by Wayson Choy
Chinatown people turned away, muttering behind my back. Poor Sek-Lung... Spent all his seven years with Poh-Poh... He can’t get over it.
Stepmother’s mahjong-playing lady friends gave her sensible advice, urged her to be patient, and fed me sweetmeats and rare oranges. Father received sympathy from both his political friends and foes. No one wanted to debate China’s future with him; no one wanted to deal with a man who had a haunted son. Kiam and Jung periodically rolled their eyes. Sister Liang refused to take me out anywhere her jitterbugging girlfriends might see or hear me.
The truth was, the Old One’s ghost was tugging at me and would not let me go.
When she was alive, Grandmama had taught me that spirits and ghosts were everywhere because the Chinese were such an ancient people; so many Chinese people had died that their ten-thousand million ghosts in Old China inhabited “the ways of the Han people.” Whether one was a peasant or royalty, Grandmama said, Old China people took it for granted that these ghosts lived constantly alongside them.
They were mischievous spirits and frightening demons, these good and bad ghosts. They could upset, or bring into harmony, the yin and yang forces—the fung-suih, the wind-water elements that helped to balance our “hot” and “cold” natures. Wind-water shaped our destiny, cured our illnesses, brought good or bad fortune. How else to ensure good fortune? How else to ensure good health and keep away from bad? Wasn’t the Old One slowly bringing back my laboured breathing to normal with her mix of ancient herbs and balms? Didn’t each mix require an external balance, like wind and water, her fingers massaging the che “energy” points located on the bottom of my feet?
“Bad and good ghosts,” Grandmama had told me, “know those points, too.”
Grandmama also had told me that in Vancouver only a small population of Chinatown ghosts could bother with us, really no more than a hundred or so, and most of these were somewhat confused by not being able to go with their bones back to Old China.
Inevitably, as a reward for my faith, the Old One came back, as she had promised, to help me in my resolve to start school when next September came.
In late January, three months after her burial, things began to happen to me which the family preferred to call “incidents.”
The back door would suddenly swing shut by itself, in exactly the way Grandmama (when she was alive) had shut it to prevent chills from creeping up her back.
“It’s Grandmama,” I insisted.
“The humidity,” First Brother Kiam cut in, matter of factly. “Damp weather swells the wood.”
“The house is very drafty,” Father said. “It’s an old house.”
“The wind again,” Stepmother said, pulling her sweater to her.
“It’s both,” Second Brother Jung nodded, looking at everyone else but me.
Sister Liang said nothing but stared at me, unsettled and unsure. I sidled up to her and whispered, “Did the door ever shut on its own when Grandmama was living with us?” Liang’s eyes widened.
Once, before lunch, I saw the Old One on the staircase, as if waiting for me. She was wearing her favourite blue quilted jacket, one hand on the worn oak bannister. I called out to Second Brother Jung. He ran to my side, stopped, and stared up at the staircase. It was empty, though he was not sure of an indistinct shadow like a veil, flitting away.
One cloudy afternoon, at precisely 3 P.M. (I can still hear the hall clock chiming), the Old One came back to visit me again. This time when I called out, Stepmother rushed out of the kitchen and stood by my side; she looked up and down the hallway, at nothing.
My actually seeing Grandmama on our staircase and in the hallway became the subject of debate in the family. No one wanted to believe me, though no one really wanted to doubt me either, for the world of Chinatown was the world of what if...
That is, what if Mrs. Jong hadn’t sensed there was something wrong one day and so decided not to sit in that seat by the exit on the Hastings streetcar, the very seat that a truck minutes later slammed into? What if Mr. Chan hadn’t dreamt twice of the numbers 2-4-6-9, the very ones that won the numbers lottery? What if the Soon family hadn’t, each of them, dreamed of their village home burning down; how would they have known to warn the family by cable to get away, three weeks before Japanese bombers actually devastated the empty house?
