CHAPTER 7: CHINESE MEMOIRS
The Story of Lee Duck by Ron Lee
Introduction:
In 1977, my mother told me to go and spend the afternoon visiting my grandfather who he had been ill. She told me that since he was getting up in age it might be the last time I would see him alive. In my 17 years, I had never sat down with my grandfather to have a conversation. Our grandfather was the patriarch of our extended family and he always gave orders and we all obediently listened. Today, was different. As he sat in his pajamas on the chesterfield with his feet up resting on a stool, I asked him to tell me his life story. For some reason, I brought a note pad and jotted down notes. A few months later he passed away but that is another story to be told. Fifteen years later, I found my notes and reconstructed his life story from those notes.
The Dinner
“What chance have I to journey to the golden mountain?” asked Lee Duck.
A sojourner had returned to the village in Toi-San after ten years of working the railroad in a land of fortune called Canada. He told Lee Duck about the wealth earned in a country filled with foreigners, strange foods, customs but an opportunity to work as a free man.
Lee Duck at the age of twenty had returned to his village to set up a small tailoring shop. At the age of ten, he left his widowed mother to seek his fortune in the streets of Canton. He had quickly become involved in the underworld city, first as a petty thief and then as a card shark beguiling the gullible in contrived games of chance. He remembered old ruse well. Walking near the dockyards or the brothels he would approach the unsuspecting marks.
“You looking for some action? You like to gamble? I know of good place to make lots of money. Come with me, please.”
The client would be led to a gaming house where a few hands of cards would be played with the initial games being won by the visitor. As the stakes would increase, a new deck of cards would be produced from a local shop. In the interests of fair play, the card deck was inspected by all the players. Only the dealer knew that the playing cards in the whole district have been secretly bought up by the Green gang who have shaved the card decks into marked decks before repackaging. By age fifteen, he was streetwise.
But one day during a card game accusations were made. A fight ensued and people were killed. Lee Duck decided it was time for a change. He never seemed to have enough money. His existence depended on scrounging the streets for customers. Sooner or later he would be caught.
Lee Duck went to a restaurant and walked to the back of the kitchen. “Hey mister, you need a strong fifteen year old boy to work as a cook?”
“What makes you think I need a cook?”
“I’m smart. I work hard for you. If you no like, throw me out. All I ask is a little food and little pay. What say you Bossman?” For three years, he learned to be a cook mastering the art of aromatic cooking, learning how to use the lowest grades of meat, and hoping one day to open his own business. But it became apparent there was no future in being a cook. His boss meant to keep him as a cook, so Lee Duck stepped across the street and offered his services to the tailor.
At the age of twenty, he had managed to save a little money and then the plague struck. The pneumonic and bubonic plague had spread from the Portuguese ships entering Macau. Dead rats were laying in the side streets by the thousands. Bodies littered the roads. Death was in the tenements. Lee Duck contracted the disease in his overcrowded hovel. He couldn’t go to work because of the fever, and remained indoors. The smell of incense and sandalwood hung in the air as the people tried to mask the stench of rotting flesh.
On the fourth day of his sickness, his glands swollen, a red pustule on his arm, Lee Duck decided to go for a final walk.
“Buy my elixir! Buy my elixir!” chanted a street quack. What have I got to lose thought Lee Duck. So he bought a bottle of the brackish looking concoction and downed its contents. He went to a restaurant to have a final meal and afterwards quickly retreated to a side street where he vomited and excreted for what seemed an eternity. Amazingly, this purgation seemed to break the fever and he recovered. Taken as a sign of good luck, Lee Duck spent his savings on a treadle machine and returned to his village to make a living as a tailor.
“You are a young man with a life of opportunity if you go to Canada. Come back like me after ten years and retire.”
“But I have no money. I am lucky to be alive. I almost died by the plague. There are no rich relatives to pay my passage.”
“ There is a way if you are brave enough to try and loyal to the association. You have heard of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the one who dares to fight the Empress Dowager. He has many followers in Canada amongst the overseas Chinese. The benevolent associations give him money to support his revolution. We have our own Lee association in Vancouver who will help you.”
