All That Matters (18 page)

By 1935, shadowy men and darker events edged the ragged borders of our life in Chinatown. More and more hobo shacks and corrugated-tin lean-tos were being built in small enclaves along False Creek.

“Very bad,” Father said as he and Third Uncle looked out from the third-storey warehouse window
and observed the hut-like humps growing around the distant steam ducts and heating vents under the Georgia Viaduct.

“Never go there,” warned Third Uncle.

Mrs. Chong claimed that at least two hundred unemployed men were living in those hovels, cooking over open fires and sharing pots of gruel salvaged from the slop pails of Chinatown restaurants. Segregated areas were now populated by Chinamen who had lost their seasonal jobs and who could no longer afford sharing a shift-time room, often just a bed with three or four others taking their turn to sleep; dozens had already starved to death, their bodies found in the rooming houses in Canton Alley, in the weekly-rental hotel rooms along Hastings and Main Street, and in the deserted alleyways.

“Those place stink with death,” said Third Uncle.

He was on a committee of merchants and landlords, part of the Chinese Benevolent Association, who volunteered to open up their warehouses, basements, and backrooms to shelter and feed some of the homeless.

The Vancouver Health Board was set to condemn Chinatown’s efforts. Men and women were coughing all night; many coughed up blood.

Father and others from Chinatown joined a committee set up by a United Church preacher to organize some soup kitchens. Late at night, Chinatown restaurants brought out unsold soup and soon-to-be-spoiled food to serve to lineups of waiting men. The rule was quickly established that no one would come to
the front of the Chinese cafés or restaurants and frighten away the paying customers. One came to ask for food only in the back alleys, and only after dark. Even the unwashed white faces came to understand that. No one was turned away.

Father told me the Canadian government would offer the hungry men and some women their fully paid passage back to China, but only if they agreed to surrender their original documents and sign a contract that said they would never return to Canada.

“They all come to Gold Mountain with hope,” Third Uncle said. “They work hard for ten or twenty years and leave with only what they can carry back in one suitcase.”

I remember going with Father to the docks to wave goodbye to a group who had accepted the free passage. Hundreds of men and the few women who saw no more future in Gold Mountain, carrying no more than a smelly duffel bag or a battered suitcase, often dressed in second- and third-hand coats, all of them sadly pushing their way up the gangplanks.

“Why not starve and die in China?” said one old man to Father. He bent down and shook my hand and wished me well in Tin-Pot Mountain. His stumpy hand felt funny, but I knew better than to back away. Father had warned me about such hands. Old Beard had first helped to clear the forest for the railroad tracks; he lost a few fingers in the shingle mill, yet with his hooked fists he had hauled nets on salmon boats until he could do so no more. Jobs vanished from the West Coast, and jobs fit only for the labouring Chinese were the first to go.

“Why not die in Toishan?” asked Old Beard. “Why not be buried back home? You remember that, Kiam-Kim. You Chinese.”

Poh-Poh understood. Old Beard’s bones would not have to wait their proper return to ancestral burial grounds. His ghost would not have to wander in Gold Mountain crying out for his Old China ancestors.

Elderly men that Poh-Poh once fed at our second-floor apartment came to our Keefer Street house to say goodbye.

“I never to forget you, Kiam-Kim,” one said to me. “How tall you be now!”

“Take care of Poh-Poh,” another said. “Listen to your good father!”

When Stepmother invited them in, pushing Only Sister aside to make way, they shook their heads.

“I not too clean,” some would say, perhaps catching Liang-Liang wrinkling her nose at the smell of their unwashed bodies.

Stepmother told me that it might break their hearts to see how all of us lived in a house, how we were living as a family in Gold Mountain. Some of the men patted Jung-Sum on his head and gave him and Liang-Liang a handful of candies. I sometimes got a red packet with their last coins enclosed.

“For school,” a few would say.

I would refuse, three times, and three times the
lei-see
would be pushed back into my hand. Then they would turn from our door and walk slowly away, or Father would walk with them down the porch steps, promising to see them one last time at the docks.

“I say goodbye now,” Poh-Poh would say from the front door, carrying Sek-Lung in her arm. “I die soon.”

The men would protest, but then they would laugh along with Grandmother, shaking their heads sadly at the same time; after all, whether young or old, they joked, who could live forever?

