by Sky Lee
Lotteries, at least four a day. Even the most cloistered of merchants’ wives, who never set one lotus foot outside of their husbands’ homes, participated whole-heartedly, through runners who were either young boys or old gossipy men. This guessing game on Choy Fuk’s male potency had to be more of a private, ongoing joke, but this was the first time Ting An had heard of such unrestrained malevolence.
When they found their table, Yee Gaw immediately yanked Ting An off his wooden feet onto a nearby chair, and asked around, “Where is he?”
“Strangely enough, the man’s not here,” someone answered sarcastically, setting off a round of ribaldry.
“Give me a drink!” Ting An demanded gruffly. He knew these guys had no heart. They had always hated Choy Fuk because he was not one of them and despised him all the more for trying so hard to be. Even if the poor idiot had been sitting right in the middle of the club, these underhanded pranks would still have continued right under his nose. Ting An began to sweat. Who knows? This could even be happening to him too, right now. He knocked back his liquor in a couple of gulps. Soon his head began to clear a bit.
Whooping and hollering from the next table caught his attention, signalling a potential win. A crowd gathered to watch the finale. He looked over at the unshaven faces focussed exclusively on their chips. There was a blind lunacy in their eyes, like the full moon reflected in a wine bowl. Greasy hair snapped back only when the length of it threatened the vision of both eyes. These gamblers might have been there for days; shirts almost shredding off their backs, flies carelessly left undone after a piss, suspenders dangling. Dirty plates strewn about; they had guzzled their food without missing a turn.
Yee Gaw had long ago slipped out of sight in the clouded room. Someone with a pipe clenched between his teeth asked, “You going to play, A Ting?”
“No money,” he answered flatly.
“You, no money! You dead boy, who’s going to be taken in by that?” someone else retorted.
“Go die!” another voice. “You’re just jealous someone else has a bit of money saved up. You good-for-nothing.” The talk rumbled around the table like an empty stomach. Ting An deliberately kept quiet, his lips pressed tight so he wouldn’t have to feed it.
“Look at that fat proprietor. You tell me if he’s not already eyeing you suspiciously. This isn’t a kiddies’ club like Kuo Seun, you know. They don’t like it when you sit around not playing.”
“Give me a bottle then!” Ting An demanded.
Yee Gaw came back with news that no one had guessed the right number of days. “They’re all way off,” he snickered.
However, in a case like this, the nearest number got the jackpot. No one had come to claim it yet. Everyone agreed that a six-month lottery was long enough for this sort of thing. After that, Choy Fuk was a dead boy.
“Anyway, I didn’t win,” announced Yee Gaw, chewing up his lottery ticket out of habit.
SONG ANG
1925
Choy Fuk woke up in the waitress’s little hovel with a start. It was so dark that it took a few seconds for his eyes to find the outline of the window in the pitch black. It couldn’t be more than a couple of hours past midnight. The stove was shedding the last bit of warmth that it had left. There’d probably still be enough glowing embers to restart the fire with a handful of kindling, and he would have liked to be warmer, but the waitress was a frugal person and it was her house. He felt her stir. She was a light sleeper, and she always knew when he awoke.
“I’ll throw a few more logs on the fire,” she said, starting to get up. She knew he had to go.
“No, no, A Song! Stay in bed a while!” He called her by her name, which was Song Ang. “I want to talk to you.”
It felt good to talk into the dark, because it was faceless. “You’ll have to get pregnant, A Song. If not by me, by somebody else. But you must have a baby.” His voice stripped as bare as a beggar.
After a long pause, the waitress said, “I don’t know if I can do that to Mui Lan.”
“Do it for me then! I’m not asking for her. I’m asking for myself. You know that I need to show them a baby. You know I have no other choice. Please, don’t do this to me!” He was desperate.
“I haven’t been that bad to you, have I?” he dared to ask, but he didn’t dare wait for an answer. “I realize that you haven’t been doing this just for the money. I know that you have a good heart. But . . . I can give you more money—much more if you want. Just name it! As a favour for all your patience and . . . what you’ve had to give up.”
