EXCERPT

WHEN I HEAR the sea wind blowing through the streets of the city in the morning, I can still feel my father and the Old One – together – lifting me up to stand on the railing of a swaying deck; still feel the steady weight of one of Father’s arms around my chest and of Poh-Poh’s thickly jacketed arm locked safely around my legs. I was three then, in 1926, but I can still hear their shouting, “Kiam-Kim, hai-laa Gim San!”, their thin voices full of relief and excitement, “Kiam-Kim, look at Gold Mountain!”

I remember the taste of salt air, seeing the rising line of the mountain peaks, of feeling my senses awakened by the ship’s roll and pitch; and my sudden, panicked pressing of a palm over each small ear to dim the assault of squawking gulls, the fragments of living sky that swirled and plunged into the waste being discharged from the ship’s belly.

The world grew more immense and even stranger than I could have ever imagined; I fell back and curled deep into Poh-Poh’s jacket to hide my head. Father swiftly reached out and put me down to stand up by myself. Poh-Poh did not stop him.

“We are near Gold Mountain,” Father said, his Toishan words shouting above other excited voices. He bent forward, his two hands clutched the top rail, holding his place against a crowd of others, and he looked ready for anything. I put my two small hands on the bottom rail, and threw my three-year-old head back, and tried to look as bold and as unafraid as Father. Poh-Poh looked behind her, through her nearly seven decades of life, as if she knew then what would be true: she would journey only one way, and never return. Shakily, she put one wrinkled hand on my shoulder and with the other hand she gripped the rail. The Old One looked ahead, as Father and I did, and when I turned to her to point out the swooping gulls, her eyes were filled with tears.

The ship pushed ahead, blowing its horn. My own eyes were stinging, too, from the blasts of sea wind as the prow rose and fell, and heaved into a narrow inlet. Now I could make out ahead of us the shadow of landing docks and the skyline of Vancouver.

Along that curving shoreline, a long train pulled countless freight cars and snaked its way into the city, as if it were racing us to the docks. Its engine discharged white clouds that rose and disappeared against the snow-topped mountain peaks.

“See?” Father said, kneeling down to shout above the squawking gulls and chaotic machinery cranking away in the ship’s belly. “I told you there would be trains.”

I laughed and jumped about until Poh-Poh firmly gripped my shoulder to stand still. The wind was chilly. The Old One bent down to lift my coat collar around my ears.

“Listen, Kiam-Kim,” Father said. “Can you make out the train whistle?”

I listened.

The pitched sound reached my ears. Then, as if in its turn, the ship gave a resounding blast. The gulls rose in a cloud. In the distance, the whistle began again, as if the ship and train were talking to each other, each racing toward the same point of land. People behind us applauded. Father raised his hand to shield his eyes against a surge of mountain wind.

“We’re here, Mother,” Father said to Poh-Poh.

“We’re here,” I said to them both.

Poh-Poh gripped me tighter.

The train, whistling, disappeared behind a shoreline of low buildings, but I could still see the great puffs of smoke. Caught between the walls of warehouse buildings, the train’s whistling echoed even louder.

“The cries of a dragon,” Poh-Poh said to me.