Disappearing Moon Cafe

by Sky Lee

  “But this warehouse is his warehouse,” Gwei Chang told her. “He has to stay in Vancouver.”

  “Let us not move, darling!” she probably wheedled Ting An afterwards. “Vancouver has such nice weather.”

  They said that Ting An found her in a back alley. A fallen woman. He would have had to fish her out of a puddle. Gwei Chang didn’t know that stray cats had got to be a habit with him. But how could he know, he hadn’t ever bothered to ask Ting An if he wanted a wife. Gwei Chang had not noticed that Ting An’s eyes never trailed after a woman, which was unusual for a man in Chinatown.

  Now, all of a sudden, Ting An was set on marrying. One evening, he came to ask Gwei Chang for advice, his great eyes swimming around in a lovesick fog. Gwei Chang could tell that he had been drinking. Ting An had intentions of changing his name back to Chen, his mother’s maiden name, as though it was very important that the slattern be properly titled. He had to consult Gwei Chang in case his birth papers had been bought or fixed, as many were.

  Ting An sat on a swivel chair in front of Gwei Chang’s desk, muttering, embarrassed.

  “Sooo . . . I figured you must have given me the name Wong to make me look like a relative . . . or until you wanted to sell the name to someone else.” Chinese bought and sold their identities a lot in those days.

  “I am your father,” Gwei Chang had to answer. “I gave you my name because you’re my son.” Ting An smirked at him.

  “Don’t you know that you are my son?” Gwei Chang asked.

  “A Chang, you have always treated me like family,” Ting An said hesitantly at first, then continued with too much deliberation. “All these years, I wanted to thank you for the protection of the Wong name, sir. I will always be very grateful to you for all that you have done for me.”

  Gwei Chang waited, but he could have waited a thousand years. Ting An refused to see the truth glaring at him.

  After a while, Gwei Chang said, “Keep the Wong name. It is yours. Eventually, I’ll find you a real wife from China. Marrying this female is absolutely out of the question for you.”

  “A real wife from China,” Ting An repeated in disbelief. He shook his head from side to side, as though something rattled in his head. A suspicion perhaps, but he kept interrupting himself. His eyes narrowed at Gwei Chang, only to dart away a couple of times. Then a bewildered expression, as though he realized something for the first time in his life. Again, he looked away, but this time, his neck rigid, his face grim. Finally, he turned to Gwei Chang, his eyes wicked with hate.

  “Like your real wife from China?” he asked. “Not a dirty half-breed, buried somewhere in the bush?”

  The confirmation he needed was when Gwei Chang shut his eyes against the heat of Ting An’s swollen rage. Gwei Chang hid his face in his hands. Ting An’s fury seemed to throw him against the walls against his will. A shower of glass rained over Gwei Chang when Ting An threw a chair through the windows of the office. Shards cut Gwei Chang’s brow, but he didn’t move, he didn’t look up. Even in this bloodthirsty rage, Gwei Chang knew Ting An would not come near him in any way. In fact, Ting An was desperately trying to escape, pressing away from Gwei Chang as if his eternal shame would contaminate him. Gwei Chang heard Ting An as he tore through the entire warehouse, wrenching what he could off the shelves. His sobbing surprised Gwei Chang, because all along, he’d thought . . . he didn’t know what he’d thought.

  KELORA CHEN

  1894

  Gwei Chang remembered that last summer. He and Kelora had travelled overland for two days, to help with the smoking of the salmon at her people’s fish camp. The happiest, most elaborate harvest he’d ever been to; those indians had a rich life. Several villages worked together to harvest, clean and dry rack upon rack of salmon which had been caught downriver. The salmon-fish swam into fences built across a narrow part of the river, until the water teemed with tens of thousands. Then, they only needed to be lifted out by the netful. Back in the camp, they had to be smoked and cured over an open alder fire.

  The sight of all this good food being hauled in got Gwei Chang very excited. It made him feel good to learn the indian ways, because they made him think that he might never starve like a chinaman again.

