TWO

POH-POH WARNED ME THAT I was no longer the same Tohng-Yahn boy she took by the hand when we first struggled up the crowded third-class gangplank in Hong Kong to board the CPR steamship to Vancouver. “You old enough now to keep secrets.”

Grandmother was right. I was eight years old that fall of 1930, as I stood waiting in the doorway of our cramped, stuffy Chinatown kitchen to help her wash and prepare the vegetables. The door jamb had lines that Father pencilled on to record my height. Father had said that when I reached a certain height, I would be trusted to know more, to know family secrets that even my very best friend, Jack O’Connor, could never be told.

“I’m taller now,” I said, looking as grown-up as I knew how. “I’m bigger, too.”

The Old One laughed.

“You not Tohng-Yahn like before, Kiam-Kim,” she said, displaying her old know-it-all village manner and shaking her wrinkled head at the fierce-faced, nearly cross-eyed Kitchen God stuck on the wall. Even he agreed. Poh-Poh unhooked Stepmother’s flower-printed apron from the doorknob. I looked at the dangling garment and took a step back into the dining room. Poh-Poh shook her head again.

“You not Chinese like before. Now you just a mo no boy, a no-brain boy!”

Poh-Poh did not mean that I didn’t have a brain; she meant that I didn’t have the right kind. One day when I sat in my room, bent-mouthed and feeling crushed, Stepmother told me to pay no attention.

“When you count up Father’s invoices to match up his bookkeeping entries, what does the Old One always say?”

I thought for a moment. “Poh-Poh says, ‘Kiam-Kim has a Number One Brain.’ Then she pulls my ear.”

“Yes, yes …,” Stepmother said. She sighed. “To keep First Son humble.”

I protested and punched my pillow.

“Father always laughs.”

“You must laugh, too!” A delicate hand brushed away my tears. “Yes, laugh. Then you have a Tohng-Yahn no, a Chinese brain like your Poh-Poh.”

Stepmother smiled when I got her meaning: never take Poh-Poh too seriously. Smile. Laugh. Stepmother herself barely reacted to any of Poh-Poh’s abrupt suggestions: “Steep tea longer.” “Fold sheets this way: tight-tuck every corner.” “Hold the baby … firmly.” “Eat more meat.”

To each command, Gai-mou would respond with a faintly pleasant smile, as if Poh-Poh’s take-charge voice should not be taken too seriously. After a moment, she would submit to Poh-Poh’s way: the green tea was steeped longer; bedsheets were stretched just so and all four corners stiffly tucked in; the baby firmly held; and, finally, another morsel of meat was politely swallowed.

“Ho, ho! Good, good!” said Poh-Poh, satisfied that Gai-mou had not disregarded her. However, even as the Old One increased her pushy ways with me, Stepmother began gradually to fold the bedsheets in her own way. In the midst of her breast-feeding my sister, she lifted Liang-Liang to burp, not as firmly as Poh-Poh would have liked: the tiny head limply propped over the towel-padded shoulder and slowly slid down again to feed. Stepmother was doing more and more things in her own way.

Mrs. Lim remarked on how the dinner table was set. Poh-Poh said, waving her hand dismissively, “Gai-mou work too hard to do everything right.”

Eventually, even Father noticed that certain habits had changed in our house: now the Old One folded her own sheets exactly in the way Stepmother did, with three corners tightly tucked in but with one inviting corner flipped back.

Father was relieved to see that the two women got along most days, though once I saw him wink at Stepmother as if they had agreed upon a secret strategy to use their Chinese brains to contain Poh-Poh’s abrasive inclinations—using the kind of brains I lacked. But if the right grey cells hadn’t yet bloomed inside me, at least I was now taller than the last pencil mark scratched on the door post: taller and bigger and able to keep a secret. And too tall to travel free to Vancouver Island.

“We’re going to the Chinatown in Victoria to get you and Liang a new brother,” Father had said that morning.

“There will be two sons in family, Kiam-Kim!” said Poh-Poh. “Two grandsons!”

“It’s a secret,” Stepmother said.

“No one else must know,” Father explained, “or the government officials might give us trouble. Understand?”

I tried to argue that I should go to Victoria instead of Liang-Liang.

“Liang small enough to ride no charge,” Poh-Poh said, but I—oh, a big boy like our First Son—would have cost the family an exorbitant full fare. “Father not rich,” she concluded, “so you, Kiam-Kim, sacrifice yourself and stay home.”

“Final decision,” said Father, lowering his glasses.

I sensed they must have known the secret for a long time, waiting until they were ready to leave to tell me. Still, I was keen to probe for more information.

“How am I going to get a brand-new brother?”

Stepmother nudged Father.

“Well,” Father said, snapping shut his leather briefcase. “How? First, lots of boring paperwork. Documents still to read, blank spaces to fill out, to sign.”

“Yes,” Stepmother said, her delicate lips barely moving, half whispering her words. “Too much … documents.”

“Then?”

“If everyone … agrees …”

“Then, Kiam-Kim, if things work out—” Father stared steadily at Stepmother’s back “—if everything agreeable, your new brother soon join the family.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s four years old, Kiam,” Father said. “Half your age.”

“He’ll be your Second Brother,” Stepmother said. “Won’t you like that? I think that I—I might like that.”

Father caught her eye and seemed pleased.

“Second?” I asked.

“Number Two,” Father said. “You be First Son, Dai-goh, you be Big Brother to him.”

“You be boss,” Stepmother said, repeating how Third Uncle told me that in Canada being “boss” or “Number One Boss” was best, like my being First Son.

“What if Second Brother doesn’t want to join us?” I asked.

“Don’t worry so much,” Stepmother said.

“And it’s a—a secret,” warned Father. “Can you keep a secret?”

I stood up straight and nodded. A shuffling sound was coming from below the staircase.

“Kiam-Kim!” Poh-Poh shouted up at me. “Too many questions!”

I carried Stepmother’s small suitcase down the stairs so she could carry Liang, twisting with excitement. In the hallway, she put Liang down and put on the second-hand wool coat that Mrs. Ben Chong had picked out for her at the China Relief Bazaar, the one held every three months at the Mission Church. Father opened the front door. In the sunshine, a taxi stood waiting at the curb; the driver stepped out and opened the trunk.

My head began to buzz: what if I shoved my way into the trunk and refused to leave it?

“In China,” Father began in formal Cantonese, “a First Son cheerfully fulfills his filial duty.”

The bleak, lecturing tone made it clear that staying home and assisting Poh-Poh were among those cheerful duties.

When the three of them left in the taxi, and the front door closed behind them, I thought, Vancouver is not China! and began to sulk.

“Come,” Poh-Poh commanded from the kitchen. “I give First Son a taste of plantation cane.”

From the blue bowl on the kitchen table, I took one of the soaking brown pieces she was using in her cooking and began to gnaw on the chewy stump. Instantly, a thin line of cloying liquid ran down my chin.

