All That Matters (43 page)

That first week of January, everything came to a head.

“Meiying sick too much with flu,” Mrs. Lim told Sekky when he went to show her his new storybooks. He wanted her to help print out the dialogue he had in mind. But Mrs. Lim stood fast. “Best for her to stay alone. You go play, Sek-Lung.”

Stepmother sent over some special teas from Poh-Poh’s pantry to help cool Meiying’s fever.

The next day, at Third Uncle’s, after working a hard midnight shift in the warehouse replacing someone who was sick, I sat in the small office, trying to catch up on the accounting entries that had
piled up since the holidays, but I was making all kinds of stupid mistakes.

“Go home to sleep, Kiam-Kim.” Third Uncle passed along some extra money for my next semester. As he walked out to join a meeting in the larger office down the hall, he gave a little laugh. “You too young to work to death.”

When I finished correcting my last entries, I put on my coat and walked down the hallway to leave by the shaft elevator. Some of the merchants were in the big room loudly talking about the camps being set up to intern all of British Columbia’s Japanese people. I stood by the doorway and listened. Since Pearl Harbor, there had been demands that all citizens of Japanese heritage be moved away from the coast. Partisan posters were showing up all over the city.
LOCK THEM ALL UP
, read one;
GOOD-BYE JAPS
! And a cartoon buck-toothed Japanese soldier was depicted burning up the forests of B.C. The rumour was that the properties of all Japanese, whether Canadian citizens or not—their houses and stores, all their goods, their farms and fishing boats, everything—were to be seized and sold off at auction. Mr. Wong suggested that all the tongs, the wealthier family associations, should be asked to put up some money to invest in the properties along Powell Street.

“Everyone at city hall debating these matters now,” Mr. Wong said. His political connections kept him well informed. “We need to invest wisely.”

Third Uncle looked up to respond, no doubt favourably, when he spotted me. He got up to shut the door.

“Go home, Kiam-Kim.”

At home, I rushed in and interrupted Father talking to Stepmother to tell him what I had overheard at the office. He said he knew about all this, and he was just now writing something to support the merchants’ grasp of the financial potential. At the other side of the dining room, Stepmother sat knitting in her chair and said nothing. But her tight lips warned me that I should not have interrupted them.

“I write three articles, Kiam-Kim,” Father concluded, “to be published in a series.”

He spoke so specifically in Stepmother’s village dialect that I knew it was all said for her benefit. But she kept knitting, as if she were deaf.

“Look at all the land the Japanese have taken from China! Now it is our turn, don’t you understand?”

“We don’t want any of it,” cried Stepmother.

Father glared at her. The atmosphere between them was explosive. The argument I had interrupted was obviously a heated one. I expected that she had held her ground.

They each retreated to work. Father tore up sheet after sheet and angrily threw the crumpled balls into the wastebasket. Stepmother kept knitting in a fury, the needles clicking loudly. Jung slowly came down the stairs, testing the quiet. But perhaps sensing the storm gathering in the calm, he stopped midway and turned around. Liang sat down at the table with Stepmother and pretended to read her library book. Sekky began to play quietly on the floor at the foot of Father’s big desk.

I fiddled with one of Father’s brushes. I wanted to take my head away from the crush of tension in the air. Stepmother’s abrupt dismissal of the idea that Powell Street should be taken over by Chinatown must have boiled inside Father. As if men like him could afford to turn their backs on such an opportunity.

“You should have chosen a damn rich man!”

The needles went silent. Stepmother’s face reddened with pain. I remembered the night Father had told me he liked Gai-mou but that he loved my mother. Though she wept that night, I assumed that Stepmother had accepted her position, accepted that she belonged to the family in the only way that was possible. But her whole being protested.

“I
chose?
I was
bought!
Even my own two children call me Stepmother!”

Both Liang and Sekky averted their eyes. They must have sensed that their mother was battling against invisible and entangled ways. Against their ancient powers, she was as helpless and defenceless as I was.

