All That Matters Read Online Free PDF Page B

shimmered. The bulging head with its sharp teeth seemed to plunge towards my neck. The Death Dragon had come for me! At my look of sudden shock, Poh-Poh yanked me aside until the two huge doors slammed shut.
    I felt no relief: the vision of an ugly, pock-faced stepmother hung stubbornly in my head.
    In 1928, when I was over five and a half—
six
in Chinese years—and could help Father put away his shoes and stand tiptoe high up on a stool to hang up his coat on the hall hook in our Keefer Street house, and even help Poh-Poh in the kitchen by using a wooden box to reach the lowest pantry shelf, the news came at last that Gai-mou was arriving from Hong Kong in three weeks on the
Empress of Asia
.
    I had been attending a kindergarten class in the United Church basement on Dunlevy and could now speak English sentences. At least, I could speak better than half the children there who spoke no English at all. Some jabbered away in such mysterious languages that even Miss Lowe’s best English could not reach them with the simplest of requests like “Sit down!” Their broad faces would turn away until she gestured at her own bum, wiggled, and then sat down. We all sat down.
    I had told our neighbours’ boy, Jack O’Connor, that my new mother was coming to stay with us. Jack was bigger than me, but I didn’t think he was as smart: he couldn’t speak a word of Chinese.
    “What’s wrong with your old mother?”
    I knew he meant my Poh-Poh.
    “I have
new
mother,” I said.
    His blue eyes said,
So what!
I didn’t know why he wasn’t impressed; he himself had only one mother to talk about.
    “You’re a big fat liar,” he said.
    I told Poh-Poh that Jack wouldn’t believe that Stepmother was coming.
    “What!”
    Poh-Poh was shocked that I had mentioned anything to our neighbours’ boy. She barely acknowledged the O’Connors’ existence, barely recognized any of the other pale-skinned outsiders, the
lo-faan
, that shared the ragged Keefer Street boundaries of our ghettoed Chinatown. To her Old China eyes, they were all the same: white barbarian ghosts with big noses and funny names like
Oh-kan-nagh
.
    The wives of the tong elders had told her the history of white brutes in 1907 yanking the braided queues of the first elders and kicking them down Hastings Street, their white hands bashing Chinese heads and tearing down the shops and laundries of Chinatown. She also knew the kindness of some white faces, of those few who tended the sick of Chinatown, but they were church people, like the China Mission House
lo-faan
, a rare breed of white foreigners who could sometimes speak perfect Cantonese. Then there were those others, so many of them in China, those white foreigners selling opium and taking away Chinese territory.
    It was a history that Poh-Poh tried to pass along to me. I listened, but still could not see anything bad inthe
lo-faan
that came my way in kindergarten. Even Poh-Poh relented and thought
lo-faan
Jack could play with me. She had accepted that children were not yet like their parents, but would soon grow up and prove their roots to be from one or another kind of tree.
    “White come from white tree,” Poh-Poh warned me. “Chinese come from Chinese tree.”
    “White belong to white tree,” Third Uncle explained. “Chinese belong Chinese.” He also told me about cherries belonging to cherry trees, and oranges to orange trees.
    Now I looked carefully at Jack’s mother and father. I decided Jack’s mother belonged to a bitter tree. Thin-lipped Mrs. O’Connor rarely smiled, but Mr. O’Connor would at least say something about the weather. If they happened to meet, both our fathers would smile and tip their hats and chat for a few moments. They must have come from the same tree.
    “Looks like rain,” Mr. O’Connor would say.
    “Yes, yes,” Father would answer. “Rain like yesterday.”
    Courtesy mattered, Father told me. After all, our neighbours were here long before we Chinese moved up this far