Authors: Wayson Choy
I stepped back from the narrow side window and was surprised to see Stepmother still standing stock-still before the closed door. She saw me staring at her.
“Hang up your jacket,” she said, and turned quickly away from me.
A
S NOVEMBER TURNED
into December, Stepmother made arrangements with Meiying to take care of me after school. And since Mrs. Lim did not like Meiying working part-time any more at the Blue Bird Cafe, where her beauty attracted the same kind of men her mother once knew—only these men were in military uniforms—everyone was satisfied. Some days Meiying seemed very happy. I watched her in her bedroom as she tied her hair with long, trailing scarves—many-coloured pieces left behind by her runaway mother that made me think of battle flags and warrior banners. The scarves were hung beside a foot-high, red-cloaked Chinese Opera doll sitting on her dresser and leaning against the mirror. Some days she sang and let me play with the doll. Carefully, I put my finger up inside its small jewelled head and moved its puppet-jointed arms so that the slippered feet danced. The delicately drawn face and the rich red cloak reminded me of an enchanted prince. And in the late afternoon light, her black hair falling over her shoulders as she opened another book to read, Meiying looked like a princess. I could see why Kazuo would like her, but I still couldn’t see why she liked him.
Those pleasant first December days, in spite of the frosty air, she smiled so effortlessly and laughed so freely that I sensed she had somehow spent some time with Kazuo at her English school. On certain days they continued to meet at Powell Ground, too. Swathed in thick sweaters, and the gloves and wool scarf Meiying knitted for me, I would play cut-the-pie with my pocketknife while they held hands and walked away from me for a little while. They always disappeared inside the empty doorway of the Methodist Church building. Some days she came out rebuttoning her coat. Of course, it was very warm inside the church. I didn’t mind. I always got new comics after that and a treat of candy or cherry coke. Kazuo once gave me some Japanese candy that tasted of seaweed. I thought it had poison in it, but they both ate it to show me it was safe.
Another time, Kaz gave me a baseball, and we threw the ball around. He showed me how to spit on it and rub the stitching part before winging it. The best time happened when Kaz, because he was as tall as Kiam, bent down to box with me. I threw Kaz a fake left and got to hit him hard on the jaw. Of course, we were just supposed to be shadow boxing, like Jung had taught me in the summer. “Goddamn!” he said and rubbed his jaw. I kept punching at him. Meiying pulled me back, but he laughed and lifted me up into the air and threw me up, up, up; he caught me by my feet and began to swing me around and around and around, higher and higher. It was dizzying and thrilling, and when he stopped, catching me mid-air, the world kept spinning. I almost threw up.
“Now we’re even,” he said, and Meiying pushed him, knocking him over and falling on top of him; I quickly recovered and jumped him. We ended up laughing and rolling around on the ground.
It was fun that day.
All this time, Meiying and I never once openly discussed with each other the understood and forbidden topic of her sneaking around to visit her boyfriend. Sometimes he pinned on the
I AM CHINESE
button that Meiying got for him, and we met at the Carnegie Library on Hastings and Main, between the boundaries of Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Not that I minded the sneaking around part. It was fun.
But he was, after all, still a Jap.
And though no strangers could tell that Kazuo was Japanese when he held hands with Meiying and walked us part way home, one day I thought for sure that Stepmother, who’d left work early to pick up some pills at the Main Drug Store for Third Uncle, saw the three of us stepping out of the library together. It was directly across the street from the drug store.
As soon as Meiying spotted the familiar face, she pushed Kazuo away. He quickly dropped Meiying’s hand and ran down the steps in the other direction. Meiying waved to Stepmother and brushed her hand against her skirt. She pulled her coat collar up against the wind and began walking down the library steps, as casually as possible. I followed. But before Stepmother could even ask anything, Meiying said, “Everything’s fine... can I carry this?” which I thought was curious. Stepmother nodded her head and handed over a cloth bag of groceries.
“Did you have fun at the library, Sekky?” Meiying asked, as if she hadn’t been with me earlier to meet Kazuo at Powell Ground.
For some reason, I suddenly felt I had to lie, too.
“It was okay,” I said, and we walked home, barely able to make out the North Shore mountains in the winter afternoon light.
