China Dog (13 page)

ONCE IN LONG-AGO CHINA
, there lived a young farmer who, although he worked hard, barely made enough to eat. When it came time for him to marry, no family wanted their daughter to marry someone with such meagre prospects
.

Every day, on his way home he walked past a wood. One evening, as he was returning home after tending the fields, he saw, standing next to a tree, someone he had never seen before. It was a young woman and she was weeping. When the farmer learned that she was lost, he agreed to take her to the crossroads, a short distance from her home. When they got there, the farmer watched as she moved away from him, her slim figure growing dimmer and dimmer in the twilight until she disappeared
.

For the next few days, the young farmer could think of no one else. At times, when he looked up from his work in the fields, he thought he saw her, a distant ephemeral presence. Each evening as he walked past the woods, he looked to see if perhaps she was between the trees
.

One night, after the farmer had finished his chores and was preparing for bed, he heard a knock. When he opened the door, he saw standing before him the young woman who had been lost
.

“If you will have me, I will be your wife. I bring with me no dowry, but I promise that while we are together we will never go hungry.” The young woman spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. Once again the farmer marvelled at her beauty. She was slender and graceful, with a complexion so pale that it was almost translucent
.

“Yes,” said the farmer. “Yes, I wish to have you for my wife.”

“But there is one condition,” said the young woman. “Promise me that once we are married, at night when we are in bed and asleep, you will never light a candle and gaze upon my form.”

Although this request seemed strange, it also seemed a simple request to fulfil. The farmer agreed
.

The farmer and his young wife lived happily together for several years. Just as the young woman had promised, the farmer began to enjoy bountiful harvests. He never felt hungry again. Finally, he even had enough vegetables left over to take to market
.

When the farmer arrived at the market, however, the villagers greeted him with dismay. There was concern in their voices. “How thin and pale you look!” The farmer was puzzled. He had never felt better. His stomach was always full and his fields were overflowing. When he returned home and told his wife, she said, “Pay them no attention. They are just jealous of your good fortune. You have enough food here. There is no need for you to return to the village.”

But the words of the villagers echoed in his head, and twice the farmer returned to the market. And each time the villagers remarked on his appearance and asked if his wife fed him enough?

Finally, he decided to visit a pond in a neighbouring farmer’s field. He knelt down at the edge of the pond and peered at his reflection. He
barely recognized himself. His skin was grey, his cheeks hollowed, his eyes sunken, and his shoulders bony. Yet when he looked at his arms in the sunlight, they were tanned and well muscled. When his fingers touched his cheeks, they felt full and firm. But when he once again examined his reflection in the water, he was shocked by what he saw
.

When he returned home that evening, he related what he saw to his wife. Her eyes were alarmed, but she spoke reassuringly. “Your eyes must have been playing a trick on you. Why, you yourself said that you had never felt better.” And she begged him, “Do not go back to the village. Stay here with me where you are happy.”

But the farmer said nothing. He grew silent and suspicious. He remembered what his wife had told him – that at night when she was asleep, he was never to light a candle and look upon her form
.

That night he decided that he could stand it no longer. He was determined to see his wife’s true form. He pretended to fall asleep beside her. When her breathing became slow and deep, the farmer rose from his bed. He reached for the candle and lit it
.

When he saw the form before him, he fainted and dropped the flame. The bed caught fire and the flames spread to the rest of the cottage. In the morning, when the villagers came, they found a smouldering shell of a home. Inside, on the remnants of a bed, they found a badly charred body. Beside it was a skeleton. Long black hair was attached to the skull. The bones glistened white in the sunlight
.

My mother told me this story many times during my childhood. I was always repelled and lured at the same time, like
peering into a deep dark well, wanting to see clear to the bottom, yet fearful of falling in.

We were inside Timothy Eaton United Church for Jean Woo’s wedding. There must have been at least a thousand people, all there to see Jean take her nuptial vows. I stood between my parents. My father was dressed in a dark blue, light wool suit with his hands loosely clasped in front of him. His relaxed, self-contained presence was always in stark contrast to my mother. Today it seemed even more so. I looked at the shimmer of my mother’s raw silk suit. She had chosen a plum colour because it flattered her complexion. Or so the saleswoman told her.

Her hair was a pretty cloud of intense black curls, those betraying white roots having been banished the previous day by the hairdresser. My mother and I strained to see the procession as it moved slowly down the aisle.

There were six bridesmaids, a flower girl, and a ring bearer. Each girl was dressed in a matching Laura Ashley print, with a full skirt and with a large bow in the small of the back. Jean’s gown was a gentle combination of soft silk and lace. Her headdress was a single layer of fine tulle attached to a wreath of white and pink roses. The church was overflowing with flowers – expensive-looking arrangements from a North Toronto florist. Jean’s taste had come a long way from Urquhart, the small city where we both grew up.

My mother’s face was tense as she arched her back and craned her neck. I noticed an almost indiscernible twitch underneath her left eye, and her lips barely moved as she silently counted the attendants. She had not expected Jean to get married before me. She had always assumed that I would be first.

Jean and I had attended Urquhart Collegiate together. After high school, Jean went to train as a paediatric nurse at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. To my mother’s pride and dismay, I went to university and majored in English. While I was finishing my last year, Jean had already been nursing for a year, making a decent salary for a young woman in 1975. To make matters worse, I had just declared that I intended to continue my education and had no job prospect in sight.

