The Jade Peony

by Wayson Choy

  “Adventurous times, my dear Tinker,” he wrote in one letter, using a pet name for Miss Doyle, “but we’ll pull through.”

  At night, in bed, I prayed to Grandmama to keep John Willard Henry safe from the bombs. Some nights I dreamed of a tall man wearing a fireman’s hat, standing with the Old One, safely. I would learn to be as brave as Miss Doyle’s wonderful brother. Sometimes the gang would play rescue war games, but it never seemed as much fun as sky diving, blowing apart cities and torpedoing ships.

  We pleased Miss Doyle when we were brave; that is, when we raised our hands to answer her questions, or ventured to speak aloud. Most of us knew the humiliation and the mockery—“Me wan’nee fly lice! Lot-see lice!”—the tittering, brought on by our immigrant accents. On streetcars and in shops where only English was spoken, people ignored you or pretended they didn’t hear you or, worse, shouted back, “WHAT? WHAT’S THAT YOU SAY? CAN’T YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!?!”

  Miss Doyle never ignored us, never tittered; she stood strictly at attention as if to compliment our valiant efforts when we spoke or read out loud, daring anyone to mock us.

  We were brave, she said, just as the King and Queen, their framed portraits hanging separately above us, encouraged us to be. Miss Doyle pinned up on the cork board by the back cloakroom a newspaper picture of King George and his Queen talking to a group of British people; they were all standing in front of a bombed-out building as if it were an ordinary day for a chat.

  “Their Majesties always enunciate perfectly,” Miss Doyle informed us, loudly.

  Day after day, we absorbed her enunciated syllables, the syllables of a King and Queen. Without our fully realizing what was happening, our English vocabulary multiplied and blossomed. When I prayed to Grandmama, asking her again and again to help Miss Doyle’s brother, the fire marshal, I prayed more and more with English words, pronounced perfectly. Grandmama, in the other world, somehow could understand all languages.

  Though every girl and boy found out quickly enough what irritated the General, no one was ever certain what, besides bravery, would really specifically please her.

  There weren’t that many chances for anyone living in Canada to be truly brave. Murderous bombs were not falling down on Vancouver as they were in London, though they fell down every day in Miss Doyle’s brother’s succinct, suspense-filled stories about rescue and valour.

  Reading aloud from those three-folded onionskin pages, Miss Doyle told us about the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in the gentle light of her brother’s rescue stories. As she carefully folded each letter and returned it to its heavily stamped envelope, we could feel our backs stiffen with courage.

  One of her brother’s rescue stories was so exciting that I told it to Jung. There were struggling baby noises coming from a dark bombed-out section of a hospital building, and John Willard Henry’s team of five men and a woman named Grace risked everything to reach the trapped child. When Grace poked her hand through a small cleared-out space to reach for the whimpering infant, the woman screamed, jumped back. The child was covered with hair. Finally, John Willard Henry reached in and pulled out a small frightened terrier.

  “I have the nipped finger to prove it,” he wrote. “Damn odd business, this risking your life for a puppy!”

  Miss Doyle even said the word damn, just like her brother wrote it.

  Jung laughed, then waited until I finished laughing, too.

  “Want to know something?” he asked me, carefully.

  I nodded yes, thinking that he was going to tell me that story was probably made up, but I was ready to let him know that it was all in a real handwritten letter sent from England.

  “You don’t know, do you, Sekky?”

  “Know what?”

  “Last Christmas—Miss Doyle’s brother—blown to bits.”

  My mouth dropped open. I refused to believe Jung, who years ago had been in Miss Doyle’s class and hated her because she strapped him for pulling the fire alarm.

  “Everyone knows he’s dead, Sekky,” Jung persisted. “His picture was in the Sun. Ask Kiam.”

  I dared not ask Kiam, nor did I ask anybody in the class, not even Alfred Stevorsky or Joe Eng. After all, if John Willard Henry was really dead, why didn’t someone in the class say so? Why didn’t Miss Doyle say so?

  Tormented all week, I did not even say a prayer to the Old One. No one knew I still talked to her. Grandmama should have warned me.

