The Jade Peony

by Wayson Choy

  PRAISE FOR THE JADE PEONY:

  “An exquisite novel... the craftsmanship is glorious.”

  GLOBE AND MAIL

  “In China, [Choy] tells us, a figure called the ‘dark storyteller’ reveals ‘hidden things not seen in the glare of daylight.’ Working in a new country and a new context, Wayson Choy has deftly continued that tradition... a fine debut novel.”

  NEW YORK TIMES

  “One of the finest works of fiction yet to break the silence that surrounds so many... immigrant communities.”

  MACLEAN’S

  “A book that is richly peopled with eccentric and complex characters... calls to mind David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, with the conflicts of loyalty and love and the poisoned ethnic hatred.”

  ST. LOUIS POST DISPATCH

  “A true and touching insight into a largely unrecorded wartime world. It’s human and moving without being sentimental.... A genuine contribution to history as well as to fiction.”

  MARGARET DRABBLE

  “The Jade Peony is a sweet and funny novel and accomplishes so much of what we expect in good fiction. Certainly, the novel delights us with beautifully written prose, but it does more than that, too. It renders a complex and complete human world, which, by the end of 200-odd pages, we have learned to love.”

  BOSTON BOOK REVIEW

  “Insightful, wise and touching.”

  CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

  Copyright © 1995 by Wayson Choy

  First Digital Edition 2009

  09 10 11 12 13 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & Mclntyre

  An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choy, Wayson, 1939-

  The Jade Peony

  ISBN 978-1-55054-468-8 (Print edition)

  ISBN 978-1-926706-76-4 (Digital edition)

  I. Title.

  ps8555.h69J3 1995 c813’.54 C95-910538-7

  pr9199.3.C56j3 1995

  Editing by Saeko Usukawa

  Cover and text design by Jessica Sullivan

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  Contents

  Praise for The Jade Peony

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Epigraph

  Part One: Jook-Liang, Only Sister

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part Two: Jung-Sum, Second Brother

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Three: Sek-Lung, Third Brother

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Acknowledgements

  A Reading Group Guide for The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy

  To my aunts, Freda and Mary,

  and in memory of Toy and Lilly Choy.

  Author’s Note

  FOUR VOLUMES CONTAINED the key information that helped to ground my early memories of Vancouver’s Chinatown, for which I extend grateful acknowledgement: Paul Yee’s Saltwater City; Ken Adachi’s The Enemy That Never Was; the collected oral histories found in Opening Doors, Vancouver’s East End by Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter; and Kay J. Anderson’s Vancouver’s Chinatown.

  This book is a work of fiction. Therefore, any references to actual historical events and locales, and any references or resemblances to persons, mythic, living or dead, are used for the purposes of fiction and are entirely coincidental. I am also responsible for any rendering of Chinese phrases and complex kinship terms into English equivalents, and for the adoption of the different sets of rules for the spelling of Chinese words.

  I thank the UBC Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Malahat Review, in which portions of this book, in slightly different versions, first appeared.

  Tòhng Yàhn Gaai was what

  we once called

  where we lived: “China-People-

  Street.” Later, we mimicked

  Demon talk

  and wrote down only

  Wàh Fauh—“China-Town.”

  The difference

  is obvious: the people

  disappeared.

  —Wing Tek Lum, “Translations”

  one

  THE OLD MAN FIRST VISITED our house when I was five, in 1933. At that time, I had only two brothers to worry about. Kiam and Jung were then ten and seven years old. Sekky was not yet born, though he was on his way. Grandmother, or Poh-Poh, was going regularly to our family Tong Association Temple on Pender Street to pray for a boy.

  Decades later, our neighbour Mrs. Lim said that I kept insisting on another girl to balance things, but Stepmother told me that these things were in the hands of the gods.

