by Wayson Choy
“Keep things simple,” Father expounded.
Beneath the surface, of course, nothing was simple: I was the Canadian-born child of unwanted immigrants who were not allowed to become citizens. The words RESIDENT ALIEN were stamped on my birth certificate, as if I were a loitering stranger.
SOMETIMES I found Stepmother sitting in Father’s large wicker chair. She looked far away, and I knew she was thinking again of her girlhood in China and the family she had left behind, and the history that was hers, her ghost-whispering history. Balanced on her lap there were two precious things: the old bamboo-framed photograph of two women standing by a moon gate, and a large, delicately carved sandalwood box. Within its sweet, mysterious scent, Stepmother kept her own family photos and all the letters and the few photos sent by Suling.
Once Stepmother said to me, as if she were stranded on an island, “Suling is my only friend who knows my family stories. Not the stories Poh-Poh tells you.”
I picked up one of the heavily stamped envelopes and slipped out a sheaf of thin-as-water onionskin papers. Holding a single sheet up, you could see the faintest cloud-haunted blue colour. Stepmother took the papers from me and carefully unfolded them.
“See how beautiful her calligraphy is,” Stepmother said. “Maybe when Chen Suling comes to Gold Mountain she will teach you how to write as beautifully.”
I saw a steel-edged ruler slapping down on my hand.
“Like a g-i-r-l!?!” I sneered and flew a Spitfire over a wooden village, noisily dropping bombs.
“You’re right,” Stepmother said, “it will be enough work to teach a mo no like you to address your uncles properly.”
To my child’s mind, the matter was simple. In English, I would have been secure with “Uncle,” “Sir,” or even “Mister.” Three basic choices instead of ten dozen Chinese brain-twisters.
“I’m going to speak and write only English!”
Stepmother smiled.
“Suling once won a prize for her English,” she said. “If only Suling were here...”
I hated Chen Suling. But maybe when she got here, she would work like Stepmother in one of those basement factories, machine-sewing parts for military knapsacks and uniforms. Maybe Suling would work double shifts, come home too exhausted to bother with me, like Father. After working twelve- or fourteen-hour days any place they were hiring (but rarely any place outside of Chinatown’s restaurants, laundries, stores and offices), Father—hardly managing to stay awake—left me alone. So did everyone but Grandmama.
Finally, Chen Suling’s family gave her the money to come to Gold Mountain. We also obtained a piece of paper, verified in China by three officials, that said she was the oldest daughter of Third Uncle, Merchant Class. Now, we would be able to sponsor her, through Third Uncle, to come to Canada.
Chen Suling in Canada.
The thought was horrifying.
She probably had a bigger steel-edged ruler than Miss MacKinney. Grandmama was always telling me that Old China had bigger and better things than anything in Canada. For example, Vancouver had that sea wall in Stanley Park, which we walked once until I had to be carried by Kiam.
“Don’t you know about the Great Wall in China?” Grandmama said. And the Old One told me everything. How you would need ten lifetimes to walk it just once. Of course, I reasoned, Suling must have walked the Great Wall twice by now and measured every inch with her yardstick!
My mind set to work, to plan Suling’s downfall. I knew enough to understand the person named Chen Suling would have “delicate” papers, trumped-up papers, at best, half-true papers.
Oh, I thought, what if I called her by the wrong title at the very first meeting at Customs?
Any slip in our very first greetings to her, and the White Demon immigration officers and their translators would pounce. Ship her back on the very next steamer, steel-edged ruler unpacked. But Stepmother wanted to be with her best friend again... I didn’t care... I made up my mind: I would call Chen Suling by the wrong name—on purpose.
At Sunday dinner, I interrupted Third Uncle talking about the documents being completed for Stepmother’s girlhood friend.
“When Suling comes to Gold Mountain,” I asked in my limited Sze-yup dialect, “will she be Father’s Number Three Wife or Father’s Number One Concubine?”
