Authors: Wayson Choy
Luxurious blasts of steam penetrated every fibre of the coat. The machinery hissed and sang; the flames danced blue and red in a ring beneath the water heater. The wool material stiffened “like new” in the mix of chemicals and steam. The brass buttons began to gleam in the sunlight pouring from the store window. Gee Sook pulled the last panel through the steam and then swung the heavy, now quite stiff topcoat majestically off the machine. Everyone stood back in the narrow work space of American Steam Cleaners.
Gee Sook slowly draped the coat over me.
“Jung looks like the young Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek,” Mrs. Lim said, clapping her hands. “We should take a picture.”
“This is a man’s coat,” Gee Sook grandly announced. “All of you women stand back.”
I felt intense heat embrace my shoulders, then curve over my back and drop upon my chest. I felt like a young warrior receiving the gift of his bright armour, a steely-grey coat born from fire and steam.
The coat felt and smelled like new. I wished Frank Yuen could see me. Stepmother smiled at her work, at me standing so proudly before all of them. Only the smallest outline of a stain could be seen on one sleeve. It was a happy flaw, I could sense her thinking. For the gods would not be jealous and take away any more of her sons, however they came to her.
When I pushed my arms through the hot sleeves, the reincarnated coat fell on my bony shoulders with military precision. I could feel my cheeks redden with pleasure.
“Yes, yes,” Gee Sook said. “Look how Jung stands like a man today.”
“Now this,” Poh-Poh said, and hobbled over and held out to Gee Sook the last task to be dealt with: the stitching back of the coat’s original trademark label.
“Inside here,” Poh-Poh instructed.
Poh-Poh had saved the label once attached to the old satin lining. The three-inch
Genuine British
label depicted an old windjammer under sail in a stormy sea. It was always this same label that had caught my eye when I hung up the coat for Old Yuen on his visits to our house. Poh-Poh had noticed.
Poh-Poh said that a long time ago before boats were powered by the breath of steam dragons—that is, before all the ships were named
Empress
—the first Chinese came to Gold Mountain huddled in the smelly cargo hold of old sailing vessels like this ancient windjammer.
“The journey took three sea-sickening months,” Gee Sook said. “The elders still talk about that.”
“Many die,” Mrs. Lim said. “Die like fish or pigs to market.”
“But you, Jung-Sum,” the Old One told me, “you came over by steamship, long past the wind days.”
Poh-Poh told everyone, once again, the story of how I was already in my First Mother’s tummy when she set sail to join my First Father in Victoria. “Jung-Sum born in B.C. town. Family move to Kamloops.
Aaaiiiyah,
too many years ago! I die soon!”
Once again, they all nodded their heads.
For as long as I could remember, Poh-Poh always said she was going to die soon, so that the gods, hearing her pronouncement, would not waste their time and she would fool them into leaving her alone to live another day.
“You live to one hundred!” Mrs. Lim, who was decades younger, quickly said. “I die first!”
Familiar stories, familiar phrases, comforted the Elders of Chinatown.
“What were my mother and father like?” I asked.
“Like everybody else,” Poh-Poh answered, and turned me around to remove some two-inch pins Gee Sook had stuck in for the pressing. “Better you forget. Look.”
Everyone stood back. Gee Sook’s full-length tailor’s mirror framed me perfectly. I felt reborn.
“Not too ugly,” Poh-Poh said.
I marched home proudly, stopping now and then for everyone to catch up with me. I wanted to see myself in the mirror at our house, in the familiar light of home.
I
LOOKED IN THE HALL
mirror. The heavy coat was now a year older; I was thirteen, taller, and fifteen pounds heavier, gaining the weight I needed to box in a higher class at the Hastings Gym. A small bandage covered a cut above my left eye, a cut caused by a loosely laced glove during a barely missed upper left hook. Max said I could have lost an eye. I liked the way the bandage looked. Joe Louis had one in a photo in the
Province
newspaper this morning.
I turned to see if the patch on my shoulder that Stepmother had fixed was too prominent. It was barely noticeable, unless you knew what to look for. Old Yuen’s coat fitted beautifully. The engraved brass buttons barely shifted.
“See?” the Old One said, breaking into pidgin English, “Still likee new and fit perfect good.”
“Tell Old Yuen,” Stepmother said, “the Tong is planning to move him out of the hotel next week.”
