The Jade Peony

“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, although she must have cast a glance at the Old One and decided to bide her time. That was the order of things in China.”

The first sentence of this passage announces several themes. For one, it highlights the hierarchy within the family. Although Stepmother is the mother of the family, she has less power than her sons, because they are men. What they speak becomes reality. Too, this passage reveals the unspoken cultural codes that pit Poh-Poh against her daughter in law. It also shows the way in which Stepmother must bear humiliations in silence, every day of her life. The passage is a microcosm of Chinese culture, and the misogyny that is intricately embedded into cultural norms and practices.

“‘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 […] 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.”

This passage provides us with a detailed snapshot of Poh-Poh. In her characteristic manner, she is lamenting all of the pain that she has suffered over the course of her long life. It also depicts the unique and intimate friendship that Poh-Poh and Mrs. Lim share. Though there is an age differential, they understand each other and each other’s pains in a singularly intimate way. Further, the way that Liang notices the similarity between the two elders’ gestures and those of the actors in Chinese operas depicts the powerful and deep reach of culture. Poh-Poh has learned to express herself in myriad ways, and one of those ways is to mimic the gestures of the actors within Chinese operas as a means of cultural shorthand. The recognition that Liang has for the resemblance between the two gestures depicts the subtle manner in which culture is transmitted through both artistic products and interpersonal relationships.

“‘Go to God Mountain,’ [the bachelor-men] 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 back home. Dozens went mad; many killed themselves. The Chinatown Chinese call July 1st, the day celebrating the birth of Canada, the Day of Shame.”

In this passage, Liang offers up a bit of Chinese-Canadian history, rendered in deeply personal and poignant detail. The passage highlights the institutional cruelty and disregard with which the bachelor-men in Liang’s community have been treated by the nation of Canada. The pain and pathos apparent in the passage demonstrate the very real and personally traumatic effects of that institutional cruelty and disregard. The Chinatown community is constantly being reminded of their place in Canadian culture, and also always having to care for those that are battered and bruised by poverty, racism, and white supremacy.

“He’s wearing a mask…I thought…like one of those Halloween demons…I wanted all at once to make sure he was not tricking me, not wearing a monkey mask, like those demons who came banging on our door and sent me crying with fright back into the kitchen. At once, I stood up on my chair. I dropped my chopsticks, turned, and grabbed Wong Sin-saang’s large ear, turning his Cheetah face towards me. Father banged his hand on the table. ‘You Tarzan monkey,’ I said to Wong Sin-saang. “You Cheetah…” Stepmother gasped. Poh-Poh reached across to stop me. Wong Sin-saang started laughing.”

In this scene, Liang and her brothers have been emphatically and carefully coached by their family members to be extremely careful to address Wong Suk in all of the properly formal and courteous ways. They have been specifically instructed not to gawk at his face. However, Liang finds herself irresistibly pulled into a spectacular act of disobedience. The way that she is moved to try to remove the mask from Wong Suk’s face is almost compulsive; it is borne out of her child’s mind and also her singular stubbornness and occasional inability to distinguish the mythological characters of Poh-Poh’s stories from reality. In this sense, the passage depicts the wonderful and terrible power of Poh-Poh’s storytelling—the way that it enraptures and convinces Liang is not something to be overlooked. Also, the passage depicts the beginning of a profound and beautiful friendship between Wong Suk and Liang.

“I looked again into the hall mirror, seeking Shirley Temple with her dimpled smile and perfect white-skin features. Bluntly reflected back at me was a broad sallow moon with slit dark eyes, topped by a helmet of black hair I looked down. Jutting out from a too-large taffeta dress were two spindly legs matched by a pair of bony arms. Something cold clutched at my stomach, made me swallow.”

This quote depicts the internalized self-hatred that cultural white supremacy has wrought within Liang. She looks into the mirror and hopes to see someone else entirely—specifically, the white and idealized Shirley Temple. Liang is devastated to find her own reflection, here understood as racially inferior and unattractive. The acute pain and poignancy of this moment is masterfully rendered by Choy, who has a sustained interest in depicting the manner in which the personal is political.

