The Jade Peony (20 page)

Everyone laughed but me. I didn’t care.

Father also “fixed” the mysteriously closing back door. Now there was a simple hook and chain to hold it shut, though the chain sometimes rattled as if someone were pushing against the door.

“The wind,” Stepmother said softly.

“Definitely,” Father said, daring any of us to suggest otherwise.

There was little sympathy for my clinging to the Old One’s presence. Father even took me to the herbalist to be examined. The old man found nothing wrong with me, except for my throat, which was a little swollen.

“Why is he wheezing so much?” Father asked.

“Too much damp these days,” the herbalist said, as if it were obvious. “Some children breathe like this until they grow up.”

I was given an extract of powdered lotus leaf and eucalyptus oil, mixed with a honey base, to coat my throat. When Father asked about my seeing the Old One, the herbalist shrugged.

“Is the boy hurting anyone?”

W
EEKS WENT BY. THE FAMILY
became used to my unabated faith in the Old One’s return.

Stepmother went back to her mending and knitting; Father, to reading his three Chinese newspapers; Kiam, to turning the pages of his thick science and math books, and keeping account books for Third Uncle; Jung, to checking out the
News-Herald
and
Vancouver Sun
sports pages to see how the Brown Bomber was doing. Sister Liang, however, lingered beside me to hear more. Sometimes she liked to hold the inch-wide jade carving that Poh-Poh (as Liang called her) had left to me before she was taken to the hospital. Liang liked to look at its pink centre, run a finger over the minature carved petals, and remember how Grandmama had spoken of her friend the travelling juggler and magician. Liang begged me to tell her everything I knew about Poh-Poh’s first boyfriend. But I decided it was useless to tell her much; she always wanted to hear the boring parts. For example, she asked if the magician and Poh-Poh ever really kissed. Because I would never tell her, we always ended up arguing about where Poh-Poh had gone after she died. Liang knew how to annoy me.

“Poh-Poh’s a-moldering in the grave,” Liang taunted, “just like John Brown’s body!” Then she broke into song: “
Poh-Poh’s body lies a-moldering in the grave—the truth is marching on—
”

“Ghosts don’t
need
bodies!”

“You don’t know anything about the Old One,” she said. “Poh-Poh’s
dead!
Ask
Dai Goh!
”

Dai Goh
—First Brother Kiam—had won a prize in science at King Edward High School. Even Father referred to him for information about the new fire bombs the Japanese were dropping over China’s cities, about how they worked, like demon dragons spewing flames for hundreds of feet in every direction. Kiam knew about facts; he would, of course, verify that the Old One was dead. I knew Grandmama was not there in the way you would assume she was there if you were like, say, First Brother Kiam, coming to
scientific
conclusions. Dragon fires were real, measurable, scientific; my seeing and talking to Grandmama were not.

Kiam had never been close to the Old One. He also prided himself on being modern, beyond what he called “all that illogical stuff”; he was learning physics and something called the Atomic Structure. He was first in his math and science classes at King Edward High. But whenever I mentioned seeing Grandmama, as I did at least twice standing by the kitchen stove, twice on the staircase, countless times by doorways, Kiam quickly reiterated the “facts”:
She’s dead. Buried. Gone.
She was, he patiently explained, disintegrating into basic atoms and molecules. Bits of matter.

“She is so there,” I shouted. “I saw her by the back door this morning before breakfast.”

“And what were you doing downstairs so early?” Stepmother asked, as she threw some vegetables into the wok. The leaves and stalks sizzled and danced. The kitchen smelled of fresh peanut oil, root ginger, coriander and crushed garlic.

“I heard Grandmama calling me,” I said, matter-of-factly. “She wanted me to say—”

I stopped; my heart started to pound.

“Wanted you to say
what?
” Jung said, slamming a bucket of sawdust into the hopper. The kitchen stove sighed as the sawdust slid down the tin sides of the chute.

“Nothing,” I said.

Stepmother looked at me with apprehension, but I could say no more.

I knew if I had said, “Grandmama told me,
Old way, best way,
” the family would laugh at me. Father and Kiam had been saying how we must all change, be modern, move forward, throw away the old.

“After all these dirty wars are finished,” Father lectured to Third Uncle, “those who understand the new ways will survive.”

Third Uncle dragged on his waterpipe as if he could not hear.

Another time, even more mysteriously, the Old One appeared on the staircase landing above me. There, in her favourite blue jacket, she stood and pointed her finger past me, and when I refocussed my eyes, she disappeared. I looked to where she had pointed. There was nothing there but our front door window looking out across the street at Mrs. Lim’s tree-shrouded shack.

