End of East, The (13 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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When Siu Sang is ready to meet Pon Man, it is at her sister’s apartment in Chinatown. The windows face an alley where seagulls pick at the rotting produce and shit on the fire escape. Siu Sang walks gingerly over the floors, trying to keep the
ancient grime and mildew from touching her feet. If she weren’t so nervous, she would laugh at how different this place is from the sophisticated suite Yen Mei described in her letters to the family in Hong Kong.
She has spent the last two hours deciding which of her five silk dresses to wear and parting her hair from the left to the right and back again. She is sitting now, in her pale green dress with the gold leaves, on the frayed corduroy couch in the corner. Her sister, fat with her first pregnancy and bustling, hurries from the stove to the table, setting out tea and pastries. Her brother-in-law waits outside.
Siu Sang closes her eyes, sees the photo of Pon Man, which she has kept in her head all this time. She imagines them dancing in one of those supper clubs Yen Mei keeps talking about, their hands smelling of spaghetti and clams, his jaw smelling of aftershave. Through her daydream, she can hear people arriving, the commotion of coats and shoes and voices. She is afraid to open her eyes.
As her eyes adjust to the daylight, she sees that the room is full, that her sister is perched awkwardly on the arm of the couch beside her. There he is, his black hair shining and smooth. She stares at his lips. Pon Man looks carefully at his shoes.
His mother begins to talk, asking all the necessary questions: when will the wedding be, where can we have a suitable banquet, what else must be provided? She looks carefully at Siu Sang, judging the set of her mouth, the width of her hips, the white smoothness of a rich girl’s hands.
His father is smiling helplessly at her.
Pon Man stands up and hands a thick red envelope to Siu Sang’s brother-in-law, who nods in understanding. Siu Sang looks over at the money; Yen Mei whispers, pig-like, “The
dowry.” Pon Man looks over at Siu Sang and smiles, saying nothing.
As they are leaving, Pon Man’s father grasps her hand quickly.
“My daughter.”
Siu Sang sniffs her hand afterward (an odour she cannot place and soon forgets, supposing that all old men smell this way) and hopes that Pon Man does not smell the same.
The newly married couple stands in the photographer’s studio, smiling. Siu Sang fidgets. The lace on the back of her wedding dress is beginning to itch. Yen Mei, watching from the side with her hands on her round belly, shakes her head and mouths the words, “Don’t move.” Siu Sang winces and looks straight ahead.
Pon Man says something funny, and the photographer laughs. Siu Sang wishes she could understand and giggles along until she realizes that Pon Man knows very well she hasn’t learned English and can therefore see through her trick. She purses her lips.
At the reception, Siu Sang doesn’t think she has ever seen so many old men. They are bunched in corners, wandering around with whiskies in their hands, pumping Pon Man’s fist up and down. Seid Quan stands in the middle of it all, listening patiently to the other men’s stories of shy brides and wedding night heroics. When Siu Sang asks Yen Mei who all these people are, she replies, “Your father-in-law is a big man here, you know. Everyone in Chinatown knows him.” Siu Sang looks across at Shew Lin, who is sitting with a group of older ladies.
“What about her?” She nods in her mother-in-law’s direction.
“I don’t know much about her,” says Yen Mei. “Only that she is supposed to be a very good cook.”
Siu Sang drops her eyes before anyone in her new family can catch her watching them. She looks instead at her bouquet—fake red roses with drooping plastic ferns and baby’s breath. “Fake is more expensive,” Yen Mei had whispered while they dressed, “and it lasts forever.” Siu Sang wonders what she is going to do with this indestructible bouquet, whether she is bound to it for the rest of her life. She sighs.
“Speech!”
Siu Sang turns her head and sees Seid Quan stand up at the front of the room by the head table, nodding at the men cheering him on. The room hushes. As he opens his mouth to speak, Siu Sang pushes herself into a corner.
It is well past midnight, and the party has ended. Siu Sang kneels awkwardly on the floor, rummaging through her trunk for her nightgown. Her wedding dress is puffed out over her knees and rumpled. She is visibly upset.
Pon Man emerges from the washroom wearing only an undershirt and his tuxedo pants. He is rubbing the back of his neck with his hand and looks tired. He sighs and sits on the bed. “What are you looking for?”
“I can’t find my nightgown. It’s not here.” Siu Sang looks up, her arm buried elbow-deep in silk and cotton. “It was here this morning!”
Pon Man laughs, his slim body vibrating like a guitar string. He kneels down on the floor with his new wife. “What do you need the nightgown for?”
The phone rings. I look up from the careers section of the newspaper and reach over to the side table.
“Sam? It’s me, Matt.”
I pull the phone closer to my face, as if the extra inch will make this conversation more private. My mother stands in the doorway to the kitchen, tongs in her hand. I can hear the ginger sizzling in the hot oil.
“Why are you phoning me?”
“I need to know. You’re never coming back?”
“I can’t. I’m here alone with my mom. I’ve quit school. There’s no way I could come back.”
