All That Matters (2 page)

WHEN I WAS THREE YEARS OLD
, Father, Poh-Poh, and I were sent away from our Toishan village to Hong Kong, sent away by the Patriarch Chen, who was recently a Mission House convert and the head of our clan. As a demonstration of his Christian charity, the old Patriarch had agreed to clear the way for Third Uncle to sponsor us to come to Canada, so that Father, Grandmother, and I, First Son, would have a chance to escape the famine and the civil wars raging in the Pearl River Delta of Kwantung province. Those who could leave Sze-yup, the Four County village district in Southern China, would have a chance for a better existence. Those who settled in Gold Mountain might find work and send back remittances to help the ones left behind; every sojourner would return home when life improved in China.

Much later, I learned that before he had put up the money and bought the documents for us to join
him in Vancouver, Third Uncle had to consider the feelings of his dead wife. He consulted Chinatown’s Madame Jing, who set up her fortune-telling table in Market Alley and had known him since he first arrived in Gold Mountain. She interpreted the final toss of the
I Ching
coins.

“The spirit of your dead wife approves,” she said.

Soon after this sign of approval, American gold and large Mexican silver coins were paid into various hands. Six months later, we sailed on an
Empress
steamer and landed in Victoria, then headed to Vancouver to settle in the Chinatown rooms that Third Uncle had rented for the three of us in a building on East Pender Street, just half a block from his warehouses on Shanghai Alley.

Third Uncle was not my father’s brother. In fact, he was a very distant cousin from Sze-yup, connected to us only through our mutual clan name of Chen; his own blood brother had died years ago in the interior of British Columbia. Over fifty, and successful as an import-export warehousing merchant, Third Uncle had been shocked into acknowledging his own mortality. In less than a month, five of his Chinatown associates had died, two from heart attacks, two from the coughing sickness, and one from a stomach tumour. He confronted a chilling fact: he had no family members in Gold Mountain to carry on after him. What legacy, then, had thirty years of his work and investments built? He promptly decided to sponsor a “namesake family” from Old China, a
maaih-gee ga-ting
, a “bought-paper family” that would replace what he himself had tragically lost.

During the long period of civil unrest in Southern China, Third Uncle’s own wife and ten-year-old son had met a fearful end. The two were abducted by a peasant warlord and held for ransom. But the ransom note arrived in Vancouver with an incorrect address, the name on the oversized envelope badly blotched by rain, and for three months on the front window of the
Chinese Times
office, the indistinct envelope was displayed, unclaimed. When it was finally opened and read, it was already too late: another letter had arrived from Patriarch Chen to say that a box had turned up, and it held the severed heads of Third Uncle’s wife and son. The two decapitated bodies were found in a neighbouring field; mercifully, the bones and skulls were brought together by Patriarch Chen for an appropriate burial, or their ghosts would have wandered hopelessly in the fields and ponds.

Third Uncle wept to think that he had countless times walked past that large envelope. He had even laughed at the awkwardly constructed ideograms, as if a childish hand had struggled with each wavering stroke of the brush: he had wondered who was so ignorant, or so ill-advised, that they would not have hired a street calligrapher to write the words properly. It turned out that the words had been brushed by his own young son. The
Chinese Times
retold this sad story and urged people to check carefully the still unclaimed envelopes taped to the Carrall Street windows: “Some words are made unreadable by rain,” the editor wrote, “and some, by tears.”

Years later, Third Uncle told me that after the loss of an older brother in Gold Mountain, and then of his
own wife and son, he had no intentions of ever again enduring a “blood loss.” Further, after receiving the tragic news in the letter from Patriarch Chen, he had been warned by Madame Jing that if he dared to remarry, he would offend the ghost of his angry wife and bring a curse upon himself.

“Your wife feels you deserted her,” the fortune teller had said, wagging her finger at him. “She saw you walking by that letter. She saw you laughing.”

During the years since that tragedy, Third Uncle kept good company with a few women companions in the Chinatown teahouses, but he never invited any of them to his private rooms in his main Shanghai Alley warehouse. He slept alone there, beside a fading picture of a tall woman and a young boy, and he never remarried.