My own Number One Brain, Chinese or not, suddenly felt mired: I had been ensnared by a finger-joint of sugar cane, lured back into the kitchen where Poh-Poh’s treacherous white crown had been waiting to outsmart me. When she reached for the flowery apron hanging on a hook, I grimaced, but it was not compelling enough to distract her weathered hands from flinging the apron into the air like a net and quickly catching the flaps around me. I yelped, but a relentless palm twirled me around; lightning fingers snatched away the chewed-up cane, tossed it back on the kitchen table, and knotted the double-folded apron tightly around my waist.

Bluebells and violets, red and yellow roses, and swirling pink petals cascaded in repeated patterns all the way down to my bare knees. I looked like a meadow in bloom. It was useless for me to smile, hopeless for me to grin, and futile for me to laugh: a wily old Fox Lady had trapped her innocent victim in an oilcloth apron of sissy flowers.

Poh-Poh lifted up my shirt sleeve to study the bony appendage of my arm, just as I would have inspected a held-up limb of one of those large, squirming toads Jack O’Connor and I regularly caught at MacLean Park. Or just as the famished Fox Lady would study its prey before … before I knew what was happening, a knobby thumb and forefinger encircled my wrist. Grandmother made a pitying face and took on the talk-story voice of the disappointed Demon Fox,

“Have bigger shank bones in soup pot!”

That was when I should have laughed at the silly joke, remembering that that was what the lip-smacking Fox Lady always declared before she locked away her struggling main course to be fattened up. Instead, a scowl stretched the corners of my mouth and I pulled back my skinny arm. But I knew it was pointless for me to resist: Poh-Poh would have her way.

Father had that afternoon warned me to be on my best behaviour and to help the Old One prepare the sui-yah, the late-night dishes, for her party of mahjong ladies. “Keep busy tonight,” Father had advised me. “Obey your grandmother and keep the family secret.”

I knew there was nothing else to do but to observe Poh-Poh, apron-wrapped in the kitchen, in the midst of a squadron of pots and pans being heated on the stove, surrounded by bowls and plates loaded with the food that she had chopped and sliced all afternoon, and obey. And keep the family secret.

Poh-Poh herself looked unnaturally plump, with her long white apron tied over her blue-quilted jacket and black Old China pants. Between her rolled-up ankle stockings and the edge of those pant legs, I glimpsed her long johns. In the early fall, with the North Shore mountain winds coming down into Vancouver and the constant fog rising from Burrard Inlet, she always felt vulnerable to drafts and chills. Still, with her hands slapping pot lids shut, her sturdy body shuffling the unprepared carrots, turnips, and leafy greens, bringing out the platters of raw meat and chicken wings from the icebox outside on the back porch, Poh-Poh wheeled back and forth like a bun-haired dervish.

“I save carrots for you to do,” she said.

Then she took the greens and chopped away with her cleaver, lifting each mound of vegetable with the flat of her blade and sliding exact portions into ceramic bowls; finally, she slapped the meat down and minced with the blade faster than my eyes could see, the rhythm of her chopping and mincing beat-beating like a drum on the cherrywood block. My sulk vanished. Any thoughts of a new brother receded. I was captivated. The climax came when the Old One grabbed the cleaver to hook the anvil-handle of the peep-grill, snapping the iron cover up to study the licking flames in the roaring belly of the stove. Hot enough to heat the rooms and, later, to sizzle the food. All at once, she pulled the blade away and the iron grill landed with an ear-shattering BANG!

I jumped.

In all Poh-Poh’s stories, the clever children escaped the clutches of the ravenous Fox Lady and came back to the village to warn others. I thought of telling Jack O’Connor to be very careful of old ladies who offered him sugar cane, who would wrap him in a shroud of flowers and fix their beady eyes on him.

“Keep busy,” Poh-Poh said. “Taste this all-day melon soup.”

She handed me a small bowl of steaming amber. Somehow, her Tohng-Yahn no had read my long and wistful face: my brain cells had been wondering, while I waited for the soup to cool, how I could tell Jack O’Connor the family secret.

“Taste now,” said Poh-Poh.

The soup tasted like warm chicken broth. Pieces of salty melon pulp burst into tangy sweetness. It was perfect. I tipped the small bowl and slurped up every crystal drop.

“Maybe,” I said, “too salty.”

“Bullshit,” Poh-Poh said, using one of the half-dozen English words she had picked up from Third Uncle’s labourers. She snatched the empty bowl from my hand before I could ask for more.

Acting grown-up, I said, “Not nice.”

“Shut up,” she said in English, without a trace of accent.

Satisfied with her orderly fleet of plates and utensils, her eyes glowing from the heat of the stove, Poh-Poh loosened her apron to fan more heat into the dining room. She asked me to thump the sawdust chute feeding one end of the stove.

My fists battered the galvanized sides until the load of sawdust inside made a gradual whoosh as it slid down towards the flames. Poh-Poh then directed me to wash my hands in the sink before I tackled my next job. I stood on tiptoe and reached over the deep metal basin and wrung my fingers under the cold tap water. Poh-Poh roughly dried my hands on a length of clean towel that hung on a wooden roller beside the back door.

“Stand on this,” she commanded. With a slippered foot she shoved sideways against an empty crate until it banged into the deep metal sink. Everything smelled of sauces and crackling firewood. She handed me back the half-chewed stump of sugar cane.

As I sucked, I looked down at the colourful label covering the slats of the crate. Between slurps, I read out loud: “Bee-Seee Ap-ples.”

“Too smart,” Poh-Poh said. “Stand up.”

“Frae-sir Val-leee Eee-daan Farm.”

Using my best English, and pronouncing carefully, I told Poh-Poh, “The Val-lee is the food bas-ket-lah of Vancouver,” just as my teacher at Strathcona had taught us. By the end of Grade 2, I knew more about British Columbia than I could ever remember about China.

“You mo no,” Poh-Poh repeated, after I badly translated into Toishan the idea that Fraser Valley Eden Farm was “the Big Paradise Apple-Box of Upside-down Mountain.”

“Nonsense,” she said and snatched the acid-sweet cane from my lips.

However they were translated, Grandmother took no pleasure in the faan gwai English words, the foreign demon words, though she was clearly jealous of my expert ability to read the complex labels of apple crates and grocery tins. I could even read the Grade 3 Look-and-Learn books like This Is the House That Jack Built. (Jack O’Connor knew that one by heart.) But instead of commending me as Stepmother and Father did, the Old One fretted over how her grandson squinted and stumbled over flimsy Chinese textbooks yet somehow could read, even with one eye shut, page after page of rhyming English words; she complained how her no-brain grandson could pivot a pencil into ten English sentences faster than he could daub a brush over just one single Chinese ideogram. Worse, she wrung her hands and warned Third Uncle and big Mrs. Lim, who only sulked to hear the latest news about me, that First Son was muttering more Chinglish than Chinese.

She begged of them, “What will happen to my grandson? What will happen to Kiam-Kim?”

I thought Poh-Poh took things too seriously. Whenever I looked in the mirror and saw my narrow eyes and pug nose, there was no escaping the fact that I was my father’s son, and I would always be her grandson. She and the elders often worried about children like myself, whom they called juk-sing, bamboo stumps, who were sturdy outside but held a hollow emptiness within.

