Disappearing Moon Cafe

by Sky Lee

  The Benevolent Associations hadn’t given Gwei Chang any specific instructions on how to get the bones to Victoria. The assumption had been that the first bone searchers would find their own way, with the minimum of expense and manpower. All the monies for their transport had been donated, and there were so many bones left still. This was in 1892, the beginning of the retrieval of bones, which lasted well into the 1930s.

  Gwei Chang had travelled up and down the Fraser Canyon and watched many an indian canoe skimming down the white rapids, the travellers whooping and hollering, their hair plastered straight back behind their heads. He thought it an exhilarating way to travel! Those raging waters mesmerized him. They didn’t seem like dangerous obstacles. Then, one day, he saw white men, on axe-hewn rafts, come dancing around the bend, men and boxes securely tied down with a strong network of ropes. That decided him. What could be easier?

  “Look,” he said to Lee Chong, “I don’t have a wagon, but I’ve got something better, faster. More challenging.”

  Lee Chong and Gwei Chang started to build their craft. They asked around to find out how. They traded with indians for handwoven cedar ropes, and the indians told them which trees were the most buoyant; the hardwood for sternposts; tough flexibility for poles and hand-hewn rudders.

  The other chinamen fumed, “If you capsize and spill your cracked brains, that’s O.K. by us, but if you lose any bones, you’re condemning human spirits to ten thousand years of aimless wandering.”

  Lee Chong and Gwei Chang saw things differently. They told each other, “Old women, every one of them! Got no gall! We just want to give the spirits of those mountain heroes one last thrilling ride.” Lee Chong and Gwei Chang figured the spirits would laugh at peril. After all, they had died for adventure and daring. Why should they object now?

  When they finished lashing their craft together, Lee Chong and Gwei Chang figured it could fall down hundreds of feet of a waterfall without splintering. They were ready to bet their lives on it, but were the dead ones prepared to risk their souls on another long shot?

  Well, in order to avoid the wrong people answering that question, early at dawn the next morning, with cedar boxes full of bones lashed down in the centre of the raft, Lee Chong and Gwei Chang pushed off. Once out of Chen’s protective cul-de-sac, the eddies of the big river grabbed the craft and threw them along the most dizzying, joyful ride of their lives.

  The sun shone through the fine mist spray which lifted out of the river and doused them with fancy. They just let the river take them. Sometimes the river was calm and giving; sometimes it knocked their senses askew. The world encircling them was raw and beautiful. The life that blew into them was inspiring and intoxicating. They careened along, hemmed in by the steep rise of gorges and canyon cliffs. Sometimes the river was fretful, contorting back on itself, treacherous. Other times, the river sprawled and meandered through pastures and rich flatlands; they glided along its shimmering reflections. The pair felt like they had ridden the river dragon, and it had lifted their souls skyward. At the end of their journey, they walked away transformed, feeling a little closer to immortality.

  Gwei Chang parted ways with the bones at the bone-house in Victoria and with Lee Chong on Tang People’s Street, and began his trek back home to Kelora.

  I

  WAITING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

  KAE YING WOO

  1986

  I’m so very disappointed. I’ve been brought up to believe in kinship, or those with whom we share. I thought that by applying attention to all the important events such as the births and the deaths, the intricate complexities of a family with chinese roots could be massaged into a suant, digestible unit. Like a herbal pill—I thought I could swallow it and my mind would become enlightened.

  All my life, I have been faithfully told, and I have also respectfully remembered. My maternal grandmother, for whom the chinese term is Poh Poh, had one son and two daughters. Her son, my uncle, whom I must address as A Queu, married a girl from Jung Saan district, whom I must call A Queu-Mu, to indicate that she is my auntie by marriage. She had three walloping huge baby girls. Poh Poh’s eldest daughter, my mother, had me—her only child and a scrawny one at that. Poh Poh’s younger daughter, my blood aunt, died of pneumonia as a young woman, when I was still a baby. She didn’t ever marry or multiply.