  I waited after school to ask Miss Doyle about her brother. She had just put another of his airmail letters away and dismissed the class. We could hear Mr. Barclay’s class next door stampeding out like cattle, but everyone in Miss Doyle’s class left in the usual orderly fashion. Miss Doyle was busy cleaning off the blackboard.

  I could hear Darlene’s braces clunking away.

  “Sekky,” Miss Doyle said, turning around. “You’re still here.”

  “Miss Doyle,” I began, “was Mr. Doyle blown to bits?”

  She looked puzzled, then her eyes glazed over. Her face registered shock, betrayal.

  I wanted to get out of the room. I abruptly turned and rushed to the cloakroom to get my jacket and hat.

  “Sek-Lung,” Miss Doyle thundered my name, “come here.”

  With my coat and hat in my hand, I walked slowly back to her. She had used me, tricked me, made me care for someone, made me pray for the safety of someone who was already dead.

  Miss Doyle gave me a wide-eyed YOU’D BETTER PAY ATTENTION look.

  “That first day,” Miss Doyle began, speaking to me as if I had forgotten to help Darlene with the water jug, “that day when I started to read my brother’s letters, you must remember that I... oh, my God...” she took my hand. “You were away that day.”

  It was true. I had been away from her class one afternoon.

  “Oh, Sekky, you went to the nurse’s office!” Miss Doyle’s voice suddenly went soft, as if she were once again the little girl in the picture. “I did. I told the class of John’s death. Yes... he is... dead...” And then Miss Doyle used Jung’s words, my words, a child’s words, in a whisper I could barely make out, “... blown to bits.”

  In uneasy silence, I let Miss Doyle lift my arms and push them through my jacket; I let her half guide me to the front of the room. Passing her desk, however, I pushed against her and stopped to study the picture in the small silver frame.

  In the picture, I could see how brightly the little girl’s blonde hair shone; her smiling face said, Nothing in the world can ever go wrong.

  I took my pilot’s cap from her hand and walked out the door. I knew I still liked Miss E. Doyle.

  MISS E. DOYLE made it a rule never to tolerate interruptions or careless behaviour in her class.

  Not only did she prefer to stand at attention for most of the time she spent with us, she expected every boy and girl in her class to adopt her military bearing, her exact sense of decorum.

  We were an unruly, untidy mixed bunch of immigrants and displaced persons, legal or otherwise, and it was her duty to take our varying fears and insecurities and mold us into some ideal collective functioning together as a military unit with one purpose: to conquer the King’s English, to belong at last to a country that she envisioned including all of us.

  After morning prayer, in a carefully modulated stage whisper, Miss Doyle told us to open our eyes and keep our bowed heads before her, then “carefully and quietly” to put our fingers under our desktop ledges and lift. A single whoosh sound filled the room as the tops of desks moved up-ward, like so many wings. Books and pencil boxes came clattering out, and desktops fell back down. We were now to remember to keep our feet flat on the floor.

  When we were all ready, she would say, “Excellent.” That was the signal to be “at ease.”

  In training us, she never hesitated to use her desk ruler repeatedly on our burning backsides, nor was she slow to engage the leather strap on our stinging bare hands. And few of our poverty-raised, war-weary parents or guardians expected a teacher, m
ale or female, to do any less.

  Once, from the back of the room in the unnatural silence that was the miracle of her careful training of her troops, we heard a delinquent pencil box crash to the hardwood floor like a bomb.

  We all turned to look: on the floor, in the middle of the back aisle, sat an absurdly large Grand Dutch Coronas cigar box the size of Miss Doyle’s Holy Bible. The lid was held tightly shut by thick-knotted yellow twine.

  Some of us stared straight at the leather strap hanging on the wall, afraid even to blink. Some of us turned to see Tammy Okada in a grubby flowery dress, pale with fear, her dirty knees shaking.

  Tammy Okada, of mixed parentage, had tightly braided brownish pigtails and wore obvious hand-me-downs; her English was terrible. None of the girls wanted to play with her, not even those who were more or less her own kind, the Japanese girls. Tammy Okada was a stupid girl, thick-waisted from a poor diet, not much blessed with looks. She always had to borrow someone else’s pencils because she could never untie her own twine-knotted box. Yet she was too proud to let anyone help her undo the twine.

