The Jade Peony

by Wayson Choy

I CAME FINALLY to celebrate my twelfth birthday, with friends like Bobby Steinberg and two of the boys from the boxing club at the Hastings Gym.

  I had discovered Joe Louis, read everything about him, and taken to boxing. After Kiam’s lion dance practice with the Chinese Students’ Athletic Club, Frank Yuen took Kiam and me to the Hastings Gym one day. At once I liked the whack-whack sound of the punching bag being hammered into a blur.

  That day, a lanky Negro was throwing himself at the punching bag, his feet hopping in rhythm with his lightning-fast fists. He noticed me practically hypnotized watching him.

  “Wanna try, China boy?” he asked, breathless, then stopped. In the glaring lights of Hastings Gym, the black man took the towel from around his neck and wiped silver beads from his forehead; he laughed and joked as he pulled off his gloves. He inspected a smaller pair on a rack, held them next to my hands, and fitted them onto me.

  Frank waved to him and called him Max and told him to go easy on me. Max laughed even harder. I liked him.

  Guys at the Hastings Gym took turns with all the equipment and a few, like Max, took it upon themselves to teach the younger boys how to hold their fists, how to swing and fake a punch, how to pull back and lunge forward, how to shadow box.

  “Do this,” Max said, in the weeks that followed, putting me through my paces. Frank and Kiam thought that was great. Someone else to babysit me while they sat on the bench waiting for weights or whatever, talking about the war and how they would like to join up somewhere.

  Max teamed me up with my friend Bobby Steinberg and taught us both how to take a punch, how to absorb the shock. He taught me how to breathe in rhythm to the movement of my arms. “You see, kid,” Max said, “the muscles of your arms are pumping up your rib muscles. Bobby, show him.”

  Bobby Steinberg caught on to some things faster than I did, but soon he couldn’t come to the gym any more, unless he sneaked around. His father and mother didn’t want him getting into fights.

  I joined the junior boxing section and paid my fifteen cents each week for lessons with one of the coaches. But I thought Max was my best trainer. I happily learned how to swear, how to kick if you have to, how to throw back any shit you didn’t want to take.

  On my twelfth birthday, Frank Yuen brought me a ticket to see three fights with him at Exhibition Park. Max was fighting. As I was staring at the ticket, looking for the name of Joe Louis, he tossed around my shoulders his father’s topcoat and held my fist up as if I were Champion of the World. Joe Louis never fought in Vancouver, of course, but if he had, he would have worn a coat like the one Frank gave me.

  The second-hand coat from Old Yuen, falling on my twelve-year-old shoulders, felt like armour. It had been worn by Frank’s father, for sure, but it was top quality and had been well taken care of.

  This charcoal coat, Frank told me, had cost his father, Old Yuen, three straight lucky nights of gambling; otherwise, it would have cost a regular China man more than three months’ hard wages. During the Depression and the opening of the war years, you could only buy such a classic coat on Granville Street, in one of those men’s stores where a salesman in a black suit sniffed at China men who asked for the bess-see—the best—and who proudly pulled out a thick roll of folding money. It was money earned from a labour camp’s honest sweat or won from gambling, or from playing a longshot at the Hastings Park races, but it was enough money to have the salesman go to the back room and pull out his best stock.

  “Make it like an army or navy coat,” I pestered Stepmother.

  Father presented me with a set of military-looking brass buttons for the coat. Stepmother washed the coat twice to get rid of Old Yuen’s stale tobacco smells. To dry it, she hung the heavy dripping coat for two days on the back porch laundry line.

  Afterwards, studying pictures of military men I’d ripped out from old copies of Liberty and Life, Stepmother stitched up two inches of sleeves; Poh-Poh raised some inches off the bottom, and Mrs. Lim, cutting with sharp butcher scissors, narrowed the two back panels, and Stepmother steadily foot-pumped and turned the wheel of our neighbour Mrs. Chin’s Singer every evening for a week.

  In exchange for the use of the Singer, Kiam and I carried Mrs. Chin’s dump-truck delivery of firelogs and kindling up the slope of her back yard and stacked the wood in her shed for her. The wood had been left in a dumped pile after the turbaned, dark-skinned driver promised Mrs. Chin he would stack the wood for her; instead, he collected his money, dropped the wood, and drove off. It was an annual ritual between Mrs. Chin shaking her fist at the disappearing truck and whoever sold her the firewood, laughing and waving goodbye sucker. Meanwhile, Stepmother ran the Singer under Mrs. Chin’s direction. Six days later, on a Saturday, the coat was sewn back together.