“ I have enough to eat here. There is rice, fish and fruit for the picking and my business may grow.”
“There is more to life than just your next dinner. Peasants have no money. Most of our villagers have lost their land rights to the city dwellers and what is left is taken by the Dowager’s tax man. We even must wear our hair in a cue in homage to an old greedy woman.”
“But you still wear a cue.”
“Because I have returned but the day is coming when the old order will fall. What is life my friend but old men who shuffle along in their slippers looking for who knows what and then the shuffling stops, the slippers remain empty and life goes on. What is life without sons to support you in your old age. Can you support a wife and family on a tailor’s salary? You go to the Golden mountain, work hard and return a rich man, honored by all the village and live the fruitful life.”
“You speak with words of the bow of pearl and the jade thumb ring whose target aims for the Heavenly Boar. It there is be a future for my ancestors, I must go west but someday will return.” So Lee Duck went to Macau with the sojourner to get a job as a stevedore on a Blue Funnel Steamer embarking for Canada.
“ Very strong boy, will work hard for you, Captain. His people pay you the $500.00 head tax when you reach Vancouver. No chance of government fine. You happy. Him happy. Friend happy. Everybody happy.”
“ Well, boy take a long look at the sun because you ain’t going to see daylight for six weeks. No Chinese are allowed topside. Can’t have you clutter up the decks and upset the passengers.”
The boom , boom , boom of the pistons was incessant and unremitting, in the engine room of The Empress of India. The workers shoveled coal into the gaping furnaces to provide steam for the infernal engines. Time became meaningless. Days drifted into days. One worked in a sweat bath, humidity 100%. Rivulets of sweat ran down pant legs, the coarse undershirt clinging to the body. After work shifts, sleep became an ordeal, asleep on steel shelves stacked like dried fish with the constant drum of the engines—a pulsating throb in the temple membranes, eyelids and eardrums.
Silence…Arrival at last. Lee Duck reaching the top deck looked out across the harbor. Above the glimmer of the gaslights he saw a new constellation, Cassiopeia, which seemed like Heaven’s Longbow, crosswise in the sky. The sun retreated, died. A land of foreigners, he was a foreigner.
On Carral Street he found the Lee Association headquarters and the headman of the fong.
“So you come to the golden mountain to seek the fortune of the gods. The path you have chosen is possible but only those who work hard, remain loyal to the brotherhood will prevail. There are many white ghosts who do not like our faces. You must learn to understand their barbaric ways or you will suffer. Sun Tzu once said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. But enough of philosophy, tomorrow the district association will approach the Zhonghua Gongtang to get employment with the railroad.”
The association fund him a job off Railway Avenue in the C.P.R. roundhouse working on another infernal machine—the locomotive. The foreman, a white man, not pleased but following company orders shouted out the duties over the din of clanging metal.
“What the hell is a name like Duck good for! Well Duck, listen to me, watch me. What I do , you do. You savvy? And quit looking at me with that stupid grin. Follow me.”
Crawling under the engine, the foreman motioned for Lee Duck who wriggled into the same position. Through the use of hand signals, and cursing, it was established that his job was to grease the undercarriage of the engine. No bearing was to escape lubrication.
Next came a thorough polishing of the engine exterior from the controls to the bell, the body and even the cowcatcher. A full day’s work and at the end of the day, his coveralls were a mass of oily, greasy, sooty splotches. The grit quickly worked its way into the skin. Lee Duck looked like a charred doll hastily fished from the fireplace. From his soot covered face, white eyeballs and white teeth seemed to protrude beneath a trainman’s cap.
Two weeks of working in the roundhouse and then unexpectedly a journey to Alberta. A grease monkey was needed at every whistle stop to grease the bearings. The journey up the Fraser Valley through the mountain passes and onto the prairies with stops in Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat and then back to the coast. To Lee Duck, the land seemed so large, so lonely.
On the prairies, there were no Chinese in many of the towns, but in 1912, only a few thousand lived in the friendly surroundings of Pender and Hastings in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Perhaps this could be a place to start a business on the prairies: a tailor shop, maybe a laundry. Wait and see.
