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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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I shake my head, rub the smokiness of the night out of my eyes.
At least I have all this
. I wave my hand around my mother’s pink and peach bathroom, knock over the crocheted toilet paper doll, and laugh.
Memories can go fuck themselves
.
I walk through the hallway and look up at the family portrait hanging on the wall. My own younger face looks back at me from within the heavy wooden frame. Shadows play across the picture, making the faces of my parents and my four older sisters jump out—three—dimensional, gargoyle-like. My eyes pass over their faces until they come to my father, sitting in a tall leather chair, a rolled-up newspaper in his hands. I walk a
little farther, and his eyes follow me, the irises moving with every step I make. I think I see him breathe.
I stop moving and close my eyes, hoping that this living, breathing version of my father will go away, disappear into the night. “Are you watching me?” I whisper. “I thought you had left us a long time ago.” I open one eye. My father’s photographed face, usually so benign, sneers.
I run forward and shut my bedroom door, feeling the resistance of the darkness without.
The next morning, I walk into the kitchen for breakfast and blink at the bright sunshine pouring in through the window. Outside, the back garden is tangled with weeds, but even so, through the tangled blackberry branches and dandelions, I can see the beginnings of returning chives, the buds on the branches of the neighbour’s cherry tree.
Penny stands in the driveway, slowly digging at the huge pile of ash with a snow shovel. She places a hand on her belly, rubs it counter-clockwise. Still wearing my flannel pyjamas and slippers, I step outside and join her.
“We have to get rid of this somehow,” she says, kicking at the ash with her shoe. “Are people even allowed to burn garbage in their yards anymore?”
“Of course not. But do you think Mom cares about bylaws?” We giggle, hands over our mouths just in case. “We’ll put it in bags and drive it down to the dump. No one will ever know.” I take the shovel from her and start working.
Penny stands to the side, watching me dig through the black, dusty pile and holding her sleeve up to her face. My pants are streaked with ash. I start to wonder what this looks like to the neighbours. My unwashed hair and skinny arms. My dirty
pink pyjamas. The remains of my grandfather’s life floating through the air and into our noses and mouths, no heavier than useless flakes of skin. I look up the unpaved alley at the decrepit garages and dangerously leaning fences. Nothing, it seems, ever really changes.
I can feel my sister behind me, unmoving. I turn.
“Are you going to help, or are you just going to stand there?”
“Don’t be a bitch, Sammy. If you want to complain, then I have six years’ worth to get off my chest.”
I turn back to the garbage bags.
“You didn’t have to come back,” Penny says suddenly. “You could have stayed in school forever. Don’t blame me for this.”
I try to think of something to say, because she’s right, but she’s also wrong. Walking down Ste-Catherine or St-Denis, past the well-dressed Montrealers, I had become convinced that they could smell the stink of Vancouver’s Chinatown—durian and rain-soaked cardboard boxes—leaking out of my pores. I had tried to let the city absorb me completely, envelop me in its own particular smells of poutine and river water, but it was no use. Leaving Vancouver was like leaving myself.
When I fled Montreal, everything was unfinished: my thesis, my feelings about my boyfriend, the unpainted walls in our apartment. I had run away once before, and I did it again, fear and duty propelling me back to the place I had once escaped. I kept telling myself that, after all, it was my turn to be the good daughter. What I didn’t know was that my spot in the family had been ready for me for a long time, carved out like a cast made from my body.
My contact lenses itch; a tear drops off the end of my chin. I wonder if Penny can hear me sniffling. I take a deep breath and turn around, but she’s gone. I squint through the ash
toward the house, but all the doors and windows are closed tight against the sun.
Chinatown shows its ghosts on every surface. They appear and disappear in the shifting light, hiding and re-hiding in the uneven concrete. In the brightness of day, homeless people fight by the Carnegie Centre on the corner of Main and Hastings. The produce merchants pace up and down the sidewalks outside their shops with their rubber aprons and boxes of vegetables and shout, “Very fine bok choy! Only ninety-nine cents a pound!” And the few surviving old men without families congregate around stoops and doorways, smoking their cigarettes, saying hello to everyone who walks by. When I was a child, my mother walked me quickly past these men, and threw away the candy they gave me.