An obliterating stillness followed. Who knew if he was getting through to her! She was like a succession of closed doors. But his mention of money seemed to give him more strength.
“Look,” he decided to try more directives, “all you need to do is go out and find yourself a fellow. How hard can that be? Who’s going to be the wiser? And you’ll actually be doing my mother a big favour. You’re very devoted to Mui Lan, aren’t you? Think about it, the more this goes on, the more obvious it’s going to become. And who’s that going to hurt? Listen, I want you to give my mother what she asks. And believe me, you will be fulfilling her most fervent wish.” The more he spoke, the more he felt like his old self again. He thought he sounded rather convincing. Moreover, he knew her; she wouldn’t say no when a friend was in trouble.
“What have I had to give up?” asked the waitress.
“What?” He couldn’t understand her question.
“You said, ‘What you’ve had to give up.’”
“Oh, that! Well, you know . . . a lot, I suppose . . .” he was reluctant to say.
“And what have you had to give up?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered a little too patiently. She didn’t try any more.
“Well? What do you say?” he pressed.
TING AN
1925
Still later that morning, Ting An woke up with a burning dryness in his throat. He had to sit up on the edge of his bunk because the sick feeling in his stomach started to rise, threatening to eject. His temple throbbed relentlessly, and he needed to prop up his head with his shaky hands; he felt very sorry for himself. Stupid to drink so much again! Made him want to dig his nails into his eye sockets. Maybe he could rip away the hurt.
Then he heard a small cough. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something to focus on, away from his own misery. His sore eyes trailed across the squalid room and settled on the other plank beds. The rumpled one across from his was still occupied. He reached out with his foot and nudged the sleeping body with his big toe.
“Hey, Big Brother . . .” Ting An had no idea who was sleeping next to him. There were four wooden beds built into each corner of the room, and the men who slept on them came and went. He just had the idea that the guy was probably broke. “You wanna earn a couple of bucks today, go to the alley behind Disappearing Moon and ask around!”
Even before the man could identify himself, Ting An had pushed a hat onto his head, his feet into his boots, and was walking out the doorway to start his morning pickup and delivery route.
In the stables on Union Street, Ting An found himself fingering the old bridle for Loongan, or Dragon Eyes. Its leather, salty and brittle, should have been replaced long ago, but the old mare that he’d been harnessing up to the same wagon painted with “Lee, Wong & Yee Produce Co. est’d 1895” for the last twelve years was gentle, plodding along the same routes for so long that he barely used any pressure on the reins any more.
Lee had died suddenly twenty years ago, sitting in this very wagon. The ghost authorities said that his heart had stopped, but Yee maintained that there were lots of foul ways to make a chinaman’s heart stop. Unnerved by his partner’s death, Yee sold out his share and went back to the Four Counties District where he lived comfortably enough. Only Wong Gwei Chang remained in the Gold Mountains and thrived. The little vegetable pedlar fattened into a restauranteur. Then he bought buildings and rented them out. Recently he’d
been developing an import/export business—rice, tea, silk, herbal medicine and the like, to be wholesaled to out-of-town and occidental companies. Gwei Chang was not an exacting businessman; he was just flexible enough to use all of the best resources available to him. Unlike many others, he was not afraid to deal with white-ghost businesses, so the money rolled into his hands rather than someone else’s.
“Step right up to them!” he advised Ting An when he was a youngster. “Ask them for an estimate! If you don’t like their price, say so! So what if you don’t ‘speakee Engrishee’ so good; our money, their money, ‘alla same’!”
