All That Matters by Wayson Choy

Author:Wayson Choy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780385257596
Publisher: Anchor Canada
Published: 1995-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

I told Jack O’Connor about Jenny Chong not being Catholic and having to leave the girls’ school.

“One of the sisters told her she was going to die and go to Hell.”

“I hear that all the time,” he said, brushing back his tightly combed hair. His broad forehead gleamed with hair oil; his blue eyes suddenly flashed with knowledge. “You have to be baptized by a priest and be a Catholic to get into Heaven.”

“Yeah?” The information irked me. “Well, you have to be Chinese to get into our Heaven.”

“That makes sense.”

Jack had been lifting weights in the sun, shirtless, trying to build up his tan like those billboard ads. He said he wanted to look like Charles Atlas to attract the girls at school. I myself was getting dark brown, not at all like the ads; Jack’s freckled back and chest mostly burned. But there was a hint of tan on his face, which made both Jung and Liang refer to him as the cowboy.

“My mom says all the nuns in her old school in Ireland used to warn her about going to Hell,” he said. “Especially when she married my father. He’s a sort-of Protestant. But my Father says, ‘Not to worry about Hell. Probably more fun there.’ ”

“What does your mother say?”

“She just pokes my father and tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ‘Frank,’ ” he mimicked, “ ‘now don’t be confusin’ the boy!’ But I looked up Hell in our Books of Knowledge. There was a fold-out copy of a painting of Hell. It looked pretty gruesome.”

He sucked on a blade of grass. Jack knew Jenny. Like everyone in the neighbourhood, the O’Connors shopped at the Chongs’ corner store. And the three of us had sat together a few times on our front porch when Jenny had visited with her mother. But Jack thought she looked too skinny to be a real girl. He said her legs were like toothpicks, and he didn’t like her Catholic school chopped-up haircut. That’s why he was happy he didn’t have to go to a church school. All the boys there had the same crewcut. Jack noticed people’s hair. He liked the way all the up-to-date girls had curls.

“She’s a chatterbox,” he said.

My eyes must have bugged out, but Jack didn’t notice.

“Hell must be confusing for Miss Bones,” he said. “Being Chinese and all.”

“Great deduction, Sherlock!”

“I don’t even think Chinese people go to Hell. There’s some Chinese nuns at St. Joseph’s.”

I thought of Mrs. Chong in a nun’s habit, with her fierce eyes and shrill voice, telling Jenny about Hell, the Chinese Hell that the foreman at Third Uncle’s warehouse had told me about to warn me away from playing with any of the bad boys in Chinatown. Third Uncle said it was a far worse place than any Christian Hell. He said that evildoers were boiled alive in huge vats until their fingernails and toenails melted and their eyes popped out, only no one ever dies. He told me about the Temple of Horrors he visited in Canton when he was a boy.

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