After thirty years in B.C., and after keeping the memory of his wife and son for so long—though he remembered only a baby the weight and size of a winter melon when he left for Canada, and remembered clearly how he pushed the tiny penis and assured himself the infant was a boy—and shortly after the funeral of his fifth business peer, Wong Ying Si, who boasted that Death would never touch him until his seventy-fifth year, and who died at the age of fifty-three, it was time for Third Uncle, then fifty-three himself and a wealthy merchant with three warehouses, to sponsor a family from his clan to become his own kin. Such sponsorship schemes were not unusual for Chinatown, though only those merchants with enough money could manage them, bringing over to Gold
Mountain their brother’s whole family, for example, or a family member of a favourite concubine. Third Uncle quickly arranged with the Chen Association to assist him in sponsoring his paper family.

Arrangements were made through Patriarch Chen back in our Toishan village to settle on the right person for Third Uncle to bring over. He wanted a much younger man who would know some English and would be able to work beside him and help him with his accounts; he would sponsor this man and two of his family members, and pay for the documents and transportation to Gold Mountain. According to the agreement, this paper family would accept him as one of theirs. As a gesture of goodwill, Third Uncle also agreed to donate a large sum of money to the China-Canada Mission House, which the Patriarch favoured.

Father, as it happened, with his gift for studies, had been taught elementary English by the Mission teachers. He had also been helping with their complex accounts, translating the Chinese and English bills and invoices. His mother, my Poh-Poh, had been one of Patriarch Chen’s household servants, but now in her sixties, whatever her merits, she held many secrets and was getting too old. Because of the famine and the civil war, Father readily agreed to the overseas proposal and signed some papers, and so we arrived in Vancouver. Father was thirty years old, and Poh-Poh was almost seventy, and I, three. Poh-Poh and I were Father’s only two surviving family members; before my second birthday, my mother had died from the coughing sickness.

Ghosts and Old China haunted us, just as they had haunted Third Uncle. Only the stillborn can leave the past behind.

The first three months in
Hahm-sui-fauh
, Salt Water City, we occupied two badly lit rooms on Shanghai Alley, across from Third Uncle’s warehouse. A barbershop was below us, and Poh-Poh and I could hear the chatter of men all day. There, Father sat and drank tea with Third Uncle while he was introduced to the community, and men came to smoke water pipes that gurgled in wooden buckets. Women came to visit us upstairs. They came and pinched my cheek and gave me stuffed animals, and soft candies to chew on, and chatted endlessly with Poh-Poh. Sometimes a boy or girl would visit and play with me. Sometimes I sat with Father downstairs in the barbershop and wondered at all the strange faces.

Then we moved into two spacious front-window rooms in a deep, three-storey brick building directly across from the Sam Kee building on East Pender and settled among the clutter of mismatched furniture and a cubbyhole kitchen. I existed there in a noisy jumble of dialects. Middle-aged or elderly faces bent over me, but were quickly forgotten and made little impression. Their concerned chatter, the smell of their seldom-washed bodies, made me wish for playmates my own size.

“Where are Jo-Jo and Little Pot?” I asked, wondering where the servant girls’ two boys had gone. “Where
is Wah Doy?” Wah Doy was an older boy who played clap-hand games with us in Patriarch Chen’s compound nursery. Other laughing faces came to mind. “Where is—?”

“All gone now,” Poh-Poh told me. “All left behind.”

The musty second-floor apartment opened only to a long, dank hallway. There was no courtyard, no palm trees, no smell of the wet or endless dry seasons, of the dust rising from the ground in swirls. Only the oily smells and train-clanging sounds of False Creek. When I was not distracted by a new toy, Father told me, I whined for my village playmates, for pudgy faces, for hands and feet that pushed against my own and smelled familiar. I must have wished that the world had not changed so suddenly.

Poh-Poh wished, too, for the familiar routine of Patriarch Chen’s servant quarters, where she had held me by my squirming, slippery waist in a large porcelain bath bowl painted with birds. In the middle of a walkabout room enclosed by flimsy curtains, she would pour from a jug the lukewarm water that Father had first bathed in. After me, she would climb in and take her turn, talking to me loudly so that no one would walk in on her. I was too young to know any difference, and only wanted to push my nose against her skin. Poh-Poh smelled of the kitchen herbs, of the mint and coriander that she crushed in her palms and rubbed over the back of her neck. In Gold Mountain we washed with a yellow soap that smelled like lye and we never bathed together again; I was stood up in an iron tub, and water poured down from taps with just a twist
of the white porcelain handles. Actual doors hook-locked shut, and with no need to chatter loudly against any accidental intruders, Poh-Poh let me splash and babble to my heart’s content while she fell into singing to herself tunes that she told me were sung to her by a magician-acrobat when she was a young girl in China.

