China Dog
ACCLAIM FOR
China Dog and Other Stories
“Sometimes you come across an author whose work is just there: all the parts fit together like a fine machine, care is lavished upon each story – and it shows. Ultimately, these stories have an impact on your life, something that each writer strives for.”
– Edmonton Journal
“Absolutely captivating.… Bates weaves a complex display of human dynamics.”
– Rice Paper
“An exemplary collection. As in Margaret Laurence’s superb collection A Bird in the House, Bates’s deceptively simple narratives expose the hopes and hardships that define her characters’ lives.”
– Globe and Mail
“Bates delivers stories you can touch and taste.”
– Florida Times-Union
“Judy Fong Bates’s debut short-story collection is absolutely irresistible.… [Bates has] a fully authoritative voice, reminiscent of Amy Tan’s.”
– Barnes & Noble
“Entertaining … [these stories] provide entry into an intricate world of Chinese traditions, curses, migrations, ghosts, and dreams.… ”
– Pacific Reader
“Bates’s spare, imagery-rich prose will transport you …”
– Bust magazine (U.S.)
BOOKS BY JUDY FONG BATES
China Dog and Other Stories (1997)
Midnight at the Dragon Café (2004)
Copyright © 1997 by Judy Fong Bates
First published in trade paperback by Sister Vision Press, 1997
First Emblem Editions publication 2005
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bates, Judy Fong, 1949-
[China dog and other tales from a Chinese laundry]
China dog and other stories / Judy Fong Bates.
Originally published: Toronto: Sister Vision, 1997, under title:
China dog and other tales from a Chinese laundry.
eBook ISBN 978-1-55199-163-4
I. Title. II. Title: China dog and other tales from a Chinese laundry.
PS8553.A827C44 2005 C813′.54 C2004-905947-5
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The author acknowledges the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
Portions of this book have previously appeared in slightly different versions in the following magazines: “My Sister’s Love,” Fireweed and This Magazine;
“The Good Luck Café,” Canadian Forum.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M5G 2E9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
For my parents
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
My Sister’s Love
The Gold Mountain Coat
Eat Bitter
Cold Food
The Lucky Wedding
The Good Luck Café
The Ghost Wife
China Dog
Acknowledgements
About the Author
My Sister’s Love
MY SISTER’S ARRIVAL in Canada had the effect of a cleaver, slicing up our lives. Three years earlier, my father had sponsored my mother and me to Canada. My mother had to leave my sister behind in Hong Kong because she was not my father’s daughter. She was only twelve years old. My mother spent the next three years becoming a Canadian citizen. She learned the names of the provinces, and their respective capitals, and the pledge of allegiance to the Union Jack. Unfortunately, none of it really sounded like English. Even at age seven, I realized that the lo fons wouldn’t understand the sounds she made.
When my mother saw my sister at the airport, she became a new person. Her tiredness fell away and there was a lightness in her body. Tears streamed down her face, yet she smiled and smiled. She stretched out her arms and ran toward her daughter. They locked each other in a tight embrace. Then my sister released herself. As she looked me up and down, her first words were, “Your nose turns up too much, sort of like a pig.” My mother smiled with embarrassment and brushed it aside. I swallowed a lump in my throat.
We spent that night in my Uncle Eddy’s house. They lived like the lo fons. Uncle Eddy operated a restaurant. He didn’t live upstairs from it. His family lived in a proper house with living and dining rooms. My Aunt Lena didn’t have to work. My mother told me that before Aunt Lena arrived, Uncle Eddy bought her a dresser for the bedroom and filled it with lingerie, body lotions, and perfumes. That evening my mother, my sister, and I slept on a pull-out couch in the living room. My mother slept in the middle, her arms entwined around my sister.
The next day we went home to Cheatley on a Gray Coach bus. My mother and my sister sat together. I sat across from them, beside a large lo fon woman. It was a long journey, and I watched as my sister fell asleep, her head gently resting on Mother’s shoulder, her lips slightly parted and letting out small puffs of air.
My father met us at the bus stop in Cheatley. It was a town of two thousand people, too small to have a real station. An unmarried brother and sister managed a candy store that also sold ice cream, magazines, comics, and bus tickets. Each carrying a piece of luggage, we began to walk the two blocks to my father’s hand laundry.
We must have made an odd-looking sight as we walked along the sidewalk. My father was a tiny man, barely five feet tall. Wrinkles were deeply engraved into his face. He tensely knitted his eyebrows so that two deep furrows formed in the middle of his forehead and extended to the bridge of his nose. He wore an oversized brown herringbone wool coat that had been left in the laundry by one of the customers, and a peaked brown wool cap. His steps were short and close together as he struggled with the weight of my sister’s brown leather suitcase, trying to keep it from dragging on the sidewalk. He remained several steps ahead of us. Even when unencumbered, my father never walked with his head up. His eyes were always fixed on the ground.
