The Jade Peony

by Wayson Choy

  Behind all the grown-up war talk, my tanks and planes roared, killing every Japanese in sight. I absorbed Chinatown’s hatred of the Japanese, the monsters with bloodied buck teeth, no necks, and thick Tojo glasses; I wanted to kill every one of them.

  During school recess, the gang and I gave surly looks to the Japanese boys and girls we didn’t know. When the recess monitor wasn’t watching, we shoved “the slant-eyes” in the back or punched them in the arm. Of course, sometimes a guy from another class mistook me for a Jap. Alfred Stevorsky and Joe Eng straightened them out. But we had to be careful: the older Japanese boys hit back. A boy with a German-type name gave Joe a black eye. Alfred got his best jacket torn. And I got my face pushed into the mud once. But we gave as good as we got. Our teacher, Miss Doyle, started to stand at her window and watch us at recess. If she caught any of us starting a fight or anything, she used the strap.

  The Japanese kids started to keep to themselves; even the ones in Miss Doyle’s class we used to be friendly with stayed more and more away from the rest of us. Some of the much older boys, white and Asian, began to protect the smaller Japanese kids from those who wanted to bully them. Some of us stood around, confused. But this was all kid stuff. Hearing about the war happening overseas was okay, but I wanted the actual fighting to start happening in Canada. The Chinatown talk was that it would, that there would soon be casualties.

  Each day I looked into the sky and waited for the fall of bombs. I thought of Singapore and London and wished I was there.

  The Japanese attacked Thailand, Borneo and the Philippines. There was more talk about enemy submarines—more Japanese ones—lurking beneath the B.C. coastal waters; there was growing anger and fear and hatred for anyone Japanese.

  AFTER SCHOOL, I had to watch other boys go off to MacLean Park with their war toys while I went straight home and chafed over the crisis that mattered most to me: my own war games, and if I would be allowed to play them in the dungeon of Mrs. Lim’s run-down shack. There would be no gang of boys there, only myself, hidden behind a hedge of roses. Myself and my arch enemy: fat old Mrs. Lim and her bossy yelling.

  Something dark seemed to possess me. Why should I not get my own way? Why should anyone think I could not be trusted? There was a war on, and boys needed to practise the arts of war. No one was on my side. I was surrounded by traitors and enemies. Before I was sentenced to Mrs. Lim’s, I had tasted freedom, and now it was gone. That first summer after Grandmama’s death, I’d kicked soccer balls and exhausted my older brothers; I’d worn boxing gloves and lost fights; I’d spat blood; I’d threatened and sworn at my sister; I’d set the mountains of Burma alight with flames and fought a hundred battles against the Japanese and won each one.

  Mrs. Lim didn’t have a chance.

  fourteen

  IT WAS SETTLED. BY THE first week of October, I was forbidden to meet my friends after school, warned not even to speak to any of them, especially not with any boy kicked out of Chinese School. Instead, right after English school, I was to go directly to Mrs. Lim’s.

  Father swore that if he heard I was even one second late presenting myself at Mrs. Lim’s, he would take the kitchen cleaver and decapitate all my toy soldiers, and with his foot crush my five tin tanks into pie plates. He swore that he would then stand at MacLean Park and give away my precious fighter planes to the very first boy who walked by, white, black, brown or yellow, “even if it a Jap boy.”

  Then he would demand that the Reverend Father Chan put me into the Bad Boys’ Orphanage, where Christian Brothers who wore hoods like Death confined trashy boys, whipped them, and threw away the key. I would be the only Chinatown boy at that orphanage; I would shame all the Chinese people on earth.

  To tell the truth, I did not once take the threat of the Bad Boys’ Orphanage seriously. After all, we weren’t Catholic. In class, Miss Doyle had already explained that Catholic families go to Catholic places, and Protestant families go to Protestant places. Same for Jewish people. Same for Hindus and Buddhists. All the people in the world belonged to families and had to stay with their families.

  But when Father raised his booted foot over my box of war toys, as if to flatten everything right there and then into pie plates, it sent a shudder through me. Father’s eyes were wild with anger; his voice, choking. So I hurried after school to meet the fifteen-minute deadline agreed upon by both him and Mrs. Lim, each sealing the bargain with a handshake, Father’s hands clasping Mrs. Lim’s pudgy fingers. The two followed that up with a deadly round of Chinese sayings, in a classical drumbeat rhythm too ancient for my mo no ears. I heard hissing snakes and growling lions.

