HAINAN DAO BOOK I
CHAPTER 02
Wedging myself through the front door and the people crammed just inside it, I oozed my way into the packed Chinese restaurant. This was Abby’s favourite spot. She loved coming here, mainly because of its roast duck. I could smell it now, the raunchy scent hanging in the air like sweaty chain mail fresh from battle. The restaurant itself was a little on the old side, and didn’t even have the luxury of air conditioning. It was up to the ventilation fan trapped in the window over by the far side of the room, to keep the smoke alarms from going off all at once.
Stretching up onto the tips of my toes, I tried to see over the heads of the men and women in front of me. The place was wall-to-wall people. At the moment, about twenty of them stood waiting around me by the front door, holding onto little slips of paper with figures on them. They kept peering down and checking them whenever the headwaiter called out a number, as if the writing could have possibly changed in the meantime.
Someone already seated at a table in the far corner waved to me. I grinned at the disappointed crowd around me and began swimming my way over to it.
En route, I passed by two men who were fighting over the cheque at the next table. One of them had been the quicker and had snatched it away from the waiter. The other man was reaching for it over the heads of his children. Now the two men were standing up, as they prepared to physically fight for it.
Like a pro, I stopped, changed direction, circled around the other way and sat down.
My sister Abby turned to me. “I didn’t wait for you. I ordered.”
I smiled. “Great.” I frowned at the empty spaces around the table. “So, where’s the other one?”
Abby shrugged. “Courtney couldn’t make it.”
“What? Again?” I adjusted my chair.
“Jimmy, I think this getting together thing is going to get more and more difficult. Maybe every month is a bit much, what with Courtney’s new baby and all. You know? You’re really the only one…”
“No, no.” I shook my head. “If we stop making it a point to get together, you know what’s going to happen. The three of us are just never going to see each other anymore.” I picked up my chopsticks and began wiping them down. “Besides, Court could always bring the rest of the family. That’s what I always tell Dylan anyway, just bring whichever girl you happen to be with that night…”
“You mean you actually spoke to him?”
“No, I meant on the machine.”
Abby shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know why you bother, Jimmy. You know I wouldn’t. The man didn’t even go to his own father’s funeral, what makes you think…?”
“Now, now. He’s our brother. You need to give him the benefit of the doubt. He probably had something…phenomenally important so he couldn’t make it.”
“‘Phenomenally’?” She waved her hand. “I’m sorry, but anything short of…of…Pearl Harbour is not going to cut it for me…”
I laughed. “Yes, but…”
The waiter began to load food onto our table.
As usual, even though there were only the two of us that night, I saw that Abby had still gone ahead and ordered the house special meal for four, the one that two starving hyenas together could not have finished. And the bubbling cauldron that stood in the centre of it all, the main attraction according to my sister, was of course, the soup.
“Please, Jimmy, don’t tell me you’re not having any.” Abby began to ladle the heavy, dark liquid into my bowl. “This is good soup. It is…”
“That’s all right, Abby. I know what it is.” I didn’t.
Need I say it? I never came to these gatherings for the food.
She filled my bowl to the rim with the suspicious mixture. I gazed deep into it, already feeling the phlegm building up in the back of my throat. The debris swirled around inside, turning in circles like leaves caught in a dust devil on a windy day. I watched and waited for it to settle.
Soup is a big deal for the Chinese people and for whatever reason, much more so for Abby. And I’m not talking about chicken noodle or the beef gumbo variety. No, sir. I’m talking about bad-ass, major league kind of soup, like oxtail soup, the kind with the ox still attached on the one end, screaming. Or maybe pig bone soup, with big hunks of skeletal pork remains sunk to the bottom of a stained metal pot, with bits of Geizhi, ginger root and chopped abalone thrown in for good measure. Then you would turn up the heat and cook it for the better part of a day. You’d get up before the sun to start your preparations, wiping your brow with the back of your arm when the chopping got too gruelling. By the end of the day, when everything that you’d thrown in there had pretty much melted into a uniform sludge, you would know that it was time to drink it. You would usually leave the sludge alone, since most of its nutrients and usefulness would be gone by then. You would not scoop it out of there with a shovel and slop it down on a plate to eat it, unless of course, your sister was feeling especially cruel that day.
