The Jade Peony (9 page)

B
EFORE I DISCOVERED IT,
the hissing
lao kwei
had been in our outbuilding for seven days. But no one had thought to tell me about it.

When Dai Kew got off his kitchen-galley duty on the
Princess
ship and arrived with the wooden crate at our house, I was asleep. It was 2
A.M.
As he always did, Dai Kew brought us tins of tea biscuits, crusty bread rolls, tiny soaps with the letters
CPR
carved in them, and other sundries or gifts, all generously pulled out from two duffle bags. Dai Kew called this loot “my salary bonus.” Then he would rush off to go gambling in a smoky Chinatown bachelor-club, with its all-night kitchen and fast night company. The men of Chinatown, who were lucky to be hired on, worked for weeks or months in the hellhole kitchens of the steamship lines, touring the B.C. coast from Seattle and Vancouver to Alaska.

We might see Dai Kew again in two days, two weeks, or two months—depending on his Chinatown winnings or, more often than not, on his losses. Dai Kew always looked for omens directing his luck. One day, a stevedore, as a joke, put a turtle in Dai Kew’s locker, and that very afternoon, in a crapshoot on the docks, Dai Kew won over a hundred dollars and escaped with only a bruised eye. He kept the turtle with him for two years, moving from ship to ship, until one day he was caught feeding it soft-boiled eggs.

And so the turtle, the
lao kwei,
arrived in a crate at our house. Father helped Dai Kew to lift the crate and put it down in a corner of our garage-sized woodshed.

Then it finally became my turn to bring in, for our hungry stove, buckets of sawdust and armloads of wood. All the old men who visited our house considered me weak and spoiled. They were from Old China, after all, remembering the calluses already forming on their own hands at five and six and seven. And here I was, ten years old, with hands like silk.

“No work, no will,” some of the bachelor-men warned my father, waving old sinewed hands with missing fingers and bent joints.

I was home between going to English and Chinese schools when Stepmother told me to fill the sawdust buckets. The mid-September evenings were quickly getting colder; the stove crackled with hunger.

“Heat, more heat!” Poh-Poh demanded. “Not heat for me! Too old for heat!” Grandmother smiled attentively at Stepmother, who was expecting her third-born in Canada: “
Fung sup, hai, m’hai-ahh?
Too damp-cold, yes?”

However warm Stepmother felt, she always nodded.

The herbalist had warned Stepmother that her third child might be born weaker than Sek-Lung, with his early years of coughing and lung infection. Since China was at war, there were shortages of women’s herbs to warm her blood. Poh-Poh and Mrs. Lim got together a concoction of leaves and roots, and steamed them into a tea for Stepmother. The balance of wind-water in a city like Vancouver, a city of fog and chills, of dampness and endless grey days, could affect the condition of the baby. Stepmother sat for hours in the rocker beneath the parlour shelf that held the Goddess of Mercy and the God of Longevity with his bald, protruding forehead, and I could tell she was worried.

Our clapboard two-storey house, which people called “a Chinaman special,” was shaking with cold. The wide cracks in the walls had been stuffed a generation before with newspapers printed in a strange Eastern European language. The woodshed—large enough to hold a truckload of sawdust, piles of broken shipping crates, and a cord of hardwood—was a perfect mate to our cedar-grey, paint-peeling house.

Father handed me the large empty pails to fill with sawdust.

At the woodshed, I rattled the tin pails as I pushed the high, creaking shed door open and made gruff, manlike noises. Loudly banging the buckets was how Stepmother taught me to scare off any Depression hobo who might have taken shelter inside, and disguising my high voice was my added touch.

When I walked into the dark, sweet-smelling shed, the beams of the low afternoon sun outlined an open crate. Inside the crate, something solid and dark... moved... shifted. Suddenly, in the silence, came a loud hissing, scratching noise. My heart nearly stopped.

“WHOooo’s there?” I half-shouted, my voice rising in pitch.

The scratching grew louder, more frantic. It was coming from the crate.

The crate was barely two feet high and three feet wide and had black letters reading
GLASS FRAGILE
on its side. No hobo or desperate enemy could hide in a box this size. I took a deep breath and calmed down. But what could
hissssss
so frantically? Perhaps a squirrel? A raccoon? A cat? I brightened. Bobby Steinberg and I had seen a movie about an old man and a boy who lived in the forest and made friends with all kinds of creatures. Since then, I’d had daydreams of having a wild animal for a pet. My fear turned to impatience. Without thinking, I dropped the two empty buckets and ran over to examine the crate.