  Breathless because of my five-block sprint from Strathcona, I stood on the street and glanced up at Mrs. Lim’s shack, perched on wooden stilts, high atop an escarpment of rock. Two rickety staircases, separated midway by an even more precarious-looking platform landing, pitched skyward towards a jutting wooden porch.

  Our neighbour Mr. O’Connor told First Brother Kiam that the peculiar shack had once belonged to a millworker named Jamieson, who bought the undesirable property for twenty-five dollars in 1895. People laughed at him, but he swore a man could make his home anywhere he liked. With salvaged lumber from the mill, and an ingenious pulley system, Jamieson built the two angled, chain-anchored maple staircases first, hammering metal spikes every three feet into the rockface. The finished stairs shook at every footfall but were, Mr. O’Connor said, “built sturdy enough to last to the end of the century.” Then, with a younger brother, Jamieson carried each board and beam up the two flights of stairs and drilled a foundation of pilings and stilts, levelling the craggy surface with Portland cement and sacks of thick black earth. One lumber season after another, the two brothers steadily brought home the timber and, after long labour, finished the shack.

  Almost immediately, an argument broke out between the Jamiesons. It could have been over gambling debts or a woman. Or too much drinking. Neighbours heard shouting that night. Then nothing. One shoved the other over the porch railing of the house. They found the older brother with his neck broken at the bottom of the stairs. The surviving brother disappeared. Years later, the city offered the house for sale at a public auction. Only a crazy one-eyed China man raised his hand and shelled out the minimum two hundred dollars to buy the worthless property. That was Mr. Lim, of course. He borrowed half the money from his Tong Association and was still in debt for his Head Tax. An elder warned Mr. Lim that the house might not be lucky.

  “Can a poor man afford a lucky house?” Mr. Lim said.

  In 1933, Mr. Lim was killed working at the same mill where the Jamiesons once worked. A pile of lumber tipped over on his blind side, crushing him. The widow put her X on a piece of paper, witnessed before a lawyer, and thereafter, every month, money was put into her bank account in Chinatown.

  Mrs. Lim told Stepmother that before Mr. Lim went to work that fateful day, “With his one eye, my husband saw the white man’s ghost lying at the bottom of those steps. But I never saw anything. I sent him back down. If you don’t work, I said to him, how can we eat?”

  Mrs. Lim put her pudgy hands to her eyes, rubbing them in disbelief.

  “Why did I let him go?” she cried. “Signs—I know signs—why didn’t I listen to him?”

  Mrs. Lim broke down and cried.

  Mr. Lim died before I was born. Kiam remembered him as a gruff man who had poor hearing and spoke too loudly, like many labourers from Old China who worked beside pitiless machinery. On steep mountain slopes and by rushing waters, their voices had to drown out the chopping of the mechanical Iron Chinks in the fish canneries, defy screeching eight-foot crosscut mill saws. In their hearts, Father said, the China men sang ancient songs and thought of other mountains, other seas. Such men built the Great Wall and pulled ships through the cloud-piercing gorges of the Yangtze and never surrendered.

  “You remember: we Chinese,” all of the Old China men drilled into my brothers and me, between their sips of tea and hacking up the b
ad waters, “Never forget, we together Chinese.”

  I was Chinese and would never surrender. I carried my three-inch Red Ryder pocketknife with me, ready to do in Mrs. Lim if she was too mean.

  Now, my fate decreed, I had to climb those two rickety flight of stairs and be babysat by the fat old widow. There was no choice. But I hesitated on that first step: the planks looked unstable, ready to collapse. I wondered how my older brothers had ever carried up Mrs. Lim’s groceries, the boxes of firewood, the gunny sacks of sawdust; how they negotiated those steps, as steep as the cliff edges of the Yangtze. Never surrender! I could look between the thick planks and see, at eye level, the first two sets of chains bolted to the staircase frame, anchoring it to the rock face, taut and moist, smelling of iron. I took a deep breath.

  “Mrs. Lim! I’m coming!”

