by Wayson Choy
No one realized that I still saw Frank Yuen.
No one realized that he would take an interest in a thirteen-year-old.
I was always hoping for a chance to run into Frank Yuen. I liked to see him spit and swear and have him show me how to fight properly. Some of my friends got to meet him, too, but Frank tended to have a temper and a mixed-up kind of English and Chinese, so that there were misunderstandings, I guess. He wasn’t easy to get along with.
“Tell your bratty pals to stay away from me, okay?”
I guess if it weren’t for the fact that Kiam was my brother and I sometimes ran errands for his father, Frank would probably have pushed me away, too.
He bought me a pair of second-hand boxing gloves, which we both wisely decided to keep at Bobby Steinberg’s shed so that no one at home would know.
Many times when I visited Old Yuen to deliver his Chinatown newspaper or some herbs he needed or to collect his rent money, I met Frank Yuen. If he happened not to be busy, we would go to the Tong’s assembly hall room, which was always empty in the afternoon.
“Okay,” he would say, “put up or die.”
Then we would take off our coats and sweaters, shirts, too, if it was warm enough. Like Max, Frank showed me how to hold my elbows in; how to take a dive, his way; how to propel my fists with fake jabs; how to duck my head and aim my right into my opponent’s glass jaw.
The assembly hall smelled of dust and burnt rope. A line of Chinese carved chairs stood on both the far sides of the room, and the walls were hung with scrolls of calligraphy. At one end of the room, three large five-foot porcelain gods of fortune stood guard, with incense pots beside each one. They looked fierce and cast long shadows on the back wall, doubling their size. At night, Poh-Poh told me, they came alive and worked as guardians for the Tong members and fought back evil spirits. When I told Frank what the Old One said, he laughed.
One day when I’d picked up Old Yuen’s rent money from his room and was leaving, crossing the empty assembly hall to get to the outside stairs, I ran into Frank, who was in a foul mood. There was the sour smell of whisky on his breath. He stepped in front of me.
“I have to go to the Blue Eagle and meet First Brother,” I told him. It was snowing outside, and I wanted to go to the Blue Eagle for a cup of hot chocolate to warm up.
Frank said he knew that and burped in my face. I felt uneasy and wanted to get away, even though I was a bit early for meeting First Brother. Confronting Frank Yuen, a head taller than me, I felt shy. With his leather jacket half-opened, his zoot pants tight at the ankle, Frank Yuen was tough-looking, all right.
“Let’s see if you can really fight,” Frank Yuen said to me, switching on one bank of spotlights at the far side of the hall. “Show me,” he sneered. “Take off your coat, if you’re not too chicken-shit.”
I measured my height against his: the top of my head came up to his chin. The three spotlights, which were only used for staging lion dances, operas and fund-raisers, threw our shadows against the wall. Old Yuen had told me once, as I counted out his rent money, that a great Chinese warrior in 1911 was lit by similar lights. His name was Sun Yat-Sen, the man whose China we pledged allegiance to in Chinese school. I felt my warrior arms grow stronger. My warrior coat slipped from me. I was not paying attention, distracted by the fierce faces of the gods lit up at the other end of the hall.
As I turned around, Frank Yuen swung his leg up in slow motion, aiming at my head. I ducked. His loose leather jacket went flying about him.
“Take off your sweater,” Frank ordered.
I did.
I pulled my sweater off over my head and his right foot went up again, just missing the left side of my head. He pushed me aside like a piece of nothing.
“A sissy punk like you,” he challenged, “wants to fight?”
He jumped away from me, kick-boxed, yanked off his jacket, yelled bloodthirsty curses; his fists jabbed away at each side of my head; his lethal left foot snapped into the air. His shadow danced around the room. Frank Yuen narrowed his eyes and looked at me menacingly. He looked like one of the porcelain gods. His pant leg danced up and I saw a lump with a handle bulging inside his sock.
“What’s that?”
“Wanna see?”