At the end of the month, Lee Duck went to see the paymaster for his first pay cheque. Thirty dollars for one months work was exactly half what the white workers received. But still, if he saved, in ten years, he could return a rich man.
“Well Mr. Lee Duck, make your mark here and here is your thirty bucks. Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Good fortune today. Thank you very much. I celebrate with a good dinner. Maybe I go across the street and eat in nice shop.”
Lee Duck entered the bright coffee shop. The red barstools, the white gleaming counter top, and one solitary customer hunched over a coffee at the far end. Lee Duck placed his coat on the wall peg opposite the counter and then sidled onto the front barstool. The short order cook who was also the proprietor came out from behind his window from which emanated the greasy aroma of fried foods.
“Today is special day for me.” Stated Lee Duck.
“ So what will it be? The special?”
“For long time I have not eaten well. I want to eat until I am full. What is your best meal?”
“Steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, coffee and pie would be one-fifty.”
“Okay, I celebrate because I got my first pay today. I am a very rich man.”
The meal had the flavor of success. With each mouthful, he tried to savor the juices of the food. Preoccupied with his meal , he did not notice the lone customer exit. When it came time to pay the bill, Lee Duck sauntered over to his jacket and to his surprise the money was gone. Pilfered, one months labor, gone…and he still had to pay for the meal.
“ My money is all gone. I think the man who was here stole money!”“You still owe me one-fifty for the meal. I got a pile of dishes back here that need washing and at 25 cents an hour you have six hours of washing. Okay deal.”
Easy come, easy go. In this country you can’t trust anyone.
It was twelve o’clock when Lee Duck left the café. He could hear the foghorn of a steamer drifting up from the Burrard Inlet. Heaven’s Longbow tilted in the sky, the arrow of good fortune was still in the distance. Ten years is a long time. My time will come.
Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons. Earth comprises distance, great and small, danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death. There will be my time of Heaven on Earth.
Remember the path of my life shall have no regrets. He was young. He was strong. He would endure.
The Story of Lee Duck by Ron Lee
Introduction:
In 1977, my mother told me to go and spend the afternoon visiting my grandfather who he had been ill. She told me that since he was getting up in age it might be the last time I would see him alive. In my 17 years, I had never sat down with my grandfather to have a conversation. Our grandfather was the patriarch of our extended family and he always gave orders and we all obediently listened. Today, was different. As he sat in his pajamas on the chesterfield with his feet up resting on a stool, I asked him to tell me his life story. For some reason, I brought a note pad and jotted down notes. A few months later he passed away but that is another story to be told. Fifteen years later, I found my notes and reconstructed his life story from those notes.
The Dinner
“What chance have I to journey to the golden mountain?” asked Lee Duck.
A sojourner had returned to the village in Toi-San after ten years of working the railroad in a land of fortune called Canada. He told Lee Duck about the wealth earned in a country filled with foreigners, strange foods, customs but an opportunity to work as a free man.
Lee Duck at the age of twenty had returned to his village to set up a small tailoring shop. At the age of ten, he left his widowed mother to seek his fortune in the streets of Canton. He had quickly become involved in the underworld city, first as a petty thief and then as a card shark beguiling the gullible in contrived games of chance. He remembered old ruse well. Walking near the dockyards or the brothels he would approach the unsuspecting marks.
“You looking for some action? You like to gamble? I know of good place to make lots of money. Come with me, please.”
The client would be led to a gaming house where a few hands of cards would be played with the initial games being won by the visitor. As the stakes would increase, a new deck of cards would be produced from a local shop. In the interests of fair play, the card deck was inspected by all the players. Only the dealer knew that the playing cards in the whole district have been secretly bought up by the Green gang who have shaved the card decks into marked decks before repackaging. By age fifteen, he was streetwise.
But one day during a card game accusations were made. A fight ensued and people were killed. Lee Duck decided it was time for a change. He never seemed to have enough money. His existence depended on scrounging the streets for customers. Sooner or later he would be caught.