Having been raised over here in Canada, I didn’t quite have the same feeling for soup that my sister did. I happened to feel that my basic North American diet was more than nutritious enough. In fact, that’s probably why most Canadians and Americans are obese. We’ve all been over-nourished.
Neither the Chinese soup phenomenon nor our obsession with eating is as weird as it sounds, though. I’ve been told since my non-comprehending days of early childhood, that these traditions only speak of the incredible sadness of our people as a nation. Our present day generation, I was told, was the only one that had not yet seen war. Every other generation has had to go through one of its own. Making the most of every meal, by reflex, was simply a genetic memory.
Abby picked up a morsel from the black mushroom dish and placed it in my bowl.
“You know who really loved this?” she asked.
“Hey, I think I know that one already.”
Abby frowned at me. “What?”
I rolled my eyes. “What?”
Abby shook her head. “Jimmy, that’s one thing about you I’ve never been able to figure out. You’re always hounding me about my health, and you would never hear a bad word about Dylan, but whenever it’s about Dad…!” She put down her chopsticks.
“Abby, please.” I took a glance around to see if people were watching us.
“You know, you can say what you want about him, but he was also a good man in many ways. If you could only see him differently…”
“I know.” I sipped my tea.
Sighing, Abby placed a hand on my shoulder. “Furen…”
My sister always used my Chinese name when she felt a lecture coming on.
She shook her head. “There’s no reason for you to be bitter. You should be appreciative of everything that he gave you.”
I glanced over to the window and saw two flies landing onto the barbequed pork hanging on their hooks. I turned back to her and smiled. “Abby, please. I know this already. Didn’t I just say that?”
My sister frowned. She returned to her soup and began to stir it. “Furen, there are many ways he could have done worse. Many fathers these days don’t even live up to their duties and provide for their families. If nothing else, with our father, family always came first.”
I cleared my throat. “Families stay together.” I stared down at my chopsticks.
Abby continued her stirring. “Then they’d starve together.”
I shook my head without looking up. “No they wouldn’t. Not if there were only the five of them and three of them were little children. Children don’t eat much.”
She put down her spoon. She shook her head. “You don’t understand…”
I lifted my head and looked at her squarely. “Can we not talk about Dad, please?”
“…he only wanted to give us the very best and he had nothing. Nothing, Furen! The only valuable he had when he left the Island was the…”
“Ring on his finger,” I finished for her. “I know. I know the story quite well.”
“He only wanted to keep you from going through what he went through in Hainan. It was difficult there. It was difficult for all of us.”
I nodded my head.
To his credit, I had to admit that it was true. Both of my parents had been born and raised on Hainan Island. Abigail was born there too. They all went through the War together, and then the coming of Communism. Everything they had was taken away. My parents had stayed there until Abby was about four or five, I think. She was now in her late forties. She was older than me by a good twenty years, which made her old enough to be my mother. Or so she kept telling me.
I insisted, on threat of leaving, so Abby had to drop the subject, rack her brain and try to find something else to argue about.
“So, are you still wandering the streets?” Abby wiped her mouth and then took a sip of tea.
I rolled my eyes. I sighed.
“You know?” Smiling, she edged in closer. “You could always…”
“I knew you were going to bring it up. Why do you always have to…?”
“Yes, but…”
“I’m not going to do it. I told you that already.”
“Why not? All your professors loved you. You said so yourself.”
I shook my head. “I’m not. I’m just not going to do it.”
She picked up the teapot and poured some tea into my cup. “He always wanted you to be a specialist…”
“I know…”
“And he’s right, you know? I just know you’d love it, and you could help so many people…”
“You don’t have to be a specialist to help people.”
“Yes, but a specialist…”
“Don’t get me started on specialists…!”
Abby clamped her mouth shut. She shrugged and tried to smile at me.
Last year, at about this time, Abby’s joints had been flaring up on her again like pressure cookers, so I had hunted around, pulled in a few favours and got her an appointment with an old professor of mine. The man was and still is one of the best Rheumatologists in the city if not the whole country. After confirming the diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis, he recommended immediate aggressive treatment with an experimental agent that was still going through clinical trials. When he told me the plan, I was grateful to find that he was willing to go this extra mile for Abby. I had read about this new medicine. It was making all the headlines with its short-term success rates so far, and was being heralded as the most important breakthrough in Rheumatology over anything else in the last ten years.