“Nothing but a tourist trap. A dumping ground for human trash,” my father always said, his eyes darting left to right as we hurriedly made our way through the markets on Keefer and Pender. The inevitable smell of rotting produce and piss only angered him more. “These old buildings should be torn down. Probably full of rats; squatters, too.” Even now, I am still faintly scared of the alleys, the sides of buildings with their mysterious downward steps that don’t seem to go anywhere, the cloudy purple glass bricks embedded in the sidewalks that seem to hide yet reveal something both underground and sinister.
I avoid the roasted pigs hanging in the butchers’ windows and the pungent smells rising from the ragged corners and, instead, propel myself westward, where the ocean salts the air, where I can pretend that those old Chinatown sidewalks aren’t so deeply lodged in my body that they tilt my walk just so, shift my eyes left and right.
The photo from my grandfather’s head tax certificate feels stuck to the inside of my head as I trudge along the seawall in Stanley Park (gulls and hot dogs, sand and flesh; here, this strip of sand and high-rise apartments makes me forget the stubby lawns and cracked driveways of our neighbourhood in East Vancouver, where cats mate behind garbage cans and old women try to grow squash in the thin, acidic soil). I imagine him walking beside me, a little off-balance, dressed, even in this unseasonable, early spring heat, in a well-pressed grey suit. He would ask me why I walk here, why I’ve grown so thin. Why I am unable to finish school or hold on to a boyfriend. Why I spend so much time away from my mother.
I imagine he understands.
At a concession on the beach at English Bay, I buy an orange Popsicle. My grandfather shakes his head.
“You’ll get a headache.”
I ignore him, but he follows me anyway, staying a few feet back so that he is out of sight. He says nothing, only treads softly behind me, his hands behind his back as he leans forward into the sea wind. I do not turn, knowing that once I look directly at him, his gaze will hold me until he is ready to let me go, until I’ve done exactly what he wants and he rests, allowing me to do the same.
I’m not ready for him, not ready to understand what he needs. I would rather rush ahead, let my body do the thinking so that I am only following the urges of my own flesh.
I stare ahead, feel a gust on my back.
That old man smell,
I think.
Not again.
I turn to look.
Seid Quan knows he is dirty; he can smell the boat on his skin, the salty, rancid odour of cured fish, other men’s hair oils, rotting wood. It is windy, and the water is nothingness: grey, bottomless, incomprehensible. The roof of his mouth is crackling dry, and his hands shake as he smoothes down the front of his only jacket. He wants his mother.
Only one thought runs through his head:
I cannot imagine that this will be all right.
He looks out toward the city and sees the mountains, dark blue and hazy behind the wood frame buildings, which appear dirty and brown, larger manifestations of the smell on his skin. He fears that the stink will be mistaken for the smell of China, but he does not know how to say that there would be no smell if Canada never was, if the boats were not so full of desperation, men trading one kind of poverty for another. Mud pools around the wooden sidewalks, indistinguishable from horse dung or something worse. He hears the water
crashing, changing shape as it hits the shore and the wooden docks. He wonders if the ocean (so close, so savage) will consume him and sweep everything else away. He shifts his small bag from one hand to the other.
He does not know where to start, which lineup he needs to be in, which direction to walk in to find the part of the city where all the Chinamen live. He had hoped someone would be able to guide him, but when he was on the boat, while they were talking and eating their watery soup and salt-cured, fatty pork, he found that everyone knew as little as he did. Like him, they had read the letters that other men from their villages sent home describing the beautiful land, the generosity of the white men, the fortunes they were making. And like him, they saw how much richer those men’s wives and children became.
The first afternoon at sea, an older man shuffled past him on the deck, his thin hips only partially hidden by his oversized Western-style pants. He turned to Seid Quan and looked him over from head to shoes.
“You must be new.”
Seid Quan nodded.
“I am the only one on this boat returning to Canada. My wife begged me to stay home—I must be crazy.”
“Don’t say that, Uncle.”
The old man pointed a finger at Seid Quan’s nose. “You’ll go crazy too one day. And by then, it won’t matter if you say it out loud or not.”
That exchange, Seid Quan now reflects, was not very helpful.
He joins one of six lines, each with a white man at its head, sitting at a desk. He hopes he is in the right one.