Ting An had worked for Wong Gwei Chang for eighteen years, more or less as his apprentice, although no one had ever specifically referred to him as such. Years ago, he had always been at the big boss’s side and had taken his orders directly from him; but back then the business had been small, so no one thought much of that. Now the companies had multiplied, and naturally his position had been elevated as well. But he was such a modest man that workers approached him for direction without even realizing that he was in fact second-in-command. People remarked that he spoke english like a native speaker; he behaved much like a ghost too, never very visible. He drove the horse and wagon around town a lot, and he bought and sold stuff, hauled things from here to there, not much different from anybody else who worked for Boss Wong. Well, he also kept some of the books, but how many realized that? He dealt with most of the business outside of Chinatown too. There were lots of others who could get by in english, but Ting An got along really well with the devils. He had a way about him, and he was the reliable type who didn’t shoot off his mouth. People readily accepted that he was a loner, more at home in the stables than with his own kind. He preferred the grassy smell of horse piss to the nauseating stench of his own cramped human condition.
Every morning, Loongan’s friendly horse sneeze and the same loving snort greeted him as soon as he stepped over the doorsill. Patient, adoring eyes watched him as he shovelled a ration of oats out of a can for her. Hers was an unconditional love forever.
On this particular morning, while Loongan munched, he stroked her and whispered into her twitching ears as if she were his only friend, “You saw what happened. You tell me if I’m a rotten egg.” But he knew that he was safe with Loongan. He cleaned out her stall.
For Wong Ting An, it would have been so easy to steep in the bitter brew that was his life. Days which were surly; men without women. When he was a boy in Lytton, his grandfather used to take him to the work camps, full of chinamen. He remembered a few of them, lonely for their own children, liked to play with him. They’d pull him up onto their laps in front of a rough table to show him charcoal characters scratched on torn newspaper. The character for “good,” they said piously, trying to teach him reverence, was a boy and girl together. Male and female together to express harmony, that all was well. Even at that early age, Ting An disapproved vehemently. He had never known a female in his life, and wasn’t he good enough? Why did he need a girl to be good? There wasn’t even a female within miles of there. Easily exasperated, the chinamen swept him emphatically off their knees.
All his life, he’d had to tread quietly among them, careful not to be touched by their violence. Despair was so infectious among orphans and orphan-men; he did not want the pain, and they could not afford the wasted kindness on him. Mind you, Ting An had been orphaned for as long as he could remember. He had learned to take comfort from the small things that come from the sensation of solitude. A friendly nudge and the dusty smell of horse hair were enough to make him whole again, at least for the moment. And what else can you expect, thought Ting An, except what you can get from moment to moment.
He manoeuvred the rig out onto the chilly wet streets. Loongan knew the route well, every pothole and cranny. There was nothing for him to do except try to keep warm, try to not think at all.
Ting An hardly knew a closeness to kin. His mother was an indian dead of a fever by the time he was two. There was no father except his chinaman grandfather, who had died in the bush when he was twelve or so. Ting still remembered how shaken he was when the old man really had succumbed. Night after night, his grandfather had lain watching him at his work with adoring eyes, the hearth fire seeming to reflect off his weariness. But one morning the fire went out, and his only kin was gone.
Ting An had buried his grandfather himself. He still thought about the spot where his grandfather lay—on the eastern side of his mountain, at the base of two ancient ponderosa pines, cradled in the arms of their massive roots. He remembered the afternoon when he finished propping up the wooden marker with stones. Splintered sunlight shone through the underbrush and danced on his handiwork—“Chen Gwok Fai” carved deep at his grandfather’s request. When the wind spoke through the branches of the tall trees, he heard his grandfather whisper through him too. The first calm he had felt since his dying. So it was true. Chinese did say that the dead come back on the third day to say good-bye.
Then it was late autumn, and Ting had been busy smoking a sackful of oysters he had gotten from a group of nlaka’pamux’sin people. They had offered to take him upriver with them to their village for the winter. They knew chinaman Chen well, and many would have gladly adopted a strong boy like him, with his pretty pale chinese face. But Ting An refused because of a vague feeling that he was supposed to wait. When he looked up through the smoke of his alder fire, he saw a man staring not at him but at the cabin. At that moment, Wong Gwei Chang was the saddest man he had ever seen.
