The Jade Peony (3 page)

A thrill went through me: this face, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom; this face, like those carved wooden masks sold during the Year of the Monkey; this wizened face looked directly back at me, perhaps like Cheetah, but more royal. I heard ghost thunder. A mountain opened, and here, right in our parlour, staring back at me, stood
Monkey,
the Monkey King of Poh-Poh’s stories, disguised as an old man bent over two canes. But I, Jook-Liang, was not fooled. It could not be anyone but mischievous
him.
The air intensified; the world seemed more real than it had ever been for me. Poh-Poh was right: she heard ghost thunder when I heard only the door. A spell was cast in our parlour. Kiam pushed against it, trying to be sensible; First Brother asked the Monkey King, “Have you eaten, venerable sir?” Kiam used the formal dialect, just as Father had instructed him.

Monkey grimaced, showing large tobacco-stained teeth.

“No, not yet, thank you, so good of you to ask,” he said, with Monkey smoothness, in a Toisan dialect, meaning that we, the family, needn’t be so formal. Kiam tried discreetly to clear his throat, gulped, and stepped back, leaving Jung to stand alone. Now Monkey King, exactly as if he were holding court, looked steadily at Jung.

Jung said nothing. There was a long silence; it was Jung’s turn as the Second Son to give his own greeting. Jung kept staring, open-mouthed. I thought of a sword flying through the air—
Whack!
—Jung’s head, tumbling. I laughed, a short unstoppable titter. Stepmother’s hand quickly covered my mouth.

“Wong Sin-saang,” I heard Stepmother say, “you must be hungry.”

Pulling a red handkerchief from his shirt pocket, Wong Sin-saang blew his nose noisily. Perhaps to signal his companion, Pig, waiting outside for instructions. I looked past the lace curtains, saw only the one-eyed street lamp.

“Who’s there?” Poh-Poh shouted from the kitchen, all this time waiting for one of us to call her politely to come and meet the visitor, so she wouldn’t seem too rude or too anxious. We’d forgotten. She banged on a bowl and banged on a plate and stayed in the kitchen, waiting.

The Monkey King seemed to hear nothing; he had turned his sable eyes on me. I let go of Stepmother’s apron and slowly walked towards him. Stepmother reached out to grab me; I slipped past her. I pushed Jung and Kiam aside. Father began to fidget in the hall.

Across the room, Wong Sin-saang seemed not much bigger than me. His grey head drooped, as if it needed to bend lower. I stepped towards him. Stopped.

“This must be Jook-Liang,” Monkey finally said, and his voice trembled, “the pr-pretty one.”

I ran the last few steps and reached out to him, at once burying my head against his bone-thin body:
Here was the Monkey King!
After all, I heard his voice tremble—
the pr-pretty one
—a signal to any child not to be afraid of him. Not to doubt him. His disguise as an old man and his two canes were not meant to fool me, especially the canes. I knew what these really were: the two walking sticks, which he could instantly rejoin to become the powerful bamboo pole Monkey used to propel himself across canyons and streams; the same pole he employed to battle monsters, mock demons, shake at courage-testing spirits. I laughed and felt Monkey awkwardly embrace me; very awkwardly of course, so as not to betray his disguise as an Old One with two canes.

His gesture broke the ice; everything was familiar again.

I heard Stepmother and Father welcoming Wong Sin-saang in a jumble of ritual phrases: “Stay, stay for dinner!” “No, please don’t stand on ceremony.” “How good of you to visit.” Even Jung finally spoke, though he did not remember every word. “Have you your rice?” No one felt it necessary to notice how Monkey blew his nose again—and again—or how quickly he wiped his eyes. A signal to Pig, hiding under our porch.

The aroma of twice-cooked chicken filled the air; we could hear Grandmother preparing the food for the table; she stepped into the parlour and boldly stared at Monkey.
Eyes for looking.

“
Aiiiiyah!
Wong Kimlein!” Poh-Poh exclaimed, calling him by his birth-name in a voice loud enough to break up the hubbub. “It’s truly you! They say you come back from Yale. Not die there. Die here, in Salt Water City, in Vancouver.”

“Die here, maybe,” Monkey said, looking up. “How goes your old years? Are you well?”

“Die soon,” Poh-Poh said. “You and me too old for these days.”

Stepmother took my hand and led the way to the dining room.

“You hear from Old China?” Poh-Poh took Monkey’s arm, as if she would lean on his walking stick, too.

“We must talk, Wong Kimlein, just you and me,” Poh-Poh commanded. “Come, come, sit for dinner.”