If visions and good sense didn’t combine to make us pay attention, what then was the meaning of anything? Grand-mama would have understood perfectly: signs and portents were her lifeblood. She had always said to her friend Mrs. Lim, “You only need to pay attention.”
I overheard big Mrs. Lim across the road ask First Brother Kiam, “Have there been any more incidents?”
I couldn’t hear First Brother’s answer, but Mrs. Lim’s strong voice shouted back, “Usually these things last for a year or two.”
Kiam groaned.
Then one spring day, on a hot dry afternoon, the three front parlour windows mysteriously slammed shut: Bang! Bang! Bang!
“It’s Grandmama,” I announced, and everyone glared at me.
Father quickly “fixed” the front windows: he put a building brick on each of the three narrow window ledges to hold them open when we needed fresh air. Each ungainly brick stood precariously on a thin ledge, waiting to fall.
“Father,” Kiam politely warned, “shouldn’t you use smaller bricks?”
“Why?” Father shot back. “And have Poh-Poh push them over like feathers?”
Everyone laughed but me. I didn’t care.
Father also “fixed” the mysteriously closing back door. Now there was a simple hook and chain to hold it shut, though the chain sometimes rattled as if someone were pushing against the door.
“The wind,” Stepmother said softly.
“Definitely,” Father said, daring any of us to suggest otherwise.
There was little sympathy for my clinging to the Old One’s presence. Father even took me to the herbalist to be examined. The old man found nothing wrong with me, except for my throat, which was a little swollen.
“Why is he wheezing so much?” Father asked.
“Too much damp these days,” the herbalist said, as if it were obvious. “Some children breathe like this until they grow up.”
I was given an extract of powdered lotus leaf and eucalyptus oil, mixed with a honey base, to coat my throat. When Father asked about my seeing the Old One, the herbalist shrugged.
“Is the boy hurting anyone?”
eleven
WEEKS WENT BY. THE FAMILY became used to my unabated faith in the Old One’s return.
Stepmother went back to her mending and knitting; Father, to reading his three Chinese newspapers; Kiam, to turning the pages of his thick science and math books, and keeping account books for Third Uncle; Jung, to checking out the News-Herald and Vancouver Sun sports pages to see how the Brown Bomber was doing. Sister Liang, however, lingered beside me to hear more. Sometimes she liked to hold the inch-wide jade carving that Poh-Poh (as Liang called her) had left to me before she was taken to the hospital. Liang liked to look at its pink centre, run a finger over the minature carved petals, and remember how Grandmama had spoken of her friend the travelling juggler and magician. Liang begged me to tell her everything I knew about Poh-Poh’s first boyfriend. But I decided it was useless to tell her much; she always wanted to hear the boring parts. For example, she asked if the magician and Poh-Poh ever really kissed. Because I would never tell her, we always ended up arguing about where Poh-Poh had gone after she died. Liang knew how to annoy me.
“Poh-Poh’s a-moldering in the grave,” Liang taunted, “just like John Brown’s body!” Then she broke into song: “Poh-Poh’s body lies a-moldering in the grave—the truth is marching on—”
“Ghosts don’t need bodies!”
“You don’t know anything about the Old One,” she said. “Poh-Poh’s dead! Ask Dai Goh!”
Dai Goh—First Brother Kiam—had won a prize in science at King Edward High School. Even Father referre
d to him for information about the new fire bombs the Japanese were dropping over China’s cities, about how they worked, like demon dragons spewing flames for hundreds of feet in every direction. Kiam knew about facts; he would, of course, verify that the Old One was dead. I knew Grandmama was not there in the way you would assume she was there if you were like, say, First Brother Kiam, coming to scientific conclusions. Dragon fires were real, measurable, scientific; my seeing and talking to Grandmama were not.
Kiam had never been close to the Old One. He also prided himself on being modern, beyond what he called “all that illogical stuff”; he was learning physics and something called the Atomic Structure. He was first in his math and science classes at King Edward High. But whenever I mentioned seeing Grandmama, as I did at least twice standing by the kitchen stove, twice on the staircase, countless times by doorways, Kiam quickly reiterated the “facts”: She’s dead. Buried. Gone. She was, he patiently explained, disintegrating into basic atoms and molecules. Bits of matter.
