The Jade Peony

by Wayson Choy

  “It’s getting late,” she finally said. “I promised to get you home by now.”

  We stood up. Pushing myself off the step, I brushed beside her and could smell a drift of Three Flowers perfume, mingling with the fresh wind and the dried grass along the sidewalk. It was the same scent Stepmother used, and I liked it. I kicked at some fallen chestnuts. She laughed and kicked them back at me.

  “We’ll go again tomorrow,” she said. “I’m to take care of you every day after school. Ma is too busy with her canning and herbs to look after you.”

  “Sure,” I said, casually.

  THE NEXT DAY, Kazuo was not there.

  Nor was he there for the rest of the week. Mrs. Lim began wondering why we liked the outdoors so much.

  “Sek-Lung needs exercise,” Meiying would say. “The school doctor said so.”

  “Too much fresh air no good,” Mrs. Lim shook her head at the madness of white doctors. “Burn out his lungs.”

  On rainy days, there was no practice, and Meiying knew he would not be there. Then we stayed in and, together, helped Mrs. Lim in the kitchen with her chores. She said we were useless and in the way, but, generally, Mrs. Lim ignored the two of us, and let Meiying make a game of our washing and sorting and chopping. At those times, Mrs. Lim sometimes sat back and watched Meiying confidently hand me vegetables to wash before drying or pass me seeds to be put into small paper packets. These were sold by Mrs. Lim to Chinatown merchants: the dried vegetables to the local cornerstore grocers, the herbs to the herbalists in the dark corners of stores. “Don’t spill the profits,” Mrs. Lim nagged.

  We snacked between washings and drank small cups of tea. Mrs. Lim would open a steaming hot fold of lotus leaf, filled with savoury sticky rice. With a string between her pudgy fingers, she divided the mold of rice into three portions, one for each person. The lucky person got the portion with a bit of red Chinese sausage. Everything seemed at peace, and I was surprised at Mrs. Lim’s long silences. On such afternoons, she chose to sit on the porch sofa and watch the October winds strip her rose bushes of petals and leaves, and listen to our voices singing from the kitchen. One day, I noticed the rose bushes were completely bare. What was left looked like a treacherous tangle of barbed wire, which made me think of battlefields and trenches and added to our pretend games in the kitchen.

  On sunny days, we ran anxiously to Powell Ground to see if Kazuo would be able to meet Meiying by the bench under the trees. There, Meiying would tell me what Kazuo had said to her at school that day, how he had almost failed his history exam, how he had a fight with some boys who were calling him “a dirty Jap.” I said nothing, but imagined my solders firing away.

  All the Japanese kids at Strathcona were sticking together now; they made up almost half of all the classes. They kept to themselves, said little, only waited to see who else would be mean to them. Miss Doyle and other teachers stood at the school exits to make sure no one attacked them. Some of the teachers and the older boys took to walking some of the younger kids home. More and more Japanese parents brought their kids to school in the morning and, after school, waited anxiously for them.

  One day Jung met me and Liang after school and said, “No one better think you’re a Jap.” He pounded his fist in front of Alfred Stevorsky and his boyfriends, then kick-boxed into the air. “I’ll beat the fuckin’ shit out of them.”

  Jung took Liang to Chinese School and watched me as I ran to Mrs. Lim’s. Kiam was busy guarding Third Uncle’s warehouse, as robberies were more and more common. The Depression squatters at False Creek, right in Chinatown, were being cleared out by the police. “Join the Army!” the younger men were told.

  At the high school Meiying and Kazuo attended, Meiying told me, the Japanese boys fought back, defended their own kind, dared anyone to call them names. Meiying said, “Kaz and me, we still talk.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We’re friends, Sekky,” she said. “Friends have alliances. You know what allies are?”

  “Yes,” I said, but knew that she meant they were sneaking around.

  After waiting half an hour, if he didn’t appear, Meiying would pretend to finish reading her book.

  “I guess Kaz had to help his brothers with the store,” she would say sadly. “They must be very busy today.”