I rushed to take the seat beside Monkey, and Poh-Poh pulled back a chair for him and sat down to be on his other side. She suddenly spoke to him in a different dialect, more pitched and strange than I had ever heard.
Monkey talk.
Poh-Poh waved Father into the kitchen to bring the food. Monkey chattered back to Grandmother, matching her odd, lurching vowels. Stepmother and Kiam and Jung brought in bowls of rice and steaming dishes of pork and vegetables and fish and bitter melon soup.

“Let’s all sit and eat,” Father said, bringing in the twice-cooked chicken.

All through dinner, I sat next to Wong Sin-saang, looking up at Monkey devouring his rice. He was careful not to miss a single grain so he would not have a pock-marked bride, and kept monkey-talking in that strange way with Poh-Poh. Jung could see what I was thinking. Being seven, he could still think like a kid, but not completely. When Jung brought over my own bowl of bitter melon soup, he whispered to me, “He’s just a man, stupid.”

I admit I was still not entirely sure and I kept arguing with myself: if Wong Sin-saang knew Poh-Poh—who said
she
felt older than even Miss Bigley’s Bible friends, like Moses—how could Monkey be just a man? An ordinary man?

I drank all my soup, but hardly ate any rice. I was too excited, though Poh-Poh was drawing away most of the Monkey King’s attention. She grew more animated, grew flushed with excitement to hear a voice matching the servant dialects of Old China. She listened with glee to the resonant
slurrrph
the old man sounded at the edge of his soup spoon, a sound not encouraged at our table. (Father had taught us to sip our soup slowly, noiselessly, in the Western way.) Poh-Poh hardly ate anything, barely touched the green vegetables Father dropped into her bowl. She had turned her attention completely to the old man, speaking Old China secrets. Poh-Poh nodded, sometimes laughed, but both of them—more often than not—sighed with longtime sadness. Grandmother’s eyes grew wide with remembering; the more she talked, the more she had to say. Monkey kept eating, nodding; between bites, he spoke a moment or two, then let Poh-Poh chatter on. He was hungry.

I thought of all the stories Poh-Poh had told me since I was two: Monkey King, in all kinds of disguises, adventuring through the world of ordinary people: “He could look like an old woman with a hooked nose and crooked fingers, or turn as lovely as Kwan Yin standing in a white silk gown; sometimes it suited him to be a country farmer with dirt on his brows... but all the time he was as hungry as a bear from his travels. You could trick the Monkey King with food, especially if you offered him ripe peaches.” Poh-Poh smacked her lips. “Lunch and dinner were perilous times for Monkey.”

My eyes were in pain from so much staring. I could not help myself:
here
beside me, the Monkey King sat, playing at being an old man as ancient as Poh-Poh, yet wielding chopsticks with youthful ease. I imagined juicy peach slices, delicately held by those same chopsticks, skinned slice after skinned slice, smoothly disappearing into his mouth. Wong Sin-saang ate every piece of stir-fried celery, bean cake, carrot, bok choi, eggplant, pork, fish and twice-cooked chicken offered to him, and ate, and ate, into his third brimming bowl of rice.
Hungry as a bear.
When the Monkey King ate, not a drop of sauce fell, not one grain of rice was lost. Father nudged Jung to stop staring at the old man.

I fidgeted with joy. Looking up at Wong Sin-saang, watching him carry his third bowl of rice to his mouth with such a sigh of pleasure, I sensed no one knew what else I knew: here, too, right beside me in his patched-up shirt, with his soft eyes, like liquid—sat the marvellous Cheetah of the matinee movies; Cheetah, Tarzan’s friend. Poh-Poh had educated me about this. After Jung took Grandmother and me to the Lux to see my first Tarzan movie, Poh-Poh announced that Cheetah was another one of the Monkey King’s disguises. It was a way for the Monkey King to be with his monkey tribe and still keep in touch with Buddha’s commands, for Monkey could not do without human company, black or white or yellow. After all, people were closest to Buddha, Poh-Poh told me.

First Brother Kiam always argued that Poh-Poh’s stories were just
stories,
nothing more, like the stories about the blonde Jesus Miss Bigley told us. At home, after Sunday School, Kiam always demanded to know: “How can anyone walk on water? How can so few baskets of bread and fish feed hundreds?” And Santa Claus never once visited our house. Doubt grew in me. Jung’s insidious whisper was doing its job:
He’s just a man, stupid.
The more I looked at Wong Sin-saang’s animated face, his cheeks flushed with food, the more I felt I needed to know for sure. Slowly, a single question began to disturb my child’s mind:
He’s wearing a mask...
I thought...
like one of those Halloween demons...
I wanted all at once to make sure he was not tricking me, not wearing a monkey mask, like those demons who came banging on our door and sent me crying with fright back into the kitchen. At once, I stood up on my chair. I dropped my chopsticks, turned, and grabbed Wong Sin-saang’s large ear, tugging his Cheetah face towards me. Father banged his hand on the table.

