The Jade Peony (5 page)

“Jook-Liang,” Wong Suk said to me one perfect day, “you are my little girl, my family.”

I was happy. I knew our adopted relationship was a true one: Wong Suk would otherwise have been only one of the many discarded bachelor-men of Chinatown—and I, barely tolerated by Poh-Poh, would merely be a useless girl-child.

“Go to Odeon or Lux?” Wong Suk would ask me.

If we hadn’t seen the movie, and Father gave us some extra coins, I always chose the Odeon. It had a gold ceiling with painted angels, and between movies there were magicians, singers, a chorus of dancing girls and dog acts. Sometimes there were acrobats and jugglers; then Poh-Poh might come with us, that is, if Stepmother or one of my brothers could stay home with Sekky. My favourite movies starred Shirley Temple; Wong Suk liked Tom Mix, any old picture with Tarzan (to tell the truth, he identified with the smart and smart-alecky Cheetah), and we both liked Laurel and Hardy. But we absolutely gloried in the Sherwood Forest world of Robin Hood. “So much like the heroes of Old China,” Wong Suk told me. My two older brothers, Jung and Kiam, used to go with us to see the gangster and Charlie Chan movies, which I hated, so much talking and no action until the end—but soon these two, especially Kiam, had their own friends, the onrushing war to worry about, and jobs to go to. These days I had Wong Suk nearly all to myself.

Today, if only the sun would peek out, if only it would not rain, I was going to delight Wong Suk with my best performance. I could see that Poh-Poh wanted Wong Suk to be pleased with me, if only because my performance would reflect on her. Wong Suk was only a few years younger than her seventy-seven years; he was her equal; he was a man whose approval meant something. And Wong Suk had bought her granddaughter ribbons for her dreams. A princess! Poh-Poh understood the appeal and danger of dreams. She broke into a chain of half-dialects.

“Too much playing,” she said, shaking her head and rocking herself impatiently. “Too much fancy! Learn nothing!”

Then she used a kind of half-English pidgin and half-Chinese which usually sent Wong Suk rollicking, for he knew more English than Poh-Poh. But he was not here.

This useless only-granddaughter wants to be Shir-lee Tem-po-lah; the useless Second Grandson wants to be cow-boy-lah. The First Grandson wants to be Charlie Chan. All stupid foolish!

“In China, Jook-Liang, you no play-act anything.” She looked up at her obviously spoiled granddaughter. “In China, they tie up your feet like this—” With her hands, she made tight, bent-back fists. “—No can dan-see!”

“Well,” I said, with my best sense of dignity, mustering up the Toisanese words, “I’m only play-acting for Wong Suk.” This was a lie: I also play-acted for myself, imagining a world where I belonged, dressed perfectly, behaved beyond reproach, and was loved, always loved, and was not, no, not at all,
mo yung.

I pulled at my chin and sucked in my thick cheeks to lengthen my “look,” just as Stepmother said the actress Anna May Wong always did. If Poh-Poh was going to launch into the story of “the old days, the old ways,” I wanted to escape.

IT WAS TIRESOME
to hear again how she hadn’t been deemed worthy enough to have her feet bound: back in China, the village matchmaker had destined Grandmother to be sold to a well-off family, to be their house servant.

“
Too ugly,
” the midwife had pronounced at Grandmother’s birth. And her father, an old farmer wishing for a son, spat at his wife and left them forever.

Grandmother had come into the world a month too early, a cursed girl-child with a misshapen birth skull, pads of skin over her face, and a fold of hair around her neck.

“At ten she will be even uglier—monster ugly!” The midwife rinsed her bloodied hands in the wooden birth pan, and spat out onto the dirt floor the bad water and evil smell caught in her throat. “Get rid of this useless girl-child.”

I got off the stool and took a pose before the half-length mirror in the hall entrance. The stiff white taffeta dress I’d begged Stepmother to buy me from the Strathcona School Rummage Sale looked really pretty. Elegant, even. I knew the breeze on the porch would catch the folds and lift them like a dream. And then, as I turned and spun, lifting my arms...

Grandmother kept shaking her head.

“Maybe it rain soon,” she said, darkly. She was always saying something discouraging. I know now she was only warning me to be patient, not to tempt the gods. Poh-Poh always said the unlucky thing to bring back the luck: for example, if you worried about her health, she would say, “Maybe die soon.”

“It’s only cloudy,” I said. “Cloudy isn’t rain.”

She refused to acknowledge me. Her rocker kept its steady motion.

