End of East, The

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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for my father
At first, what frightened her about this place was the drizzle—the omnipresent grey of morning, afternoon, nighttime too. She was afraid that she would slowly be leached of colour and that, one day, while she was combing her hair in the mirror, she would see that her reflection was as grey as the sky, sea and land that surrounded her. Everything she saw as she moved about the city was filtered through the mist—dampened, weighed down, burdened.
She would come home after a day in Chinatown and find her wool pants covered in tiny drops of water—cold, as if no human being had ever touched them before. If she didn’t brush them off, they would seep into the fabric until they chilled her skin and she shivered into the night, long after the dishes were washed and everyone else had gone to bed.
In the summer, the sun finally emerged, dried up the puddles, opened flowers that had cowered in the rain. Buttercups shone in the light and multiplied in the lawn faster than she
could dig them out. Children spat watermelon seeds over the porch railing, laughing at the squirrels who scurried across the lawn in fear. But every year, as winter returned, these days slipped from her memory. Too good to be true, perhaps. Too few to be important.
One morning, she woke and realized that she had come to accept the drizzle, that she had grown resigned to the squelch of rubber boots, the smell of damp wool on the bus. She walked around the park in the mornings, a film of fine water on her cheeks and eyelashes. Soon, she could not start her day without washing her face in the mist, letting the coolness do away with the bad dreams from the night.
And the half-light that lingered throughout the day let her believe that she was somewhere else, a dream-like netherworld in which anything might happen. Men could become lovers again. Women could be ageless. Children might even come back home.
But what she settled for was the cool, wet breeze that came in through the windows, the air that straightened her spine as she walked. The way the drizzle stayed with her, soaked into her hair, her clothes, her sheets. It pushed itself onto her skin, huddled with her when she cried, remained cool even as she cooked at a blazing stove. Unshakeable. Like family.
“It is time,” my mother says as she pulls me from the cab, “to run that old-man smell out of my house.”
As I haul my luggage out of the trunk, the smell of smouldering dust and gas fills the air, burning my nose and mouth. I follow my mother’s rapidly retreating body around the side of the house to the backyard, wondering if she has finally snapped and set one my sisters ablaze.
In the driveway off the lane, she pokes angrily at a crackling fire with a metal garden rake; I catch my breath, holding my suitcase in front of me like a shield. Piles of my grandfather’s old, woolly clothes line the backyard and spill into the gravel alley, waiting to be tossed into the gassy flames. A light rain begins to fall, generating puffs of smoke that blow into my face. I cough, but she doesn’t seem to hear me above the snap and sizzle.
Waving the rake in my direction, she shouts, “Take your suitcase upstairs and go help your sister.” As I turn back toward
the house, she slaps down a stray spark that has landed in her permed, greying hair.
Once inside, I scan the front hall. The same rubber plant behind the door. My old slippers by the stairs. I breathe out, and cobwebs (suspiciously familiar) sway in the corners.
My mother steps through the door after me, her hands on her wide hips. “What’s taking you so long? I thought I told you to run upstairs.”
“I’m jet-lagged,” I mutter, kicking off my shoes.
She inspects my face closely, staring at me through her thick glasses. “Jet-lagged? Montreal is only three hours ahead. Go. Penny is waiting.” She spins me around with a little push and pokes me in the back with one sharp fingernail.
I trudge up the stairs to my grandfather’s bedroom, where my sister is on her hands and knees, ripping out the nubby red carpet he brought over from his small apartment in Chinatown. Her long black hair drags on the sub-floor.
“Samantha,” Penny says, pushing her bangs out of her eyes. “I feel like I’ve been waiting for you forever.”
My hands shake. I try to tell myself that it’s only the dampness in the air that’s causing this deep bone shiver. But, really, I am simply afraid. When I was sitting in the airplane, the idea of coming home didn’t seem so real or so final, and I could pretend that I wasn’t passing over province after province. Standing here, in my grandfather’s old room, with my mother’s footsteps coming up quickly behind me, I know that I have irrevocably returned.
“We have to get rid of your grandfather’s junk before the wedding. We’ll need his bedroom for the tea ceremony,” my mother says, pushing me aside to inspect the closet. She turns to Penny: “I don’t know why you have to get married so fast. I’m
too old to run around like this. Inconsiderate girl.” She lets out a loud breath, punctuating her rapid, angry Chinese with a huff.
