Disappearing Moon Cafe Read online

  Praise for

  DISAPPEARING MOON CAFE

  “Powerfully and elaborately wrought, Lee’s first novel traces generations of a Chinese-Canadian family and their ties to (and clashes with) one another, their culture, and their land in China and North America . . . the layers of experience, emotion and cultural identity of succeeding generations build to an abundantly detailed story.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “SKY Lee’s simultaneous weaving and unravelling of the Wong history avoids the pitfalls of chronicle and succeeds wonderfully in its evocation of the family tree as myth.

  The novel . . . uses humor, scandal, melodrama and theatricality to evoke the Chinese-Canadian world.”

  ARITHA VAN HERK,Globe and Mail

  “Lee presents an unflinching look at both the men and women of the culture, their passions, their hatreds and their unique gift—or curse—for survival.”

  EVELYN LAU, Vancouver Province

  “A compelling first novel . . . Lee successfully combines magic realism and epic sweep in the fast-moving story.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “This is an ambitious and complex novel . . . her dialogue is wonderful and she is a first-rate storyteller.”

  MARGARET MACMILLAN, Toronto Star

  “A feisty, complex, and award-winning first novel.”

  Booklist

  “This ambitious and vastly entertaining first novel follows four generations of a troubled Chinese-Canadian family through its gradual and often painful assimilation and eventual disintegration . . . The lively, often riotous spirit of Disappearing Moon Cafe is never lost in the epic sprawl. This is a moving, deeply human tale about the high price of assimilation, the loneliness of being of two cultures but no longer really belonging to either and the way in which the sordid secrets of the past can cast long, tragic shadows . . . If Gabriel Garcia Marquez had been Canadian-Chinese, and a woman, A Hundred Years of Solitude might have come out a little bit like this.”

  Washington Post Book World

  “Raw human hungers, traditional imperatives, blind and tragic forces of racism conspire to weave a dense and tangled web.

  SKY Lee’s skill at unravelling the knots is mesmerizing.”

  JOY KOGAWA, author of Obasan

  “Lee is an unusual storyteller: brilliant, unrelenting and humorous.”

  JOY HARJO, author of She Had Some Horses

  Copyright © 1990, 2017 by SKY Lee

  Copyright © 2017 Chris Lee (afterword)

  Copyright © 2017 Smaro Kamboureli and SKY Lee (interview)

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Originally published by Douglas and McIntyre in 1990. First NeWest Press Landmark Edition, 2017.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lee, Sky, author

  Disappearing Moon Cafe / Sky Lee.

  (Landmark edition)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-926455-81-5 (paperback).

  ISBN 978-1-926455-82-2 (epub).

  ISBN 978-1-926455-83-9 (mobi)

  I. Title. II. Series: Landmark edition

  PS8573.E353D5 2017 C813'.54 C2016-905875-1

  C2016-905876-X

  Editor: Saeko Usukawa

  Editor of NeWest Press Landmark Edition: Smaro Kamboureli

  Cover design: Michel Vrana

  Interior design: Jennifer Blais, based on a design by Peter Cocking

  Author photograph: Bob Hsiang

  All of the characters depicted in this book are fictional.

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program.

  This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.

  # 201, 8540 – 109 Street,

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada

  1 2 3 4 20 19 18 17

  To Mother

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I offer my thanks and appreciation to those who have shared in the realization of this dream. They include Saeko Usukawa, Philip Wong, Jim Wong-Chu, May Lynn Woo, Lorraine Chan, Jamila Ismail, Viola Thomas, Paul Yee, Frederick Lee, Agnes Mui, Leila Chu, Shirley Chan, Albert Lee, Nathan Wong, Dennis Lee, Cao Xiao Li and Don Poy.

  Special acknowledgements to the old Makara collective, the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop, the people at Cordova House and John Haugen of the Lytton Indian Band.

  Thanks, Jim, for the title.

  THE WONG FAMILY

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: Search for Bones

  I Waiting for Enlightenment

  II Ties Overseas—A Ticket In

  III Triangles

  IV Ties to the Land—A Ticket Out

  V Identity Crisis

  VI The Writer

  VII The Suicide

  EPILOGUE: New Moon

  AFTERWORD by Chris Lee

  Smaro Kamboureli in Dialogue with SKY Lee

  PROLOGUE

  SEARCH FOR BONES

  WONG GWEI CHANG

  1892

  He remembered that by then he was worn out from fighting the wind. He had to stop and rest in a shaded spot, so he found a smooth, flat stone to sit on, beside a stream that meandered off around a sharp bend. He was bone-tired from all this walking, watching the land dry out and the trees thin out. He wasn’t thirsty; he was hungry, the last of his provisions gone days ago. So very hungry, so very tired of quenching his thirst on cold mountain water, sweet as it was.

  He wanted to complain out loud, “Why send men out to starve to death?” But the wind snatched the words out of his mouth, and even he couldn’t tell if he had spoken them or not. He looked up at the unsettled sky and realized that if a freak storm should happen, he would be finished. He slapped his knees and shook his head. Ill-equipped, ill-informed, he was doomed from the start.