Lee Duck went to a restaurant and walked to the back of the kitchen. “Hey mister, you need a strong fifteen year old boy to work as a cook?”
“What makes you think I need a cook?”
“I’m smart. I work hard for you. If you no like, throw me out. All I ask is a little food and little pay. What say you Bossman?” For three years, he learned to be a cook mastering the art of aromatic cooking, learning how to use the lowest grades of meat, and hoping one day to open his own business. But it became apparent there was no future in being a cook. His boss meant to keep him as a cook, so Lee Duck stepped across the street and offered his services to the tailor.
At the age of twenty, he had managed to save a little money and then the plague struck. The pneumonic and bubonic plague had spread from the Portuguese ships entering Macau. Dead rats were laying in the side streets by the thousands. Bodies littered the roads. Death was in the tenements. Lee Duck contracted the disease in his overcrowded hovel. He couldn’t go to work because of the fever, and remained indoors. The smell of incense and sandalwood hung in the air as the people tried to mask the stench of rotting flesh.
On the fourth day of his sickness, his glands swollen, a red pustule on his arm, Lee Duck decided to go for a final walk.
“Buy my elixir! Buy my elixir!” chanted a street quack. What have I got to lose thought Lee Duck. So he bought a bottle of the brackish looking concoction and downed its contents. He went to a restaurant to have a final meal and afterwards quickly retreated to a side street where he vomited and excreted for what seemed an eternity. Amazingly, this purgation seemed to break the fever and he recovered. Taken as a sign of good luck, Lee Duck spent his savings on a treadle machine and returned to his village to make a living as a tailor.
“You are a young man with a life of opportunity if you go to Canada. Come back like me after ten years and retire.”
“But I have no money. I am lucky to be alive. I almost died by the plague. There are no rich relatives to pay my passage.”
“ There is a way if you are brave enough to try and loyal to the association. You have heard of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the one who dares to fight the Empress Dowager. He has many followers in Canada amongst the overseas Chinese. The benevolent associations give him money to support his revolution. We have our own Lee association in Vancouver who will help you.”
“ I have enough to eat here. There is rice, fish and fruit for the picking and my business may grow.”
“There is more to life than just your next dinner. Peasants have no money. Most of our villagers have lost their land rights to the city dwellers and what is left is taken by the Dowager’s tax man. We even must wear our hair in a cue in homage to an old greedy woman.”
“But you still wear a cue.”
“Because I have returned but the day is coming when the old order will fall. What is life my friend but old men who shuffle along in their slippers looking for who knows what and then the shuffling stops, the slippers remain empty and life goes on. What is life without sons to support you in your old age. Can you support a wife and family on a tailor’s salary? You go to the Golden mountain, work hard and return a rich man, honored by all the village and live the fruitful life.”
“You speak with words of the bow of pearl and the jade thumb ring whose target aims for the Heavenly Boar. It there is be a future for my ancestors, I must go west but someday will return.” So Lee Duck went to Macau with the sojourner to get a job as a stevedore on a Blue Funnel Steamer embarking for Canada.
“ Very strong boy, will work hard for you, Captain. His people pay you the $500.00 head tax when you reach Vancouver. No chance of government fine. You happy. Him happy. Friend happy. Everybody happy.”
“ Well, boy take a long look at the sun because you ain’t going to see daylight for six weeks. No Chinese are allowed topside. Can’t have you clutter up the decks and upset the passengers.”
The boom , boom , boom of the pistons was incessant and unremitting, in the engine room of The Empress of India. The workers shoveled coal into the gaping furnaces to provide steam for the infernal engines. Time became meaningless. Days drifted into days. One worked in a sweat bath, humidity 100%. Rivulets of sweat ran down pant legs, the coarse undershirt clinging to the body. After work shifts, sleep became an ordeal, asleep on steel shelves stacked like dried fish with the constant drum of the engines—a pulsating throb in the temple membranes, eyelids and eardrums.
Silence…Arrival at last. Lee Duck reaching the top deck looked out across the harbor. Above the glimmer of the gaslights he saw a new constellation, Cassiopeia, which seemed like Heaven’s Longbow, crosswise in the sky. The sun retreated, died. A land of foreigners, he was a foreigner.