  Stepmother was a young woman when she came to Canada, barely twenty and a dozen years younger than Father. She came with no education, with a village dialect as poor as she was. Girls were often left to fend for themselves in the streets, so she was lucky to have any family interested in her fate. Though my face was round like Father’s, I had her eyes and delicate mouth, her high forehead but not her high cheekbones.

  This slim woman, with her fine features and genteel posture, was a seven-year-old girl in war-torn China when bandits killed most of her family. Found hiding between two trunks of clothes, she was taken to a Mission House, then taken away again, reclaimed by the village clan, and eventually sold into Father’s Canton merchant family. For years they fed her, taught her house duties, and finally put her on a steamship to Canada. She was brought over to help take care of Poh-Poh and to keep Father appropriate wifely company; but soon the young woman became more a wife than a concubine to Father, more a stepdaughter than a house servant to Grandmother. And a few years later, I, Jook-Liang, was born to them. Now, in our rented house, she was big with another child.

  Poh-Poh, being one of the few elder women left in Vancouver, took pleasure in her status and became the arbitrator of the old ways. Poh-Poh insisted we simplify our kinship terms in Canada, so my mother became “Stepmother.” That is what the two boys always called her, for Kiam was the First Son of Father’s First Wife who had died mysteriously in China; and Jung, the Second Son, had been adopted into our family. What the sons called my mother, my mother became. The name “Stepmother” kept things simple, orderly, as Poh-Poh had determined. Father did not protest. Nor did the slim, pretty woman that was my mother seem to protest, though she must have cast a glance at the Old One and decided to bide her time. That was the order of things in China.

  “What will be, will be,” all the lao wah-kiu, the Chinatown old-timers, used to say to each other. “In Gold Mountain, simple is best.”

  There were, besides, false immigration stories to hide, secrets to be kept.

  Stepmother was sitting on a kitchen chair and helping me to dress my Raggedy Ann; I touched her protruding tummy, I wanted the new baby all to myself. The two boys were wavin
g toy swords around, swinging them in turn at three cutout hardboard nodding heads set up on the kitchen table. Whack! The game was to send the flat heads flying into the air to fall on a roll-out floor map of China. Whack! The game was Hong-Kong made and called ENEMIES OF FREE CHINA.

  One enemy head swooped up and clacked onto the linoleum floor, missing its target by three feet. Jung started to swear when Father looked up from his brush-writing in the other room. He could see everything we were doing in the kitchen. Poh-Poh sat on the other side of the table, enjoying Kiam and Jung’s new game. Bags of groceries sat on the kitchen counter ready for supper preparations.

  “I need a girl-baby to be my slave,” I insisted, remembering Poh-Poh’s stories of the time she herself once had a girl-helper in the dank, steamy kitchen of the cruel, rich Chin family in Old China. The Chins were refugees from Manchuria after the Japanese seized the territory. Not knowing any better, Poh-Poh treated the younger girl, her kitchen assistant, as unkindly as she herself had been treated; the women of the rich Chin family who “owned” Poh-Poh were used to wielding the whip and bamboo rods as freely on their fourteen servants as on the oxen and pigs.

  “Too much bad memory,” Poh-Poh said, and then, midway in its telling, would suddenly end a story of those old days. She would make a self-pitying face and complain how her arteries felt cramped with pain, how everything frustrated her, “Ahyaii, ho git-sum! How heart-cramp!” Though she was years younger than Poh-Poh, Mrs. Lim would shake her head in agreement, both of them clutching their left sides in common sympathy. It was a gesture I’d noticed in the Chinese Operas that Poh-Poh took me and my brothers to see in Canton Alley.

  Whack! Another head rolled onto the floor. Kiam swung his toy sword like an ancient warrior-king from the Chinese Opera. Jung preferred to use his sword like a bayonet first, and then, Whack!

  “Maybe Wong Bak—Old Wong—keep you company later, Liang-Liang,” Poh-Poh said, happily stepping over one of the enemies of Free China to get some chopsticks from the table drawer. She was proud of her warrior grandsons. “Kill more,” she commanded.

