The Jade Peony (27 page)

The whole adventure was inexplicable and deeply exciting. I wanted to shout, to give my Tarzan yell. I had expected to be tortured by Mrs. Lim today; instead, I had become a soldier and confronted the enemy.

I knew, of course, Meiying was involved in something shameful, something treasonable.

Everyone knew the unspoken law:
Never betray your own kind.
Meiying was Chinese, like me; we were our own kind.

“Keep your business in your pants,” Third Uncle had warned Kiam when he got interested in a white waitress at the Blue Eagle who liked to dance with him.

I could see Father’s outrage if he ever found out, and I shuddered to imagine how horrified Stepmother would be:
No, no, not Meiying, not the perfect one!

There was no getting around it. She must have known Kazuo for a long time. She was a
traitor
. Her boyfriend was a Jap, a monster, one of the enemy waiting in the dark to destroy all of us.

Yet I felt oddly relieved. Uplifted even. Powerful. We had just been in the heart of Little Tokyo, a place where even Alfred Stevorsky or Joe Eng would never go, at least not without a gang of much older boys. How I wanted to run into them, even if it were the Han boys, and tell all my pals everything. But there was no one around.

The faster Meiying walked, the more boldly my mind embraced my new knowledge:
I, Sek-Lung, could turn her in.

I glanced up at Meiying. Her eyes seemed to glitter; perhaps the wind was too strong.

“Don’t cry, May,” I said. “I won’t tell on you.”

“Promise me,” she said, between holding back her tears, “promise me you’ll go back to Powell Ground with me again.”

I was taken aback, but heard myself say, “I promise.”

I thought of secretly borrowing Jung’s large scout knife. After all, going back to Japtown could be dangerous, just like in a real war zone. A few years ago, one Halloween night, mobs of white men in masks and armed with clubs had rioted in Japtown, smashing plate glass windows, kicking down doors, looting whatever they could carry away.

Everyone in Chinatown talked about that night.

Some recalled another night, years before I was born, when a similar mob had hit Chinatown. “Years and years ago,” Third Uncle told us. “You bet they yank us Chinkee pigtails. Cut off, like this!” Years before that, there had been white mobs in San Francisco that left, some said, three China men, limbs and necks broken, hanging dead from lampposts.

But I wondered why we, the Chinese, had not joined the Halloween mob that attacked Japtown.

Perhaps I could do some damage in my own way, weaken the enemy. Trap her. Trap them both. Meanwhile, I could pretend to be Meiying’s friend: I could be a spy. Turn her in later to the Tong or the
RCMP
. Would they tie her hands behind her back, blindfold her, and
bayonet
her? I saw the Japanese soldiers do that in the war photos Father brought home from one of the Chinese newspapers. Kiam and Jung saw the same thing in the newsreels. The Japanese tied up people with barbed wire and hung them up for live bayonet practice. But Chinese soldiers gave away spearmint gum and cans of food to refugees and were cheered wherever they went.

Meiying tightened her grip on my hand. We stopped at the corner store and she bought me a double-scoop chocolate ice-cream cone, a Sergeant Canuck comic and a Captain Marvel one. We walked over to the Good Shepherd Mission and found a clean step to sit on. A laden chestnut tree spread its arms above us. I started on Sergeant Canuck first. He was a Sergeant of the B.C. Police, fighting spies and traitors. Meiying sat quietly beside me, looking at nothing except the large-leaf shadows on the sidewalk.

It was almost too windy for me to hold down the pages of the comic book and still lick my cone, but I managed to finish both. Then I opened my second comic. The first story was about how Billy Batson could shout “Shazam!” and turn into Captain Marvel.

I looked away from my comic and saw how pale Meiying looked, how hopefully she watched me. I thought about our time together. We had both walked into Japtown. In fact, I knew we were headed to Little Tokyo by that last block. Yet I hadn’t stopped her. If I were being honest, I would have to admit that I pretended I didn’t know what was happening until the last possible moment. If she was a traitor, what was I?

I remembered how Kazuo had kept brushing home plate, how he ignored that big man crowding over him. Meiying caught me lost in thought.

“What are you thinking?”

“He’s a sporty guy,” I said, meaning to say that I liked his nerve. But I guess she thought that I liked
him.
She broke into a smile, as if a wonderful thing had just happened between us.

“Oh, Sekky! If only you were the whole world!”

She threw her arms around me, totally catching me off guard, then quickly let me go.

