The Jade Peony (7 page)

The old man would smack his lips.

“No stew! Just no-good Johnson!”

He barely managed to pull Johnson up, dragged him off the rails and wrapped the huge man in one of the two new Hudson’s Bay blankets he had just bought from the supplier. Wong Suk knew enough to keep the half-conscious Johnson walking, back and forth, back and forth, happily slapping Number Two Boss Man, until his blood circulated again and pain snapped him awake. The Boss Man never forgot.

DURING THE LAST WEEK
of his dying, Johnson related his old times as the camp Boss Man to his son: how he had once been beaten and robbed—how freezing to death was like burning in fire—how someone managed to slap him alert, kept him walking, kept him warm against the plunging mountain temperature. And when his eyes cleared enough, how he had seen to his amazement the wizened Monkey Man, the camp cook’s Chinaman assistant, staring back at him, slapping him silly, laughing like a crazy coyote. “You lookee good!”

It was Wong.

Johnson wanted to reward Monkey Man, but anything he offered—a wool vest, food, a kerosene lamp—was abruptly refused.

“Wong come to
Gim San
—come for
gim,
for gold—” Wong Suk said, sternly pushing the giant Johnson and his gifts out of his makeshift tent, “—no gimme
gim,
no gimme thanks!”

“Monkey Man only wanted gold,” Johnson told his son. “He knew of course none of us had any damn gold, just these railroad chits to trade for food and supplies, and some emergency cash to buy bootleg liquor. I never got to thank that Chinaman properly.”

Johnson’s son said to him, “I’d like to thank him, too.”

Later that month of September, Wong Suk received a large parcel covered with both Chinese and English writing. The English words read, “
TO MR. WONG KIMLEIN
, c/o
CHINESE TIMES
, Vancouver,
B.C. FROM ROY JOHNSON
.”

Father read aloud the Chinese letter inside, explaining the origin of the gift in the flowery words of a Chinese elder.

The son wrote he had come home from studying at Oxford to be with his sick father. Now Johnson had died, and the son was going back to England. Here was the son’s new cloak, “a blanket,” the son wrote, “to replace the one you wrapped around my father.”

The note itself was wrapped around a heavy American gold coin. Engraved on one side of the coin was an eagle, its beak as bent as Wong Suk remembered it.

I LOVED
that story.

“Eagle good luck,” Wong Suk told me, but I thought his cloak was even more lucky. I always leaned against its thick warmth and begged Wong Suk to let me drape it over my shoulders, to let me fly about, become Robin Hood’s bandit-princess, turning rapidly around and around in the imaginary forest of our back yard, the cape lifting, like wings, lifting above the earth. And the Monkey King would roar with laughter, clap-clap his two canes in a drumbeat; I was dizzy with pleasure. We would not stop until the neighbours loudly slammed their doors against such invading, clapping, joyful madness. Then we would sit quietly together on the back steps, to catch our breath. Sometimes Second Brother Jung stepped out and sat with us. Wong Suk would tell us one of his stories from the past. Jung liked that. He would listen intently, hugging his knees, his eyes as dreamy as Wong Suk’s, his need as deep as my longing for Wong Suk to be sitting close to us, like this, with Jung and me, forever.

But, of course, when Wong Suk and I stood on the porch that day, looking at his Head Tax photo, the young monkey face I stared at had not yet gone into the mountains, nor lifted the camp cook’s heavy armour of pots and pans, nor met the giant he called Boss Man Johnson, nor seen a huge eagle diving between the sky and mountain wall: he had just arrived in the Customs House in Victoria. The immigration official had just freshly glued his photo onto the document, impressed a seal on it, and taken fifty dollars cash for the Head Tax that Chinese immigrants had to pay to the Dominion of Canada.

I craned my neck to inspect the old photo. My almost-nine-year-old eyes looked back down at Old Wong Suk, then back at the photo: two faces, almost fifty years apart. Yet each was the same wide-eyed monkey face. The porch creaked. I sensed Wong Suk wanted me to say something, maybe about the young face that stared unchanged back at both of us.

I could see the same square jaw, the large teeth, intact; oiled-slick hair, eyebrows thicker brushes of black. Fewer wrinkles. Definitely fewer wrinkles.

“What you think, Liang?” Wong Suk asked me, holding the photo against a shaft of porch sunlight. He sounded sad.

