The Jade Peony

by Wayson Choy

  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.”

  “Anything?” 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 tu
rtle, 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.”

  Dai Kew looked strangely at me.

  “King George?” he said to me. “You named the turtle after the Royal King?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I pointed to Bobby Steinberg who kept piling on more leaves. “This low fan doy here, this foreign boy, said it was a low fan turtle.”

  “Ahh, yes-yes, Jung,” the wiry Dai Kew smiled broadly. “Named after the King...” Dai Kew seemed to be talking to himself. He frowned, began to hum, and then half-sang some words from God Save the King, “... lonnngg livadah King...”

  Suddenly, Dai Kew snapped his fingers, as if struck by a revelation.

  “Aaiiyaah! An omen!” he said. “Today is the day!”

  “What’s today?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Nothing,” Dai Kew said, too quickly. And just as quickly he disappeared.

  Bobby Steinberg looked at me and said, “That guy’s crazy.”

  I could hear Dai Kew talking with Grandmother, then Stepmother, and finally Father’s voice came drifting through the yard. But I was busy chopping up the wood, and now and then, stopping to watch King George watching me. When I looked up, all the family was standing at the kitchen window, faces close to the glass, unsmiling. Dai Kew stepped out of the back door again.

  “Here,” he said, and handed me a crisp new one-dollar bill. “You take your low fan pal with you to a good movie and some ice-cream treat afterwards. I’ll take care of King George until you come back. Go on, now.”

  I had rarely held a large one-dollar bill with the face of King George on it that was my very own to spend. Any lucky money I was given, even coins, was put away for my future by the family. But I could see the family at the window, Stepmother with her hand on her big stomach, and no one made a move.

  I took the dollar and told Bobby Steinberg to ask his mother if he could go with me to see a double, maybe a triple bill, at the Lux on Hastings. We gave a cowboy cheer. I bent down and tugged at the rope-harness, and King George slowly turned his yellow-eyed head to look at me. He did not snap, I remember. Just looked. And from his turtle brain he must have seen me and Bobby Steinberg happily running out of the back yard and away, pulling close our windbreakers against the autumn wind.

  Perhaps Grandmother was right, as she told me later that October evening: Lao Kwei heard ghost-voices in that autumn wind.

  five

  “JUNG, IT’S SNOWING,” Father said. “Go see how Old Yuen is doing,” and then he added, lowering his voice, “before it’s too late.”

  I hesitated.

  The radio was just warming up; outside, the temperature was dropping. I could hear the late autumn wind pouring down from the North Shore mountains.

  “Go now,” Father urged. “Hurry. Get the rent money from Old Yuen before he spends it on drink or gambling.”

  Father reached over and turned off the radio. Stepmother handed me my “best” coat.

  “Put this on,” she said. “It’ll be cold enough today.”

  Stepmother had patched my wool coat behind the left shoulder, a reminder of its first years spent on Old Yuen’s back before the thick charcoal grey coat was finally passed on to me. His only son, Frank Yuen, had turned it down.

  “It just needs cleaning,” Old Yuen said to Frank. “I wear this, all the crooks think this is rich old sonovabitch China man.”

  “Not my style,” Frank said, holding the heavy coat up against himself. “Too fancy for me. Give it to Jung-Sum for his birthday. Jung wants to be an army captain.”

  The wool coat was a little tight on Old Yuen, but fitted on me like a loose blanket. Poh-Poh said I would quickly grow into it now that I had turned twelve.

  “Stay small,” she said, with her ancient eyes registering my recent growth. After eight years of living with her, since I was four, she never stopped appraising me with her faded eyes; her glance, still watchful, searching.

  “Jung-Sum is different,” I overheard her say to Mrs. Lim one day when I was waiting for a chance to do my daily round of shadow boxing. I walked in on them in the parlour. I was dressed in an undershirt and Boys’ Club boxing shorts, and wore a pair of old runners that no longer fitted Kiam. Poh-Poh was demonstrating an embroidery stitch and Mrs. Lim was watching carefully, now and then biting into red melon seeds.

  �
��Of course,” Mrs. Lim responded, always blunt. “He has different blood. More handsome than your own two grandsons.”

  “No, no, not looks,” Poh-Poh protested. “Inside unusual, not ordinary.”

  “Very ordinary to me,” Mrs. Lim chimed back. “All Jung wants to do is to fight all the other boys. All boys the same!”

  “Different—that’s all I say!”

  I usually did a daily fifteen-minute round to keep in fighting shape. I put Father’s snake-arm desk lamp on the floor, the green shade turned to face the wall as if it were a spotlight. I clicked on the lamp. My shadow sprawled across the wall. Max said it was important to see how the line of your left and right arm pitched forward, at what angle the shadow lengthened; it was necessary to push your fist with an illusion of weightlessness, pushing into the air like a bullet propelled through someone’s skull. That’s why Joe Louis always seemed to float, to centre the power of his jabbing fists as if they were no more than an extension of his own shadow, a bomb falling through air.

  In front of the two old women, I began to shadow box, taking deep breaths, punching away in the air, my feet skipping, just as Max taught me. I danced about, happily showing off, moving faster than I should, tiring myself out in five, six, seven minutes. My arms began to feel leaden.

  The Old One put down her embroidery and turned back to Mrs. Lim and started an old saying, “Sun and moon both round...”

  “—yet,” Mrs. Lim finished the saying, “sun and moon different.”

  “I’m the sun,” I said, cheerfully, puffing away, breaking into their conversational dance. “I’m the champion!”

  “Jung-Sum is the moon,” Poh-Poh said.

  Mrs. Lim stopped drinking her tea, her eyes as alert as the Old One’s. Between her fingers she held a half-shelled melon seed.

  “The moon?” Mrs. Lim blurted. “Impossible!”

  Mrs. Lim knew the moon was the yin principle, the female. Mrs. Lim studied me as I went through my paces, jabbing away at the air.