On Carral Street he found the Lee Association headquarters and the headman of the fong.
“So you come to the golden mountain to seek the fortune of the gods. The path you have chosen is possible but only those who work hard, remain loyal to the brotherhood will prevail. There are many white ghosts who do not like our faces. You must learn to understand their barbaric ways or you will suffer. Sun Tzu once said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. But enough of philosophy, tomorrow the district association will approach the Zhonghua Gongtang to get employment with the railroad.”
The association fund him a job off Railway Avenue in the C.P.R. roundhouse working on another infernal machine—the locomotive. The foreman, a white man, not pleased but following company orders shouted out the duties over the din of clanging metal.
“What the hell is a name like Duck good for! Well Duck, listen to me, watch me. What I do , you do. You savvy? And quit looking at me with that stupid grin. Follow me.”
Crawling under the engine, the foreman motioned for Lee Duck who wriggled into the same position. Through the use of hand signals, and cursing, it was established that his job was to grease the undercarriage of the engine. No bearing was to escape lubrication.
Next came a thorough polishing of the engine exterior from the controls to the bell, the body and even the cowcatcher. A full day’s work and at the end of the day, his coveralls were a mass of oily, greasy, sooty splotches. The grit quickly worked its way into the skin. Lee Duck looked like a charred doll hastily fished from the fireplace. From his soot covered face, white eyeballs and white teeth seemed to protrude beneath a trainman’s cap.
Two weeks of working in the roundhouse and then unexpectedly a journey to Alberta. A grease monkey was needed at every whistle stop to grease the bearings. The journey up the Fraser Valley through the mountain passes and onto the prairies with stops in Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat and then back to the coast. To Lee Duck, the land seemed so large, so lonely.
On the prairies, there were no Chinese in many of the towns, but in 1912, only a few thousand lived in the friendly surroundings of Pender and Hastings in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Perhaps this could be a place to start a business on the prairies: a tailor shop, maybe a laundry. Wait and see.
At the end of the month, Lee Duck went to see the paymaster for his first pay cheque. Thirty dollars for one months work was exactly half what the white workers received. But still, if he saved, in ten years, he could return a rich man.
“Well Mr. Lee Duck, make your mark here and here is your thirty bucks. Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Good fortune today. Thank you very much. I celebrate with a good dinner. Maybe I go across the street and eat in nice shop.”
Lee Duck entered the bright coffee shop. The red barstools, the white gleaming counter top, and one solitary customer hunched over a coffee at the far end. Lee Duck placed his coat on the wall peg opposite the counter and then sidled onto the front barstool. The short order cook who was also the proprietor came out from behind his window from which emanated the greasy aroma of fried foods.
“Today is special day for me.” Stated Lee Duck.
“ So what will it be? The special?”
“For long time I have not eaten well. I want to eat until I am full. What is your best meal?”
“Steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, coffee and pie would be one-fifty.”
“Okay, I celebrate because I got my first pay today. I am a very rich man.”
The meal had the flavor of success. With each mouthful, he tried to savor the juices of the food. Preoccupied with his meal , he did not notice the lone customer exit. When it came time to pay the bill, Lee Duck sauntered over to his jacket and to his surprise the money was gone. Pilfered, one months labor, gone…and he still had to pay for the meal.
“ My money is all gone. I think the man who was here stole money!”“You still owe me one-fifty for the meal. I got a pile of dishes back here that need washing and at 25 cents an hour you have six hours of washing. Okay deal.”
Easy come, easy go. In this country you can’t trust anyone.
It was twelve o’clock when Lee Duck left the café. He could hear the foghorn of a steamer drifting up from the Burrard Inlet. Heaven’s Longbow tilted in the sky, the arrow of good fortune was still in the distance. Ten years is a long time. My time will come.
Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons. Earth comprises distance, great and small, danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death. There will be my time of Heaven on Earth.
Remember the path of my life shall have no regrets. He was young. He was strong. He would endure.