  Poh-Poh spoke her Sze-yup, Four County village dialect, to me and Jung, but not always to Kiam, the First Son. With him, she spoke Cantonese and a little Mandarin, which he was studying in the Mission Church basement. Whenever Stepmother was around, Poh-Poh used another but similar village dialect, in a more clipped fashion, as many adults do when they think you might be the village fool, too worthless or too young, or not from their district. The Old One had a wealth of dialects which thirty-five years of survival in China had taught her, and each dialect hinted at mixed shades of status and power, or the lack of both. Like many Chinatown old-timers, the lao wah-kiu, Poh-Poh could eloquently praise someone in one dialect and ruthlessly insult them in another.

  “An old mouth can drop honey or drop shit,” Mrs. Lim once commented, defeated by the acrobatics of Grandmother’s twist-punning tongue. The Old One roared with laughter and spat into the kitchen sink.

  Whack!

  Another head fell.

  Stepmother rubbed her forehead, as if it were driving her mad.

  “Wong Bak come for supper tonight,” Poh-Poh said, signalling Stepmother to start preparing the supper. The kitchen light caught something gleaming on the back of her old head; Poh-Poh had put on her jade hair ornament for Wong Bak’s visit tonight. He was an Old China friend of Grandmother’s; they were both now in their seventies.

  Wong Bak had been sent from the British Columbia Interior by a group of small-town Chinese in a place called Yale. He was too old to live a solitary existence any longer. Someone in our Tong Association gave Father’s name as a possible Vancouver contact, because Old Wong might know Poh-Poh, who had once lived in the same ancestral district village.

  Most Chinatown people were from the dense villages of southern Kwangtung province, a territory racked by cycles of famine and drought. When the call for railroad workers came from labour contract brokers in Canada in the 1880s, every man who was able and capable left his farm and village to be indentured for dangerous work in the mountain ranges of the Rockies. There had also been rumours of gold in the rivers that poured down those mountain cliffs, gold that could make a man and his family wealthy overnight.

  “Go to Gold Mountain,” they told one another, promising to send wages home, to return rich or die. Thousands came in the decades before 1923, when on July 1st the Dominion of Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and shut down all ordinary bachelor-man traffic between Canada and China, shut off any women from arriving, and divided families. Poverty-stricken bachelor-men were left alone in Gold Mountain, with only a few dollars left to send back to China every month, and never enough dollars to buy passage home. Dozens went mad; many killed themselves. The Chinatown Chinese call July 1st, the day celebrating the birth of Canada, the Day of Shame.

  Some, like Old Wong, during all their hard time in British Columbia, still hoped to return to China if they could somehow win the numbers lottery or raise enough money from gambling. But now there was the growing war with the Japanese, more civil strife between the Communists and the Nationalists, and even more bitter starvation. Hearing all this, Poh-Poh gripped her left side, just below her heart, and said she only wanted her bones shipped back.

  Father always editorialized in one of the news sheets of those Depression years how much the Chinese in Vancouver must help the Chinese. Because, he wrote, “No one else will.”

  In the city dump on False Creek Flats, living in makeshift huts, thirty-two Old China bachelor-men tried to shelter themselves; dozens more were dying of neglect in the overcrowded rooms of Pender Street. There were no Depression jobs for such men. They had been deserted by the railroad companies and betrayed by the many labour contractors who had gone back to China, wealthy and forgetful. There was a local Vancouver by-law against begging for food, a federal law against stealing food, but no law in any court against starving to death for lack of food. The few churches that served the Chinatown area were running out of funds. Soup kitchens could no longer safely manage the numbers lining up for nourishment, fighting each other. China men were shoved aside, threatened, forgotten.

  During the early mornings, in the 1920s and ’30s, nuns came out regularly from St. Paul’s Mission to help clean and take the bodies away. In the crowded rooming houses of Chinatown, until morning came, living men slept in cots and on floors beside dead men.

