A Superior Man

by Paul Yee

  “Didn’t spank him when he didn’t listen, did you?” he muttered. “He ran everywhere, screaming like a monkey.”

  “Why didn’t you let him bawl and starve from time to time?” he demanded. “Then he would have seen how our sweat is water for the rice crop.”

  “To keep his food warm,” he sniffed, “you covered it with your own hands. So useless.”

  Grandmother in turn railed at Grandfather for sending her son too far away.

  “The Yang men in South Ocean were too busy gambling and whoring to guide my son,” she insisted. “The dropped bowl broke, but not one good shard was left.”

  “Men must come home to teach their sons,” she said, “and listen to their wives, not spend their nights in town.

  “When only one nib of a son survives,” she yelled, “you keep him close by.”

  Mother kept quiet: she was worse off than the children. We ran to our grandparents who sometimes stopped her from beating us and scolded her bad temper. But when Father slapped or beat her, she had no one to hide behind, seeing that our grandparents were the fiercest voices nagging Father to reproach her.

  Then, during her persistent pestering, Grandmother revealed by mistake Grandfather’s veto of the first bride that she had picked for Father: “Didn’t I say that that girl was best of all? She knew sweet words, knew how to sew sturdy shirts. Even without rice she could cook porridge. She would have taught our boy how to be a good husband.”

  Mother’s neck burned as if roasted and she slammed our chipped dishes.

  “Second best, you’re always a guest,” she lamented. “I knew people were hiding a secret from me.”

  On and on she went. “Out of ten matchmakers, nine are liars.”

  “They sneer at me even though I had two strong sons.”

  “In good times, praise the pig’s big litter; in bad times, blame the pig’s big belly.”

  After her death, the neighbours quickly changed their tune and marvelled without shame at the care she had spent on her final deed. Her hair had been washed, then coiled and pinned up, as for a special event. She put on her best clothes and only shoes, saved for temple visits, knowing full well that no one wanted to wash and dress a suicide’s corpse that seethed with rage and ill will. Her body hung from the main beam that ran the width of the house, making clear her anger at my grandparents. If there had been any thought of sparing them the stigma of a haunted house, then Ma’s final trip would have led into the hills to a sturdy tree. Or she could have gone home to her mother, but that would only have spread our great shame even wider.

  Neighbours on one side of us moved away and that house was left empty, but Grandfather refused to leave because our house was newly built after the Guest Wars. Grandmother nagged Grandfather until he begged help from a priest renowned for cleansing homes. He paced our courtyard in a golden robe and placed candles, wine, and a woodblock print of mighty Ghost Subjugator on an altar. His first weapon was a sword, woven from brass coins. Then he marched through the house with a bowl of smoky incense, chanting and swinging a horse-tail whisk. He chopped the tail off a small black dog and dragged the blubbing puppy through the house, using its trail of blood to draw out evil spirits. Long strings of firecrackers were set off. Then the dog was taken away and killed.

  I planned to do what my rogue father should have done long ago: leave my mix-blood offspring with his local mother and return to my homeland. I saw myself telling Grandmother about taking Peter to Mary and letting Grandfather grin, sigh with extended relief, and rub his ever-aching neck. Only from his tight grip of my arm would I be able to tell how deeply pleased he was. He would inform the clan elders and all his friends about my gruelling quest, about Mary bursting into tears at regaining her son and dropping to her knees to thank me. Grandfather would loudly report this to the ancestors at the hilltop graves, hurling his words through the incense and ashes into the other world. My deed would be sure to attract their blessings, unlike the disgrace of my parents. Then, in secret, I would visit Mother’s unmarked grave to tell her that I had helped her grandson Peter find a good home. That would bring her a small measure of comfort.

  She was not a woman who nagged Father for money. She only wanted tuition for my brother and me. When thinking of gifts for Grandmother and Younger Sister, I wondered what to buy for Mother, had she still been alive. She was easily pleased. Tiny earrings were fine, but I wanted something that would never be pawned on behalf of the family. She deserved something that belonged to her solely and permanently. Only she had ever set out to make us children laugh. After dinner, when the dishes were washed, she sang out:

  Come, come sit,

  Eat sweet bits.

