by Wayson Choy
Wong Suk looked at Father, then at me, then back to Father. Tell her.
“We must only use the papers that have exactly the same birth month and year,” Father said, softly, like a conspirator.
Wong Suk nodded.
Father selected some papers.
“This one, and maybe this—yes—this one for the Benevolent Society. The Head Tax Certificate for the government—that’s all they need... Some of the rest we can trade or—”
Wong Suk half-whispered, as if it were a delicate matter to mention, “Maybe negotiate with the... the Tong—?”
Father looked agreeable. Poh-Poh cleared her throat.
No one would say anything more: a child with a Big Mouth stood beside the oak table. Big Eyes. Big Ears. Big Careless Mouth. A Mouth that went to English school and spoke English words. Too many English words. Poh-Poh looked at me cautiously.
I knew that every brick in Chinatown’s three- and five-storey clan buildings lay like the Great Wall against anyone knowing everything. The lao wah-kiu—the old-timers who came overseas from Old China—hid their actual life histories within those fortress walls. Only paper histories remained, histories blended with talk-story. Father said to me, “Jook-Liang, don’t you need some spring air?”
I did. The smell of those documents, packed so long ago and undisturbed between packets of moth balls, prickled my nose. I took my tap-dance book with me and walked out to the front porch and looked up and down the sun-washed street.
I wondered if all the clapboard houses along the street harboured as many whispers as our house did. Those damp shacks decaying on their wooden scaffolding, whose doors you reached only by negotiating rickety ramps—all the one-and two-storey houses parallel along Pender and Keefer, Georgia and Union—did each of those broken, scarred doors lock in their share of whisperings? Some nights I would hear in my dreams our neighbours’ whisperings rising towards the ceiling, Jewish voices, Polish and Italian voices, all jostling for survival, each as desperate as Chinese voices.
I could see the North Shore mountains from our porch and imagined Wong Suk and Father still murmuring behind me, their words lifting against the ceiling. I laid open the Easy Lessons book and did a shuffle-tap-kick. My best step, my favourite one, was the full turn, double-tap curtsy. It involved a furious spinning motion, my starched crinoline noisily swirling above my tip-tap tapping feet—drumbeats, I suppose—to beat out all the whispering.
After Wong Suk finished his business with Father, he came and sat down on the porch steps beside me. He pulled out the Head Tax Certificate, unfolded it carefully, and pointed at the two-inch square photo pasted on the bottom right-hand corner. I looked down and inspected a shoulders-up shot of Wong Suk as a young man. He was wearing a plain shirt.
“Liang,” Wong Suk said, “what you see?”
There was a man in a white shirt. There was no sign of the black woollen cloak he wore in most weathers, the same kind of woollen cloak gentlemen in England wore. I was disappointed. For some reason, I had expected the cape to show up on his shoulders even in the old photograph, something that was simply always a part of him, like his two arms and two crooked legs.
But that was foolish, just because I had always known Wong Suk with his grand cape. I had heard the story of the cape, heard him tell it many times. Heard him talk-story about it when Poh-Poh mended it for him, or when Stepmother patiently restitched the lining and patched up the secret pocket for the tenth time.
Wong Suk had inherited the cloak when I was five years old, from a man named Johnson who lived in Victoria. Roy Johnson had once been Wong Suk’s Number Two Boss Man “in olden CPR day,” as Wong Suk referred to the years after 1885 when he helped build one of the last sections of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
Johnson was over six feet tall, a dai huhng-moh gui—a giant red-haired demon—who, on his deathbed decades later, remembered Wong Suk as a friend. Johnson asked Chinese old-timers in Victoria if a man whose birth-name was Wong Kimlein, famous for his monkey face, was still alive.
“No one else could have such a face,” he said, and with the fingers of each hand pulled at the corners of his mouth to demonstrate.
“Yes, yes,” they said, and told Johnson everything. Monkey Man was living in Vancouver in one of the rooming places near the Winter’s Hotel in Gastown, a place run by the Chinese Benevolent Society. They said he could write to any B.C. old-timer in care of the Chinese Times newspaper. Then Roy Johnson gave instructions to his oldest son to have a message translated into Chinese writing by one of the Chinese elders, and to send this message to Wong Kimlein.
