I Can Use Chopsticks

I can use chopsticks. I’ve always been able to. I own sets of them, most of them from South Korea, bought on a trip while I was pregnant with my son. I also have Japanese hashi, a gift from a dear friend who moved to Japan and then thought better of it. They aren’t a big deal to me, and being able to use them, especially as a teenager in Trinidad, didn’t strike me as impressive. Looking back, I realize that it was, and how it came to be is even more so.

This is the story of Mr. Yee. It is also the story of Trinidad, inasmuch as the country’s soul resides in everyone who lives there.

According to family lore, my grandfather’s father was born on an immigrant sailing vessel between Trinidad and Jamaica. We no longer know his real name, but he was called George for most of his life. No one has been able to confirm the veracity of the narrative of George’s birth, but this is the story that is told. George was the child of Chinese immigrants who came to the Caribbean region, passed through Jamaica, and finally landed in Trinidad. George would become a delivery truck driver and marry a tall, dark-skinned woman named Syvrenea, who would later be called Phillipa. Syvrenea’s ancestral line is convoluted and irrelevant to this story, except that his marriage to a large (bigger than he was, at least) black woman said something about great-grandfather George. It is something unspoken, something survivalist and universalist that has yet to be driven from the family line.

There is much to be said about "racial" mixing in the Caribbean region and the way that some groups have leveraged purity as a form of social currency. For now, though, I’d like to think that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, my great-grandparents were cresting the arc that has bent toward inclusion.

So, my grandfather, Errol, was Syverenea’s son. By the time I was born, my family was four generations away from being phenotypically Chinese. Other branches of the family, having married the descendants of Chinese immigrants, had retained more of the stereotypical Asian features. My grandfather’s line, however, merely retained the name.

And I suppose this is why I find the character of Mr. Yee so remarkable and his story so compelling. Mr. Yee was the proprietor of the neighborhood grocery. As a child, he was just another adult character in the landscape of my reality. His store had about four or five aisles. It was air-conditioned. His wife and elder sons worked the register. The aisles faced the road. I can remember the long freezer that ran the length of the store. I remember that dry goods, saltfish in particular, were kept in open top wooden crates. I remember these boxes being both on the shelves to the left of the entrance and on a counter to the right of the register. Perhaps I don’t remember correctly, perhaps they were moved. There was a door to the right of the register that led to an upstairs room that could have been an office. I was too young at the time to think it important enough to commit to memory. I also have a vague memory of a kind of meat counter on the far right of the square room. This too, might be a hallucination.

What I remember clearly is Mrs. Yee. She was younger than her husband, or perhaps his bad relationship with the sun exacerbated the gap of years between them. Like Syvrenea, she was taller than her husband. She was also kind of round, not fat or plump, just full. Her face, especially, was round and always smiled gently. Most of all, though, she was brown. I don’t say this to raise the issue of her ancestry, though one could speculate from the shape of her face and the texture of her hair in the context of the Caribbean milieu, that she too had some kind of East Asian ancestry. At that historical moment in Trinidad, it probably meant she was the child of a Chinese and African pair.

Her brownness, though, was not so much an indication of race but of health. Mrs. Yee glowed. She was lit from the inside. The skin on her face and arms was smooth. At my height then, I was always closest to her arms, leaning on the flimsy counter edge of the grocery conveyor belt. So, I remember very vividly the sombré of brown from wrist to shoulder and how the soft mound at the halfway point would always be tanned a darker shade and then fade into the crease on the inside of her elbow. At its darkest, her skin was the color of rich cocoa, and at the lightest, almost beige. One would think that such a spectrum on a single person might be terrible to look at, but it was perfect on her. Mrs. Yee, with her brown, brown skin and short-sleeved dresses, would always look down at me with a kind of elegant contentment. She made me feel safe. So, with the dignified Mrs. Yee at the register, Yee’s was not a “corner store” or a “parlour.” Yee’s was a Supermarket, and the tall sign in the five-car parking lot said as much. One could turn off the Diego Martin Main Road and into the lot. Years later, some mercenary entrepreneur would make Yee’s into a rum shop and later a failing fast-food outlet.