When he had come to Tang People’s Street to stay, Ting An couldn’t help but feel a camaraderie with the orphan-men there; it was like a contract between faces, so to speak. People who had suffered the same hardships understood each other. Then too, since orphan children were rare in the Gold Mountains, he was lavished with attention from the A Sook-A Bak-A Gong strangers. A dried lychee nut, sometimes a nickel, pressed into his palm. Old fingers oftentimes lingered on his cheek or hair. He’d look up at the deeply aching brown eyes and smile his lovely little boy smile. In these ways, he was never lonely.
These days, Ting An had no other ambition than to stay crouched in a pedlar’s wagon behind a clip-clopping horse and stare blankly into a pearly grey fogbank. He knew, soon enough, his peace would evaporate like early morning mist. His first stop was always Disappearing Moon. There, Loongan parked herself in the alley, while he went in and swished coffee around his mouth to clean it. This morning, though, crowds of men pressed up against the kitchen door. Ting An had to shove and elbow past the crabby men in order to reach the coffee urns.
Not quite six o’clock, and Wong Gwei Chang was already in the middle of this bustle.
It was going to be a long, hard day, Ting An figured as he took his first sip of the hot brew. Someone jostled his elbow, and the coffee slopped over his chin, scalding him.
“Damn . . .” He stopped and swallowed his curses because it was bad luck to begin a day with angry words. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” he yelped instead at an unfamiliar back.
He caught Gwei Chang looking at him with such wholehearted concern that he had to turn away, embarrassed. Still, he felt Gwei Chang’s eyes lingering on him, and he smiled in spite of himself. Gwei Chang was the fat-bellied boss; he wasn’t an overly affectionate man, but in all these years, Ting An had never had much occasion to question his loyalty to him. After all, he was a man easily admired, easily adhered to, especially if one was alone in the world.
It wasn’t as though Ting An didn’t ever have a wandering heart. Sure, he’d like to leave this Chinatown, go up north, maybe work in a logging camp for a while. What was there to keep him here? A young loafer, as Yee Gaw said, no ties! Some of those camps would pay white man’s wages if they were desperate enough, and when you knew enough to ask for it. One cold hard bunk was the same as another, and he could easily earn in four months what he’d been earning down here in a year.
Very tempting, yet Ting An just couldn’t brin
g himself to face the old guy and say, “I’m going to quit! Had enough!”
No, he just couldn’t; somehow, he knew a light would go out in the old man’s eyes. Ting An could see a deep voiceless loneliness in Gwei Chang, and somehow this made Ting An all the more loyal to him.
Ting An knew he was expected to stand close to the old man. In his familiar slouch, hands thrust deep into his pockets, he sidled up to Gwei Chang and stood waiting for orders.
“Don’t suppose you brought along one of the new trucks, A Ting?” Gwei Chang gave him his first greeting of the day. Ting An simply shook his head, irritated with himself for such an obvious oversight. Of course Gwei Chang would not reproach him, but this did not make him feel any better.
“Leave Loongan with Yee Gaw! He can take over your delivery route. Need you probably all day,” Gwei Chang continued. “Another big shipment on the docks. Came in last night. More at the customs office. Today might get a bit tricky, but maybe you can ease by those customs ghosts like you did with A Fong Mei Sow, he, he, he!”
He was referring to Ting An’s negotiations six years ago, which had considerably reduced Gwei Chang’s soon-to-be-acquired daughter-in-law’s wait at the immigration holding station. Ting An didn’t do anything special—just looked a ghost full in the eyes and asked a few questions, but nobody in Chinatown ever forgot a miracle. Ever since then, he had found himself handling all the customs and immigration business, as if he were a good-luck charm.
“Know you can’t be two places at the same time, but maybe A Fong Mei Sow can take over the inventory at the warehouse today. Maybe you can take her out there before you get the truck. Show her where you left off. But just the big items today.