Later, I was told that some sickened and died in the fourth-class hold of the slow steamers that took them back. Others jumped into the ocean, unable to bear the shame of going home with less than nothing in their pockets.

Beside a few obituary lines published in the Gold Mountain newspapers, some formal names were noted under the heading “Missing at Sea.”

“Who’s that name?” I asked Father, who was reading the list aloud to Poh-Poh. They were both commenting on the last formal name, as if they had known the person very well.

“Old Beard,” said Stepmother. “Do you remember him?”

If I hadn’t been so busy being protective of him, I would almost have been proud of Jung-Sum.

Father constantly emphasized that we all had to take care of one another, and the oldest son would always be the one the family members would most depend upon. Stepmother taught me that Jung-Sum and Liang would pay attention to my example, and so I was to do my very best in school.

As First Son, I had a responsibility that weighed
heavily on me: to set an example, to never let the family down, to never give them cause to be ashamed of me.

“What’s ashamed?” Jung-Sum asked me.

“It’s when you do something bad and—and …”

“And everyone wishes you weren’t part of the family,” said Poh-Poh.

Second Brother shivered.

“No worry,” Poh-Poh said. “We raise you up to be good. Never to shame the family.”

But Jung-Sum insisted on hearing examples of shameful behaviour.

“You murder someone,” explained the Old One. “That very shameful to family.”

“How about stealing?”

Poh-Poh thought a moment. She guessed what Second Brother was thinking: the Old One often put extra “samples” into her shopping bag at Mr. Lew’s vegetable stall when he put out dried fruits, salted greens, or fresh peas for customers to taste or sniff.

“Big stealing,” she said finally. “Big stealing very bad.”

“How big?”

“Too many questions!”

Stepmother smiled at the Old One’s impatience. Wrinkled eyes caught her looking too comfortable.

“What do you say, Gai-mou?”

“When you do something bad,” she answered, “something inside will tell you.”

“That’s what Miss Schooley tells us,” I said. “Except very bad people don’t know how to tell right from wrong. Miss Schooley says they don’t have education.”

Poh-Poh nodded, grateful for the change in subject. “Study hard like Kiam-Kim,” she told Jung and Liang, then set down a cup of tea beside me as if I were to be respected as much as Father was respected behind his pile of notebooks and invoices.

“The oldest branch bear the most fruit,” Mrs. Lim once said to me.

I thought she meant to compliment my stature as First Son, but as was the way of village women, the saying was to warn me of the unspeakable burdens that lay ahead. Third Uncle later revealed to me that when Mrs. Lim’s only brother, many years older than her, was in his thirties and none of his three brides had produced a single child, he hanged himself from a courtyard tree. Then her family sent Mrs. Lim away to be a mail-order bride to a desperate stranger in Gold Mountain.

I asked Poh-Poh why Mrs. Lim’s brother didn’t pick up a son like we had Jung-Sum. After all, children were bought and sold in Old China.

“Too proud,” she said, turning away from me with a look that disturbed Stepmother and puzzled all of us, especially Jung-Sum. Poh-Poh reached out to him and took his hand. “Never worry. You be family with us,” she said. “You hear what I say, Kiam-Kim?”

I nodded, sipped my tea, and turned back to my textbook.

The Depression soon set me free from my work duties at Third Uncle’s warehouse; it was considered inappropriate for children to be doing work that an
unemployed man might do. Children in Chinatown never starved, for the Benevolent Society kept track of the Tong families. And Father and Stepmother had part-time work offered to them, however menial.

I was at liberty to play.

Jack had started to go to the Hastings Gym for boxing lessons. He was a few months older than me, taller and heavier than I was, and he qualified for the twelve-to-fourteen Second Junior Level.

I took Jung to the gym to watch Jack. At night, I would walk into our bedroom and catch him boxing with his shadow. Skinny arms flailing, he looked comic in the beginning, but he quickly caught on. At first his fists thrashed away at the air. Jack and I would position his elbows to stick out at a certain angle. Tell him to punch from there.

“Imagine a guy in front of you, Jung,” Jack said. “See his ugly nose?”

Jung-Sum nodded. Jack pointed in front of him. Gave me the signal.

“Ready,” I said. Jung shifted his weight. “Aim.”