  Everyone stood around me as I tried the coat in front of our hall mirror, even Kiam, wondering if the coat was worth all that wood-lugging labour.

  “Good, good,” Mrs. Chin said.

  Unbuttoned and loose, the garment sagged shapelessly over my shoulders. I didn’t look anything like a champion or an army captain.

  Before I could register disappointment on my face, Stepmother looked at me sternly and said, “Not finished yet. We go with Grandmother to visit Gee Sook.”

  Gee Sook was a bachelor-man dry cleaner and tailor who ran the one-man American Steam Cleaners at Pender and Gore. Despite urgings that he should marry and father many sons, the cleaner claimed he could never afford a mail-order bride and would ask aloud how at fifty-five he could ever have sons and see them grow up. Gee Sook looked years younger, but everyone said that was the steam.

  If marriage wasn’t part of his plans, Gee Sook seemed neither bitter nor jealous of anyone with children, as some bachelor-men were. He gave generously of his cleaning and tailoring services, and at the lowest fees, to those poorer families like ours who were always making over old clothes.

  “I make like new,” he always sang in Cantonese, even to the white people who gave him business.

  Poh-Poh often camped at the small back room behind the store, just to rest in the midst of her daily Chinatown rounds, to sit back, gossip. Other elderly women dropped in, too. Sometimes the women helped Gee Sook with mending a piece of embroidery or sewing on some buttons. They drank tea poured from Gee Sook’s all-day teapot encased in a cloth-quilted jacket. They would urge Gee Sook to sing familiar village ditties and watch him drip with sweat over his steamer. When Liang and I were younger, the Old One had often taken us with her to show us how hard Gee Sook had to work to earn a living. For all Liang and I could make out, Gee Sook did not look like he was working hard at all. He sang Chinese songs and English songs, like chick-a-ree-chick, cha-lah, cha-lah, and pressed jackets and suits, while two or three old ladies sat at the back mending and sewing and stitching away happily.

  “Such waste!” Poh-Poh would shout in Toisanese over the machinery and Gee Sook’s merry singing. “You should buy some papers, some gai gee, and send for a bride!”

  “Marry me!” Gee Sook sang back, wiping the steam from his glasses. “I’m asking you for the tenth time—marry me!”

  “You watch out,” Poh-Poh laughed. “I say yes and chop you to death!”

  Why Gee Sook never did marry was sometimes a topic of conversation at the ladies’ mahjong tables, but, in truth, many men dared not marry. There might never be enough money to buy more food for another mouth, never a secure job to pay regular rent, never enough decent work to feed the children that would come along.

  “Your ancestors must be furious,” Mabel Tam told him one day. “It’s a natural law that all men should marry!”

  Gee Sook winked at Poh-Poh and charged Mabel Tam twice the fee for her cleaning.

  “If I get marry,” he said to Mabel, “then my fees are double. Thank you.”

  Yet Gee Sook was not merely selfish, like some of the bachelor-men who lived quite openly with loud and disorderly white or native women, drank and gambled and roamed the streets looking for trouble.

 
“Mix blood,” many of the Chinese ladies told their children, quoting an old saying, “mix trouble!”

  There were exceptions, of course. There were Yip Gong and his wife, Nellie, a white woman who had been educated in both China and the United States, lived in New York, and fluently spoke five Chinese dialects, spoke them better than those born into the language. With her perfect unerring district accents, Mrs. Nellie Yip would berate any China-man who dared to cross her path or dared to match wits with her. Like Poh-Poh, she could criss-cross into a variety of dialects—pidgin, formal or informal—and snap out a hundred sayings, enough to slaughter any peasant or mandarin attempt at a comeback. She was a legend, but how many Chinese could find a legend to marry?

  Nellie Yip was also one of the midwives most trusted to help with the delivery of Chinatown babies. When Stepmother ended up losing the baby during her third pregnancy—not long after Dai Kew reclaimed his turtle from our shed—Grandmother reassured everyone that the very best had been done for Stepmother, especially as Mrs. Yip, as a favour to Father, was in attendance. Poh-Poh said that Nellie Yip knew both white and Old China medicine ways, but she was mainly Chinese in her heart, which was all that mattered. Father and old Mrs. Lim, our neighbour, agreed.