“She is so there,” I shouted. “I saw her by the back door this morning before breakfast.”
“And what were you doing downstairs so early?” Stepmother asked, as she threw some vegetables into the wok. The leaves and stalks sizzled and danced. The kitchen smelled of fresh peanut oil, root ginger, coriander and crushed garlic.
“I heard Grandmama calling me,” I said, matter-of-factly. “She wanted me to say—”
I stopped; my heart started to pound.
“Wanted you to say what?” Jung said, slamming a bucket of sawdust into the hopper. The kitchen stove sighed as the sawdust slid down the tin sides of the chute.
“Nothing,” I said.
Stepmother looked at me with apprehension, but I could say no more.
I knew if I had said, “Grandmama told me, Old way, best way,” the family would laugh at me. Father and Kiam had been saying how we must all change, be modern, move forward, throw away the old.
“After all these dirty wars are finished,” Father lectured to Third Uncle, “those who understand the new ways will survive.”
Third Uncle dragged on his waterpipe as if he could not hear.
Another time, even more mysteriously, the Old One appeared on the staircase landing above me. There, in her favourite blue jacket, she stood and pointed her finger past me, and when I refocussed my eyes, she disappeared. I looked to where she had pointed. There was nothing there but our front door window looking out across the street at Mrs. Lim’s tree-shrouded shack.
Mrs. Lim, I knew, liked the old ways, as if she had never left Sun Wui. Mrs. Lim told Mrs. Chang she thought she saw the Old One in the upstairs window looking across at her. When Mrs. Chang, shaking an armful of gold and jade bracelets, reported this to Stepmother over the mahjong table, Stepmother slammed her cards down.
“Just old-fashioned talk.”
None of the ladies around the table said another word. When we got home that evening, Stepmother threw her coat down.
“Don’t you dare repeat Mrs. Lim’s crazy words about seeing the Old One.” Her voice rang with frustration. “Don’t you dare mention any of this to your father when he gets home. He has the war in China to worry about.”
What no one could accept was this: Grandmama had never left me.
By the end of March, Father and Stepmother were pleading with my Chinatown uncles to intervene, to join forces against my madness.
“She’s shipped out, Sekky,” Third Uncle said, bluntly. “Your Poh-Poh’s shipped out.”
I went on playing with my tin soldiers.
“Gone,” said Uncle Dai Kew. “You’ll see your Grandmother in Heaven when you get there one day. Just like the Bible tell you so.”
I wished I had never gone to church with Uncle Dai Kew. The Bible explained everything to him, even his gambling losses.
I turned away.
One night, when we were in bed, Second Brother Jung was talking to me about the new job Stepmother had managed to get in the woollen factory, about how he himself was trying to get odd jobs at the wharf, how everyone would be working soon because we were poor, how Father and First Brother Kiam worried about the rent.
“Sekky, you have to understand,” he warned me, “everyone in the family is caught up with work and school.”
Jung went on; he really only wanted to talk to himself. I fell into a trance; my breathing seemed easier, grew stronger. I looked past Jung and suddenly saw the Old One standing at the end of Second Brother’s bed.
“Sekky,” Jung said, “what the hell are you staring at?”
“Nothing,” I said, startled, and caught Grandmama’s smile before she vanished. I felt good about seeing Grand-mama, felt the oxygen fill my lungs, and went to sleep, smiling. But Jung, I know, sat up in his bed for a long, long time, staring at nothing but moonlight. He was desperate for his own room, never mind the irritation of having to share it with a kid brother who was always seeing a ghost. I could not help it: my heart, my eyes, had not lied to me.
After another one of my “incidents,” I heard Father swear to Third Uncle that if he could ever raise enough money, the Old One’s bones would be dug up and taken to the Bone House in Victoria.