“Grandfather’s been dead for ten years, Mother,” Penny says quietly in English, as usual. “And we’ve been engaged for almost a month. You’ve had plenty of time.”
She waves her hand. “Why do I think you’ll understand? I’ve had other things to do, like look after all you girls by myself.”
Penny looks at me with her round, seemingly innocent eyes and shrugs.
I walk to the window and open it even wider. A prickly wind starts to blow out the thickness of my grandfather’s mysterious balms, the slight mouldiness of his tweed. Sharp chemical smoke wafts in. My mother walks briskly out of the room with as many of my grandfather’s possessions as she can carry—old books, a grey knitted scarf, a faded wooden apple crate with its lid nailed shut. The fear of bad luck and death hangs over her like a storm cloud, and her face is set.
“Sammy,” she snaps as she disappears down the hall, “clean out the dresser.” Penny starts to follow, dragging the rolled-up carpet behind her. As she passes, she whispers to me, “Your hair looks nice.” I put my hands on my bangs as she hurries away.
My grandfather left this room intending, perhaps, to come back one day. We kept it undisturbed, as we thought he wanted us to, but then he died and the door just stayed shut until my sisters and I forgot it was even there. I suppose my mother never thought his long life was as important, or as unlucky, as my father’s. It took her only one week to burn everything of his.
Listlessly, I open my grandfather’s dresser. In the top drawer is a cigarette tin stuffed with papers and photographs, all of them yellow around the edges. As I pull documents out
one by one, I can hear his cough, the chime on the radio signalling the end of a hockey game, the click of his false teeth.
If my grandfather was ever young, I never knew. He was quiet, eating his daily bacon and eggs and reading newspapers in his brown upholstered chair. Now, I unearth a folded and yellowed piece of paper. His head tax certificate. A thin neck balancing an irregular head. Bulging eyes. The date stamped near the bottom tells me he is not quite eighteen.
I read quickly, my ears turned toward the back door and the sound of my mother returning. “Chan Seid Quan,” it says, “whose photograph is attached hereto on June 27, 1913, arrived or landed at Vancouver, BC, on the
Empress of India.”
His arrival is stamped and duly noted by G.L. Milne, Controller of Chinese Immigration.
The old cigarette tin, with its aging photos and cracked papers, suggests that my grandfather, in all his silence, never wanted to forget. In these pictures, his right leg is always shorter than his left. His bow tie is never straight. His face is bony. But what did it mean that he wanted to remember these things?
Perhaps my grandfather wanted to think of his flaws so he could say, “I am not perfect, forgive me.”
I hear my mother and sister coming through the back door for more things to burn. I thrust the tin under the bed and feel something sharp cut my thumb—one of my grandfather’s old straight razors, its blade protruding from its crumbling leather sleeve. I never saw his barbershop, never walked through Chinatown with him, meeting all the men he knew. He was eighty when I was born, his shop long since sold, his customers long since dead.
When I turn around, sucking the blood off my hand, it’s only Penny standing in the doorway, brushing the dirt and ash
off her baggy T-shirt. She looks up at me, meets my gaze and drops her eyes again.
“Find anything else to burn?” she asks, staring at the ends of her hair.
“Not much.” I sit down on the bare mattress, facing the window. “Where is everyone?”
“Oh, you know how it is. Wendy is busy at work. Jackie can’t leave the kids. Daisy is off on some business trip.” Penny pulls an old stray sock from the closet. “It’s not you they don’t want to see.” She gestures toward the kitchen, where I can hear my mother muttering to herself.
“Of course.” I wipe my thumb on my jeans. “How’s the wedding coming along?”
“You know, it’s all just flowers and food and dresses.” She puts a hand on her stomach. “Wait—that reminds me. I have to make a quick phone call to the hotel. You can finish all this by yourself, right?”
I nod and see the relief on her round face—the loosening of the muscles around her eyes and mouth. I wonder if I looked the same when I left Vancouver for Montreal six years ago, delirious with the kind of happiness only escape can bring. My hands begin to shake again, and this time they will not stop.
As she steps back into the hall, Penny turns her head. “Sammy? Thanks for coming back. Adam really wanted to get married quickly, and I knew I just couldn’t live with her anymore. And someone has to.”