“‘Eagle good luck,’ Wong Suk told me, but I thought his cloak was even more lucky. I always leaned against its thick warmth and begged Wong Suk to let me drape it over my shoulders, to let me fly about, become Robin Hood’s bandit-princess, turning rapidly around and around in the imaginary forest of our back yard, the cape lifting, like wings, lifting above the earth. And the Monkey King would roar with laughter, clap-clap his two canes in a drumbeat; I was dizzy with pleasure. We would not stop until the neighbors loudly slammed their doors against such invading, clapping, joyful madness. Then we would sit quietly together on the back steps, to catch our breath. Sometimes Second Brother Jung stepped out with us [when] Wong Suk would tell us one of his stories from the past. Jung liked that. He would listen intently, hugging his knees, his eyes as dreamy as Wong Suk’s, his need as deep as my longing for Wong Suk to be sitting close to us, like this, with Jung and me, forever.”

This passage depicts the greatly fulfilling and intimate friendship that Liang shares with Wong Suk. It also showcases the power and salience of Liang’s imagination, which is one of her key character traits.

“I believed in ghosts, like everyone else in Chinatown, and I knew that sometimes enemies, like hobo runaways from the tent city on False Creek, like Japanese from Japtown and Indians from dark alleyways—like ghosts—could lurk in the workshed. Fights, muggings, knifings, these were not uncommon. There was treachery in the world. But there were good ghosts and bad ghosts, and you had to be careful not to insult the good ones nor be tempted by the bad ones. And you had to know a ghost when you saw one.”

Jung narrates his passage. The direct manner in which he states his beliefs marks him as inexorably Chinese-Canadian. In Canada, a part of the Western world where there is a Little Tokyo, and racial heterogeneity, his contexts are wildly different from those of even his immediate ancestors. While he grapples with the complexities of his own surroundings, he also internalizes ancestral beliefs about ghosts, and seamlessly integrates them into his understanding of the world. Such is the experience of those within his generation: they are constantly mitigating and negotiating the wildly divergent cultures and beliefs that they experience on a day-to-day basis.

“At our house sometimes, Frank and Kiam talked about the war back in China. I imagined that Frank, with his short hair and high forehead, his wiry body, would be a superior soldier, as tough as any U.S. Marine, tougher than John Wayne himself.”

This quote condenses a complex idea into a seemingly simple statement. Jung, who narrates it, observes how the older boys talk constantly of the war, and so this action becomes ingrained into his conception of masculinity. More importantly, though, young Jung does not perceive the irony of Chinese-Canadians fighting for a country that never loved them. The way that the quote is carefully laden with cultural references to dominant white culture, however, is highly intentional, and Choy does not mean to depict that this irony has gone completely lost on Jung. This is an interesting duty that the hindsight paradigm that the book is written in performs: Choy so often allows the reader to understand both the limitations of his characters when they were children, and the ways in which they can see themselves and their contexts much more clearly by virtue of the passage of time and their maturation into adults. This book would be an entirely different one if the narrators were children, and not adults looking back on their childhoods.

“A line of Chinese carved chairs stood on both the far sides of the room, and the walls were hung with scrolls of calligraphy. At one end of the room, three large five-foot porcelain gods of fortune stood guard, with incense pots beside each one. They looked fierce and cast long shadows on the back wall, doubling their size. At night, Poh-Poh told me, they came alive and worked as guardians for the Tong members and fought back evil spirits. When I told Frank what the Old One said, he laughed.”

In this passage, Jung details the statues that sit in the Tong Association hall. The Tong Association is an important entity in the narrative. It is one key organization that the Chinatown community maintains in order to aid the survival of the members of its community. Here, Jung relays the importance of Old China traditions to this institution. The Tong Association is not solely interested in the day-to-day survival of its members in modern-day Canada; it is also deeply invested in maintaining the ancestral traditions of its Chinese members. For this, it becomes an important cultural access point for Jung. Pointedly, here we see Frank laughing dismissively at the bit of Chinese lore that Jung breathlessly repeats. His laughter is emblematic of the conflicts unique to their generation of Chinese-Canadians.