Sometimes Poh-Poh held me by my shoulders and looked into my eyes as if she wanted to drill deep inside me, to see if anything of value was filling up that hollow domain. I would speak to her, say something that was using my very best half-Chinese, half-English sentences, and she would choke and choke at the apparent absurdity of my statements.

At those times, I thought of all the wrinkle-faced people, white-haired people with furrowed brows from Eastern European countries and from Italy, who sat on their porches and on the steps along Keefer Street, and how sadly they sometimes looked upon the lot of us white and yellow kids romping together on the streets. Their disapproving glances and shouts for their grandchildren to rejoin them on the porch made me think they all longed for us to be among our own kind, just as they once were: children of a single language and a single community.

“Fraser Valley …,” I said even louder and kicked the box hard. “Eden Farm.”

“Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh warned, “you soon forget—you China!”

I started to protest. She bowed her head and began dabbing her eyes with the corner of her white apron.

“On—onions …,” she said.

Just as she turned her back to me, I snatched the chewed-up sugar cane and stuffed it in my mouth to suck out its last bit of pulpy sweetness. Then I loudly and rudely spat the stringy fibres into the compost bin.

“I’m finished,” I said and jumped off the wooden crate.

“You clean and cut carrots for me.”

She did not even turn around. I picked up the dull scraping knife and pulled up a chair. The carrots were thick and twisted. Her old chin rose to beg the tolerance of the Kitchen God for the salvation of her mo-no grandson.

The wild-eyed Kitchen God was only a picture on a placard, an ancient warrior printed on a small poster stuck just above the stove, but she mumbled something to him. Scraping away, I mumbled something, too.

“Careful,” Poh-Poh said. “Tsao Chung hear you.”

I made a face at Tsao Chung and didn’t even care if all my few Chinese brain cells withered away.

She lifted her know-it-all eyebrow. “You ask for more blessing or trouble?”

At my look of surprise, she burst out laughing and left me by myself in the prickly heat of the Kitchen God’s kingdom.

As I yanked the green, ferny tops from the knobby carrots, my head began to work out the things both Third Uncle and Grandmother taught me that would either bless me or trouble my life.

Between hacking into spittoons, the elders were always proclaiming ten thousand this or ten thousand that. “Ten thousand blessings!” Third Uncle would exclaim if his business went well; then, Poh-Poh would laugh and warn him, “Aaaiiyaah! Ten thousand troubles!”

Sure enough, the stock market crashed. Ten thousand troubles landed upon our doorstep.

Grandmother explained to me that her words were meant to chase away the envy of the gods, but she had not been present to utter the right incantations when Third Uncle boasted of his growing bank account over business lunches with the H.Y. Louie and the Yip Sang merchant families. Women were never invited to those lunches. Poh-Poh told me how in America some months ago men jumped out of buildings when the value of investments dropped. Third Uncle had even thought of killing himself, but Poh-Poh reminded him to think of his new family in Gold Mountain. As a family, Father assured him, we would survive. Third Uncle joined the merchants for their regular luncheon.

“They never invite women,” Poh-Poh explained. “No woman die for money.”

The last carrot waited to be scuffed and washed. The idea of having a new brother sent my mind searching for blessings.

Whenever anyone offered Chinatown children candy, we were taught to refuse at least twice, so one would be humble and worthy of a final third offering. Whenever I expected too much, like lots of lucky money at New Year’s, I would walk past the small Goddess of Mercy in our parlour, behave as if I didn’t care how much lucky money I might get, that I wasn’t greedy or grasping. I wanted only luck.

Big Mrs. Lim always told me that the gods and ghosts look for ways to trick you. It was no use my saying I never saw any gods or ghosts; apparently they were everywhere. I was in even more danger, she warned, because I did not see them. Other children saw them, she told me and Poh-Poh, like the Lon Sing twins, who finished each other’s sentences, and the Chiangs’ little girl, who went mad with hearing ghost voices and fell into a coma and died.

“Expect nothing,” Father told me, “and anything that comes will be a gift.”

“Be patient,” Stepmother had cautioned me that very morning. “Keep deep longings to yourself.”

I thought of what everyone had said to me when I got all Excellent on my first report card.

“Even white people say,” Third Uncle said, “ ‘Never show poker hand.’ Pretend you got Needs Improvement.”

Mrs. Lim warned me not to strut too much. “The cocky rooster makes the best soup.”

Grandmother told me that when I was a baby in China, whenever she took me outside, she complained out loud of my wretchedly pinched eyes and snot-running nose, so the gods would not be jealous and snatch me away.

I fought down my excitement: I would set an example for my promised Second Brother when he disembarked; that is, I would be openly disappointed with him. But why would any jealous god worry about me as Number One Boss? What example was I, wrapped in a flowery apron, wearily scrubbing carrots and wiping at my nose with the back of my wet and skinny wrist?

Poh-Poh stepped back into the kitchen. She had oiled and neatly primped up her hair with her jade hairpieces. I lifted the long knife, as she and Stepmother had taught me, and began slowly, carefully, slicing the carrots at an angle. Grandmother ignored me until she noticed my runny nose. She took a tissue from her sleeve and made me blow three times. She washed her hands, then began wiping the wok with a tiny mop soaked with cooking oil. My eyes glazed with thought. Between her humming a singsong tune, she broke into comment whenever she felt like it.

“Kiam-Kim thinks too much,” she told the Kitchen God, her tune faltering between some nonsense lyrics. “Aaaiiyaah, what proper girl will ever marry my worthless grandson!”

I reminded myself that the so-called Kitchen God was only a small, heat-curled poster pinned on the wall. He looked like a warrior in one of my floppy Chinese comic books.

“At the end of this year, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh went on in her lecturing tone, “the Kitchen God Tsao Chung will tell tales about the family.”

I knew that. I handed her the plate of cut carrots.

“Tsao Chung soon fly back up to Heaven to the Jade Emperor.”

I knew that, too. During the last week of the year, after smearing the paper lips with a dab of honey to sweeten his words, Grandmother had Father walk out the back porch and set Tsao Chung free by burning him up in a clay pot in front of all the family. Transformed by the fire into smoke, Tsao Chung began his journey to Heaven to report on our family. Last year, as Poh-Poh solemnly followed the rising vapours, Father nudged me and winked. Then he threw the ashes into the air. Poh-Poh stared at the fragments, never looking away until every bit of ash vanished skyward. By the second week of the New Year, a new Kitchen God would be pinned in the same place.

Later that day, Father told me how—scientifically—it was only smoke. Overhearing this, Third Uncle said, with some reluctance, “Sometime smoke, Kiam-Kim, and sometime not.”

Next door, at the O’Connors’, there was nothing like a Kitchen God. But as I waited in their front hall for Jack to come out to play, I saw hanging askew a wood-framed picture of a white lady in a blue dress. In their tidy, uncluttered kitchen, Mrs. O’Connor made Jack and me hot dogs in the only pot that I could see, and Jack told me that the lady in the blue dress was the Blessed Virgin Mary. She had the Holy Baby Jesus in an old barn crowded with livestock. Mrs. O’Connor said it was all true, and crossed herself.

