All That Matters (21 page)

“Yes,” Father said, “much more room in bed.”

“And the children not be there,” Tai Sim said, coming into the parlour. She felt Stepmother’s forehead with the back of her small palm; patiently, with her forefinger she traced the vein that visibly throbbed beneath the ear. Tai Sim sighed. “Not for children to see. Much to be done.” Tai Sim marched back into the kitchen, her body rigid with efficiency.

“Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh commanded. “You and Father help Gai-mou upstairs.”

Stepmother leaned against Father’s arm. Then she put one hand on my shoulder and asked me to walk up the stairs first.

The Old One rushed back from the kitchen with a small lidded bowl. “I mix broth with honey,” she said, climbing the staircase behind us. “Sweet and bitter balance heat and cold.”

As we all shifted up the stairs, I glimpsed Liang through the bannister. She sat on the parlour floor, pushing a toy spoon of imaginary medicine into Raggedy Ann. With a tin horn, Sekky poked at its stomach.

At last, Stepmother lay down on the bed. Father began to undress her. Poh-Poh told me to run downstairs and help clear up the kitchen.

Mrs. Chong was slipping into her hooded raincoat. As she walked out of our house, the rain lashed against her umbrella.

I remember that Madame Nellie Yip arrived very late that night. Sekky, Liang, and Jung had all gone to bed
hours before, and Father and I sat in the dining room, quiet and waiting.

Poh-Poh came downstairs to rinse and boil some more towels. She told Father that Stepmother had already taken half of the phoenix liquid.

“Go to bed, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh said. “This night for women only.”

I went to bed, listening through the half-open door of the bedroom to the groans and troubling sounds coming from the room across the hall. I remember the stairs creaking as big Mrs. Lim made her way upstairs. Carrying a thermos of soup in one hand, she leaned against the doorway and peeked in, looking over at Jung-Sum. As I turned over, she said to me, “Go to sleep, First Son.”

I sat up. “Will the new baby be okay?”

Mrs. Lim waved the container at me. “Good soup here,” she said softly. “Not for you to worry.”

“Father worries,” I said. “He worries all the time.”

“Yes, yes.” In her Toishanese words there followed as blunt a truth as ever, as if one could not be defeated by even the inevitable. “Worry and die. Worry and die. What is the use of such a life? You go to sleep.”

Mrs. Lim saw the sock I had jammed into the doorway so it would stay open. She tugged it out of the way, tossed it onto my bed, and shut the door tightly. There was nothing to do but listen to the rain, lie still, and be swallowed by the darkness.

I was wakened by a scream.

Jung-Sum sat up, too. I could hear Liang crying and jumped out of my bed to see what was the matter. In seconds, the three of us stood in the doorway and watched the last moments of the birthing. No one chased us away. Father was a few steps into the room, carrying a sleeping Sekky in his arms.

Bending over the bed, Madame Nellie Yip announced, “A boy,” but there were no smiles on anyone’s face.

The baby had been strangled by its cord.

I could hear Stepmother weeping softly, as if she were a child. I watched Madame Yip lift the small, glistening baby with the dangling cord into a tin pail at the foot of the bed. A folded bedsheet covered the galvanized bucket. Mrs. Lim bowed her head and walked to the other side of the bed, as if her weight might balance the cruel fate of birth and death.

Poh-Poh slowly took Jung-Sum to the bedside.

“This is why we were given Jung-Sum,” she told Stepmother.

Then the Old One turned to me. “You hear, Kiam-Kim?”

Second Brother did not pull away. He stood tall and straight and held on to the Old One’s hand.

Liang slipped into the room to be with her mother; then I stepped in, too. Then Father brought Sekky in his arms and stood behind Poh-Poh.

“Why cry?” she said. “Tomorrow we bury this one. We thank the temple gods that this grandson suffer only this night.”

Father asked Madame Yip a complicated question I did not understand. The big woman bowed her head and looked solemnly down at Stepmother before she would answer. Stepmother’s eyes were closed. The phoenix medicine must have done its work.

“No, no more,” Madame Yip said.

The wet head lifted up from the pillow. Eyes opened wide. Stepmother smiled with relief.

“No,” she repeated, “
no more
 … 
no more.”

Father’s hand gripped my shoulder.

FIVE

DURING THOSE WEEKS OF STEPMOTHER’S
slow recovery, I wanted to do more work, to help out with things. Jack O’Connor already had a paper route for the
Morning Herald
, but Father didn’t want me wandering the streets so early in the morning when the last drunks woke up looking for someone to beat up.

Third Uncle told Father that next year, when I looked older and stronger, and if business picked up, he would give me some real work to do. But just that week, he had had to lay off three of his best labourers, and it would be awkward, and shameful, to be seen bringing in a boy to do any of the men’s work. The men would lose face, as well as lose hope.

“Let Kiam be lucky for a few more months,” Uncle said. “Let him play like a rich man’s boy.”