He stopped, bent down and lifted up his leg to show me an ebony handle sticking out of a leather holster strapped around his stocking. He unsnapped it; six inches of glistening blade slid out, razor-sharp. The knife could easily slit a man’s throat with a single swipe or, with a well-aimed thrust, pierce through bone.
“Honed German steel,” he said. “World War One. You could shave with it, if you weren’t still a baby.”
The blade glided back down into its leather holster.
“In a fight, I always win,” he said to me, snapping shut the strap that held the knife in place. “My lion friend here helps me out now and then.”
Frank Yuen would not let his conviction go unheard.
“Always fight to win or... die.”
“Die?”
I always thought you only died in movies. In real life, no one fights to the death. If you knock the other guy down, you win.
“If you don’t win,” Frank spoke as if the truth were obvious, “you don’t deserve to live.”
For some mad reason, I thought I could catch Frank Yuen off guard, show him I was every bit as good as he was. For some reason, I wanted to win his respect.
Following his example, I swung my foot into the air; the tip of my boot barely reached his chest. His left foot swiftly kicked up, hit my own foot mid-air and sent me crashing like a knocked-down bowling pin. I thought I heard porcelain laughter.
“No fair,” I said, getting halfway up. “You’re bigger than me.”
“Mukka hai,” he swore, and with his right fist sent me slamming back down to earth. The immediate intense pain took my breath away. Tears welled up in my eyes; the skin on my face stiffened in shock.
“You think no man is going to beat up a little fuck-ass bastard kid like you, eh?”
He danced around me, his left foot suddenly whizzing past my right ear. He laughed: “You want fair?”
I froze.
“Stupid asshole,” he said, his fists came closer and closer to my face. “Don’t you know hotshots like you make perfect punching bags?”
He stopped dancing, stood high above me, breathing hard.
“You sure you like to box?”
I nodded my head. He opened his fist and slapped me hard across my right cheekbone. It sent me sprawling. I knew he expected me to cry or yell stop. Some wildness in him was unleashed; his eyes looked through me. He rushed closer to me, waiting for a sign of weakness, a gesture of surrender. I pushed myself up off the floor. His other hand slapped my left cheek. The sound echoed in the hall. My face burned.
I consciously stood my ground, but that enraged him, pushed him to hitting me again, only harder. A deep burden began to lift inside me, but no words came out, only a rising sound, a keening, half-animal, half-human sound. Another part inside me instinctively went cold, said, “Win!”
In spite of my bravura, the hot pain on my cheeks burned; my eyes began to water. I willed myself not to cry, not to break down. I willed myself to think... react... fight to win or die.
“Jesus,” Frank Yuen said, disgusted. “You’re just a god-damn chicken-shit punk!”
An intense icy resolve came over me, a clarity about what to do next. I dropped down, bolted sideways, and grabbed at Frank Yuen’s leg. Startled, he tried to pull away, resist. I quickly pushed up his trouser cuff and clawed with my fingers until the lethal German blade slipped out of its holster. And just as Frank Yuen’s disbelieving eyes began to understand, I grabbed the weapon. His open-shirted throat stood naked just above my face.
I clutched the ebony handle, felt for a split second its odd, dead weight; then, with the speed of a rattler, taking only half a breath, I thrust the knife point-blank at his bobbing Adam’s apple.
Frank Yuen j
umped back, not a second too soon, his arms flailing away from the knifepoint coming up at him like a spear. The thin material of his shirt tore, hissed apart, as the blade slit upwards.
“Stop!” he said.
A sharp pain burst into my fist and my shoulder. My fingers flew apart; the knife flew away.
Frank’s left foot had connected. The steel knife skittered across the assembly hall like a small frantic animal.
I fell back down, harder than before.
“Shit,” he said. “You were going to kill me.”
I was on my knees. The tears began to fall. My chest began to heave.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “C’mon, catch your breath.” He knelt down to see how I was.
Frank’s shadow fell across me. Long shadows on the wall moved as we moved.
The pain burned across my shoulder.
A memory came to me, of something hard hitting my back, its metal sharpness ripping flesh; a strap whipping lines of fire across my back. Words began to tumble out of my mouth, in a voice that was childish, panic-stricken, in a dialect that I had forgotten: “Bah-Bah, don’t hit me... don’t hit me...”