  At the very top, I could see the grey shack and the wall of imperial yellow roses Mrs. Lim had planted the spring of Mr. Lim’s death. A curtain of brilliant end-of-summer blooms nodded in the early October breeze; a few petals drifted down. The roses were Mrs. Lim’s pride, bright as beacons, hiding the pilings on one side and from spring to fall scenting the tiny porch landing. The porch was just large enough to hold a dark old sofa. I suppose it seemed like Paradise to her, a fat woman, sitting on that lone chair above the street, peering through her shelter of roses and leaves and thorns to look down at the rest of the world. From the bottom of the street, however, it just looked like a dump with sharply angled walls of grey and a smaller wall of yellow pushing against the sky. Riding a cool breeze, a scattering of yellow petals floated down. One landed on my head.

  I started climbing, carefully, one step after another. I tried not to look down. Tried not to shake the staircase. It trembled and quaked under my feet. The chains clanked. I thought about how it must have felt to be pushed over the porch railing, like the Jamieson brother, and hear your neck snap. I pushed on.

  At the platform landing, I decided to pause a bit. I sat on a bench seat built for that purpose. Hang on a bit. Just to look around. I have to do this every school day, I thought, bitterly. I looked out at the houses across the street, the free houses: one of them was ours, then Mr. O’Connor’s, then the Chens and...

  A raspy voice called out my name: “Sek-Lung!”

  I glanced up just in time to see Mrs. Lim on the porch, turning around and ambling back into the shack. The front screen door slammed. I knew what torture she had in store for me: ten thousand Chinese sayings to memorize.

  I remembered how an RCAF pilot would not be afraid of any kind of challenge—not of anything—like James Cagney in Captains of the Clouds, like Deuce Granville and his Jumping Jeep Men, like Terry and the Pirates. I closed my eyes and scaled the last flight, pulling myself, hand over hand, like a blind mountain climber. The staircase bounced against the escarpment. When I landed on the porch, the thing seemed to sway; it creaked loudly, then stopped. All these years, I realized, these steps and this porch had held Mrs. Lim’s weight.

  A breeze brushed against the porch, stirring the leaves and flowers. Leaf shadows danced everywhere. The air was sweet with scent. Enemy cunning. Inside the house, Mrs. Lim had a secret button that her pudgy thumb would press; underneath the porch, instantly, a spring would trip and send me soaring. I saw my body pitching skyward, flying, plane-less, to the bottom of the escarpment. Father and Stepmother would discover my broken body, neck neatly snapped. I moved a few cautious steps forward. Was Mrs. Lim ever breathless when she reached the top?

  “... in...” a voice said, from somewhere in the shadowy hallway, “... come in.”

  It was a soft voice, breathless. Maybe Mrs. Lim had used up all her volume calling down my name.

  I peered into the semigloom of the house. A pot-bellied stove with a sawdust hopper stood in the middle of a square hallway. A neat stack of firewood sat in a galvanized bin between two partly curtained doorways. Sacks of sawdust leaned against one wall. I pulled open the screen door and walked in. The floor creaked.

  There was an open doorway to my left. Over the damp wood, I could smell sweet herbs mixed with a strong salty aroma of pickled cabbage. There was the sound of water angrily boiling, and from an angle I could see a black iron stove and clouds of steam rising from a pot and kettle. Overhead dangled a straw-hooded lightbulb, throwing strange shadows against the ceiling and a warm light on the walls.

  “Here,” a voice said.

  Mrs. Lim sat at a large kitchen table, dressed in a dark blue smock, her broad face lit impassively by the overhanging lightbulb. Her wide arms rested on a basket of peas and behind her, a triple line of glass jars sat along the sink. My heart sank. I hated washing anything, even myself. At her black-stocking, slippered feet were more baskets of peas waiting to be shelled, assorted bunches of unwashed leafy vegetables, pyramids of dusty red and green peppers. A quick glance and I could see on a wall of newspapered shelves above the table piles of sun-dried bok choi to be bundled with raffia; small crates of twisted roots, deep dishes of pungent herbs and spices, dried mushrooms, piles of velvet-coloured bark, thorny twigs, all waiting to be cleaned, cooked, ground up or chopped. All the womanly tasks she and Grandmama, Stepmother and Liang used to do together in our kitchen: now I had inherited the labour. I was to spend eternity shelling, washing, sorting, chopping... never to see daylight again. Never to eat anything but bitter peas, drink herb-infused teas, chew salted cabbage. My mouth went dry; my teeth tasted of chalk.

  To the left of Mrs. Lim’s elbow, a neat row of rippling silver caught my eye. I gulped. An array of honed knives and hefty cleavers of varying sizes and shapes gleamed on the gingham oilcloth that covered the table. I quickly counted seven readied weapons, each blade longer and sharper than the last.