Wong-Suk told me, “Johnson bess-see Boss Man,” and with a flourish threw the cloak around himself, remembering why a demon on his deathbed would call him friend. Of course, Wong Suk sat back in our big cane chair and told us the story.
IT BEGAN, he said, in one of the last rail camps set up to extend the CPR rails to Granville, now called Vancouver. Wong Suk that early winter evening was taking a heavy sack of supplies back to one of the few remaining Chinese work camps in the interior of British Columbia, and—as he told the story—noticed a sudden shadow, looked up, and saw an eagle flying angrily overhead. It circled majestically and sent down a screeching sound, soared, then swooped down so close that Wong Suk recalled forever the loud snap of its bent beak and the oncoming rush of its broad powerful wings.
Wong Suk ducked his head quickly. As he did so, his eye caught sight of something between the tracks ahead, something humped up against a distant reflecting curve of rail. Wong Suk thought the lump on the track was a wild animal, maybe worth some extra money—its spleen or heart or liver could be sold for medicine. Instead, as Wong Suk hurried along with his heavy sack, feeling lucky, he just as quickly felt his heart turn on him. It was a human shape lying inside the tracks, a giant body slumped low against the steel track. He could make out the head positioned on the rail, waiting to be crushed. The head had red hair. Wong Suk recognized at once that it was Johnson, Number Two Boss Man.
Wong Suk later learned that Johnson had shared his last bottle of whisky with a new drinking partner. The two ended up wandering drunkenly along the tracks. Johnson’s new friend became abusive, knocked him down from behind; when he refused to stay down, the friend took out a handy pocketknife and cut him up for his lack of co-operation. Whoever it was took Johnson’s pocket change and a gold watch. Whoever it was also took his wool jacket and his new vest, then neatly leaned his head against the steel rail and left him to die.
When Wong Suk dropped his sack and stood over the slug of a body, the giant’s orange beard was already beaded with ice, his breath shallow, his nostrils frost-clotted; the left side of his head was swollen purple. His shirt had been cut open; his chest criss-crossed with thin lines of blood scabbing from the cold. Luckily, Roy Johnson had drunk enough to keep his blood from freezing. At this point of the storytelling, Wong Suk always laughed and rubbed his tummy and smacked his lips.
“I think maybe find dead animal—maybe big, big deer—make good food—make good medicine—make stew.”
The old man would smack his lips.
“No stew! Just no-good Johnson!”
He barely managed to pull Johnson up, dragged him off the rails and wrapped the huge man in one of the two new Hudson’s Bay blankets he had just bought from the supplier. Wong Suk knew enough to keep the half-conscious Johnson walking, back and forth, back and forth, happily slapping Number Two Boss Man, until his blood circulated again and pain snapped him awake. The Boss Man never forgot.
DURING THE LAST WEEK of his dying, Johnson related his old times as the camp Boss Man to his son: how he had once been beaten and robbed—how freezing to death was like burning in fire—how someone managed to slap him alert, kept him walking, kept him warm against the plunging mountain temperature. And when his eyes cleared enough, how he had seen to his amazement the wizened Monkey Man, the camp cook’s Chinaman assistant, staring back at him, slapping him silly, laughing like a crazy coyote. �
�You lookee good!”
It was Wong.
Johnson wanted to reward Monkey Man, but anything he offered—a wool vest, food, a kerosene lamp—was abruptly refused.
“Wong come to Gim San—come for gim, for gold—” Wong Suk said, sternly pushing the giant Johnson and his gifts out of his makeshift tent, “—no gimme gim, no gimme thanks!”
“Monkey Man only wanted gold,” Johnson told his son. “He knew of course none of us had any damn gold, just these railroad chits to trade for food and supplies, and some emergency cash to buy bootleg liquor. I never got to thank that Chinaman properly.”
Johnson’s son said to him, “I’d like to thank him, too.”
Later that month of September, Wong Suk received a large parcel covered with both Chinese and English writing. The English words read, “TO MR. WONG KIMLEIN, c/o CHINESE TIMES, Vancouver, B.C. FROM ROY JOHNSON.”
Father read aloud the Chinese letter inside, explaining the origin of the gift in the flowery words of a Chinese elder.
