The Jade Peony (24 page)

MEIYING
turned out to be a blessing for Mrs. Lim; she had a quick mind, shed few tears, and went gratefully from her own mother’s drunken chaos into the widow’s firm Old China ways. Grandmama repeated Meiying’s mother’s story many times to my sister, Liang. Liang always said, “We’re in Canada, not Old China.”

“We in Chinatown,” Grandmama said. “Things different here.”

Mrs. Lim and Grandmama would both shake their heads with frustration at my sister’s stone ear: “
Aiyahh, ho git-sum! Aiyahh,
” they exclaimed,
how life cramped one’s heart!

Liang wondered how the beautiful Meiying, with her long hair and perfect set of grades in Chinese and English school, could tolerate living even one minute in Mrs. Lim’s shack. Liang, many years her junior, admired Meiying from a distance.

“If only May,” Liang said to me one day, calling Meiying by her English name, “had a different mother than Mrs. Lim...”

The only good things we could say about Mrs. Lim were that she had the grandest climbing yellow roses in the neighbourhood and that she made the best noodles whenever we shared our flour and eggs with her.

“Stepmother is across the street talking with Mrs. Lim,” Jung said to me. “If old Mrs. Lim agrees to take care of you, you’d better wear your pilot’s cap. Flaps down.”

I PUSHED
my largest tank over a row of soldiers.

I had always been glad I was not a girl-child. When Jung told me that I was to be put under the thumb of Mrs. Lim because Stepmother and Father had had enough of my war games and of the neighbours’ complaints, I envied my sister Liang for the first time. Liang was lucky. She could work sometimes and also go with Father anywhere she wanted. Mainly, Liang dried and stacked dishes at Hon Lee’s Cafe (and would get ten cents for that, too) or stuck on address labels at the
Chinese Times.
She liked being with Father, and sometimes she even got to stay at the newspaper office as he struggled to finish a piece of writing to meet the deadline.

Father worried about China, about the civil war there between the Communists and the Nationalists; he worried about our schooling and worried about the Japanese; he worried about Kiam wanting to fight for Canada when Canada did not want the Chinese. He worried about Stepmother, always angry. And then, of course, he worried about Jung working instead of going to school, and about Liang wanting to wear oversized sweaters like a clown, and he worried about me. There was nothing, it seemed, that Father did not worry about. And things he worried about, he wrote about in the newspaper, and then worried about what others would think.

I liked going to the newspaper office with Father, but on the third visit I accidentally knocked over a small tray of English type while reaching for the capital letter
S.
The tray of letters was used to print up English names and Vancouver streets. Not all the metal pieces spilled onto the floor and disappeared under the printing machines, the editing desk and the front counter, but the owner said I was not to be found there again. I think he meant that I could not go near the trays of type again, but Father would not listen to my argument.

Any place Father took me, shortly after the second or third visit, someone didn’t want me around again. Once I sat on a glass-topped counter at Ming Wo’s, and it broke. I wasn’t hurt, but half a sack of rare dried shrimp was wasted. The owner himself had sat me up on the counter so I could see how he worked an abacus; it wasn’t my fault. But Father said that was that.

Mrs. Chang said that Liang should be old enough to handle me, but Liang refused to think about it. Besides, Father and Stepmother didn’t trust Liang to be home by herself with me. My sister and I didn’t exactly get along.

Eleven months after the Old One’s death, my sister insisted that I still had not returned to the world shared by everyone else in the family—“the real world,” as she pointed out, with twelve-year-old wisdom. To frighten her, I pretended I saw the ghost of Grandmama.

“Poh-Poh’s dead,” she said, indifferently turning over a
Movie Story
page with a big picture of Sonja Henie on skates. “It’s time you grew up, Sekky.”

I made a crash landing with my Spitfire.

“And stop playing all those stupid war games. You don’t know anything about war.”

I was in Liang’s room, which had been Grandmama’s room before she died.

I sniffed the air and said, “I can still smell the Old One.” Liang shut her eyes in disbelief.

“Will you get out of here?” she said. “It’s
my
room now.”

I looked around. The room was freshly wallpapered, in a design of white and pink roses. There was a small dresser, the trunk she had been given by her friend, monkey-faced Wong Suk, who had returned to Old China years ago, and a desk rescued from the dump and painted sky white. The desk was missing a bottom drawer. A wooden chair, also painted white, sat on a little rug.