“Clean up for Father today,” she would say to me on days when expected warehouse inventory and supplies hadn’t arrived for counting and storage. “On his afternoon break, Father take you for a walk.”

Wearing one of Third Uncle’s English suit jackets and the scooped Stetson he had bought from Modern Tailors, Father would take my hand and we would walk fifty feet south, behind Pender Street, down Carrall, and see the whole spine of Chinatown pushing against the thriving industrial mud flats of False Creek. Checking his pocket watch, Father lifted me up when I grew tired and pointed out the huge doors that opened up into the back of Third Uncle’s warehouse. From the tops of bales and barrels, men waved to Father, who proudly lifted me even higher, urging, “Wave back, Kiam-Kim!”

By four in the afternoon, a fresh sea wind would blow in from the inlet. Until its arrival, the yellow-tinged air often tasted of the acrid smoke and fires spewing from the three- and five-storey-high brick chimneys of mills and refineries. The industrial sites were mostly crammed together under the distant Georgia Viaduct, but they also sat in exile all along False Creek like grim castles anchored deep in toxic black mud. Chinatown children like myself were warned not to go near any puddles, the shallow pools
whose rainbow-glazed waters, we were warned, would quickly eat away our skin and leave only our bones behind. Then Father would take me back up the narrow stairs of our residence, and Poh-Poh would give him some extra food to see him through his long shift. I ran to the window and looked down to see Father crossing the street to wave to me before he disappeared into Shanghai Alley.

Our apartment was beside the warehouse district and among the busy narrow byways of Shanghai, Canton, and Market alleys, the three cobbled laneways located between Abbot and Columbia streets. These busy back lanes were enclosed on the south side by the expansive rail yards of the Great Northern and Canadian National railways. On these manmade flat-lands of False Creek, freight cars and engines crowded the CPR Roundhouse, an enginehouse with a giant cranking turntable to shift the direction of the trains.

When the air was still and muggy, and gritty with the soot of train engines, Poh-Poh tied a wet cloth over my mouth and nose. After an hour, the damp cloth turned grey.

At all hours, the
foih-chai
, the trains, tugged freight cars that banged together like thunder and shook the windows of our rooms. At bedtime, Poh-Poh stuffed cotton in my ears until I got used to the noises.

“Only dragons playing,” she told me. “Lucky dragons.”

BANG! BANG!

“Only CPR freight trains,” Father said, and took me by the hand one morning to show me how giant
boxcars slammed together and shook the ground, crossing from the shipping docks below Hastings to East Pender, rumbling deep into False Creek to disappear into the steaming bowels of the Georgia Viaduct.

When we were alone in our tiny bedroom, Poh-Poh used to whisper to me from her bed: “At night when you sleep, Kiam-Kim,
foih-chai
change into iron dragons—lucky dragons to protect you from white demons. You be like Father: no worry.”

Father did not worry about dragons. He had already been set up by Third Uncle to worry about entering numbers into large accounting books, numbers taken from piles and piles of invoices. Poh-Poh told me that Father was now so busy with numbers that he had no more room in his brain to worry about iron dragons.

I, too, did not worry—at least, not in the daytime.

On our afternoon walks, after all, Father had shown me that a train was a train, a solid, whistling, steam-blowing piece of reality. But at night, just before the darkness swept me deeply into sleep, as shunted boxcars went
BANG! BANG!
against each other, and as Father worked on his books under the single desk lamp in the next room, and Poh-Poh, with her knees and elbows cracking every night, as she sank back into her pillowed chair beside my cot, and as my eyelids sank under the weight of unbidden dreams, I felt stirring beside me a steel-plated, steam-hissing grey dragon uncoiling itself. Throughout the night, as the trains rumbled out of the roundhouse and click-clicked across Pender, bisecting the yellow light of street lamps,
I saw dragon eyes flash across the bedroom ceiling and fly into Poh-Poh’s ancient head.