  Piggy pulls the wood,

  Doggy tends the fire,

  Kitty brings a bench

  Letting Granny rest!

  When she named each animal, we all pointed at someone in the circle. If every finger landed on the same person, we hooted and the victim stomped his foot and cried out, “Not me! Not me!”

  As the train slowed to approach Spuzzum, I dropped the pack to the ground, recalling too late the earthenware jugs on my back. The jump wasn’t far, but I grunted on landing, as though leaping from a high wall. I hobbled on sore ankles into the town, cursing how everything in Gold Mountain brought pain.

  Redbeard shops were built close to the station while Chinese ones lay farther away. Flimsy boarding halls stood as forlorn as those that we had seen earlier. The town was lopsided like a wind-tipped scarecrow: all buildings stood on one side of the railway, its mountain flank, because the tracks ran too close to the shoreline edge.

  The cookhouse door was open, trading sunlight for greasy smoke and cheap incense.

  Three men sat around a low crate, two of them eating and slurping. The wall’s rough planks were cracking; small windows held no glass. The kitchen lay empty. I untied my pack and found cold boiled water at the counter. Speaking a hick Yenping dialect, the men glanced at me and then away to talk even louder, debating if winter would come early or late, based on predictions from the Chinese almanac. One man insisted the almanac was never wrong; the others disagreed. They were testing my patience over this petty topic, watching my temper, wondering if I might be provoked into a fight at being ignored.

  Finally, one man shoved blackened feet into wooden clogs and stomped over. I called for rice and eggs, the easiest dish to cook. When he went to the stove, I called out, “I need a guide to take me to Lytton.”

  “Sam Bing Lew knows people and can talk,” said Cook.

  “People in Yale praised him too,” I said. “But he’s not right for me.”

  “Men want to be left alone. One fellow bought land and couldn’t bear to leave it. Another man picked up gold dust, but just enough to stay alive each year. He had nothing to send or take home. Men use nicknames and keep quiet. It’s easy to hide.”

  “Sam found them?”

  “They still avoided their relatives. A rich man came one spring and stayed until winter. He walked up and down the railway line, into every camp and Company office, seeking his son. He trekked to the gold fields. People wouldn’t help. ‘Don’t bother me,’ they said, ‘You make trouble.’ Sam found the man, not far from here, in Similkameen.”

  “People in Lytton can help you.” The diner wore a blue smock. “Don’t listen to the cook. Sam is his customer; he eats here. His grandmother lives nearby, in the Native village.”

  “Sam’s all right,” said Cook. “But he gets no respect, like us Yenping folk.”

  He brought my food. “Last year, Sam went to the graveyard. He came running back, his face all red. His father’s grave was empty. Everything was gone—bones, marker, rotted wood. The father’s friends had dug up the bones, cleaned them, and sent them to China. Sam howled. He grabbed one man and slammed his head into a log wall. He pulled down shelves of goods in the other man’s store. People didn’t know who to help. The police dragged him to jail.”

  “Sam is a stupid pig,” said Blue Smock,
waving off a pesky fly. “His father’s eldest son lived in China, so Sam had no need to fuss.”

  “Not so,” said Cook. “The son at home was adopted, but Sam was trueborn.”

  “That cockhead can’t go around beating our people,” said a man in a knitted hat. “I would have smacked him.”

  “You have no spine!” cried Blue Smock. “Every time you see Sam, you run away!”

  “Sam isn’t Chinese.” Knitted Hat gazed at me. “Don’t follow him!”

  “Look at old Yang’s daughter,” said Blue Smock. “All those mix-bloods are crazy-crazy.”

  “She’ll come back,” Cook insisted. “Wait and see.”

  “Yang the washman married off his mix-blood daughter Jane to Wee-yum, the redbeard hotel man.” Blue Smock grinned at me, taking pleasure from Yang’s mess. “A week ago, Jane ran off. Wee-yum demanded his bride-money back. Yang refused. Wee-yum shouted, ‘You and Jane, you cheated me. You told her to run. Townspeople are laughing at me.’”

