All That Matters (9 page)

She lifted her know-it-all eyebrow. “You ask for more blessing or trouble?”

At my look of surprise, she burst out laughing and left me by myself in the prickly heat of the Kitchen God’s kingdom.

As I yanked the green, ferny tops from the knobby carrots, my head began to work out the things both Third Uncle and Grandmother taught me that would either bless me or trouble my life.

Between hacking into spittoons, the elders were always proclaiming ten thousand this or ten thousand that. “Ten thousand blessings!” Third Uncle would exclaim if his business went well; then, Poh-Poh would laugh and warn him,
“Aaaiiyaah!
Ten thousand troubles!”

Sure enough, the stock market crashed. Ten thousand troubles landed upon our doorstep.

Grandmother explained to me that her words were meant to chase away the envy of the gods, but she had not been present to utter the right incantations when Third Uncle boasted of his growing bank account over business lunches with the H.Y. Louie and the Yip Sang merchant families. Women were never invited to those lunches. Poh-Poh told me how in America some months ago men jumped out of buildings when the value of investments dropped. Third Uncle had even thought of killing himself, but Poh-Poh reminded him to think of his new family in Gold Mountain. As a family, Father assured him, we would survive. Third Uncle joined the merchants for their regular luncheon.

“They never invite women,” Poh-Poh explained. “No woman die for money.”

The last carrot waited to be scuffed and washed. The idea of having a new brother sent my mind searching for blessings.

Whenever anyone offered Chinatown children candy, we were taught to refuse at least twice, so one would be humble and worthy of a final third offering. Whenever I expected too much, like lots of lucky money at New Year’s, I would walk past the small
Goddess of Mercy in our parlour, behave as if I didn’t care how much lucky money I might get, that I wasn’t greedy or grasping. I wanted only luck.

Big Mrs. Lim always told me that the gods and ghosts look for ways to trick you. It was no use my saying I never saw any gods or ghosts; apparently they were everywhere. I was in even more danger, she warned, because I did not see them. Other children saw them, she told me and Poh-Poh, like the Lon Sing twins, who finished each other’s sentences, and the Chiangs’ little girl, who went mad with hearing ghost voices and fell into a coma and died.

“Expect nothing,” Father told me, “and anything that comes will be a gift.”

“Be patient,” Stepmother had cautioned me that very morning. “Keep deep longings to yourself.”

I thought of what everyone had said to me when I got all
Excellent
on my first report card.

“Even white people say,” Third Uncle said, “ ‘Never show poker hand.’ Pretend you got
Needs Improvement.”

Mrs. Lim warned me not to strut too much. “The cocky rooster makes the best soup.”

Grandmother told me that when I was a baby in China, whenever she took me outside, she complained out loud of my wretchedly pinched eyes and snot-running nose, so the gods would not be jealous and snatch me away.

I fought down my excitement: I would set an example for my promised Second Brother when he disembarked; that is, I would be openly disappointed with him. But why would any jealous god worry about me as
Number One Boss? What example was I, wrapped in a flowery apron, wearily scrubbing carrots and wiping at my nose with the back of my wet and skinny wrist?

Poh-Poh stepped back into the kitchen. She had oiled and neatly primped up her hair with her jade hairpieces. I lifted the long knife, as she and Stepmother had taught me, and began slowly, carefully, slicing the carrots at an angle. Grandmother ignored me until she noticed my runny nose. She took a tissue from her sleeve and made me blow three times. She washed her hands, then began wiping the wok with a tiny mop soaked with cooking oil. My eyes glazed with thought. Between her humming a singsong tune, she broke into comment whenever she felt like it.

“Kiam-Kim thinks too much,” she told the Kitchen God, her tune faltering between some nonsense lyrics.
“Aaaiiyaah
, what proper girl will ever marry my worthless grandson!”

I reminded myself that the so-called Kitchen God was only a small, heat-curled poster pinned on the wall. He looked like a warrior in one of my floppy Chinese comic books.

“At the end of this year, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh went on in her lecturing tone, “the Kitchen God Tsao Chung will tell tales about the family.”

I knew that. I handed her the plate of cut carrots.

“Tsao Chung soon fly back up to Heaven to the Jade Emperor.”