We hear my mother walking toward us, the slap of her slippers on the floor. Penny looks suddenly afraid. I stare at her T-shirt, at the completely obscured belly inside it, and wonder what she has been hiding. She shifts on her wide feet.
“I have to go,” she says quickly as she backs out of the room.
I haul the rest of Grandfather’s clothes out to the fire. The smoke begins to form a dark grey layer over my face and arms as I throw hats and vests and belts into the flames. I look over at my mother, and she stands perfectly still, staring fixedly at the burning pile in front of her.
Later, after hiding the cigarette tin on the top shelf of my closet, I return to my grandfather’s bedroom one more time. There is nothing left but a sub-floor, a bed and his empty dresser, yet his smell remains, embedded so deeply into the walls that nothing, not even the tornado-like energy of my deceptively small and shrinking mother, will ever erase it. I am looking at a beginning and an end, and a myriad of possibilities for the body in between.
For once, the curtains are open. I am six years old and lie on the floor in my favourite teal blue tracksuit as the sunlight pools around me, warming my closed eyelids. I see yellow, dots of white, the faint shadows of movement from the television. I open one eye and push my glasses back into place to see how Laura Ingalls Wilder, newly married, is faring on
Little House on the Prairie.
“I need a haircut,” my father announces, walking in the back door from the garden. He stands between me and the television. “Sammy, be a good girl and tell your grandfather to bring out his scissors.”
I pull myself up and run into my grandfather’s room, rubbing my eyes as I go. “Dad wants a haircut,” I shout, just to make sure he can hear me. “Can I see your barber’s pole?”
Grandfather smiles and stands up slowly from his dusty brocade chair. “Of course. You just sit here and watch while I get my things.” He pulls an old wooden apple crate from the closet and unwraps the pole from its layers of newspapers.
The barber’s pole seems to spin endlessly—red, then blue, then white and red again. I wonder if it somehow turns inward on itself, pulling its own striped skin into a hidden and perpetually hungry mouth. My father, passing by on his way to the basement, sniffs. “An optical illusion,” he says.
“Why did you become a barber?” I look away from the pole just long enough to squint at my grandfather’s lined, thin face. “I want to be an interior designer.”
He turns off the pole then, and passes his hand over the scissors and combs in his haircutting kit. “After I married your grandmother, the man who used to own my shop wanted to retire and go back to China, so I took over, simple as that.”
He picks up his barber’s kit and, with one foot, shoves the apple crate back into his closet.
While I stand in the corner, half-hidden by our yellow fridge, my grandfather slowly lines the kitchen floor with a blue plastic tarp and arranges his small broom, scissors and shaver on the table. My father brings up the bar stool from the basement, and my grandfather, his hands trembling just slightly, goes to work, the silence between them an invisible, unbroken wall.
These haircuts were the only times I saw them touch, those brief moments when my grandfather awkwardly placed his hand on my father’s shoulder for support, or when his long, delicate fingers brushed my father’s neck clean—gently, carefully. As they both grew older and thinner (mirrors of each other, yet also somehow not), my grandfather would linger over my father’s head, the expression on his face, as always, impassive.
I creep through the basement door as quietly as possible, hoping that my entrance won’t wake my mother. As I walk
toward the stairs, I can hear Penny snoring through her open bedroom door. I climb upward, passing the doilies my mother has draped over the banister, my body dull and heavy with wine and cigarettes.
Such a long evening
, I keep thinking,
like a boring foreign movie with no subtitles
. The whole time, even as I was sitting on a bar stool with my old friends from high school, nodding along to the beat (monotonous, cold), I could only think,
Fuck you, Matt.
I push open my bedroom door, throw my shoes on the floor beside my bed and put on my pyjamas.
I just don’t know how to finish things, that’s all.
I stumble my way to the bathroom. My mother mumbles in her sleep. I turn on the light and look in the mirror. Red eyes, flat hair, makeup rubbed off a long time ago. I suck in my thin cheeks.
“What’s up, Dollface?” I say to my reflection, realizing too late that I have just mimicked the way Matt used to greet me in the mornings. Our last day together, he placed his hands on either side of my face, holding my head just so, daring me, it seemed, to move. I did move, but only when he let me, after he kissed me and asked, “How about just one more time?”

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