  But Kelora told him that even with this abundance, her people faced famine later in the winter.

  “The harvests haven’t been as good as they used to be,” she said, “there still might not be enough to eat.”

  Then a strange thing happened to him. Kelora looked up because she sensed a change. An icy silence perhaps. He stood over her on purpose, so that he could pour his bitterness onto her. Gwei Chang had often looked into the sallow face of famine. He could see how famine was the one link that Kelora and he had in common, but for that instant, it made him recoil from her as surely as if he had touched a beggar’s squalid sore. The memory of hunger flung him back to that other world again, where his mother’s wretchedness plucked at his sleeve and gnawed through his stomach.

  In the next instant, he looked at Kelora, and saw animal. His stare hostile, as if he had just recognized her for what she really was. Then in that case, what was he except her prey—her trap so cleverly woven! He convinced himself that she had tricked him, and he willed himself to blot out those eyes of hers, already frightened and searching. She knew he was fighting against her lure; she knew that he had received a letter from his mother, pleading with him to come home and do his duty as the eldest son. Kelora probably also knew that he would abandon her long before he realized it.

  GWEI CHANG

  1939

  “Would it help my dying soul to tell you that I love you, Kelora? Love like that only comes around once in ten lifetimes. And it’s a love beyond death. You could spend the rest of your reincarnated lives searching for a love like that. So why did I leave you? I’ve never left you. You left me.”

  “So why did you spend the rest of your pitiful life feeling guilty?”

  “O.K., I did leave you. In the gorgeous full bloom of our love, I left you and went back to China where my family beckoned. Yes, I surely did leave you. And to marry another, no less. I swore to you that I was coming back. So why did you die? You left me more than I left you. Why? Why did you have to weaken? Your spirit was fragile after all, when all along it seemed so strong! Ever since, I’ve lived a miserable life, grieving for your loss, bitterly paying. You told me that indians have another name for the eagle—the one who stays perched on a tree, who doesn’t fly.”

  “KELORA, I lost your son,” he told her. Funny, how he could just be sitting there and the feeling of her lips brushing against his would take him by surprise. The taste of her breath, sweet and faintly vanilla, would become more real than the feel of his sickbed against his tired back. But just for a second. Then it would be gone, leaving him to agonize alone. Funny, wasn’t it, how she could still do that to him.

  “You’re just getting sentimental in your old age.” A voice.

  Something fleshy flitted across the corner of his eye. He turned his head, or rather, he tried to turn his head, but nothing happened.

  “You’ve been haunting me all my life. Now, I need someone to talk to. So talk to me!” he said out loud.

  Silence.

  “I live with pain all the time now,” he said.

  “And heartache is the only thing that can chase it away?”

  “I don’t mean to whine.”

  “But you do.”

  “Kelora, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “Never mind, the fire has gone out, the dance is over. There is nothing left for you to do.”

  “I can remember . . .”

  The beating of clackers in his head. The front of him burning hot from the intensity of the fire, the back of him shuddering with cold. The frost of the night scratching along the edges of the ring. The smell of wood smoke on her skin. Kelora crouched on their cattail bed of blankets and hides, combing out her tangled hair. Her face relaxed, staring at the fire. The curves of her skin glowing, in shadows.
He wanted to press his face into the mounds of her flesh with his eyes open, to feel the cottonlike lumpiness beneath the silken coverlet. His lips pressed against her breast, and she collapsed against him.

  The shuffle of wooden rattles in his head. Her black cloud hair woven across his face, weblike, dreamlike. He looked up and saw smoke tendrils escaping between roof planks into the dark sky. Nudging and pressing against the stars, he soaring, she soaring. She, keeper of the fire, covering him with intense desire, he searing, they searing. She opened herself like a secret revealed; their bodies joined in dance, writhing with power. She, wet from tears, slick with lust, steeped in sweat; their souls keening, reaching for eternity. From another part of the village, a child whimpered and sighed. Other fires tended by other women glowed and murmured in the distance. He melting into her like molten gold, like sunset.

