The Jade Peony (16 page)

“Enough, Jung-Sum,” Poh-Poh said. She tapped Sekky on his head. “It’s time, Little One. We go upstairs to do our own work.”

Kiam and Father looked at each other and shrugged. Father sighed, not too loudly. It seemed that only Third Uncle’s frown was missing, and the three of them could have sighed together. But I still belonged with Poh-Poh, belonged to her stories and her ghosts, just as Liang and Sekky did.

I helped her slip each piece into the silk envelopes, and she started putting everything away in her large jacket pocket. One piece was missing.

“Will this one be mine one day, Grandmama?” Sekky asked, greedily clutching the last piece. “Will this one be mine?”

“Why not,” the Old One said, laughing, and took the small, round stone from Sekky’s hand as she walked into the gloom of the hallway to start work on the windchime she had promised him.

I
N 1939, WHEN I WAS SIX
years old, the whole family—my two brothers and my sister, and all our relatives—considered me brainless.

“
Mo no!
” Stepmother used to say in Cantonese, pointing to my head. “
No brain!
Wait until your Auntie Suling comes to Canada. She’ll give you a brain!” I looked upon Stepmother’s best friend, Chen Suling, as my enemy.

Everyone knew why I was brainless. A stubborn lung infection was keeping me out of the Vancouver public school system. My family, however, focussed on the way I stumbled over calling my adopted
Gim San gons
(Gold Mountain uncles) their proper titles. I would say “
Third
Uncle” instead of “
Great
Uncle.”

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!
”

Suling was Stepmother’s age, a woman who had given up her own family’s wealth to become a Christian teacher in Old China. Stepmother worshipped the bamboo-framed photograph of Suling and herself standing before a moon gate when they were young together and everything seemed possible.

“The street photographer, an old man, thought Suling was so pretty!”

Chen Suling, clutching a thick Bible in her hand, had discovered the Christian God in the spring of 1920, or as Stepmother told it, “The Christian God picked her.”

“Suling gave me that beautiful silk scarf with gold flowers,” Stepmother said, pointing. “See how it falls over my shoulders.”

The two young girls in the picture were stiff, barely smiling. Suling looked righteous, like Miss MacKinney, my Grade One teacher at Strathcona School. Miss MacKinney had a wooden ruler with a steel edge, unbending. She slapped it on your desk if you didn’t pay attention in class. Miss MacKinney had not called me Sek-Lung, but “Sekky,” because, she smiled, it was “more Canadian.”

I looked at the picture of Stepmother’s girlhood friend. She looked so stern, I thought she should have a steel-edged ruler in each of her hands. Instead, there was an embroidered sharp-clawed dragon slinking down Chen Suling’s wide sleeve. Stepmother noticed me staring at it.

“Isn’t that a beautiful jacket? Suling and I picked it out together. When she comes to Canada, Sek-Lung,” she paused to imagine that happy day, “I will wear the same flowered scarf she gave me, like the old days.”

The dragon on the sleeve looked powerful, forbidding; Chen Suling’s long
cheong-sam
hid everything but her dour face.

Because Stepmother’s vanity wouldn’t let her wear glasses, she insisted that she could not make out the writing in the letters Suling sent from China, so Father read them aloud: “Today, the farmers tell us landlords and Christians are being arrested in the Outer Districts near Tsingyuan. Some are beheaded. It is difficult to write. Pray for us.” Suling’s own First Mission Group barely escaped death; then the Japanese pushed deeper into South China and we scarcely heard from her.

Even so, Stepmother believed Suling would someday come to Canada. Rich Chinese merchant families, students and baptized Christians were arriving every three or four months.

“Why not?” she said to Mr. Tom, the fresh vegetable vendor. “Even if the Chen family deserts her, Suling has her God to help her. And my
mo no
boy needs her brain.”

FAMILY RANKINGS
and Chinese kinship terms gave me a headache. For example, Stepmother was the birth-mother of both my sister Liang and myself. She had been brought over to Canada from China to become a family servant or concubine, a kind of second-class wife, after Father’s first wife died in China. Kiam was the son of Father and his first wife, and Jung was adopted.

Grandmama decided it was simpler for everyone to refer to Father’s second wife as “Stepmother.”

“In Canada, one husband, one wife,” Grandmama said. Because of her age, the wiry ancient lady was the one person Father would never permit any of us to defy.

When Third Uncle told me that “Stepmother” was a ranking much more respectable than “family servant,” more honourable than “concubine,” but never equal in honour or respect to the title of First Wife or Mother, Stepmother remained silent.

Every Chinese person, it seemed to me, had an enigmatic status, an order of power and respect, mysteriously attached to him or her.

“Isn’t a
boy
baby better than a
girl
baby?” I asked Father one day, with specific reference to myself and to my sister Liang.

“The older one,” Liang butted in, “is always better than the younger one.”

Liang was ten; I was six.

Liang was always jealous that Grandmama, whom she called Poh-Poh, treated me better; I was the one the Old One had spent the most time caring for since I was a baby, and sickly. And I was a boy.

My two stepbrothers naturally felt superior. Kiam was fifteen and was getting all
A
’s at King Edward High; Jung was twelve and was learning how to box like Joe Louis at the Hastings Gym.