I moved closer to the old man, craned my neck again. Re-focussed against the sunlight. Last week I had decided, for absolute sure, to become Shirley Temple. Little Shirley was his favourite dancing girl, but Wong Suk said he would be just as happy to have the movie star Miss Anna May Wong come visit him any time.

To me, Miss Anna May Wong was an old lady—more than twenty-five years old—yet Wong Suk insisted he would like her to visit Vancouver’s Chinatown, just as Shirley Temple had during the city’s Golden Jubilee when we waved to her and she waved back. After all, he said, he had in me alone both his Little Shirley
and
bandit-princess. I wasn’t old enough to be Miss Anna May Wong; she reminded him of someone he’d known from afar in Old China.

“Not close like you, Liang,” Wong Suk explained.

“How close?” I had to know.

“Meet her maybe three times in Old China. I never to forget her. Last time I gave her plum blossoms.” Wong Suk looked far away, became quiet.

“What did she do?” I asked, meaning was she a movie star.

“What she do?” Wong Suk looked far away. “She spit.” His voice softened. “Throw back at me all the blossoms.”

I looked at his face in the photo and the face before me: the sadness was still there.

“You look the same,” I told Wong Suk and took a tap position.

“You look same, too,” he laughed. He looked up at me and raised his hand high enough to brush my curls. “Still Jook-Liang, but dance bess-see.”

Which was a lie; I couldn’t tap without tripping, but I liked being lied to. I felt he wanted to say something else. The screen door squeaked open. It was Father.

“Good,” Father said. “You two haven’t gone.”

Father stepped onto the porch and handed Wong Suk a lucky red envelope of money. We only ever spent thirty cents together, including treats; this was
real
money,
folding
money.

“Take Liang to the show and get some extra treats on me,” Father said. “Keep the rest.”

Wong Suk waved his hand in refusal but Father insisted, pushed away his hand, and stuffed the lucky envelope into the old man’s shirt pocket.

Lucky money was awarded on birthdays or maybe when a report card was all
A’
s. I couldn’t think why today was special at all, but sometimes one is lucky, I thought—and thought of an eagle against the mountain and the sky, thought of how the blanket Wong Suk had wrapped around Johnson turned, years later, into a cape. Lucky and fun, as when Wong Suk and I, in the back yard, played out Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, and I was his bandit-princess, the cape royally spread around me.

Later, at Benny’s Ice Cream Parlour, when Wong Suk opened up the lucky envelope, a fifty-dollar bill slipped out. I saw the orange-coloured paper and the number before he could put it away. Wong Suk began to stare at the Coca-Cola calendar on the wall; he just gulped and said how much prettier I was than that little girl holding onto the Lassie dog. A few people, probably new to Benny’s, stared at us and whispered. Perhaps that was a sign, too, and I did not pay enough attention.

I was eight-plus, grown up, slurping up my second cherry soda at Benny’s, but I remembered that at age five and six I had confused Wong Suk with the Monkey King or Cheetah. I knew most of Chinatown called him
Mau-lauh Bak
—
Monkey Man
—usually behind his back. He knew that, too. He looked like an old grouchy monkey and he was my Best Friend.

And I didn’t like sharing Wong Suk, either. Even my two closest girlfriends, Jenny Soo Yung and Grace Ventura, knew that they didn’t rank any place near my never-ever-going-to-split-up Best Friend.

I always pestered Wong Suk for stories. Whenever Second Brother Jung tagged along with us, Wong Suk’s stories took place in rail camps; he told us how he survived climbing up sheer mountain cliffs, how one limb after another got broken; and he told us about fights he had with white demons in lumber mills, late at night, by campfires, when all the men were surrounded by the glowing needle eyes of wild animals. I preferred the stories with demons and ghosts, like those Poh-Poh used to tell me before she got stuck on my baby brother Sekky and had no more time for me.

I liked the stories Wong Suk told of being friends with some Siwash natives on the rocky shores of the B.C. coast. There were Indian ghosts, as incredible as Chinese ghosts; forest ghosts and animal and bird spirits. Wong Suk had even witnessed sacred Indian pow-wows and smoked special tobacco called sweet grass and traded gold nuggets and gold dust for bear paws, antlers, herbs and wood fungus. In his stories, men changed into spirits, animals, birds and demons, had names like Boss Man Johnson, One-eyed Smith, Broken-tooth Cravich, Thunder Tongue and Clever Fox.