“Read this Marvel comic three times, Sekky,” she said. “Then tell me all the stories about Captain Marvel.”

I did. Meiying listened and never once corrected me or called me stupid. I even invented spy bits as I went along, just to improve things, to make one story out of the many. She taught me how to decode
SHAZAM
. Each letter stood for something like Strength and Hero and Amazing... I soon forgot she was really just a girl who was babysitting me. I even forgot about fat Mrs. Lim. The October wind blew sharply, and some chestnut clusters fell onto the sidewalk.

“It’s getting late,” she finally said. “I promised to get you home by now.”

We stood up. Pushing myself off the step, I brushed beside her and could smell a drift of Three Flowers perfume, mingling with the fresh wind and the dried grass along the sidewalk. It was the same scent Stepmother used, and I liked it. I kicked at some fallen chestnuts. She laughed and kicked them back at me.

“We’ll go again tomorrow,” she said. “I’m to take care of you every day after school. Ma is too busy with her canning and herbs to look after you.”

“Sure,” I said, casually.

THE NEXT DAY
, Kazuo was not there.

Nor was he there for the rest of the week. Mrs. Lim began wondering why we liked the outdoors so much.

“Sek-Lung needs exercise,” Meiying would say. “The school doctor said so.”

“Too much fresh air no good,” Mrs. Lim shook her head at the madness of white doctors. “Burn out his lungs.”

On rainy days, there was no practice, and Meiying knew he would not be there. Then we stayed in and, together, helped Mrs. Lim in the kitchen with her chores. She said we were useless and in the way, but, generally, Mrs. Lim ignored the two of us, and let Meiying make a game of our washing and sorting and chopping. At those times, Mrs. Lim sometimes sat back and watched Meiying confidently hand me vegetables to wash before drying or pass me seeds to be put into small paper packets. These were sold by Mrs. Lim to Chinatown merchants: the dried vegetables to the local cornerstore grocers, the herbs to the herbalists in the dark corners of stores. “Don’t spill the profits,” Mrs. Lim nagged.

We snacked between washings and drank small cups of tea. Mrs. Lim would open a steaming hot fold of lotus leaf, filled with savoury sticky rice. With a string between her pudgy fingers, she divided the mold of rice into three portions, one for each person. The lucky person got the portion with a bit of red Chinese sausage. Everything seemed at peace, and I was surprised at Mrs. Lim’s long silences. On such afternoons, she chose to sit on the porch sofa and watch the October winds strip her rose bushes of petals and leaves, and listen to our voices singing from the kitchen. One day, I noticed the rose bushes were completely bare. What was left looked like a treacherous tangle of barbed wire, which made me think of battlefields and trenches and added to our pretend games in the kitchen.

On sunny days, we ran anxiously to Powell Ground to see if Kazuo would be able to meet Meiying by the bench under the trees. There, Meiying would tell me what Kazuo had said to her at school that day, how he had almost failed his history exam, how he had a fight with some boys who were calling him “a dirty Jap.” I said nothing, but imagined my solders firing away.

All the Japanese kids at Strathcona were sticking together now; they made up almost half of all the classes. They kept to themselves, said little, only waited to see who else would be mean to them. Miss Doyle and other teachers stood at the school exits to make sure no one attacked them. Some of the teachers and the older boys took to walking some of the younger kids home. More and more Japanese parents brought their kids to school in the morning and, after school, waited anxiously for them.

One day Jung met me and Liang after school and said, “No one better think you’re a Jap.” He pounded his fist in front of Alfred Stevorsky and his boyfriends, then kick-boxed into the air. “I’ll beat the fuckin’ shit out of them.”

Jung took Liang to Chinese School and watched me as I ran to Mrs. Lim’s. Kiam was busy guarding Third Uncle’s warehouse, as robberies were more and more common. The Depression squatters at False Creek, right in Chinatown, were being cleared out by the police. “Join the Army!” the younger men were told.

At the high school Meiying and Kazuo attended, Meiying told me, the Japanese boys fought back, defended their own kind, dared anyone to call them names. Meiying said, “Kaz and me, we still talk.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We’re friends, Sekky,” she said. “Friends have alliances. You know what allies are?”

“Yes,” I said, but knew that she meant they were sneaking around.

After waiting half an hour, if he didn’t appear, Meiying would pretend to finish reading her book.