Poh-Poh’s mother had said, looking at the wretched baby, twice-cursed for being born ugly and a girl-child, “Maybe die soon.”

For weeks after Grandmother’s too-early birth, Father told me, Poh-Poh’s stubborn village mother fed her with a rubber syringe given to her by the Heavenly Gate Mission lady. She filled the bulb-shaped syringe with her own breast milk, sometimes mixed with three drops of ox blood saved for her by the village butcher. The mission lady brought blankets, mysterious potions, biscuits. The hard biscuits were slowly chewed into a warm pulpy spittle by Poh-Poh’s mother, and dabbed into the baby’s hungry mouth. Father told me that slowly the flabs of skin lifted up from Poh-Poh’s face, the skull grew to be normal; her coarse, black hair rose up richly to cover her head. The hideous, twice-cursed baby survived, grew up, married, had one son—my father.

In fact, Poh-poh had become quite pretty, with high cheekbones that made her seem ageless for her first sixty years. Now she was seventy-seven. And I was almost nine, getting ready to tap-dance for Wong Suk:
One shuffle, kick-back, kick-side, two shuffle, step-toe, step-back... kick, kick, kick...

The Old One grew bored with my self-absorption. She had more important things to do. Carefully, she bent over to look at Sekky, now struggling to wake up. She gently rocked the crib and began cooing at him. My baby brother was her chief concern; I was a distraction, a nuisance. She was always happy to see me go off with Wong Suk.

“Rain, rain, go away,” I sang under my breath, “come again some other day...”

Poh-Poh hated English tunes that sounded like bad-luck chants. When would her
mo yung
granddaughter learn not to tempt the gods? She reached down to pick up Sekky; he was waking up slowly, arms unfolding beneath him, in that stupid way all babies do, even Canadian-born ones. Poh-Poh liked to whisper blessings in his ear, always whispering softly, so that Sekky could never really repeat them; softly, so that the gods could not hear; she liked to sing to him, pat his hands and back, to enchant him with stories and songs.

“Well, when is
Mau-lauh Bak
coming?”

“Don’t call him that,” I protested. My bandit-prince was not anyone’s Monkey Man. “Call him Wong Suk.”

“Why not?” Grandmother said, in a half-whisper, now that baby Sekky was stirring from his nap. “
Mau-lauh Bak
ugly like me—he Ugly One. We know world. No one spoil us.”

She got worked up and her dialects fell into a kind of controlled disorder. “No one care for us. Not like you—spoiled Jook-Liang—always play. Wong Suk and me too ugly—
ahhyaiii... Git-sum! Git-sum!
Heart-cramp! Heart-cramp!”

In the old pictures of Poh-Poh, even the fading sepia ones with their cracked edges taken by the mission lady, the photos where she clings to her mother’s black pants, no one would ever think her ugly. But when the village midwife had pronounced fresh-born Poh-Poh hideous, the judgement stayed. Why not? A beautiful girl-child from a poor family is even more useless than an ugly one from a rich family, unless you can sell either one for a jade bracelet or hard foreign currency. Then you can feed your worthy sons, give them educations, arrange marriages, make them proud men. But a girl-child? If no one else appreciated me, Wong Suk knew my worth: he would never desert me. I was his family. He told me so.

I shifted my weight, did a simple turn, and watched the cream-coloured skirt lift and ripple above the dancing rosettes on my patent shoes. Above the tap-tap-tap, the soft taffeta rustle embraced the silence.
I’m not ugly,
I thought to myself,
I’m not useless.
Oh, if only it would not rain, I thought, and whirled.

Above the house, the clouds broke up.

Suddenly, the light from the window brightened and poured over the crib; the sitting room and hallway became brilliant, full of sun.

My heart almost burst with expectation. I looked again into the hall mirror, seeking Shirley Temple with her dimpled smile and perfect white-skin features. Bluntly reflected back at me was a broad sallow moon with slit dark eyes, topped by a helmet of black hair. I looked down. Jutting out from a too-large taffeta dress were two spindly legs matched by a pair of bony arms. Something cold clutched at my stomach, made me swallow.

Sekky started to wail. Grandmother lifted him up into the light, whispering.

I looked down: masses of red clustered at my feet. I thought of old Wong Suk leaning on his two canes. And I danced.

W
AITING FOR OLD WONG
Suk to come and see me dance, I stood on our porch—back straight, eyes forward—and did a practice
toe-tap, shuffle-kick, turn.
It was my tap version of the Castle Walk. Last week, Wong Suk had asked me, in his best English, “Liang, next time show me Shirley Temple. Show me so I never to forget you, okay?”