In spite of all his stories about the past, Wong Suk really said little about his earlier times in Old China. When I asked, “What was it like when you were a little boy?” he roared with laughter or sighed deeply. “Too long ago,” he would say, and leave me guessing. Others speculated, too. Wong Suk was a topic of conversation in Chinatown. Everyone knew everyone’s daily business, but not always everyone’s past. I did everything to hear conversation
about
Wong Suk, unusual conversation.

Around the
mahjong
tables that Stepmother took me to while Father was many times away at different seasonal jobs during the Depression, some of the Chinatown ladies, clinging to Old China ways, speculated about Wong Suk and his monkey face:

How do you think Monkey Man got that face?

It was all curious talk, though the women would never discuss these matters in front of the men, and certainly not within Wong Suk’s hearing. The women’s
mahjong
gaming tables were a cozy haven, like a club gathering, a sorority. With their men often away on seasonal work, the women got to swear as hard as any man, said the outrageous without hesitation and with much delight, traded shopping tips and imparted gossip before anything bad festered into reality. Gossip was a way everyone warned everyone else about what was known (“Someone thought they saw you going into Mr. Lim’s car...”). Or warned you about what was to be discovered (“They say you should worry about your First Son’s fondness for too many late nights at the Good Fortune Club...”).

Late into the night, when the
mahjong
ladies thought I and the two younger Lee kids, Mary and Garson, were fast asleep on the large sofa, Stepmother and her friends sat around the
mahjong
table, slapping down the playing cubes, and giggled and wondered aloud about Wong Suk’s
penis.
It was a word Second Brother Jung always used when he swore in Chinese at stone-throwing white boys; it was a word that alerted my ears. Half-nodding in my practised fake sleep, I got to hear most everything Stepmother and her friends shared:

“How long his penis, you think?”

“Like my old man’s—long enough to have babies—”

“—and too damn short to have fun!”

Everyone laughed. The ivory pieces clacked back and forth.

“Perhaps a hairy ape back in the Old China village frightened his mother.”

Cards were discarded. I imagined a hairy ape, gorilla-size, chasing Wong Suk’s poor mother.

“Ahhh, perhaps she fell in love with a monkey!”

Someone discarded her last pieces. Someone swore. Then the ivory pieces clacked again.

“How you think monkeys do it?”

“Men and monkeys, do-do, do-do, all the same!”

Do-do
what, I puzzled.

The women’s voices pitched higher between the smacking of the game pieces, then settled like musical notes. Tea was being poured.

“I hear
Mau-lauh Bak
’s family was eating live monkey brain... you know how they carve that stuff out, with razor-sharp spoons, and—”

“—they forgot to blindfold the creature!”

“Yes, yes, the expectant mother walks by and—”

“—
aaiiiiyahhh
—”

“—the Demon-Monkey threw a curse on the unborn baby, just like that. The poor mother grips her opening, she feels wetness and pain, she gives birth—a monkey boy with a monkey face!”

I was proud of Wong Suk. Not even Rosie Chung’s one-eyed, monster-faced uncle, Chung-Guun, drew so much attention. Chung-Guun’s face had been divided by a thrown axe after a card-cheating episode in a fish cannery up the B.C. coast near Bella Bella. To cheat at cards and get caught—what did Chung-Guun expect? Luckily for him the axe only sliced his face open. In Chinatown, as in Old China, so many men walked about with scarred faces and limbs. Who did not have a tale to tell?

THE LONG AWAITED
mill whistle blasted into the air.
Noon,
it said. Countless birds flew up from the giant Douglas fir across the street and noisily resettled. The porch step I was sitting on felt hard. The plate of food sat heavy on my lap. Should I wind up the
RCA
gramophone? Why was Wong Suk more than an hour late?

If I had been allowed to stay to listen to more of their talk last Saturday, Grandmother would not be holding her hint of mystery over my head: “Paper, paper,
paper
”... so what if there was? If only I had stayed longer, I might have found out something.
Tell her,
Wong Suk had urged. And Father could not.

Today he had promised to see me decorated in his gift of red ribbons, the ones Grandmother this very morning tied into pom-poms on my tap-shoes. Today I was dancing my new
Short’nin’ Bread
tap-steps for him. Then we were going to line up at the Lux, stay twice to see the newsreels. “You’ll see the Japanese bombing Shanghai,” First Brother Kiam had told us at dinner. “You’ll see bodies everywhere. There’s a baby crying by the railway tracks, his mother dead beside him.” I imagined the bodies scattered all over. But we’re safe in Canada, I thought.