The Jade Peony (14 page)

And Kiam came home and sometimes told me things, just so that I would not grow up stupid about luck or women or life. Kiam did not want me to grow up taking in too much of what he considered the Old One’s superstitions about fate and jealous gods. “Just Old China village nonsense,” he assured me, sounding more like Third Uncle than he realized. But I listened to every word about Frank Yuen; he was someone to admire, a survivor.

So, whenever I had a chance to collect the rent from Old Yuen for the Tong Association, I always hoped to meet up with Frank Yuen.

ONCE, OLD YUEN
pulled on my sleeve as Frank hurried away from him.

“Stay,” he said to me. “You be my son.”

“I can’t,” I said, thinking of Poh-Poh waiting on the street for me to pick up the rent money and take it to the Tong official with her. I took the three bills plus the coins that I was instructed to remove. Old Yuen smiled at my counting ability.

“Your papa lucky. He has three sons and I have none.”

“You have Frank,” I said, and hurried away.

I was thirteen and envied Old Yuen’s only son for his unfeeling independence; the history of his family troubles, however bad, was a history I did not have. I marvelled that Frank found girls so interesting, just as Kiam did, now that Kiam was starting to date Jenny Chong and even jitterbugging with her at the Y dances. Kiam hardly stayed home, except to work on the account books Third Uncle asked him to do at the end of every month. The Old One said he would soon go blind from working so hard with numbers. Kiam ignored her, his mind on balancing the books or on Jenny.

At our house sometimes, Frank and Kiam talked about the war back in China. I imagined that Frank, with his short hair and high forehead, his wiry body, would be a superior soldier, as tough as any U.S. Marine, tougher than John Wayne himself.

No one crossed Frank Yuen. He was nearly a decade older than my own thirteen years. At four I had lost my mother and father; he had also lost his mother and, in a way, too, lost his father to alcohol. At least, Old Yuen, aged by worry, by drink and gambling, by a dark unhappiness and unlucky streak that was relentless, still came back for him, took Frank wherever he could, sat the boy in the gambling halls, sat him outside beer parlours. “My boy Frank,” he told everyone who walked by, his arm on his son’s shoulders, as if Frank’s being there were enough to win some respect for himself.

ONE DAY
I saw Frank Yuen at Hastings Gym. He was not a boy like First Brother but a wiry, sharp-eyed man, earning big money at lumber mills and paying for his own father’s upkeep.

“Kiam tells me you’re getting pretty good at boxing,” he said, and started to shadow box like an expert.

“You like the Brown Bomber?” I asked.

“People say I fight like him.”

I doubt it, I thought. But after a few more meetings, he changed my mind.

Frank Yuen spat with deadly accuracy and cursed in a variety of languages and dialects and took on all comers in bars and street fights. Sometimes he came to our house with a black eye or wrenched shoulder and boasted to Poh-Poh how she should have seen the other guy. Frank liked the Old One’s ways with herbs. She soaked large leaves and put them over his eye and swore back at him for swearing so boldly. She happily took the packages of dried mushrooms and bark he gathered for her from the forest. Stepmother stood back and told Liang to stay out of Frank Yuen’s way.

Frank had grown up in work camps, been taught much by his father, who slaved beside him, and his fellow labourers. They were natives, Hindus, and runaway city men of all sorts, Depression-broke and desperate. From them, Frank Yuen learned to carry a long knife in a carved leather holster, dress in torn workpants or soiled overalls, wear loud plaid shirts so that, at least in the lumber camps, he would not be mistaken by hunters for wild game and, in the city, he would not be mistaken for a country hick ready to be robbed blind. And they taught him how to box: his fists danced, clenched like two grenades waiting to explode.

I wished my best friend Bobby Steinberg could see this man shadow box. Bobby and I had set up a boxing ring in his shed and got a bell we rang to start each round of pretend-boxing. We took turns playing the announcer, took turns being Joe Louis. And here was Frank Yuen shadow boxing the way the Brown Bomber shadow boxed in the News of the World. When I started boasting about Frank Yuen, Poh-Poh refused to listen to anything about him. She was like most of Chinatown; they already knew too much about Frank Yuen.