  Ha! he thought. A bone-searching expedition! We’ll find bones all right, gleaming white, powdery in the hot sun, except they’ll be our own. His feet ached relentlessly, throbbing cold from wading through ditches and icy creeks. Already, holes in the thinned soles of his borrowed boots.

  “I suppose I should be damned grateful I am still alive to feel the ache!” he cursed out loud. Then there was the loneliness. He didn’t want to think about the loneliness; it was the most dangerous struggle.

  He didn’t know why he’d been chosen. Perhaps because he was young and big, and had muscular shoulders. Maybe because his hair was thick and smooth, and not just black but blue-black. He had two whorls on the crown of his head—the sign of a nonconformist. He also had very big hands. Most likely the old men had liked his face and its look of kind innocence.

  They said, “This youth has a tender face, but he has the look of an old soul.”

  “An old soul?” he asked when they leaned close, looking for promises.

  “Yes,” they replied, “you have been reincarnated many times. You have lived many lives fruitfully and have a deeper understanding of many things.” They told him that he must believe.

  “Believe what!” he demanded.

  “In your mission.”

  “My mission is to search out the bones of those who have died on the iron road
, so they can be sent back home . . . by you, the Benevolent Associations.”

  “No!” the old eyes commanded brilliantly. “It is more than that. To believe is to make it live! You must make your mission live, or else you will not succeed.”

  Thus, they sent him into a trance. Around him, the mountain barricaded with trees reaching into the eternal mist, and the rain pressed down from the heavens. He felt totally hemmed in. His eyes untrained to see beyond the wall of wilderness, his heart unsuited to this deep, penetrating solitude. Hunger had already made him hallucinate, afraid of the rustling leaves and whistling animals.

  So he thought she had to be a spirit when he met her. In this dreamlike state, he thought maybe he had died and she was another spirit here to guide him over to the other side.

  “Look, a chinaman!” She crept up behind him and spoke in his language. He whirled around and his knees buckled under, the last of his strength not enough to contain his furious trembling. Meanwhile, she darted back into the safety of the underbrush and hid. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear her laughing at him; the sounds gurgled like an infant’s blown back and forth by the wind. The whole landscape winking and flashing at him.

  “You mock me, yet you don’t dare show yourself to me,” he challenged, peering into a shimmering sea of leaves. “Come out now!” he barked with bravado.

  “Ah, so he speaks chinese,” the voice observed. Finally, a brown face peeped out of the stems and brambles. She was an indian girl, dressed in coarse brown clothing that made her invisible in the forest. Her mouth did not smile, but her eyes were friendly—a deer’s soft gaze. He was astonished when she stepped out onto the tall grass.

  “You speak chinese,” he said, indignant, unwilling to believe what he saw before him.

  “My father is a chinaman, like you. His eyes are slits like yours. He speaks like you.” She spoke deliberately and demonstrated by pulling back the skin beside her dark, round eyes. He saw that she was wearing a crude cape made of a worn animal skin. A long blanket served as a skirt and covered her bare feet. A small basket hung across her chest and made her look stooped over. Yet she moved gracefully, swaying from side to side, small intense movements like a little brown bird. He stared like a crazy man, because he thought she would disappear if he didn’t concentrate on her being.

  “But you’re a wild injun.” He spilled out the insults in front of her, but they were meaningless to her. In chinese, the words mocked, slanglike, “yin-chin.”

  “You look hungry, chinaman.” She tipped her head to one side as she looked him up and down. From her clothing, she drew out coiled strips of some kind of substance and held these out to him. “My father tells me chinamen are always hungry.”

  “I am not hungry,” he shot back. He could tell she was teasing him, and he was offended that she knew more than he did. She could tell he was hungry, that he had no more power left, that in this wilderness he was lost.

  “Ahh, he has no manners,” she exclaimed. He could only blink, astonished by this elegant rebuke from a “siwashee,” a girl, younger than he. It made him feel uncivilized, uncouth; the very qualities he had assigned so thoughtlessly to her, he realized, she was watching for in him.

  It was then he recognized familiar features on her dark face. A melon-seed face, most admired in a beautiful woman. Her hairline high, inkstrokes by an artist’s brush down both sides of her face. Cheeks caressed.

  Ah, he thought, why be afraid of her! What was she but another human being? Why should she mean him harm? He stepped up to take whatever it was from her hand, but as he reached out, she sprang back, dropping the strange food behind her like one of those shy creatures who sense no great danger but move prudently out of range just in case. Again, he was surprised to see that she was wary of him. It emphasized the distance between them, as if she was not a human being as he was, or . . . as if he was not a human being as she was.