There were two Chinese restaurants in Urquhart. Ours, and the Woo’s. There was a third, but it didn’t count. It was a family business, had no hired labour, the local greasy spoon. Our restaurant, the China Palace Café, was smaller than the Woo’s, but it was classier. It had white tablecloths and the waiters wore burgundy red jackets. My mother had imported several Chinese silk paintings from Taiwan, had them framed and hung them on the walls. My parents took turns greeting the restaurant guests and showing them to their tables. My father always wore a white shirt and tie. He fastened the cuffs with cufflinks of jade Buddhas. My mother, who maintained a slim figure even in her sixties, always wore patent leather pumps and a cheongsam. In the winter they
were sewn from a heavy silk brocade. In the summer they had short sleeves and were made of fine cotton, often with a flower print. Her prize jade pendant dangled from a heavy gold chain around her neck. When my mother showed signs of turning grey, she immediately started to dye her hair. She now possessed an ageless look, her face lightly powdered and her black eyebrows skilfully drawn in the same shape as Elizabeth Taylor’s.

The Woo’s restaurant, the Golden Gate, had a spacious dining room. At the back was a large room divider decorated with a golden dragon and phoenix, moulded in relief. Behind this was the entrance to the kitchen. The waitresses wore mustard-coloured uniforms with short white aprons – semicircles with ruffles around the edge. The lighting in the Woo’s restaurant was always bright, whereas ours was dimmed. The atmosphere in the Woo’s restaurant seemed casual and open. Ours, I suppose, was meant to be enticing. Mrs. Woo, who was round-faced and thickset, never possessed my mother’s dramatic flair in clothing. Throughout my childhood I only remember seeing her in A-line skirts and white short-sleeved blouses with Peter Pan collars. In the winter she wore a beige cardigan with pearl buttons.

The rivalry was never out in the open. After all, the two families got together at Christmas, Chinese New Year, and barbecues during the summer. But each lay hidden in ambush, ready to politely belittle the other’s success and secretly relish the other’s failure. They competed in business and – for even higher stakes – with their children. My brother David and I
against Jean and Bobby. Mrs. Woo still had twelve-year-old Helen at home, but she being so much younger didn’t count when it came to the tally of scores. Although the Woos had the edge when it came to business, my mother clearly had the upper hand when it came to the children. My brother and I were both good-looking, excellent students, Ontario scholars, winners of academic prizes. Our winning point, though, was that we both spoke perfect unaccented English. This probably had more to do with the fact that we were both born here, than with any intrinsic linguistic ability. My mother used to brag, “If you’d never met them and just spoke to them on the phone, you’d never know that either was Chinese.” On the other hand, Jean, who came to Canada at age nine, spoke English with a slight but obvious accent, forever marking her as a foreigner. She would never be able to hide behind a telephone line. And her older brother, Bobby, never even finished high school. He would have no choice but to carry on the family business. My mother and Gladys Woo often joked about me and Bobby one day getting married. Once it became apparent that I was to continue in school and would not settle for a life in the restaurant business, Gladys said to my mother, “Well, when Bobby gets married, I’ll find him a big girl. She’s going to be so tall, when she falls she makes a sound.” My mother knew that this was a thinly cloaked barb aimed at her daughter, who was barely five feet tall. But my mother apparently said nothing, recognizing the sour grapes for what they were. She knew she had the upper hand. Her daughter was moving up, soon to be high class, a member of a profession.

But now the tables were turned and Jean was getting married. To make matters worse, Jean had snared herself a doctor. Mrs. Woo could now bask in her daughter’s newly elevated status and look forward to even more grandchildren.

I had first learned about Jean getting married three months ago. I was visiting my parents in their new suburban home in Urquhart. Several years earlier, my father had sold his business for a handsome price, and now he spent his time maintaining his rental properties and gardening. I was at the kitchen table helping my mother make wontons when she suddenly said to me, “You marry someone Chinese. Only someone Chinese knows what it means to be Chinese,” as she placed a dollop of pork and shrimp filling in the middle of the wonton wrapper.

Mah, this is Canada. The people here don’t think like that
. At least that’s what I wanted to say. Instead I opted for something safe. “I’m not even thinking about marriage. When I finish my degree, I’m going to graduate school.” My eyes remained downcast as I placed a small spoonful of the minced meat in the middle of my wonton wrapper. The amount of filling had to be just right. Too much and the pouch would burst, too little and people would think you were cheap. Next I dipped my finger in the rice bowl filled with water, and then started to wet the edges of the wrapper. As I put my finger in the bowl a second time, my mother called out, “Don’t put on so much water. The pastry will get all soggy.” The edges of the wrapper
were brought together to make a triangle. The two bottom corners were brought together to form a circle, and then the top corner was pushed through the opening. The final result looked a little like the crown of an Egyptian pharaoh. My mother was always disdainful of those people who brought the four corners of the wonton square together and cinched the pastry at the top of the filling. It was a display of laziness and a lack of artistry. When I finished my little creation I carefully added it to the rows of wontons on the rectangular tray in the middle of my mother’s red arborite table. My mother smiled indulgently at me, for her wontons were perfect creations. The edges were perfectly matched, and the apex of each triangular crown pointed straight up. Next to hers, mine were by no means misshapen, if so, only slightly, but obviously “not perfect.”

Mah continued. “Jean Woo is getting married next month to a doctor. He has a practice in Urquhart. I met her mother last week at Lucky People’s grocery store when your father drove me to Toronto.”

“Oh? That’s nice. When’s the big date?”