The Jade Peony (26 page)

I knew Stepmother liked her; sometimes, they spent time chatting together while trying out hairstyles or makeup. Mrs. Lim would sometimes linger over her cup of tea, taking quiet pride in her adopted daughter’s popularity with the married women in the community.

Everyone liked Meiying. Father even pointed her out as someone my sister Liang should emulate. Liang, at twelve, her teeth slightly bucked, wished she could be as tall and as elegant and as smart as Meiying. But Meiying was seventeen, far beyond the reach of my sister’s giggling group of girlfriends. With her tightly curled hair, Liang moped about, sunk deep in her Sloppy Joe sweaters. Meiying walked briskly and wore deep-coloured cardigans, and her long black hair shone, spilling over her shoulders.

First Brother Kiam liked her looks, too, I could tell, but he wasn’t attracted to the fact that she did so many things so well. Meiying knew enough Mandarin, for example, to explain a phrase or two to Kiam, who was studying the dialect because Father felt it would be the official language of any New China “when the people win.” Meiying knew some Mandarin because her mother for years had sung in concerts in the local Chinese Opera, in the classical dialect, before she gambled and drank too much and gave Meiying away to Mrs. Lim, leaving her with some clothes and a foot-high Chinese Opera doll with the painted white face of a scholar.

And now Meiying was to be my babysitter. If I had to have a babysitter, Meiying was better than Mrs. Lim. She runs like Second Brother Jung, I thought, and liked her for that. I wished she were a boy. I could really like her then. Still, I hoped Alfred and Joe and the rest of the boys were not around to see her tagging around with me.

When Meiying slowed down, I made a dash to be a step or two in front of her. She took a moment to catch her breath, which made me feel better.

“We’re going to the park, Sekky,” she said in English, putting a slim hand on her chest. “You’ll like it there because they’re having a baseball practice.”

She tried to fasten my shirt collar; I pushed her hand away.

“At least button your jacket.”

I let my jacket hang open. I only wished I had my leather pilot’s cap with me. What I said next would have had more authority.

“There’s no baseball at MacLean Park now.”

I thought of MacLean Park, where my friends might be gouging out miniature trenches with sticks, shooting away whole battalions. Older boys played soccer there, but rarely baseball.

“There is,” she said, “where we’re going. You’ll see.”

Instead of turning south on Jackson, over the cobblestone roadway towards MacLean Park, Meiying turned north and walked even faster. The mountains in the far distance were already topped with snow, but flowers were still blooming in Vancouver yards. We were walking away from familiar territory, away from the boundaries of Chinatown. I tried to catch her attention. What was she doing?

Meiying’s hand reached back for mine; I avoided it and gave her my special blood-chilling heartless look, something I copied from the movies. One eyebrow twisted up like a crazed Charlie Chan; the other eyebrow narrowed into a fiendish slant. She ignored me.

“Walk faster,” she commanded. “What have you got in your pocket?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just one of my planes. A Spitfire.”

“They have an excellent attack range,” she said.

Good faking, I thought.

“Deadly interceptors,” she went on, hardly pausing to witness my surprise.

“The Luftwaffe’s long-range Messerschmitts haven’t got a chance,” she said.

Shit,
I thought,
she can even pronounce the names correctly.

She pretended to dive-bomb, then flew ahead.

From the cockpit of my Spitfire, I machine-gunned her.

“Keep up,” she said. Her shawl lifted from her shoulders and gave her outstretched arms wings against the wind. I made machine-gun noises, but she refused to fall down.

We kept running north (now she was a Stuka), flew towards Hastings Street. At last she slowed down to a brisk walk. Making the machine-gun noises had completely used up my wind. Then it dawned on me: this was the
bad
end of Hastings Street. The streetcar tracks gleamed like pewter.

I had been warned to stay away from this “hoodlum end” of Hastings Street. I let Meiying walk ahead a few steps to see if she would stop, if she would realize she was going the wrong way. Instead, her pace increased. She double-timed over the tracks, unfazed by the bell-ringing streetcar headed towards her.

“Watch out!” I yelled, but she ran on.

The Hastings streetcar rumbled by, the driver shook his fist; I had to run faster.

I swore to myself that if we ran into the Han twins in this neighbourhood, I would murder her.