“I consciously stood my ground, but that enraged him, pushed him to hitting me again, only harder. A deep burden began to lift inside me, but no words came out, only a rising sound, a keening, half-animal, half-human sound. Another part inside me instinctively went cold, said, ‘Win!’”

This passage depicts the fight that Jung has with Frank inside of the Tong Association hall, an incident that will become seminal for Jung. Here, Frank is giving Jung a surprisingly savage beating. The brutality of his physical force against the younger boy marks Frank, in all of his idealized hyper-masculinity, as, momentarily, an irresponsibly and fearsomely violent person. The quote thereby depicts the brutal rituals that men share with each other in order to prove and welcome each other into manhood: Jung’s refusal to show weakness is an equally-masculine performance.

“I curled up on the floor. My child’s voice could not stop its pleading, Frank Yuen, keeling, bent forward and pressed my babbling head against his torn shirt. He began to rock me, and the slow rhythm of his rocking, back and forth, caught me off guard. I closed my eyes and moved with him, a child being cradled, back and forth. There was the smell of Frank’s sweat and his tobacco; his rapid breathing sounded as loud and ragged as my own. We were collapsed together on the floor. The porcelain gods gazed down on us from the far end of the hall. Minutes passed. Frank’s lips brushed my forehead, settled for a second, then lifted.”

In this passage, Jung has broken down following his surprisingly brutal joust with Frank. The beating has triggered memories of the abuse he suffered at his biological father’s hands as a young child, and Jung subsequently breaks down. The way that Frank unhesitatingly and intimately comforts the boy depicts the surprising complexity of the brutal masculine ceremony that they have just enacted. For while Frank’s violence was real and pointed, it is almost as if he got carried away and didn’t actually mean to seriously hurt Jung. Too, this quote shows the undeniable sexual attraction to Frank that is steadily growing stronger in Jung. It speaks to the unique position Frank occupies in Jung’s life. Frank is his mentor. He is also someone who has abused Frank. He is also the object of Jung’s love.

“My mind reeled with distorted, sneering faces, including Frank’s and Kiam’s. I thought someone would see inside me. I waited for someone to expose me. I waited for Frank to turn on me, to spit in my face. Across the room, a camera flashed. My hands desperately tightened around the gold watch, the metal still warm from being next to Frank’s body.”

In this passage, Jung has just felt a powerful sexual attraction to Frank. Immediately understanding the social consequences of his romantic love and sexual attraction to Frank, Jung’s immediate impulse upon the register of these sexual feelings is to anticipate the ways that people (and, particularly, men) will react with disgust and rejection upon receiving the knowledge that he is gay.

“I carefully studied the moon in the blue crescent of the gold watch and asked Poh-Poh what else the moon was besides the yin force. She said the moon was the sign of the dark storyteller. In Old China, this was the one who told of hidden things not seen in the glare of daylight. Moon people felt things, as she did, things that others did not name. I could see Father shaking his head at his desk, wanting to interrupt her Old China nonsense.”

In Jung’s mind, Frank is the sun, and Jung is the moon. Here, Jung has asked Poh-Poh for more mythological insight into the moon. He is, essentially, asking Poh-Poh to tell him about his own identity. This, in itself, is a highly intimate act that speaks to the esteem within which Jung holds Poh-Poh. As the family conservator of Old China’s ways, she is someone whose wisdom and knowledge is to be consulted.

“Grandmother told [the story of one charm], and then another, each story brief and sad and marvelous. There were seven pieces of jade, carved in the shape of ancient symbols. The one she held most dear, we knew, was a coin-sized one, an exquisitely carved peony of translucent white and pinkish jade; its petals were outlined in a simple, carved relief against a perfect round of stone. Its underside was smooth and flawless. Grandmother said that life itself was loss and pain and suffering. Who would deny this, she exclaimed, was a fool. Then she recited some Chinese sayings, about the bitter and the difficult, which Father smiled at. ‘Half the jade made in Chinatown is made from bits of bone and flesh,’ she said, gathering up her pieces […] and the other half […] is made of blood.’ […] Father, who was working on another editorial essay about China and the Japanese invasion, laughed out loud. He was more worried about the rent for next month.”