  “Jane and Wee-yum are the crooked ones,” said Knitted Hat. “They’re cheating Yang. When Yang gives back the bride-money, then those two will be laughing in their bed.”

  “Wee-yum has a gun,” said Blue Smock. “Yang should run.”

  “A redbeard paid for a mix-blood bride?” I frowned. “Never heard of it.”

  “Pretty girl,” said Cook. “Lots of men were watching her.”

  “Will you use Sam?” Knitted Hat looked at me and gestured at Blue Smock and at Cook. “Who do you listen to?”

  “Go ask Yang about Sam,” said Cook. “You can buy a bath with hot water there.”

  I enjoyed my meal. No brat here to fuss and demand food.

  Sam arrived, tugging the boy along. Peter’s face was smeared with saliva, dirt, and tears.

  “You made him cry,” I exclaimed. Sam was wearing a different shirt and looked as if he had washed his face.

  “He ran shouting to my grandmother as if they were family. She pushed him away. He fell and started bawling.”

  Sam wasn’t carrying his pack. He must have left it in his village.

  “Didn’t I say I could gallop like a horse?” I opened my arms. “I crossed that trestle, no trouble.”

  “Liar. You rode the train.”

  “I walked my aching legs to death.”

  “Let me watch you run over the next trestle carrying your son and I’ll believe you.” He reached for my pack. “Go to Yale and take your boy to China.”

  “Listen,” I said. “At the next trestle, I’ll take off my pack, and you can carry it across. That way your goods are safe.”

  “My grandmother says the boy will have a better life in China.”

  “I’ll give money to Mary.”

  “For what? One meal? One month? A whole lifetime?”

  “One year at school,” I said, “a sojourner enrolled his son, born to a dark woman in the South Ocean. Classmates chopped off the boy’s pigtail and held him down and painted his face black with ink. They said he wasn’t Chinese. They tore off his clothes and chased him home naked. Why? They said, ‘His mother’s people dance in the forest wearing nothing.’ Complain to the teacher? The man snickered and called the boy a monkey, a bastard, a mule.”

  “When I was small, my father promised to take me to China.”

  “You must have looked like a China man then.”

  “My father said the man is the line, not the woman.”

  “What did his parents say?”

  “Mister, want to play? Want to play?”

  A Native woman chanted Chinese words in a high voice and tugged my arm. Her blouse was filthy, her skirt swept the ground, and her hair, though coiled in a bun, was coated with dust. She had a girl’s slim body but an older woman’s face, crumpled with wrinkles.

  She frowned at Sam and kept her distance. To annoy him, I caught her gaze, nodded and grinned, as if pondering her offer. I strolled around her, peering here and there to inspect her. She lifted her skirt and showed callused feet, soles pink against the dark skin.

  “Mister, want to play?” Her next words sounded like good price for good time.

  Sam yelled and ran at her, his fist raised. She made a sour face and flounced away. When he headed off with my pack, I called, “When is the next train to Lytton?”

  “You don’t listen!” He stopped. “Go back to Yale!”

  “A boy belongs with his trueborn mother.”

  “You just want to crawl between her legs.” He stomped away. “Chinese whores are crying for customers. Go visit them.”

  He wasn’t listening either. There was no stronger porter here than me. I could sell his goods with no effort. If he had seen me touting boat tickets in Victoria, he wouldn’t walk away. I could talk to any man. I knew how to bargain, knew the lowest price, knew when to almost walk away. If he saw the roll of bills I was carrying, he would fall over. Who the hell could Sam hire out here? His people were busy, caching food supplies to last through the winter, not loitering. He and I, we could help one another.

  But China men didn’t beg from mix-bloods.

  The bell over the washhouse door jangled, and I propped it open to let in more light. The building was battered, built before the railway, but the shelves holding finished laundry were glossy from a recent coat of paint. A pendulum clock and paper calendar hung on the wall. Beside the front door, someone had hammered a row of nails, their gleam long gone. An umbrella and a woman’s straw bonnet hung on them. Toys lay in the corner, a drum with one stick, a mop-haired doll, a wooden block with holes for marbles. The brat ran to some crinkled, rusted tin soldiers that looked like salvage from the garbage dump and tried to stand them up.