I told Poh-Poh and Stepmother about Blessed Mary and her having a baby right there in a cowshed. I told them about all the creatures surrounding Baby Jesus, all the chickens and ducks, the sheep, the cows and pigs, including, best of all, the three hairy men and their three camels. Poh-Poh thought a moment.

“Not too clean,” she said finally.

When I told some of the other Grade 3 white boys about Tsao Chung, they all laughed at me. Jon Wing, whose father’s store sold the images wholesale, said nothing. One of the Italian boys shoved me aside, but he said something that made sense to me. That afternoon in the kitchen, I repeated the boy’s words to the Old One.

“Poh-Poh, the Kitchen God—just a piece of paper!”

“Kiam-Kim, you be careful what you say. You clean up now,” she ordered. “Put out chopsticks and best dishes on kitchen table, all ready for later.”

I quickly scrubbed the empty colander. Then, wiping my hands, I jumped off the apple crate, climbed up on the chair, and lifted from the lower shelves two sizes of our best plates and bowls. Then I dipped into the lower drawer for the chopsticks. Everything clattered into three stacks bristling with serving spoons and eye-poking chopsticks.

“What’s that?” Poh-Poh asked.

Gentle knocking drifted from the front door, but I kept busy, carrying the dishes to the pine board that Father had put up as a serving shelf. I’m too busy, I thought, and gathered the spoons into one bowl; the chopsticks I plunked into a glass, just as Stepmother would have done.

The Old One had no time for my stubbornness. She tossed her flour-bag apron over the broken-backed chair by the doorway and shifted the stockpot away from the direct heat. Thick pork bones bobbed to the surface. Her lightning-quick eyes appraised bowls and plates of raw and semi-cooked ingredients, all placed in a certain order for the stir-frying. Finally, Poh-Poh reached over and wiped her hands on my apron. “Who answer your door, clever boy,” she said to me, “if no one marry you!”

I didn’t care.

She hurried out of the kitchen, her quilted jacket dancing on her shoulders. I looked past the Old One as she opened the door. Two tiny ladies bustled in to escape the fall dampness, Mrs. Pan Wong and Mrs. Hin Leong, their voices happily chirping above Grandmother’s humble greetings.

Grandmother shouted back at me, “Watch the soup pot!”

Minutes later, she scurried into the kitchen with a small bag of oranges and two wrapped parcels. There was a parcel of two cooked chicken breasts from Mrs. Wong, who always brought the same thing. Crunchy-skinned barbecued pork fell out of the second parcel onto a serving dish.

Poh-Poh stood at the loaded kitchen table and wiped her hands on the dish towel. Everything was in place. Except me.

“Sit,” Poh-Poh said to me, frogging the row of silk buttons on her jacket. “Read.”

I knew she meant the Chinese First Word books lying dead on the corner stool, just as Father had left them.

Turning her back on me, she lightly touched the greyish bun of her hair and adjusted a cloisonné barrette. I yanked off my flowery apron, threw it aside, and advanced towards the textbooks as if I were going to lift one up. Satisfied, the Old One ambled away. I ducked into the pantry.

There I sat on the cool linoleum floor under the glowing lightbulb. I pushed aside the family rice barrel and reached behind for the comic book that Stepmother had slipped me that morning.

“Don’t tell Poh-Poh,” she had said.

These China-made comics were stitch-bound booklets. Their sixteen pages depicted in vivid, detailed drawings how ancient Chinese warriors had fought the early Mongol invaders. There were five booklets in the series, each with running panels of detailed drawings and captions below in Chinese. Even if you could not read the Chinese, the drawings were so elaborate anyone could follow the story. Even Jack. We both traded our comics and read them. He said he read them on the floor in the parlour and in bed. Terry and the Pirates was the best. We sometimes read comics together in his house, but Poh-Poh never wanted me to let Jack into ours. Playing on our porch one summer day, he had asked Poh-Poh what smelled so rotten in our house. I translated. Poh-Poh had been making a herbal soup. The front door slammed shut in our faces.

“Mo li,” she told me later. “No manners.”

Mr. O’Connor said that the Chinese comics had more details in them but the writing was all “chop-chop” to him. Jack made a face and pretended he could read Chinese. I could make out only a word or two myself.

Jeung Sam was number three. Father had taught me about the Chinese heroes of the first two books, how each of the five warriors were like today’s soldiers fighting against the evil foreigners who were dividing up China. The dog-turd Japanese. The demon Russians. The big-nosed British. I was supposed to enjoy number three only after finishing my chores for Poh-Poh and after I made sure I read my Chinese-school homework.

“I promise,” I said to Stepmother, remembering how the Old One laughed at these comic heroes that Father thought were so important for me to discover.

“No one kung fu any more,” Poh-Poh said, pushing her fists into the air. “Spears! Swords! Useless! Today, one bomb kill everybody!” The war news from China had been terrible.

Poh-Poh reminded me that comic books were bad for young eyes.

Now I leaned against the wooden slats and flipped through the first few pages of the comic. Here were drawn the usual Chinese words on the huge banners of the fighting armies: North. East. Tiger … and the adventures began …

That bit of reading would be, I reasoned, my Chinese homework.

I studied the dramatic panels, the wave of arrows in the air, the swords dripping with blood, easily figuring out the good guys from the bad guys with their snarling dark faces and slit Mogul eyes. I found myself stage-whispering sounds to mimic the flying arrows and slashing swords, marvelled at the trickery of friend and foe, and cracked my knuckles as the enemy broke the legs of the captured hero. I gulped at his dying, and heard his challenge for others to come forward, not to save him but to “Come and save China!”—the same words Father wrote in his newspaper essays, the words he taught me to write out—the final cry of a victory in defeat.

“China never lose,” Father said. “Always be Chinese.”

I looked up and remembered where I was. In the yellowish light of the pantry I could hear rising voices, impatient voices.

From the parlour, Mrs. Pan Wong and Mrs. Sui Leong were talking anxiously with the Old One, all three waiting for their fourth partner. They were cracking red melon seeds and tsk-tsking over and over about how late, as usual, Mrs. Chong was.

When I had read twelve pages—another hero, this one a master of archery, now perched on a double-spread cliff ready to plunge into the raging river below—Poh-Poh’s firm voice rose above the other two.

“Well, this is more than Chinese time to be so late.”

I heard a bustle of rattling paper bags being opened. I imagined packets of candied plums, sugared ginger, dried prunes being exchanged. They were relaxing into serious talk, sitting back on the cushions, not waiting for Mrs. Chong. Mrs. Pan Wong started to speak, and Poh-Poh abruptly said, “Shh—the kitchen!”

Now there came whisperings. I listened closely, imagining three heads bowed towards each other. Huddling spies. I thought I heard my name pitched dramatically, Kiam-Kim … Kiam-Kim, but I couldn’t make out anything else. The murmuring intrigued me.

Grandmother, from where she sat in the parlour, could partly see the empty stool. She demanded I come out. Right now! I refused to answer. Abruptly, her tone sweetened. Perhaps she remembered her promise to Father to be patient with me.

“Come out, Kiam-Kim,” she said. “Come and join Mrs. Leong and Mrs. Wong for a visit. They want to see you.”