I was playing with my rice, but looked up when there was no answer from Third Uncle. He looked startled and said, firmly, “Not my business.”
Everyone laughed.
“Mo no,” Stepmother said, shaking her head at me. “Suling will teach you proper Chinese,” Stepmother said to me. “Suling is a teacher in the Mission House in China.”
Stepmother’s Sun Wei village accent, blunt and final, burned into my ears while she sizzled the late night stir-fry, “Mo no... mo no... no brain... no brain!” Then I would hear Father sighing in the next room. He was exasperated with Stepmother’s stubbornness.
Against Stepmother’s pointing chopsticks, against Father’s heavy sighing, I was driven to prove them wrong: I did, too, have a brain! There was nothing Suling needed to teach me!
When I got into English school at last, I would push myself. If Chinese was impossible to know correctly, I would conquer my Second Language. I would be a Master of English, better than Chen Suling, even if Miss Chen had ten thousand prizes!
I already had real English books to learn from. I didn’t have to struggle for English the way Suling did. “Like a scavenger,” Stepmother told me.
Chen Suling had to write down in her copy book the English words she searched for on billboards and war posters, had to pick up old British magazines discarded in heaps behind the Foreign Compound. Stepmother said that Suling fought with her father, for he was angry at the way she was taking in the Demon words and was horrified to see her believe that eating the flesh and blood of someone called Jesus was the only possible way to go to Heaven. Suling would light incense to the family ancestors but would not bow three times before their images. Suling’s father expelled her from the family, said to the village he had no such daughter.
“She fled her home like the Sky Dragon,” Stepmother said.
Chen Suling had moved into the First Mission Church. Suling and Jesus were now best friends.
“In the Mission Church,” Stepmother emphasized, “Chen Suling learned First Class English.”
I wished someone would expel me and I could live somewhere else. That would be fun. Instead, I pretended it was dangerous to learn English in Canada. I slyly picked up mysterious old books and magazines from the back of Strathcona School. I cut out war pictures and kept them in a wooden, tin-lined shipping crate Uncle Dai Kew got me from the docks. It smelled of sweet marjoram. On the lid I crayoned KEEP OUT!!!
I even took to reading the scraps of English newsprint that wrapped up our groceries, and I bugged my two brothers for definitions.
No one laughed at my efforts to learn English. Education, in whatever language, was respected. Around me were “uncles” who had gone to universities in the 1920s and ’30s but remained unemployable because only Canadian citizens could qualify as professionals. For if you were Chinese, even if you were born in Canada, you were an educated alien—never to be a citizen, never a Canadian with the right to vote—“an educated fool” in the words of some old China men, or a “hopeful fool” in the words of those who knew the world would soon change.
“Furnish your mind,” Father said to us. “You don’t have to be poor inside, too.”
“Look at your son,” Sam gon, one of the old uncles, said to Stepmother, who was setting the table. She pushed my picture book off the table onto my lap.
“He reads books as if he is a scholar,” Stepmother said. “He loves to read, just like my friend Chen Suling.”
“But he doesn’t know what to call me when I visit,” Sam gon persisted. “All those low fan words, those foreign words, and no Chinese! What a waste!”
I slammed my book shut and glared at Sam gon. In my best Chinese, I said loud
ly, “What’s the difference what you’re called! My huhng-moh gui, my red-haired demon friend, says if you drop a plate in a restaurant, a dozen Chinks will answer!”
Sam gon’s eyes opened wide as saucers. Stepmother dropped a large plate. Grandmama walked out of the room. That evening, there was no supper for me. Stepmother could hit hard, but when Father came home from working at the restaurant, he hit harder. He walloped me with a wad of folded Chinese Times.
I was sent to my room and grew even more to hate the Chinky language that made such a fool of me. I hated the Toisan words, the complex of village dialects that would trip up my tongue. I wished I were someone else, someone like Freddy Bartholomew, who was rich and lived in a grand house and did not have to know a single Chinese word.