“You Tarzan monkey,” I said to Wong Sin-saang. “You Cheetah...”

Stepmother gasped.

Poh-Poh reached across to stop me. “Let go!”

Wong Sin-saang started laughing.

“Let her pull, Old One,” Monkey said, “let her pull away. Jook-Liang has your
lao foo
spirit.” He looked into my eyes and announced, “Liang is tiger-willed.”

I looked into his eyes. His dark eyes focussed and refocussed. They were real, reflecting life. I touched his deeply wrinkled forehead, studied both sides of his head to look for a telltale string. Nothing but straggly hair. Even the pen-brush tufts that stuck out from his ears were honest. I felt proud of myself, unable to hold back the news: “
Gene-goh Mau-lauh Bak!
” I said to the soft eyes. “A
for-real
Monkey Man!”

Stepmother swallowed deeply. Jung giggled. Wong Sin-saang pushed himself a foot away from my chair. Father tried to say something, but Monkey shook his head. Everyone sat with chopsticks poised. Silent.

The old man bent his head lower. We were eye-to-eye. He knew I knew his real name. My lips soundlessly mouthed the words:
Monkey Man. Mau-lauh Bak. Monkey Man.
He denied nothing. But he said, “Will you call me Wong
Suk?
”

I tried out the name: “Wong
Suk.
”

Suk
meant someone about Father’s age, or much younger.
Suk
was more informal than
Sin-saang. Suk,
I thought, and knew he was younger than Father even if he was very old on the outside.

“I like
Suk
very, very much,” he said. “Oh, much better than Wong
Bak—Old
Wong. Make me feel younger. Call me Wong Suk. Okay? Maybe everyone call me that. Okay?”

I nodded. He was giving us his secret magic name as a blessing.

Then I said the next thing Father insisted no one was supposed to say out loud.

“Wong Suk,” I said, loudly, in Chinese, “you all twisted up,
crooked.
”

Wong Suk swallowed; he reached out and held me gently at arms’ length, though it seemed to me, his long fingers, his wide palms, were too awkward to hold an almost-six-year-old with such unearthly gentleness. Wong Suk’s eyes grew strange. He spoke to me in the family dialect:

“
M-pai Mau-lauh Bak?
” Wong Suk’s voice was a half-whisper. “You not
scared
of Monkey Man?” I shook my head, took a closer look at Wong Suk, touched his for-real wide nose, delicately tugged at the curving tufts of salt-and-pepper hair that formed his bushy eyebrows. I recognized his hair tonic; it smelled of the stuff Father always used. I leaned closer. Crooked arms enfolded me.
M-pai... m-pai...?
I heard Wong Suk chant.
Not afraid...
you
not afraid... m-pai...?

It seemed he could not stop his chanting nor his heart’s rapid beat, nor could he let go his hold on me. I only knew to hold him tighter, lean into him like a cat, a tiger, catching the herbal scent of his body. The air felt hot.

“This child not afraid of me,” I heard him say to everyone. “She not afraid.”

“Don’t be foolish,” I heard Poh-Poh saying, in the dialect I understood, and I could feel her tugging away at my arm. “Don’t be foolish.”

He’s mine,
I wanted to shout.
He’s mine!
Something old sprang from me, something struggled to defy even Poh-Poh. I pulled my head away from Wong Suk and looked back at her. Something like an ancient sword swooped—
Whack!
—striking her against the wall, though outwardly nothing happened to Grandmother, or to Wong Suk, or to me.

Wong Suk let me go. I slumped back into my chair and picked up my chopsticks. Poh-Poh turned back to the table. Everyone went back to steadily eating supper, went on breathing the heated air. After Wong Suk settled back and slurped his soup, loudly, he and Poh-Poh spoke no more in their secret language to one another, though their lips smiled and moved with the memory of something deep and savoury.

J
OOK-LIANG, IF YOU WANT
a place in this world,” Grandmother’s voice had that exasperating let-me-remind-you tone, “do not be born a girl-child.”

“This is Canada,” I wanted to snap back, “not Old China.”