The door shut behind me. I was to rush to Old Yuen’s rooming house and pick up the rent for the Tong Association office.
I wanted to stay home that Sunday afternoon to listen to
The Shadow
with Orson Welles and Lamont Cranston; but I knew what Father meant when he lowered his voice in warning, just like Lamont Cranston, “
before it’s too late.
” Someone had to get the rent money from Old Yuen before he drank or gambled it all away.
Old Yuen was only in his early forties, just a few years older than Father, but had been made older by years of crippling camp labour, his drinking and gambling, and his bad luck.
Old Yuen’s bad luck was legendary. Chinatown gossips still talk about the time Old Yuen took his joss stick and burned seven winning spots on a lottery ticket, on a “bad water” day when the
fung-suih,
the wind-water energies, were in disharmony, only to hear that the numbers-man had been killed by a runaway horse pulling an ice wagon. When the police and ambulance finally arrived, the wagon was dripping with water—“Oh, such ill waters,” Mrs. Lim wailed when she heard that the water had soaked into the tickets the lottery runner was clutching. The sopping illegal mass had been seized by the police as evidence of wrong-doing. How could Old Yuen dare go to the police to claim his ticket, and what could he claim? The melting ice had soaked all the flimsy, tissue-thin tickets into illegible pulp. Such bad luck, after years of faithfully playing them, all those numbers coming up at last.
Those special numbers had come to Old Yuen’s wife once in a dream she had, long before she gave birth to their only child, Frank. Mrs. Yuen told Stepmother a ghost told her the numbers. Old Yuen faithfully played those numbers for a year, but too few of the numbers came up to win anything. He went home and beat up Mrs. Yuen and she did not cry. But he kept playing them, nevertheless, and beat her at his whim. It maddened him that she never cried, only whimpered as she backed away from him.
“Too bad she won’t cry,” Poh-Poh said to her friend Mrs. Lim, the gossip.
“Too bad?” Mrs. Lim was perplexed.
Kiam said he thought Poh-Poh was crazy. After all, if Mrs. Yuen cried, she would be weakened.
“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Lim agreed. “Her dog’s turd of an ill-fortuned husband would beat her even more.”
“Why should she cry?” Kiam asked, when he knew he was supposed to pretend he’d heard nothing.
“Tears...” Poh-Poh told Mrs. Lim, as if her friend instead had asked the question, “... tears save us from damnation.”
It was another one of Poh-Poh’s old sayings; she and her generation were full of ancient words. Dai Bak, the grocer, and Mrs. Lim always traded sayings with her. Father knew these sayings but wanted to be more modern.
“Just old poetry,” Father said, when Kiam asked him about the tears. There was an old story about that saying, but Father could not remember all the details, except something about the tears of gods falling to earth and turning into precious jewels.
Tears or not, Old Yuen’s bad luck was irreversible. The gossips told Gee Sook at American Cleaners the story of the lottery ticket and Old Yuen’s misfortune.
“I can change his luck,” Gee Sook exclaimed. “Everyone knows that I was born the tenth day of the tenth month.”
Gee Sook asked Old Yuen for his lottery numbers. Gee Sook told the new runner to take a cigarette and burn every other number into the ticket. Then the laundry man added his own lucky numbers. On fifty cents, Gee Sook won almost seventy dollars. He bought Old Yuen a bottle of Tiger Bone Wine and did a free load of dry cleaning for Mrs. Yuen. It did not help. Old Yuen got drunk on Tiger Bone and then threw up over the clean laundry.
Later, when Mrs. Yuen, in a small mining town, gave birth to a son, and it survived its first month, Gee Sook sent the child a ceremonial bonnet with gold-embroidered lucky words. The baby boy’s head was shaved to symbolize its first Chinese birthday. Perhaps the son, Frank Yuen, was lucky, but his father’s luck did not change.
First Brother told me that when Frank was three years old, Old Yuen gambled big at
pai kew
and won big, then lost everything to a red-headed woman who drank with him and slept with him at the Winter’s Hotel; she stole all his money and disappeared. Mrs. Yuen told Mrs. Lim how Old Yuen took the last of her jade pieces and tore the gold bracelet from her arm and pawned them to buy milk and groceries and pay rent. When Mrs. Lim told Poh-Poh how things were, Kiam said the Old One nodded her head, and said, “Nothing one can do about bad luck.”