  The food was seaweed, both crunchy and rubbery soft. As he chewed hungrily, she watched him and he watched her. After a while, she hoisted a heavily laden basket of freshly dug-up roots and bulbs up onto her back. She secured it with a wide band across her forehead. Her hand carried a slim stick, one end of which was dirtied, perhaps from digging the roots, and the other end of which was carved, perhaps bone. This she waved at him and called out, “Come and sit!” nonchalantly as if the invitation was for any time, as if in a day or two he would not be dead of exposure. “My father enjoys the company of his own kind. And he will be glad to help you find your way.”

  “Yes,” he answered, his mouth full of gracefulness, “perhaps I should have a word with your father.”

  Then, as if the barren wasteland around him had magically opened and allowed him admittance, he followed her through dense thickets, up hills and down through ravines, a respectable distance between them. He marvelled at her bare feet, which padded softly along the forest floor without injury. Many times he sank to his knees, soaked in sweat, so tired he could hardly hold up his head. He was fearful that she would abandon him, but she paced her steps according to his strength and smiled encouragingly.

  They followed the big river until they finally arrived at her home, which stood high up on the cliff side of a mountain overlooking the water. By then darkness had fallen and the wind was blowing fiercer than ever, the first raindrops of a storm about to descend.

  He knew it was on a cliff because he could see the wide expanse of stars beyond the immediate trees, and he could hear rushing water far below them. She ran into the little cabin first, then a man and a woman came out and stood beside the door. They peered excitedly into the night, looking for their visitor. “Come in!” said the man.

  It was so dark, he couldn’t see their faces. He just got the idea that they were older by their voices and the placid way they both moved.

  “My name is Chen Gwok Fai. Come in and rest, sir! What is your precious surname, sir?”

  “Wong,” he said, “Wong Gwei Chang.”

  Chen put his hands on Gwei Chang’s shoulders and led him into the tiny cabin. Beside a small fire in the fireplace, Gwei Chang saw the girl kneeling, her hands in front of her, reaching for warmth. He noted the intelligence in her face, ignited by the firelight; hers was a beautiful face full of vision. He didn’t remember anything else, because he fell unconscious right on the spot, and he slept for a long, long time. By the time he awakened, he had stayed for three years.

  GWEI CHANG

  1939

  He was an old man now. And he played with his memories all day long. Or they played with him. He felt he must tell of a most peculiar dream he’d had around that period of his life when he went looking for the bones of dead chinamen strewn along the Canadian Pacific Railway, their ghosts sitting on the ties, some standing with one foot on the gleaming metal ribbon, waiting, grumbling. They were still waiting as much as half a century after the ribbon-cutting ceremony by the whites at the end of the line, forgotten as chinamen generally are.

  In his dream, he was strolling down a street in a wealthy residential area of Victoria. He knew it was a street where rich people lived, because it was lined by fine old trees at neat intervals in front of each sprawling lawn. And he was troubled because he was about to turn down a job as a servant in one of these grand houses in order to go on a dangerous, almost senseless expedition. Not only was it going to be gruelling hard work, but the pay was a bad joke. Of course he knew that the rewards for the performance of such work would come later, but his family in China needed to eat now.

  As he walked, he noticed some crested myna birds flitting back and forth, looking for nesting sites in the trees. They had a shrill, rasplike cry, which got on his nerves. In order to make himself feel better, he began to search the ground, hoping to spot a glimmer of gold in the dirt, convinced that the Gold Mountains weren’t a myth at all. He got so crazed by this idea that he couldn’t stop gawking at the sidewalk; then in a mad rush, he got down on his hands and knees, his hands groping and sifting the ground. He did
n’t care that he demeaned himself nosing through the dirt like a dog. Worse still, he panicked and started rummaging through the garbage cans. Whenever he glanced back, he noticed that the mynas were following him and getting bigger, their black plumage and crests more and more distinct. But he was so intent on what he needed to do that he took little heed of them.

  Suddenly, a huge shadow fell over him, and he heard the flapping of giant wings directly over his head. Unable to fight off his instincts, he crouched and his hands flew up to ward off attack, but he was too late. A bloodcurdling scream shattered his ears, and a windstorm caught him about the head and beat him to his knees. The rest was a blur, but he did manage a glimpse of the menace; huge wings of a black raven swooping down upon him. When its talons ripped into his flesh, he felt neither pain nor fear, just the sensation of being lifted into a flying dream.

  KELORA CHEN

  1892

  Gwei Chang remembered being half-unconscious, with Old Man Chen telling him that it was the isolation that tore out a man’s good senses. Then Chen told him that he had been delirious for days. “The white men have a name for it. Cabin fever,” Chen laughed, “cabin fever, he, he, he!” and made a grand gesture towards his surroundings. He was without a doubt a most peculiar man.

  “I got this cabin from a white man,” Chen grinned foolishly. “I climbed up here and found a white man dying of a festering gunshot wound, with his head in an indian woman’s lap right here,” he pointed to the bed Gwei Chang was lying on. “So, as he died, I just stayed and took over where he left off, you see. I took care of his woman like a wife and his cabin like a home. She had a daughter. Kelora—indian name. She is my daughter so I taught her to speak chinese. She’s old enough to have a husband now,” Chen smiled down at Gwei Chang.