The Chinatown elders, especially of the merchant class, were offended by Frank Yuen’s openly “hoodlum” gambling ways, shooting dice with a mix of
fan quo
and
kai doi
low life. Chinatown expected no more from Old Yuen’s only son than the young man’s early death. In fact, Kiam was constantly warned to not get too close to him. Father was relieved when Kiam’s girlfriend, Jenny Chong, also insisted that he spend less time with Frank and more time with her.

No one realized that I still saw Frank Yuen.

No one realized that he would take an interest in a thirteen-year-old.

I was always hoping for a chance to run into Frank Yuen. I liked to see him spit and swear and have him show me how to fight properly. Some of my friends got to meet him, too, but Frank tended to have a temper and a mixed-up kind of English and Chinese, so that there were misunderstandings, I guess. He wasn’t easy to get along with.

“Tell your bratty pals to stay away from me, okay?”

I guess if it weren’t for the fact that Kiam was my brother and I sometimes ran errands for his father, Frank would probably have pushed me away, too.

He bought me a pair of second-hand boxing gloves, which we both wisely decided to keep at Bobby Steinberg’s shed so that no one at home would know.

Many times when I visited Old Yuen to deliver his Chinatown newspaper or some herbs he needed or to collect his rent money, I met Frank Yuen. If he happened not to be busy, we would go to the Tong’s assembly hall room, which was always empty in the afternoon.

“Okay,” he would say, “put up or die.”

Then we would take off our coats and sweaters, shirts, too, if it was warm enough. Like Max, Frank showed me how to hold my elbows in; how to take a dive, his way; how to propel my fists with fake jabs; how to duck my head and aim my right into my opponent’s glass jaw.

The assembly hall smelled of dust and burnt rope. A line of Chinese carved chairs stood on both the far sides of the room, and the walls were hung with scrolls of calligraphy. At one end of the room, three large five-foot porcelain gods of fortune stood guard, with incense pots beside each one. They looked fierce and cast long shadows on the back wall, doubling their size. At night, Poh-Poh told me, they came alive and worked as guardians for the Tong members and fought back evil spirits. When I told Frank what the Old One said, he laughed.

One day when I’d picked up Old Yuen’s rent money from his room and was leaving, crossing the empty assembly hall to get to the outside stairs, I ran into Frank, who was in a foul mood. There was the sour smell of whisky on his breath. He stepped in front of me.

“I have to go to the Blue Eagle and meet First Brother,” I told him. It was snowing outside, and I wanted to go to the Blue Eagle for a cup of hot chocolate to warm up.

Frank said he knew that and burped in my face. I felt uneasy and wanted to get away, even though I was a bit early for meeting First Brother. Confronting Frank Yuen, a head taller than me, I felt shy. With his leather jacket half-opened, his zoot pants tight at the ankle, Frank Yuen was tough-looking, all right.

“Let’s see if you can really fight,” Frank Yuen said to me, switching on one bank of spotlights at the far side of the hall. “Show me,” he sneered. “Take off your coat, if you’re not too chicken-shit.”

I measured my height against his: the top of my head came up to his chin. The three spotlights, which were only used for staging lion dances, operas and fund-raisers, threw our shadows against the wall. Old Yuen had told me once, as I counted out his rent money, that a great Chinese warrior in 1911 was lit by similar lights. His name was Sun Yat-Sen, the man whose China we pledged allegiance to in Chinese school. I felt my warrior arms grow stronger. My warrior coat slipped from me. I was not paying attention, distracted by the fierce faces of the gods lit up at the other end of the hall.

As I turned around, Frank Yuen swung his leg up in slow motion, aiming at my head. I ducked. His loose leather jacket went flying about him.

“Take off your sweater,” Frank ordered.

I did.

I pulled my sweater off over my head and his right foot went up again, just missing the left side of my head. He pushed me aside like a piece of nothing.

“A sissy punk like you,” he challenged, “wants to
fight?
”

He jumped away from me, kick-boxed, yanked off his jacket, yelled bloodthirsty curses; his fists jabbed away at each side of my head; his lethal left foot snapped into the air. His shadow danced around the room. Frank Yuen narrowed his eyes and looked at me menacingly. He looked like one of the porcelain gods. His pant leg danced up and I saw a lump with a handle bulging inside his sock.

“What’s that?”

“Wanna see?”

