The Jade Peony (23 page)

From my seat in the middle of the room, I could see Tammy Okada’s braided pigtails visibly trembling.

“You will become my best student,
yes?
”

Tammy Okada’s back, in spite of herself, seemed to straighten a little.

“Sit.”

Miss Doyle walked away with Tammy’s cigar box still clutched in her hand. We figured this was the last anyone would ever see of that pathetic dirty box. We all waited to see if Miss Doyle would throw it into her desk drawer of confiscated stuff, or if she would toss it into the wastepaper basket, after which she would slowly dust off her big hands and walk over to the hanging strap.

I thought Tammy Okada must feel like a leaky submarine. I was feeling a little sorry for her when Miss Doyle walked past the wastepaper basket and strode directly to the front of her own cabinet-style desk. She reached down into a bottom drawer out of everyone’s sight. There were snipping noises. Miss Doyle threw away cut pieces of knotted twine and rummaged noisily, but we could not see what she was doing. Then we heard the smart Snap! Snap! of elastic bands.

Still unsmiling, Miss Doyle walked back to Tammy Okada’s front row seat and placed the big cigar box on the desktop. The whole class could hear a weighty load of contents shifting and rattling with what every boy and girl suddenly knew to be the best possible pencil-box paraphernalia anyone could ever dream of owning: stuff from the General’s own hidden cave of seized treasures.

I imagined the years and years of confiscated collectibles—coloured pencils of every hue and length, mechanical pencils, pen nibs, holders, crayons, jacks, pencil sharpeners, paper cutouts, elastics, marbles, stencils, erasers, fold-away rulers, Crackerjack miniatures, maybe even a
compass
—all poured into that single box. Tammy Okada, unbelieving, ran a shy finger over the crisscrossed rubber bands.

“Tammy Okada,” Miss Doyle’s crisp enunciation did not falter, “your pencil box,
yes?
”

“Yes,” Tammy said, in a voice so soft we barely heard it.

“
Jeez,
” Elizabeth Brown breathed.

The rest of us sighed.

Miss Doyle picked up a chalk, tapped the blackboard for attention and began to teach us how to use the letter
S
to show possession. The General printed in big letters:
Alfred’s book... Sekky’s cap... Tammy’s pencil box...

“You’re all paying attention,
yes?
”

“
Yes,
Miss Doyle,” we sang in unison, like soldiers.

We had learned to answer the General’s tone-dipping
Yes?
or deeper
No?
with “
Yes,
Miss Doyle” or “
No,
Miss Doyle.”

Jung, who had been in Miss Doyle’s class many years ago, advised me not to raise my hand to answer a single question, not even if I knew the answer.

“It’ll work in your favour if the General hollers your name and you surprise her with the answer.”

Then up would go her ample breasts.

The girls in the class grew to admire Miss Doyle and would hold themselves high like her, chin back, sweater buttoned to the absolute top. The oldest boy, aged twelve, just arrived from Poland, would widen his eyes at Miss Doyle. “Denny”—his real name was too easy to make fun of and too hard to pronounce—liked to please Miss Doyle, too, though he, like Tammy Okada, only fitfully spoke half a dozen English phrases. Miss Doyle strapped him once, and at recess he muttered, “I kill that bitch... I kill!” But by the next day, Denny only wanted to copy a straight line of words, neatly spaced and correctly spelled, line after tidy line. Like the rest of us, he wanted to earn the General’s gold star stuck on the top of the page.

At recess, our dialects and accents conflicted, our clothes, heights and handicaps betrayed us, our skin colours and backgrounds clashed, but inside Miss E. Doyle’s tightly disciplined kingdom we were all—lions or lambs—equals.

We had glimpsed Paradise.

A
FTER SURVIVING THOSE
first few weeks into September, I was like the other Advanced Grade Three kids, wanting to please Miss Doyle. And yet, when her staunch authority focussed on me, I suddenly wanted to be forgotten, left alone, ignored.

“Sekky, you are playing with—
what?
”

Against her thundering authority there was no appeal. For example, if an innocent boy went home and complained Miss Doyle had unfairly seized his favourite tin fighter plane, which happened to slip out of his pocket during Silent Reading, that boy would get a worse strapping at home. It was a hard life. I missed my freedom.

