Read All That Matters for Free Online

east on Keefer. All these rows of pine-box houses, Father explained, were built by white carpenters. He had been reading picture books about Vancouver and showed me the funny people in cowboy hats. There was a time when nearly every Keefer Street house was occupied by an Irish family or by white people who spoke no English at all. But I didn’t care abouthistory lessons. “Why is Poh-Poh mad at me for talking about Stepmother?”
    “What did you tell little Jack?”
    I hesitated. Poh-Poh picked up her chopsticks. Using my best English so that only Father would understand, I half whispered,
“I tell him my new mother coming
.”
    Before I could stop him, Father translated my words. And before Father could stop her, Poh-Poh’s chopsticks snapped, stinging, against my head. The voice grew stern and hard:
    “Tell white ears nothing!”
    I bit my lip. Father patiently explained to me that white people did not understand Chinese ways. In English, I should refer to Gai-mou as Stepmother.
    “Say nothing more,” he continued. “Say nothing about our being Third Uncle’s paper family.”
    “Not one word,” Poh-Poh stressed. “Or we go back to China on next boat. Starve to death in China!”
    I knew that many people in China were starving; that was why I was always told how lucky I was to be able to eat up every grain of rice, how fortunate to be able to chew up every morsel of black-bean chicken and swallow every piece of leafy green.
    The next time I saw Jack, he had a few more things to say.
    “My mother says Chinamen can have as many mothers as they want, like Solomon the Jew.”
    I had no idea what any of those words meant. I sensed he, too, had no idea what he was saying. We both shrugged, knelt down, and went on with our serious game of road building.
    Having stood for a week watching trucks of all kinds widening Keefer Street with cobblestones and cement, Jack came up with make-believe construction trucks of his own. He showed me how he used the chunks of waste wood that Mr. O’Connor had cleaned out from one of the freight cars to burn in their fireplace. The half-dozen wooden blocks plowed imaginary roads for us, and the triangular ones made zigzag furrows in the small mixed piles of dirt and cement dust. Clouds rose into the air, inspiring Little Jack and me to make louder and louder engine roars. We bellowed out our version of truck horns until we grew hoarse. The thick greyish dust drifted down and clung to our damp faces.
    Standing at our front door to call me in to wash up for supper, Father shouted to Poh-Poh in the kitchen that he thought that he was looking at two
lo-faan
boys playing down on the sidewalk. For a moment, he laughingly told the Old One, he wondered where I had gone to.
    “I’m here,” I shouted, using my English words.
    Jack took back the blocks of wood. His mother was stiffly calling for him to come into the house.
    With a face as grim and bitter as Mrs. O’Connor’s, Poh-Poh threw Father a wet towel to wash me off.
    “Not funny,” she snapped.
    As the Old One stomped back into the kitchen, I struggled against the impossible thought that Poh-Poh and Mrs. O’Connor must have come from the same tree. I pushed away Father’s hand and took the wet rag from him to wipe my own hands. The cloth was streaked with dirt, but I hardly cared that Poh-Pohwould complain about it. Instead, I kept asking myself what kind of tree would Stepmother be from?
    That Saturday afternoon, Third Uncle stopped my outside play and sent me back into the house to tell Father the taxi had arrived to take us to the harbour.
    “I’ll get the Old One,” he said, and called Poh-Poh to come away from the kitchen, where she had been plating sweetmeats and special dumplings to welcome Gai-mou to her new home.
    I found Father upstairs standing before his bed, busy with the new bedsheets. Finally, he used his knees to push against the large mattress to straighten everything. I was surprised at how his hand lingered