Tuyen’s own possessions, her clothes, her pots and dishes and such, were scattered in small piles around the growing lubaio in her apartment. These, her clothing, her dishes, spewed all over the floor, only hid smaller sharp-edged constructions of an earlier idea to build a hutoung in miniature, and an idea earlier still for mud terraces and a simultaneous one of ornamental wenshou—monsters and lions, horses and fish, phoenixes—all magical animals; some of which she gave to friends when their abundance threatened to clutter even her sense of space. These last she made of wood or soapstone or clay, and they were numerously scattered all around the room. Finally, and not unconnectedly, she had decided on the lubaio.
Tuyen had secreted one more letter from her mother’s cache like a magical wenshou. She had memorized that one and replaced it—the only one in her father’s handwriting—addressed to the director of the Chi Ma Wan Camp shortly after the family arrived in Toronto.
Dear Sir,
We have lost our child as you know. We were six months in Chi Ma Wan Camp. I am inquiring as to if you have a record of him there. Did he arrive after we left? In case he reaches the camp, here is some money for his passage, and a small amount to get him sweet milk. Also this hat which belongs to his Bo, he will know it. Please take care of him until he can be with us.
Respect to you, Vu Tuan
She had no idea what she would do with these letters, but she sought them out in her mother’s room when she went on visits home and held them like ornate and curious figures of a time past.
She had surreptitiously broken down the wall between her bedroom and the kitchen, making one large room for her installations. One thing with Mrs. Chou’s slum apartments—the ceilings were high. Tuyen’s dark room was a thick black velvet curtain. The dishes were in the bathtub as the countless paintbrushes were in the sink. Chinese architecture, she said, dating way back, did not use walls for support. Columns were used, she said. She avoided the visits of Mrs. Chou, installed new locks, and made Carla her lookout for Mrs. Chou’s possible raids. She had virtually destroyed the apartment. If she ever moved, she would have to do it late at night and very quickly and without a trace.
Still exasperated and a little disturbed by her brother, Tuyen knocked on Carla’s door. Why, she wondered, did she find herself still waging that childish war with Binh?
“Look what I have,” she said, when Carla opened.
“Oh, sweet!” Carla said, reaching for the two plastic bags of food Tuyen offered.
“Yeah? What do I get?”
“Hugs,” Carla said, embracing her gratefully, “but really it’s your brother who should get them.”
“Don’t even mention him. I’m so pissed with him.”
“Why? I wish I had a brother like that.”
“Oh, you do not know him. He is so manipulative …”
“Well, I’ll exchange him for mine if you want.” Carla’s tone foreshadowed bad news.
“Sorry, what now?”
“Mimico again. Carjacking.”
“Whoa! Christ!”
“Freaking carjacking. How am I going to fix that one?”
“Why do you have to fix it?”
“Because he’s mine.”
Tuyen had a peculiar feeling of self-betrayal. It was the word “mine.” Binh had more or less asked her the same thing—didn’t she want to know what had happened to their brother? Didn’t she want that anomalous void in her life—in their life—charged with some specific substance or body? Did she not feel that sense of casualty, if not fatality, wrapped around their childhood?
Carla had moved to look out the window, and shaking off such thoughts, Tuyen walked across the room to her. She watched the thin muscle of Carla’s neck quiver like a tulip’s stem. She wanted to caress it, she wanted to put her lips on it. Then the mouth, turned down and sulking, she wanted to kiss it to the upturned suppleness she knew was there. Touching Carla’s shoulder gently, as if afraid of breaking it with her desire, she said, “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”
THREE
CARLA WOKE UP to the sound of the streetcar along College. The tiny apartment was hot already. She had slept late. She heard Tuyen still chipping away at her wooden lubaio next door, and she imagined Tuyen’s intense face, the woodchips in her hair, battling her demons, hammering them out on the wooden pole, amidst the ever-present coffee smell enveloping the room.
Carla’s eyes took some time to clear before she could see the clock. Ten A.M. Late. Shit. The thought alarmed her for the briefest second. The rest of the room came into its bare view. She heard the man downstairs rolling out the awning on the storefront. Her head felt woolly as if she’d been drinking—she remembered, yeah, but only one beer. Again the brief feeling of alarm. She was halfway off the futon, her head on the floor. This is how she woke up each morning, askew as if some great fight happened during her sleep. The awning downstairs squealed. The light from a clouded sun had already filled the apartment. She struggled to raise herself up, but a lassitude enveloped her. Not the lassitude of sleep but of consciousness. Slumping back onto the futon, she remembered yesterday.
Yesterday she’d come home exhausted, dragging her bike up the filthy stairs. She was streaming with sweat. She had ridden so fast, and she’d ridden, out of her way, all over the city, burning off a white light on her body. First through the downscale suburb of Etobicoke, which looked like the badlands of some alienated city—the low seemingly unfinished buildings, the stretches of uncreative streets, the arid after-winter look of everything, the down-in-the-heel, stranded feel of the people.
She was riding away from the Mimico Correctional Institute, where she’d gone to visit her brother, Jamal. Her visit with him had only heightened the mixture of anger and fright she’d felt over the last few weeks. She didn’t like this