After school, every day, I tried my best to maintain my membership in Alfred Stevorsky’s defiance-loving, war-battling gang. I rushed through my homework in front of Father or Stepmother when either was around, and escaped outside as soon as I finished.

Father, Stepmother, brothers Kiam and Jung, and even sister Liang, were all working wherever and whenever they could. Our household was constantly short of money. My older siblings also went to Chinese School.

I played.

I was, after all, supposed to be too weak for doing any kind of real work and, of course, too young to do anything that others would take seriously. I wasn’t allowed to go to Chinese School either—“Too much stress for the boy,” the Strathcona School doctor had told Father.

“Let the boy play,” Dr. Palmer said to Father, who heard the word “play” and thought how foolish to waste away those hours.

Though he knew better, Father saw each of his three sons as Confucian scholars, as if his B.C.-Chinatown boys could reflect the Old China he himself remembered as a child. There, in Sun Wu village in the county of the Four Districts, if a boy was not too poor, after his labours in the family shop or after his toils on some ancestral field, he looked forward to an encounter with reading and writing. Settling into a creaking chair with brush in hand, he sensibly studied the
Sam zi jing,
the
Three Character Classic.
At least that was what the elders told the Chinatown sons. In Old China, no scholarly child actually played after age six. He put away childish things, found in learning his recreation and inspiration.

“In China,” Third Uncle told me, “there was a poor boy who caught a hundred fireflies and kept them in a jar. Know why?”

I waited for a story as wonderful as Grandmama used to tell me.

“So he could have enough light to study at night.”

I thought it would be fun to catch the flies, but too much of a strain to read at night.

“Nighttime is for dreaming,” I remembered the Old One used to say, “for signs to appear.”

Besides, such a boy I was not. Here I was, almost eight years old, playing. Playing until I was too tired even to dream. The gang and I became neighbourhood terrors.

I not only shouted words I learned from play-boxing with Jung’s friends at the gym, but words like
chink, nigger, bohunk, wop, jap
and
hymie
quickly infiltrated my playground vocabulary. I knew enough not to say those special words in front of bigger boys, and never in front of an adult, but they somehow were overheard by neighbours and reported to Father and Kiam. Though Jung said “I don’t give a shit,” Liang pretended to be constantly outraged about my reckless phrases, especially about the expressions that described girl-parts and dog-parts. She always looked like she was going to faint but still managed to tell Father what I said.

ONE DAY
, I got bored.

Alfred Stevorsky and the other boys had gone to sneak into a three-ring Barnum circus at Exhibition Park, but First Brother Kiam wouldn’t give me the few pennies for the Hastings streetcar to get there and back. Kiam was not as much fun as he had been in the summer; nowadays, he worried about the war, his school projects, his work at the warehouse, or his girlfriend, Jenny Chong. He told me not to wander too far away.

I took my cardboard carton of war toys and stepped outside the house.

From our porch, I noticed a jumbled row of bundled
Sun
and
Province
newspapers on our sidewalk, stacked along with other stuff to be recycled for the war effort, all waiting for the pickup truck. I could see the two- and three-foot-high paper stacks standing in for the haphazard mountains surrounding the Burma Road. The Japanese were attacking. I took out my favourite Curtiss
P
-40 Warhawk with the Flying Tiger teeth painted on both sides of its nose. First Pilot Sek-Lung was going to drop some bombs over the Burma Road. I snapped on my leather pilot’s cap.

The “bombing” was a neat game Alfred Stevorsky had invented with matches he borrowed from his house. First, you slightly dampened two matchheads with your tongue, just
barely
damp. Then you struck the thick, sulphurous head of one matchstick with the head of the other; and as one dampened match started to sizzle and smoke, you snapped it into the air with your middle finger. The “bomb” would quickly shoot skyward and then spiral downward, trailing circles of white smoke, before it burst into flame. If you timed things right, the “bomb” burst white-hot exactly as it “hit,” like the kind of smoke-and-fire incendiary bombs all of us saw in the newsreels. One afternoon, the gang pooled our pennies together and brought seven large boxes of matches to practise on in the alleyway. I got pretty good at it.

With the matches I “borrowed” from a distracted Kiam, buried in his schoolbooks and Canadian army recruiting pamphlets, I strolled off our porch and stood over the curb-side piles of newspapers and snapped away. I meant only to create smoke and sizzle, not flames.

