The Jade Peony

Jung begins this chapter by recounting that a person named Old Yuen gave him his “best” coat: a thick, patched-wool coat that Old Yuen’s own son, Frank, had rejected. Jung then spends an extended time relaying in crisp detail how he came to be with his current family. When he was 4 years old, and living in Kamloops, he awoke one morning to find his father slumped over the stove. He remembered his mother being in bed that morning, plainly dead, with purple bruises covering her throat. Before this time, his father would often beat him, until his mother would bear the beatings for him. Both of his parents were dead, and he was ultimately retrieved by a neighbor, who found him curled against his mother’s corpse. 

Jung then floated around from family to family before finally landing in Vancouver, also called Salt Water City, with Stepmother, Father, Poh-Poh, Kiam (who was older than him), and Liang (who was younger than him). Poh-Poh’s faded and intent eyes falling upon him is one of his most enduring memories of that time. When he first came to live with them, he was convinced that all of the adults, and Poh-Poh especially, were fox-demons that were trying to trick him into his doom. 

Although he initially looked for his parents, thinking they would return to retrieve him, he eventually settled in to the family. He shared a room with the brusque and tough Kiam, who also began to be his playground guardian. He was given picture-books to use while learning how to read with Liang. Being two years her senior, he was expected to do better than her. He recounts how each adult taught him distinct life skills, and Father would take him around town boasting about his new son. He recounts that he was never treated differently from Liang or Kiam, but that Sekky swallowed up nearly all of Poh-Poh’s attentions when he was born, because of Sekky’s sickly nature. As the years passed, his birth parents became shadows. 

Now 12, Jung spends the remainder of the chapter speaking in detail about the jacket he inherited from Old Yuen. He also mentions that he was taught to box by a black man named Max at the Hastings Gym. 

The coat, a charcoal color, cost Old Yuen his earnings from a three-night lucky streak at gambling. Jung wanted Stepmother to make it like an army or navy coat. Father presented him with old brass buttons for it, while Grandmother washed it twice in order to get the smell of tobacco out of it. 

Jung spends the bulk of the rest of the chapter speaking about Gee Sook, a bachelor-man tailor and dry cleaner who runs American Steam Cleaners at Pender and Gore. A perpetual bachelor who never married, despite the chiding of others that he should father many sons, Gee Sook is a kind and generous man who welcomes children into his business. While his bachelorhood is a favorite gossip topic for the women who play mahjong, it is also understood that families are difficult to provide for, and the lives of Chinese immigrants are marked by poverty. 

Jung notes that there are some Chinese men who date loose white and Native women, and also a white midwife named Nellie, who is married to a Chinese man named Yip Gong. Nellie, an anomaly, speaks five Chinese dialects fluently. She is also the favored midwife within the Chinese immigrant community. As a favor to Father, she assisted during the birth of Stepmother’s third child, who was stillborn. Jung notes that this death was not kept from him, as such things are not kept from children within his family. 

Jung warmly remembers the days that he and Liang spent in Gee Sook’s shop, helping him with his orders and eating the sweet treats he always had on hand. He fondly recounts the day that Gee Sook lined his treasured jacket with the navy-dyed cotton twill that Poh-Poh requested. He also put the coat into a huge, pedal-operated steam-pressing machine before gracefully placing it onto Jung’s shoulders. Jung remembers that he felt like a young warrior that day, along with the fact that only a trace of the old stain on the jacket remained (which was a good thing in Poh-Poh’s eyes, as it would keep the gods from being jealous). Poh-Poh also had Gee Sook re-sew the coat’s original tag, which read Genuine British, back into it. 

Jung recounts that, for as long as he could remember, Poh-Poh was always saying she was going to die soon. It was her way of tricking the gods into letting her live longer. When he asks her what his first mother and father were like, she tells him that they were just like everyone else, and that it was better to forget them. The chapter ends with Jung wanting everyone to see him in his jacket, but mostly he wants to look at himself in it in the mirror in his own home.

Jung begins this chapter by telling us he is a year older: “thirteen, taller, and fifteen pounds heavier, gaining the weight [he] needed to box in a higher class at the Hastings Gym” (104). Looking in the mirror, he admires the way Old Yuen’s coat fits him, as well as the coat’s brass buttons. 

It’s Jung’s job to go to Old Yuen’s rooming house in order to pick up the rent that is due to the Tong Association office. His father reminds him to do this errand quickly, before Old Yuen spends all of his money on alcohol or gambling. 

Jung intimates that Old Yuen, only in his forties, has been prematurely aged by “crimpling camp labor […] drinking and gambling […] and bad luck” (105). 

Old Yuen’s bad luck is legendary. His wife claimed to have been told special winning lottery numbers by a ghost. Old Yuen played those numbers for a year—unsuccessfully. Then he would return home empty-handed and beat Mrs. Yuen, who refused to cry while enduring the blows. Poh-Poh, the Old One, would muse that it was too bad that Mrs. Yuen wouldn’t cry, for her tears would save her from damnation. Jung notes that while his father knows all of the Old One’s old poetry and sayings, his father prefers to comport himself in a more “modern” fashion. 