“It’s a boring room now,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else.

“Get out,” Liang said and started to write secrets into her diary, making sure that I could see the letters of my name being capitalized across the page, waiting for a wicked entry. I didn’t care. With Grandmama gone, everyone was my enemy. I went downstairs to lock myself in the pantry’s cool semi-darkness.

Only a week before, I had accidentally had thrown one of my fighter airplanes into the pantry. When I climbed up to retrieve it, I found a whole shelf of Grandmama’s herbal remedies. Familiar fragrances, sharp and bitter flavours, made my tongue and nose go moist with anticipation. Stepmother had put all these “dangerous medicines” on the highest shelf she could find. Mrs. Lim had helped her put aside the valuable dried sea horses, the rare hard black nugget of bear spleen, the squat bottle of ground deer antler; she named the powdered herbs and brown ointments no one else could guess. On the shelf were these: the still mysterious seeds like peppercorns with tiny spikes, the packets of bitter thick-veined leaves and mandrake roots, the tubes of
BB
-like pills, the tiny cosmetic pots of sweet-smelling ointments, a tin or two with half-torn labels. And a small tin of Bayer Aspirins. Nothing was to be thrown away; nothing to be wasted. Roots and leaves. Dried things that once had crawled and hopped in the moonlight.

“With the old one gone,” Mrs. Lim told Stepmother, “I only can know half as much.”

The pantry now held all of Grandmama’s herbal knowledge. My sister’s secrets, even if she was scrawling my name into her private diary, could not compare with the Old One’s secrets. Revitalized by the medicinal scents, I returned upstairs. Liang was still scribbling away in her diary.

“Boring,” I commented.

“You’re boring, Sekky,” she said. “Why can’t you just go to your room and think of—
Mrs. Lim?
”

FATHER
and Stepmother told me that Mrs. Lim would probably strangle me after my first day over there.

“This is going to be fun,” Liang said. “I can hardly wait for next week.”

On the Monday before I went to Mrs. Lim, Miss Doyle noted that my voice was snappy. At recess, I foolishly picked a fight with Jack McNaughton and lost. I couldn’t even concentrate on my war games.

Mrs. Lim had been invited over for tea so that I could get used to her. Stepmother and Mrs. Lim chatted. I pretended I had polio and couldn’t move. They paid no attention.

By Wednesday, I had grown stubborn and hostile, angry that I was not yet as strong and independent as Jung nor as smart and grown-up as Kiam. At least I wasn’t as ugly as Sister Liang. I did everything to ruin their time with me, if they stayed around at all. I was a brat. I whined and sulked and fought, except of course, with Father. To cross him would be dangerous. Father became louder and angrier with each report from China. Territories, counties and provinces fell to the Japanese. The
BBC
announced the arrival of Commonwealth soldiers in Hong Kong. Soon Canadian troops would be there, too. Father was sure Hong Kong would be the next to fall. How could the British, two oceans away, direct the defence of Hong Kong? The Burma Road, China’s lifeline, had been lost. The Flying Tigers had failed to halt the enemy. Japanese troops drove deeper and deeper into southern China.

By Thursday, Stepmother was trying her best to prevent Father from ruining our dinner with his spluttering rage against “the dog-shit Japs!” She stopped him from detailing the horror stories about the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese population.

“But the children should know what kind of dog-screwing bastards those Japs are!”

“They know too much already,” Stepmother said. “You think they don’t know? Ask them if they know nothing!”

“They bayonet pregnant women!” Liang volunteered, her eyes wide with terror.

“They bury alive villagers and nuns,” Jung joined in.

“They cook up Chinese babies,” I said, with dark authority, for all of us at recess had traded stories and begun to turn away from the Japanese boys and girls in the schoolyard. In the older grades, there were already fights between gangs of “good guys” and “Japs.”