I curled up on the floor. My child’s voice could not stop its pleading. Frank Yuen, kneeling, bent forward and pressed my babbling head against his torn shirt. He began to rock me, and the slow rhythm of his rocking, back and forth, caught me off guard. I closed my eyes and moved with him, a child being cradled, back and forth. There was the smell of Frank’s sweat and his tobacco; his rapid breathing sounded as loud and ragged as my own. We were collapsed together on the floor. The porcelain gods gazed down on us from the far end of the hall. Minutes passed. Frank’s lips brushed my forehead, settled for a second, then lifted.
But Frank Yuen could not comfort me forever. He sighed deeply, began to let me go, to let some darkness gently go.
I felt his arms withdrawing, the strong warrior hands leaving me. Frank got up and walked away to pick up his jacket and sweater.
As I, too, moved to get up, my whole body suddenly lit with an unbidden, shuddering tension; a strange yearning awoke in me, a vivid longing rose relentlessly from the centre of my groin, sensuous and craving, rising until my hands unclenched, throwing me forward, soundlessly, until my fingers tingled and stretched to grope the raw tactile air.
I closed my eyes, tasted salt and smelled the dust in the air. A roar came into my ears. Outside, a car drove past, its engines gunning.
“Jung,” came a voice above the roaring, “are you okay?”
I opened my eyes and looked up and was astonished at the depth and height of the vast shadowy ceiling looming over Frank’s head. He stood in silence above me, like one of the temple gods. For a moment, we stared at each other. He spoke, and I was surprised at how ordinary his voice sounded.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. My cheeks were wet. “You?”
Frank put his hand through his slashed shirt and waved.
“Nearly killed me, you little bastard,” he said and grinned.
I broke into a smile, then flinched with the pain that stabbed my shoulder. He reached into his pocket and gave me a clean handkerchief.
“Honk,” he said. “Keep it.”
I wiped my cheeks and blew my nose.
“So where the fuck’s my knife, Champ?” Frank said, looking around.
“Under that chair,” I said.
I stood up. He’d called me Champ. Champion.
Frank walked over and picked up the knife and snapped it back in its sheath. He threw me my sweater and reminded me that Kiam and Jenny Chong were waiting for us at the Blue Eagle.
I pushed my arms through the sleeves, careful not to show how badly he had hurt me. Frank switched off the lights. Our shadows disappeared.
After that time I fought Frank Yuen, I never felt the same about anything.
Frank Yuen is the sun, I remembered thinking, and I remembered also the Old One telling Mrs. Lim, “Jung-Sum is the moon.”
Yes, I said to myself, as I finished putting on my coat, my armour, I am the moon. As I walked briskly to keep up with Frank on our way to the Blue Eagle, the Old One’s words followed me, followed me all the way along the snow-dusted streets of Chinatown.
seven
AYEAR AFTER I FIRST MET him, Frank said he was going to Seattle to sign up with the U.S. Marines. They were welcoming English-speaking Chinese. Max, the Negro coach at the Hastings Gym, and the gang gave a goodbye party for Frank. Kiam and Jenny Chong went to it, and Frank insisted that I join them, too. First they had a ten-course dinner at the W. K. Gardens, where people passed around a bottle hidden in a paper bag and poured “tea” into the tea cups. I got some cherry pop in mine, and Frank picked up his chopsticks and gave me the best pieces of chicken and duck and pork.
After the meal, it was only about seven-thirty. All the guys, about twelve of them, went back to the gym to get in some early drinking in the back room. I went along too. The three women, including Jenny Chong, went first to her place to “freshen up.” Frank got a little tipsy, made a big deal of looking at his watch for the time. It was the gold watch Old Yuen had given him to take away for keeps. In front of everyone, Frank made a big show of handing it over to me.
“It’s yours, Champ, if I don’t make it back,” he half-joked.
