The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy

Author:Wayson Choy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Canada, Brothers and sisters, Chinese, Fiction, Literary, B.C.), Chinatown (Vancouver, Vancouver (B.C.), General, Poor families
ISBN: 9781590512166
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2007-02-15T02:20:41+00:00

eight

IN 1939, WHEN I WAS SIX years old, the whole family—my two brothers and my sister, and all our relatives—considered me brainless.

“Mo no!” Stepmother used to say in Cantonese, pointing to my head. “No brain! Wait until your Auntie Suling comes to Canada. She’ll give you a brain!” I looked upon Stepmother’s best friend, Chen Suling, as my enemy.

Everyone knew why I was brainless. A stubborn lung infection was keeping me out of the Vancouver public school system. My family, however, focussed on the way I stumbled over calling my adopted Gim San gons (Gold Mountain uncles) their proper titles. I would say “Third Uncle” instead of “Great Uncle.”

Whenever I called a visitor by the wrong title again, Stepmother shook her head, apologizing for the blunder. Then she would sing in her Sze-yup dialect, “Suling, Suling, come to Gold Mountain, give my boy Sek-Lung—a brain, a brain!”

Suling was Stepmother’s age, a woman who had given up her own family’s wealth to become a Christian teacher in Old China. Stepmother worshipped the bamboo-framed photograph of Suling and herself standing before a moon gate when they were young together and everything seemed possible.

“The street photographer, an old man, thought Suling was so pretty!”

Chen Suling, clutching a thick Bible in her hand, had discovered the Christian God in the spring of 1920, or as Stepmother told it, “The Christian God picked her.”

“Suling gave me that beautiful silk scarf with gold flowers,” Stepmother said, pointing. “See how it falls over my shoulders.”

The two young girls in the picture were stiff, barely smiling. Suling looked righteous, like Miss MacKinney, my Grade One teacher at Strathcona School. Miss MacKinney had a wooden ruler with a steel edge, unbending. She slapped it on your desk if you didn’t pay attention in class. Miss MacKinney had not called me Sek-Lung, but “Sekky,” because, she smiled, it was “more Canadian.”

I looked at the picture of Stepmother’s girlhood friend. She looked so stern, I thought she should have a steel-edged ruler in each of her hands. Instead, there was an embroidered sharp-clawed dragon slinking down Chen Suling’s wide sleeve. Stepmother noticed me staring at it.

“Isn’t that a beautiful jacket? Suling and I picked it out together. When she comes to Canada, Sek-Lung,” she paused to imagine that happy day, “I will wear the same flowered scarf she gave me, like the old days.”

The dragon on the sleeve looked powerful, forbidding; Chen Suling’s long cheong-sam hid everything but her dour face.

Because Stepmother’s vanity wouldn’t let her wear glasses, she insisted that she could not make out the writing in the letters Suling sent from China, so Father read them aloud: “Today, the farmers tell us landlords and Christians are being arrested in the Outer Districts near Tsingyuan. Some are beheaded. It is difficult to write. Pray for us.” Suling’s own First Mission Group barely escaped death; then the Japanese pushed deeper into South China and we scarcely heard from her.

Even so, Stepmother believed Suling would someday come to Canada. Rich Chinese merchant families, students and baptized Christians were arriving every three or four months.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.