Free All That Matters by Wayson Choy Page B

Mercy in our parlour, behave as if I didn’t care how much lucky money I might get, that I wasn’t greedy or grasping. I wanted only luck.
    Big Mrs. Lim always told me that the gods and ghosts look for ways to trick you. It was no use my saying I never saw any gods or ghosts; apparently they were everywhere. I was in even more danger, she warned, because I did not see them. Other children saw them, she told me and Poh-Poh, like the Lon Sing twins, who finished each other’s sentences, and the Chiangs’ little girl, who went mad with hearing ghost voices and fell into a coma and died.
    “Expect nothing,” Father told me, “and anything that comes will be a gift.”
    “Be patient,” Stepmother had cautioned me that very morning. “Keep deep longings to yourself.”
    I thought of what everyone had said to me when I got all
Excellent
on my first report card.
    “Even white people say,” Third Uncle said, “ ‘Never show poker hand.’ Pretend you got
Needs Improvement.”
    Mrs. Lim warned me not to strut too much. “The cocky rooster makes the best soup.”
    Grandmother told me that when I was a baby in China, whenever she took me outside, she complained out loud of my wretchedly pinched eyes and snot-running nose, so the gods would not be jealous and snatch me away.
    I fought down my excitement: I would set an example for my promised Second Brother when he disembarked; that is, I would be openly disappointed with him. But why would any jealous god worry about me asNumber One Boss? What example was I, wrapped in a flowery apron, wearily scrubbing carrots and wiping at my nose with the back of my wet and skinny wrist?
    Poh-Poh stepped back into the kitchen. She had oiled and neatly primped up her hair with her jade hairpieces. I lifted the long knife, as she and Stepmother had taught me, and began slowly, carefully, slicing the carrots at an angle. Grandmother ignored me until she noticed my runny nose. She took a tissue from her sleeve and made me blow three times. She washed her hands, then began wiping the wok with a tiny mop soaked with cooking oil. My eyes glazed with thought. Between her humming a singsong tune, she broke into comment whenever she felt like it.
    “Kiam-Kim thinks too much,” she told the Kitchen God, her tune faltering between some nonsense lyrics.
“Aaaiiyaah
, what proper girl will ever marry my worthless grandson!”
    I reminded myself that the so-called Kitchen God was only a small, heat-curled poster pinned on the wall. He looked like a warrior in one of my floppy Chinese comic books.
    “At the end of this year, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh went on in her lecturing tone, “the Kitchen God Tsao Chung will tell tales about the family.”
    I knew that. I handed her the plate of cut carrots.
    “Tsao Chung soon fly back up to Heaven to the Jade Emperor.”
    I knew that, too. During the last week of the year, after smearing the paper lips with a dab of honey to sweeten his words, Grandmother had Father walk outthe back porch and set Tsao Chung free by burning him up in a clay pot in front of all the family. Transformed by the fire into smoke, Tsao Chung began his journey to Heaven to report on our family. Last year, as Poh-Poh solemnly followed the rising vapours, Father nudged me and winked. Then he threw the ashes into the air. Poh-Poh stared at the fragments, never looking away until every bit of ash vanished skyward. By the second week of the New Year, a new Kitchen God would be pinned in the same place.
    Later that day, Father told me how—scientifically—it was only smoke. Overhearing this, Third Uncle said, with some reluctance, “Sometime smoke, Kiam-Kim, and sometime not.”
    Next door, at the O’Connors’, there was nothing like a Kitchen God. But as I waited in their front hall for Jack to come out to play, I saw hanging askew a wood-framed picture of a white lady in a blue dress. In their tidy, uncluttered kitchen, Mrs. O’Connor made Jack and me hot dogs in the only pot that I