All That Matters (7 page)

That made me think that no one ever laughed in Old China. I was glad to be in Canada.

“Kiam-Kim, never forget,
ney hai Tohng-Yahn,”
Father said. “Never forget, you are Chinese.”

The way Father stared proudly at Third Uncle, who was showing me large picture books with ancient
Chinese temples, and the way they both turned to study each page, telling me tales of monks who could snap steel rods and smash stone boulders with their bare hands, made me sit up straight in my chair. Even Stepmother looked up at me from her breast-feeding, as if it would be impossible, if not madness, to be other than
tong-yung
.

“Baby be Chinese, too,” she said.
“Tohng-Yahn
is best.”

I looked at her feeding Liang-Liang and reasoned that if, instead of having given me a skimpy butterfly when we first met, she had put into my palm a silver dragon with five claws, or even a tiger with fierce eyes, a great joy would now be sucking at her breast. And Father and Third Uncle would have lit firecrackers. Poh-Poh would have demanded Third Uncle pay for a first-class banquet at W.K. instead of dinner at the Pekin. From a red baby’s cap would dangle countless gold trinkets; twice the number of red-dyed eggs would sit on our best dishes, and many more pink-dotted dumplings for many more guests. My lip curled.

“Kiam-Kim?” Stepmother beckoned to me. She shifted Jook-Liang onto her knees. “Would Big Brother like to hold her?”

I quickly realized that it was useless to keep wishing the girl baby would go away. I finally got used to stroking the brown eggshell forehead and pushing the rubber pacifier between the tiny cupid lips to keep her quiet.

“Gently,” Stepmother said to me.

I tried again. Baby fingers grasped my thumb and held on tightly.

“See how she likes First Son,” Father said.

I pushed away from the cradle. With so much to discover in my own world, I did not mind sharing Poh-Poh and Stepmother with her. Father spent as much time as he could with me, and when he came home early he always gave me his hat to hang up on the small hook beside my own coat. In the beginning, the two of us would go for walks before the darkness came. But soon, as he took on more part-time work in the restaurants and warehouses of Chinatown, helped Third Uncle and other merchants with their invoices and accounts, studied English books in the Carnegie Library, and worked on his English with the minister from the United Church, Father was rarely at home when I was awake. Arrangements were made: other men and women, kindly acquaintances of Third Uncle, mostly elders, took me out for walks. Father taught me to recite their proper names while standing at attention; I mimicked appropriate greetings with a bow and learned how to accept small red-enveloped gifts of lucky money without rudely opening them to peep at the contents.

“Too generous,” Poh-Poh would protest on my behalf.

“Too kind,” Stepmother would instantly say as I held the
lei-see
in my hands for a respectful few seconds and lowered my head before another tall or squat newcomer to our house. Father was pleased to hear that I was considered polite and smart and gave others the pleasure of recalling their family life in Old China.

Poh-Poh had taught me to feel with my fingertips during the exchange of lucky money and my humble thanks, to discover whether coins or crinkly bills sat inside the red folds of the
lei-see
. She said this would help me resist tearing open the flap. It was a trick she had taught the grandchildren of Patriarch Chen himself.

“Lowly children,” Poh-Poh said. “All girls.”

I didn’t care. I wanted to know what were the consequences if my fingers felt a coin or a bill. Poh-Poh laughed at my impatience. A ten- or twenty-five-cent coin meant I might keep it in my own piggy bank. A fifty-cent coin or any folding money meant Father or Stepmother took the
lei-see
from me.

“For your education,” I would hear them say.

Of course, to open any
lei-see
in front of guests was very rude and would expose my lack of manners. Worse, Stepmother warned me, whoever gave me a coin, however generous, would feel that they had
suk-mein
, lost face, in front of anyone else who might have slipped me folding money.

“Father would lose face, too,” she said. “Guests would shake their heads and say, ‘What an impatient and greedy First Son!’ ”

“Yes, yes,” Poh-Poh chimed in. “People would say, ‘Has this greedy grandson of yours
mo li
—no manners?’ ”

The world, I discovered, was filled with such refinements, and to have
mo li
meant not only to lack manners but to have little sense of social ritual, thus bringing a bad reputation to one’s family. Poh-Poh’s brows furrowed at the tragic thought that her grandson might have been born an idiot with
mo li
. She quoted
something from Confucius, “Follow the Right Way.” This was the highest authority, to warn me to be on my best behaviour. The classic four-word proverb meant nothing to me, but the Old One’s warning tones as she pronounced each word so precisely spoke volumes: Confucius was High Authority.

Lucky money was a social ritual I liked. Whenever my longings began to run away from Old China ways, lucky money brought them back.

“What’re those red things?” Little Jack asked me once, when I was showing off how many lucky packages I had collected from a dinner party at the Pekin celebrating Poh-Poh’s and my birthday. It hadn’t mattered that our birthdates were days and months apart; Father felt it was time to honour the Old One, and Poh-Poh said I should have my share of joy, too. Everyone gave me a toy or lucky money. Afterwards, the lady guests came to our house to play mahjong, and the men went someplace to gamble and drink. My pockets were bulging with
lei-see
. I got tired of playing with the other children and looked out the front window, and I saw Jack staring at me from his porch.

“Look what I got,” I said, showing a fistful of red
lei-see
packages. “Bet you don’t have any.”

Jack came closer to see. I held my fist out and offered him one. I checked with my fingers that only coins were inside. Otherwise, Father or Poh-Poh would be mad at me. All at once, Jack laughed and tore open the envelope.

“Hey, it’s money!”

“No,” I said, “it’s lucky money.”