No one on the boat had been worried. A golden mountain it couldn’t be, of course, but there would be jobs, good paying
jobs, jobs with which you could feed your whole family for a year with only two months’ pay. And in a place with that kind of opportunity, the going could only be easy. However, Seid Quan still isn’t so sure.
The line moves, and he pushes his suitcase two feet forward. He peers ahead and sees that a policeman is leading one of the men to a building on the left, a building with bars over its tiny windows. He hears someone say, “They are going to put us in that jailhouse for a couple of days, so they can fully check our papers. I didn’t come here to be thrown in prison!”
Just before they disembarked, he told one of the other men he was worried that the stories couldn’t be as good as they sounded. The man laughed and said, “Well, why do we keep coming, then?”
Seid Quan responded, “Do you see any rich men on this boat?”
The other man laughed again and, as he walked away, the loose soles of his worn-out shoes slapping against the floor, he turned around. “You can doubt all you want, brother, but remember how much money the people in your village saved to send you to this gold mountain. So, for their sake, it had better be as good as everyone says.”
The white man peers at him over the rim of his glasses. “Your papers,” he says, with his hand stretched out. Seid Quan swallows. It is his turn.
He is one of the lucky ones. He spends only one night in the jail cell at the dock and manages not to cry, as some of the other young men do. They beg the guards to let them out, snot and tears running down their faces for everyone to see. The guards turn away and pretend they don’t understand.
Really,
thinks Seid Quan,
what else could these young men possibly be asking for?
When Seid Quan is released, he follows the rest of the Chinese men who are leaving the docks from various boats. Some of them are coming back after having visited their families. Some are like him: gangly, open-mouthed, eyes squinting in the morning sun. Like a line of ants, they walk east. He sniffs the air, smells rotting fish and freshly cut wood.
One of the older men asks Seid Quan what his family name is. “Chan? Why, that’s my name too! Good to meet you, little brother! You should come with me to our clan association. The men there, they’ll help you find a place to sleep, maybe a job, too. It’s always good to have family in a strange place, eh?”
At the clan association’s offices, which turn out to be in the storage room behind a restaurant, the men quickly find Seid Quan a just-vacated room in a boarding house and arrange for him to begin English lessons at the church every morning for two hours, starting immediately. The next afternoon, he finds a note slipped under his door from the clan association president, telling him to report for work at Yip Tailors at five. There, he discovers that several businesses in Chinatown have hired him to clean their offices and front rooms after they close. They dare not hire white cleaning women, so it is Seid Quan who begins sweeping up the loose threads at the tailor’s shop, cleaning windows at the laundries and washing out towels for the barber.
Women’s work
, he thinks, looking down at his thin, chapped hands,
but better than nothing.
He doesn’t start until the evening, and spends most of his days walking through the city, although he stays away from the richer neighbourhoods. Stanley Park lies just beyond the tall houses and manicured gardens of the West End. He has heard
that it is like a forest within the city, a place where trees the size of buildings dwarf even the brawniest white men. Seid Quan wants to breathe in the tang of the trees every morning and feel the moss with his hands, but he dares to walk only as far as the entrance, where he stands and stares at the white families strolling along the water. One morning, a photographer, who had set up his camera opposite a large tree stump, turns to him and asks, “Brother, do you need a picture to send home?” Seid Quan fishes in his pockets for some change, poses for the photo and scurries off.
A few weeks later, he walks along Pender Street, nodding at the laundrymen who call out to him from their front steps. “Lucky brother,” one shouts. “My shop is like an oven, it’s so hot, and here you are, walking in the fresh air without a care in the world. How about we trade places?” The frail, wood-sided tailor and laundry shops begin to disappear, and Seid Quan finds himself among tall brick and limestone buildings. He shrinks into his jacket and keeps his head down, avoiding the glances of the well-dressed white men walking around and toward him. Some, walking in pairs, whisper to each other, and Seid Quan can only guess what they are saying.
“Another one, did you see, Robert? I wonder if they simply cut off their fingers to grow more Chinamen and breed themselves that way.”
He turns south to the Granville Bridge. He cannot keep his eyes off the teeming grey-tinged water below, swollen with floating logs. Somehow, he had expected the water here to be clean, reflective of the sky and the faces of people surrounding it, not this brown and grey mess, not much cleaner than the Pearl River, which Seid Quan had never liked to visit.
All that shit smell,
he remembers.
Made my eyes water.