I slipped my comic back into its hiding place and stood up. As I walked towards them, Poh-Poh offhandedly mentioned that Grandson would be helping her cook each dish for the sui-yah, that Grandson had even helped her prepare the many ingredients.

“Such a smart boy already!” Mrs. Wong said. “Some lucky girl will catch him!”

Mrs. Leong said, “If only my eight-year-old could do a tenth as much!”

She was talking about her Winston, a fat boy with a thick head. He failed English Grade 2 and was taken out of Chinese school for throwing ink at some of the younger girls who laughed at his stuttering. Mrs. Leong bit her bottom lip. Mrs. Wong knitted her thinly drawn eyebrows.

It was inspection time. Glittering, appraising eyes took in everything. Poh-Poh reached out and tucked my shirt in. I felt I was going to be sold to one of the ladies, just as the bad children back in China were sold at the whim of an elder. The two ladies on the chesterfield broke into even broader smiles. Mrs. Wong pulled me closer to her. What a good grandson. How tall, how always considerate. Under the parlour lamp beside her, Mrs. Pan Wong’s gold tooth shone like fire. The Old One’s eyes registered enough, enough. She was more anxious to play mahjong, to get on with the business of the evening.

“Check on the chicken-melon soup,” Poh-Poh said. “Use the metal spoon carefully.”

I knew what she meant. Stand on the apple box. Lift the pot lid and peek in to see that the liquid was not bubbling over.

It wasn’t.

“I’m getting a new brother,” I said just to myself, and, to pass the time, banged on the side of the stock pot with the spoon and a chopstick. The banging did my talking for me: New! new! new! new! The pot lid tilted, the golden liquid hissed and bubbled over.

Poh-Poh stormed into the kitchen, her back hunched up beneath her quilted jacket, bent knuckles ready to land on my crown. “You study your school book and listen for the door.” With stinging precision, her knuckles landed. “Mrs. Chong come any minute now.”

She straightened the 100 per cent Canada Wheat apron hanging over the chair. As I rubbed my head, the flaps of the white apron wavered like two ghosts.

“Did you say something, Grandson?”

“Nothing,” I said, dropping the spoon and chopsticks.

“How clever,” the Old One said, “to say nothing.”

Giggling rippled from the front room.

When finally Mrs. Annah Chong arrived at our front door, she apologized, using her formal Cantonese to win back Poh-Poh’s good grace.

“Jan-haih mh-hoh yee-see la,” the tall woman said. “How thoughtless of me. Arriving so late. You must think I am so ungrateful.”

“Mh-hoh haak-hei,” Poh-Poh said, echoing Mrs. Chong’s formality. “Don’t stand on ceremony. Let my grandson take your lovely fur coat.”

As I stepped up to do so, Mrs. Chong slapped her purse into my hands and hurriedly unbuttoned her coat.

“Thank you, Kiam-Kim,” she continued in Cantonese. “You’re such a good boy, so smart looking, so tall! Grandmama must be feeding you her best cooking.”

I smiled, but knew I was not to say anything. Mrs. Chong swung her thin arms out to let her heavy coat slide away from her. The coat smelled faintly of mothballs; two beady-eyed foxes dangled from the collar into my nose. I grabbed one corner of the dark garment just before it hit the floor and was surprised to see Mrs. Chong’s daughter, Jenny, standing right behind the curtain of fur. The coat knocked the purse from my hand; Jenny was quick to catch the strap. Her eyes narrowed at me as if I were stupid or clumsy. Or both.

Tonight was for Poh-Poh’s ladies only, a chance to get away from the rest of their families, especially from their crowded households of live-in namesake cousins and roomers, and from children the likes of Jenny Chong and me.

Except I got stuck as kitchen help and doormat.

“Remember to help Poh-Poh greet the guests, Kiam-Kim,” Stepmother had said. “You be the man of the house tonight.”

When Mrs. Chong walked by and absent-mindedly patted my head, I remembered to be like Father. I stood taller. Girl children, like Jenny Chong, first-born or last-born, hardly mattered. I ignored her.

Jenny’s lips curled when I said my formal greetings to her mother. “Chong Sim, nei ho ma?” If she smiled, she might not have been so ugly.

Mrs. Chong gave her a stern look, her pencil-drawn eyebrows curving upward, her dialect slipping back to her Toishan village origins.

“Mo yung neuih upset her father! Useless girl! Three times this week!” Mrs. Chong dragged Jenny into our parlour, grabbed her thin shoulders, and shook her in front of everyone. “You behave! Dai-mo send you away!”

She called my grandmother Dai-mo, Great Mrs. or Great-aunt, because Poh-Poh, in her seventies, was the oldest of her crowd. Mrs. Chong brushed back a strand of her hair as if she were regaining control. She pushed Jenny down on our long sofa and glared at her.

“Stay here and die,” Mrs. Chong said, throwing some school books at her. She sighed and walked into the next room to join the mahjong group.

“Say neuih,” Mrs. Chong said, her arms opening up to her three friends for sympathy. “Dead girl, I have a dead girl for a daughter.”

Two stiff-necked foes were left behind in the parlour.

Jenny looked up at our Great Wall of China calendar. She sat rigidly in her bright red dress, a dress topped with a ruffled collar. When she turned back to glare at me, the ruffles shifted like a stupid clown’s collar.

I could see no interest or mystery in girls like Jenny. If I laughed, even smiled, she would have told Poh-Poh. Then I would be sent right up to bed without even a taste of the late-night supper. The two bowls of jook I had earlier would hardly keep me from hunger. I glared back.

Jenny Chong was almost eight, but skinny in the way most Chinese girls were, stretched too tall for her weight. Her braided pigtails were tightly pinned up and ribboned, and her nostrils visibly flared. She dared me to look away. I found it hard to keep my eyes focussed on her, so I glanced at the four women, who were babbling again. They were admiring Mrs. Chong’s embroidered silk cheongsam, as if her tardiness hadn’t mattered at all.

“I wear special dress for special party,” Mrs. Chong said.

Then there was that pause again, a sudden and important silence.

“Grandson,” Poh-Poh called out to me, “come and get the game table ready.”

I slowly walked away from Jenny to make it clear that she, a girl, wasn’t the one who made me leave the parlour.

“Grandson!”

I went to the hall cupboard and took out the game case.

Mrs. Chong smiled at the three ladies already sitting at the fold-away card table parked just a few feet from our round oak dining table. The tall woman stood as if she could barely move, still fuming over whatever had happened at home. She took out the lucky ashtray she always carried to these parties and parked it on her right side. It was a tiny thing, shaped like a flower. Poh-Poh handed me a coaster to put under it. Finally, Mrs. Annah Chong sat down.

“Just relax, Ann-nah,” Poh-Poh said, and pursed her lips to signal the other two ladies to remain silent. But they purred with curiosity.

“Annah, may I ask what your lovely daughter has done to upset you so?” Mrs. Pan Wong’s Sun Wui village dialect sounded delicate, more diplomatic than familiar.

Mrs. Leong caught Grandmother’s warning look, too, but ignored it. “What could such a beautiful daughter have done to her poor mother?”