  For some reason, Miss Doyle had never forced Tammy to open her pencil box; instead she always commanded one of the other students to lend Tammy a ruler or an eraser or whatever. And now the cigar box had slipped off her desktop and banged onto the floor.

  The eagle-eyed General could see right away whose stupid makeshift pencil box it was.

  Miss Doyle walked straight up the aisle, bent down and snatched up the cigar box. The box immediately broadcast a rolling noise, as if it held no more than a tiny solitary item: a single steel marble, perhaps, or maybe a small round ball of foil, rolling inside... round, round, round. We could all hear the loud rolling hiss coming from the box as it was held in mid-air, frozen in Miss Doyle’s surprised grip. Now everyone knew: a box almost ten inches square and three inches high, and it was practically empty!

  Empty! This absurd discovery caused three or four of the girls in the class to trade smirks across the aisles. Florence Chan giggled. Elizabeth Brown threw her head back. Alfred Stevorsky snorted. Joe Eng started to guffaw, but thought better of it when the General’s blonde head did not move. The classroom grew still, waiting, watching. Tammy Okada instinctively held her hands over her scalp as if she expected Miss Doyle, her grey eyes glistening, to take the box and break it over her head.

  For a long, long moment, the big woman did nothing. Miss Doyle’s stillness also warned the rest of us that her uncanny radar was O-N. The slightest hint of another giggle or snort, or even a misplaced sigh, would mean the strap. We held our breath.

  The General loudly cleared her throat: Ahem!

  In three seconds, like disciplined soldiers, we sat up, hands folded, feet flat on the floor, eyes front, staring at the Map of the World. Still, I couldn’t resist turning my head a little, straining the corner of my eyes to sneak a look: General Doyle, unsmiling, still held the knotted box in her enormous grip. She focussed her steel-cold eyes on Tammy Okada.

  “Take out your books and put them in a pile,” she said to Tammy, each word clear and sharp as a warning bell. She stood silently watching, as the brownish-haired girl, eyes edged with tears, dropped her shaking hands and nervously emptied her desk.

  Miss Doyle put her hand out, gripped Tammy’s shoulder, walked up the aisle and stopped before the one remaining empty front seat.

  “Here, Tammy Okada,” Miss Doyle carefully enunciated each syllable, “you will be able to pay much better attention, yes?”

  From my seat in the middle of the room, I could see Tammy Okada’s braided pigtails visibly trembling.

  “You will become my best student, yes?”

  Tammy Okada’s back, in spite of herself, seemed to straighten a little.

  “Sit.”

  Miss Doyle walked away with Tammy’s cigar box still clutched in her hand. We figured this was the last anyone would ever see of that pathetic dirty box. We all waited to see if Miss Doyle would throw it into her desk drawer of confiscated stuff, or if she would toss it into the wastepaper basket, after which she would slowly dust off her big hands and walk over to the hanging strap.

  I thought Tammy Okada must feel like a leaky submarine. I was feeling a little sorry for her when Miss Doyle walked past the wastepaper basket and strode directly to the front of her own cabinet-style desk. She reached down into a bottom drawer out of everyone’s sight. There were snipping noises. Miss Doyle threw away cut pieces of knotted twine and rummaged noisily, but we could not see what she was doing. Then we heard the smart Snap! Snap! of elastic bands.

  Still unsmiling, Miss Doyle walked back to Tammy Okada’s front row seat and placed the big cigar box on the desktop. The whole class could hear a weighty load of contents shifting and rattling with what every boy and girl suddenly knew to be the best possible pencil-box paraphernalia anyone could ever dream of owning: stuff from the General’s own hidden cave of seized treasures.

  I imagined the years and years of confiscated collectibles—coloured pencils of every hue and length, mechanical pencils, pen nibs, holders, crayons, jacks, pencil sharpeners, paper cutouts, elastics, marbles, stencils, erasers, fold-away rulers, Crackerjack miniatures, maybe even a compass—all poured into that single box. Tammy Okada, unbelieving, ran a shy finger over the crisscrossed rubber bands.

  “Tammy Okada,” Miss Doyle’s crisp enunciation did not falter, “your pencil box, yes?”

  “Yes,” Tammy said, in a voice so soft we barely heard it.