Behind him, the three of us persevered against the March wind with our heads tucked into our chests, protecting ourselves from the sprays of snow. I wrestled with my share of my sister’s bags and tried to keep pace with my mother walking in the middle. But after bumping into her several times, she suggested that I walk behind. Mother and I were dressed in old winter coats given to us by one of the ladies from the Presbyterian church. They were shapeless and hung loosely on both of us. Mine had a belt that was tightly buckled, forming a skirt with deep folds around my waist. I was expected to grow into it. My sister wore a blue wool coat, tailor-made in Hong Kong, as smart as the one worn by the doctor’s young wife. Her one free han
d clutched the lapels together to keep the wind off her chest. And the wind whipped in every direction the previously obedient strands of her freshly permed hair.
My father, my mother, and I were all small and dark. My mother was round-faced and plump, while my father and I were thin and wiry. We both had high cheekbones and skin that stretched tautly around slightly protruding jaws. My hands were like my father’s. They were large, with joints that were thickly knuckled and square at the fingertips.
Walking with us, my sister was tall, elegant, and exquisite. We were coarse, tough, and sinuous. Her face was a perfect oval with ivory skin the texture of flower petals. But it was her hands that always captured people’s attention. The palms were narrow and the long slender fingers ended in nails that glistened like water drops. When she held them together, they reminded me of tendrils on a vine, seeking and wrapping – vulnerable and treacherous.
We passed the hardware store, turned a corner and came to my father’s laundry, our home. My father set down the suitcase he was carrying and lifted the wooden latch on the panelled wooden door, then opened the heavier wooden door, the one with the glass window, and let us into the first room of the laundry. Because it was winter, we were greeted by a blast of sulphurous air from the coal burning stoves. My sister gasped. My father lifted the hinged portion of the handmade wooden counter that separated the work area from the customers. He awkwardly stepped aside as we filed past him. Silently we watched as my mother’s smile tightened and her eyes grew large with anxiety, while her older daughter surveyed and assessed.
My sister glanced at the wooden shelves, stacked with brown paper bundles of finished laundry. We walked past a wooden table, the top thickly swathed with old blankets and sheets. At the edge of the table stood an iron, and beside it, a basin of water with a bamboo whisk resting inside. She pointed to two long horizontal rollers that were held up by a wooden frame. I explained that this was an ironing press. When my father bought the laundry, it was considered a real bonus, a true labour-saving device. When it was turned on, wrinkled bedding, tablecloths, tea towels, and pillowcases were fed between the humming, rotating rollers. Like magic they piled on the shelf underneath in smooth folds like sheets of molten lava. On ironing days my father stood at these tables from early morning until late at night. At the end of the day, he rubbed Tiger Balm into his aching muscles.
My mother held open the red and yellow paisley curtain that concealed the washing room. The first thing that caught my sister’s attention was the washing machine. It stood in a drainage pan in the middle of the floor. It was a monstrous steel barrel, held up horizontally by four posts, looking like some mythical headless beast. Along one wall was a row of three wooden tubs. Attached to the one at the end was a hand-cranked mangle, used to wring out water. Inside one tub was a four-legged wooden stand with an enamel basin. Above it hung a clothesline between two nails. Dangling down were three thin hand towels and facecloths. My sister’s eyes moved slowly about the room. She swallowed as she looked at the four-burner coal stove with an oven. On the front burner was a large canning pot filled with hot water and holding a ladle. Beside the stove, on a wooden shelf covered in faded blue-and-white-checked oilcloth, was a two-burner electric hotplate. The rings were finely cracked and the electric coils were recessed inside. In the corner, standing at attention, was a tall cylindrical water heater made of galvanized iron. Connected to it was a small coal burner. Hot water flowed from the taps only on washdays, which were Mondays and Thursdays. Along the wall that led to the stairs were four straight-backed wooden chairs and a wooden table covered with the same faded, blue-checked oilcloth that was beneath the electric hotplate.
It seemed a long time before anyone spoke. Then I heard my mother’s voice.
“Irene-ah, hang up Elder Sister’s coat and take her upstairs. Show her where she’ll sleep.”
After I hung up both our coats, I led my sister past the faded wallpaper of large yellow pansies, up the wooden stairs, and past the window whose frame was stuffed with rolls of rags, keeping out the winter air. We stood on a floor covered with a piece of worn and finely cracked linoleum, patterned with brown and blue paisleys. My sister set her suitcase down beside her. I pointed to a bed behind us. “That’s where Baba sleeps.” Then I pointed to a narrow room off the main one. “You and Mah and I sleep in there.” A single bed was jammed against the end wall; at a right angle stood a bunk bed. Across from the bunk was a four-pane window. A flower-print curtain, threaded with a string, was tied to a nail in each top corner of the wooden frame. She walked over and poked her head in the doorway. “You can sleep on the bottom bunk; I sleep on the top.” My sister stood in the doorway, listening. I touched the large wooden dresser that stood opposite from my father’s bed. “This is where we keep our clothes. I use the bottom drawer. You can have the middle one. Baba and Mah use the small drawers at the top.”