“Oh, Leong Sim,” Mrs. Chong said, lighting up a Sweet Caporal, “you are too thoughtful.” She blew out the match. “Me? I suffer in silence. Please, let’s ignore my useless daughter.”

I liked the way Annah Chong would inhale so deeply that her cheeks formed indentations; when she exhaled, they ballooned out. A puff of smoke rose into the air.

The Kitchen God, I thought.

“Grandson,” Poh-Poh said, “we’re ready to play.”

I lifted the leather case of playing tiles onto the table and slipped out the tray with the counters, shook out the two dice and the four-wind disc. Mrs. Wong smiled at me.

“What a good boy,” she said. “So tall.”

The ladies began throwing dice to see who would start breaking up the tiles.

“You start, Sui Leong,” Poh-Poh commanded. “You East, Pan Wong, you sit across.”

I stepped out of the way.

The four ladies began shuffling and palming the ivory tiles, turning them face down, stacking the pieces into two-tier walls. Their gold and jade bracelets tinkled like bells.

I sat at Father’s small oak desk, facing the gaming table, and turned my attention to my Meccano set, hardly looking up at anyone. I was building a Ferris wheel, like the one shown on the battered box that Third Uncle had bought me from the Strathcona School bazaar.

“It’s an Advanced project,” Father told me, “recommended for big boys, twelve and up.”

“I can do it,” I said.

“There’s some pieces missing,” Third Uncle had told me. “You do your best, Kiam.”

“Very smart Grandson,” Poh-Poh said, out of the blue.

With a quick flip of her forefinger, Mrs. Chong discarded a tile. She and Poh-Poh smiled across the table at each other.

Between one of the mahjong rounds, while the tiles were being shuffled, Mrs. Chong finally broke down. A cloud of cigarette smoke streamed into the air.

“My heart is too heavy,” she began. “I must tell you, dear friends.”

“Tell, tell!” Mrs. Wong said. “You know we all care for your happiness.”

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Leong said. “If the women of Chinatown don’t care for each other, who will?”

“Well …,” Mrs. Chong began, putting down her Sweet Caporal, “my worthless daughter threw a book at her father.”

“Poor Ben Chong!” Mrs. Leong leaned over to hear more.

Mrs. Wong shook her head in disbelief. “Attack her father!”

Jenny’s mother gravely bowed her head. “That’s why, Dai-mo, I thought it best I bring this useless girl with me.”

“No worry, Annah,” Poh-Poh said. “She really is good girl. Has tiger spirit.”

“Tiger, yes, but good,” Mrs. Wong said, and her pudgy hand reached out to touch Mrs. Chong’s sloped shoulder. “Your daughter is plenty smart. How could she—?”

“Let her rot by herself,” Mrs. Chong said. “Say neuih! Mo yung neuih! Dead girl! Useless girl!” She lit up another cigarette.

Mrs. Leong and Mrs. Wong clucked their tongues at this news of a mere girl daring to throw anything at anyone, let alone a book at her father. One of Ben Chong’s many jobs, aside from working in his own corner store, was keeping sets of accounts for Chinatown’s smaller, and more and more often failing, businesses. In their upstairs office, where I had visited a few times with Father, big metal-clipped volumes lay about. I imagined one of those inches-thick account books, two feet wide, being heaved across the room. They could knock out a man with one blow. Mouth open, I looked at Jenny Chong. She looked so thin, too thin.

Grandmother noticed my astonishment and said, “Annah, may I ask—?”

“Yes, yes, Dai-mo, ask me.”

“How large was this book that your daughter threw?”

“Well, of course,” Mrs. Chong said, exhaling, “it was only one of those school scribblers.”

“A scribbler,” Poh-Poh said, pausing thoughtfully, looking directly at me, “is hardly a book.”

I squeezed my lips together, tried not to laugh. A scribbler was smaller than a comic, would barely flutter a few feet in the air.

“But what a thing to do!” Mrs. Wong said, fanning the fires. “Such spirit!”

“We needn’t give this another thought.” Grandmother tapped the table. “South?”

After almost two hours and nearly completing the round, Poh-Poh called me away from my wobbly, nearly finished Ferris wheel to get the wok ready. Mrs. Leong complimented me on my skill. I sighed. For sure, there were some Meccano pieces missing, but I had done my best. Poh-Poh told me to hurry and heat up the large wok.

I wiped the curved bottom as I had been taught to do, then lifted one of the stove tops to set the pan in. I slid the handle on the grate. The stove stirred awake and flames began to lick the wok bottom.

“Everything all cut and ready,” Poh-Poh said, pushing Mrs. Leong back into her seat and insisting she only needed me. “Just need ten minutes to stir-fry.”

In front of our wood-and-sawdust stove, Grandmother handed me Stepmother’s flowery apron. I folded and tied it around my waist just the way Mr. Ding Wong the butcher would, or the waiters at the Hong Kong Café.

Poh-Poh seemed pleased that I did not have to be told twice to follow any of her instructions. When she ordered, I handed her the tin pan of marinated chicken pieces and the flat of pork cubes out of our wooden icebox; passed her the bowls of bean sprouts and soaked mushrooms; tossed her the soy bottle and sesame oil when she nodded towards the pantry and the small dish of dao-see, black-bean sauce, with the tablespoon of starch when she said, “Din-foon.”

She had taught me well, as she had promised Father she would, so that I would survive in Gold Mountain among the barbarians who boiled greens into mush and blackened whole chunks of meat the size of a man’s head, and carved the dead thing and ate whole slabs employing weapons at the table.

“He will teach Liang when I gone,” she told Father.

One after another, our serving plates filled with different dishes. Then I stood back from the wok as Poh-Poh threw in a splash of water to steam the last of the greens with crushed ginger and garlic and a final plop of oyster sauce.

Tonight, at the Old One’s gathering, I was supposed to be on my best behaviour. I was. Still, in the midst of all the activity between Poh-Poh and myself, I thought Jenny Chong should be here, too, not sulking in our parlour. More than I did, she belonged in the kitchen. She should have been whipped, the way Poh-Poh was whipped when she was a servant girl in Old China, with thin bamboo rods that etched hairline scars forever on her back.

The melon soup was now at full boil. Five steaming plates were piled with greens and meats.

“We serve now,” Poh-Poh said. “Why you look like that?”

“Nothing,” I said, still fuming about doing all the work when Jenny could have helped.

“Take off your nothing apron.”

I obeyed. She pointed to the cloth napkins. I folded the napkins, then picked up the chopsticks.

With a pot holder, Poh-Poh lifted the hot dish of beef and greens sprinkled with herbs, all steaming with flavours and glistening from the sesame oil. Grandmother clanged her ladle against the wok.

“Everyone please help!” she said, and the three ladies rushed into the kitchen, exclaiming over the delicious smells. Mrs. Chong filled blue-and-white bowls with rice, and scrawny Mrs. Leong and pudgy Mrs. Wong, holding tea towels against the hot platters, carried the remaining pie-plate tin and porcelain dishes past Grandmother’s surveying eyes. I counted out enough napkins for everyone and picked up the porcelain soup spoons, just as I always did for Stepmother at dinnertime. I slapped a napkin, chopsticks, and a spoon down in front of each empty chair. Adding me to the table, there were five chairs. But there should have been six.