  Could we help out with Wong Bak? Perhaps a meal now and then, a few visits with the family...? asked the officer from the Tong Association. It turned out that Poh-Poh indeed knew Wong Bak when they were in China, more than thirty years ago.

  “Old-timers know all the old-timers,” Third Uncle Lew said, taking inventory of his warehouse stock with an abacus. “Why not? The same bunch came over from the same damn districts,” he laughed. “We all pea-pod China men!”

  And now, tonight, Wong Bak was coming for dinner.

  I looked up past Stepmother’s swelling stomach, at the kitchen counter beside the sink with the pots and pans. Father had splurged on groceries: a bare long-necked chicken’s head, freshly killed, hung out of the bag he had carried home. Poh-Poh also unwrapped a fresh fish, its eyes still shiny. Once it was cooked, Kiam and Jung would fight over who would get to suck on the hard-as-marble calcified fish eyes. I wanted the chicken feet. I wondered which part Wong Bak would want.

  Father was worried about our meeting him for the first time. Wong Bak, I sensed from Father’s overpreparation and nervousness, was indeed not an ordinary human being. He was an elder, so every respect must be paid to him, and especially as he knew the Old One herself. Grandmother must not lose face; we must not fail in our hospitality. Excellent behaviour on the part of my two brothers and me would signal our family respect and honour for the old ways.

  Father looked at his watch and put down his writing brush.

  “Let us talk a moment,” he said to my brothers, and they left their game and stood before him. He told Kiam and Jung that
Wong Bak might appear “very strange,” especially to me, as I was so young, and a girl, and therefore might be more easily frightened.

  “Frightened?” Stepmother said.

  My ears perked up.

  Father answered that the boys, being boys, would not be as easily scared about you-know-what. He spoke in code to Stepmother but whispered details to Kiam first, then Jung, whose eyes widened. After the whispering, Father delivered to the three of us a stern lecture about respect and we must use the formal term Sin-saang, Venerable Sir, as if Wong Bak were a “teacher” to be highly respected, as much as the Old Buddha or the Empress of China.

  Respect meant you dared not laugh at someone because they were “different”; you did not ask stupid questions or stare rudely. You pretended everything was normal. That was respect. Father tried to simplify things for my five-year-old brain. Respect was what I gave my Raggedy Ann doll. I knew respect.

  “I don’t want you boys to stare at Wong Sin-saang’s face,” Father warned, which I thought was odd. Old people’s faces were all the same to me, wrinkled and craggy. “Wong Sinsaang’s had a very tough life.”

  “We know how to behave,” First Brother Kiam insisted, waving the toy sword over the buck-toothed “WARLORD” nodding on the edge of the kitchen table. Jung poked his sword, bayonet-fashion, and two other heads nodded away, waiting for decapitation.

  Third Uncle Lew had given Kiam the ENEMIES OF FREE CHINA game for his tenth birthday. Third Uncle had imported some samples from Hong Kong with the idea of selling them in Chinatown. Kiam read the game instructions written in English: “USE SWORD TO SMACK HEAD. COUNT POINTS. MOVE VICTORIOUS CHINESE AHEAD SAME NUMBER.”

  The Warlord was one of three Enemy-of-China “heads.” The other two were a Communist and a Japanese soldier named Tojo. All three had ugly yellow faces, squashed noses and impossible buck teeth. It was a propaganda toy to encourage overseas Chinese fund-raising for Free China.

  Watching Kiam and Jung jump up and down was far better than having them force me to play dumb games like Tarzan and Jane and Cheetah. Kiam had seen the picture Tarzan three times. Kiam got to be Tarzan; Jung, Cheetah; and I got to be Jane doing nothing. I embraced my Raggedy Ann and watched another swing of Jung’s sword Whack! take off Tojo’s head. Father said that Tojo, a Japanese, was in command of the plot to enslave China for the Japanese.