The two Han boys lived in No Man’s Land, where the few no-class
Haka
(“guests of Old China”) lived, where hoods and drunks and, Jung said, “wicked ladies with no place to sleep” stood about. I fell back a few more steps. Hotels and bars and little shops with handwritten English signs stood on each side of Hastings Street; Meiying turned down a side street. I felt for the rusty jackknife in my jacket. Meiying stopped, took a small compact mirror from her cardigan pocket. She wet her lips and peered at herself, smoothed her long hair and arranged the shawl around her shoulders.

“Do I look okay, Sekky?” she asked.

“Where are we?”

“We’re almost there.”

She pointed towards the end of the block, where a small crowd had gathered. Then, it came to me: Powell Ground. It was officially called Oppenheimer Park, but Chinese and Japanese found the name difficult to pronounce. And Oppenheimer Park, Powell Ground, was Little Tokyo—Japtown—enemy territory!

Meiying pushed ahead, barely noticing my blatant loathing. I thought of air battles over Burma, imagined Jap Zero fighters going down in flames.
Banzai!

Powell Ground had a dingy, dusty baseball diamond surrounded by a green border of grass and weeds and three trees in one corner. Across from the playground, dozens of Japanese stores, with large lanterns, neon signs and names painted in gold on the windows, fronted Powell Street. Even from where we stood, I could see how uncluttered and clean the store window displays appeared, compared to the casual disarray of Chinatown stores. A large two-storey churchlike building stood on one corner, and wood-framed houses, like our own, bordered the side streets, planted with neighbourhood victory gardens.

Like the soldier I was, I knew Meiying had made a bad mistake: only a girl would think that every playground was the same. I walked quickly and stood with her at the edge of the small crowd. Someone broke into a laugh. Among a few words of English, I could hear rising clipped-toned voices, foreign tongue babble.

I tried my best to whisper discreetly to Meiying. “This is Japtown—we shouldn’t be here.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not Japs,” I said. Girls were so thick.

“You’re not
afraid,
are you, Sekky?”

She lifted a corner of her shawl, as if to indicate the crowd of striped-shirted ballplayers a hundred feet beyond us, some of them with bats in their hands, swinging them in wide arcs. A few men tossed baseballs into the air and began throwing them hard-smack into their teammates’ thick leather gloves. They were all
Japs.
The enemy.

“No,” I said loudly, a soldier standing guard, fists ready. “I’m not afraid of some dumb Ja—”

She put her hand over my mouth. Then she reached down and took my fist and gripped it. Tightly. My other hand, deep in my jacket pocket, palmed the cool handle of my Red Ryder knife. I thought of Mrs. Lim’s collection of knives and cleavers.

The crowd was mostly Japanese. Older women sat on picnic blankets, reaching into baskets, unwrapping small trays of food; children ran around them, laughing. Three Japanese men moved closer towards us. Meiying pretended not to notice them. My three-inch knife wasn’t too sharp and had a chipped rusty blade, but if we were surrounded... attacked... it would still make a nasty hole in some... The three men walked right by us. Everyone ignored us; we must have blended in. Some of the younger women had shawls on like Meiying’s. Others pulled sweaters tightly around themselves. The men looked ordinary, some in fedoras and wide pants, some in tweed jackets like Father’s. I had to remind myself that they were the enemy.

Then a guy’s voice behind us said “May!”

We turned around. It was a young Japanese man, wearing a baseball uniform that had letters in English on it:
ASAHI
. He was as tall as Meiying and maybe a bit older. I was wondering who he was when she smiled back at him. That shocked me. She released my clenched fist and looked down at the ground. The three Japanese men standing close to us turned to stare, then slowly moved away. They didn’t seem happy.

“Is this the boy, May?” he asked, when he reached us.

“Yes, this is Sekky,” she said. “He’s okay.”

What did she mean,
okay?

Meiying put her hands on my shoulders. For protection, I thought. She seemed half glad to see him, half confused.

He turned his head, slightly embarrassed that he had attracted attention. He had a high forehead, deep black eyes like coal, thin lips; his hair was shiny with hair cream. He looked like a Chinese movie soldier, a Good Guy, in one of those films we saw at the China War Effort Fund Drive. But he was
Japanese.

