The End of East

by Jen Sookfong Lee

Genres: Asian American

Synopsis

In the tradition of Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, a moving portrait of three generations of family living in Vancouver's Chinatown

From Knopf Canada's New Face of Fiction program--launching grounds for Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees--comes this powerfully evocative novel.

At age eighteen, Seid Quan is the first in the Chan family to emigrate from China to Vancover in 1913. Paving the way for a wife and son, he is profoundly lonely, even as he joins the Chinatown community.

Weaving in and out of the past and the present, The End of East pieces together the spellbinding tale of Seid Quan's family: his wife Shew Lin, whose hope for her family are threatened by her own misguided actions; his son Pon Man, who struggles with obligation and desire; his daughter-in-law Siu Sang, who tries to be the caregiver everyone expects, even as she feels herself unraveling; and his granddaughter Sammy, who finds herself embroiled in a volatile mixture of seduction, grief, and duty.

An exquisite debut of isolation, immigration, romance, and insanity, The End of East sets family conflicts against the backdrop of Vancouver's Chinatown--a city within a city where dreams are shattered as quickly as they're built, and where history repeats itself through the generations. It is a bold and accomplished debut from one of Canada's brightest new literary stars.

Release date: April 29, 2008

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

one
stanley park
"It is time," my mother says as she pulls me from the cab, "to run that old-man smell out of my house."
As I haul my luggage out of the trunk, the smell of smouldering dust and gas fills the air, burning my nose and mouth. I follow my mother's rapidly retreating body around the side of the house to the backyard, wondering if she has finally snapped and set one my sisters ablaze.
In the driveway off the lane, she pokes angrily at a crackling fire with a metal garden rake; I catch my breath, holding my suitcase in front of me like a shield. Piles of my grandfather's old, woolly clothes line the backyard and spill into the gravel alley, waiting to be tossed into the gassy flames. A light rain begins to fall, generating puffs of smoke that blow into my face. I cough, but she doesn't seem to hear me above the snap and sizzle.
Waving the rake in my direction, she shouts, "Take your suitcase upstairs and go help your sister." As I turn back toward the house, she slaps down a stray spark that has landed in her permed, greying hair.
Once inside, I scan the front hall. The same rubber plant behind the door. My old slippers by the stairs. I breathe out, and cobwebs (suspiciously familiar) sway in the corners.
My mother steps through the door after me, her hands on her wide hips. "What's taking you so long? I thought I told you to run upstairs."
"I'm jet-lagged," I mutter, kicking off my shoes.
She inspects my face closely, staring at me through her thick glasses. "Jet-lagged? Montreal is only three hours ahead. Go. Penny is waiting." She spins me around with a little push and pokes me in the back with one sharp fingernail.
I trudge up the stairs to my grandfather's bedroom, where my sister is on her hands and knees, ripping out the nubby red carpet he brought over from his small apartment in Chinatown. Her long black hair drags on the sub-floor.
"Samantha," Penny says, pushing her bangs out of her eyes. "I feel like I've been waiting for you forever."
My hands shake. I try to tell myself that it's only the dampness in the air that's causing this deep bone shiver. But, really, I am simply afraid. When I was sitting in the airplane, the idea of coming home didn't seem so real or so final, and I could pretend that I wasn't passing over province after province. Standing here, in my grandfather's old room, with my mother's footsteps coming up quickly behind me, I know that I have irrevocably returned.
"We have to get rid of your grandfather's junk before the wedding. We'll need his bedroom for the tea ceremony," my mother says, pushing me aside to inspect the closet. She turns to Penny: "I don't know why you have to get married so fast. I'm too old to run around like this. Inconsiderate girl." She lets out a loud breath, punctuating her rapid, angry Chinese with a huff.
"Grandfather's been dead for ten years, Mother," Penny says quietly in English, as usual. "And we've been engaged for almost a month. You've had plenty of time."
She waves her hand. "Why do I think you'll understand? I've had other things to do, like look after all you girls by myself."
Penny looks at me with her round, seemingly innocent eyes and shrugs.
I walk to the window and open it even wider. A prickly wind starts to blow out the thickness of my grandfather's mysterious balms, the slight mouldiness of his tweed. Sharp chemical smoke wafts in. My mother walks briskly out of the room with as many of my grandfather's possessions as she can carry—old books, a grey knitted scarf, a faded wooden apple crate with its lid nailed shut. The fear of bad luck and death hangs over her like a storm cloud, and her face is set.
"Sammy," she snaps as she disappears down the hall, "clean out the dresser." Penny starts to follow, dragging the rolled-up carpet behind her. As she passes, she whispers to me, "Your hair looks nice." I put my hands on my bangs as she hurries away.
My grandfather left this room intending, perhaps, to come back one day. We kept it undisturbed, as we thought he wanted us to, but then he died and the door just stayed shut until my sisters and I forgot it was even there. I suppose my mother never thought his long life was as important, or as unlucky, as my father's. It took her only one week to burn everything of his.
Listlessly, I open my grandfather's dresser. In the top drawer is a cigarette tin stuffed with papers and photographs, all of them yellow around the edges. As I pull documents out one by one, I can hear his cough, the chime on the radio signalling the end of a hockey game, the click of his false teeth.
If my grandfather was ever young, I never knew. He was quiet, eating his daily bacon and eggs and reading newspapers in his brown upholstered chair. Now, I unearth a folded and yellowed piece of paper. His head tax certificate. A thin neck balancing an irregular head. Bulging eyes. The date stamped near the bottom tells me he is not quite eighteen.
I read quickly, my ears turned toward the back door and the sound of my mother returning. "Chan Seid Quan," it says, "whose photograph is attached hereto on June 27, 1913, arrived or landed at Vancouver, BC, on the Empress of India." His arrival is stamped and duly noted by G.L. Milne, Controller of Chinese Immigration.
The old cigarette tin, with its aging photos and cracked papers, suggests that my grandfather, in all his silence, never wanted to forget. In these pictures, his right leg is always shorter than his left. His bow tie is never straight. His face is bony. But what did it mean that he wanted to remember these things?
Perhaps my grandfather wanted to think of his flaws so he could say, "I am not perfect, forgive me."
I hear my mother and sister coming through the back door for more things to burn. I thrust the tin under the bed and feel something sharp cut my thumb—one of my grandfather's old straight razors, its blade protruding from its crumbling leather sleeve. I never saw his barbershop, never walked through Chinatown with him, meeting all the men he knew. He was eighty when I was born, his shop long since sold, his customers long since dead.
When I turn around, sucking the blood off my hand, it's only Penny standing in the doorway, brushing the dirt and ash off her baggy T-shirt. She looks up at me, meets my gaze and drops her eyes again.
"Find anything else to burn?" she asks, staring at the ends of her hair.
"Not much." I sit down on the bare mattress, facing the window. "Where is everyone?"
"Oh, you know how it is. Wendy is busy at work. Jackie can't leave the kids. Daisy is off on some business trip." Penny pulls an old stray sock from the closet. "It's not you they don't want to see." She gestures toward the kitchen, where I can hear my mother muttering to herself.
"Of course." I wipe my thumb on my jeans. "How's the wedding coming along?"
"You know, it's all just flowers and food and dresses." She puts a hand on her stomach. "Wait—that reminds me. I have to make a quick phone call to the hotel. You can finish all this by yourself, right?"
I nod and see the relief on her round face—the loosening of the muscles around her eyes and mouth. I wonder if I looked the same when I left Vancouver for Montreal six years ago, delirious with the kind of happiness only escape can bring. My hands begin to shake again, and this time they will not stop.
As she steps back into the hall, Penny turns her head. "Sammy? Thanks for coming back. Adam really wanted to get married quickly, and I knew I just couldn't live with her anymore. And someone has to."
We hear my mother walking toward us, the slap of her slippers on the floor. Penny looks suddenly afraid. I stare at her T-shirt, at the completely obscured belly inside it, and wonder what she has been hiding. She shifts on her wide feet.
"I have to go," she says quickly as she backs out of the room.
I haul the rest of Grandfather's clothes out to the fire. The smoke begins to form a dark grey layer over my face and arms as I throw hats and vests and belts into the flames. I look over at my mother, and she stands perfectly still, staring fixedly at the burning pile in front of her.
Later, after hiding the cigarette tin on the top shelf of my closet, I return to my grandfather's bedroom one more time. There is nothing left but a sub-floor, a bed and his empty dresser, yet his smell remains, embedded so deeply into the walls that nothing, not even the tornado-like energy of my deceptively small and shrinking mother, will ever erase it. I am looking at a beginning and an end, and a myriad of possibilities for the body in between.


For once, the curtains are open. I am six years old and lie on the floor in my favourite teal blue tracksuit as the sunlight pools around me, warming my closed eyelids. I see yellow, dots of white, the faint shadows of movement from the television. I open one eye and push my glasses back into place to see how Laura Ingalls Wilder, newly married, is faring on Little House on the Prairie.
"I need a haircut," my father announces, walking in the back door from the garden. He stands between me and the television. "Sammy, be a good girl and tell your grandfather to bring out his scissors."
I pull myself up and run into my grandfather's room, rubbing my eyes as I go. "Dad wants a haircut," I shout, just to make sure he can hear me. "Can I see your barber's pole?"
Grandfather smiles and stands up slowly from his dusty brocade chair. "Of course. You just sit here and watch while I get my things." He pulls an old wooden apple crate from the closet and unwraps the pole from its layers of newspapers.
The barber's pole seems to spin endlessly—red, then blue, then white and red again. I wonder if it somehow turns inward on itself, pulling its own striped skin into a hidden and perpetually hungry mouth. My father, passing by on his way to the basement, sniffs. "An optical illusion," he says.
"Why did you become a barber?" I look away from the pole just long enough to squint at my grandfather's lined, thin face. "I want to be an interior designer."
He turns off the pole then, and passes his hand over the scissors and combs in his haircutting kit. "After I married your grandmother, the man who used to own my shop wanted to retire and go back to China, so I took over, simple as that."
He picks up his barber's kit and, with one foot, shoves the apple crate back into his closet.
While I stand in the corner, half-hidden by our yellow fridge, my grandfather slowly lines the kitchen floor with a blue plastic tarp and arranges his small broom, scissors and shaver on the table. My father brings up the bar stool from the basement, and my grandfather, his hands trembling just slightly, goes to work, the silence between them an invisible, unbroken wall.
These haircuts were the only times I saw them touch, those brief moments when my grandfather awkwardly placed his hand on my father's shoulder for support, or when his long, delicate fingers brushed my father's neck clean—gently, carefully. As they both grew older and thinner (mirrors of each other, yet also somehow not), my grandfather would linger over my father's head, the expression on his face, as always, impassive.


I creep through the basement door as quietly as possible, hoping that my entrance won't wake my mother. As I walk toward the stairs, I can hear Penny snoring through her open bedroom door. I climb upward, passing the doilies my mother has draped over the banister, my body dull and heavy with wine and cigarettes. Such a long evening, I keep thinking, like a boring foreign movie with no subtitles. The whole time, even as I was sitting on a bar stool with my old friends from high school, nodding along to the beat (monotonous, cold), I could only think, Fuck you, Matt. I push open my bedroom door, throw my shoes on the floor beside my bed and put on my pyjamas. I just don't know how to finish things, that's all.
I stumble my way to the bathroom. My mother mumbles in her sleep. I turn on the light and look in the mirror. Red eyes, flat hair, makeup rubbed off a long time ago. I suck in my thin cheeks.
"What's up, Dollface?" I say to my reflection, realizing too late that I have just mimicked the way Matt used to greet me in the mornings. Our last day together, he placed his hands on either side of my face, holding my head just so, daring me, it seemed, to move. I did move, but only when he let me, after he kissed me and asked, "How about just one more time?"
I shake my head, rub the smokiness of the night out of my eyes. At least I have all this. I wave my hand around my mother's pink and peach bathroom, knock over the crocheted toilet paper doll, and laugh. Memories can go fuck themselves.
I walk through the hallway and look up at the family portrait hanging on the wall. My own younger face looks back at me from within the heavy wooden frame. Shadows play across the picture, making the faces of my parents and my four older sisters jump out—three—dimensional, gargoyle-like. My eyes pass over their faces until they come to my father, sitting in a tall leather chair, a rolled-up newspaper in his hands. I walk a little farther, and his eyes follow me, the irises moving with every step I make. I think I see him breathe.
I stop moving and close my eyes, hoping that this living, breathing version of my father will go away, disappear into the night. "Are you watching me?" I whisper. "I thought you had left us a long time ago." I open one eye. My father's photographed face, usually so benign, sneers.
I run forward and shut my bedroom door, feeling the resistance of the darkness without.


The next morning, I walk into the kitchen for breakfast and blink at the bright sunshine pouring in through the window. Outside, the back garden is tangled with weeds, but even so, through the tangled blackberry branches and dandelions, I can see the beginnings of returning chives, the buds on the branches of the neighbour's cherry tree.
Penny stands in the driveway, slowly digging at the huge pile of ash with a snow shovel. She places a hand on her belly, rubs it counter-clockwise. Still wearing my flannel pyjamas and slippers, I step outside and join her.
"We have to get rid of this somehow," she says, kicking at the ash with her shoe. "Are people even allowed to burn garbage in their yards anymore?"
"Of course not. But do you think Mom cares about bylaws?" We giggle, hands over our mouths just in case. "We'll put it in bags and drive it down to the dump. No one will ever know." I take the shovel from her and start working.
Penny stands to the side, watching me dig through the black, dusty pile and holding her sleeve up to her face. My pants are streaked with ash. I start to wonder what this looks like to the neighbours. My unwashed hair and skinny arms. My dirty pink pyjamas. The remains of my grandfather's life floating through the air and into our noses and mouths, no heavier than useless flakes of skin. I look up the unpaved alley at the decrepit garages and dangerously leaning fences. Nothing, it seems, ever really changes.
I can feel my sister behind me, unmoving. I turn.
"Are you going to help, or are you just going to stand there?"
"Don't be a bitch, Sammy. If you want to complain, then I have six years' worth to get off my chest."
I turn back to the garbage bags.
"You didn't have to come back," Penny says suddenly. "You could have stayed in school forever. Don't blame me for this."
I try to think of something to say, because she's right, but she's also wrong. Walking down Ste-Catherine or St-Denis, past the well-dressed Montrealers, I had become convinced that they could smell the stink of Vancouver's Chinatown—durian and rain-soaked cardboard boxes—leaking out of my pores. I had tried to let the city absorb me completely, envelop me in its own particular smells of poutine and river water, but it was no use. Leaving Vancouver was like leaving myself.
When I fled Montreal, everything was unfinished: my thesis, my feelings about my boyfriend, the unpainted walls in our apartment. I had run away once before, and I did it again, fear and duty propelling me back to the place I had once escaped. I kept telling myself that, after all, it was my turn to be the good daughter. What I didn't know was that my spot in the family had been ready for me for a long time, carved out like a cast made from my body.
My contact lenses itch; a tear drops off the end of my chin. I wonder if Penny can hear me sniffling. I take a deep breath and turn around, but she's gone. I squint through the ash toward the house, but all the doors and windows are closed tight against the sun.


Chinatown shows its ghosts on every surface. They appear and disappear in the shifting light, hiding and re-hiding in the uneven concrete. In the brightness of day, homeless people fight by the Carnegie Centre on the corner of Main and Hastings. The produce merchants pace up and down the sidewalks outside their shops with their rubber aprons and boxes of vegetables and shout, "Very fine bok choy! Only ninety-nine cents a pound!" And the few surviving old men without families congregate around stoops and doorways, smoking their cigarettes, saying hello to everyone who walks by. When I was a child, my mother walked me quickly past these men, and threw away the candy they gave me.
"Nothing but a tourist trap. A dumping ground for human trash," my father always said, his eyes darting left to right as we hurriedly made our way through the markets on Keefer and Pender. The inevitable smell of rotting produce and piss only angered him more. "These old buildings should be torn down. Probably full of rats; squatters, too." Even now, I am still faintly scared of the alleys, the sides of buildings with their mysterious downward steps that don't seem to go anywhere, the cloudy purple glass bricks embedded in the sidewalks that seem to hide yet reveal something both underground and sinister.
I avoid the roasted pigs hanging in the butchers' windows and the pungent smells rising from the ragged corners and, instead, propel myself westward, where the ocean salts the air, where I can pretend that those old Chinatown sidewalks aren't so deeply lodged in my body that they tilt my walk just so, shift my eyes left and right.
The photo from my grandfather's head tax certificate feels stuck to the inside of my head as I trudge along the seawall in Stanley Park (gulls and hot dogs, sand and flesh; here, this strip of sand and high-rise apartments makes me forget the stubby lawns and cracked driveways of our neighbourhood in East Vancouver, where cats mate behind garbage cans and old women try to grow squash in the thin, acidic soil). I imagine him walking beside me, a little off-balance, dressed, even in this unseasonable, early spring heat, in a well-pressed grey suit. He would ask me why I walk here, why I've grown so thin. Why I am unable to finish school or hold on to a boyfriend. Why I spend so much time away from my mother.
I imagine he understands.
At a concession on the beach at English Bay, I buy an orange Popsicle. My grandfather shakes his head.
"You'll get a headache."
I ignore him, but he follows me anyway, staying a few feet back so that he is out of sight. He says nothing, only treads softly behind me, his hands behind his back as he leans forward into the sea wind. I do not turn, knowing that once I look directly at him, his gaze will hold me until he is ready to let me go, until I've done exactly what he wants and he rests, allowing me to do the same.
I'm not ready for him, not ready to understand what he needs. I would rather rush ahead, let my body do the thinking so that I am only following the urges of my own flesh.
I stare ahead, feel a gust on my back.
That old man smell, I think. Not again. I turn to look.
arrival
Seid Quan knows he is dirty; he can smell the boat on his skin, the salty, rancid odour of cured fish, other men's hair oils, rotting wood. It is windy, and the water is nothingness: grey, bottomless, incomprehensible. The roof of his mouth is crackling dry, and his hands shake as he smoothes down the front of his only jacket. He wants his mother.
Only one thought runs through his head: I cannot imagine that this will be all right.
He looks out toward the city and sees the mountains, dark blue and hazy behind the wood frame buildings, which appear dirty and brown, larger manifestations of the smell on his skin. He fears that the stink will be mistaken for the smell of China, but he does not know how to say that there would be no smell if Canada never was, if the boats were not so full of desperation, men trading one kind of poverty for another. Mud pools around the wooden sidewalks, indistinguishable from horse dung or something worse. He hears the water crashing, changing shape as it hits the shore and the wooden docks. He wonders if the ocean (so close, so savage) will consume him and sweep everything else away. He shifts his small bag from one hand to the other.
He does not know where to start, which lineup he needs to be in, which direction to walk in to find the part of the city where all the Chinamen live. He had hoped someone would be able to guide him, but when he was on the boat, while they were talking and eating their watery soup and salt-cured, fatty pork, he found that everyone knew as little as he did. Like him, they had read the letters that other men from their villages sent home describing the beautiful land, the generosity of the white men, the fortunes they were making. And like him, they saw how much richer those men's wives and children became.
The first afternoon at sea, an older man shuffled past him on the deck, his thin hips only partially hidden by his oversized Western-style pants. He turned to Seid Quan and looked him over from head to shoes.
"You must be new."
Seid Quan nodded.
"I am the only one on this boat returning to Canada. My wife begged me to stay home—I must be crazy."
"Don't say that, Uncle."
The old man pointed a finger at Seid Quan's nose. "You'll go crazy too one day. And by then, it won't matter if you say it out loud or not."
That exchange, Seid Quan now reflects, was not very helpful.
He joins one of six lines, each with a white man at its head, sitting at a desk. He hopes he is in the right one.
No one on the boat had been worried. A golden mountain it couldn't be, of course, but there would be jobs, good paying jobs, jobs with which you could feed your whole family for a year with only two months' pay. And in a place with that kind of opportunity, the going could only be easy. However, Seid Quan still isn't so sure.
The line moves, and he pushes his suitcase two feet forward. He peers ahead and sees that a policeman is leading one of the men to a building on the left, a building with bars over its tiny windows. He hears someone say, "They are going to put us in that jailhouse for a couple of days, so they can fully check our papers. I didn't come here to be thrown in prison!"
Just before they disembarked, he told one of the other men he was worried that the stories couldn't be as good as they sounded. The man laughed and said, "Well, why do we keep coming, then?"
Seid Quan responded, "Do you see any rich men on this boat?"
The other man laughed again and, as he walked away, the loose soles of his worn-out shoes slapping against the floor, he turned around. "You can doubt all you want, brother, but remember how much money the people in your village saved to send you to this gold mountain. So, for their sake, it had better be as good as everyone says."
The white man peers at him over the rim of his glasses. "Your papers," he says, with his hand stretched out. Seid Quan swallows. It is his turn.


He is one of the lucky ones. He spends only one night in the jail cell at the dock and manages not to cry, as some of the other young men do. They beg the guards to let them out, snot and tears running down their faces for everyone to see. The guards turn away and pretend they don't understand. Really, thinks Seid Quan, what else could these young men possibly be asking for?
When Seid Quan is released, he follows the rest of the Chinese men who are leaving the docks from various boats. Some of them are coming back after having visited their families. Some are like him: gangly, open-mouthed, eyes squinting in the morning sun. Like a line of ants, they walk east. He sniffs the air, smells rotting fish and freshly cut wood.
One of the older men asks Seid Quan what his family name is. "Chan? Why, that's my name too! Good to meet you, little brother! You should come with me to our clan association. The men there, they'll help you find a place to sleep, maybe a job, too. It's always good to have family in a strange place, eh?"
At the clan association's offices, which turn out to be in the storage room behind a restaurant, the men quickly find Seid Quan a just-vacated room in a boarding house and arrange for him to begin English lessons at the church every morning for two hours, starting immediately. The next afternoon, he finds a note slipped under his door from the clan association president, telling him to report for work at Yip Tailors at five. There, he discovers that several businesses in Chinatown have hired him to clean their offices and front rooms after they close. They dare not hire white cleaning women, so it is Seid Quan who begins sweeping up the loose threads at the tailor's shop, cleaning windows at the laundries and washing out towels for the barber. Women's work, he thinks, looking down at his thin, chapped hands, but better than nothing.
He doesn't start until the evening, and spends most of his days walking through the city, although he stays away from the richer neighbourhoods. Stanley Park lies just beyond the tall houses and manicured gardens of the West End. He has heard that it is like a forest within the city, a place where trees the size of buildings dwarf even the brawniest white men. Seid Quan wants to breathe in the tang of the trees every morning and feel the moss with his hands, but he dares to walk only as far as the entrance, where he stands and stares at the white families strolling along the water. One morning, a photographer, who had set up his camera opposite a large tree stump, turns to him and asks, "Brother, do you need a picture to send home?" Seid Quan fishes in his pockets for some change, poses for the photo and scurries off.
A few weeks later, he walks along Pender Street, nodding at the laundrymen who call out to him from their front steps. "Lucky brother," one shouts. "My shop is like an oven, it's so hot, and here you are, walking in the fresh air without a care in the world. How about we trade places?" The frail, wood-sided tailor and laundry shops begin to disappear, and Seid Quan finds himself among tall brick and limestone buildings. He shrinks into his jacket and keeps his head down, avoiding the glances of the well-dressed white men walking around and toward him. Some, walking in pairs, whisper to each other, and Seid Quan can only guess what they are saying.
"Another one, did you see, Robert? I wonder if they simply cut off their fingers to grow more Chinamen and breed themselves that way."
He turns south to the Granville Bridge. He cannot keep his eyes off the teeming grey-tinged water below, swollen with floating logs. Somehow, he had expected the water here to be clean, reflective of the sky and the faces of people surrounding it, not this brown and grey mess, not much cleaner than the Pearl River, which Seid Quan had never liked to visit. All that shit smell, he remembers. Made my eyes water.
He steps off onto the shores of False Creek; even here, more Chinamen. Their shacks are built with scraps from the lumberyards and whatever else they can find—hammered-out biscuit tins, aluminium wrappers. Seid Quan notices the gaping holes in the walls, the small plots of limp vegetables growing in the muck. He feels the failure in the air, almost as thick as the smell of the human waste being used as manure. How can they keep on like this? Doing nothing, making the rest of us look so bad and lazy? An old man peeks through his open doorway and smiles when he sees Seid Quan.
"Young man! Come in and have some tea with me." He waves his skinny arms.
"Thank you, Uncle, but I need to go back to Chinatown very soon to start work."
"Ah, you young fellows, always working. I used to work hard too, laying down tracks for those godforsaken trains." He shakes his head. "Some other time, then. I'm always here."
Seid Quan, back on the bridge, sighs with relief.


That night, Seid Quan washes the floors in the front room of Mr. Yip's shop on Carrall Street. There are rat droppings everywhere, and some of the cloth used for winter suits has been chewed through, probably for nests. This close to the waterfront, the rats seem to outnumber the people. Seid Quan carefully kicks a trap into the corner, where the white businessmen who come in to get their shirts made cheaply won't see it. The high windows above the door are open for the fresh night air—clear and, as Seid Quan thinks, blue to the eye if it weren't invisible. The streets are mostly empty, and even the sounds of gambling that sometimes float out into the night—the tapping of mah-jong tiles, the shouts of men losing the money they have just made, whisky-rough singing—are absent. It's eerie tonight, Seid Quan thinks. I don't like being alone when it's like this.
He hears footsteps, several of them, running. He puts out his kerosene lamp and steps back into the shadows of the dark shop, behind a dressmaker's dummy.
A man is shouting in English, "There, over there! All these places are owned by them!"
Just as Seid Quan begins to understand what it is they're shouting, the front window of the shop shatters. Seid Quan ducks, covering his head and face wit