  The steady rhythm of feet thumping in his head. The smell of snow; their burning hearts. They huddled together, legs a slippery tangle. Pure and naked, their juices still swift-flowing currents. The earth seemed to drift. He clung on, trembling; she reached out and pulled a blanket over him. Her cheeks beautiful, seductive, flushed. Her eyes still lewd; he wandered, helpless in their fiery depth.

  He closed his eyes, the heavy chant of the storyteller turning to mist in his head.

  THE PASTS AND FUTURES OF

  Disappearing Moon Cafe

  AFTERWORD

  Christopher Lee

  Towards the end of Disappearing Moon Cafe, Kae Ying Woo, the narrator whose search for her family history we have been following throughout the novel, reflects on what it means to uncover and retell stories that have been buried for many years. Kae speaks as a writer, staring at the “torpid text” appearing behind the “throbbing cursor on a black-and-white computer screen” and contemplating its significance. Mediated through language, the past has a visceral, even material, existence in the present, evoking an “old pain” that has been transmitted from one generation to the next. She describes the fear of confronting these secrets, as if she “might turn to stone, petrified by the accumulated weight and unrelenting pressure of so many generations of rage” (213). What stands in the way of a full understanding of the past is a “great wall of silence and invisibility” that “chinese-in-Canada” have built to forbid the “telling of [their] history.” Kae recognizes the power of these prohibitions to keep “the more disturbing aspects in our human nature” in check, but finally decides to continue writing even if it means “violat[ing] the secret code” (214).

  These passages appear just before a series of climactic scenes in which the Wong family’s struggles with male impotence, adultery, inter-generational conflict, repressed secrets, and unrequited desires are fully revealed to the characters (as readers, we have known about these secrets for some time already, which makes the suspense of the revelations at once excruciating and riveting). But Kae’s comments also pertain, as the text suggests, to the history of Chinese in Canada more generally and in this sense, her words could also serve as a reflection on Disappearing Moon Cafe’s status as the first novel published by a mainstream press by and about Chinese Canadians. SKY Lee’s novel was a major intervention in contemporary Canadian literature, a bold attempt to account for the role of Chinese migrants in settler colonialism, a feminist interrogation of diaspora, family, and kinship, as well as a gesture towards the possibility of queer futures. Moreover, it challenged readers to grapple with what it means to write, as well as read, a Chinese Canadian novel in the first place. It asks: how can a diverse collection of narrative materials, including social history, family stories, and community memories, be made legible as Chinese Canadian and subsequently transformed into fiction? How would this novel make sense in an English-language context in which the legacies of colonialism, sexism, homophobia, and racism are still operating? Some twenty-five years later, these questions are no less urgent but they have taken on very different resonances with the passing of time. Disappearing Moon Cafe, I want to suggest, is no less disruptive when it comes to challenging our assumptions about desire, power, history, and identity, even as we read this novel alongside contemporary struggles for social, economic, and ecological justice.

  I straddle the shifting locations of being Chinese, Canadian, contemporary, woman, and feminist of colour (etc). Insider and outsider to my own culture, gender, history and so on. I am able to take risks and transgress the boundaries (of these social constructs) each category imposes.

  (SKY Lee, “Cultural Politics” 12)