This important passage depicts the jade peony. Grandmama has gathered all of the children around her, as they sit enraptured and enjoy her storytelling. She has her set of treasured charms arrayed in front of her, and dictates each charm’s wondrous and magical history. This scene depicts Grandmama’s important and singular position within the family. She is living history, the guardian and messenger of the ancestral ways. She holds her grandchildren in thrall, ensuring that the lifeblood of Old China and its culture remains flowing. However, she is also sharply undermined by her own son—who, besieged by worries of mere survival (never mind folklore), and enamored with the ways of the West, essentially laughs in her face. This speaks to the richness and complexity of the family’s Chinese-Canadian identity and experience.

“Whenever I called a visitor by the wrong title again, Stepmother shook her head, apologizing for the blunder. Then she would sing in her Sze-yup dialect, ‘Suling Suling, come to Gold Mountain, give my boy Sek-Lung—a brain, a brain!’”

This quote exemplifies the unique pressures that Sekky is put under as a mo no—a “brainless” first-generation Chinese-Canadian. Stepmother good-naturedly chides and taunts him for his ignorance of the Chinese language, but the apparent cruelty is still palpable. This quote therefore demonstrates the casual brutality that elders exercise on younger generations: even Stepmother, one of the more tender and compassionate characters in the book, has a mean streak when it comes to her children.

“Each lao wah-kiu, each Chinatown old-timer, had been driven out of China by droughts, civil wars, and famine. They put their marks on foreign labor contracts and ended up in Gold Mountain engulfed by secrets.”

This quote is emblematic of Choy’s narrative style. In the midst of sharply wrought emotions, sensations, and mini-plot lines, Choy often inserts terse sentences that are packed with sociological and historical detail. Together, the moving parts of his work create a tapestry that displays the complexities of the characters and the community they share. Not only do we see into their hearts and minds, but we see the larger social, historical, and political forces that shape their experiences and identities.

“English words seemed more forthright to me, blunt, like road signs. Chinese words were awkward and messy, like quicksand. I preferred English, but there were no English words to match the Chinese perplexities. I sometimes wished that my skin would turn white, my hair go brown, my eyes widen and turn blue, and Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor next door would adopt me and I would be Jack O’Connor’s little brother.”

Here, Sekky remarks on an important element of his experience as a child: trying to understand and hew out an identity for himself. Caught between the Western world of English and the Chinese world of Cantonese and its myriad and intricate dialects, Sekky finds himself yearning to be white. This moment bears remarkable similarity to the scene in which Liang wishes she looked like Shirley Temple. Both children dearly wish to change their physical features and, therefore, their cultural identities. They wish to morph into white people for myriad reasons, the principal one being that white people are the ones who are seen as beautiful and legitimate in the culture that they live in. Here, Sekky wishes to simplify the painful complexity of his identity by flattening and erasing the Chinese part of itin favor of the Western part.

“But even if I was born in Vancouver, even if I should salute the Union Jack a hundred million times, even if I had the cleanest hands in all the Dominion of Canada and prayed forever, I would still be Chinese. Stepmother knew this in her heart and feared for me. All the Chinatown adults were worried over those of us recently born in Canada, born ‘neither this nor that,’ neither Chinese nor Canadian, born without understanding the boundaries, born mo no—no brain.”

This passage depicts the way that Sekky struggles with his identity as a first-generation Canadian-Chinese person. No matter how much pious loyalty he may demonstrate to Canada, he will never be truly Canadian because he is not white. Stepmother, too, sees Sekky’s unique position, which she does not share. Although she has been through her own trials and tribulations, she was born in China and is resolutely Chinese. Sekky, however, occupies a liminal territory that makes his identity precarious and vulnerable—so vulnerable, in fact, that he is perceived as stupid and bumbling through no fault of his own. He, like everyone else in his generation, is simply struggling to reconcile the incredible complexity of his social, cultural, and historical position.