I knew that, too. During the last week of the year, after smearing the paper lips with a dab of honey to sweeten his words, Grandmother had Father walk out
the back porch and set Tsao Chung free by burning him up in a clay pot in front of all the family. Transformed by the fire into smoke, Tsao Chung began his journey to Heaven to report on our family. Last year, as Poh-Poh solemnly followed the rising vapours, Father nudged me and winked. Then he threw the ashes into the air. Poh-Poh stared at the fragments, never looking away until every bit of ash vanished skyward. By the second week of the New Year, a new Kitchen God would be pinned in the same place.

Later that day, Father told me how—scientifically—it was only smoke. Overhearing this, Third Uncle said, with some reluctance, “Sometime smoke, Kiam-Kim, and sometime not.”

Next door, at the O’Connors’, there was nothing like a Kitchen God. But as I waited in their front hall for Jack to come out to play, I saw hanging askew a wood-framed picture of a white lady in a blue dress. In their tidy, uncluttered kitchen, Mrs. O’Connor made Jack and me hot dogs in the only pot that I could see, and Jack told me that the lady in the blue dress was the Blessed Virgin Mary. She had the Holy Baby Jesus in an old barn crowded with livestock. Mrs. O’Connor said it was all true, and crossed herself.

I told Poh-Poh and Stepmother about Blessed Mary and her having a baby right there in a cowshed. I told them about all the creatures surrounding Baby Jesus, all the chickens and ducks, the sheep, the cows and pigs, including, best of all, the three hairy men and their three camels. Poh-Poh thought a moment.

“Not too clean,” she said finally.

When I told some of the other Grade 3 white boys about Tsao Chung, they all laughed at me. Jon Wing, whose father’s store sold the images wholesale, said nothing. One of the Italian boys shoved me aside, but he said something that made sense to me. That afternoon in the kitchen, I repeated the boy’s words to the Old One.

“Poh-Poh, the Kitchen God—
just a piece of paper!”

“Kiam-Kim, you be careful what you say. You clean up now,” she ordered. “Put out chopsticks and best dishes on kitchen table, all ready for later.”

I quickly scrubbed the empty colander. Then, wiping my hands, I jumped off the apple crate, climbed up on the chair, and lifted from the lower shelves two sizes of our best plates and bowls. Then I dipped into the lower drawer for the chopsticks. Everything clattered into three stacks bristling with serving spoons and eye-poking chopsticks.

“What’s that?” Poh-Poh asked.

Gentle knocking drifted from the front door, but I kept busy, carrying the dishes to the pine board that Father had put up as a serving shelf.
I’m too busy
, I thought, and gathered the spoons into one bowl; the chopsticks I plunked into a glass, just as Stepmother would have done.

The Old One had no time for my stubbornness. She tossed her flour-bag apron over the broken-backed chair by the doorway and shifted the stockpot away from the direct heat. Thick pork bones bobbed to the surface. Her lightning-quick eyes appraised bowls and plates of raw and semi-cooked ingredients, all placed
in a certain order for the stir-frying. Finally, Poh-Poh reached over and wiped her hands on
my
apron. “Who answer your door, clever boy,” she said to me, “if no one marry you!”

I didn’t care.

She hurried out of the kitchen, her quilted jacket dancing on her shoulders. I looked past the Old One as she opened the door. Two tiny ladies bustled in to escape the fall dampness, Mrs. Pan Wong and Mrs. Hin Leong, their voices happily chirping above Grandmother’s humble greetings.

Grandmother shouted back at me, “Watch the soup pot!”

Minutes later, she scurried into the kitchen with a small bag of oranges and two wrapped parcels. There was a parcel of two cooked chicken breasts from Mrs. Wong, who always brought the same thing. Crunchy-skinned barbecued pork fell out of the second parcel onto a serving dish.

Poh-Poh stood at the loaded kitchen table and wiped her hands on the dish towel. Everything was in place. Except me.

“Sit,” Poh-Poh said to me, frogging the row of silk buttons on her jacket. “Read.”

I knew she meant the Chinese First Word books lying dead on the corner stool, just as Father had left them.

Turning her back on me, she lightly touched the greyish bun of her hair and adjusted a cloisonné barrette. I yanked off my flowery apron, threw it aside, and advanced towards the textbooks as if I were going to
lift one up. Satisfied, the Old One ambled away. I ducked into the pantry.

There I sat on the cool linoleum floor under the glowing lightbulb. I pushed aside the family rice barrel and reached behind for the comic book that Stepmother had slipped me that morning.

