China Dog (15 page)

WEI JOON CHONG SAT
down at the kitchen table for lunch and saw before him in a chipped bowl a lifeless lump of shiny rice, sticking together like a mass of mushy, white, glutinous dough. His wife had purposely committed this act of treachery to stir up his loathing. He knew it. That Lai Yung dared to insult him so soon after his eightieth birthday was more than he could stand. Lai Yung knew that when properly cooked, each rice kernel should be soft, yet stand out separately from all the others. His heart pounding, his head throbbing, Wei Joon looked up and saw Lai Yung’s stare, pretending innocence, secretly gloating.

“You bitch! Look at this rice. Overcooked, all stuck together. Fit for a pig!”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” said his wife. She picked up her bowl and started to shovel the rice in her mouth with her chopsticks. “Everything’s fine. You’re imagining things, old man.”

Wei Joon stood up shaking. He was dripping with perspiration, his undershirt clinging to his body. The Chinese radio station was on. He could hear the news announcer in the background. Something about dragon boats, races, the Toronto Islands. Each word hung in the air, alone, without meaning. The drone of the voice was irritating. He wanted it off, but where was the radio? His mind was separating from his body. Where were his hands? His elbows? He looked down and saw a soup bowl lying on its side, the broth spilling out over the faded, mottled beige arborite, and then dripping over the chipped chrome edge of the table. Was that his soup? Had he done that?

“You clumsy old man! Look what you’ve done. As if I don’t have enough to do!” Lai Yung grabbed the dishcloth from the sink.

Wei Joon pushed the wooden chair from behind him and rushed down the wooden stairs into the basement. Lai Yung shouted after him. He didn’t understand any of her words. Everything was a jumble of angry sounds, sharp jabs piercing his body.

Lai Yung picked up her bowl again and started to carefully eat her rice. The silence grew, filling the room like smoke from a burning pot. Suddenly she dropped her bowl and chopsticks onto the table and rushed down the basement stairs. She moved with such speed that she might have smashed into the wall had her momentum not been interrupted by a pair of legs dangling in the air.

“
Eiiiiyah!
Oh my God, my God …” Lai Yung looked up and saw Wei Joon hanging like a puppet with a rope around his neck. The head was slack and slumped at a strange angle on his chest. Her hand shot up to her mouth when she saw the protruding eyes and the wide gaping mouth. But her heart lurched, cramped, when she realized the lips had frozen with just a hint of a smile, triumphantly mocking her.

Then she saw the chair, knocked over, lying on its side. Lai Yung’s heart pounded heavily and her breath grew short as she righted the chair. She was trembling uncontrollably. She climbed up and wrapped her arms around his scrawny thighs, attempting to lift the body, slacken the rope from which he hanged. He was still warm.

Dan-Mu sat between his wife, Lee Ming, and his stepmother, Lai Yung.

They were sitting on the first pew inside the chapel at the Wen Ing Funeral Home on College Street in Toronto. His stepmother was weeping. Lee Ming sat with her hands gripped in a tight, tense knot. Her head was bowed, but her eyes were darting furtively about. Wei Joon was laid out in the casket at the head of the chapel. Even in death he looked uncomfortable. The suit was slightly too large. He looked out of place in the luxury of a polished mahogany coffin, his body surrounded and cushioned by soft folds of shiny satin. In front of the open casket was an altar with an offering to the
ancestors. As people came into the chapel, they stood before the altar, lit sticks of incense, and placed them in the brass urn next to a plate of cooked white chicken. They walked to the casket and bowed three times before Wei Joon. Then the mourners turned and exchanged awkward expressions of sympathy with the grieving family members before quickly returning to their pews.

Everywhere Lee Ming looked, she saw vases and wreaths of flowers – gladioli, carnations, chrysanthemums, and roses, mostly white, some in varying shades of yellow. It was an unexpected display. The old man was not popular in the community. He was known for his ill-temper. She heard the minister’s words in the background. Her mind drifted in and out, catching phrases of his service. Her father-in-law had endured an immigrant’s life, a life of hard work and sacrifice. To him, his children owed the life they now enjoyed. But no one was listening. They were all immersed in their own thoughts, the same thoughts. Why did he do this? An act of anger? Revenge? Spite? Was this his final statement?

Lee Ming looked around at the funeral gathering. The pew behind her and the one beside were filled with immediate family members. They were a collection of half- and step-siblings, having arrived in Canada at different times. Usually the Chongs bore no resemblance to each other. But today grief had painted them with the same dark brush. Even the family bohemian had abandoned her leather sandals and full floral Indian skirts for nylon stockings, black pumps, and a plain black dress. Their heads were bowed, eyes cast down,
shoulders hunched. Eye contact was fleeting. Everyone was wrapped in sombre cloth. Shame connected them more powerfully than blood.

There had been rumours about Lee Ming’s father-in-law and his family. She sat twisting her hands, trying to remember. It was something that had happened a long time ago, something about someone back in China hanging himself. Was this family that she had married into really cursed by suicide? In the background she heard the monotone of the minister’s words, but in her mind the whispers from the congregation thundered. The two women in the pew behind were whispering. Lee Ming turned and glared at them. One of the women looked up and caught Ming’s stare. The woman averted her eyes and stopped talking.

When Ming was twelve years old and living in China, an old woman dressed in rags wandered into her village. Ming was laughing and gossiping with a friend outside the compound wall that enclosed their homes. Her friend suddenly tapped Ming on the shoulder. Ming turned and saw the old woman walking directly towards her, like a menacing storm-cloud of grey rags flapping in the air. She stopped in front of Ming and stared at her. Ming stood frozen, unable to move, barely able to breathe. The old woman spoke without blinking in an icy monotone, her breath like sour meat, her words like shards of glass. “For a long time you will think you are happy, but beware, for the scorpion of misfortune rides on your back.” The old woman turned and started to walk away. Ming ran after her, “What do you mean? Who are you?” But the old
woman kept walking, facing straight ahead. Ming collapsed and started to sob. Her friend ran inside the compound and rushed out with Ming’s mother. They ran up and down the dirt road. But the old woman was nowhere to be seen.