  My paternal grandmother, or Ngen Ngen, had three children—only my father survived. Both Ngen Ngen and my paternal grandfather, or Lo Yeh, came from destitute backgrounds, torn from starving families too feeble to stay together—but since they had lost contact with those left for dead in China over a half century ago, there isn’t much for me to remember about that side of the family. My mother’s side is more vibrant, to my way of thinking. My mother sponsored Poh Poh’s sister’s oldest son, or Ai Bew Sook (which doesn’t have an equivalent in english) and his family over in 1959, when Canada’s immigration policies finally softened with prosperity, and we’ve maintained conscientious ties ever since. Especially after Poh Poh died in 1962, of cancer. Her husband, my maternal grandfather, or Gong Gong, puts me in a bit of a dilemma, because the family tree gets tricky here. Let’s just say for now that Gong Gong died in 1972, maybe 1942.

  So, having swallowed the pill, here I am, still waiting. For enlightenment. Disappointed, yet eternally optimistic!

  Oh, and I’ve been told that it is important to keep a family strong and together, especially in this day and age, so I’ve come to expect the ceremonies and assemblies that come with families. At funerals, full-month parties, graduations, it was easy to see an inevitable logic underlining life, a crisp beginning and a well-penned conclusion, nice and neat, and as reassuring as receiving a certificate for good attendance or a gold star at the top of the page. Although chinese parents tend not to acknowledge rewards.

  “So what!” they said after glancing at my report card beaming with A’s. Instead, I was told that excellence was the natural and orderly progression of . . . of things, I guess! Why do I feel they have secrets?

  Even grown women get conned into going further. I was. Weddings are celebratory.

  “So why don’t we get pregnant, dear?”

  “O.K., honey!”

  I get tricked because I want to be so damned perfect all the time. Now I’ve found that nobody has told me the whole messy truth about anything!

  My mother says, benevolently, “Drink this ginger water. It chases the wind away. You have a lot of wind in your system after birthing a baby.”

  “Maah,” I ask with my whining voice, “why didn’t you tell me it was going to be so hard?”

  “No good to dwell on these things,” the other one answers.

  “You’ll get better! Drink!”

  In all my thirty-six years as a young, healthy, able body, I’ve never been so degraded; never known so much raw pain; never faced such demented panic! In my dreams, a fat, slippery baby suddenly appeared between my legs. The gore was red catsup. I remained calm and dignified, and appeared brave.

  Actually, I should feel more shame for having made such an awful scene at my so-called delivery. I admit that I lost control. Well, panicked, in fact, screeching and quivering in front of strangers! How many times in our lives do we lose control like that? I never did until then, and I really felt like I was going to die! A close scrape with death always makes us want to rethink our lives or, to be more candid, rewrite it wherever possible.

  But first I had to get therapeutically angry at the two-ply, sterile masks. Mad at the world for unfairly dividing itself into hormonal camps—those who curse (my obstetrician) and those who burst, then are stitched and stuffed with bloodied gauze!

  A pretty blonde nurse in a pink uniform arrives by my bedside.

  “When can I have another injection?” I ask.

  “Anytime,” she replies cheerfully, “you want it.”

  “Now!” I indicate.

  “Being a nurse is good,” says one mother in chinese, smiling and nodding just as cheerfully back at the nurse, try
ing to change the subject. “Nice and clean. Wear pink dresses. Play with babies all day.” Yet when the pink nurse turns away, the other examines every inch of her back as if she were very alien.

  After the injection, the world recedes to a comfortable distance again. The baby, riding in what appears to be a clear plastic bubble on top of a cart, is rolled in for a feed by another nurse, this one older with a ruddy face, singing (to the tune of “A Huntin’ We Will Go!”):

  To mommy we will roll,

  To mommy we will roll.

  Hi ho the cheer . . . i . . . ooo

  To mommy we will go!

  I thank her politely.

  “This one’s got a big head,” she adds. Yes, I know; I smile wanly like a newly delivered mother.