I had thanked him profusely and then went over this new plan with my sister, telling her that this was probably going to be the best treatment for her available under the circumstances. I told her that it was the latest thing in RA, according to all the recent journal articles that I had read, and when I finished talking, I had thought she was going to be ecstatic.
She wasn’t.
She didn’t want anything to do with it. She said it was a cancer drug. It was going to make her vomit and have diarrhoea and lose her hair and for what? She didn’t have cancer. Besides, she said, it was just a family disease anyway, and a lot of the people back home had it too. And it was going to settle down by itself again, just like it always did before, so give it time.
I was so angry with her I didn’t talk to her for weeks. Yes, her condition did in fact settle down again but that wasn’t even the point. I was still angry. At first, she thought I was upset because she had made me look foolish in front of my old professor. When I found out about that, I got even more upset and threatened to drag her down for treatment by force next time.
As a rule, we don’t talk about specialists much anymore.
***
“So, how’s Judy?”
Oh, God.
“You are still seeing her, aren’t you?” asked Abby.
Heavens to Betsy! Was it BYOT night tonight? (Bring Your Own Thumbscrews)
“Or have you broken up?”
Mercy me, and here I’d forgotten all about it! “Yes. Yes, we have.”
“Well…” She frowned. “…what about Amy?”
“Nope.”
“Wendy?”
I shook my head.
“Mei-ling?” Abby smiled and sat up. “Now don’t tell me that you don’t even see Mei-ling anymore.”
I spun around. “Which reminds me. Didn’t I tell you not to set me up anymore…?”
“Well, it’s not like you’re doing very well on your own, now is it?”
“But you have no idea…”
“I always bring you the nicest girls…”
“Yeah, like Mei-ling?”
“Yes, like Mei-ling!”
I rolled my eyes.
“So, what’s wrong with Mei-ling?”
“I…”
“There’s nothing wrong with that girl.”
“But…”
“You tell me one thing wrong with Mei-ling and I’ll…”
“She worships Satan.”
Abby stopped talking.
I stared straight into her nose. And her open mouth. “She’s a Satan worshipper.”
“She does not…!”
“She does too…”
Abby laughed. “You’re making that up.”
“…every weekend when she’s not working.”
“She does not.” Abby slapped me lightly on the shoulder.
I shrugged. “Okay. She does not.” I went back to eating. “But with all that incense she’s burning to dead people all the time, she might as well be.”
“Is that right?” Abby nodded to herself. “So, that’s what that smell was…!”
“It was driving me nuts.”
Abby waved her hand, dismissing the idea. “Well, I’m sure she was only trying to show respect for her ancestors. You could probably learn a lot about that.”
“It was starting to make me squirrelly. There was always something burning in the house. She even wanted to set up a spot right there on the mantelpiece above my fireplace.”
“Yes, but…”
“Now, come on, Abby. We’re Christians! We’re Baptists, for crying out loud. We don’t do that.”
Abby stared down at her food. She shrugged. “Well, I probably should have known anyway. There’s no pleasing you.”
“That’s not true.”
“And I don’t know why you’re so picky, anyway.”
“I am not picky.”
“You know what your problem is? You’re just expecting way too much out of this type of thing.”
“Now, Abby…”
“So, what is the big deal? People get married everyday. It’s really not that complicated! You know what it is? It’s all those movies and that other crap on TV that you used to watch all the time when you were a kid—all those silly romantic ideas, with sunsets and flowers and all that other nonsense…”
Groaning, I shook my head.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people nowadays. It wasn’t so difficult in my time.”
Yeah, right. Her time was more like twenty years ago, which might as well have been last century.
“What are you looking for anyway?” Abby asked. “A super-genius? A perfect body? I’ll tell you what you need. You just need someone who knows how to cook good healthy food…and it wouldn’t even have to be Chinese neither! As long as she makes some decent soup every once in a while…” She picked up her spoon and drank some more of her broth.
