The Jade Peony (18 page)

Father wept to hear this. I stood beside her bed: she turned to me. Her round face looked darker, and the gentleness of her eyes, with the thin, arching eyebrows, seemed weary. I brushed a few strands of grey, brittle hair from her face; she managed to smile at me. Being the youngest, I had spent nearly all my time with her and knew that she would be with me forever. Yet when she spoke, and her voice hesitated, cracked, the sombre shadows of her room chilled me. Her wrinkled brow grew wet with fever, and her small body seemed even more diminutive.

“You know, Little Son, whatever happens I will never leave you,” she said. Her hand reached out for mine. Her palm felt plush and warm, the slender, old fingers bony and firm; so magically strong was her grip that I could not imagine how she could ever part from me. Ever.

Her hands
were
magical. Long, elegant fingers, with impeccable nails, a skein of fine barely visible veins, and wrinkled skin the colour of light pine. Those hands were quick when she taught me, at six, simple tricks of juggling, learnt when she was a village girl in southern Canton; a troupe of actors had stayed on her father’s farm. One of them, “tall and pale as the whiteness of petals,” fell in love with her, promising to return. “My juggler,” she said, “he never came back to me from Honan... perhaps the famine...” In her last years, his image came back into her life. He had been a magician, an acrobat, a juggler, and some of the things he taught her she had absorbed and passed on to me through her stories and games.

Most marvellous for me was the quick-witted skill her hands revealed in making windchimes for our birthdays: windchimes in the likeness of her lost friend’s parting present to her, made of bits of string and the precious jade peony, a carved stone the size of a large coin, knotted with red silk to hang like a pendant from the centre, like the clapper of a sacred bell. This wondrous gift to her had broken apart years ago, in China, but Grandmama kept the jade pendant in a tiny red silk envelope, and kept it always in her pocket, until her death.

Hers were not ordinary, carelessly made chimes, such as those you now find in our Chinatown stores, whose rattling noises drive you mad. But the making of her special ones caused dissension in our family, and some shame. Each one that she made was created from a treasure trove of glass fragments and castaway costume jewellery. The problem for the rest of the family lay in the fact that Grandmama looked for these treasures wandering the back alleys of Keefer and Pender Streets, peering into our neighbours’ garbage cans, chasing away hungry, nervous cats and shouting curses at them.

“All our friends are laughing at us!” Second Brother Jung said at last to Father, when Grandmama was away having tea at Mrs. Lim’s.

“We are not poor,” First Brother Kiam declared, “yet she and Sek-Lung poke through garbage as if—” he shoved me in frustration and I stumbled against my sister “—they were beggars!”

“She will make Little Brother crazy!” Sister Liang said. Without warning, she punched me sharply in the back; I jumped. “You see, look how
nervous
he is!”

I lifted my foot slightly, enough to swing it back and kick Liang in the shin. She yelled and pulled back her fist to punch me again. Jung made a menacing move towards me.

“Stop this, all of you!” Father shook his head in exasperation. How could he dare tell the Old One, his ageing mother, that what was appropriate in a poor village in China was shameful here? How could he prevent me, his youngest, from accompanying her? “She is not a beggar looking for food. She is searching for—for...”

Stepmother attempted to speak, then fell silent. She, too, was perplexed and somewhat ashamed. They all loved Grandmama, but she was
inconvenient,
unsettling.

As for our neighbours, most understood Grandmama to be harmlessly crazy, others conceded that she did indeed make lovely toys, but for what purpose?
Why?
they asked, and the stories she told to me, of the juggler who had smiled at her, flashed in my head.

Finally, by their cutting remarks, the family did exert enough pressure that Grandmama no longer openly announced our expeditions. Instead, she took me with her on “shopping trips,” ostensibly for clothes or groceries, while in fact we spent most of our time exploring stranger and more distant neighbourhoods, searching for splendid junk: jangling pieces of a broken vase, cranberry glass fragments embossed with leaves, discarded glass beads from Woolworth necklaces. We would sneak them all home in brown rice sacks, folded into small parcels, and put them under her bed. During the day when the family was away at school or work, we brought them out and washed the pieces in a large black pot of boiling lye and water, dried them carefully, and returned them, sparkling, to the hiding place under her bed.