The Yees and their five sons lived within walking distance from the store, about midway between the business and my own home. There were two routes from my house to the grocery. One went along a busy thoroughfare, often used as a shortcut by motorists avoiding traffic, and onto a main road. The other had to be traveled on foot, across a small playing field known as the “savannah,” up a short street, and then onto the main road. If I continued up the short street from the savannah instead of turning off, I would come to the Yees' home. This was a trek I did not make alone until I was a teenager.

Seeing where the Yees lived was perhaps my first encounter with wealth. Not exactly riches but the outward expression of financial health. Unlike many of the houses in the neighborhood, the Yees had a very tall wall topped with a row of clay tiles, and a high electronic gate. Looking through the ornately wound wrought iron of that gate, one could see down the driveway to the back wall, and the side of their two-story house. It was a picture of order. The lawn was cut, there were groomed trees, there was a hose neatly rolled up to the side of the driveway. There was a white-painted stone birdbath and a trimmed hedge with large red flowers.

Somehow though, it was the grass that made them different in my mind. This wasn’t the ordinary grass that was permitted to grow helter-skelter in front of the other homes, including mine. This was lawn; lawn that had been paid for. It was lawn like my grandfather tended around his house on the hill. In the early days, my grandparents were plagued with water issues. Low pressure in the pipes made the supply to their home uncertain. Nonetheless, risking dry pipes and showering under a drip, my grandfather could be found merrily watering the garden that included the lawn and oversized hanging plants that could drink as much as ten men. I never ventured into the Yee’s home and didn’t quite understand the differences between us until much later. When Mr. Yee first came to my house, he was just the man from the grocery store.

I remember it being a weekday afternoon. It may have been evening. I was still in some part of my primary school uniform when I saw the car pull up at the end of my driveway. Little Mr. Yee came out carrying a plastic bag tied at the top like they do in Chinese restaurants. He spoke to my mother briefly, and when she returned, she ushered us into the kitchen. In the bag was a take-away bowl of wonton soup, two ceramic bowls that I now know are qinghua and two sets of chopsticks, the good kind.

Mr. Yee had brought us dinner. But he had also brought us a part of our heritage that he believed we may have been missing out on.

The death of our father in 1985 made my sister and I minor celebrities in Trinidad. Death by shooting in a public place was not common. The whole country knew of the three children (my cousin was there) in the car who had witnessed the crime. They had followed the case in the newspapers. They had grieved with us. Mr. Yee no doubt knew that our father was dead. He may have suspected that our link to China would be severed as a result. He couldn’t be certain but felt compelled to make his interaction with us culturally significant.

The next time we saw him, he asked how the chopstick practice was going. I don’t recall if he ever actually showed me how to use them, but keeping track was his way of being Chinese in Trinidad. And I think this is what it means to be Trinidadian. It is the delicate balance of instincts. First, the duty to preserve the far-away place by giving a black woman a wonton soup bowl set so that her children could see some part of their heritage in action. Second, the sense of belonging to the island that made such an impulse entirely normal and without offense.

Sometime later, the Yee family also gave us a dog. The Pomeranian/Pekinese mix that was given to me as an infant, Dinkus, had met her fate under the rear wheel of my mother’s Mitsubishi Lancer. When Mr. Yee’s dog had puppies, my sister and I were allowed to choose one. She was black and white, and we called her Brittaya. May God forgive us for how wickedly we named those defenseless creatures.

By the time I was 8, I could use chopsticks comfortably. None of my primary school friends could, even the one that was Chinese. It’s a skill I took into my adulthood, not realizing it was a skill that others learned much later in life. Nothing about my physical appearance screams Chinese heritage. My family gave me a Chinese name, but it was Mr. Yee who reminded me of what it could mean.