.”

Here in Salt Water City, he explained, we had a pine-board home with running tap water, a metal stove that ate logs in its grated mouth, and enough dried food stored away in a deep pantry for a month of eating. “No worry,” he said. “We keep your baby sister.”

In
Hahm-sui-fauh
, Mrs. Lim told me, hardly any girl babies were abandoned, though quite a few were sold to merchant families to be raised as servants, or were traded for a boy baby who would be a greater joy for the adopting family, or—if undesirable and ugly—would be given away, like the children given away by white people. In this city, and in New Westminster, and even Victoria, there were buildings that warehoused hundreds of such children.

Stepmother, too, must have been fretting. She consulted Third Uncle. He told her of his arrangements
with the elders of the Chen Tong Society that he himself would see to any additional expenses the girl baby might entail; for sure, he said, our family would keep Jook-Liang. Third Uncle laughed at her Old China fears. Still, all that first month of Liang’s life, I remember how Stepmother clutched on to her girl baby as if nothing would separate them.

“No worry,” Poh-Poh assured her. “Gold Mountain not like Old China.”

Third Uncle expected a boy child, but like Father he did not mind the first being a girl. Uncle wiped his wire-rimmed glasses and told me that Baby Jook-Liang and I must remember how to refer to each other in Chinese, because we were Chinese. Little Sister soon was called Liang-Liang, which meant “Beautiful Bell.” In English, however, everything would be made simpler if we matched all our
gai-gee
, our false documents. That was why Liang-Liang would call her own mother Gai-mou: we would fool the demon immigration spies, who would otherwise deport us back to China.

“Remember that in this country of white demons we are undesirables—
Chinks,”
Third Uncle said, “but we are, in fact, a superior people.”

Father quoted a Chinese poet and spoke of the Middle Kingdom being “a country as old as sorrow.”