Our greatest excitement occurred when a fire gutted the large Chinese Presbyterian Church, three blocks from our house. Over the still-smoking ruins the next day, Grand-mama and I rushed precariously over the blackened beams to pick out the stained glass that glittered in the sunlight. Her small figure bent over, wrapped against the autumn cold in a dark blue quilted coat, she happily gathered each piece like gold, my spiritual playmate: “There’s a good one!
There!
”

Hours later, soot-covered and smelling of smoke, we came home with a carton full of delicate fragments, still early enough to smuggle them all into the house and put the small box under her bed.

“These are special pieces,” she said, giving the box a last push, “because they come from a sacred place.”

She slowly got up and I saw, for the first time, her hand begin to shake. But then, in her joy, she embraced me. I buried my face in her blue quilted coat, and for a moment, the whole world seemed perfect.

One evening, when the family was gathered in their usual places in the parlour, Grandmama gave me her secret nod of warning: a slight wink of her eye and a flaring of her nostrils. There was
trouble
in the air. Supper had gone badly, school examinations were approaching. Father had failed to meet an editorial deadline at the
Chinese Times.

A huge sigh came from Sister Liang. “But it is useless, this Chinese they teach us!” she lamented, turning to First Brother Kiam for support.

“I agree, Father,” Kiam began. “You must realize that this Mandarin only confuses us. We are Cantonese speakers...”

“And you do not complain about Latin, French or German in your English school?” Father rattled his newspaper, a signal that his patience was ending.

“But Father, those languages are
scientific.
” Kiam jabbed his brush in the air for emphasis. “We are now in a scientific, logical world.”

Father was silent. He wanted his children to have both the old ways and the new ways.

Grandmama went on rocking quietly in her chair. She complimented Stepmother on her knitting, made a remark about the “strong beauty” of Kiam’s brushstrokes which, in spite of himself, immensely pleased him.

“
Daaih ga tohng yahn,
” Grandmama said. “We are all Chinese.” Her firm tone implied that this troubling talk about old and new ways should stop.

“What about Sek-Lung?” Second Brother Jung pointed angrily at me. “He was sick last year, but this year he should have at least started Chinese school, instead of picking over garbage cans!”

“He starts next year,” Father said, in a hard tone that immediately warned everyone to be silent. Liang slammed her book shut.

The truth was, I was sorry not to have started school the year before. I knew going to school had certain privileges. The fact that my lung infection in my fifth and sixth years gave me a reprieve only made me long for school the more. Each member of the family took turns on Sunday, teaching me. But Grandmama taught me most. Tapping me on my head, she would say, “Come, Sek-Lung, we have
our
work,” and we would walk up the stairs to her small crowded room. There, in the midst of her antique shawls, the ancestral calligraphy and multicoloured embroidered hangings, beneath the mysterious shelves of sweet-smelling herbs and bitter potions, we would continue making windchimes.

“I can’t last forever,” she declared, when she let me in on the secret of the chime we had started this morning. “It will sing and dance and glitter.” Her long fingers stretched into the air, pantomiming the waving motion of her ghost chimes. “My spirit will hear its sounds and see its light and return to this house to say goodbye to you.”

Deftly, she reached into the carton she had placed on the chair beside me. She picked out a fish-shaped amber piece, and with a long needlelike tool and a steel ruler, she scored it. Pressing the blade of a cleaver against the line, she lifted up the glass until it cleanly snapped into the exact shape she required. Her hand began to tremble, the tips of her fingers to shiver, like rippling water.

“You see that, Little One?” She held her hand up. “That is my body fighting with Death. He is in this room now.”

My eyes darted in panic, but Grandmama remained calm, undisturbed, and went on with her work. I got out the glue and uncorked the jar for her. Soon the graceful ritual movements of her hand returned to her, and I became lost in the magic of her task: she dabbed a secret mixture of glue on one end and skilfully dropped the braided end of a silk thread into it. This part always amazed me: the braiding would slowly,
very
slowly, unwind, fanning out like a prized fishtail. In a few seconds, as I blew lightly over it, the clear, homemade glue began to harden, welding to itself each separate silk strand.