“Mo nos went to English school and mixed with Demon outsiders, and even liked them. Wanted to invite them home. Sometimes a mo no might say one careless word too many, and the Immigration Demons would pounce. One careless word—perhaps because a mo no girl or a mo no boy was showing off—and the Immigration Demons would come in the middle of the night, bang on the family door, demand a show of a pile of documents with red embossed stamps. Then the Immigration Demons would separate family members and ask trick questions. Then certain ‘family’ members would disappear. Households would be broken up. Jobs would be lost. Jail and shame and suicides would follow.”

This passage depicts the extremely high stakes and precarity within which the Chinatown community lives. Children, merely struggling to understand and process the world around them, could inadvertently attract the attention of immigration enforcement and thereby trigger a chain reaction leading to the dissolution of families and the ensuing tragedies that deportations wreak. With crystalline detail, Choy renders the profound injustice of this existence, one in which children are not allowed to make innocent mistakes, and must bear the grave consequences forced upon them by a home that is hostile to their very existence.

“‘Keep it simple,’ Father expounded beneath the surface, of course, nothing was simple. I was the Canadian-born child of unwanted immigrants who were not allowed to become citizens. The words RESIDENT ALIEN were stamped on my birth certificate, as if I were a loitering stranger.”

Here, Sekky baldly proclaims the precarity, complexity, and pain inherent to his first-generation Chinese-Canadian identity. Never is he safe from the knowledge that he is not literally nor figuratively a citizen of Canada: he is marked as a member of a disrespected and unwelcome underclass.

“I slammed my book shut and glared at Sam Gon. In my best Chinese, I said loudly, ‘What’s the difference what you're called! My huhng-moh gui, my red-haired demon friend, says if you drop a plate in a restaurant, a dozen Chinks will answer!’ Sam Gon’s eyes opened wide as saucers. Stepmother dropped a large plate. Grandmama walked out of the room.”

In this scene, family friend and elder Sam Gon has insulted Sekky’s Chinese language abilities. Sekky then hits Sam Gon with a surprising and sharp rebuke: He calls Sam Gon a chink. Although according to the designation of the slur Sekky qualifies as a chink too, he intuitively understands his own position as essentially less Chinese than Sam Gon’s. Although Sekky is a resident alien and outsider to white Canadian culture, he knows that by virtue of his being born in Canada and therefore born into Western culture, he has more facility with Canadian society at-large, and is therefore “less” of a chink than Sam Gon is. His brazenness in lobbing the slur is also shocking, as many of the adults register. It is symptomatic of his internalization of the white supremacist narratives that predominate immediate Canadian culture.

“First Brother Kiam insisted on the Big Fact: Death meant the end of someone’s activity on earth. There was no such things as ghosts or demons or spirits. In response, I quoted from Mrs. Williams, who taught at Methodist Sunday School, about the Holy G-h-o-s-t and how it was everywhere. Everywhere. Like Grandmama. Though naturally Mrs. Williams only understood about Christian ghosts with their pink faces and huge white wings and never mentioned Grandmama in her blue jacket.”

This rare glimpse of Kiam shows him as a man of science. Keen to depart from what he clearly sees as the backwards, outdated, and frivolous superstitions of Chinese folklore, he emphatically asserts a secular, Western point of view: there is no such thing as ghosts, only molecules. Sekky, however, incisively combats him by pointing to the subtle hypocrisy of Western Christianity, which is just as quick to condemn the cultural traditions of the Chinese as it is to erect, worship, and believe its own set of unscientific beliefs.

“Some of the younger women had shawls on like Meiying’s. Others pulled sweaters tightly around themselves. The men looked ordinary, some in fedoras and wide pants, some in tweed jackets like Father’s. I had to remind myself that they were the enemy.”

In this scene, Meiying has taken Sekky to a park in Little Tokyo. Sekky is shocked and appalled by her open association with Japanese Kazuo. Sekky has consumed and internalized a great deal of war propaganda that has taught him to regard all Japanese people, including Japanese-Canadians, as the absolute enemy. However, he here sees that these Japanese-Canadians are just like people that he knows and loves.