Then Poh-Poh told Mrs. Yuen to think of her son, to endure, to survive for the boy. Father spoke to the Tong Association, and a parade of elders spoke to Old Yuen about his bitter and fermenting shame, about his losing face. Old Yuen stayed sober for a while, worked hard as he always did when his hand was steady. But he grew mean and cursed his rancid ill luck.
There was more Chinatown talk in the next five years: Old Yuen went back to drinking and took to beating his wife for her nagging, for her simple-minded ways, for her avoidance of him when he came home from his seasonal work at the lumber camps. He slapped her for the baby’s crying, for his losing this job or that job, for his gambling debts, for his bad luck. Then Old Yuen’s wife finally deserted him, took five-year-old Frank with her and begged to stay at the Tong’s rooming house.
When Kiam sat down to tell me all this, he said to me, “Jung, you were lucky to become part of our family. Imagine if you had been given to someone like Old Yuen.”
I had asked Kiam about my own parents, who faded from my life when I turned four, but there was no history to be told.
“Too long ago,” Stepmother said.
“Old history,” Father said, when I asked about First Father.
“Too much talk,” Poh-Poh said, and pushed me out of her tiny room.
But when I asked about Frank Yuen, Kiam said, “That’s different. Everyone knows about Frank’s parents.”
The Tong Association had to take a vote before Mrs. Yuen was permitted to stay in the three-storey building that served as the Tong headquarters and also as a place for all the bachelor-men to room. There, Mrs. Yuen cleaned out the toilets on each floor and swept the communal rooms with their rows of cots and night tables and brass spittoons. She pushed and harried the bachelor-men who coughed too much and smoked their water pipes, who swore—
eel-ka-ma!
—and talked cunt-talk and penis-talk, who spat into brass bowls and missed, and who washed their feet every other night in the same porcelain and tin basins in which they soaked their facecloths.
In a tiny room at the very back of the building on the second floor, Mrs. Yuen’s son sat alone, wondering when his father would come for him. Some of the bachelor-men brought him toys, made him a shuttlecock and showed him how to kick it, taught him ancient words and took him to the Chinese Opera and delighted in his amazement at the noise and lavish colours. No one ever noticed that the boy, still only a child, never cried.
One of the men took Frank into a dark place in the building, gave him candy, hugged him, calling out the name of his own son back in China, and would not let him go for a long time.
Mrs. Yuen coughed into the night, began to spit blood and told her son not to tell anyone about the red smear she would wipe from her lips. One morning Mrs. Yuen could not get up from her cot. She lay there, not even coughing. Frank got in beside her. That evening, when he was barely awake by his mother’s side, his father lifted him in his arms and took him away.
Now Old Yuen himself was gravely weakened by his work injuries, the alcohol, and the bad luck.
The only luck he had left was his son, Frank, the boy he took with him to the lumber camps and raised: the father taught the boy how to survive, how to fight, how to labour in the mills, how to avoid bad luck.
Frank grew older and waited and watched, went from school to school, fought on every playground, lived from rooming house to rooming house, until he was old enough to start work, old enough to stay away, old enough to call his father
Lao Yuen
—Old Yuen—as everyone else did, in a kind of mock respect for a man who had aged before his time but never grown wise.
The son would not desert the father, as the father had not deserted the son when the mother died; but the son did not linger with the father beyond a cursory greeting and the counting of the paper money he placed in his father’s gnarled hand.
Old Mrs. Lim told Poh-Poh there was no reason for Frank to stay around.
Frank himself said: “Why stay around bad luck?”
Yesterday was payday.
Frank Yuen, grown up, would bring home a money packet from one of the lumber camps, leave his father a portion for two months’ rent and food, then take off again to gamble or drink. Like Old Yuen always did, but Frank Yuen was lucky.
Frank told Kiam he visited the East Hastings rooming hotels, where men smelling of sweat and dirt from fishing and lumber camps paid weekend rates. The labourers now competed with men in military uniforms; fights often broke out over which of them would sleep with this woman or that woman, in this room or that room.
Kiam and his teenage friends were eager to hear all the details; Frank enjoyed the audience of Kiam’s teenage friends only a half-dozen years younger than he was. They hung out in a Chinatown alleyway, back of the Blue Eagle, always smoking and arguing about the war in China or England. Frank shared his tobacco with them, and sometimes a swallow from his bottle of Johnny Walker, which he kept in a brown paper bag.