Photograph: Jonathan Desmond

Limits of the language

In the 1990s, when I was a boy in Vancouver, my grandpa would take me along to Chinatown to meet with his old friends. Quite a few of them were veterans of the Chinese Civil War. They would book community spaces to display their orchids and bonsai trees. They traded antique coins. Some would let me leaf through their albums of postage stamps.

My grandpa and I would often walk along Main Street, which runs through the neighbourhood and connects it to the Downtown Eastside. Thinking back, it seems like on every street corner could be heard the shrill voices of Cantonese opera, performed live in a nearby park or played from a cassette player.

Today, Chinatown is where you slurp oysters on the half-shell, fold your slice of pizza New York-style, eat high-end ramen, drink fancy cocktails, buy vegan deli meats and cheeses, and dance with sweaty millennials.

It was nearly six o’clock, twilight, when my companions Stefan and Anthony—who are both of Italian heritage and new to the city—and I left Oyster Express, a restaurant in a renovated nook of an otherwise rundown Edwardian building at the edge of Chinatown. Only half the shopfronts on the street were still open.

Ahead of us loomed the Sun Wah Centre—a sort of Chinatown community centre with art spaces and dimly lit retail stores—with gilded Chinese sign­age that spanned its brick front. Some of the mid-rises had pseudo-Chinese roofs and simplified Asian window lattice motifs; a few were narrow in the tong lau style of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei at the turn of the twentieth century.

When we came up to a dry market, Anthony and Stefan paused to hover over the stalls, which sprawled out into the sidewalk, displaying dried shrimp, scallops, squid, shiitake mushrooms, orange peels, wood ear, jujubes and goji berries.

A little farther down the block we stopped in front of a dimly lit restaurant at the bottom of an old narrow mid-rise. A single roasted duck hung on a hook by the window.

“People have got to start eating duck again,” Anthony said.

“Rabbits too,” Stefan said.

Suddenly, an old woman in a puffy neon pink jacket dashed into the street and hailed a police cruiser travelling in the opposite direction. By the time the police made the U-turn and came back up the block, an old man wearing a flat cap had caught up to the old woman and seized her arm.

Two officers, a blond man and a blond woman, got out of the cruiser. They seemed perfectly calm. When they finally came up to the old man and the old woman, they appeared comically tall.

The old woman pleaded in what sounded like Cantonese, but the old man cut her off. He took off his flat cap and he, too, began to plead in what sounded like Cantonese to the officers, who kept repeating in English that they could not understand.

I walked over and said, “I can help.”

The old man turned to me, held his flat cap against his belly, and spoke in an even-measured manner. I realized then that my knowledge of restaurant-bound Cantonese would not help.

Stefan said to Anthony, “I thought our pal spoke only Mandarin.”

At this point, I pulled my phone out and dialed my mom’s number. “Can you translate their words? I think they’re speaking Cantonese,” I said. I offered my phone to the old woman, but the old man quickly intercepted. He held my phone below his chin and, still looking at me, spoke in a mix of Cantonese and a language I could not decipher.

The female police officer smiled. “Trouble with the dialect? I’m learning Spanish and it’s hard with the regional variations,” she said to me. Her partner led the old woman farther up the block. She spoke slower to him now, but still in the dialect of Cantonese I couldn’t understand.

A couple minutes later, the old man handed back my phone. “That wasn’t Cantonese,” my mom said. “I couldn’t understand a word. He’s trying to speak Mandarin, but I don’t know where he learned it.”

“Should I tell him to speak in Cantonese?” I said.

“I think he’s from Taishan, or somewhere close, in Seiyap, like Uncle George’s parents,” my mom said. “Tell him to speak the dialect. I’ll be able to make out the gist.”

I passed the phone back over to the old man. Hoping he could approximate Cantonese into Seiyapese, I strung together a few Cantonese words I knew: “You from Taishan? Seiyap? My mom can understand you.” He closed his eyes and repeated his story in what I took to be Seiyapese into the phone.

A man watched us from the side entrance of a building on the opposite side of the street, a cigarette jutting out from his lower lip. He was squatting and had on a fishmonger’s apron. When we made eye contact, he got up and crossed the street. With the cigarette still dangling in his mouth, he said in English, “I help.”

“That would be wonderful,” the female police officer said.

The man in the fishmonger apron shook his head. He fingered quickly in the air to indicate that he would only translate the old man’s words for me, and that I would then relay them to the officers.

The female police officer stepped back away from the smoke of his cigarette. “Tell him, ‘thank you,’” she said to me.

The old man returned my phone. My mother told me that the old man told her that he and the old woman used to live on the same floor of a building. The old man lent the old woman a thousand bucks, but then she moved away and he never got his money back. He saw her a couple of times in the neighbourhood, but she always ran from him. Just now he saw her buying vegetables and she ran again. I recounted the story to the officers.

“So he grabbed her arm?” the male police officer said.

I hung up on my mom and asked in Mandarin for the man in the fishmonger apron to relay to the old man in Seiyapese what the police officer had said in English. When the old man began to tell his story again, the man in the fishmonger apron made no effort to translate and instead egged him on with questions of his own.

“I think he only meant to stop her from running away again,” I said.

“It sounds like this is a civil dispute,” the male police officer said. “We’re the police. We don’t deal with civil disputes.”

The female police officer said, “If he’s got a claim to make, he can take it up with the Civil Resolution Tribunal.”

I told this to the man in the fishmonger apron, who translated into Seiyapese for the old man and old woman. Just then the old woman launched a string of insults and curses at the old man. The old man scolded back and jabbed his finger in the air.

The male police officer said, “Do they understand where they have to go?”

The female police officer grinned. “They’ll have translators there,” she said.

As we were all making to leave, the old woman grabbed the male police officer’s hand, which was resting by his gun.

“No,” she said. “No, no.” Then she said in English, “He hit me—hit my heart.” She pointed to her chest.

The old man nodded. With a new cigarette in his mouth, the man in the fishmonger apron said in English, “Mm, yes—hit her heart.”

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