When I got the dress and tap-shoes at the last Strathcona School Fall Rummage Sale, Miss McKinney threw in an oversized book,
Professional Tap-Steps in Twenty Easy Lessons.
The book cover featured Fred Astaire side-stepping with Ginger Rogers. The book came with fold-out pages stamped with shoe prints I could follow with my own feet. Like
glide
-one,
glide
-two. Otherwise, for the actual tap-steps, I imitated the movie shows that occupied my head and smiled and curtsied, just like Shirley did.

The white taffeta dress was actually a creamy white, a colour that made my skin look more canary than I liked. There was a faded raspberry stain near the collar.

“If you don’t look for it,” Father said, “you won’t notice it.”

The taffeta dress was going to be a surprise for Wong Suk, only I wished the dress had colourful polka dots, too, but it didn’t. Wong Suk loved polka dots.

Maybe the plain white dress was a sign; the raspberry stain, a sign. Poh-Poh told me there were always signs, if only one was paying attention, like the time she dreamed of me falling off the porch when I was a baby. I didn’t fall off. But I was learning to walk and I did trip and bump my head on the bannister. Even today, you can spot a tiny nick just above my left eyebrow. Poh-Poh likes to hold my head a certain way and point out to people how she foretold the scar.

Maybe I should have known it was a warning—a sign, I mean—when after Poh-Poh tied all those ribboned pom-poms on my tap-shoes, she didn’t ask me to help her rinse out the stinky pail of diapers. “Keep your dress clean,” was all that she said, throwing the rinsed diapers into the galvanized tub herself.

Everything seemed right that Saturday except Wong Suk was late. He usually appeared by eleven o’clock, latest. The spring sun overhead reminded me it was nearing twelve o’clock: the mill whistle by the B.C. docks would blow soon. The air felt wet and warm, spring and summer, though it was mid-spring. Small clouds scudded cross the mountain tops.

Wong Suk and I were, as usual, going to have a lunch of leftovers, then walk two blocks down Pender, cross Main, down to Hastings near Carrall, to the Lux movie house. Hastings Street, outside of Chinatown, was where people always stared at the two of us—stared at this bent-down agile old man with the funny face leaning on his two canes, at this almost-nine-year-old girl with her moon face—but we didn’t care.

“Look,” a teenage boy once said, loud enough for everyone walking by to hear, “Beauty and the Beast.”

His two pals giggled. Wong Suk didn’t quite understand, but I knew the English words and I knew the story from one of my school readers. I had loved Wong Suk since I was five, loved his wrinkled monkey face, so it didn’t matter what people said.

The Lux was showing a Festival of Cartoons plus two main features. Wong Suk and I stayed late to catch the newsreel. China was at war, fighting the Japanese invaders. Wong Suk liked to start the clapping whenever Chiang Kai-shek appeared on the screen. Then we would all hiss the enemy if they showed up, especially if General Tojo marched into view, or if we saw the western-dressed Japanese going in and out of the White House, chattering away with the Americans. If enough Chinatown people were there, the hissing was as loud as the clapping. Grown-up white people clapped every time they saw President Roosevelt, Chinatown people booed every time they saw the Japanese, and children cheered every time Mighty Mouse showed up. I always looked forward to the Petunia Pig cartoons and
only the Shadow knows
mystery serial.

The old porch creaked. I did another tap-step. Turned once. Turned twice. My Shirley Temple ringlets smelled of Stepmother’s curling iron; my hair felt floppy against my neck. No one was home except Poh-Poh, Sekky and me. My older brothers were working at Third Uncle Lew’s warehouse. Stepmother was busy in Chinatown on some errand with Father. That was, I now realize, another sign. Of course, I thought they were busy selling raffle tickets to raise funds for China’s battle against Japan.

“Stay out of Poh-Poh’s way,” Stepmother had said to me, as she stepped out of the house that morning. “Sek-Lung’s been coughing all night again. He needs extra sleep today.”

I did keep very quiet and let Sekky sleep away most of the morning. Gladly. In fact, I hardly bothered Grandmother at all, except to ask her to knot and tie the ribbons on my shoes. (Sicky Sekky still took most of Poh-Poh’s attention, though.) I myself tied the strand of red ribbon holding back my curls. I didn’t want the curls to melt away on my brow in the wet-warm morning air, especially with Stepmother away, unable to help me “freshen up” like the big girls did.