  Of course, Disappearing Moon Cafe did not emerge in a vacuum; it rewrites and refracts the author’s family and personal history, her activist commitments, as well as the broader history of the Chinese in Canada. SKY Lee is a third-generation Chinese Canadian whose father was born in Canada and married her mother in China in 1936. Like many Chinese migrants during this period, their family was marked by geographical separation. After 1923, almost all Chinese were barred from immigrating to Canada and many diasporic families struggled to maintain transpacific ties in the face of virulent racism and economic marginalization. Lee’s mother was not able to come to Canada until 1951, and Lee herself was born the following year in Port Alberni. In an interview published in Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women (1992), Lee explains that her family moved to this town in northern Vancouver Island because “that was the only place where my father could find work.” She recalls, “Port Alberni was a very racist community when I was growing up. There weren’t many Chinese families. But I didn’t really have an identity problem. We were so poor—so obviously from the wrong side of the tracks that there was no use wasting time feeling ashamed. Our family was just concerned about surviving” (92). For her mother, life in a small town was “very isolating and alienating,” devoid of the close-knit communities of women like those she left behind, a theme that would recur in Disappearing Moon Cafe. The pressures of racism and poverty deeply affected her family: “my father would get angry and frustrated at his work at the mill, but instead of identifying his real oppressors, he’d come home and oppress his family and destroy himself” (94).

  Later, while studying fine arts at the University of British Columbia, Lee began to explore Chinese Canadian history and culture in earnest. During this time, Vancouver’s Chinatown and its surrounding area was the site of protracted struggles against poverty, neglect, and top-down urban development. Back in the 1880s, Chinatown had been established on what was then the swampy edge of a newly established city, on land that was unattractive to many European settlers. Although the Chinese lived and worked throughout the West Coast, Vancouver’s Chinatown was the commercial, cultural, and symbolic hub for the Chinese community at large. After 1947, when immigration laws started to be relaxed, many newly reunited families moved to the adjoining working-class area of Strathcona, one of the oldest and most diverse residential districts in Vancouver. Starting in 1958, the city government marked Strathcona for “urban renewal.” Refusing to invest resources into upkeep and maintenance, authorities labelled it a slum and drew up plans to demolish its residential neighbourhoods to make way for large-scale housing projects. In ensuing years, these plans would displace numerous long-time residents, many of them Chinese, and destroy places such as Hogan’s Alley, which had once been home to the largest black community in Vancouver. In 1968, the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) was formed to spearhead the fight against the continuing destruction of the community and it would go on to stop plans to build a highway as well as a large fire hall in the area. As community-based historians and activists such as Hayne Wai and Joanne Lee have chronicled in detail, many of these efforts were led by Chinese residents, with women playing a notably prominent role.

  As the primary setting of Disappearing Moon Cafe, the histories of Chinatown and Strathcona deeply shape the characters and plot of the novel. Along with “radicalized friends who were well-educated and progressive second and third generation Chinese Canadians,” Lee participated in an eme
rging “Asian Canadian Identity Movement” that “work[ed] hard to chronicle the Chinese Canadian history of struggle against marginalization and disenfranchisement” (Lee, “Cultural Politics” 11). She participated in new groups such as the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, and her illustrations were featured in the landmark anthology Inalienable Rice (1979), which also contained work by writers such as Paul Yee, Jim Wong-chu, Roy Miki, Roy Kiyooka, and Joy Kogawa, all of whom would go on to play significant roles in Asian Canadian literary culture. Her short stories started to appear in various venues, giving voice to experiences and perspectives that were largely absent in English-language Canadian writing. Lee was actively building relationships across Asian groups in Canada and the US, as well as with First Nations communities and other peoples of colour. Along with important writers such as Lee Maracle and Jeanette Armstrong, she explored Asian-Indigenous relationships in ways that would presage the work that is currently being done on this topic. Lee was also involved in Makara, a feminist art collective, in the late 1970s. As she later recalled:

  Before long, I strolled so very naturally into the feminist collective of artists and writers, not far from Chinatown, who were only too happy to include a woman of colour. My ideological drive switched gears[,] so to speak, from race to gender.

  I didn’t find any real difference between the marginalized people of colour community which searched for identity while battling racism . . . and the marginalized white feminist community which searched for identity while battling sexism and homophobia. (“Cultural Politics” 11-12)

  These crossings made her keenly aware of how race, gender, and sexuality affect and intersect with each other in ways that are generative and liberating, but also conflict-ridden.