Sure. Chinese soup. I’ll have to remember to put that on the application form.
Maybe that was the problem. I wasn’t really interested in someone who could make me a good Chinese dinner. Sometimes I even wondered if I really wanted to marry someone Chinese at all, though I had valued my own neck enough, not to have ever mentioned anything about it in public. I have gone out with plenty of Chinese women in my time. I felt I knew the type. Spoiled, manipulative, always expecting for you to pay her way through everything. At least that was the stereotypical Hong Kong high-class variety. I’ve also had a chance to try out the Caucasian kind too. Dumb, emotionally labile, too independent, uncaring of family values. And then there were the CBC’s. Canadian Born Chinese women. They tended to ride the problems somewhere in between. As a group, men and women both, the CBC’s were seen by most as misfits, people stuck halfway between cultures, belonging to neither. A group of people that had no identity and didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.
Some would even have labelled me as one of them. Naturally, I had never even considered that possibility. The idea was crazy! After all, I was still cognizant of Chinese culture. I had a dab of knowledge with regard to Chinese history, and I spoke fluent Cantonese. At least I thought I did.
Sometimes, I would look at Caucasian women, and I would find myself attracted to the way they looked and behaved. They were so much more open and to the point. There was so much less subtlety to figure out. I longed for the easiness in the relationship.
And then I would gaze into the mirror and see a Chinese face staring back at me, and I would feel that I could never deny my roots, my heritage. Who was I to ignore who I was? Where I had come from? How could I share my life with someone who could never truly understand so significant a part of me? It seemed so minor sometimes, but who would I have gone to see a Chinese movie with? She wouldn’t have known enough to laugh in the right places. She couldn’t have gone to enjoy a good meal of marinated pig’s feet with me after the show. Would my life have been as meaningful if I were to be denied all of that?
I wanted someone Chinese. I wanted someone non-Chinese. I wanted someone…more than Chinese.
Sometimes…well, let’s face it. Sometimes, I didn’t know what I wanted.
***
“…and then back on Hainan there was our next door neighbour, Mrs. Wang,” my sister was saying, “and she could make her pork chops so tender, you’d be chewing on the bone and wouldn’t even know it.” She bent down to her tea cup.
Suddenly remembering, I frowned as I turned to her. “How come we never went back to Hainan?”
Abby spat out her tea.
I grabbed a napkin and helped her to wipe herself off. The people around us stared at us for a second before going back to their own noisy conversations.
“You all right?”
My sister waved me off, reassuring me. “It’s okay. It was just the duck…”
I had to smile in spite of myself. “So, uh…” I waited to make sure she wasn’t going to take another sip. “…why was that, anyway? I mean, we went back to Hong Kong all the time, but Dad never took us back to the Island. Not even once.”
Abby frowned. She wiped off her mouth as she finally recovered. “Oh…what ever for? Why would he do that? There’s nothing to see there. It wasn’t worth your while. It’s always hot, humid. Not nearly civilized enough…”
“But isn’t that all changed now? It’s more developed. It’s more touristy now, right?”
“I…suppose.”
“They say it’s just like Hawaii.”
“Then why don’t you go to Hawaii?”
I sipped my tea. “Is there still that well in the middle of the village?”
“Well? What well? I don’t remember any well.”
“Oh, of course you do! I remember you telling me one time. The one you fell into as a kid.”
“Is that right?”
“When your doll fell into it, you tried to go down after it and then you fell too? You never did get the doll back, you said.”
Abby sighed. She blinked a few times. Smiling, she nodded. “It had the shiniest, blackest eyes…”
“So it’s probably still there. The well, I mean.”
Abby looked down as she brushed away a speck of something from her blouse. “So, why are you asking about that, all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know. I thought I might go back for a visit.”
“Oh, you don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” She frowned. “…because you don’t want to, that’s all. And why the sudden interest, anyway? You had never wanted to go back before.”
“Well, I want to now.”
“But…”
“Why does that surprise you so much? I’m a grown man now. My education is all finished. Maybe it’s just about time that I wanted to find out a little more about myself, my family, don’t you think? After all, I’m not a little boy anymore. I think I want to know more about my roots, where I came from…and all of that. That’s not so unusual, is it?”