He steps off onto the shores of False Creek; even here, more Chinamen. Their shacks are built with scraps from the lumberyards and whatever else they can find—hammered-out biscuit tins, aluminium wrappers. Seid Quan notices the gaping holes in the walls, the small plots of limp vegetables growing in the muck. He feels the failure in the air, almost as thick as the smell of the human waste being used as manure.
How can they keep on like this? Doing nothing, making the rest of us look so bad and lazy?
An old man peeks through his open doorway and smiles when he sees Seid Quan.
“Young man! Come in and have some tea with me.” He waves his skinny arms.
“Thank you, Uncle, but I need to go back to Chinatown very soon to start work.”
“Ah, you young fellows, always working. I used to work hard too, laying down tracks for those godforsaken trains.” He shakes his head. “Some other time, then. I’m always here.”
Seid Quan, back on the bridge, sighs with relief.
That night, Seid Quan washes the floors in the front room of Mr. Yip’s shop on Carrall Street. There are rat droppings everywhere, and some of the cloth used for winter suits has been chewed through, probably for nests. This close to the waterfront, the rats seem to outnumber the people. Seid Quan carefully kicks a trap into the corner, where the white businessmen who come in to get their shirts made cheaply won’t see it. The high windows above the door are open for the fresh night air—clear and, as Seid Quan thinks, blue to the eye if it weren’t invisible. The streets are mostly empty, and even the sounds of gambling that sometimes float out into the night—the tapping of mah-jong tiles, the shouts of men losing the money they have
just made, whisky-rough singing—are absent.
It’s eerie tonight
, Seid Quan thinks.
I don’t like being alone when it’s like this.
He hears footsteps, several of them, running. He puts out his kerosene lamp and steps back into the shadows of the dark shop, behind a dressmaker’s dummy.
A man is shouting in English, “There, over there! All these places are owned by them!”
Just as Seid Quan begins to understand what it is they’re shouting, the front window of the shop shatters. Seid Quan ducks, covering his head and face with his arms. Someone outside laughs and the running footsteps continue. He can hear other windows breaking in the distance.
He walks to the front, glass cracking under his feet. A brick lies on the floor, and he sees that there are English words written on it. Just then, Mr. Yip, who lives upstairs, comes down in his nightshirt. He walks over to the window and shakes his head, murmuring, “It’s been a long time since someone broke my window, ten years, maybe. I thought this wouldn’t happen anymore.” He looks at Seid Quan. “You okay, little brother? Not cut anywhere?”
“I’m all right. I found this.” Seid Quan hands over the brick to the older man. “What does it say?”
Mr. Yip takes a look at the writing and drops the brick on the floor. Glass fragments bounce up. “It says ‘Die, Chinaman, die.’” He turns away and starts heading to the back. “I’ll get a broom and help you clean this up.”
After they are done, Mr. Yip sits down heavily on the stool behind his sewing machine. “Such anger,” he says, shaking his head again. “They are only afraid of us, you know. Afraid that we will take jobs they think are theirs, afraid that we will one day be their next-door neighbours and turn their children
into lazy opium addicts.” He looks up at Seid Quan. “Look at that long face. Come. We’ll have to do something to forget about this mess.”
Forgetting.
Seid Quan puts a hand on his stomach to try to quell the rising guilt.
They think we are all lazy and shouldn’t live here, and I thought the same
. Forgetting is the very thing he needs.
Mr. Yip won’t tell Seid Quan where they’re going, only that they must pick up Mr. Lam, the barber, on their way. Seid Quan looks suspiciously at the tailor’s finely fitted shirt and pants and wonders whom he is dressing up for.
Mr. Lam opens the door to his apartment. As soon as he sees them, he hoots loudly. “Coming to get me in the middle of the night,” he laughs as he pulls on his trousers, “can only mean one thing!”
Ten minutes later, Seid Quan sits in a small living room. He perches awkwardly on the edge of a red and purple velour sofa and does not speak to the other men. His friends slap each other on the back, make lewd jokes and take sips from a flask Mr. Lam pulls out of one of his pockets. Seid Quan fixes his eyes on the gold-painted ceiling.
A fat woman with red lips and ratty hair waddles into the room. Her blue eyes are small and almost invisible in her puffy face. She breathes heavily and winks. “All right, who’s next?”

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