  We would then leave Powell Ground and decide either to go window shopping all the way downtown to Woodward’s store or even Eaton’s, or stop midway at the Carnegie Library at Hastings and Main, just off Chinatown. Meiying left me in the Boys and Girls section with a pile of books for me to read at a table by myself. She went to another section upstairs, where I found her flipping through large picture books about Japan. Then we would walk about Chinatown, looking in the windows at tin toys, and remember to ask for Mrs. Lim if any new shipments of rare foodstuffs had arrived from China. Everything was getting scarce. Even soy sauce and cooking wine were being watered down. On the last day of October, the newspapers said that Halloween was cancelled.

  Now that it was November, the streets darkened very early. We walked past houses with their blackout curtains pressed against windows and door frames, past volunteer men and women who carefully checked each window and door to see that the law was being strictly obeyed.

  “You Japs?” a man in a brown jacket said to us.

  Meiying showed him the tin buttons pinned on our lapels that had the Chinese flag proudly stamped on them. Kiam had got them for us from Chinese School. I also had one that said: I AM CHINESE.

  “Get home,” said the man. “It looks like snow.”

  We didn’t rush. Meiying walked as if we had every right to be walking as we did, slowly. Our breath clouded before us. We laughed. Part of the sky was clear. Stars shone through, and we glimpsed an early moon. Then the clouds thickened and snow fell. I studied the sidewalk for boy’s treasures, for lucky pennies or lost toys or an unbroken conker.

  The chestnut trees had dropped their hard dark-brown seeds long ago. The Han boys had gone around claiming they had the champion conkers. Boys were everywhere boring holes in the horse chestnuts, stringing them, and challenging each other to bashes. Meiying taught me to swing my chestnut at a sharp angle, like a Spitfire soaring skyward for a kill. I beat both the Han twins’ conkers, one smash after another.

  By the time Meiying took me home to my house, I was happy and exhausted. Usually, everyone was home by then. Father would be unfolding his bundle of Chinese newspapers, worried about the China Front, shifting in his big sofa chair, growing angrier and noisier about the invading dog-dung Japs. Stepmother and Liang would be setting the table for our late supper. Jung would be dialling the RCA radio from one end to the other to catch the latest sports news. First Brother Kiam would be upstairs listening to Artie Shaw or Benny Goodman on his own Philco radio. Kiam’s part-time work at Third Uncle’s warehouse had almost come to a halt: no import shipping was reaching Vancouver harbour.

  Nothing at home was out of the ordinary, except that I knew Meiying had entrusted me with a highly treacherous secret. If her widowed mother, with her deep village loyalties and Old China superstitions, found out about Kazuo, she would spit at Meiying, tear out her own hair, and be the second mother to disown her.

  If Chinatown found out, Meiying would be cursed and shamed publicly as a traitor; she would surely be beaten up, perhaps branded with a red-hot iron until her flesh smoked and flamed. In the Chinese propaganda movies that Stepmother sometimes took me to see, there were violent demonstrations of what happened to traitors.

  One November afternoon we waited much longer for Kaz than our usual half hour. Snow had come and gone, though the mountain tops were white and glistening. It became too dark to be sitting on that park bench, too dark for me to see my soldiers in the dirt trenches I had dug, too dark for Meiying to pretend she was reading her book.

  “Let’s go,” I said, impatiently.

  When we got to my house, Meiying paused, knocked on the door and delicately gathered one end of her shawl and pres
sed it gently against her eyes.

  “Just some dust,” she said. “Do I look all right now, Sekky?”

  I nodded my head.

  Stepmother opened the door, let us both in and said nothing to Meiying. As I removed my jacket, it seemed to me they stared at each other for a long time. Then Stepmother silently embraced her. I peeked out from the parlour window after the door closed. I watched Meiying walk across the street and swiftly climb the steps up to her own house. I could see Mrs. Lim, wide as the doorway, waiting for her daughter. She had her arms folded impatiently across her apron; her large body seemed to cause the old wooden porch to sag. I could hear her shouting at Meiying. Her stupid daughter of a worthless person had left her bedroom window open again. And hadn’t she paid good money, prayed ten thousand prayers, to have the Buddhist monk seal up the windows against the broken-neck white demon? The harsh voice seemed physically to hammer away at the thin figure crossing the porch. A flash of red and gold caught my eyes, and Meiying disappeared into the darkness.