“The Old One decided,” cried Father.
“You
accepted!”

I saw now that Father had taken for granted the Old China ways without realizing how Stepmother had been pushing against them. Stepmother’s eyes flashed in the same way that Jenny’s did whenever she felt cornered. I thought of Stepmother’s Three Flowers perfume, which I smelled on Meiying when I happened to bump into her coming down our stairs, rushing away from our house to go
where?
To meet
whom?
Did Stepmother
dab some perfume on Meiying and say, “Go meet the boy tonight”?

And what had they been talking about under the ruse that Stepmother was teaching Meiying her household skills, helping Mrs. Lim’s adopted daughter to become
sensible?
And did Meiying push her Gold Mountain way into Stepmother’s thinking? Sensibly, did Meiying ask, “Why do your own two birth-children call you
Step
mother?”

I thought of Poh-Poh’s old story about the tyrannical mistress who had whipped her, how even a lowly servant girl could fight back against all those days and nights of injustice. But Stepmother needed no magic combs to turn into river dragons; she had her silence. This time, I could see, she would not weep a single tear.

Father must have known he could not simply reach out and take her hand as if nothing had changed. He looked around the room and sought to re-establish his place.

“One of you, make some tea,” he said. “Should be making lunch by now.”

Everyone, including Father, held their breath. Her knitting needles clicking away, Stepmother refused to move. I knew what I had to do. I got up and went to the kitchen. Father went on writing, as if it were not unusual for First Son to make him his tea. He would not lose face.

After filling the kettle, I turned my head as Poh-Poh might have and looked for the Kitchen God. But Father and Stepmother had decided not to remind
Sekky of last year’s ritual burning. The Kitchen God would not come into this house again.

While waiting for the kettle to boil, I stood at the back door and looked out at the wooden fence dividing the O’Connors’ backyard from ours. If I shut my eyes, I could go back many years and see Jack playing there that first winter in this house, when we were just getting to know each other. He had seen me on the back porch and waved his mittened hand and pointed at the half-made snowman.

Tall Mr. O’Connor, who came out from their small shed with two pieces of coal, was waving at me, too, to come down and join Jack.

“Snow not good for you,” Poh-Poh said, calling me to come in. I had already been coated and sweatered up for the cold, ready to go out with Stepmother and Poh-Poh to shop at Market Alley. The snow and building a snow creature was too tempting. I had seen the snow pile up that winter and envied the other boys playing outside, building forts and snowmen with coal eyes and carrot noses, which they knocked down with glee. I broke away from the Old One and ran out the back door, plodded through the foot of snow and attempted to climb over the fence. Mr. O’Connor lifted me up out of the deep snow and put me down beside Jack.

Poh-Poh told Stepmother to call me back, but Father and Third Uncle, meeting over business, must have been watching from the dining-room window.
Later, Stepmother said Father had told her and Poh-Poh to leave me alone. Third Uncle said to them, “In Gold Mountain, First Son must learn other ways.”

Jack and I babbled at each other as if we were using the same language. We finished the snowman, and with Mr. O’Connor guiding us with shovelfuls of snow, we constructed a fort. Finally, Mr. O’Connor lifted Jack and me back over to our yard, where the snow lay pristine, unbroken except for the trail I had left behind. He directed Jack with a torrent of words, and I watched as Jack fell backwards into the bank of snow. Then the tall man pointed at me. I threw myself onto the deep snow, and pushed my arms up and back along my side. Then Jack carefully stood up to see what impression he had made. I did the same thing. My eyes widened at the wonderful sight. Butterfly creatures were pressed into the snow. Mr. O’Connor flapped his arms as if they were wings and called out, “Angels.”

Stepmother clapped her hands at the snowy creations, and Father laughed with delight, but the Old One shook her head.

“Soon all gone,” she said.

“No matter, Kiam-Kim,” Third Uncle commented. “Still beautiful.”