  My mom, who must be feeling like a venerable grandmother, scoops him up, and with intense concentration unwraps him. She starts to count fingers and toes. She unravels his tightly clenched fists and reads his wizened little face. She pinches his earlobes and prods his entire skull. Peering at private parts, she is thorough; even the underarms have to be examined. Afterwards, she sits down on her chair again, looking as if she wishes with all her heart she could unzip him to continue with her search inside.

  “What are you looking for, Mah?” I ask, although I figure I already know.

  “Nothing.” She suddenly stiffens in a way that is very familiar to me. And she knows! That small gesture’s hidden meaning is not lost on me. We have communicated too much and too hard for me not to know, although on the day of the birth of my son, we are all jumpy, like fish out of water. Details could be misinterpreted.

  “Ah hah!” I feel like cackling. “Charlie Chan! Cat-and-mouse and mothers!” Great melodrama, a stiffened mother, a stoned daughter and a sleeping newborn grandson together in a boxlike hospital room. Life is an afternoon TV screen. Perhaps if we were caucasian and a little more straightforward with each other, my next line might be, “But mother dear, somehow I can’t help feeling that there is something amiss.” Instead, I watch without looking. My eyes are half-closed, and I finish my ginger water. In a few moments, it will come—the. . .

  “Sigh,” sighs my mother. Then another sigh—heavier, sad and troubled! “I see now the baby is fine. The doctor also said the baby is just fine. Ahh . . . I’ve waited a long time to make sure . . . for your sake, daughter.”

  Ahh, for my sake! I was wise to stay mute, staring at an exploding fuschia plant barely contained in its delicately woven basket, suspended from the curtain rail. It is a gift from one of my mother’s cousins, whom I must call A Ai Bui Jie every time we come face to face. I wonder if she shouldn’t have sent me an oak tree instead—old and hard and stubborn, with leaves like ideas that hang on withering, fighting the seasons.

  “You don’t know, A Kae,” whispers my mother, “but there has been much trouble in our family. It’s best that what I tell you does not go beyond these four walls.”

  Thus, the story—the well-kept secret that I had actually unearthed years ago—finally begins to end for me with the birth of my son, Robert Man Jook Lee, on April 29, 1986. It took quite the sentimental occasion for my mother to finally loosen a little of her iron grip on her emotions in order to reveal a little of her past that she thought so shameful—the same past that has shaped so much of my own life, with evil tentacles that could have even wormed into the innocent, tender parts of my baby. No, no, it will not be so unless I make it so. And I will leave it boxed in our past—mine and my mother’s, the four walls that we share! At least what they say about childbirth is true—that it’s always worth it no matter how hard it was.

  The story began, I guess, with my great-grandmother, Lee Mui Lan, sometime in June 1924, as she stood behind the cash register at the front of the even-now famous Disappearing Moon Cafe, 50 East Pender Street, Vancouver, British Columbia.

  LEE MUI LAN

  1924

  Mui Lan stood very still, severely dressed in a black robe and matching trousers, a concentrated frown straining her hard-boiled face. She was forty-four years old, yet despite her smooth, egg-shaped face, she appeared older. Faced with Mui Lan, people always presented a brave show of politeness and respect, but they tended to avoid her, perhaps because after some contact with her, no matter how minimal, they were always left with a faint, dry dusting of dissatisfaction blown over their faces and shoulders.

  If this seemed contrary to her thirteen-year-old role as proprietress of the busiest, largest restaurant in Chinatown, and as the wife of the most admired and likable businessman in Chinatown, well then, life must be full of vexations. But people had a simpler reason for not liking her. Perhaps it was because she had done very well for an ignorant village woman, and under the same circumstances in which a lot of people had not done very well at all. So it must have chafed them to see the chronic pain on her face, as if to suggest that she suffered more than they did. After all, they’d all known the same bare-boned poverty.

  “Eh, Mui Lan-ah . . .” a coarse voice leapt into the midmorning calm of the restaurant, “reaping in the dough, and you still look greedy!” Two laundresses came in by the kitchen door at the back, a young one and an old one—mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. They carried heavy laundry bundles in their arms, and each had a sleeping baby strapped to her back. Big, healthy babies, with their adorable round heads dangling and lolling, their fine wispy hair fluttering with every breeze and movement. Babies were such a rare sight in the new world that Mui Lan immediately perked up in their presence.