  “If Madame Yip cannot save the baby,” Mrs. Lim commented later, “then no one can.”

  After the troubled pregnancy was over, Stepmother seemed to accept that it was meant and felt relieved.

  Miscarriages and stillbirths were not uncommon in those days, and no one expected a safe delivery so soon after Stepmother had just had Sekky. Besides, the more practical mahjong ladies stressed, how could her man manage another mouth to feed?

  The dead baby was strangled by its cord. Stepmother wanted to know if it was a boy-baby or a girl-baby. The dead baby was in a pail at the foot of the bed, a tin pail covered with a folded bedsheet.

  “A boy,” Mrs. Yip said. After she gently wiped Stepmother’s wet forehead and passed the cloth to Poh-Poh, Mrs. Yip cleaned herself, said goodbye to each of us, and went to get a doctor to verify the baby’s death.

  Poh-Poh came to the door and brought me to Stepmother.

  “This is why we were given Jung-Sum,” the Old One said, taking me by the hand and holding it tightly and making sure everyone paid attention to me. Stepmother called me over to her bed and hugged me. She smelled of Tiger Balm and sweat, and her hair was matted against her forehead. Liang pressed closer, and Stepmother reached out to hold her as well. Kiam and Father, holding a sleeping Sekky in his arms, and Grandmother stood back and watched.

  THE THREE OF US, Kiam, Liang and myself, had stumbled into Father and Stepmother’s bedroom and heard and seen almost everything of the last half-hour of the birthing. That is, what we could make out from the doorway. We knew we were to keep out of the way, but factual matters about birthing and dying were not secrets kept from children. Births and deaths were part of life. Families went to cemeteries to see graves dug up after seven years, to see bones gently washed and prepared, and wrapped by Bone Men who hummed blessings as they worked. These bones were to be returned to China, as promised.

  Kiam stood matter-of-factly by the door, unafraid to watch everything. Kiam was First Son, Poh-Poh had told me, born of First Wife who died in Old China during the famine when he was just three years old. “Those were hard times,” the Old One said. “No food, not even enough water to drink.” I noticed she had little to do with Kiam, spending all her time with Sekky or Liang or me, but mostly with Sekky.

  Ever since Kiam had come to Canada, Third Uncle always told him that, as First Son, he had to behave more like a man than a boy. Father agreed, and together, he and Third Uncle taught Kiam as much as possible how to behave responsibly. Of course, he was expected to stay away from the influence of the women. Kiam belonged more and more to Father, to Third Uncle, to the men of Chinatown who knew the worth of a well-trained and well-mannered First Son. Already, at only ten years old, Kiam was doing odd jobs at Third Uncle’s warehouse, and he had shown an interest in helping with the careful business of entering numbers onto long sheets of papers printed with columns. Kiam made Father proud.

  Standing tall and quiet by the doorway, Kiam might have imagined by contrast how happy his own birthing day had been back in Old China. It’s a boy! Poh-Poh had half-whispered when Kiam first pushed his way out of First Wife.

  The Old One told us the story again and again, told how she bundled the wet baby boy with suppressed joy, barely whispering Kiam’s birth name into his tiny ear.

  “Why did you whisper?” Liang asked.

  “So the gods would not notice and be jealous,” Poh-Poh said. “Kiam-Kim was perfectly shaped, strong and bawling. So I shook my head sadly, as if he were not so.”

  “What would happen if you didn’t?” I asked.

  “Why,” the Old One said, “the gods from jealousy would strike the baby dead.”

  The birth of a boy baby, in Old China, would be announced from bedside immediately to a village crowd at the doorway. The father would be praised, the ancestors’ names called out one by one.

  Kiam’s name was not spoken aloud by Poh-Poh until he, as a baby of Old China, had survived the first month and had his hair symbolically shaved. Whenever Poh-Poh told this story and he happened to be around, First Brother looked indifferent. Kiam only half-listened, if at all, to any of her tales. He was to step into Father’s shoes and learn sensible, grown-up things from Father and Third Uncle. Kiam spent more time with the men, and Liang, Sekky and I spent more time with Stepmother and Grandmother. He was the First Son.