The kettle rattled me back to the present. A different winter now stared at me from the backyard—dead vines tied up with string, brown stalks of dead plants and grass, patches of bare earth, and the leaning slab fence. I picked up the pot holder in one hand, and with the other I lifted the teapot from the warming shelf and shook in some tea leaves from the old caddy.

Just as I was reaching for the boiling kettle, there came a loud banging on the front door. Father quickly unlocked the door. Mrs. Lim barged through, shouting to Stepmother.

“Chen Sim! Chen Sim!
Aaaiiyaah!
Lim Meiying! Meiying!”

Mrs. Lim did not have her winter coat on. Father led the big woman into the parlour. She was almost incoherent. Then, with chilling effect, she screamed to Stepmother,
“In her room! Meiying in her room!”

Father and I looked at each other.

“You and Jung take Liang and Sekky to Third Uncle’s,” Father said, “and wait for me to come for you.”

I grabbed their coats, but Sekky was gone.

Looking past the open door, I saw him across the street, chasing after Stepmother, climbing up the two rickety flights of stairs as fast as he could to catch up with her. As we rushed to Third Uncle’s, I could not shut out Mrs. Lim’s cries:
“Aaaiiyaah! Lim Meiying! Meiying!”

Overnight, the news ran through Chinatown. Perfect Meiying had given herself to a Japanese boy. She had to do something and failed terribly. She had bled to death. Two ambulance men arrived, and a crowd gathered to watch them take away the bundled body. Word had been sent to Meiying’s mother in Toronto. And a Buddhist monk arrived right away to chant and perform special rituals to expunge the bad luck such a death would surely leave behind. Yes, yes, a terrible, terrible loss.

The third day after Meiying’s death, and the day before the private burial, Jenny agreed to see me. I had tried twice before, but whenever there was a visitor for her, whether her other friends or me, Mrs. Chong said she would lock herself in her bedroom.

“I never see her like this before, Kiam-Kim,” she said. “Her heart so broken over Meiying.”

But this time Mrs. Chong noticed the door unlock, and she led me upstairs and knocked gently.

Jenny’s eyes were swollen from crying, and she could barely speak. Her throat was parched. We were alone in her small bedroom upstairs, and she seemed unable to sit up.

She looked at me, her eyes dark with pain.

“First Jack … then poor Meiying. They’re both gone now.”

I guessed at Jenny’s thoughts. She and Meiying had both crossed the line with someone not of their own kind. “No, not both gone,” I said. “Someone missing is not dead.”

I picked up the glass of water on her bedside table, lifted her head, and encouraged her to drink.

She swallowed, and sat up against her pillows. “Don’t stay with me, Kiam,” she began. As I held the glass, she took another sip of water. Then another, until the glass was empty. “Break off with me, Kiam.”

I answered the only way I knew how.

“Marry me,” I said.

She grabbed the glass from my hand and smashed it against the wall.

Mrs. Chong came running up the stairs.

“What is happening, Kiam-Kim?” she cried, wiping her hands on her blue smock. “What’s wrong, Jenny?”

“Nothing, Mother,” Jenny said. “Kiam just asked me to marry him.”

Mrs. Chong jumped. “And how did you answer him? What did you say to Kiam-Kim?”

Jenny looked at me as if she had thought of this moment many times before.

“Aaaiiyaah,”
said Mrs. Chong.
“What did you answer him?”

Jenny’s eyes did not move from mine. “Why not?” she said. “My heart answered him, ‘Why not?’ ”

“Yes, you mean
yes!”
Mrs. Chong leaned against the doorway. Jenny and I turned to see triumph gleaming in her eyes. “Kiam-Kim, your Poh-Poh will have many great grandsons!” She took a deep breath and began shouting, “Ben! I have news for you!” She disappeared down the stairs.

Jenny held my hand. In the haunted quiet between us, I surveyed the fragments of glass reflecting the sunlight.

ENDINGS