Mrs. Yuen gave birth to the couple’s only son, Frank, in a little mining town. When Frank survived his first month on earth, Gee Sook, the tailor, sent Frank a ceremonial bonnet gold-embroidered with lucky words. Frank’s head was also shaved, in order to represent his first Chinese birthday. Frank’s good luck did not wear off on his father. 

After being robbed blind by a woman while he slept in bed, Old Yuen tried to reform. However, the reformation was short-lived, as he quickly fell back into his old habits: drinking and beating his wife for any given reason. When Frank was 5, Mrs. Yuen ran away with Frank and begged the Tong Association to be allowed to stay in its rooming house. She was eventually allowed to stay, and essentially became the housekeeper of the rooming house, cleaning up after the “bachelor-men who coughed too much and smoked their water pipes, who swore […] and talked cunt-talk and penis-talk” (107-108). Frank lived with his mother in a cramped room hidden away on the house’s second floor. Some of the bachelor-men showed him kindness during this time in his life, although none of them noticed that he never cried, despite still being a young child. 

Frank’s mother eventually became ill with tuberculosis and died in her bed. Old Yuen then took Frank away for a life of bouncing from rooming house to rooming house, in order to follow lumber camp work. Frank grew up fighting in every schoolyard he encountered, until he was old enough to start working. Now an adult, Frank maintains an icy relationship with father, only seeing him in order to give him money to help with rent: “Why stay around bad luck?” he says (109). Kiam relays the sad history of the Yuen family to Jung, and tells Jung that he was lucky to be adopted by his family, and not one like the Yuens. 

Kiam and his teenage friends, who are only a few years younger than Frank, love it when Frank regales them with all the details of his various “hoodlum” exploits, including “shooting dice with a mix of fan quo and kai dot low life” (112). Kiam is repeatedly told to stay away from Frank and the bad example he sets. He is happy to do so because his girlfriend, Jenny Chong, takes up most of his time. 

Although (or perhaps because) most of Chinatown, and especially Poh-Poh, steers clear of Frank and even of any talk about him (besides gossip), Jung quickly becomes enraptured with Frank and his tough, masculine manner. Frank, about 22 years old, has a reputation of being a hard man whom no one crosses. 

One day, Jung sees Frank at Hastings Gym. He admires his strong, grown, manliness: Frank is a man who earns his own money by working at lumber mills and who supports his own father. Frank tells Jung that he has heard that Jung is getting good at boxing, and Frank admires the older man’s fatal accuracy with his fists and his ability to curse and insult others in an array of languages and dialects. He observes that Frank shadowboxes “the way the Brown Bomber shadow boxed in the News of the World” (111). Although Frank is rough and difficult with Jung and his friends, Jung does everything he can to be near him, and Frank occasionally indulges Jung by casually training and sparring with the boy in the Tong’s assembly room. 

One day, Jung runs into Frank in the assembly room after picking up Old Yuen’s rent money. At one end of the room, “three large five-foot porcelain gods of fortune [stand] guard, with incense pots beside each one. They [looked] fierce and cast long shadows on the back wall, doubling their size.” (113). Poh-Poh has told Frank that these statues come alive at night to fight back evil spirits: they work as the guardians of the Tong members.   

Frank, wearing a half-open leather jacket and tapered zoot suit pants, is in a bad mood and stinks of whiskey. Jung recalls feeling shy and intimidated by the older man, who is a head taller than him. 

Frank turns on the room’s three spotlights, which in turn throw their shadows up spectacularly against the wall and light up the ferocious faces of the porcelain gods. Jung notes that these lights are only used for special occasions, and he feels emboldened. His “warrior coat” slips from his shoulders, and he hardly notices (113). 

Frank aims a fierce kick at Jung’s head, which the younger man dodges. Frank then orders Jung to take off his sweater, and Jung obeys. Next, Jung dodges another of Frank’s kicks. Frank, increasingly agitated, taunts Jung and removes his own jacket. As he levels another savage kick, his pant leg rides up and Jung espies the black handle of a knife. Frank then pulls the knife out of its sheath to reveal a six-inch, razor-sharp blade. He tells Jung that he always wins every fight, and that one should always fight to either win or die: “If you don’t win […] you don’t deserve to live” (114). 

Jung, eager to challenge Frank and to prove himself to him, tries to kick Frank. Frank then proceeds to give Jung an almost crazed beating while Jung wills himself to receive the violence without crying. Frank slaps and hits Jung increasingly harder, enraged by the way that Jung stands his ground. Jung wills himself to think of the mantra fight to win or die. After Frank taunts him, calling him a “goddamn chicken-shit punk,” a cold resolve comes over Jung (116). Beneath Frank’s disbelieving gaze, Jung deftly maneuvers in order to snatch Frank’s knife from inside his trousers, and “[thrusts] the knife point-blank at [Frank’s] Adam’s apple (116). Frank jumps back, “his arms flailing away from the knifepoint coming up at him like a spear” (116). As the blade juts upward, it catches Frank’s shirt and cleanly slits it with a hiss. He commands Jung to stop, before catching the boy’s arm with a swift kick that sends the knife careening across the floor. Frank curses, musing that Jung was truly trying to kill him. 