  Mrs. Lim scowled at the useless sight of me standing dumbstruck before the baskets and crates and the sink of woman’s work. She went on shelling peas with lightning speed. She was truly mean: she didn’t even offer me something to eat.

  “Here,” a voice repeated.

  It was amazing. Mrs. Lim’s lips had not moved. I looked again. The scowl remained frozen in disapproval of the spoiled mo no boy standing before her.

  “Behind you, Sekky.”

  I turned around. It was Meiying, Mrs. Lim’s daughter. Her long hair flowed over her shoulders, and she held a large silk shawl shimmering with autumn colours.

  “Let’s go,” she said and pushed open the torn screen door.

  It slammed shut. She was gone.

  I looked at Mrs. Lim. Behind me, I heard Meiying’s quick steps disappearing down the staircase. The stairs rattled. Reaching for a handful of peas, Mrs. Lim waved me away.

  I could not believe I was to leave. After a moment’s pause to see if Mrs. Lim would pick up a cleaver, I turned around, pushed open the screen door. I imagined a cleaver just missing the back of my head. I hit the first stair even before I heard the screen door slam. But the trembling, banging staircase stopped me. I grabbed for the rail and hung on. The stairs banged and banged against the escarpment wall. Meiying was rushing down the last flight of steps in double-time, unafraid of the chain-pulling, shuddering stairs.

  I held my breath—if a girl isn’t afraid!—and plunged down the precarious steps as fast as Meiying had. I leapt off the last shaking step and stood gasping before her. Street dust bellowed around my patched Buster Brown boots. I felt like Robert Preston, leatherneck, landing on Wake Island, machine gun blasting away.

  The staircase banged one last time. I stared at the thin girl before me. Meiying tossed the large silk shawl about her shoulders.

  “We’re going to the playground, Sekky,” she said, turning. “Keep up.”

  She raced ahead of me; she was so much taller, her legs so much longer, faster.

  “Wait,” I said, but thinking of the baskets of peas, the salt cabbage and the scowl-frozen Mrs. Lim in the tiny dark kitchen, I ran to catch up.

  Between breaths and the pounding of my boots hitting the pavement, I felt my lungs expand, co
ntract, expand, and without any warning, heard myself yelling FU-UCKkkk! exactly as if I were Alfie Stevorsky or Joe Eng. It was the one word Father once slapped Jung across the face for saying; it was the very word that First Brother Kiam warned me Father would cut out my tongue for uttering, if I even pretended to say it. I could see Mrs. Lim’s cleaver suddenly strike the wall, quivering.

  Meiying ran on.

  WHEN I WAS almost eight, girls were not exactly my favourite people. But Meiying was not like most girls.

  Meiying called me Sekky, instead of Sek-Lung, as if I was her friend. When she visited Stepmother, she always brought Liang and me some jaw breakers or gum or Five Flavour Lifesavers and never, never, asked us about school. I liked that about her. She didn’t even mind if I slipped and called her May, her English name, even though Father scolded me.

  I knew Stepmother liked her; sometimes, they spent time chatting together while trying out hairstyles or makeup. Mrs. Lim would sometimes linger over her cup of tea, taking quiet pride in her adopted daughter’s popularity with the married women in the community.

  Everyone liked Meiying. Father even pointed her out as someone my sister Liang should emulate. Liang, at twelve, her teeth slightly bucked, wished she could be as tall and as elegant and as smart as Meiying. But Meiying was seventeen, far beyond the reach of my sister’s giggling group of girlfriends. With her tightly curled hair, Liang moped about, sunk deep in her Sloppy Joe sweaters. Meiying walked briskly and wore deep-coloured cardigans, and her long black hair shone, spilling over her shoulders.

  First Brother Kiam liked her looks, too, I could tell, but he wasn’t attracted to the fact that she did so many things so well. Meiying knew enough Mandarin, for example, to explain a phrase or two to Kiam, who was studying the dialect because Father felt it would be the official language of any New China “when the people win.” Meiying knew some Mandarin because her mother for years had sung in concerts in the local Chinese Opera, in the classical dialect, before she gambled and drank too much and gave Meiying away to Mrs. Lim, leaving her with some clothes and a foot-high Chinese Opera doll with the painted white face of a scholar.