There, peering up at me, rose the poking, snakelike, angry, fearless, eye-glittering head of a turtle. I gaped. The shell was the size of a large oval serving-plate, and the creature was knocking against its wooden prison and pushing a webbed foot into a deep pan of water. The crate smelled like a stale swamp. But the animal was incredibly, monstrously splendid: dark and greenish-brown, with a slate-black shell above its long, outstretched neck, its sharp jaws opening and shutting between hisses. A
snapper.
Exactly the kind of turtle that I had seen in a picture book at the library. The turtle looked at me unafraid, twisting its fist-sized head to one side, one yellow eye now taking me into its brain as vividly as my own eyes had taken in its majesty. I ran back into the house and told Poh-Poh what I had found.

“That old thing,” Grandmother said, trying to put another sweater on top of the two she was already wearing. Stepmother helped her push her arms through the sleeves. “Dai Kew left it here last week.”

“But what does it eat?” I asked, excited.

“Table scraps,” Stepmother said.

“Is that all?” I said, imagining a more glamorous diet for such a monster.

“It eats that or it dies,” Grandmother said. “What you think it eats?”

“It eats everything,” Stepmother said. “Dai Kew says on the steamship he trained it to eat anything.”

“
Any
thing?” I said, imagining an enemy or two.

“Your Dai Kew has had that
lao kwei
with him for two years. Last week he got caught by his kitchen-boss.”

“It bites, and it’s stinky,” Grandmother said, stretching her two palms like the back of the turtle and wetting her lips. “Still, turtle very good fortune. Long life.”

“But it’s lonely out there.”

“Stupid boy,” Grandmother said. “Turtle talk to ghosts—all the time, ghost-talk!”

“Maybe, Jung, you’d like to take care of it?” Stepmother said, a little discomforted by her big stomach.
Take care of it?
My mouth fell open:
My
turtle! Seeing my excitement, Stepmother went over to the stove and pointed to the two pails. “Fill these with water and change the turtle’s water pan.”

I rushed to pick up the buckets and ran to the sink and started half-filling each one with water.
The turtle was going to be mine!

“Watch out for ghosts!” I heard Grandmother shout as I slammed the back door.

I believed in ghosts, like everyone else in Chinatown, and I knew that sometimes enemies, like hobo runaways from the tent city on False Creek, like Japanese from Japtown and Indians from dark alleyways—like ghosts—could lurk in the woodshed. Fights, muggings, knifings, these were not uncommon. There was treachery in the world. But there were good ghosts and bad ghosts, and you had to be careful not to insult the good ones nor be tempted by the bad ones. And you had to know a ghost when you saw one.

But that day ghosts were not on my mind.

I had to figure out how to clean the turtle crate and change the water. It took nerve, believe me. I stared at the yellow eyes, the hooked mouth grinding away, ghost-talking. The plush, snakelike folds of its neck told me how well fed it was. Slowly, I tipped over the crate, let everything spill out against the sawdust pile: the murky water, decaying food scraps, the plate-sized turtle,
thump!
When the metal water pan fell out, with a crash, the turtle smartly pulled its head into its shell as far as it would go. It was not as fearless as I thought. Dai Kew must love this turtle very much to keep it so well for two years. Good fortune, Grandmother had said, long life.

Now, I thought, he’s mine!

Of course, I knew that Dai Kew would one day find a way to get the turtle back on board some other ship, as I would, if the turtle were really my own pet. Until such time, the turtle really
was
mine. All mine. “Hello, Lao Kwei,” I said. “Hello, Old Turtle.”

I cleaned everything with splashes of water. Finally, with a board, I carefully shoved the turtle into the tipped crate; then I righted the crate and heard the thick turtle
thump
into place; next, with my calculating pilot’s eye, I dropped the water pan down and sloshed fresh water into it. I filled the empty wet buckets with sawdust, took one more look at the crate.
The turtle is mine,
I exulted, and shut the shed door like a vault.
I have a pet like the old man and the boy in the woods!