ONE DAY, when I was stuck at home because I was wheezing badly, and everyone was out except Stepmother and myself, the postman had an important piece of mail for us. Stepmother, who was wary of any strange documents, called me to the door. “What does this White Demon want?” I could see she wished Suling were here, with her perfect English.
The bearded postman explained to me he needed a signature; he held out a parcel, as if to tempt us. Stepmother looked at the package with our address in English and some Chinese writing cascading alongside the block-print words: FROM CANTON. INSPECTED / INTERNATIONAL ZONE.
“Just tell your mom to make an X,” the man said, drawing in the air. I told Stepmother she must sign for it.
Stepmother took the postman’s pencil, and he pointed to the document in his hand. Carefully, Stepmother drew two lines, one crossing over the other. She could have written her name in Chinese ideograms, but the man only wanted an X. It was the first time I saw Stepmother write anything in English. X. She did not like the way the postman smiled at her.
“Sek-Lung, tell the White Demon to give me the box.”
“Sir,” I said, “my mama wants the box right away.”
“You’re a smart young fella,” he said, putting the box in her hand. He saluted Stepmother and slapped his receipt book shut and left.
“Did you hear that?” I said. “He called me smart.”
“Smart English not smart Chinese,” Stepmother said.
I followed her to the kitchen table. With a sharp cleaver held expertly in her hand, Stepmother cut the twine in two. I tore open the brown wrapping paper.
Stepmother hesitated a moment, then reached in and lifted out a quilted green silk jacket. When she gently, very delicately, unfolded it, we discovered a thick, water-stained Chinese-English Bible, three photos—one exactly matching the photo in the bamboo frame—and an official Mission Hospital envelope.
In silence, Stepmother touched the stained dragon crest on one sleeve of the jacket. Dragon claws gripped my stomach. Giant wings pushed against my ribs.
Stepmother took out a sheet of onionskin from the envelope and looked blankly at the two small paragraphs of typewritten print; the Demon language stared blankly back at her. She put the paper in my hand.
“What does this paper say?” she asked in a low voice. “Hurry, Sek-Lung, tell me!”
I silently read the typewritten message and began tumbling them into my broken, mo no Chinese:
“... a bomb... Miss Suling Chen...”
When I finished, to avoid Stepmother’s eyes, and to not hear the silence that was now louder than any noise, I put down the letter and opened up the well-worn Bible. Something was handwritten on the inside of the cover. It faced a decorated page that said this book was presented as a First Prize for Language Achievement. Stepmother pointed her fingers at the handwritten English words.
“Read,” she commanded.
I read.
TO SEK-LUNG, SUN OF LONGTIME FRIEND LILY. I NEVER TO FORGET HER. LEAF JACKET AND BOOK WITH GOD.
BLESSINGS.
—CHEN SULING.
As she listened, Stepmother strained to read the two columns of hand-brushed Chinese words beside the English words. She nodded her head. Yes, the same meaning. Yes, this was her best friend’s very hand. Yes, even if the ideograms were shaky, even if there were ink blots here and there, hesitations as if strength or faith were ebbing.
Stepmother took the Bible from me. “See her excellent English, Sek-Lung? She used to win prizes. Did I not tell you Suling was best?”
I said nothing.
Stepmother closed up the thick book, held it a moment, and put it back in my hand. The dragon in my stomach unclenched—twisted once—and flew away. She folded up the jacket and quickly picked up everything, and silently went up to her room.
I never heard Stepmother mention Chen Suling’s name again.
nine
WHEN GRANDMAMA DIED in 1940 at eighty-three, our whole household held its breath. She had promised us a sign of her leaving, final proof that her life had ended well. My parents knew that without any clear sign, our own family fortunes could be altered, threatened. Stepmother looked every day into the small cluttered room the ancient lady had occupied. Nothing was touched; nothing changed. Father, thinking that a sign should appear in Grandmama’s garden, looked at the frost-killed shoots and cringed: No, that could not be it.