The son wrote he had come home from studying at Oxford to be with his sick father. Now Johnson had died, and the son was going back to England. Here was the son’s new cloak, “a blanket,” the son wrote, “to replace the one you wrapped around my father.”
The note itself was wrapped around a heavy American gold coin. Engraved on one side of the coin was an eagle, its beak as bent as Wong Suk remembered it.
I LOVED that story.
“Eagle good luck,” Wong Suk told me, but I thought his cloak was even more lucky. I always leaned against its thick warmth and begged Wong Suk to let me drape it over my shoulders, to let me fly about, become Robin Hood’s bandit-princess, turning rapidly around and around in the imaginary forest of our back yard, the cape lifting, like wings, lifting above the earth. And the Monkey King would roar with laughter, clap-clap his two canes in a drumbeat; I was dizzy with pleasure. We would not stop until the neighbours loudly slammed their doors against such invading, clapping, joyful madness. Then we would sit quietly together on the back steps, to catch our breath. Sometimes Second Brother Jung stepped out and sat with us. Wong Suk would tell us one of his stories from the past. Jung liked that. He would listen intently, hugging his knees, his eyes as dreamy as Wong Suk’s, his need as deep as my longing for Wong Suk to be sitting close to us, like this, with Jung and me, forever.
But, of course, when Wong Suk and I stood on the porch that day, looking at his Head Tax photo, the young monkey face I stared at had not yet gone into the mountains, nor lifted the camp cook’s heavy armour of pots and pans, nor met the giant he called Boss Man Johnson, nor seen a huge eagle diving between the sky and mountain wall: he had just arrived in the Customs House in Victoria. The immigration official had just freshly glued his photo onto the document, impressed a seal on it, and taken fifty dollars cash for the Head Tax that Chinese immigrants had to pay to the Dominion of Canada.
I craned my neck to inspect the old photo. My almost-nine-year-old eyes looked back down at Old Wong Suk, then back at the photo: two faces, almost fifty years apart. Yet each was the same wide-eyed monkey face. The porch creaked. I sensed Wong Suk wanted me to say something, maybe about the young face that stared unchanged back at both of us.
I could see the same square jaw, the large teeth, intact; oiled-slick hair, eyebrows thicker brushes of black. Fewer wrinkles. Definitely fewer wrinkles.
“What you think, Liang?” Wong Suk asked me, holding the photo against a shaft of porch sunlight. He sounded sad.
I moved closer to the old man, craned my neck again. Re-focussed against the sunlight. Last week I had decided, for absolute sure, to become Shirley Temple. Little Shirley was his favourite dancing girl, but Wong Suk said he would be just as happy to have the movie star Miss Anna May Wong come visit him any time.
To me, Miss Anna May Wong was an old lady—more than twenty-five years old—yet Wong Suk insisted he would like her to visit Vancouver’s Chinatown, just as Shirley Temple had during the city’s Golden Jubilee when we waved to her and she waved back. After all, he said, he had in me alone both his Little Shirley and bandit-princess. I wasn’t old enough to be Miss Anna May Wong; she reminded him of someone he’d known from afar in Old China.
“Not close like you, Liang,” Wong Suk explained.
“How close?” I had to know.
“Meet her maybe three times in Old China. I never to forget her. Last time I gave her plum blossoms.” Wong Suk looked far away, became quiet.
“What did she do?” I asked, meaning was she a movie star.
“What she do?” Wong Suk looked far away. “She spit.” His voice softened. “Throw back at me all the blossoms.”
I looked at his face in the photo and the face before me: the sadness was still there.
“You look the same,” I told Wong Suk and took a tap position.
“You look same, too,” he laughed. He looked up at me and raised his hand high enough to brush my curls. “Still Jook-Liang, but dance bess-see.”
Which was a lie; I couldn’t tap without tripping, but I liked being lied to. I felt he wanted to say something else. The screen door squeaked open. It was Father.
“Good,” Father said. “You two haven’t gone.”
Father stepped onto the porch and handed Wong Suk a lucky red envelope of money. We only ever spent thirty cents together, including treats; this was real money, folding money.
“Take Liang to the show and get some extra treats on me,” Father said. “Keep the rest.”
Wong Suk waved his hand in refusal but Father insisted, pushed away his hand, and stuffed the lucky envelope into the old man’s shirt pocket.