Every day, between English and Chinese schools, I ran home and looked in on the turtle, who looked back at me with glistening eyes. Every three or four days, I flushed the crate with fresh water, cleaned and filled up the pan, and tossed in fresh table scraps. It was wonderful. The turtle seemed to know how much I appreciated his presence. In spite of myself, I was sure his ancestry belonged to the Great Turtle in Old China, the one who held the Dragon, the Phoenix and the whole world on its back. I told Bobby Stein-berg about Lao Kwei, but he only looked into the crate and said, “So?”

By the second week, I had lured a few more boys from my English school to come and admire my turtle. I also got to show Bobby Steinberg and Peter Brodlin how I could hold up carrot tops and cause the turtle slowly to stretch out its neck and snap its jaws. Even Bobby Steinberg thought that was neat.

By the third week, I had gone to the library at Main and Hastings and looked up the scientific name of my turtle, followed its ancient lineage all the way back to the time of sea-swimming dinosaurs. Between my chores and my helping sometimes at the warehouse, I would take the turtle out into our backyard and let it move a few feet here—a few feet there—and pull it back by the rope-harness that First Brother Kiam had made for me. I could slip the harness back and forth onto Lao Kwei and pick him up, swinging, to carry him out of the crate and out into the daylight.

By now, Lao Kwei politely pulled in his head and strong limbs, and rarely snapped at me: he knew he would be taken out of the crate. He always blinked in the sudden bright light outside of the shed, and slowly, gravely, yawned with pleasure. No doubt he had been used to being handled and hauled about by Dai Kew, in those two years he kept Lao Kwei on the steamship liners. No doubt, Lao Kwei had been stuffed into one of Dai Kew’s duffle bags to be secretly transported from one Alaskan ship to another.

One day, Bobby Steinberg brought lettuce over and said to me, “What’s his name? What do you call that thing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The family just calls it Lao Kwei. Old Turtle.”

“It’s not a
Chinese
turtle.” Bobby Steinberg sounded disgusted. “It’s got to have a—you know—British or Canadian name.”

He thought a moment, dropping some leaves into the crate.

“Why don’t you call it
Hopalong?
Like the cowboy.”

“That’s United States,” I protested. “This is a
Canada
turtle.”

“So,” Bobby Steinberg snapped, tossing the rotten head of lettuce in the air. Tossing. Catching. Tossing. “Name it!”

“
George,
” I said, pausing for effect. “
King
George.”

Bobby Steinberg dropped the head of lettuce, and the turtle, neck outstretched, defiantly snapped it in half. It loved the rotten parts.

For two more weeks, King George sat in his crate waiting for me to harness him, pick him up, and take him out into the daylight. On weekends, I began to carry him about the neighbourhood, showing him off, but was always careful to carry him at arm’s length. I let King George snap impressively at sticks, snapping some, cracking some, hanging onto others, and all the children in the neigbourhood crowded around Bobby Steinberg and me, wanting to take a turn with the sticks. They even brought food for King George. By late October, I was famous for my turtle.

Then, one Saturday morning, Bobby Steinberg and I were in the back yard; I was chopping up some crates for firewood and Bobby was singing to King George, “
I’m an ole cowhand, from the Rio Grande
...” When I looked up, Dai Kew had stepped out onto the back porch, coins jingling in his pocket.

“Well,
Yee Doy,
” Dai Kew called out to me in Toisanese. “How is the Second Son today?”

Bobby stopped singing. He jumped up, respectfully, and Dai Kew noticed King George in his harness, and laughed. Bobby had just heaped a pile of leaves over him. The yellows and reds of the leaves stood out against the dark shell of the turtle.

“So,” Dai Kew said, “your father tells me you’ve taken very good care of Lao Kwei.”

He said something more to me, about my “partner’s share” or “part of the bowl.” Dai Kew was a bachelor-man who spoke a heavier dialect than the one I understood, but I quickly imagined that I would be rewarded with some lucky money for all my work, or maybe even given King George to take care of for the whole of next year.

“Can I keep Lao Kwei a little longer?”

Dai Kew stood over me, unsure. He knitted his thick eyebrows.

“I’m going to build him a winter home,” I said, unable to stop. “The family won’t let me take him inside the house to live. Poh-Poh says he’s too stinky. I read all about this kind of turtle. I’m going to bury King George in thick mud just before the winter comes.”