“I guess Kaz had to help his brothers with the store,” she would say sadly. “They must be very busy today.”

We would then leave Powell Ground and decide either to go window shopping all the way downtown to Woodward’s store or even Eaton’s, or stop midway at the Carnegie Library at Hastings and Main, just off Chinatown. Meiying left me in the Boys and Girls section with a pile of books for me to read at a table by myself. She went to another section upstairs, where I found her flipping through large picture books about Japan. Then we would walk about Chinatown, looking in the windows at tin toys, and remember to ask for Mrs. Lim if any new shipments of rare foodstuffs had arrived from China. Everything was getting scarce. Even soy sauce and cooking wine were being watered down. On the last day of October, the newspapers said that Halloween was cancelled.

Now that it was November, the streets darkened very early. We walked past houses with their blackout curtains pressed against windows and door frames, past volunteer men and women who carefully checked each window and door to see that the law was being strictly obeyed.

“You Japs?” a man in a brown jacket said to us.

Meiying showed him the tin buttons pinned on our lapels that had the Chinese flag proudly stamped on them. Kiam had got them for us from Chinese School. I also had one that said:
I AM CHINESE
.

“Get home,” said the man. “It looks like snow.”

We didn’t rush. Meiying walked as if we had every right to be walking as we did, slowly. Our breath clouded before us. We laughed. Part of the sky was clear. Stars shone through, and we glimpsed an early moon. Then the clouds thickened and snow fell. I studied the sidewalk for boy’s treasures, for lucky pennies or lost toys or an unbroken conker.

The chestnut trees had dropped their hard dark-brown seeds long ago. The Han boys had gone around claiming they had the champion conkers. Boys were everywhere boring holes in the horse chestnuts, stringing them, and challenging each other to bashes. Meiying taught me to swing my chestnut at a sharp angle, like a Spitfire soaring skyward for a kill. I beat both the Han twins’ conkers, one smash after another.

By the time Meiying took me home to my house, I was happy and exhausted. Usually, everyone was home by then. Father would be unfolding his bundle of Chinese newspapers, worried about the China Front, shifting in his big sofa chair, growing angrier and noisier about the invading
dog-dung Japs.
Stepmother and Liang would be setting the table for our late supper. Jung would be dialling the
RCA
radio from one end to the other to catch the latest sports news. First Brother Kiam would be upstairs listening to Artie Shaw or Benny Goodman on his own Philco radio. Kiam’s part-time work at Third Uncle’s warehouse had almost come to a halt: no import shipping was reaching Vancouver harbour.

Nothing at home was out of the ordinary, except that I knew Meiying had entrusted me with a highly treacherous secret. If her widowed mother, with her deep village loyalties and Old China superstitions, found out about Kazuo, she would spit at Meiying, tear out her own hair, and be the second mother to disown her.

If Chinatown found out, Meiying would be cursed and shamed publicly as a traitor; she would surely be beaten up, perhaps branded with a red-hot iron until her flesh smoked and flamed. In the Chinese propaganda movies that Stepmother sometimes took me to see, there were violent demonstrations of what happened to traitors.

One November afternoon we waited much longer for Kaz than our usual half hour. Snow had come and gone, though the mountain tops were white and glistening. It became too dark to be sitting on that park bench, too dark for me to see my soldiers in the dirt trenches I had dug, too dark for Meiying to pretend she was reading her book.

“Let’s go,” I said, impatiently.

When we got to my house, Meiying paused, knocked on the door and delicately gathered one end of her shawl and pressed it gently against her eyes.

“Just some dust,” she said. “Do I look all right now, Sekky?”

I nodded my head.

Stepmother opened the door, let us both in and said nothing to Meiying. As I removed my jacket, it seemed to me they stared at each other for a long time. Then Stepmother silently embraced her. I peeked out from the parlour window after the door closed. I watched Meiying walk across the street and swiftly climb the steps up to her own house. I could see Mrs. Lim, wide as the doorway, waiting for her daughter. She had her arms folded impatiently across her apron; her large body seemed to cause the old wooden porch to sag. I could hear her shouting at Meiying. Her stupid daughter of a worthless person had left her bedroom window open again. And hadn’t she paid good money, prayed ten thousand prayers, to have the Buddhist monk seal up the windows against the broken-neck white demon? The harsh voice seemed physically to hammer away at the thin figure crossing the porch. A flash of red and gold caught my eyes, and Meiying disappeared into the darkness.