“Don’t tell Poh-Poh,” she had said.

These China-made comics were stitch-bound booklets. Their sixteen pages depicted in vivid, detailed drawings how ancient Chinese warriors had fought the early Mongol invaders. There were five booklets in the series, each with running panels of detailed drawings and captions below in Chinese. Even if you could not read the Chinese, the drawings were so elaborate anyone could follow the story. Even Jack. We both traded our comics and read them. He said he read them on the floor in the parlour and in bed.
Terry and the Pirates
was the best. We sometimes read comics together in his house, but Poh-Poh never wanted me to let Jack into ours. Playing on our porch one summer day, he had asked Poh-Poh what smelled so rotten in our house. I translated. Poh-Poh had been making a herbal soup. The front door slammed shut in our faces.

“Mo li,”
she told me later. “No manners.”

Mr. O’Connor said that the Chinese comics had more details in them but the writing was all “chop-chop” to him. Jack made a face and pretended he could read Chinese. I could make out only a word or two myself.

Jeung Sam
was number three. Father had taught me about the Chinese heroes of the first two books, how each of the five warriors were like today’s soldiers fighting against the evil foreigners who were dividing up China. The dog-turd Japanese. The demon Russians. The big-nosed British. I was supposed to enjoy number three only after finishing my chores for Poh-Poh and after I made sure I read my Chinese-school homework.

“I promise,” I said to Stepmother, remembering how the Old One laughed at these comic heroes that Father thought were so important for me to discover.

“No one kung fu any more,” Poh-Poh said, pushing her fists into the air. “Spears! Swords! Useless! Today, one bomb kill everybody!” The war news from China had been terrible.

Poh-Poh reminded me that comic books were bad for young eyes.

Now I leaned against the wooden slats and flipped through the first few pages of the comic. Here were drawn the usual Chinese words on the huge banners of the fighting armies:
North. East. Tiger
 … and the adventures began …

That bit of reading would be, I reasoned, my Chinese homework.

I studied the dramatic panels, the wave of arrows in the air, the swords dripping with blood, easily figuring out the good guys from the bad guys with their snarling dark faces and slit Mogul eyes. I found myself stage-whispering sounds to mimic the flying arrows and slashing swords, marvelled at the trickery of friend
and foe, and cracked my knuckles as the enemy broke the legs of the captured hero. I gulped at his dying, and heard his challenge for others to come forward, not to save him but to “Come and save China!”—the same words Father wrote in his newspaper essays, the words he taught me to write out—the final cry of a victory in defeat.

“China never lose,” Father said. “Always be Chinese.”

I looked up and remembered where I was. In the yellowish light of the pantry I could hear rising voices, impatient voices.

From the parlour, Mrs. Pan Wong and Mrs. Sui Leong were talking anxiously with the Old One, all three waiting for their fourth partner. They were cracking red melon seeds and tsk-tsking over and over about how late, as usual, Mrs. Chong was.

When I had read twelve pages—another hero, this one a master of archery, now perched on a double-spread cliff ready to plunge into the raging river below—Poh-Poh’s firm voice rose above the other two.

“Well, this is more than Chinese time to be so late.”

I heard a bustle of rattling paper bags being opened. I imagined packets of candied plums, sugared ginger, dried prunes being exchanged. They were relaxing into serious talk, sitting back on the cushions, not waiting for Mrs. Chong. Mrs. Pan Wong started to speak, and Poh-Poh abruptly said, “Shh—the kitchen!”

Now there came whisperings. I listened closely, imagining three heads bowed towards each other.
Huddling spies. I thought I heard my name pitched dramatically,
Kiam-Kim
 … 
Kiam-Kim
, but I couldn’t make out anything else. The murmuring intrigued me.

Grandmother, from where she sat in the parlour, could partly see the empty stool. She demanded I come out.
Right now!
I refused to answer. Abruptly, her tone sweetened. Perhaps she remembered her promise to Father to be patient with me.

“Come out, Kiam-Kim,” she said. “Come and join Mrs. Leong and Mrs. Wong for a visit. They want to see you.”

I slipped my comic back into its hiding place and stood up. As I walked towards them, Poh-Poh offhandedly mentioned that Grandson would be helping her cook each dish for the
sui-yah
, that Grandson had even helped her prepare the many ingredients.