AT HOME
one evening, my curiosity got the better of me. I asked Father, “Are all Japs our enemy, even the ones in Canada?”
Stepmother sat stiffly; her set of four knitting needles stopped clicking. Father shuffled his newspapers with authority.
“Yes,” he said, with great finality. He looked sternly across at Stepmother. “All Japs are potential enemies... even if Stepmother doesn’t realize that.”
“Well, Sek-Lung,” Stepmother began, “some Japanese persons were born here and—”
Father sharply snapped his papers. Kiam looked warningly at me, trying to signal me to shut up. Then, in an effort to lessen the tension, he said, “The ones who are born here are only half enemies.”
Liang laughed, tossing her head back. “That’s stupid,” she said, daring to defy First Brother.
“It’s not!” I exclaimed.
Stepmother looked at me, startled, then smiled broadly, as if she understood something beyond me. She picked up her knitting. In the stillness, the long metal needles clicked and stabbed into the air.
“Are you enjoying your after-school hours with Meiying?” Stepmother asked.
Her tone confused me, but I thought she just wanted to change the subject, to avoid the storm of Father’s dark looks directed at her.
“Yes,” I answered. “Lots.”
It was true. Meiying entertained me well. Last week we’d run into the Han boys, and she took us all to the soda counter at the corner store across from MacLean Park. We ordered cherry cokes. Sitting in the only booth, Meiying’s eyes lit with fire as she told us stories, scary ones, about the ghosts in Chinatown. There was the opera ghost whose shape could suddenly be seen pushed against the front curtains; the Shanghai Alley ghosts of the laundrymen who died from despair of ever seeing their families again, their footsteps treading the narrow steps; ghosts of those who died from hunger, from love; water ghosts from False Creek who moaned and gave warnings. They were just like the spirits and demons Grandmama used to tell about.
“The smell of a ghost,” Meiying warned us, “is like the smell of burning incense, just as the ember touches the wood.”
We boys were entranced.
When Meiying tired of telling tales, she let us play war games on the mostly deserted grounds of MacLean Park; she settled disputes about the efficiency of weapons or the firepower of planes, urged us to draw the enemy in and then strike. A tactic, she said with authority, as old as Robin Hood’s forest ways. Larry Han asked her why she knew so much.
“Aren’t we all at war?” she answered.
When the two Jenson boys, Ronny and Rick, deigned to play with us, and we had arguments, she taught us how to form alliances. “Fight against a common enemy,” she said. “That’s what friends do.”
While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice.
Whenever it rained, Meiying and I stayed in her tiny room to the left of the pot-bellied stove.
Sitting on her bed, she read stories to me, or made up war stories from dramatic pictures I cut out from
Life.
“Tell me about this picture, May,” I said. She helped me to set up my soldiers on her desk and positioned my tanks behind “hills” and on “bridges” made of books, and watched my favourite planes battle oncoming bombers.
“Now,” she commanded, if I paused and might interrupt her reading, “protect that bridge.”
“Do you think we will win the war, May?”
A tank rumbled over an open geography book.
“I mean, will we win against the Tojos?”
She looked at me sourly.
“Will we win against the
Japs?
” I repeated.
“Monday the fifteenth is your birthday,” she said, changing the subject. “You’ll be eight years old in a few days. I’m making something special for you.”
It would be a sweater, of course, because she had already commented on how tightly the ones I had fitted me. That was boring.
“You didn’t answer me, May,” I persisted. “The Japs are fighting in Hong Kong now. Mr. O’Connor’s son is there with the Commonwealth troops. Miss Doyle says we’re all allies.”
“Yes,” she said. “Everyone in Chinatown is talking about the Canadians fighting there.”
I thought of Mr. O’Connor’s son on his last visit home in October. A bunch of us boys stood around admiring him. He looked good in his uniform and thick woollen army coat. He walked over to our yard from his father’s house and showed Kiam some pictures of his buddies. Kiam used to be in the same class with him, but Jack O’Connor had quit school to enlist. I admired his heavy army boots, with the khaki puttees anchoring his pants. Later, Mr. O’Connor and Mrs. O’Connor got into a taxi with their son to take him back to the docks.