  Yang came from the back, wiping his hands on his pants. He was middle-aged, with forehead neatly shaved and thick short eyebrows. His face lit up on seeing the brat. He went to squat by him, fishing out scraps of wood to help prop up the soldiers. The boy knocked them over and laughed. Yang laughed too, and stood the soldiers straight. Again the boy knocked them over, this time clapping his hands as well. Yang looked at me. But instead of giving me a hearty welcome, he kept quiet, forcing me to speak.

  “This is my son.” I faltered. “I’m taking him to his mother. Children should be with their trueborn mothers.”

  He went behind his counter and clicked his abacus, which drew the boy to him. Yang put it down and let him flick the beads.

  What an oddball! Few shopkeepers would let dirty children play with a tool so crucial to reckoning one’s wealth.

  Without warning, he barked, “You walked from Yale?”

  “Started this morning,” I said.

  “All the way?” His snort called me a liar.

  I lifted my chin and said, “We go even farther.”

  “North?”

  “Of course.” I said, irritated. “Is there another way?”

  “The Native people of Spuzzum here have trails that go west over the mountains.”

  “Cookhouse man said you welcome travellers,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “He said there was hot water for bathing.”

  The adjacent room contained lines of drying shirts and trousers, and the smell of soap and starch. Light from the back door showed grimy Hudson Bay blankets on the log walls, the gaps plugged with white plaster. Steam rose from a large bucket atop the stove.

  On the back porch was a big tin tub, barrels of water, and bars of soap on a plate. I wasted no hot water on the brat, who yowled at my scrubbing and flung soap suds into my eyes. I fought to hold him still and wash his hair. After drying him, I tried to dress him, but he insisted on doing it himself. I threw out the slurry and scraped myself clean before refilling the tub. My last bath had been over a week ago, in Victoria.

  During my washhouse job, each day I strolled clean as a newborn baby, always bending over to sniff the sweetness in my clothes. People on the street asked why my nose needed so much wiping. It had been easy to toss my pants or shirt into the cauldrons of clothes being boiled and
bleached. It was easy to dry them too, with a roof overhead when it rained and a hot stove when it was cold. Too bad the coolies hadn’t been able to afford the washhouse.

  I pulled my knees to my chin and slid into the hot water, shutting my eyes. A smarter fellow, I told myself, would have paid fifty dollars to the Church Mission and left the country right away. If I didn’t need to cross those trestles, I’d turn around and head south at once.

  The washman padded in with two large kettles of hot water. When I thanked him, he nodded and turned away. But then he came back and stood staring at my cock until I tossed my wash cloth over it. There weren’t enough women here, so men sometimes made do with the backsides of workmates. He seemed sullen; a pretty daughter running off must have caused him much anger and loss of face. I wanted him to be jolly and friendly so the brat could tell his mother tales of kindly China men selling us food, giving us water, and playing soldier with him.

  I pulled on my dirty clothes but washed my wet smelly stockings and hung them to dry. In the storefront, Yang sat on the floor across from the boy, the abacus between them. The boy flicked the beads one at a time from his side to the other side, moving from row to row, shouting, “Shoo, shoo, shoo.” Yang sent the beads clicking back as fast as he could go, calling “Woong, woong, woong” with each snap of his fingers. The only grown men I knew who played with children were simpletons who had never found their adult minds.

  “I need a guide to take me to Lytton and find the boy’s mother.”

  “Ask at the cookhouse?” He didn’t look up.

  “They said Sam Bing Lew, but he’s not right for me.”

  “Sam helps everyone.”

  I should have expected a man with a mix-blood daughter to side with Sam.

  “That Sam is a brave man. He went to get free land,” Yang declared. “The office worm told him that China men couldn’t have any. Sam said, ‘I was born here. I’m Canadian.’ The office worm laughed. ‘You’re Native, and your people can’t take free land.’ Everyone snickered, for days. China men said, ‘Sam, you’re no China man. Go claim the free land.’ The Native people said, ‘Sam, you’re not one of us. Go get some free land.’”