Ever since that time we had tangled in the Tong assembly hall, Frank had been calling me Little Brother and Champ and Killer. He let me hang out with him sometimes, and when Kiam and he went to boxing matches or rugby games, I was allowed to tag along. He had let me hold that gold watch now and again, just to time a match or check how long it took him to do ten push-ups.
Frank was a little drunk and he put his arm around my shoulder, proud of me. I was beginning to win some of my exhibition fights, just like Max said I would. Frank kept holding onto me.
I felt a little queasy, maybe it was from the two or three swallows of beer that Max, just a few minutes ago, had allowed me to guzzle from his bottle.
“Whoa!” Max said. “Don’t hog it, just drink it!”
I thought it was great to get away with a gulp or two. Frank, laughing, pulled me even closer to his chest and pressed me harder against himself.
In the joy of his affection, secure and clownish, he gave me a kiss-smack on my forehead, cheerfully shouting to his gang of friends, “Hey, all you bastards! This is my Little Brother, Jung-Sum—THE CHAMPION YELLOW BOMBER!”
At first I blushed, then laughed with everyone. Then all at once I felt the centre of my body go weak. I began to push Frank to break away from him. He let me go. Maybe he thought he was acting too crazy and embarrassing his Champ. But he wasn’t. I was getting scared.
I wanted him to hold me again, wanted him to press against me, even harder and closer. But I pushed him away. I pushed him away. A warm, sensual shiver started inside me, rising from my groin and threading up my spine. The same feeling had come over me that time when Frank held me, rocking, back and forth, on the assembly hall floor.
My mind reeled with distorted, sneering faces, including Frank’s and Kiam’s. I thought someone would see inside me. I waited for someone to expose me. I waited for Frank to turn on me, to spit in my face. Across the room, a camera flashed. My hands desperately tightened around the gold watch, the metal still warm from being next to Frank’s body.
Nothing happened. Three of the guys raised more bottles of beer and shouted “Bon voyage!” and then someone started everyone singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow...” The camera flashed again.
Minutes later, everyone was quietly watching Frank at the other end of the room, reading out loud his farewell messages from a big card that Jenny Chong got from Woodward’s.
Frank laughed, threw his head back to drink more beer.
My eyes suddenly focussed on the smallness of his ear, the curve of his neck; I thought I could smell again the sweet soy, the salt of his body. I stepped back, thirsting for the sensations that were already leaving me.
Some
times a lightning bolt strikes the darkness, making visible for miles a frieze of housetops, trees and mountains carved against the sky, and you see at the same time your smallness against the immensity of the world. As Frank turned his muscular body to smile for the camera, he waved to me.
Fear abruptly turned my spine to water. My fists began to shake. What if Frank caught on? Would I still be his Little Brother? Would I still be the Champ? A hand touched my shoulder from behind. It was Max’s hand, dark and shining in the gym light that spilled off the boxing ring. He neatly gripped my shoulder. Everyone’s attention had turned again to Frank, who was singing some bawdy song about girls in the back of cars. Only that ebony hand could feel me trembling.
“It’s okay, Jung,” Max whispered in my ear, a whisper not of warning but of deliverance. “It’s okay.”
He didn’t smile at first, not until I looked him in the eye, not until I stopped trembling.
“Good boy, Champ,” Max said. “Here.”
He put the bottle in my hand and let me throw back some more of his beer. Then he took the bottle from me, and without looking back, walked into the crowd and joined the applause that ended Frank’s yowling.
I was the youngest there. All the guys and the three girls, including Jenny Chong, wanted to go dancing in the back room of the Jazz Hut. Kiam said I should say goodbye to Frank and go home; it was getting late.
I made my way through the crowd. I shook Frank’s hand and wished him well. He gave me another sloppy kiss on my forehead. Everyone cheered and laughed. Then Max said he’d walk me, the Champ, back to the lockers, because he had the key to the room where we kept our coats and things.
On the way there, we hardly talked, Max and I, except to joke and wonder how many bad guys Frank would kill. When he unlocked the storage door, Max unfurled my coat and draped it on my shoulders, like I was a Champion.
