Free All That Matters by Wayson Choy

him sugar cane, who would wrap him in a shroud of flowers and fix their beady eyes on him.
    “Keep busy,” Poh-Poh said. “Taste this all-day melon soup.”
    She handed me a small bowl of steaming amber. Somehow, her
Tohng-Yahn no
had read my long and wistful face: my brain cells had been wondering, while I waited for the soup to cool, how I could tell Jack O’Connor the family secret.
    “Taste now,” said Poh-Poh.
    The soup tasted like warm chicken broth. Pieces of salty melon pulp burst into tangy sweetness. It was perfect. I tipped the small bowl and slurped up every crystal drop.
    “Maybe,” I said, “too salty.”
    “Bullshit,” Poh-Poh said, using one of the half-dozen English words she had picked up from Third Uncle’s labourers. She snatched the empty bowl from my hand before I could ask for more.
    Acting grown-up, I said, “Not nice.”
    “Shut up,” she said in English, without a trace of accent.
    Satisfied with her orderly fleet of plates and utensils, her eyes glowing from the heat of the stove, Poh-Poh loosened her apron to fan more heat into the dining room. She asked me to thump the sawdust chute feeding one end of the stove.
    My fists battered the galvanized sides until the load of sawdust inside made a gradual
whoosh
as it slid down towards the flames. Poh-Poh then directed me to wash my hands in the sink before I tackled my next job. I stood on tiptoe and reached over the deep metal basin and wrung my fingers under the cold tap water. Poh-Poh roughly dried my hands on a length of clean towel that hung on a wooden roller beside the back door.
    “Stand on this,” she commanded. With a slippered foot she shoved sideways against an empty crate until it banged into the deep metal sink. Everything smelled of sauces and crackling firewood. She handed me back the half-chewed stump of sugar cane.
    As I sucked, I looked down at the colourful label covering the slats of the crate. Between slurps, I read out loud: “Bee-Seee Ap-ples.”
    “Too smart,” Poh-Poh said. “Stand up.”
    “Frae-sir Val-leee Eee-daan Farm.”
    Using my best English, and pronouncing carefully, I told Poh-Poh, “The Val-lee is the food bas-ket
-lah
of Vancouver,” just as my teacher at Strathcona had taughtus. By the end of Grade 2, I knew more about British Columbia than I could ever remember about China.
    “You
mo no,”
Poh-Poh repeated, after I badly translated into Toishan the idea that Fraser Valley Eden Farm was “the Big Paradise Apple-Box of Upside-down Mountain.”
    “Nonsense,” she said and snatched the acid-sweet cane from my lips.
    However they were translated, Grandmother took no pleasure in the
faan gwai
English words, the foreign demon words, though she was clearly jealous of my expert ability to read the complex labels of apple crates and grocery tins. I could even read the Grade 3 Look-and-Learn books like
This Is the House That Jack Built
. (Jack O’Connor knew that one by heart.) But instead of commending me as Stepmother and Father did, the Old One fretted over how her grandson squinted and stumbled over flimsy Chinese textbooks yet somehow could read, even with one eye shut, page after page of rhyming English words; she complained how her no-brain grandson could pivot a pencil into ten English sentences faster than he could daub a brush over just one single Chinese ideogram. Worse, she wrung her hands and warned Third Uncle and big Mrs. Lim, who only sulked to hear the latest news about me, that First Son was muttering more Chinglish than Chinese.
    She begged of them, “What will happen to my grandson? What will happen to Kiam-Kim?”
    I thought Poh-Poh took things too seriously. Whenever I looked in the mirror and saw my narroweyes and pug nose, there was no escaping the fact that I was my father’s son, and I would always be her grandson. She and the elders often worried about children like myself, whom they called
juk-sing
, bamboo stumps, who were sturdy outside but held a hollow emptiness