Each jam-sized pot of glue was treasured; each large cork stopper had been wrapped with a fragment of pink silk. We went shopping at the best stores in Chinatown for the perfect square of silk she required. It had to be a deep pink, blushing towards red. And the tone had to match, as closely as possible, her precious jade carving, the small peony of white and light-red jade, her most lucky possession. In the centre of this semitranslucent carving, no more than an inch wide, was a pool of pink light, its veins swirling out into the petals of the flower.

“This colour is the colour of my spirit,” Grandmama said, holding it up to the window so I could see the delicate pastel against the broad strokes of sunlight. She dropped her voice, and I held my breath at the wonder of the colour. “This was given to me by the young acrobat who taught me how to juggle. He had four of them, and each one had a centre of this rare colour, the colour of Good Fortune.” The pendant seemed to pulse as she turned it: “Oh, Sek-Lung! He had white hair and white skin
to his toes!
It’s true—I saw him bathing.” She laughed and blushed, her eyes softened at the memory. The silk had to match the pink heart of her pendant, for the colour was magical for her: it held the unravelling strands of her memory.

Six months before she died, we began to work on her last windchime. Three thin bamboo sticks of varying length were steamed and bent into circlets; twenty exact lengths of silk thread, the strongest kind, were cut and braided at both ends and glued to pieces of the stained glass. Her hands worked on their own command, each hand racing with a life of its own: cutting, snapping, braiding, knotting. Sometimes she breathed heavily, and her small body, growing thinner, sagged against me.
Death,
I thought,
is in this room,
and I would work harder alongside her. For weeks Grandmama and I did this every other evening, a half-dozen pieces each time. The shaking in her hand grew worse, but we said nothing. Finally, after discarding a hundred, she told me she had the necessary twenty pieces. But this time, because it was a sacred chime, I would not be permitted to help her tie it up or have the joy of raising it.

“Once tied,” she said, holding me against my disappointment, “not even I can raise it. Not a sound must it make until I have died.”

“What will happen?”

“Your father will then take the centre braided strand and raise it. He will hang it against my bedroom window so that my ghost may see it, and hear it, and return. I must say goodbye to this world properly or wander in this foreign land forever.”

“You can take the streetcar!” I blurted, suddenly shocked that she actually meant to leave me. I thought I could hear the clear chromatic chimes, see the shimmering colours on the wall: I fell against her and cried, and there in my crying I knew that she would die. I can still remember the touch of her hand on my head, and the smell of her thick woollen sweater pressed against my face. “I will always be with you, Little Sek-Lung, but in a different way... You’ll see.”

Weeks went by, and nothing happened. Then one late September evening, Grandmama was preparing supper when she looked out our kitchen window and saw a cat—a long, lean white cat—jump into our garbage pail and knock it over. She ran out to chase it away, shouting curses at it. She did not have her thick sweater on and when she came back into the house, a chill gripped her. She leaned against the door: “That was not a cat,” she said, and the odd tone of her voice caused Father to look with alarm at her. “I cannot take back my curses. It is too late.” She took hold of Father’s arm. “It was all white and had pink eyes like sacred fire.”

Father started at this, and they both looked pale. My brothers and sister, clearing the table, froze in their gestures.

“The fog has confused you,” Stepmother said. “It was just a cat.”

But Grandmama shook her head, for she knew it was a sign. “I will not live forever,” she said. “I am prepared.”

The next morning she was confined to her bed with a severe cold. Sitting by her, playing with some of my toys, I asked her about the cat: “Why did Father jump when you said the cat was white with pink eyes? He didn’t see it, you did.”

“But he and Stepmother know what it means.”

“What?”

“My friend, the juggler, the magician, was as pale as white jade, and he had pink eyes.” I thought she would begin to tell me one of her stories, a tale of enchantment or wondrous adventure, but she only paused to swallow; her eyes glittered, lost in memory. She took my hand, gently opening and closing her fingers over it. “Sek-Lung,” she sighed, “
he
has come back to me.”