Lucky money was awarded on birthdays or maybe when a report card was all A’s. I couldn’t think why today was special at all, but sometimes one is lucky, I thought—and thought of an eagle against the mountain and the sky, thought of how the blanket Wong Suk had wrapped around Johnson turned, years later, into a cape. Lucky and fun, as when Wong Suk and I, in the back yard, played out Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, and I was his bandit-princess, the cape royally spread around me.
Later, at Benny’s Ice Cream Parlour, when Wong Suk opened up the lucky envelope, a fifty-dollar bill slipped out. I saw the orange-coloured paper and the number before he could put it away. Wong Suk began to stare at the Coca-Cola calendar on the wall; he just gulped and said how much prettier I was than that little girl holding onto the Lassie dog. A few people, probably new to Benny’s, stared at us and whispered. Perhaps that was a sign, too, and I did not pay enough attention.
I was eight-plus, grown up, slurping up my second cherry soda at Benny’s, but I remembered that at age five and six I had confused Wong Suk with the Monkey King or Cheetah. I knew most of Chinatown called him Mau-lauh Bak—Monkey Man—usually behind his back. He knew that, too. He looked like an old grouchy monkey and he was my Best Friend.
And I didn’t like sharing Wong Suk, either. Even my two closest girlfriends, Jenny Soo Yung and Grace Ventura, knew that they didn’t rank any place near my never-ever-going-to-split-up Best Friend.
I always pestered Wong Suk for stories. Whenever Second Brother Jung tagged along with us, Wong Suk’s stories took place in rail camps; he told us how he survived climbing up sheer mountain cliffs, how one limb after another got broken; and he told us about fights he had with white demons in lumber mills, late at night, by campfires, when all the men were surrounded by the glowing needle eyes of wild animals. I preferred the stories with demons and ghosts, like those Poh-Poh used to tell me before she got stuck on my baby brother Sekky and had no more time for me.
I liked the stories Wong Suk told of being friends with some Siwash natives on the rocky shores of the B.C. coast. There were Indian ghosts, as incredible as Chinese ghosts; forest ghosts and animal and bird spirits. Wong Suk had even witnessed sacred Indian pow-wows and smoked special tobacco called sweet grass and traded gold nuggets and gold dust for bear paws, antlers, herbs and wood fungus. In his stories, men changed into spi
rits, animals, birds and demons, had names like Boss Man Johnson, One-eyed Smith, Broken-tooth Cravich, Thunder Tongue and Clever Fox.
In spite of all his stories about the past, Wong Suk really said little about his earlier times in Old China. When I asked, “What was it like when you were a little boy?” he roared with laughter or sighed deeply. “Too long ago,” he would say, and leave me guessing. Others speculated, too. Wong Suk was a topic of conversation in Chinatown. Everyone knew everyone’s daily business, but not always everyone’s past. I did everything to hear conversation about Wong Suk, unusual conversation.
Around the mahjong tables that Stepmother took me to while Father was many times away at different seasonal jobs during the Depression, some of the Chinatown ladies, clinging to Old China ways, speculated about Wong Suk and his monkey face:
How do you think Monkey Man got that face?
It was all curious talk, though the women would never discuss these matters in front of the men, and certainly not within Wong Suk’s hearing. The women’s mahjong gaming tables were a cozy haven, like a club gathering, a sorority. With their men often away on seasonal work, the women got to swear as hard as any man, said the outrageous without hesitation and with much delight, traded shopping tips and imparted gossip before anything bad festered into reality. Gossip was a way everyone warned everyone else about what was known (“Someone thought they saw you going into Mr. Lim’s car...”). Or warned you about what was to be discovered (“They say you should worry about your First Son’s fondness for too many late nights at the Good Fortune Club...”).
Late into the night, when the mahjong ladies thought I and the two younger Lee kids, Mary and Garson, were fast asleep on the large sofa, Stepmother and her friends sat around the mahjong table, slapping down the playing cubes, and giggled and wondered aloud about Wong Suk’s penis. It was a word Second Brother Jung always used when he swore in Chinese at stone-throwing white boys; it was a word that alerted my ears. Half-nodding in my practised fake sleep, I got to hear most everything Stepmother and her friends shared:
