When We Win

By the time Ah-mah finished consulting the I-Ching, I was worried that we might be running late. But she had insisted her rites be done before we could drive her cousin to the airport. So, I fetched the mail—two bills and a letter—as she jotted down her numbers for the lottery.

The letter was one those blue postal aerogrammes confusing to open. I made a wrong slit and had to tape the pieces together. From the sprawling English and the precise Chinese characters, my mother and I knew who wrote it and what it would probably say.

“He doesn’t give up, does he?”

“He’s crazy. Crazy.” my mother said. “Throw the letter away.”

I thought better of it, though, and put the letter in her purse, right beside the list of lottery numbers, as she struggled into her winter coat. I bundled up for the mid-February chill and ushered her out the door.

Even after thirty Canadian winters, Ah-mah could not adapt to the cold and snow. She muttered a curse and gripped the railing tightly as she walked down the verandah stairs. Seven years ago, she had slipped and bruised her left side badly, and she never forgot that mishap. I helped her into the car.

“It’s an old car. It takes a while to warm up,” I told her when she fretted impatiently. As a matter of fact, it was an adventure starting up the old Chev this month.

“When I win the lottery,” she assured me, “I will buy you a new car. The biggest and the best.” She rummaged through her purse and held up the numbers written on lucky red paper, the numbers she had conjured and cajoled out of the I-Ching. “Tomorrow is Chinese New Year. The I-Ching promises good fortune. We are going to be rich.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said. She caught my perfidious tone and scowled. “You’re wasting your old age pension money,” I added.

“With the winnings, we can fix up the house. The verandah is rotting, and the roof leaks. But I will buy you a new car first,” she assured me. “Maybe then you will come home more often.”

“The whole house needs an overhaul,” I told her. Whenever I visited my mother, I wondered how she could stand the creaking floor, the wobbly verandah steps, the messy kitchen, and a host of other interior problems. I was too far away at university most of the time to effect major repairs.

The house was over sixty years old, and my mother owned it for the last twenty. When my father was alive, he had only put in band-aid repairs. He had neglected the house because it wasn’t our real home.

“Our home is in China,” he had often declared. “A mansion with a large courtyard and garden, and thick, high walls to keep out robbers and burglars. I had it built on prime land with the money I earned in Canada, the first time I went back to the village before the War. If it weren’t for the Communists, we’d be there now. This shelter is good enough. Why waste good money.”

Although Ah-Bah counselled his off-the-boat employees about good money management, he had gambled a lot of his own earnings at mah-jong and lost his shares in the restaurant through some unwise ventures, and now the only thing the family had left was this house, bought at my mother’s insistence and registered in her name.

Ah-mah looked at the letter from Hong Kong and began reading it. According to my mother, Wah Feng, our intrepid letter writer, had a reputation for eccentricities which frequently embarrassed his family. He was left to his own devices, and he learned to read and write in English. Ten years ago, he took it upon himself to pester his overseas relatives with his letter writing skills. Wah Feng was fifty-three then.

“How much does he want this time?”

“Only five hundred thousand.”

“Hong Kong or Canadian dollars?” I asked glibly.

Ah-mah translated the Chinese part for me: “Illustrious relative, please help a poor distant cousin. You who have so much in gum san can surely spare a pittance of five hundred thousand yuan. The business I wish to buy already prospers, and your loan will secure it. Surely this sum is nothing to you who walked on streets paved with gold.”

“Maybe we should send him a lottery ticket,” I said.

“It’s all your dead father’s fault,” Ah-mah said, stuffing the letter into her purse. “If he hadn’t encouraged him, this distant idiot would not be sending up these letters by the month.”

“Ah-Bah only sent him five dollars. And that was years ago.”

And ever since then, the letters came like clockwork, at least a letter every two months. The theme was always the same: money for some harebrained scheme. Once, there were four separate occasions to which he invited us to his weddings and requested outrageous sums as wedding gifts. Another time, he wanted to buy out the shareholders of the Communist bank in Hong Kong. Dear cousin, I need half a million for this or a paltry hundred thousand for that. Wah Feng never asked for anything less than fifty thousand, and recently in American funds yet. The five dollars my father had sent him must have been used up a long time ago on aerogrammes alone, but the man persists.

I wondered whether his other immigrant “cousins and relatives” took pity on Wah Feng and sent him a few dollars.

“Who would send him money? Who would be so foolish?”

We picked up my mother’s cousin, Eddie Leung, and started for the airport. Eddie was some years younger than my mother, and he come over to Canada eighteen years ago.

Eddie had to leave his wife and son in Hong Kong because at that time the Ministry of Immigration did not permit the influx of family members to gum san, the golden mountain. Anyway, Eddie took a terrible risk: he bought a cousin of a cousin’s immigration papers—an act the government still doesn’t approve of, but a popular method for many desperate Hong Kong Chinese at the time. Those first few years, he was always tense and nervous, and more so when a policeman or a RCMP constable dropped by. In one of those periodic Canadian amnesties on illegal immigration, Eddie made a clean breast of his illicit status and was granted exemption.

For a while, he worked first as a dishwasher and later as a waiter in my father’s restaurant. He sent money back to Hong Kong to support his family and other relatives, and he was ambitious. When his command of English improved, he soon drifted to other jobs. He dabbled in the stock market without any knowledge and received a tidy windfall. When he got his citizenship, he Canadianized his Chinese name.

Curiously, though, he never applied for permission to bring his whole family over as other immigrants had. With the money he sent back, his wife bought some properties and other holdings. His family was now relatively well off by Hong Kong standards.

“I have saved enough money to live like a mandarin,” he boasted in Chinese. “You know, it was such a gamble then to immigrate to gum san. What if something had gone wrong?” Then he switched to English, thickly accented: “I made it! Canada’s been damn good to me!”

Eddie was going back to his family. And he wasn’t going to come back, so he said. “No more winters, no more fries and hamburgers,” he joked. I doubted that for the years in Canada, Eddie had eaten more than a dozen burgers.

Eddie Leung was more than a former employee, more than a distant cousin from the old country; he was a conscientious, good friend to my mother especially after the death of my father. He was the person in Thibeault Falls whom Ah-mah would call when she needed help, like fixing a ceiling light or calling the plumber, or driving her to a grocery store and back. He would get things done, quickly and willingly. He had said once he was returning the long favor that my father did by hiring him when he was just one of the many Chinese young men going from town to town looking for work. (As the only son, I was supposed to look after my widowed mother, but I was some four hundred miles away at university and could only come home on long weekends and holidays.)

Ah-mah and I felt duty-bound to drive him to the airport and see him off. Surprisingly, we made it to the airport with time to spare. When I told Ah-mah that, she admonished me for rushing her earlier.

“Good. We will go to the lottery booth first. The I-Ching says we have to buy the tickets before three o’clock.” Already, she clutched the slip of numbers in her hand.

From the sound of her voice, I knew we would be buying a bundle of tickets. She had just cashed in her pension cheque a few days ago.

When we reached the airport lottery booth, it was closed. Well, not really. The makeshift sign said it all: MACHINE BROKE DOWN. SORRY. For a moment, she just stood in front of the booth, staring blankly.

“They can’t do that! This week’s jackpot is five million dollars,” she blurted out to all to hear.

“Look, we’ll get the tickets after Eddie’s plane leaves, okay?”

Crushed to the core, she shook her head. “This has happened before, you know. Before the war, in Macao. I had the exact numbers, and they closed the betting just as I stepped in the door.” To this day, she is still convinced that the betting shop knew she had the winning numbers and purposely stopped her cold.

I had heard Ah-mah’s hard luck story about the Macao lottery many times. Her one chance to win big in the Pigeon Lottery, an oriental version of pick-your-six numbers. Ever since, she had tried to redress that loss. I endured another rendition of that tale as we walked away from the booth.

Ah-mah, Eddie and I went to the Departure section of the air terminal. Eddie had on an expensive three-piece suit and sported a fashionable wristwatch. He was far from the wretched immigrant who came to gum san with only the clothes on his back. Like the Chinese sojourners who had come to build the Canadian railway and to make their meagre fortunes, Eddie could now return home, head high, to a family he had not seen in eighteen years. He would perpetuate the myth that Canada, gum san, the gold mountain, had streets paved with gold. He would lie instead of telling the truth and thus spoiling their beliefs, dreams, and illusions.

“You should come back to Hong Kong,” he said to my mother. “Don’t you miss the old country?”

“I am over seventy-years old,” Ah-mah said. “The bones of my dead husband lie here.”

“There aren’t enough lotteries there,” I interjected, and received a scowl from my mother.

“Sure there—” Eddie caught on, laughed, exchanged a few more pleasantries and goodbyes, shook our hands heartily and went to board the plane.

Eddie didn’t hear it, but Ah-mah predicted: “He will come back. He doesn’t realize how much better off he is here.”

“You’re always complaining about our lives in Canada. Always longing for the old country. Are we better off?”

“We have better luck,” she replied enigmatically.

She showed me her list of numbers. So, we stopped at the nearest shopping mall. She bought the gamut of scratch-and-win dreams, the million dollars, the half-million, the hundred thousand, and the pick-your-six.

“Remember: eight, eighteen, thirty-three, twenty-four, thirteen, forty.”

I dutifully ticked off the lucky numbers for her. She handed the vendor some money, looked the man in the eye and said in Chinese: “When are you going to let me win?” as if the man had the power to dispense or withhold luck.

The vendor smiled blandly, took her money and said: “Thank you. Good luck!”

As I drove home, Ah-mah examined the lottery tickets carefully as if each ticket would suddenly blossom into folds and folds of money. She placed the tickets neatly in her purse and held on tightly. Sometimes I worry about her trust in the I-Ching.

One time I had the impudence to rebuke her faith in the toss of some joss sticks. “The I-Ching can’t predict. Look at all the times it was wrong. When did it ever come true?”

But my mother only remembered the very, very few times when her numbers came, but on very small winnings. The countless losses never dampened her spirit.

My mother looked at me with sadness. “You have become a fan gwei, a white devil, my son. You lack proper respect for your parents. You understand so little of the Chinese way. When the Communists overran our home in China and when we fled to Hong Kong, we had nothing, no hope. None. It seemed we were destined to starve and die on the streets. The I-Ching said we would find deliverance. We are here, aren’t we?”

Since that time, I, as a dutiful Chinese son, would try to hold my tongue when she consulted her fortune, and when she wanted her lottery tickets. It was hard to keep silent and I failed often.

On Thursday, Ahmah won five numbers in the pick-your-six numbers—a veritable treasure of three thousand dollars. The very next day, another Wah Feng aerogramme arrived.

“Dear cousin, could you spare a million dollars—in American funds?”