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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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Seid Quan shrugs. “It feels good, I guess. I have to leave in a few weeks, though, so I’m not sure that I’ll really feel married even after it’s all over.”
His great-uncle looks at him out of the corner of his eye.
“Yes, I can see how that would be difficult. But you’ve done well with what you have. Why, you speak English now, even better than those snobs in the city. You know, your mother has been able to buy a lot more things since you left. She’s started dowries for your sisters already. Widows always have the hardest time, don’t you think?”
“Yes. My mother has always worked hard for us. I just wish there was a way that I could stay home and make the same money here.” Seid Quan taps his glass on the table, and the old man on his right raises his head for a moment before sleepily dropping it again.
“The children are so much healthier here since the young men started going away and sending money home,” his great-uncle continues, as if Seid Quan hasn’t spoken. “No more bony knees, no more sunken bellies! Our village has waited a long time to be healthy, I’ll say. You must have seen that new water pump in the square. The village owes a lot to its young men overseas. But, as I’m sure you’d be the first to admit, the young men owe a lot to the village too.”
“Of course we do, Uncle.”
“All the money we saved to send you boys to Canada and America in the first place—the amounts can keep me up at night. It brightens my day just to think of you all working so hard so far away—I know you do it for us, for the money you send home to make everything better here.”
Seid Quan sighs and stands up. “I should take the others home now. Are you going to stay here, or should I take you home first?”
The old man stands up and pats his great-nephew on the shoulder. “Oh, I think I can go home by myself. Without any young men, the village has never been safer.”
That night, just before he falls asleep, Seid Quan imagines that he is king of his village. Fruits, vegetables and game are laid at his feet, and he says grandly, “Pass this food out equally among the villagers and let the men serve the women and children, so that these men may also know what it’s like to find joy in domestic rituals.” He is called the Magnanimous King, and he parades around the village, magically living without food and watching his subjects grow fat.
When Seid Quan wakes up, the insubstantial light of dawn has seeped into his room. He sees his trunk and his wedding clothes gleaming redly on the hook by the door. Through the wall, he hears his mother, her steps slow and heavy, as if she is dragging something behind her. He runs out of the room in his nightclothes to help her because he cannot bear the sound.
He wanders on the deck, his hands clasped behind his back as he makes his way around piles of rope and other Chinese men.
Another boat,
he thinks,
but exactly the same
.
It has been only twenty hours since he left his new wife standing in the doorway of their new home, where she will be its only permanent occupant. That morning, she was wearing a jacket and pants, her hands held behind her back as if she had something to surprise him with, or as if she were afraid he would see her shaking hands. Her eyes, small and sharp, darted left and right. He placed his suitcase in the yard and put his hand on her head.
“Will you be lonely?”
Shew Lin snorted, the nostrils in her broad nose flaring. “No, silly. I’m still in the village, aren’t I? I should be asking
you
if you will be lonely.”
He kissed her on the forehead. “No more than usual.”
But this, he now knows, is a lie, because he did not have her to miss before. He stares at the ocean—limitless, forever moving men away from their places of birth.
I haven’t known her for very long
, he reasons to himself.
Really, I’ve only just met her
. But in those five weeks they lived together in their little house (the only thing, he reflects, that he actually owns), they conducted a marriage in miniature—shopping together, cooking together, eating and sleeping together.
“I feel so old,” he whispers to himself. And then he laughs, his twenty-one-year-old self amused.
He watches the young men and boys around him, some no older than fourteen or fifteen. They are dressed in the working clothes of their villages: pants rolled up well above their ankles, ropes as belts, long-sleeved jackets unbuttoned to show bare chests. As Seid Quan knows, each boy will have only one good Western suit in his bag and will not waste it on the boat. But Seid Quan, like the others who are returning to Canada, wears his Western suits all day, every day. He can feel the envy boring into the back of his jacket from the newcomers, who must suppose that he thinks nothing of ruining his good clothes on this dirty boat. But he doesn’t care—he has done well so far, and the jealousy only makes him shrug.
Only four more weeks of this boat
, he thinks.
But then it will be years before I see her again.
He pushes his hands into his empty pockets, feels the cotton muslin, the loose threads he never bothers to cut. If he could, he would strip off all his clothes and jump off this boat, swim back to the Guangzhou port and walk on the river’s shore all the way back to the village. But there is no money there, no wool to make Western suits, no one who could pay for a
straight razor shave. The house would have to be sold. He would have to repay the village elders somehow, but there would be no way to do it.
He looks out at the ocean again, knowing that his only destination is to the end of east, where the west begins.
The smoke is almost solid, forming transparent walls between Seid Quan and the next man. He squints, but that does not help. He can hear men shouting and the jingle of coins. He steps forward and bumps into someone else’s back.
It’s not often that Seid Quan goes to the gambling dens, rooms hidden between floors or underneath cellars in almost every building in Chinatown. There’s the danger, of course, that the police might come, or that he might lose all his money. But really, these places always make him feel sick. Perhaps it’s the trapped smells of cigarette smoke, stale whisky and dozens of men crammed into a windowless room. Or perhaps, like Lim always says, he’s just not man enough to play real stakes with real gamblers.
Midnight, and the action shows no sign of slowing down.
The mah-jong table is surrounded by men, all crowding around to peek at each player’s hand and whisper to each other about who is most likely to win. The players have been sitting for six hours already, having rushed here as soon as the workday ended. One of them, a short, fat man whose butchering apron is still draped on the back of his chair, is sweating so much that his shirt is soaked through. Dozens of beads sit glistening on his forehead. The crowd murmurs that he has not even gotten up to relieve himself. Someone makes a loud joke about wet bottoms, but the butcher still does not move. His eyes are fixed on the tiles.