One afternoon, over small cups of wine with Third Uncle and Father, Uncle Dai Kew changed his tone of voice and referred to Father and Father’s First Wife and “the others.”

“What others?” I asked, for I knew that Father’s Number One Wife had died in China.

The three men drank their medicinal wine, looked at each other, and shut up.

“Keep it simple,” Father said. “We in Canada now.”

“Simple best,” Grandmama said, sternly, tapping her finger on the kitchen table, ignoring Liang and taking me into her arms. Liang made a face at me.

I always wanted to keep things simple, just as Father advised, and that made things worse.

The Chinese rankings for acquaintances and relatives were overwhelming. There were different titles for those persons related to us according to the father’s age, the mother’s age, and even the ages of the four grandparents, and according to whether they were from the mother’s or father’s side—never mind if you threw in a
step
mother and
her
best friend. And if these persons were also tied to us by false papers to obtain immigration visas, they became “paper sons” or “paper uncles,” heirs to a web of illegal subterfuge brought on by laws that stipulated only relatives of official “merchant-residents” or “scholars” could immigrate from China to Canada. Paper money could buy paper relatives. But whose papers were connected to whose relatives? My head pounded.

First Brother Kiam showed me a few kinship terms you could look up in an English-Chinese missionary dictionary. For every one term in English, like “First Cousin” or “Aunt,” there were ten Chinese terms. Jesus, for example, had something like eleven brothers and sisters whose Chinese kinship terms, as a footnote, took up half the page. I could only think that Chen Suling was very smart, and Jesus needed her in China.

“Lucky Jesus wasn’t Chinese,” I said, seriously.

“These rankings,” Kiam agreed, “they’re more confusing than Confucius!”

ONE DAY
, after shopping with Grandmama and studying the Chinese flag and the Union Jack and the Buy War Bonds posters hanging in Chinatown store windows, I had a burning question. I came home and interrupted Stepmother, who was busy learning how to knit socks for the soldiers in China.

“Am I Chinese or Canadian?” I asked Stepmother.

“
Tohng yahn,
” Grandmama said, collapsing in her rocking chair and setting her grocery bags down on the floor. “
Chinese.
”

“When Chen Suling comes to Canada,” Stepmother said, caught in a missed stitch, “she will teach you the right way to be Chinese.”

Father reached out to touch her hand, but she withdrew from him. Stepmother did not like my spending so much time with Grandmama. They must have had words again about it: “The Old One spoils the boy! Everyone says so!”

“We are also Canadian,” Father said.

After a long pause, Stepmother gave him her hand, and he held it for a moment. She would not smile, and he went back to sorting out his Chinese newspaper cuttings spread out on the floor.

I knew just enough Chinese and English to speak to people, but not always to understand the finer points; worse, each language was mixed in with a half-dozen Chinatown dialects. I never possessed enough details, in either language, to understand how our family, how the countless cousins, in-laws, aunts and uncles, came to be related. Behind their wrinkled hands, the few old women and the old bachelor-men, the
lao wah-kiu,
whispered their guarded knowledge of bloodlines, of clans claimed or deserted, of women bartered for silver coins, of indentured children bought or sold to balance family debts or guarantee male heirs.

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

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.

“Sekky’s driving himself crazy,” Liang complained.

“Simple, please,” Father urged everyone.

“Sek-Lung will never get things right,” Stepmother said. “Even my friend Suling may not be able to help.”

“Different roots, different flowers,” Grandmama said, chopping a head of cabbage. “Different brains.”

EVERYTHING
was a puzzle to me. Everyone was an enigma.

When Grandmama, still strong in her eighties, and our neighbour Mrs. Lim, younger at fifty-something, sat together on our porch, they talked in private riddles and spoke in a servant dialect, using a kind of clipped and broken grammar they had in Old China. And this was only one dialect of the many Chinatown dialects they knew in common. Each dialect opened up another reality to them, another time and place they shared.

Old-timers knew about survival. Mrs. Lim exclaimed to Grandmama, “
Aaiiiyaah!
The tea is bitter, but we drink it.”

And they raised their cups to each other, laughing.

“
We are all Chinese,
” Mrs. Lim said. “
Daaih ga tohng yahn.
”

Grandmama nodded agreement, for to think anything else was betrayal. And betrayal meant that one could still be shipped back to China, be barred from Canada, taken away from Gold Mountain, exiled, shamed, removed from the privilege of sending a few dollars back to the family-name clan starving in war-torn, famine- and drought-cursed China. And always came the pleading letters from village and city: “Send more money, send more, send more.”

And other letters came, like Chen Suling’s: “Can you help me, dear Lily? I must come to Gold Mountain and see you once more.” Surely, once in Canada, one was safe.

But born-in-Canada children, like myself,
could
betray one. For we were
mo no
children. Children with no Old China history in our brains.

“Who are you, Sek-Lung?” Mrs. Lim asked me. “Are you
tohng yahn?
”

“Canada!” I said, thinking of the ten days of school I had attended before the doctor sent me home, remembering how each of those mornings I had saluted the Union Jack, had my hands inspected for cleanliness, and prayed to
Father-Art-in-Heaven.

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.

Mo no
s 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.