His fingers reached for hers, the tips brushed against hers; hers moved slowly between his.

“The news is much worse today, May,” he said.

I could see his fingers tighten over hers; she didn’t pull away but went on listening to him.

“There’s more talk about us being the enemy. Being traitors. The
Sun
printed letters about putting us away, there’s talk about us registering—”

“It’s only stupid talk!” There was a sudden urgency in her voice. “We can still see each other after school, Kaz. We can still meet after choir.”

But he turned away from her and I only caught his last word:
dangerous.

He brushed his other hand against her arm. Meiying suddenly remembered me.

“Go over there, Sekky, by that first tree, by that bench.” She let go his hand; he stepped back. “You’ll be fine. Kaz and I will be watching out for you.”

I refused to move.

“Play with the Spitfire you brought with you. Go on.”

“Spitfire?” The slim Japanese gave a funny laugh. “Everyone’s at war! Even—”

Stupid Jap,
I thought.

“Go on, Sekky,” Meiying pleaded.

The desperate tone in her voice caused me to move; my head was filled with mixed thoughts. The spot was far enough away for me not to be able to hear them talking. I was trying to figure things out when the ballplayers on the field started shouting a chant in Japanese. One player pitched a ball directly to home, then another player threw a ball to the same catcher. In a split second, the catcher caught the ball, snapped it whizzing to first, caught the next one, hurled it away even faster to third... suddenly five, six, seven, eight balls were in play, and the diamond was exploding with baseballs smacking into leather gloves and instantly being whipped away. All the players became incredible jugglers, chanting in rhythm and catching, throwing, catching. When I thought they could not catch or throw a ball one split second faster, they gave a shout in unison and abruptly stopped. They were as good as the star players on the Chinese Students Soccer Team, passing the ball with their heads and feet, faster and faster and faster. For a moment I forgot I was watching the enemy. And that one of them was standing too close to Meiying.

The first baseman looked around, adjusting his glasses with his glove. He called out “Kazuo! Kazuo!” whistling and yelling the name out comically. When he spotted Kaz standing so close to Meiying, his smile turned angry. No one on the diamond moved.

Kazuo broke away from Meiying and ran out onto the field, ignoring the cold stares. He swiftly swooped down to collect all the baseballs, scooping them up as he ran by, tossing them neatly one after another to a bat boy standing on the pitcher’s mound, who unerringly caught them and put them into a canvas bag. Then both of them ran to home plate; the smaller boy, about my size but heavier, began to organize the equipment behind the catcher’s cage. Kazuo bent over and took out a stiff thick brush and cleaned home plate. A large menacing man in a black jacket walked over to Kaz and began to shout at him. He pointed angrily at Meiying, shaking his fist and spitting in the sand. Some of the Asahi men began to stare at Kaz, then at Meiying standing alone. I ran back to her and stood guard.

The stout catcher came towards us and shouted in English, as if we might be deaf: “Leave Kazuo alone, little girl! He’s already in enough trouble with his family over you!”

The man in the black jacket was still shouting at Kazuo, arms gesturing wildly, threateningly. But Kaz continued brushing off home plate, as if nothing were bothering him. Nothing. His hair shone in the afternoon light.

Meiying turned to me and took my free hand. It was sweaty. Some of the women on blankets pointed at us, chattering. We had crossed a line. No one would have minded if Kazuo had kept his distance and we, ours; if this girl and this boy had remained onlookers and not trespassers.

They stared at us, waiting.

“Let’s go, Sekky,” Meiying said.

She bent down.

“Walk slowly,” she whispered. “Don’t let anybody think we’re being chased away. Don’t look back.”

A half block away, I turned around and could see the row of store display lights clicking off early to meet the blackout rules. These were the same Japanese stores selling Japan-made goods that everyone in Vancouver was boycotting. Buy their toys and foodstuffs, and you buy a bullet aimed at the Chinese. Father had joined a rally in Chinatown that piled up all our Japan-made goods—clothing, toys, bamboo racks, games, junk dishes of all kinds—and smashed them or set them ablaze.

I was thrilled to have met the enemy, yet still so reluctantly dazzled by their baseball skills that I found myself tongue-tied and mostly silent. I would begin to speak, stop, then begin again.