“Well, if that isn’t enough room, I can keep the rest in my suitcase.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You can shove your suitcase under your bed.”
The next day when I returned home from school, I saw the photographer from the local newspaper in front of the laundry. My sister was standing beside a drift of snow and the man was taking her picture. By the time she started school two days later, her picture had appeared on the front page of the town paper.
For the few months that were left in that school year, my sister was in the grade eight class. But the following September, after her sixteenth birthday, the school placed her in grade seven. We never walked to school together. I remember often seeing her at recess, alone in a corner of the schoolyard. Our schoolyard was separated from the train tracks by a high wire-mesh fence. My sister always watched the trains whistle by as I played and laughed and talked with my friends.
While my sister was in Hong Kong, we lived on a diet of soup made from chicken bones, salted fish and pork, and dried vegetables. When she arrived, there was suddenly meat on the chicken bones, and fresh fruit on the table. My mother cooked my sister’s favourite dishes. Lily picked at the food and rejected her efforts. My mother watched in despair as her daughter’s unhappiness grew and seeped into our lives like a persistent mist. Lily longed for her friends in Hong Kong. She told me stories about her life there. With each telling our town became more dull, our home more meagre, our food more plain, our clothes more shabby. Even her new Canadian name, Lily, so evocative of her delicate beauty, and given to her by our neighbour across the road, did little to make her feel more at home.
Several months after Lily arrived, Mother decided to take us to Toronto to visit Uncle Eddy and Aunt Lena. Uncle Eddy took us for dim sum at a restaurant in Chinatown. Afterwards we shopped for groceries in the China Trading Store. The atmosphere at the store was always dusty and mysterious. The mingled, conflicting odours from the many packages of dried fish, shrimps, oysters, scallops, and mushrooms had a pungency that prickled the nostrils. The China Trading Store had glass cases along one wall. Inside were dried roots, seeds, and herbs that were carefully weighed on a hand-held scale before they were wrapped in white paper and sold. There were barrels containing “thousand-year-old” eggs, and shelves of fresh fruit. On that particular day, there was displayed a small shipment of fresh lychees. No one in our family had had lychees since coming to Canada. My sister looked at them and touched them with her long white fingers. It was then that I noticed a man staring at us from a corner of the store. He was a tall, powerfully built man. His thick black hair was greased and combed straight back. He had a strong jaw and a nose that was slightly aquiline, unusual for a Chinese. His clothes were new and fashionable, his shoes black and polished. The other men in Chinatown were shabby, and their spirits were worn by living in the Gold Mountain. This man possessed a confidence that was enigmatic, predatory. His gaze fastened on my sister, and he watched as her hands picked up the lychees, and then put them back. My sister looked up and turned to meet his eyes. Then he suddenly walked toward us and shook hands with Uncle Eddy.
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“Ah, Eddy, good to see you. How are you? How’s business?”
“Not bad, not bad. And how about you, Tom?”
“The usual. And who are these two beautiful girls?” the man asked as his gaze once again fixed upon my sister.
“Yes, these are my two nieces, Lily and Irene. This is their mother, Chung Tai Tai. I’d like you to meet Tom Leung.” The man looked us over. Uncle Eddy went on proudly. “They’re visiting the big city. Later this afternoon they’re leaving on the bus for Cheatley.”
Tom turned to my mother. “Cheatley, I’m going that way myself. I can give you a lift.”
“Oh, no. We don’t want to take you out of your way. It would be too much trouble,” protested my mother.
Tom wouldn’t hear of it, and that afternoon he made the first of many visits to our home.
In 1955, Tom Leung was forty-seven years old and a very wealthy man. He owned several restaurants in Chinatown, three houses, and a fancy car. However, he was still unmarried. Unlike other Chinese men his age, he had never returned to China to look for a wife. He had come to Canada as a young boy. A self-educated man, he moved with ease in the white man’s world. He spoke English perfectly and he read their newspapers. When he joked with the lo fons, he laughed like an equal, throwing his head back with his mouth wide open. Other Chinese always came to him when they needed someone to fill out forms, or to read and answer letters from the government. In Chinatown, this gave him special status – a sense of power. This air of confidence, along with his flashing eyes and quick laughter, were like a magnet. But along with this expansive, easy charm, there was a shark-like quality that seemed to devour people.
A week after our ride home in Tom’s car, he came to visit us. He drove up in a shiny sea green car with gleaming chrome bumpers and a wrap-around windshield. What impressed me most were his sunglasses. They were mirrors that rested on the bridge of his nose and reflected his world around him. What impressed my mother, though, were his gifts of food. He brought a barbecued duck, oranges, assorted dim sum from Chinatown, and lychees for Lily.