My two older teenage brothers and my sister, Liang, were embarrassed by my parents’ behaviour. What would white people in Vancouver think of us? We were Canadians now, Chinese-Canadians, a hyphenated reality that our parents could never accept. So it seemed, for different reasons, we were all holding our breath, waiting for something.
I was nearly seven when Grandmama died. For days she had resisted going into the hospital... a cold, just a cold... and instead gave constant instructions to Stepmother on the boiling of ginseng root mixed with bitter extract. At night, between racking coughs and deadly silences, Grand-mama had her back and chest rubbed with heated camphor oil and sipped a bluish decoction of an herb called Peacock’s Tail. When all these failed to abate her fever, she began to arrange the details of her will. This she did with Father, confessing finally: “I am too stubborn. The only cure for old age is to die.”
Father wept to hear this. I stood beside her bed: she turned to me. Her round face looked darker, and the gentleness of her eyes, with the thin, arching eyebrows, seemed weary. I brushed a few strands of grey, brittle hair from her face; she managed to smile at me. Being the youngest, I had spent nearly all my time with her and knew that she would be with me forever. Yet when she spoke, and her voice hesitated, cracked, the sombre shadows of her room chilled me. Her wrinkled brow grew wet with fever, and her small body seemed even more diminutive.
“You know, Little Son, whatever happens I will never leave you,” she said. Her hand reached out for mine. Her palm felt plush and warm, the slender, old fingers bony and firm; so magically strong was her grip that I could not imagine how she could ever part from me. Ever.
Her hands were magical. Long, elegant fingers, with impeccable nails, a skein of fine barely visible veins, and wrinkled skin the colour of light pine. Those hands were quick when she taught me, at six, simple tricks of juggling, learnt when she was a village girl in southern Canton; a troupe of actors had stayed on her father’s farm. One of them, “tall and pale as the whiteness of petals,” fell in love with her, promising to return. “My juggler,” she said, “he never came back to me from Honan... perhaps the famine...” In her last years, his image came back into her life. He had been a magician, an acrobat, a juggler, and some of the things he taught her she had absorbed and passed on to me through her stories and games.
Most marvellous for me was the quick-witted skill her hands revealed in making windchimes for our birthdays: windchimes in the likeness of her lost friend’s parting present to her, made of bits of string and the precious jade peony, a carved stone the size of a large coin, knotted with red silk to hang like a pendant from the centre, like the clapper of a sacred bell. This wondrous gift to her had broken apart years ago, in China, but Grandmama kept the jade pendant in a tiny red silk envelope, and kept it always in her pocket, until her death.
&nbs
p; Hers were not ordinary, carelessly made chimes, such as those you now find in our Chinatown stores, whose rattling noises drive you mad. But the making of her special ones caused dissension in our family, and some shame. Each one that she made was created from a treasure trove of glass fragments and castaway costume jewellery. The problem for the rest of the family lay in the fact that Grandmama looked for these treasures wandering the back alleys of Keefer and Pender Streets, peering into our neighbours’ garbage cans, chasing away hungry, nervous cats and shouting curses at them.
“All our friends are laughing at us!” Second Brother Jung said at last to Father, when Grandmama was away having tea at Mrs. Lim’s.
“We are not poor,” First Brother Kiam declared, “yet she and Sek-Lung poke through garbage as if—” he shoved me in frustration and I stumbled against my sister “—they were beggars!”
“She will make Little Brother crazy!” Sister Liang said. Without warning, she punched me sharply in the back; I jumped. “You see, look how nervous he is!”
I lifted my foot slightly, enough to swing it back and kick Liang in the shin. She yelled and pulled back her fist to punch me again. Jung made a menacing move towards me.
“Stop this, all of you!” Father shook his head in exasperation. How could he dare tell the Old One, his ageing mother, that what was appropriate in a poor village in China was shameful here? How could he prevent me, his youngest, from accompanying her? “She is not a beggar looking for food. She is searching for—for...”