Around all the tables and cafe counters of Chinatown, people wailed or whispered the news of family losses, an aunt here, a friend there, a father, a mother, a sister. There were tales of incredible enemy cruelty. A cousin wrote from Shanghai how the Japanese army were burying people alive, women and children. Another wrote how she witnessed living people, tied to posts, being used for bayonet practice. There were even darker rumours: the Japanese had camps for medical experiments, there were special camps for women hostages. A dozen incidents of mass slaughter were exposed in the newsreels: machine guns ripped across a line of defenceless citizens; bombs fell on civilian targets; starving refugees poured into the ravaged countryside; the sanctuary of churches and temples and hospitals were all violated; in one newsreel of captured enemy film, a Japanese bayonet lifted up what seemed to be a woman’s head, her long dark hair matted with blood.

“I want to join the Canadian military,” Kiam said.

We all turned to see what Father would say.

“You’re not a citizen of Canada,” Father said, calmly. “You were registered in Victoria as a
resident alien.
We’ve had this talk before. When the Dominion says we are Canadian, then we will all join up!”

Kiam closed his chemistry book. I knew he had been talking to his friends again, and to Jenny Chong. Father would not say another word. Father and Jenny Chong’s father did not agree on many things.

On Friday, three days before I was to go to Mrs. Lim’s, Third Uncle came to visit with us. Whenever he came, Stepmother said very little so that Father would not lose face. If things became too heated because Third Uncle and Father could never agree on the politics of the Old China and the New China, she interrupted sweetly with an offering of more rice or soup or another cup of tea. About one thing, however, the two men were in absolute agreement: the Japanese demons must be driven out of the Middle Kingdom. Third Uncle and Father were working on the script of a Chinese Opera to raise Save China War Bonds.

Behind all the grown-up war talk, my tanks and planes roared, killing every Japanese in sight. I absorbed Chinatown’s hatred of the Japanese, the monsters with bloodied buck teeth, no necks, and thick Tojo glasses; I wanted to kill every one of them.

During school recess, the gang and I gave surly looks to the Japanese boys and girls we didn’t know. When the recess monitor wasn’t watching, we shoved “the slant-eyes” in the back or punched them in the arm. Of course, sometimes a guy from another class mistook me for a Jap. Alfred Stevorsky and Joe Eng straightened them out. But we had to be careful: the older Japanese boys hit back. A boy with a German-type name gave Joe a black eye. Alfred got his best jacket torn. And I got my face pushed into the mud once. But we gave as good as we got. Our teacher, Miss Doyle, started to stand at her window and watch us at recess. If she caught any of us starting a fight or anything, she used the strap.

The Japanese kids started to keep to themselves; even the ones in Miss Doyle’s class we used to be friendly with stayed more and more away from the rest of us. Some of the much older boys, white and Asian, began to protect the smaller Japanese kids from those who wanted to bully them. Some of us stood around, confused. But this was all kid stuff. Hearing about the war happening overseas was okay, but I wanted the actual fighting to start happening in Canada. The Chinatown talk was that it would, that there would soon be casualties.

Each day I looked into the sky and waited for the fall of bombs. I thought of Singapore and London and wished I was there.

The Japanese attacked Thailand, Borneo and the Philippines. There was more talk about enemy submarines—more Japanese ones—lurking beneath the B.C. coastal waters; there was growing anger and fear and hatred for anyone Japanese.

AFTER SCHOOL
, I had to watch other boys go off to MacLean Park with their war toys while I went straight home and chafed over the crisis that mattered most to me: my own war games, and if I would be allowed to play them in the dungeon of Mrs. Lim’s run-down shack. There would be no gang of boys there, only myself, hidden behind a hedge of roses. Myself and my arch enemy: fat old Mrs. Lim and her bossy yelling.

Something dark seemed to possess me. Why should I not get my own way? Why should anyone think I could not be trusted? There was a war on, and boys needed to practise the arts of war. No one was on my side. I was surrounded by traitors and enemies. Before I was sentenced to Mrs. Lim’s, I had tasted freedom, and now it was gone. That first summer after Grandmama’s death, I’d kicked soccer balls and exhausted my older brothers; I’d worn boxing gloves and lost fights; I’d spat blood; I’d threatened and sworn at my sister; I’d set the mountains of Burma alight with flames and fought a hundred battles against the Japanese and won each one.

Mrs. Lim didn’t have a chance.

I
T WAS SETTLED. BY THE
first week of October, I was forbidden to meet my friends after school, warned not even to speak to any of them, especially not with any boy kicked out of Chinese School. Instead, right after English school, I was to go directly to Mrs. Lim’s.