But Father stared at the Free China poster hanging above Third Uncle’s desk. It showed a sturdy young
marching boy, dressed like a soldier, the flag of the Republic of China clutched in one hand, a donation can in the other. In the distance, coming down ancient hills, marching past schools and hospitals, hundreds of smiling young people were following, carrying blankets, farm implements, books, tin goods, warm clothing, and medicines … the good things that such donations would buy. Father saw me staring at the poster, too.

“You’re thirteen,” he said. “Would you like to take on more duties?”

Earlier that spring, Father had shown me some pictures of Chinese soldiers sleeping on snow-covered ground, their trousered legs hugging rifles. And pictures of starving children from all over China, their skeletal arms outstretched, eyes sunken with hunger.

“These soldiers will need winter blankets,” he had said.

“These children need food,” added Stepmother.

Father would take me with him when he went around Chinatown to ask for donations for the New China Relief Fund.

I thought now of the soldiers freezing in the cold, the children without even a grain of rice to eat. I nodded; I would do what was right.

First, I had to look my best. Father showed me how to polish my shoes with my own spit, as he had observed the Negro shoeshine man polishing boots and shoes at the CPR station. Stepmother pushed my arms through a freshly ironed and starched blue shirt and buttoned it up to my neck. Poh-Poh encouraged me to put on my
best woollen pants with my new suspenders. I shivered as the tweed material prickled against my legs.

“Itchy make you stand up,” she explained. “Make you taller.”

“Kiam-Kim, hold still,” Stepmother commanded. She rubbed her palms together with a dab of Father’s emerald-coloured pomade, which one of his appreciative readers gave him as a gift and which came all the way from France. Then she ran her palms and fingers through my hair and neatly combed a part in the middle. By the time I stepped out of the house, my shoes and my hair shone and I smelled of fresh lemons. My first trial visit would be to the warehouse, and then I would go to the rooming-house district.

“Kiam-Kim,” Third Uncle said, turning me around with a firm grip on my shoulders. “Let me see, front to back.” He adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses along his nose. “Yes, yes, very good!”

Father looked pleased. Uncle went to a shelf of small cardboard boxes and picked one out.

“Hold like this,” he said, showing me how my fingers should grip the box straight. The sides were covered with Chinese writing and official-looking paper stamps. At the top there was a slot. Third Uncle took some silver coins from his pocket and dropped them through the slot, one after another. He took my wrist and shook it. The coins jingled.

“That’s all you do, Kiam-Kim.”

Father waited a moment. “What do you say?”

“Thank you,” I said. Father slipped some coins in. I shook the box and said, “Thank you.”

“Yes, yes,” Third Uncle said. “When box heavy enough, you or Father bring back here.”

We walked down the long back staircase from Third Uncle’s mezzanine office, the coins clinking with my every step. In the warehouse, I passed some of the men who were unpacking large China bowls.

“Go ahead,” Father said. I walked up to the two men closest to me and shook the box. From the Saturdays helping with Father’s paperwork, I knew them by their nicknames.

“A soldier for the cause,” Father said. “My son, Chen Kiam-Kim.”

“Yes, yes, Mr. Chen,” Box Ears said, and dug in his pocket and put in some pennies. Long Arms, who could reach into the corners of any crate, quickly did the same thing, and I saw it was a nickel. I rattled the box and broke into a smile.

“Never forget to say—”

“Thank you, thank you!” I said, and ran down the back ramp of the warehouse and laughed to think how easy it was going to be to buy blankets for the soldiers and to feed the children of China.

After I’d spent five days going from shop to shop, door to door, shaking the New China donation box, Father told Stepmother that everyone seemed to enjoy giving me their attention. In fact, that was why the three-day assignment took us two extra days.

“People like his enthusiasm,” Father reported to Third Uncle. “They like Kiam-Kim’s cleverness.”

“And people like to laugh,” he told Box Ears.

It was true. Many times the elders and ladies would ask me what the money was for, and I would say in my excitement, “Blankets for rice!”

Father corrected me. I was to enunciate my short speech clearly, stand with my back straight, like a nationalist officer of the Kwomintang.

It wasn’t easy. Cantonese tones were as complicated as the guttural Sze-yup dialects. Liang-Liang and Jung-Sum, after they stopped making faces, and Stepmother would sometimes sit on the sofa as my spectators. Poh-Poh ambled by the parlour during one of my final practices. I harrumphed, then began:

“Generous donations benefit our soldiers of Free China with blankets for winter. Spare coins fill the empty rice bowls of our starving countrymen. A New China will rise from the old. Every penny helps. Every dollar matters. Thank you, kind sir, kind lady.”

And with my arms straight at my side, I bowed.

“Much better,” the Old One said to Father on her way to the kitchen. “Sound like a smart parrot.”

Father said I was ready to try again, and this time I would wear a new white shirt and double-polish my shoes.

After giving that short speech, I was to rattle the box—“not too loudly”—and Father would point to someone sympathetic I should head towards. Then I was on my own. Of course, I had to remember, if there were no ladies present, to stop the speech at “kind sir.” I was also to take a breath after “countrymen,” raise my voice on “dollar,” and not rush myself.