  I stepped back from the narrow side window and was surprised to see Stepmother still standing stock-still before the closed door. She saw me staring at her.

  “Hang up your jacket,” she said, and turned quickly away from me.

  fifteen

  AS NOVEMBER TURNED into December, Stepmother made arrangements with Meiying to take care of me after school. And since Mrs. Lim did not like Meiying working part-time any more at the Blue Bird Cafe, where her beauty attracted the same kind of men her mother once knew—only these men were in military uniforms—everyone was satisfied. Some days Meiying seemed very happy. I watched her in her bedroom as she tied her hair with long, trailing scarves—many-coloured pieces left behind by her runaway mother that made me think of battle flags and warrior banners. The scarves were hung beside a foot-high, red-cloaked Chinese Opera doll sitting on her dresser and leaning against the mirror. Some days she sang and let me play with the doll. Carefully, I put my finger up inside its small jewelled head and moved its puppet-jointed arms so that the slippered feet danced. The delicately drawn face and the rich red cloak reminded me of an enchanted prince. And in the late afternoon light, her black hair falling over her shoulders as she opened another book to read, Meiying looked like a princess. I could see why Kazuo would like her, but I still couldn’t see why she liked him.

  Those pleasant first December days, in spite of the frosty air, she smiled so effortlessly and laughed so freely that I sensed she had somehow spent some time with Kazuo at her English school. On certain days they continued to meet at Powell Ground, too. Swathed in thick sweaters, and the gloves and wool scarf Meiying knitted for me, I would play cut-the-pie with my pocketknife while they held hands and walked away from me for a little while. They always disappeared inside the empty doorway of the Methodist Church building. Some days she came out rebuttoning her coat. Of course, it was very warm inside the church. I didn’t mind. I always got new comics after that and a treat of candy or cherry coke. Kazuo once gave me some Japanese candy that tasted of seaweed. I thought it had poison in it, but they both ate it to show me it was safe.

  Another time, Kaz gave me a baseball, and we threw the ball around. He showed me how to spit on it and rub the stitching part before winging it. The best time happened when Kaz, because he was as tall as Kiam, bent down to box with me. I threw Kaz a fake left and got to hit him hard on the jaw. Of course, we were just supposed to be shadow boxing, like Jung had taught me in the summer. “Goddamn!” he said and rubbed his jaw. I kept punching at him. Meiying pulled me back, but he laughed and lifted me up into the air and threw me up, up, up; he caught me by my feet and began to swing me around and around and around, higher and higher. It was dizzying and thrilling, and when he stopped, catching me mid-air, the world kept spinning. I almost threw up.

  “Now we’re even,” he said, and Meiying pushed him, knocking him over and falling on top of him; I quickly recovered and jumped him. We ended up laughing and rolling around on the ground.

  It was fun that day.

  All this time, Meiying and I never once openly discussed with each other the understood and forbidden topic of her sneaking around to visit her boyfriend. Sometimes he pinned on the I AM CHINESE button that Meiying got for him, and we met at the Carnegie Library on Hastings and Main, between the boundaries of Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Not that I minded the sneaking around part. It was fun.

  But he was, after all, still a Jap.

  And though no strangers could tell that Kazuo was Japanese when he held hands with Meiying and walked us part way home, one day I thought for sure that Stepmother, who’d left work early to pick up some pills at the Main Drug Store for Third Uncle, saw the three of us stepping out of the library together. It was directly across the street from the drug store.

  As soon as Meiying spotted the familiar face, she pushed Kazuo away. He quickly dropped Meiying’s hand and ran down the steps in the other direction. Meiying waved to Stepmother and brushed her hand against her skirt. She pulled her coat collar up against the wind and began walking down the library steps, as casually as possible. I followed. But before Stepmother could even ask anything, Meiying said, “Everything’s fine... can I carry this?” which I thought was curious. Stepmother nodded her head and handed over a cloth bag of groceries.