He stopped, bent down and lifted up his leg to show me an ebony handle sticking out of a leather holster strapped around his stocking. He unsnapped it; six inches of glistening blade slid out, razor-sharp. The knife could easily slit a man’s throat with a single swipe or, with a well-aimed thrust, pierce through bone.

“Honed German steel,” he said. “World War One. You could shave with it, if you weren’t still a baby.”

The blade glided back down into its leather holster.

“In a fight, I always win,” he said to me, snapping shut the strap that held the knife in place. “My lion friend here helps me out now and then.”

Frank Yuen would not let his conviction go unheard.

“Always fight to win or...
die.
”

“Die?”

I always thought you only died in movies. In real life, no one fights to the death. If you knock the other guy down, you win.

“If you don’t win,” Frank spoke as if the truth were obvious, “you don’t deserve to live.”

For some mad reason, I thought I could catch Frank Yuen off guard, show him I was every bit as good as he was. For some reason, I wanted to win his respect.

Following his example, I swung my foot into the air; the tip of my boot barely reached his chest. His left foot swiftly kicked up, hit my own foot mid-air and sent me crashing like a knocked-down bowling pin. I thought I heard porcelain laughter.

“No fair,” I said, getting halfway up. “You’re bigger than me.”

“
Mukka hai,
” he swore, and with his right fist sent me slamming back down to earth. The immediate intense pain took my breath away. Tears welled up in my eyes; the skin on my face stiffened in shock.

“You think no man is going to beat up a little fuck-ass bastard kid like you, eh?”

He danced around me, his left foot suddenly whizzing past my right ear. He laughed: “You want
fair?
”

I froze.

“Stupid asshole,” he said, his fists came closer and closer to my face. “Don’t you know hotshots like you make perfect punching bags?”

He stopped dancing, stood high above me, breathing hard.

“You sure you like to box?”

I nodded my head. He opened his fist and slapped me hard across my right cheekbone. It sent me sprawling. I knew he expected me to cry or yell stop. Some wildness in him was unleashed; his eyes looked through me. He rushed closer to me, waiting for a sign of weakness, a gesture of surrender. I pushed myself up off the floor. His other hand slapped my left cheek. The sound echoed in the hall. My face burned.

I consciously stood my ground, but that enraged him, pushed him to hitting me again, only harder. A deep burden began to lift inside me, but no words came out, only a rising sound, a keening, half-animal, half-human sound. Another part inside me instinctively went cold, said, “
Win!
”

In spite of my bravura, the hot pain on my cheeks burned; my eyes began to water. I willed myself not to cry, not to break down. I willed myself to think... react...
fight to win or die.

“Jesus,” Frank Yuen said, disgusted. “You’re just a god-damn chicken-shit punk!”

An intense icy resolve came over me, a clarity about what to do next. I dropped down, bolted sideways, and grabbed at Frank Yuen’s leg. Startled, he tried to pull away, resist. I quickly pushed up his trouser cuff and clawed with my fingers until the lethal German blade slipped out of its holster. And just as Frank Yuen’s disbelieving eyes began to understand, I grabbed the weapon. His open-shirted throat stood naked just above my face.

I clutched the ebony handle, felt for a split second its odd, dead weight; then, with the speed of a rattler, taking only half a breath, I thrust the knife point-blank at his bobbing Adam’s apple.

Frank Yuen jumped back, not a second too soon, his arms flailing away from the knifepoint coming up at him like a spear. The thin material of his shirt tore,
hissed
apart, as the blade slit upwards.

“
Stop!
” he said.

A sharp pain burst into my fist and my shoulder. My fingers flew apart; the knife flew away.

Frank’s left foot had connected. The steel knife skittered across the assembly hall like a small frantic animal.

I fell back down, harder than before.

“Shit,” he said. “You were going to kill me.”

I was on my knees. The tears began to fall. My chest began to heave.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “C’mon, catch your breath.” He knelt down to see how I was.

Frank’s shadow fell across me. Long shadows on the wall moved as we moved.

The pain burned across my shoulder.

A memory came to me, of something hard hitting my back, its metal sharpness ripping flesh; a strap whipping lines of fire across my back. Words began to tumble out of my mouth, in a voice that was childish, panic-stricken, in a dialect that I had forgotten: “
Bah-Bah, don’t hit me... don’t hit me...
”