Her mother quickly swept Ming back inside the house. Ming sat in the kitchen, watching her mother rush erratically about, first pouring a cup of tepid tea for her daughter, then looking through her shelves for the jar of rock sugar, muttering all the while, “No fear, no fear. Just a silly old woman.” But Ming saw her slop the tea as she poured and heard the shortness in her breath. As Ming sipped the tea with the rock sugar melting in her mouth, she knew the sweetness of the candy was but a flimsy talisman against the old woman’s words. Someone from another world had reached into their lives with a frightening pronouncement, casting a shadow over Ming’s life. From that moment on, Ming faced the world with her head turned to the side, longing for the security of the past, dreading the uncertainty of the future.

The minister asked everyone to stand and pray. Ming rose and looked at Dan-Mu standing beside her, his jaw tightly clenched, his face impassive. Gradually, she was remembering more details of the rumour. It was about Wei Joon’s grandfather. He hung himself too. That was it. There was something about a landlord back in China placing a curse on the family. But why? Was this family really cursed by suicide? Ming turned and glanced again at Dan-Mu. The words of the ghost
woman from her childhood resonated inside her head. “Beware, the scorpion of misfortune rides on your back.” Her eyes widened with sudden horror. Dan was next. She knew it. A revelation. No one needed to tell her in words or write it down on paper. Again she looked at her husband, this piece of dormant organic knowledge sprouting, rooting, branching into every corner and crevice of her being. It was as real and irrefutable as the floor beneath her feet.

Ming and her two children stood outside the door of their house, watching Dan fiddle with the key. Once inside, they all bent down and took off their shoes before putting on their Chinese slippers. For six years they had lived on the first floor of this house, and rented the second and third floors to other families. Over the last few days there had been little contact. Ming knew that her tenants were deliberately avoiding them. Their whispering stopped when they caught sight of her. Bad news in Chinatown spread like fire on a windy day. She understood their discomfort. What do you say when someone has hanged himself? Somehow the sympathies that were usually expressed seemed ill-fitting. Did he go peacefully?

Ming stood by her sink rinsing out the rice. Tonight’s dinner would be simple. Leftover chicken and oxtail soup from yesterday. She would stir-fry some greens. They had had a good meal at the reception after the funeral. Fortunately no one would be very hungry.

There was little conversation as they sat down together at the kitchen table. Ming looked at her son, who was twelve; her daughter, fifteen. They were both strong, healthy, well-adjusted
children and excellent students. That description fit all their cousins as well. Then why did that old man go and hang himself? Didn’t he recognize good fortune? Was he fighting with his wife again? But they were fighting even before Ming married into the family. Their anger towards each other was the engine that propelled their marriage. Was it spite? Did he just want to have the last word? One final gesture that would leave his wife defeated?

“Ming, is there any more soup?”

“Oh. Oh, yes, Dan. I’ll get some. Do you want some more rice?” Ming took her husband’s rice bowl without waiting for an answer. As she handed him the refilled bowl, she saw a crease around his neck that she had never noticed before. For a moment she stood mesmerized, watching his adam’s apple move above and below the line as he chewed and swallowed his food. She had to control an impulse to put her fingers around his neck, to stretch the skin and make the crease disappear.

After the supper dishes and the Chinese evening news, Ming started to prepare for bed. Dan was already in the bathtub. Ming stood in front of the bathroom mirror, concentrating on the circular motion of her toothbrush.

“Ming, don’t take it so hard. You’ve been so quiet all evening.” Dan got out of the bathtub and started to dry himself. Ming rinsed her mouth and spat the water into the sink. “You’ve hardly said a thing. This place is starting to feel like a morgue.”

Until that moment, Ming hadn’t realized how self-absorbed she was being. She turned abruptly and faced her husband.
“Dan, you don’t suppose what those old ladies are saying might be true?” Ming started to change into her pyjamas. She carefully folded her clothes and placed them on a chair in the corner of their bedroom.

“What are they saying?”

“That your family’s cursed. That suicide runs in your family.”

“And what does that mean?” Dan finished putting on his pyjamas and got into bed.

“Dan, isn’t there something about a landlord cursing your great-grandfather, who ended up hanging himself?”

“Oh, that. My mother told me the local landlord used to cheat the tenant farmers by rigging the scales. My great-grandfather was routinely paid next to nothing for his harvests of oats. Apparently, he got so angry, he kidnapped the landlord’s prize Pekinese. Then he chopped it into chunks, put everything into a pot and put it on the landlord’s doorstep. Only he didn’t do it right away. He waited for several days until the meat started to rot and stink. Nobody was able to prove that it was my great-grandfather. He was just the prime suspect. Probably because he was the loudest about his anger.”

“So then the landlord cursed the family?”

“That’s never been proven. But when the old man hung himself, the village said it was the landlord’s curse.”

“Well, people are whispering that your family is cursed.”

“Is that what you’re worried about? Don’t be ridiculous. This is Canada.”

“But Dan.… What if?”

“Ming, stop worrying. Life in China was hard. And my father was always unhappy here. Things are different now. I’ve no intention of wearing a rope around my neck. Now or in the future.” Ming got into bed next to her husband. Dan could tell that the notion of suicide running in the family had embedded itself in her mind. He put an arm around her. She was biting the right corner of her lower lip. When she did that, there was no hope of distracting her.

“C’mon Ming. Give your mind a rest.”