I caught a glimpse of Jenny Chong looking as mean as her mother. Her eyes narrowed again, daring me to stare one second longer.

Poh-Poh pushed me aside. “Watch out for the soup!”

And when the lid with the lucky red-and-gold crests was lifted off, the golden brew steamed majestically. Crystals of melon lay in a rich broth. The air smelled of crushed ginger. Everyone sighed with delight. Summer melon with chicken and sweet pork in chicken-feet stock was one of Poh-Poh’s specialties. Mrs. Chong had grown the prized melon in her backyard garden, and Mrs. Leong, the herbs. Mrs. Wong, the butcher’s mother, had contributed the pork bones; she made sure they were thick with meat.

“People still eat,” she had said, “but they don’t buy so much any more. Stingy times.”

To signal the beginning of the meal, Poh-Poh dipped her chopsticks down into the communal soup bowl and gracefully lifted away the largest pork bone. Thick, tender-cooked pork slid away and fell back into the fragrant broth. Everyone began to chatter, drifting into the deep comfort of their village dialects.

“Perfect,” Mrs. Leong said in her Sam-yup manner. She reached over with her chopsticks and graciously took the bone from Poh-Poh to put onto the bone plate. “Everything perfect.”

“Sik-la!” Grandmother commanded. “Eat, eat, eat! Don’t stand on ceremony!”

“You and your grandson, dai yat!” Mrs. Chong said. “Number One!”

I suddenly felt proud that I belonged there with Poh-Poh—the Number One assistant to the culinary celebrity. Clicking chopsticks rose and fell, and the clink of porcelain spoons in the large bowl made a happy chorus. Grandmother picked up choice pieces of chicken and pork with her ivory chopsticks and generously put them into the rice bowls of her friends.

“Take this one,” she would urge, “this is best.”

Each guest would feign refusal, smiling all the while with pleasure. Finally, everyone was left to eat the portions fate had left facing in his or her direction, like sections of a pie. To cross over your section was rude, unless you wished to give away a good piece from your own portion to someone else. Because I was a growing boy, I was often given good pieces. Mrs. Chong lifted a leafy stalk into my rice bowl.

“Be big and strong for my useless daughter,” she said. “Ten thousand blessings!”

“Here, Kiam-Kim,” Mrs. Wong said, “this morsel of chicken will help you grow up even bigger and stronger.”

“You be good friend to Jenny,” Mrs. Leong said. “She need good friend.”

The women all laughed, as if they were sharing a secret.

“Eat, eat,” Poh-Poh said to me before I could think.

Through the waves of savoury steam, I stole quick glances at Jenny Chong. Grandmother noticed me looking.

“Come—come in and eat, Jen-Jen,” Poh-Poh called out. “Kiam-Kim, bring the kitchen chair.”

Everyone turned to look at Jenny Chong in the parlour. She sat with her hands in her lap as if she had been frozen in ice. Just below her chin, below the ruffles, a pinkish flower was pinned to her red dress; I watched to see if it moved. It didn’t: she was stubbornly holding in her breath. Her two thick pigtails shone like plaited rope under the parlour lamp.

“No, no, no!” Mrs. Chong said. “Leave my mo yung daughter alone. Nobody wants a useless daughter to spoil our dinner!”

“Stop staring, Kiam.” The Old One shoved me back into my seat. “Eat.”

The chair I had slipped between Mrs. Chong and Mrs. Wong sat empty. Now I had a direct view into the parlour. Jenny Chong turned her face away, as if she had better things to look at than a bunch of monkeys feeding their fat faces. She pretended to read.

“Soup very hot,” Poh-Poh said. “Careful, Mrs. Wong.”

I picked up a piece of chicken, moist with flavour, and held it up to see if I could catch Jenny Chong’s attention. I wanted her to notice, to get up and join us. I chewed and swallowed. She took deep breaths; the pink flower on her dress shifted up and down. She was peeking at me. I picked up an even nicer piece. I made a show of slowly chewing and swallowing the meat. I picked up a length of bok choy with my chopsticks and let it slip gradually, lusciously, into my mouth. I thought Poh-Poh should also see how much I enjoyed her cooking, but all the ladies hardly noticed me. Mrs. Chong went on talking about whose Pender Street business might fail next, and the others nodded sadly. In between the nodding, the women slurped their hot soup and complimented the Old One on her cooking.

“Nothing at all,” Poh-Poh responded. “So simple to make.”

I moved my chopsticks over the glistening mushrooms studded with crushed peanuts and seasoned with soy, and the fresh-picked green beans and savoury fried onions. My smiling face and my broad table gestures were all saying delicious!

I chewed with even greater mouth-watering, Charlie Chaplin intensity, desperate to catch the eye of someone starving to death. She should come to the table, I thought, add to Poh-Poh’s joy.

Jenny Chong’s head turned slightly. She looked at me from the corner of her eye. I imagined her stomach growling with hunger, a tigress’s empty belly, her mouth salivating, her eyes the eyes of a huntress. Her jaw moved slightly, as if she were chewing.

I gobbled down some rice like a hungry bear. I took up my spoon and royally dipped into the communal bowl. The mixed pork and chicken broth was savoury with sweet dried shrimp and greens. I slowly tipped the brimming porcelain spoon and caught a square of melon.

I only meant to slurp gently, but the heat of the melon caught me off guard. I gulped, gasped. Everyone stopped talking. I sputtered, a trail of glowing liquid dribbling down the corner of my mouth. Jenny Chong stared wide-eyed. Knuckles rapped my head.

“Stop showing off,” Poh-Poh said. “No one wants you!”

Beneath the stinging pain, through the waves of half-swallowed heat that made my eyes tear, I saw a grin break out on Jenny Chong’s face.

After dinner, when all the ladies had helped Poh-Poh clear the dishes away, the women persuaded Mrs. Chong to let Jenny out of the parlour.

“She only a child,” Mrs. Leong said. “She learn her lesson, yes, yes.”

“Too much discipline,” Poh-Poh said, “can spoil the lesson.”

“And not enough discipline,” Mrs. Chong sniffed into her flowery hanky, “spoils the child.”

Poh-Poh and Mrs. Wong stared at Mrs. Chong until she relented. She got up, knuckled Jenny, and sent her smarting out of the parlour.

“You go help Kiam-Kim clean up,” she commanded, and pushed her dead girl in the direction of the kitchen.

Poh-Poh suggested that Jenny help me rinse the dishes to be washed later. In the kitchen, she quietly offered some soup to Jenny, but Mrs. Chong stood guard at the doorway.

“Let her starve,” she said. “Let this mo yung girl earn her keep like we did in Old China. Who gave us good soup?”

“Every child spoiled here,” Mrs. Pan Wong said. “My two grandsons always they beg for candy and Coca-Cola! They die soon, poisoned!”

“You show Jen-Jen what to do,” Grandmother said to me.