  THE NEXT DAY, Gee Sook, Mrs. Lim and Poh-Poh went to the Tong Association Temple to light joss sticks, to give up prayers for the dead baby boy. Liang and I helped to burn paper images of powerful gods, and we set on fire sheets of silver and gold paper, and small paper toys that Mrs. Lim and Gee Sook had folded the night before. Nothing need be done, for the nameless baby had never reached its first breath, but Poh-Poh insisted, and it comforted Stepmother. Then Father Chan came by, read a blessing from his Bible to further comfort all of us. A week later, Liang had a pretend funeral with one of her dolls, and Sekky kissed it and helped Liang to bury it in the back yard.

  Poh-Poh went to the herbalist and traded one of Sekky’s jade baby bracelets for a priceless root of rare Korean ginseng and a small mysterious packet of black powder.

  Father stayed all day with Stepmother and spooned into her mouth a strength-giving soup made of the ginseng mixed with dried orange peel, sugar crystals, crushed fresh ginger and the black powder, which Poh-Poh would only say was “best for woman only.” Mrs. Lim insisted on adding the powder of half an aspirin tablet.

  Stepmother asked about the baby, what would happen to it. Father said that it would be buried that day in a nameless plot, that Gee Sook had made a burial cloth of special silk, perfectly pressed and sewn, for the dead baby. He showed the small vestment to Stepmother, who approved, and Father took Gee Sook’s hand, bowed and thanked him.

  In such thoughtful ways, Gee Sook gave away so much of his cleaning and tailoring services, so much of his time at the Free China fundraisers, so much after-hours time reading and writing letters from and to China for those who could not themselves read or write, that the elders said of him, “This man lives in Heaven already.”

  And Gee Sook so much seemed to enjoy the company of other people’s children in his shop that Liang and I took our visits to his kingdom for granted.

  LIANG AND I used to like sniffing the smell of the drycleaning chemicals mixed with the bolts of cloth and bags of material lying everywhere around Gee Sook’s shop, and we had fun watching the long blasts of steam shoot into the air as we threw handkerchief-sized rags at the machine and they rose like kites against the large picture window. Sometimes Liang and I just sat mesmerized looking at the fire lit in a ring beneath the water heater tank in the corner of the room. Gee Sook could make the flames dance up and down and hiss at will.

  When we grew into our sixth and eig
hth years, Liang and I stood on a stool and a wicker chair to help Gee Sook shelve the wrapped packages of cleaning waiting for his customers’ claim tickets. We learned the order of the numbers as we did so. It was a job Kiam had liked to do, too, when he was the same age. Gee Sook also had treats, like dried fruit, sticky plums, sugar-glazed ginger, burnt crackling pig’s skin, thick dumplings with plush red bean centres, or an Orange Crush for Liang and me to share.

  When Liang and I grew too old to hang around with Poh-Poh, it was Sekky’s turn to follow her on her rounds, though, as she got older, she began to roam alleyways as well. And when I went back that day to American Cleaners to be fixed up in my “new” coat, I felt at ease in the old way, as if I might toss cloth patches into the streams of steam and watch them float down.

  But now I was twelve years old, too tall and grown up to be patted on the head by Gee Sook. At his cheerful greeting, I shook his hand and stood patiently still while he expertly checked the inside of the coat now lined with the navy-dyed cotton twill Poh-Poh insisted was bess-see for long-lasting wear.

  “Good job,” the tailor said, and quickly threw the coat over my shoulders and brushed over it, dusting away loose threads. At last, Gee Sook raised the garment onto the massive steam-pressing machine that he worked with a wide foot pedal; he began raising and lowering a metal panel, pulling it down with one hand, as he wiped the fog from his wire-rimmed glasses with his other hand.

  Luxurious blasts of steam penetrated every fibre of the coat. The machinery hissed and sang; the flames danced blue and red in a ring beneath the water heater. The wool material stiffened “like new” in the mix of chemicals and steam. The brass buttons began to gleam in the sunlight pouring from the store window. Gee Sook pulled the last panel through the steam and then swung the heavy, now quite stiff topcoat majestically off the machine. Everyone stood back in the narrow work space of American Steam Cleaners.

  Gee Sook slowly draped the coat over me.

  “Jung looks like the young Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek,” Mrs. Lim said, clapping her hands. “We should take a picture.”