I got each match to spiral down in a trail of smoke and sizzle out perfectly, just singeing the tops of the bundled newspapers. I flew over the whole mountain range, striking pairs of damp matchheads together, one expertly after another. With each one, I caught my breath, pursed my lips, and made the roaring sound of a diving fighter plane. Then, while I was busy bombing to death thousands of Japanese troops, out of nowhere descended Mr. O’Connor, swearing a blue streak, with a full bucket of water to douse the pile of papers burning wildly five stacks behind me.

It was the best bombing run I had ever seen, just as I had daydreamed. I wished all the boys could see this: hot white smoke and fire like molten gold swirled upward; waltzing grey ashes, like flak, suddenly enveloped my Warhawk. The sooty air burned my nostrils.

Even Mr. O’Connor’s endless choice of colourful phrases added immeasurably to the effect.

But after no more than three or four minutes, there was only the choking smoke and the sound of dripping water, and through the afternoon haze, Mr. O’Connor looking dampish in his wet trousers, his grey eyes like Miss Doyle’s looking piercingly at my bomber.

When Father and Liang came home, Father was not happy at all with the blackened sodden mess in front of our house. If you ask me, Mr. O’Connor did not have to use so much water, as I quietly explained to Father.

An hour later, Stepmother came home and Father gave her that look that said
something happened.
Father had Kiam take me upstairs to await my fate. Then Kiam left for his date with Jenny Chong.

“Tough luck, kiddo,” he said, and shut the door tightly behind him. I could hear him dancing down the stairs, exchanging some words with Father, then leaving the house.

Upstairs in the bedroom I shared with Second Brother Jung, I could hear my parents’ voices against the clatter of dishes and the sound of my sister’s sudden laughter. Then I heard Jung come home, and minutes later, I heard him say, “Holy shit!” And there was more yelling. I spilled out my box of military toys and set up a war game with some soldiers and tanks. Jung knocked on the half-open door and came in.

“You’re grounded,” he said. “Father says you’re going to have to stay at Mrs. Lim’s house any time no one is home with you, if she’ll have you.”

MRS. LIM
, who lived across the street, used to speak three or four shared dialects with Grandmama when the Old One was alive. Together, they always talked about Old China and Old China ways and traded Chinatown secrets. They also exchanged herbal remedies: Grandmama knew all about the
che
power, the
essence,
of roots and herbs, of crawling and swimming things; and Mrs. Lim knew all about the leaves and the healing parts of large animal organs.

Mrs. Lim habitually wore black, as if she still lived in the peasant world of Old China. Every time she came over to visit us, Mrs. Lim and Grandmama talked about how I should be raised in the old ways, the best ways, how I needed to address my elders properly and remember how to speak their names in the right way. She compared me to her daughter, Meiying, when the girl had been given to her years ago at the age of eight.

“Nearly same age as you now, Sek-Lung,” Mrs. Lim would say. “Meiying learn everything very fast.”

Some days, from our porch, we could hear Mrs. Lim yell at her adopted daughter, yell at the neighbours, yell at us boys if we played too loudly, yell at anyone who crossed her path. But mainly she yelled at her daughter.

Meiying never protested. Perhaps she knew that her own mother had not wanted her. Meiying’s mother, an actress once, and a gambler, so the talk went, did not know who of the many bachelor-men whose bed and food she shared was the father. Coming home with the day’s groceries one afternoon, Mrs. Lim met up with Meiying’s mother in front of the Fast Service Laundry.

“Take this bitch-girl from me,” she said drunkenly to Mrs. Lim, pushing her thin eight-year-old away.

Mrs. Lim took Meiying home, and people said Meiying’s mother disappeared with a man who took her to Toronto. She left her daughter some clothes, a couple of silk shawls and pieces of Chinese Opera costumes, and a small Chinese Opera doll with an exquisite white-painted head. The doll was styled and dressed as a princely scholar. Mrs. Chang said it was a doll given to Meiying’s mother by the Canton Opera Company when she left China. A fortune-teller told her the doll was her future husband, who would be a handsome man living in a royal household and who would always be studying a foreign language. “Wouldn’t you know it,” Mrs. Chang laughed, as she told the story to the
mahjong
ladies, “Mabel finds a man who studies the racing form every day and lives in Toronto on King Street! Oh, so royal! Such a scholar! Well, Tommy Fong’s certainly handsome, even when he gets as drunk as Mabel.”