“A fine, fine First Grandson, your Kiam-Kim,” Mrs. Chong said. “Oh, why am I cursed with such a daughter!” She pushed up her silk sleeves and went back to the mahjong table, all set up for another round.

Grandmother shut the kitchen door behind her and left the two of us by ourselves.

Jenny stuck her tongue out, then turned to the platters of leftovers. She picked up some chicken and vegetables with her fingers. Through the door, I could hear the loud clicking of the mahjong tiles, the muffled chattering of satisfied voices rising with pleasure and complaint.

“What job do you want?” I said. “Rinsing or stacking?”

“Shut your mouth,” she mumbled. She picked up a pair of chopsticks and started chewing on a piece of chicken, then she dashed in some rice. A grain of rice stuck to her chin; she ignored it. She tilted the soup bowl to scoop up what was left. Piles of dirty bowls and plates sat on the galvanized wash counter.

“I’ll get the sink rack ready,” I said.

I always liked doing this orderly chore. I could see what was done and what was not done. I didn’t have to wait for Jenny Chong.

After Baby Liang’s arrival, rinsing the dishes was one of the jobs that Poh-Poh and Stepmother insisted I do. Only the dishes, though, not the knives or the pots and pans. I was five then and used to stand on a wooden stool to reach counter height, doing very little but passing along plates and utensils. It was like a game. I sang songs I learned from the Chinese United Church kindergarten and rattled the plates like cymbals. But now I was older, and I stood on a sturdy wooden crate to do the job.

“So,” Jenny said to me in a stuffy voice, “start.”

I decided not to. She was tall for a girl, but no taller than I was. I went to the back porch and got another crate.

“What’s that for?”

“You,” I said. “You rinse. I stack.” Rinsing was really more fun, and so I thought she might prefer it.

She sneered. “Put this box on top of yours,” she said, “and you’ll maybe reach the counter.”

I ignored her. She paid no attention. She stepped up on the box, brushing back her hair. She had unbraided half of one pigtail and must have been playing with it all that time in the parlour jail. It was messy. Her pinned flower looked wilted up close, but now I could see it was only scruffy pink tissue paper. She tried to turn on the brass tap, but there was a trick to turning it.

“Let me,” I said, and stood on tiptoe on the edge of her box and reached over to the tap. The water started to trickle out. I turned the tap a little more. I would let her decide how much water she wanted.

The sneer never left Jenny Chong’s face.

“So,” she said, “why are you doing this sissy job?”

“This a man’s job in all the Chinatown restaurants.”

“This”—she waved her arms—“a restaurant?”

Stepmother said I was not to fight with girls, even if they teased. Even if they started it. And even if they deserved a sock in the mouth.

“My sweet mother says you do just about everything”—Jenny Chong held her nose in the air and shut her eyes like a snob—“just perfectly.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m not a mo yung girl like you. I’m tough.”

“Tough?” She stepped back, looked at the stove, at the steam rising from the stock pot. “Bet you don’t dare stick your hand into that.”

“Put on an apron,” I said. “There. On the hanger.”

She hopped off the box. “You put yours on,” she said. “You think you’re so smart.”

She threw a half apron at me and took the full apron for herself. She stared into the sink at the dirty pots and pans stuck with rice and food, the upside-down greasy wok lying on top. I could see she didn’t want to go near them.

“We don’t have to do anything with those,” I said. “Just rinse these dishes for Poh-Poh to wash later.”

“Shut your mouth,” she said.

With my bare warrior hands, I could pick up Jenny Chong, spin her in the air like nothing, and toss her out of the kitchen.

Poh-Poh’s voice startled me.

“How come I don’t hear the tap running?”

Mrs. Chong shouted out from the dining room, “Get busy, mo yung! I send you away. Send you away soon!”

Being sent away did not seem to scare Jenny. Her eyes boiled with anger. She grabbed the brass tap and twist-turned it violently.

I should have known to step back, but it happened so fast. A watery burst hit the upturned bottom of the wok and curved up in a sudden arc. A wave splashed full in my face. Eyes blurry with water, I pushed Jenny off her crate and blindly turned the tap.

I gasped. I was soaked, from shirt to pants. Jenny Chong, apron thrown over her head, could not stop laughing. Too loudly.

“What’s that dead girl doing!” Mrs. Chong shouted, and we could hear her chair screech back.

Jenny’s hands went to her eyes, and her face contorted with fright. We both held our breath.

Through the partly open door, we heard Mrs. Leong saying, “Don’t be so upset.” We heard someone get up, holding back Jenny’s mother.

“They’re only children,” Mrs. Wong said. “Children play.”

For a second, I wasn’t sure what to do.

“It’s me!” I called. “I made a funny joke!”

“A miracle,” I heard Poh-Poh say. “My grandson is clever enough to tell a joke.”

Mrs. Leong chortled. “Oh, they get along good, very good, those two children.”

Mrs. Wong laughed. But Jenny’s mother kept muttering. “Send her to strict Catholic school! Useless dead girl!”

Her chair scraped again as she sat down.

The mahjong game continued, tiles clicking and crashing. Jenny sighed with relief. My quick thinking had saved her skin. She caught me looking at her and quickly made a little cough, covered her mouth, then reached down and roughly rinsed off another plate.

“Big hairy deal,” she said, and shoved the plate at me.

I decided to say something that would really catch her off guard. The wood stove crackled. “I’m getting,” I half whispered, “a new brother.”

She looked around, as if someone might overhear us, and whispered back to me, “It’s a secret, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a big, big secret.”

She smiled for the first time. “You mo yung say doi.” Her lowered voice made each word sound triumphant, her thin, bloodless lips curled into a sneer. “You useless dead boy,” she said. “You shouldn’t have told me.”

The Kitchen God glared.

The Kitchen God must have laughed at Jenny Chong’s thinking she had tricked me into giving away the family secret and that I would be punished. The joke was on her. Nothing happened.

Within a week of the papers being signed, every one of the mahjong ladies knew all the details. Those agreement papers had been signed in Victoria, but my Second Brother was coming from Kamloops, far away in the Interior. I marvelled at how the papers and the boy were miles apart. I remembered that the immigration papers that brought Stepmother over were a whole ocean apart to begin with.

Stepmother said that we could not go to the train station to get Second Brother. A tong official would be with him on the train. With another mouth to feed, Stepmother told Father that they could not afford to stop working. The money mattered more than ever now. Poh-Poh and Third Uncle agreed. He had to work that afternoon, too.

“I pick him up at the station,” the Old One said.

“I’ll go, too!”

“No,” Father said. “Too much confusion for your new brother. Poh-Poh will go in a taxi. She knows the tong elder who will be with the boy.”

“You be patient,” Poh-Poh said to me. “I bring him home.”

Stepmother took me aside. “You forget something?”

“What?”

“You fix up your room for him. Move your bed over. We discussed this.”

In protest, I pushed my hands down to my side.

“That be your duty,” said Father.

Third Uncle tapped his pipe. “Don’t you want to be Number One Boss, Kiam-Kim?”

They all looked at me across the dining-room table. Beneath the tablecloth, I pushed my fingers out like a boxer in training.

“Yes,” I said, and tightly clenched my fists. Ready for anything.