“You bet it is,” he said, holding up two fifty-cent pieces.

Then he ran into his house. There was nothing to do but go back into my own house. A few minutes later, there was a loud knock on our door, and Stepmother saw Mr. O’Connor’s tall, lanky figure shadowing our parlour window. Everyone stopped playing mahjong and stared quietly at the front door. Stepmother hesitated to open it. In the dining room, Poh-Poh glanced at Jenny Chong’s mother, who spoke English. Mrs. Chong got up with a heavy sigh and went down the front hall. She was always interpreting for Chinatown residents.

“Yes?” Mrs. Chong used her customer-service voice with Mr. O’Connor. “May I please to help you?”

“Your boy gave my son this money,” Jack’s father said. “Should he have done that?”

Mrs. Chong could see the torn red envelope and the two coins peeking out.

Poh-Poh looked hard at me. Stepmother stood up from the parlour table and shook her head.

“You gave lucky money away?” Poh-Poh said, in Toishanese. I could see Jack’s father was wondering about the Old One’s serious tone. “Now you tell that foreigner what you mean by that.”

Poh-Poh got off her chair and pushed me forward down the front hall. Mrs. Chong stepped aside. Jenny Chong came running out from the back to see what was the matter. She was always a Nosy Parker.

“For Jack to keep,” I said to Mr. O’Connor.

The tall man looked past me to see how Stepmother or Poh-Poh would respond.

“Play cards,” Poh-Poh said in Toishanese, and the other ladies immediately began pushing the tablets noisily around the table, ignoring the situation at the door.

Stepmother watched me step back. Mrs. Chong shut the door.

Then the noise of the clicking game resumed in both rooms. No one said anything to me as Mr. O’Connor’s figure left our porch and descended down the steps.

Jenny Chong said, “Give me one, too.”

Mrs. Chong reached out and slapped her daughter’s head. None of the ladies in the room took notice.

When I was put to bed, Poh-Poh wagged her finger at me. “Only a fool give lucky money away! Are you a fool?” Shortly afterwards, Stepmother’s shadow crossed my bed. I shut my eyes and refused to acknowledge her. She tucked me in and slipped some extra coins in my palm.

TWO

POH-POH WARNED ME THAT I
was no longer the same
Tohng-Yahn
boy she took by the hand when we first struggled up the crowded third-class gangplank in Hong Kong to board the CPR steamship to Vancouver. “You old enough now to keep secrets.”

Grandmother was right. I was eight years old that fall of 1930, as I stood waiting in the doorway of our cramped, stuffy Chinatown kitchen to help her wash and prepare the vegetables. The door jamb had lines that Father pencilled on to record my height. Father had said that when I reached a certain height, I would be trusted to know more, to know family secrets that even my very best friend, Jack O’Connor, could never be told.

“I’m taller now,” I said, looking as grown-up as I knew how. “I’m bigger, too.”

The Old One laughed.

“You not
Tohng-Yahn
like before, Kiam-Kim,” she said, displaying her old know-it-all village manner and shaking her wrinkled head at the fierce-faced, nearly cross-eyed Kitchen God stuck on the wall. Even
he
agreed. Poh-Poh unhooked Stepmother’s flower-printed apron from the doorknob. I looked at the dangling garment and took a step back into the dining room. Poh-Poh shook her head again.

“You not
Chinese
like before. Now you just a
mo no
boy, a no-brain boy!”

Poh-Poh did not mean that I didn’t have a brain; she meant that I didn’t have the right kind. One day when I sat in my room, bent-mouthed and feeling crushed, Stepmother told me to pay no attention.

“When you count up Father’s invoices to match up his bookkeeping entries, what does the Old One always say?”

I thought for a moment. “Poh-Poh says, ‘Kiam-Kim has a Number One Brain.’ Then she pulls my ear.”

“Yes, yes …,” Stepmother said. She sighed. “To keep First Son humble.”

I protested and punched my pillow.

“Father always laughs.”

“You must laugh, too!” A delicate hand brushed away my tears. “Yes, laugh. Then you have a
Tohng-Yahn no
, a Chinese brain like your Poh-Poh.”

Stepmother smiled when I got her meaning: never take Poh-Poh too seriously. Smile. Laugh. Stepmother herself barely reacted to any of Poh-Poh’s abrupt suggestions: “Steep tea longer.” “Fold sheets this way:
tight-tuck every corner.” “Hold the baby … 
firmly.”
“Eat more meat.”

To each command, Gai-mou would respond with a faintly pleasant smile, as if Poh-Poh’s take-charge voice should not be taken too seriously. After a moment, she would submit to Poh-Poh’s way: the green tea was steeped longer; bedsheets were stretched just so and all four corners stiffly tucked in; the baby
firmly
held; and, finally, another morsel of meat was politely swallowed.

“Ho, ho!
Good, good!” said Poh-Poh, satisfied that Gai-mou had not disregarded her. However, even as the Old One increased her pushy ways with me, Stepmother began gradually to fold the bedsheets in her own way. In the midst of her breast-feeding my sister, she lifted Liang-Liang to burp, not as
firmly
as Poh-Poh would have liked: the tiny head limply propped over the towel-padded shoulder and slowly slid down again to feed. Stepmother was doing more and more things in her own way.

Mrs. Lim remarked on how the dinner table was set. Poh-Poh said, waving her hand dismissively, “Gai-mou work too hard to do everything right.”

Eventually, even Father noticed that certain habits had changed in our house: now the Old One folded her own sheets exactly in the way Stepmother did, with three corners tightly tucked in but with one inviting corner flipped back.