I don’t tell him that I am afraid, that the years stretch ahead of me, seemingly empty, that I have no idea how I will fill in the time. All I really know is that I cannot leave.
He pauses, and the miles of air between us crackle. “What if I came to Vancouver? I could find a job. Maybe I could help
out with your mother—you know, drive her to buy groceries and stuff.”
It’s as if the walls of my mother’s house have started to cave in, and drywall and flakes of paint are raining down on my head. I cover my mouth with my free hand and say nothing.
“Hello? Sam? Are you still there?”
I place the phone carefully back in its cradle because only disconnecting will stop that roaring in my ears. My mother calls me in for dinner.
The kitchen is cold and dark. She never turns on a light or the heat unless we have company, or unless I complain that my eyes hurt from reading in the gloom. It is seven in the evening, and outside a cold spring rain clatters against the tiny window above the sink. I look over at my mother, and she chews so deliberately that I decide it’s best if I don’t speak at all. After we eat, she washes dishes. I wipe and put away.
Steam rises from the hot, soapy water. My mother’s hands are red and chapped.
Suddenly, she starts with the drain in the bathtub. “You leave all this hair in the tub, and you never clean it out. You can’t just come back here and treat my house like a hotel.”
“I just forgot,” I mumble.
“Forgot? Forgot? When’s the last time you forgot to read one of your precious books? You just think housework is dirty, below you. You think I’m no better than a servant, that I’m stupid because I’m no good at English.” She points a soapy finger at me. “You think you’re better than me, I know it. What good is all your reading if you can’t even heat up a can of soup, if you can’t find a job? It’s because you’re useless. Go ahead, tell me you’re useless.”
With her sharply filed nail pointing at me and her angry Chinese words throwing themselves through the air, I want to turn around and run. I look behind me at the dark hallway and living room and realize that leaving right now will only make things worse. I put my head down and open the drawer closest to the sink to put the cutlery away.
I nick my mother’s hip with the corner of the drawer and turn around to apologize. Instead of standing at the sink, glaring at me behind her thick glasses, she collapses on the floor, one wet hand clasping the spot on her hip I have just bumped. Her eyes are tightly closed and she is motionless.
In a deep, flat voice, she says, “You’ve just killed me. Go ahead, do whatever you want now. Dance on my grave; I know you want to.”
I almost laugh. There she is, lying in a pool of dishwater, one hand on her chest, the other on the fatal wound I dealt her, pretending to be dead yet speaking all the same. The light from the fluorescent bulb above the sink has turned her skin bluish-green. She half-opens one eye to see how I’m taking it.
“I died without the love of my ungrateful daughters. It’s too easy to forget the pain of a mother’s labour. Killed by a useless, unloving child.”
A dark, thick bubbling bursts from my stomach and into my head.
Useless
. I can hear nothing else.
I pick her up by the shoulders, not at all surprised that she pretends to be limp. Crouching down, with my mother’s upper body in my hands, I begin to shake her. Her eyes pop open and her teeth start to rattle together. I stare at her face, the smugness of fake death replaced by fear.
“I’m not useless,” I hiss at her in English, and I know she understands. I shake her again. “And you’re not fucking dead!”
I let go and she falls backward, hitting her head with a thump on the brown linoleum. This time, her eyes are closed because she is scared, because she is trying to catch her breath, because, for the first time, I’ve said what I think and she knows it is right.
I walk out of the kitchen, through the hall, down the stairs and out the front door. The coolness of the night hurts my lungs; the driving rain hits my face like thousands of needles intent on piercing my skin so that they can get to the bottom of this mess. I walk toward Hastings Street and the industrial stretch of waterfront that hugs the East Side on its northern border.
I can hear the water echoing in my ears. I cross Hastings, then Dundas, and just keep going. I walk past warehouses, fishprocessing factories and the barbed-wired fences protecting it all. I know the ocean is there somewhere, and even though I am wet, soaked through with so much rain that it begins to come out of my eyes, I don’t care. I just keep going.
Finally, I come to a thin sliver of rocky beach. The mist in the air meets the water, and it is all grey—beach, ocean, sky. I could be on the moon. Down the beach, I see something flickering in the almost-dark. I walk to it, thinking that perhaps this is what I have come for, that this shiny, glinting thing could be the answer to everything.
There it is: a glass ball the size of a basketball—hollow, perfectly round, faintly green. I pick the seaweed off it and hold it to my stomach, staring at the bubbles in its surface, at its seeming fragility. I wonder how far it has travelled to wash up on this beach. Water streams off my nose and onto the glass.
I look around at all the water—in the ocean, collecting in puddles, soaked into my jeans—and realize there is nowhere else to go. I think I might drown. I fish in my pocket for
a quarter, walk across the thin strip of sand to a phone booth across the street and dial the number for my best friend from high school.
“Hi, it’s me, Sammy. Listen, I’m kind of stuck. Would you mind picking me up?”