  “Jeez,” Elizabeth Brown breathed.

  The rest of us sighed.

  Miss Doyle picked up a chalk, tapped the blackboard for attention and began to teach us how to use the letter S to show possession. The General printed in big letters: Alfred’s book... Sekky’s cap... Tammy’s pencil box...

  “You’re all paying attention, yes?”

  “Yes, Miss Doyle,” we sang in unison, like soldiers.

  We had learned to answer the General’s tone-dipping Yes? or deeper No? with “Yes, Miss Doyle” or “No, Miss Doyle.”

  Jung, who had been in Miss Doyle’s class many years ago, advised me not to raise my hand to answer a single question, not even if I knew the answer.

  “It’ll work in your favour if the General hollers your name and you surprise her with the answer.”

  Then up would go her ample breasts.

  The girls in the class grew to admire Miss Doyle and would hold themselves high like her, chin back, sweater buttoned to the absolute top. The oldest boy, aged twelve, just arrived from Poland, would widen his eyes at Miss Doyle. “Denny”—his real name was too easy to make fun of and too hard to pronounce—liked to please Miss Doyle, too, though he, like Tammy Okada, only fitfully spoke half a dozen English phrases. Miss Doyle strapped him once, and at recess he muttered, “I kill that bitch... I kill!” But by the next day, Denny only wanted to copy a straight line of words, neatly spaced and correctly spelled, line after tidy line. Like the rest of us, he wanted to earn the General’s gold star stuck on the top of the page.

  At recess, our dialects and accents conflicted, our clothes, heights and handicaps betrayed us, our skin colours and backgrounds clashed, but inside Miss E. Doyle’s tightly disciplined kingdom we were all—lions or lambs—equals.

  We had glimpsed Paradise.

  thirteen

  AFTER SURVIVING THOSE first few weeks into September, I was like the other Advanced Grade Three kids, wanting to please Miss Doyle. And yet, when her staunch authority focussed on me, I suddenly wanted to be forgotten, left alone, ignored.

  “Sekky, you are playing with—what?”

  Against her thundering authority there was no appeal. For example, if an innocent boy went home and complained Miss Doyle had unfairly seized his favourite tin fighter plane, which happened to slip out of his pocket during Silent Reading, that boy would get a worse strapping at home. It was a hard life. I missed my freedom.

  After school, every day, I tried my best to maintain my membership in Alfred Ste
vorsky’s defiance-loving, war-battling gang. I rushed through my homework in front of Father or Stepmother when either was around, and escaped outside as soon as I finished.

  Father, Stepmother, brothers Kiam and Jung, and even sister Liang, were all working wherever and whenever they could. Our household was constantly short of money. My older siblings also went to Chinese School.

  I played.

  I was, after all, supposed to be too weak for doing any kind of real work and, of course, too young to do anything that others would take seriously. I wasn’t allowed to go to Chinese School either—“Too much stress for the boy,” the Strathcona School doctor had told Father.

  “Let the boy play,” Dr. Palmer said to Father, who heard the word “play” and thought how foolish to waste away those hours.

  Though he knew better, Father saw each of his three sons as Confucian scholars, as if his B.C.-Chinatown boys could reflect the Old China he himself remembered as a child. There, in Sun Wu village in the county of the Four Districts, if a boy was not too poor, after his labours in the family shop or after his toils on some ancestral field, he looked forward to an encounter with reading and writing. Settling into a creaking chair with brush in hand, he sensibly studied the Sam zi jing, the Three Character Classic. At least that was what the elders told the Chinatown sons. In Old China, no scholarly child actually played after age six. He put away childish things, found in learning his recreation and inspiration.

  “In China,” Third Uncle told me, “there was a poor boy who caught a hundred fireflies and kept them in a jar. Know why?”

  I waited for a story as wonderful as Grandmama used to tell me.

  “So he could have enough light to study at night.”

  I thought it would be fun to catch the flies, but too much of a strain to read at night.

  “Nighttime is for dreaming,” I remembered the Old One used to say, “for signs to appear.”

  Besides, such a boy I was not. Here I was, almost eight years old, playing. Playing until I was too tired even to dream. The gang and I became neighbourhood terrors.