I thought of Jack O’Connor charging into Hong Kong with his army buddies, guns blazing.
“Will us good guys win the war, May?”
“Of course we will! Why, Sekky, we have good alliances!”
“Then all the Japs will be killed?”
Her eyes widened in shock. I had breached our code. I was sorry to have asked that question, even more sorry when I heard her answer, at last, “Yes, yes... I... suppose so.”
THAT SUNDAY
morning, Jung and I were awakened by hard pounding on our front door. Jung swore and got up from his bed. I peeked out from my blankets. Voices were raised; there was shouting. Someone came running up the stairs,
“Stepmother, Stepmother!” I heard Father yell, “The Americans are going to have to fight the Japs!”
Footsteps ran back down the stairs.
Jung and I pulled on our kimonos and ran downstairs. Third Uncle, still in his winter coat, was standing impatiently at the parlour doorway, telling Kiam to “open” the radio: “Open it up! Open it!”
The front tube warmed; I could see its pinpoint glow behind the edge of the large dial. There came the familiar sharp buzzing sound; we smelled electricity, then heard static... a voice said, “... Pearl Harbor has been bombed...”
Liang said, “What’s that?”
“The tide has turned,” Father said. “America is going to be China’s ally!”
“Dirty Japs!” Jung said.
“Father,” Kiam said, “I want to join the Canadian Army!”
“Yes, yes,” Father said, forgetting the countless times he had told Kiam not to think of such a foolish thing.
Third Uncle and Father were charged with excitement. Jung took a boxer’s stance and started shadow boxing. Kiam bent down closer to the radio. Stepmother pulled her dressing gown tightly around herself, looking worried. She was standing behind me and I could see her face in the wall mirror. She put her hands on my shoulders and gently squeezed them.
I thought of Powell Ground and the slim boy holding Meiying’s hand, laughing at my Spitfire.
THE SECOND WEEK
of December, we began a new routine. Meiying told me we were going to meet at my house. “That way you won’t have to rush home, Sekky,” she said. “I’m still not feeling well enough to be good company.”
When I got home from school, Meiying would be upstairs in Stepmother’s bedroom. Both women would talk quietly while Stepmother prepared herself to go to work at the woollen factory.
Sometimes their conversation, in a formal dialect, was agitated, and I was told not to come upstairs but to get something to eat. I realize now that the kitchen was the farthest place away from the bedroom.
Then Meiying would take me to play with my boy friends at MacLean Park. She sat on a bench, wrapped in her dark coat, book unopened.
Once Meiying came to Strathcona School to pick me up. Her face looked bruised, and there was a small cut over her left eye. She told me it was nothing. There had been a fight at school; she’d defended herself. Everything would be okay. She turned pale, uneasy, and told us she had a queasy stomach. I drank my cherry coke in silence and watched her grip her glass of water and stare at the empty soda counter.
On the Monday of the second week of December, Meiying did not arrive on time for Stepmother to leave for her shift.
I remember that day because it was December 15, my official birth date. Meiying had promised me a special treat. The day before, the first Sunday after Pearl Harbor, I had a big dinner with the family, and a fake-chocolate birthday cake from Woodward’s with my name spelled Sekee. Father bought a freshly killed chicken from Keefer Poultry and Stepmother made my favourite dish: braised white-meat chicken smothered with salted black beans and special black Chinese mushrooms.
I waited for my special surprise from Meiying, but she did not appear. When I asked about her, Stepmother said she’d forgotten to tell me that Meiying had some kind of flu.
I got a pair of socks, a rare package of All-Sorts all the way from England, some lucky money from relatives, and a new pair of suspenders with sheriff badges on each strap. Kiam gave me two new Dinky Toy jeeps. Jung made me a set of Sherman tanks out of empty Spam tins and large rubber bands. Each tank emitted a clacking noise when you pushed it along the ground. Liang clipped off the blonde hair of one of her smallest dolls, painted the hair with Chinese black ink, and dressed it up in a Flying Tiger pilot’s outfit Stepmother helped her to sew—except the doll had blue eyes and didn’t have a pilot’s leather cap.