  “Go die, you stinky bitch!” Mui Lan countered good-naturedly at the older. She dived under the glass display case, in search of candies to poke into the ungrasping hands of the infants.

  “We’re almost broke! These old, overseas chinese are so tightfisted they can’t even afford a cup of hot water, never mind a restaurant meal,” she continued at the top of her lungs, oblivious to the sprinkling of patrons a few feet away. And they seemingly oblivious to her.

  “Ahh, this restaurant business!” she sighed dramatically after she resurfaced, checking the tight bun at the nape of her neck with a rigid flick of her arms. “Can’t even make money if we sold twenty banquet tables every night! That’s the honest-to-goodness truth! Drink a cup of tea, Auntie!”

  “Hey, you know . . . in devil talk,” the craftier, bolder, older one grinned slyly, “‘ca-fei’ means coffee place. That means a small place. Why don’t you name your restaurant ‘Chicken Chow Mein Palace’? That means a big, fancy place. Devils like to eat like that.”

  “Ahh go die!” Mui Lan retorted loudly. “Who cares how those devils talk! You see them poking their big noses in Tang People’s Street more and more these days. Who’s going to sit around waiting for business from them! Those little cow-sitters . . . keeping O.K.?”

  “Useless as ever.” The baby-bearers threw their noses over their shoulders for a second. “Eat, sleep, excrete. Then eat more, and excrete more. Who needs them!” they added modestly, disparaging their offspring for the sake of politeness.

  “You have prosperity!” Mui Lan answered patly, her eyes glued to the soft-snoring infants with the same intense cupidity that always cut conversations short.

  “You will too, Auntie, soon.”

  “Yes, very soon!” the youthful one echoed as they backed off.

  Not until the two women had left did Mui Lan’s brow furrow deep. With a drawn-out sigh, she deflated until her head drooped onto her chest again. After five years, three months and eighteen days, you’d think the old bag would tire of the same remark. It irked Mui Lan to think that that one—so poor that she and her daughter-in-law scrubbed pounds of table linen for a few cents a day—should have grandsons popping out every year. She herself was rich enough to buy a building for a half-dozen grandsons, yet she was still waiting after five years, three months, and soon nineteen days.

  And although Mui Lan was not aware of it, their closeness also annoyed her. She even envied them for their prosaic work because it was something that the two women
had in common and did together. A singularity of purpose; the babies would also grow up close to each other. Together, the two women gave an impression of strength, as if they knew something that she didn’t.

  “Bah, who needs them!” she muttered to herself, not realizing that she referred to a faraway home in her heart that had disintegrated over the years—her old home in the village, made up almost entirely of women except for the children and a few old men. At the time, Mui Lan’s position in the village was a high status one. Her husband’s overseas prosperity gave her a lot of clout in her community, and she enjoyed that. She missed the daily sweep of woman-talk from morning till night, about who received a letter and who didn’t get money; whose husband was coming home and whose son was being sent for. All of them desperately weaving tenuous, invisible threads over the ocean, to cling cobweblike to their men and sons in the Gold Mountains.

  Mui Lan remembered once visiting a household—all women—where there was a mother whose son had committed suicide rather than suffer the loneliness high up on some desolate mountain in Wyoming. Wasn’t her son’s agony the same pain suffered by all their absent men? So the village women stayed up with her to wail through the night. For Mui Lan, it felt good to wail together, to be filled with something, even if it was just a wariness of other people’s grief.

  One day, Mui Lan received the first indications that she and her boy were being sent for, and she became the brightest centre of attention. A new bride all over again! It was like being chosen by God himself. Her neighbours gazing at her as if she glowed; furthermore, she began to believe it herself. In this welter of woman-sounds, Mui Lan was at her happiest. Propelled by women who could only dream of such a reunion with their men, she landed in the Gold Mountains, full of warmth and hope. Little did she realize that people’s most fervent hope can turn into their worst nightmare.