When I hang up, I see that I am still holding the glass ball in my left hand. I step out onto the road and roll it gently down the middle of the street. It isn’t long before a car turns the corner and knocks it to the side, where it smashes against the curb, leaving nothing but tiny pieces of glass that catch the light off the street lamps. I sit on the sidewalk, hoping my friend will bring me a towel and a change of clothes.
We are all eating dinner together—my sisters, my parents, my grandfather, my older sisters’ boyfriends. I am almost bursting with something I really want to say, something that burns my six-year-old throat from being kept in too long, something that is really, really important. Every time I open my mouth to let it out, someone else starts speaking, makes a joke or spills something on the floor. I squirm in my seat. My face is red with frustration, and I stop eating altogether in protest.
Finally, when everyone else is chattering and the noise in the room just can’t be any louder, I stand up and yell, “You’re all mean, just mean!” Everyone stops. A pair of chopsticks clatters on the floor.
My mother pulls me out of my chair and drags me to the back door. I look in her eyes (fleetingly, surreptitiously, for it would never do to have her catch me staring) and immediately see that the fire behind her glasses will only consume me faster and more ferociously if I try to stop it. I let my body go limp.
As she shoves me through the doorway and onto the porch, she hisses, “See how you like it outside all on your own. I bet an old, scary lady will come and take you away, so you’d better watch out.”
She turns around and closes the door.
I creep to the window, press my ear to the two-inch crack my mother has opened to air out the steam that collected during dinner. I can hear everyone, still eating, laughing at me. “She’s just a shrimp,” someone says. “Watch out, she’s going to turn out wild,” says another. My grandfather makes a clucking noise with his throat. “She’s just angry,” he says quietly. “Your grandmother used to say things before she thought all the time, just like that.” I hear my mother let out her derisive, cruel laugh, and the conversation falls silent.
I walk to the edge of the porch and peer down at the cement driveway and vegetable garden below me, now covered in frost. The alley is dark. Garbage cans stand in the dim—short and squat like demonic little leprechauns, waiting for just the right moment to spring on me and search my pockets for hidden gold with their precise, skinny fingers. To the east, illuminated by the dull yellow of the street lamp, a long-haired grey cat stands, staring. It blinks before running off, its paws skittering on the loose gravel. I pull my turtleneck over my nose and inch backward until I can feel the cool stucco of the house through my sweater.
An old lady,
I think. I shiver as I remember that I don’t know any old ladies. One of my grandmothers lives in Hong Kong, where, my mother once told me, she is slowly going blind and getting fatter and fatter. The other grandmother, my father’s mother, died the day I was born, a story my sisters like to tell when they want to scare me. I know nothing about old
ladies, only that they like to steal children and, perhaps, simmer them for soup. It occurs to me suddenly that those dried brown things in the herbalist’s shop look suspiciously like little baby toes. I whimper into my sleeves.
I can hear my father and sisters laughing in the house. I imagine that they are planning all the things they will do now that I’m no longer living with them.
Penny
, I think,
is going to watch all the music videos she wants all day long.
Wendy might even move her fiance in when they get married, to luxuriate in all the extra room. I resolve to return when I am all grown up and give them a piece of my mind.
See if I help them out then.
I slump down and wrap my arms around my knees. The wind is cold and blows through my sweater and corduroys.
At least
, I think,
a soup pot would be warm.
I close my eyes and lean my head against the house. As I start to fall asleep, the cold disappears. I dream of an old woman, her face lined and brown, leaning toward me, her hands held out to warm my cold cheeks. She squats and pushes my chin up, breathes her hot breath on my ears.
A warm gust of wind smelling of mothballs, wet wool and soap blows against my face, pushing against my eyelids and tickling my nose. My eyes snap open, but there is nothing to see, only the same old dark. When I stand to look up and down the alley, I think I see, out of the corner of my eye, a small figure scurrying to the west, its head obscured by a knitted cap. As soon as I turn my head to look more closely, it’s gone, leaving behind only a faint trace of its comforting, old lady smell.
When I turn around, Daisy is holding open the back door and gesturing for me to hurry up and come inside. “Grandmother always used to let us in when we were small. Come on, then, before Mom sees.” I run, careful to tread
lightly. I follow Daisy to the basement, where she hides me until our mother goes to bed.
The club is dark and steamy, and the beat of the music seems to go on forever, an undercurrent that never changes, song after song after song. You could whisper your most hidden desires to the person right next to you and be sure he would never hear it. I stand by the only exposed window, trying to breathe the damp, urine-scented air outside rather than the sweat-scented air inside, which moves slowly and thickly.
After I dried off and put on borrowed clothes, my friends and I headed to this place, a rickety old downtown building surrounded by the kind of people my mother always warned me against. “Don’t get too close—you don’t know what they might have.”
I figure I must have an aura of despair hanging on me like a big wool sweater. One by one, my friends have all managed to pick up guys (toothy and gelled, all of them) and I am still, two hours later, hunched over in a corner by myself, drinking one Long Island iced tea after another.
Outside, a raggedy man has fallen into the Dumpster. He pulls himself out, clutching a plastic bag—dripping with dirty water—as if it contained gold.

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