Jack put his lips right next to Second Brother’s ear and barked:
“FIRE!”

Battering rams slammed into the air. One-two, one-two. Jung’s eyes lit up; his bony shoulders heaved with every whiplash wallop until finally Jack grabbed his wrists and shook one tiny fist into the air.

“Knockout!”

Jung collapsed into Jack’s side.

Jack’s father got him started at Hastings Gym, in tribute to his pal, Jimmy McLarnin, the gallant
neighbourhood boxer who knocked out Young Corbett III in 1933 and took on the title of World Welterweight Champ. A picture of Mr. McLarnin even hung on one of the walls at Strathcona School, where he was once a student. At the Hastings Gym, the champ’s newspaper pictures were prominently displayed in the manager’s front office. Every one of them caught McLarnin’s left fist poised to strike the final, skull-cracking blow. But Mr. O’Connor had a special photograph.

“That’s Jimmy McLarnin,” Jack said, pointing to a picture in a frame that he took from his father’s dresser. “And that’s my dad.”

Mr. O’Connor looked much younger in his sharp fedora, and proud, as if he knew he was standing beside a future champion boxer.

Jack put their RCA in the front parlour window so Jung and I could hear the Saturday games: baseball in the daytime and boxing matches sometimes at night. His father listened to them at a Hastings Street pub and would discuss the highlights with Jack later in the evening.

We crouched down and strained to catch the fadeaway American baseball broadcasts, three heads bumping like coconuts. Sometimes Jack and I did push-ups during the commercials for Burma Shave, pushing up and down with the rhyming jingles. Jung would stoop and count with us, pumping himself up and down like the heroes who ate Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions. Jung begged Father to buy Wheaties instead of the oatmeal Poh-Poh would boil for the family.

Jung-Sum began to grow taller, faster, stronger. His habit of cheerfully eating everything and asking for seconds, even thirds, made Poh-Poh and Stepmother feel like happy matrons, but Father wondered if his children would eat him into the poorhouse.

Father wasn’t wrong. Some days, there wasn’t enough food on the table. As I caught on, I told Jung he ate like greedy Pigsy. Poh-Poh knuckled me.

“I tell him when to eat or not eat,” she snapped. “Jung-Sum, hold your tummy in. Tight, like Kiam. See?”

I sucked in my stomach.

“You feel full in two minutes,” Poh-Poh said. “You eat more, Sekky!”

Jung-Sum did feel full, and Baby Brother ate more of the food Stepmother chewed first and then, with mushy dabs on her finger, slipped into his mouth. But we all worried: Sek-Lung slept more than Stepmother thought he should, and in his sleep, his breath was raspy and unsteady. Dr. Chu said he was having some lung problems and we should track his growth and watch that he did not catch any drafts. At night, I could hear Stepmother pacing back and forth, calling out his name as if to call him back from some dark well. Father would take his turn, but neither would sleep until Sek-Lung was breathing well again. Some nights, Poh-Poh took over, and she woke me up to bring the bowls of steaming water that smelled of eucalyptus, and the Old One would hold his little head high over the vapours. Finally, Dr. Chu said that he was getting stronger. Sek-Lung began to chatter, grab at things with his fists, and one day he stood up
and yelled for a toy. We all ran to him and clapped, and he laughed as Father picked him up to gently swing him by his arms. Stepmother cried, and Poh-Poh beamed. Liang even said she would make doll clothes for his toy bear.

Father found time to take Jung-Sum and me to visit various tong halls while he interviewed Chinatown politicians for the community newspaper. Some were just street-level reading rooms, like the ones along Columbia Street, where the elders sat around smoking and talking. The larger family association halls were on second or third floors, up long flights of wooden stairs that you climbed from the street, finally to stand before latched swinging doors that opened up to vast assembly rooms.

During those visits, Father would tell a friendly elder to take charge of us. “Teach my unworthy sons to be Chinese,” he would say.

The elders would laugh, call us
juk-sing
, hollow bamboo stumps, then ease into telling us stories of their young lives back in China, how they, as I should, bowed three times before the tall gleaming statues of Buddha or the grinning Gods of Fortune and Longevity. We were given fresh fruit from red-and-gold-rimmed bowls and sometimes a penny or a nickel if we had been especially attentive. When no one around cared to give us attention, Father would let us wander about.