Seid Quan is scanning the room, looking for anyone he knows, when he feels a gnarled hand on his shoulder.
“How are you, young man?”
“Mr. Yip. I’m very well. How about you?”
The tailor grunts. “Not so great. The arthritis is getting worse, and I haven’t been working as much as I used to. I’m sorry I haven’t been around to see you when you come in to clean. I’ve been relying on my brother to do most of the work.” He smiles. “But I hear you’ve been busy. Your wife had a baby?”
He blushes. “Yes. A girl—Yun Wo. Everybody is healthy.”
“Good. Good.” Mr. Yip cranes his neck for a look around the room. “Ah, it’s old Mr. Wong. I should say hello before he decides to get his shirts made somewhere else.”
Seid Quan walks over to the mah-jong table and peers at the players’ tiles. He hears a familiar voice behind him and turns around.
“I can get you anything you want, brother!” Lim waves his arms at a man standing in front of him. He blinks his eyes twice and shakes his head before continuing. “You and me and these useless drunks, we’re family. You just need to ask. How do you think I can afford all this?” He gestures down at his shiny black shoes, the perfectly sewn cuff of his glen plaid trousers. “I can get you fellows everything you want: women, Scotch whisky, even some of the good stuff.” He pauses as he looks into the stony eyes of his companion. “You know,” he whispers loudly,
“dope
. Don’t ever sell anything you don’t use yourself, that’s my motto.”
Seid Quan looks around, wonders if anyone else has heard Lim’s speech. He hurries over and grasps his friend by the elbow.
“Lim. Good to see you. Let’s go for a walk, get some fresh air.”
“I don’t want to leave. This is a great party. Just great.” Lim smiles widely at the room.
“Maybe you just need some sleep, maybe something to—”
The butcher has overturned the mah-jong table, sending tiles sailing through the air and skittering across the floor. Someone pushes someone else, and men start shouting obscenities, throwing glasses, shoes, anything at each other. Other men push past and pour into the street.
“All this noise, the police will surely come now,” someone shouts as Seid Quan runs down the stairs, losing his grip on Lim’s sleeve. He slips into an alley, pokes his head around the corner to see if Lim is anywhere in sight. Men are running into every alley and street, but in this dark, it is impossible to see if one of them is Lim. He turns to walk home and breathes the night air. Into the blue light.
He has come to understand the movements of the boats, the sway that means a storm is coming from the west, the rocking that means another ship, miles away, is slicing through the water at the same time. He lies on his bunk, listens to the breathing of the three other men in his cabin. He places his hand on a pocket in his pants, feels for the wad of papers he will need to re-enter Canada. At the port, they will look him over, ask him questions about where he has been and why. They will mark his return on a piece of paper—one more little check mark on a list of comings and goings.
This last trip, he played with Yun Wo, a serious-faced three-year-old who asked him alarmingly adult questions about his life in Vancouver. “Do white men treat you badly? How many hours a week do you work? Why do you stay?”
He helped his wife cook meals (she laughed at the clumsy way he chopped vegetables and claimed she could do better with her bare hands), poked around in their garden. He showed her the pile of bills he had brought back, and she went with him to his great-uncle’s house to pay the rest of his debt to the village. As they left, he whispered in her ear, “It’s all going to be better now. You’ll see.”
He held her at night, his hand resting on her solid hip. He watched her sleep, noted the way her mouth fell open as she exhaled, the movement of her eyeballs beneath the lids. It was warm, as he remembered, and he shed layers of wool, relishing the lightness of linen and cotton, sun on skin.
He sits up in his bunk, hitting his head on the low ceiling. He feels around in his bag until he pulls out a knitted grey scarf—Shew Lin’s goodbye present. He wraps it around his neck and over his chin and lies back down, noting the tilt of the boat to the left and wondering what it means.
“Congratulations, little brother! This surely predicts a long, lucky life for you!”
“You’re a good man.”
“I’ll never get my hair cut anywhere else again.”
“Hey, he gives a good shave, too!”
Seid Quan stands in the middle of a crowd of men at the clan association offices, now located in a newly purchased house on Keefer north of Gore, shakily holding a glass of rye. He knew before he arrived that everyone had heard about his new ownership of the barbershop and that even more knew about the birth of his second daughter in China, but he did not know they would hold a party for him, complete with food supplied from the Bamboo Terrace.
“Seid Quan, we need a speech!”
He blinks rapidly, wonders what he will say when, usually, he says so little. Perhaps,
I fear I will forget what my wife looks like or I am so lonely that I stay in my barbershop after closing until late at night, pretending that I am still cutting hair
. He walks to the front of the room, turns and faces the crowd of eager, half-drunk men staring at him, waiting for the words that mean time here is not wasted and their lifetimes spent chasing success will count for something in the end. Seid Quan opens his mouth to speak.
“I am only a man. I don’t feel successful, and I’m not sure I ever will. This,” and he waves his hand around the room, at the streets of Chinatown beyond the windows, “is what I’m living. I make the best of it, as you do, and I don’t think I deserve a party all to myself just for that.”
He looks around him. The men are crestfallen, so disappointed with his speech that their mouths are gaping open. Some shift uneasily from foot to foot. Others cough.
“But,” he begins again, loudly, “here we are, together despite all the bad things we have experienced in this country: washing dirty laundry, poor wages, living with these white ghosts.” The crowd snickers. “And yet we still succeed. We have improved our villages, fed our families and helped tame this wild place. We will go on and conquer anything in our paths, brothers, I promise you that. Thank you.”

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