  “Did you have fun at the library, Sekky?” Meiying asked, as if she hadn’t been with me earlier to meet Kazuo at Powell Ground.

  For some reason, I suddenly felt I had to lie, too.

  “It was okay,” I said, and we walked home, barely able to make out the North Shore mountains in the winter afternoon light.

  AT HOME one evening, my curiosity got the better of me. I asked Father, “Are all Japs our enemy, even the ones in Canada?”

  Stepmother sat stiffly; her set of four knitting needles stopped clicking. Father shuffled his newspapers with authority.

  “Yes,” he said, with great finality. He looked sternly across at Stepmother. “All Japs are potential enemies... even if Stepmother doesn’t realize that.”

  “Well, Sek-Lung,” Stepmother began, “some Japanese persons were born here and—”

  Father sharply snapped his papers. Kiam looked warningly at me, trying to signal me to shut up. Then, in an effort to lessen the tension, he said, “The ones who are born here are only half enemies.”

  Liang laughed, tossing her head back. “That’s stupid,” she said, daring to defy First Brother.

  “It’s not!” I exclaimed.

  Stepmother looked at me, startled, then smiled broadly, as if she understood something beyond me. She picked up her knitting. In the stillness, the long metal needles clicked and stabbed into the air.

  “Are you enjoying your after-school hours with Meiying?” Stepmother asked.

  Her tone confused me, but I thought she just wanted to change the subject, to avoid the storm of Father’s dark looks directed at her.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Lots.”

  It was true. Meiying entertained me well. Last week we’d run into the Han boys, and she took us all to the soda counter at the corner store across from MacLean Park. We ordered cherry cokes. Sitting in the only booth, Meiying’s eyes lit with fire as she told us stories, scary ones, about the ghosts in Chinatown. There was the opera ghost whose shape could suddenly be seen pushed against the front curtains; the Shanghai Alley ghosts of the laundrymen who died from despair of ever seeing their families again, their footsteps treading the narrow steps; ghosts of those who died from hunger, from love; water ghosts from False Creek who moaned and gave warnings. They were just like the spirits and demons Grandmama used to tell about.

  “The smell of a ghost,” Meiying warned us, “is like the smell of burning incense, just as the ember touches the wood.”

  We boys were entranced.

  When Meiying tired of telling tales, she let us play war games on the mostly deserted grounds of MacLean Park; she settled disputes about the efficiency of weapons or the firepower of planes, urged us t
o draw the enemy in and then strike. A tactic, she said with authority, as old as Robin Hood’s forest ways. Larry Han asked her why she knew so much.

  “Aren’t we all at war?” she answered.

  When the two Jenson boys, Ronny and Rick, deigned to play with us, and we had arguments, she taught us how to form alliances. “Fight against a common enemy,” she said. “That’s what friends do.”

  While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice.

  Whenever it rained, Meiying and I stayed in her tiny room to the left of the pot-bellied stove.

  Sitting on her bed, she read stories to me, or made up war stories from dramatic pictures I cut out from Life. “Tell me about this picture, May,” I said. She helped me to set up my soldiers on her desk and positioned my tanks behind “hills” and on “bridges” made of books, and watched my favourite planes battle oncoming bombers.

  “Now,” she commanded, if I paused and might interrupt her reading, “protect that bridge.”

  “Do you think we will win the war, May?”

  A tank rumbled over an open geography book.

  “I mean, will we win against the Tojos?”

  She looked at me sourly.

  “Will we win against the Japs?” I repeated.

  “Monday the fifteenth is your birthday,” she said, changing the subject. “You’ll be eight years old in a few days. I’m making something special for you.”

  It would be a sweater, of course, because she had already commented on how tightly the ones I had fitted me. That was boring.

  “You didn’t answer me, May,” I persisted. “The Japs are fighting in Hong Kong now. Mr. O’Connor’s son is there with the Commonwealth troops. Miss Doyle says we’re all allies.”