China Dog

China Dog and Other Stories
(1997)

Midnight at the Dragon Café
(2004)

MY SISTER
’
S ARRIVAL
in Canada had the effect of a cleaver, slicing up our lives. Three years earlier, my father had sponsored my mother and me to Canada. My mother had to leave my sister behind in Hong Kong because she was not my father’s daughter. She was only twelve years old. My mother spent the next three years becoming a Canadian citizen. She learned the names of the provinces, and their respective capitals, and the pledge of allegiance to the Union Jack. Unfortunately, none of it really sounded like English. Even at age seven, I realized that the
lo fons
wouldn’t understand the sounds she made.

When my mother saw my sister at the airport, she became a new person. Her tiredness fell away and there was a lightness in her body. Tears streamed down her face, yet she smiled and smiled. She stretched out her arms and ran toward her daughter. They locked each other in a tight embrace. Then my sister released herself. As she looked me up and down, her first
words were, “Your nose turns up too much, sort of like a pig.” My mother smiled with embarrassment and brushed it aside. I swallowed a lump in my throat.

We spent that night in my Uncle Eddy’s house. They lived like the
lo fons
. Uncle Eddy operated a restaurant. He didn’t live upstairs from it. His family lived in a proper house with living and dining rooms. My Aunt Lena didn’t have to work. My mother told me that before Aunt Lena arrived, Uncle Eddy bought her a dresser for the bedroom and filled it with lingerie, body lotions, and perfumes. That evening my mother, my sister, and I slept on a pull-out couch in the living room. My mother slept in the middle, her arms entwined around my sister.

The next day we went home to Cheatley on a Gray Coach bus. My mother and my sister sat together. I sat across from them, beside a large
lo fon
woman. It was a long journey, and I watched as my sister fell asleep, her head gently resting on Mother’s shoulder, her lips slightly parted and letting out small puffs of air.

My father met us at the bus stop in Cheatley. It was a town of two thousand people, too small to have a real station. An unmarried brother and sister managed a candy store that also sold ice cream, magazines, comics, and bus tickets. Each carrying a piece of luggage, we began to walk the two blocks to my father’s hand laundry.

We must have made an odd-looking sight as we walked along the sidewalk. My father was a tiny man, barely five feet tall. Wrinkles were deeply engraved into his face. He tensely
knitted his eyebrows so that two deep furrows formed in the middle of his forehead and extended to the bridge of his nose. He wore an oversized brown herringbone wool coat that had been left in the laundry by one of the customers, and a peaked brown wool cap. His steps were short and close together as he struggled with the weight of my sister’s brown leather suitcase, trying to keep it from dragging on the sidewalk. He remained several steps ahead of us. Even when unencumbered, my father never walked with his head up. His eyes were always fixed on the ground.

Behind him, the three of us persevered against the March wind with our heads tucked into our chests, protecting ourselves from the sprays of snow. I wrestled with my share of my sister’s bags and tried to keep pace with my mother walking in the middle. But after bumping into her several times, she suggested that I walk behind. Mother and I were dressed in old winter coats given to us by one of the ladies from the Presbyterian church. They were shapeless and hung loosely on both of us. Mine had a belt that was tightly buckled, forming a skirt with deep folds around my waist. I was expected to grow into it. My sister wore a blue wool coat, tailor-made in Hong Kong, as smart as the one worn by the doctor’s young wife. Her one free hand clutched the lapels together to keep the wind off her chest. And the wind whipped in every direction the previously obedient strands of her freshly permed hair.

My father, my mother, and I were all small and dark. My mother was round-faced and plump, while my father and I were thin and wiry. We both had high cheekbones and skin
that stretched tautly around slightly protruding jaws. My hands were like my father’s. They were large, with joints that were thickly knuckled and square at the fingertips.

Walking with us, my sister was tall, elegant, and exquisite. We were coarse, tough, and sinuous. Her face was a perfect oval with ivory skin the texture of flower petals. But it was her hands that always captured people’s attention. The palms were narrow and the long slender fingers ended in nails that glistened like water drops. When she held them together, they reminded me of tendrils on a vine, seeking and wrapping – vulnerable and treacherous.

We passed the hardware store, turned a corner and came to my father’s laundry, our home. My father set down the suitcase he was carrying and lifted the wooden latch on the panelled wooden door, then opened the heavier wooden door, the one with the glass window, and let us into the first room of the laundry. Because it was winter, we were greeted by a blast of sulphurous air from the coal burning stoves. My sister gasped. My father lifted the hinged portion of the handmade wooden counter that separated the work area from the customers. He awkwardly stepped aside as we filed past him. Silently we watched as my mother’s smile tightened and her eyes grew large with anxiety, while her older daughter surveyed and assessed.

My sister glanced at the wooden shelves, stacked with brown paper bundles of finished laundry. We walked past a wooden table, the top thickly swathed with old blankets and sheets. At the edge of the table stood an iron, and beside it, a basin of water with a bamboo whisk resting inside. She pointed to
two long horizontal rollers that were held up by a wooden frame. I explained that this was an ironing press. When my father bought the laundry, it was considered a real bonus, a true labour-saving device. When it was turned on, wrinkled bedding, tablecloths, tea towels, and pillowcases were fed between the humming, rotating rollers. Like magic they piled on the shelf underneath in smooth folds like sheets of molten lava. On ironing days my father stood at these tables from early morning until late at night. At the end of the day, he rubbed Tiger Balm into his aching muscles.

My mother held open the red and yellow paisley curtain that concealed the washing room. The first thing that caught my sister’s attention was the washing machine. It stood in a drainage pan in the middle of the floor. It was a monstrous steel barrel, held up horizontally by four posts, looking like some mythical headless beast. Along one wall was a row of three wooden tubs. Attached to the one at the end was a hand-cranked mangle, used to wring out water. Inside one tub was a four-legged wooden stand with an enamel basin. Above it hung a clothesline between two nails. Dangling down were three thin hand towels and facecloths. My sister’s eyes moved slowly about the room. She swallowed as she looked at the four-burner coal stove with an oven. On the front burner was a large canning pot filled with hot water and holding a ladle. Beside the stove, on a wooden shelf covered in faded blue-and-white-checked oilcloth, was a two-burner electric hotplate. The rings were finely cracked and the electric coils were recessed inside. In the corner, standing at
attention, was a tall cylindrical water heater made of galvanized iron. Connected to it was a small coal burner. Hot water flowed from the taps only on washdays, which were Mondays and Thursdays. Along the wall that led to the stairs were four straight-backed wooden chairs and a wooden table covered with the same faded, blue-checked oilcloth that was beneath the electric hotplate.