Abby stared into her rice bowl.
“Besides, I don’t think I’ve…I’ve ever laid eyes on that ocean before…or ever seen that part of the sky.” Huh. Why did I say that? I frowned. That phrase. Where have I heard that phrase before?
“Abby?”
She didn’t hear me.
I turned toward my sister. She wasn’t even looking my way. For some reason, her eyes were glued to the bowl in front of her, and the half finished glob of rice cooling down in the middle of it. She was toying with it with her chopsticks in one hand, as she lifted up her other one to brush a lock of grey hair from her face. I frowned. I remembered this face. This was the face she used to wear whenever she had to help me clean up my scraped knee. And all those other times, when she had to figure out what the thermometer was reading after she had taken it out of my mouth because she thought I was getting sick.
I touched her on the arm. “Abby?”
She spun around to face me, startled by my voice. She let out a sigh, and then she eased in closer to me. Reaching out her hand, she laid it on top of mine. “Are you…are you sure?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Sure? About what? Going back to Hainan?”
She sighed.
“So what’s the big deal anyway?”
She wiped something out of her eye. “I’m just worried about you…”
“Worried?”
“…well, maybe you’re right about that after all. It is about time, I guess.” She reached up and touched my face. She smiled. “You are a big boy now…!”
“Yes…”
“It’s just that… surprises tend to…” She looked down for a second. “…upset you.”
I laughed. “That’s not true!”
“You don’t deal with situations like that very well. You never have.”
I smiled and shook my head.
She sighed. “I’ll tell you what. Give me a few weeks to take care of a few things first, and then we can book a flight for next month…”
Next month? “No, that’s all right, Abby, I was planning to go back by myself anyway.”
“By yourself?” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Give it some time, Jimmy. If nothing else, wait until after the summer’s over. If you go now you’re going to be burned to a crisp.”
“No, Abby, I don’t think I’ll wait. I’ll be all right.”
“No, you won’t. You need me! You’ve never been back before. You don’t even speak Hainan. Did you think you could just drop off from the plane and go out walking about on the Island?”
“I could join a tour…”
“A tour…!”
“It wouldn’t be so bad. And even if I didn’t, I could still make my way around. My Putonghwa is passable.”
“No, no, no! This is entirely unacceptable.” As the conversation wore on, the swinging of my sister’s head from side to side got so bad, I thought I was going to hear a click any minute and it would go popping off her neck. “If you’ll only learn a little patience and maybe actually listen to me every once in a while…”
“Well, it’s too late.” I crossed my arms. “I already have a flight booked. I’m leaving next week.”
That stopped the swinging.
Now, you must understand something. I didn’t make it a habit of lying to my sister. In fact, I made it a point not to. She was my sister, after all. Which made it all the more a jolt to the system, especially to mine, as once the words had pushed past my lips, there seemed no way of taking them back.
“Oh,” she said, as if I had just remarked on the weather.
Sighing, she began rummaging through her purse. “I still think you’re making a big mistake.”
“No…”
“But who am I to convince you? That big bull neck of yours. Just like your father’s.”
I frowned at her.
“And don’t glare at me like that.” How did she know? She wasn’t even looking at me. Her head was still buried in her bag. “I know you don’t like it when I say that, but it’s true…”
“Oh, Abby…”
“…I could never get your father to change his mind about anything, and it’s always been the same with you.” She whipped out her address book and began copying something from it onto a napkin. “Now, is it so unreasonable to find that you’re like your own father? Who else would you be like?”
“But…”
“I’m like him in certain ways too, and I fully admit it. I have nothing to be ashamed of. And you shouldn’t be ashamed either.” She handed me the napkin that she had been writing on.
I frowned at the offering. “What is this?”
“Take it.”
I stared at the paper in her outstretched hand.
“Please, take it! What? You think it might be laced with poison or something?”
I took it. I squinted at the writing. There was a name and a phone number on it. “Who is this?”
“If you’re not going to wait for me, will you at least listen to me? This one time?”
I sighed.
“When you get to Hong Kong, and before you head out to Hainan, give him a call.” She pointed to the napkin. “He will help you.”
The headwaiter called out another number. No answer. The party must have left.