Liang told me about her friend Monkey Man sailing home to China with a shipment from the Bone House—two thousand pounds of old China men bones from the lumber, fishing and railroad camps. But the war changed a lot of things. Now such back-to-China bone shipments were discouraged. Overseas shipping space was restricted to war munitions and emergency supplies, and to the transport of living men for the purpose of killing other men.
No one in the family really wanted to talk about ghosts, not when they were speaking around me. On the contrary, they insisted only on the facts of life and death.
First Brother Kiam insisted on the Big Fact: Death meant the end of someone’s activity on earth. There were no such things as ghosts or demons or spirits. In response, I quoted from Mrs. Williams, who taught at the Methodist Sunday School, about the Holy G-h-o-s-t and how it was everywhere. Everywhere. Like Grandmama. Though naturally Mrs. Williams only understood about Christian ghosts with their pink faces and huge white wings and never mentioned Grandmama in her blue jacket.
“The fact is,” Third Uncle said to Father, “you haven’t paid your respects properly to your dead mother. You must bai sen, you must bow. Pay your respects! All this political talk you talk, one world, one citizenship! You forget you Chinese!?!”
Father jumped out of his easy chair and stormed out of the house. When he slammed the door behind him, one of the building bricks on the front window ledge tipped over and fell onto the porch. The window slammed shut, cracking the glass.
Everyone turned to look at me.
Soon after that, Grandmama’s room was cleared out and Father asked the family, including Third Uncle and Uncle Dai Kew, to prepare for a final ceremony. Everyone seemed to know what was going on, except me.
Kiam went across the street and came back with Mrs. Lim. The big woman was dressed in a blue silk jacket, the same colour as Grandmama’s. Two men came with her. Father said the one with the bald head and long black jacket was a Buddhist monk, an old friend of his who worked on the CPR steamships long before the war in China started. The other man was taller and wore an ill-fitting western suit; he had long oily hair that dangled over his collar. We all walked upstairs into Grandmama’s old room.
I stood in the doorway and looked inside, feeling the Old One’s presence. The place was empty, except for two large clay bowls. Outside the freshly clean, curtainless windows, I could see the distant line of North Shore mountains like resting lions.
Mrs. Lim took me aside.
“It’s time,” Mrs. Lim whispered in my ear, “for the family to let the Old One go.”
But they had already let her go, I thought.
The tall, long-haired man, Mrs. Lim told me, was a fung-suih expert, a geomancer who understood the harmonious flow of wind-water forces.
“If only your Father had a
sked him for advice about your Grandmother’s burial,” Mrs. Lim shook her head, “Poh-Poh wouldn’t be bothering you now.”
The long-haired geomancer looked older than Father. He had narrow eyes and waved his hand in the air and sniffed for emphasis, like the doctor at school who had tapped my chest and told me to take a deep breath. The bald-headed monk bowed to Father; he had a long face and spoke in a clipped dialect unfamiliar to me. The services of the monk and the geomancer were called upon (I was told years later) because of my stubbornness.
The two men put on white gowns over their own clothes; they planted burning incense sticks in the red clay bowls placed at the east and west corners of Grandmama’s room. Smoke trailed upward; rhyming whispers rose into the solemn air. The family was now being prepared to surrender Grandmama, as Mrs. Lim told me, to let the Old One go.
The long-haired geomancer and the bald-headed monk, Third Uncle, Mrs. Lim, and even Uncle Dai Kew, encouraged our household to bai sen for future prosperity, for good health and long life. To think of the Grand Old One. To pay our respects to Grandmama. Having done all this, Father felt satisfied and assumed my silliness would stop.
But it didn’t.
I SAW GRANDMAMA three more times. So did Mrs. Lim, who swore it was no mere shadow drifting between our house and the O’Connors’ next door. Liang went pale, said she felt a chill that day, even though it was sunny and hot. Kiam looked sympathetic. Jung said he thought the back door just now shut by itself.
