China Dog Read Free Page B

Tom’s car. Lily was asleep. Tom’s arm was around her and he kissed her gently on the lips to wake her up. When I saw them get out of the car, I hurried into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I never mentioned to anyone what I saw.
    The following Wednesday, I had a headache at school and the teacher let me come home early. I walked in the back door. My parents didn’t know I was there. As I peeked around the door to the work area, I saw my father shove a letter in my mother’s face.
    “Read this. Read what Eddy’s written. People are talking about your daughter and her
kai yaah
. You’ve got to do something about this.” My father spat out the words
kai yaah
like bile stuck in his throat.
    As my mother silently read the letter she started to cry. “But Tom makes Lily happy. Life here has been so hard for her. She hasn’t made any friends of her own. And he has spent so much money on us. What can we do?”
    “Tom’s feelings for Lily aren’t those of a godfather. You know that. Stop fooling yourself. Do you want Lily to marry Tom?”
    “You know what I want for my daughters. I don’t want them to be like us. I want them to marry men, you know, educated, higher class. I want them to be Canadians. Not helpless, like us.” My mother looked desperate. “Tom has been so good to us. How can we tell him to go?”
    “Well, if this keeps up, the talk in Chinatown will grow; Lily will have no marriage prospects. And then what?”
    My mother put the letter down on the ironing table, looked at my father as she wiped her face, turned and left the room. I tiptoed out of the house and crossed the road to call on a friend.
    After that, the line of my mother’s mouth changed. Her lips were pressed tightly together with the corners tucked in, and the two tendons in her neck stood out from her collarbone to her jaw. Her eyes, bewildered, became moist whenever she looked at Lily and Tom.
    The quarrelling between my parents grew worse. And it was over little things. My father exploded one night because the soup wasn’t hot enough.
    “I’ve been working all day ’till I’m like a worn-out clog. And you can’t even come up with hot soup!”
    One humid summer evening, while Lily and Tom were out for a drive to escape the heat, my mother chased after my father as he ran into the backyard. She pleaded with him. “Tom has to leave this house. I know that now. But I can’t bring myself to do it. You have to do it.”
    “But Lily is your daughter. You need to take charge.”
    “I can’t. Don’t you see. Lily hates me. She hates me becauseI left her in Hong Kong, even though I had no choice. If I make Tom leave, she’ll hate me even more. You have to tell Tom to leave, for my sake, for the sake of our family.”
    One afternoon in September, I returned home from school, went to my favourite corner, and sat down on a squat wooden stool, opening a book of fairy tales I had borrowed from my teacher. The atmosphere felt different, clouds of tension and relief hanging in the air at the same time. My parents were silently working. My mother was preparing supper and my father was ironing clothes. A few minutes after I entered, Lily walked in. “Where’s
kai yaah
’s car? He’s usually here by now.” Before anyone spoke, Lily understood. Panic and fear radiated from her eyes. She dashed upstairs to the small room that Tom had added. She saw the bed and opened the empty drawers of the dresser.
    Lily came hurtling down the stairs. Mother was standing at the kitchen table, slicing vegetables for supper. Lily, her body rigid, walked over and faced her. Rage emanated from every pore in her body. Her words were like knives, slashing the air around her. “Where is he? Why is his room empty?” In the silence that followed, I thought the air around us would explode. I wanted to fade into the flowered wallpaper, to become just a face, flat on the wall, staring out. Any movement would let them know I was there. I knew if I stayed