Jung, moved by repressed memories of the abuse he suffered at his biological father’s hands as a very young child, begins to babble in a long-forgotten dialect: “Bah-Bah, don’t hit me,” he says (117). He curls up on the floor, unable to stop the refrain from tumbling out of his mouth, over and over. Frank kneels and presses the boy’s head against his torn shirt. He rocks Jung and kisses him on the forehead before letting him go a few minutes later. As Frank withdraws, Jung senses his entire body igniting with an uninvited and strange yearning: “a vivid longing [rises] relentlessly from the centre of [his] groin, sensuous and craving” (117). 

Frank, grinning, says “You nearly killed me, you little bastard” (118). Jung returns the smile and is careful to move his body in such a way that does not betray the real damage that Frank has done. Frank asks where his knife is. Jung privately glories in the fact that Frank has called him “Champ,” meaning Champion. Jung intimates that he never felt the same about anything after this encounter with Frank; “Frank Yuen is the sun,” he remembers thinking (118). And he remembers the Old One telling Mrs. Lim, “Jung-Sum is the moon” (118).

Jung reports that a year after he met Frank, Frank decided to go to Seattle to join the US Marines. Max, the black coach at the Hastings Gym, decides to throw a goodbye party for Frank. Kiam and his girlfriend, Jenny Chong, attend the party; Frank insists that Jung also join them. The party begins at a restaurant, where everyone is served a ten-course meal. They pass a bottle of liquor in a brown bag around the table, and Frank puts all of the best meat morsels on Jung’s plate. Jung gets soda instead of liquor, but Max later lets him sneak sips of alcohol. Then, the men and Jung go back to the gym, to drink in a back room, while the girls “freshen up.” 

Frank makes a big show of giving Jung a gold watch that Old Yuen had given to Frank. Frank jokes that the watch will become a memento to remember him by, should he not return from the war. Jung notes that Frank has been calling him Little Brother, Champ, and Killer since their fateful encounter at the gym. 

Frank is proud of Jung, who has begun to win some of his exhibition fights. He pulls Jung into an embrace. Tipsy, he hugs Jung firmly and plants a playful kiss on his forehead before declaring him his brother and the Champion Yellow Bomber. Jung initially blushes and laughs, but then grows scared by the romantic and sexual longing stirring deep within him. He begins waiting for someone to expose him, for Frank to turn and spit in his face. But that does not happen and Jung merely watches Frank continue to revel. Max does notice that Jung seems shaken, and treats him kindly and reassuringly. He then sees to it that Jung retrieves his jacket and makes it safely out to the street. 

On his walk home, Jung takes out Frank’s watch. He notices that it has a cut-out, upside-down crescent under its numbers, within which revolve antique images of the sun and moon. Jung stops under a street lamp as the watch gently chimes eight times. He longs for Frank. 

When Jung returns home, the entire family is sitting in the parlor. He shows them all the gold watch. Father and Sekky assure Jung that Frank will return from the war, while Liang muses about how handsome Frank will look in his uniform. 

Jung, studying the crescent window in the watch, asks Poh-Poh what else the moon stands for, besides the yin force. She answers that the moon represents the dark storyteller: “the one who [tells] of hidden things not seen in the daylight,” according to the Old China wisdom (123). Father, at his desk, shakes his head. 

Later, Poh-Poh decides to show her jade amulets and charms to Jung, Liang, and Sekky. She has seven pieces of jade in total, each one carved into the shape of an ancient symbol. The one dearest to her is “an exquisitely carved peony of translucent white and pinkish jade, its petals […] outlined in a simple, carved relief against a perfect round of stone” (123). Poh-Poh then declares that life itself is pain, loss, and suffering. She intones old Chinese sayings about the bitterness and difficulty of life; this time, Father smiles. She also declares that all of the jade in Chinatown is comprised of bone, flesh, and blood. Father, who is working on an editorial about the Japanese invasion of China, and more worried about making rent than Poh-Poh’s yarns, laughs aloud at this declaration. 

Kiam declares that when he joins the army and fights for Canada, he will change his name to Ken. Liang says that Jenny Chong will like that, because Jenny has said that they all should have “real English names,” and try not to stand out as different when they are not in Chinatown (124). Poh-Poh shrugs this off and then holds her carved jade peony talisman up to the light and bids Sekky to look at “the shifting swirl of pink in the stone’s moonlit center” (125). 

Father chastises Poh-Poh, stating that she lives too much in the past while the children must live the new ways. But Jung knows that he and his siblings still belong with their grandmother, just as they belong to her stories and her phantoms. When Sekky asks if the peony talisman will be his one day, Poh-Poh answers “why not,” before disappearing into the darkness of the hallway, in order to begin work on the windchime that she has promised to him.