Mrs. Lim, I knew, liked the old ways, as if she had never left Sun Wui. Mrs. Lim told Mrs. Chang she thought she saw the Old One in the upstairs window looking across at her. When Mrs. Chang, shaking an armful of gold and jade bracelets, reported this to Stepmother over the
mahjong
table, Stepmother slammed her cards down.

“Just old-fashioned talk.”

None of the ladies around the table said another word. When we got home that evening, Stepmother threw her coat down.

“Don’t you dare repeat Mrs. Lim’s crazy words about seeing the Old One.” Her voice rang with frustration. “Don’t you dare mention any of this to your father when he gets home. He has the war in China to worry about.”

What no one could accept was this:
Grandmama had never left me.

By the end of March, Father and Stepmother were pleading with my Chinatown uncles to intervene, to join forces against my madness.

“She’s shipped out, Sekky,” Third Uncle said, bluntly. “Your Poh-Poh’s shipped out.”

I went on playing with my tin soldiers.

“Gone,” said Uncle Dai Kew. “You’ll see your Grandmother in Heaven when you get there one day. Just like the Bible tell you so.”

I wished I had never gone to church with Uncle Dai Kew. The Bible explained everything to him, even his gambling losses.

I turned away.

One night, when we were in bed, Second Brother Jung was talking to me about the new job Stepmother had managed to get in the woollen factory, about how he himself was trying to get odd jobs at the wharf, how everyone would be working soon because we were poor, how Father and First Brother Kiam worried about the rent.

“Sekky, you have to understand,” he warned me, “everyone in the family is caught up with work and school.”

Jung went on; he really only wanted to talk to himself. I fell into a trance; my breathing seemed easier, grew stronger. I looked past Jung and suddenly saw the Old One standing at the end of Second Brother’s bed.

“Sekky,” Jung said, “what the hell are you staring at?”

“Nothing,” I said, startled, and caught Grandmama’s smile before she vanished. I felt good about seeing Grand-mama, felt the oxygen fill my lungs, and went to sleep, smiling. But Jung, I know, sat up in his bed for a long, long time, staring at nothing but moonlight. He was desperate for his own room, never mind the irritation of having to share it with a kid brother who was always seeing a ghost. I could not help it: my heart, my
eyes,
had not lied to me.

After another one of my “incidents,” I heard Father swear to Third Uncle that if he could ever raise enough money, the Old One’s bones would be dug up and taken to the Bone House in Victoria.

Liang told me about her friend Monkey Man sailing home to China with a shipment from the Bone House—two thousand pounds of old China men bones from the lumber, fishing and railroad camps. But the war changed a lot of things. Now such back-to-China bone shipments were discouraged. Overseas shipping space was restricted to war munitions and emergency supplies, and to the transport of living men for the purpose of killing other men.

No one in the family really wanted to talk about ghosts, not when they were speaking around me. On the contrary, they insisted only on the facts of life and death.

First Brother Kiam insisted on the Big Fact: Death meant the end of someone’s activity on earth. There were no such things as ghosts or demons or spirits. In response, I quoted from Mrs. Williams, who taught at the Methodist Sunday School, about the Holy G-h-o-s-t and how it was everywhere. Everywhere. Like Grandmama. Though naturally Mrs. Williams only understood about Christian ghosts with their pink faces and huge white wings and never mentioned Grandmama in her blue jacket.

“The fact is,” Third Uncle said to Father, “you haven’t paid your respects properly to your dead mother. You must
bai sen,
you must
bow.
Pay your respects! All this political talk you talk, one world, one citizenship! You forget you Chinese!?!”

Father jumped out of his easy chair and stormed out of the house. When he slammed the door behind him, one of the building bricks on the front window ledge tipped over and fell onto the porch. The window slammed shut, cracking the glass.

Everyone turned to look at me.

Soon after that, Grandmama’s room was cleared out and Father asked the family, including Third Uncle and Uncle Dai Kew, to prepare for a final ceremony. Everyone seemed to know what was going on, except me.

Kiam went across the street and came back with Mrs. Lim. The big woman was dressed in a blue silk jacket, the same colour as Grandmama’s. Two men came with her. Father said the one with the bald head and long black jacket was a Buddhist monk, an old friend of his who worked on the
CPR
steamships long before the war in China started. The other man was taller and wore an ill-fitting western suit; he had long oily hair that dangled over his collar. We all walked upstairs into Grandmama’s old room.

I stood in the doorway and looked inside, feeling the Old One’s presence. The place was empty, except for two large clay bowls. Outside the freshly clean, curtainless windows, I could see the distant line of North Shore mountains like resting lions.

Mrs. Lim took me aside.

“It’s time,” Mrs. Lim whispered in my ear, “for the family to let the Old One go.”

But they had already let her go, I thought.

The tall, long-haired man, Mrs. Lim told me, was a
fung-suih
expert, a geomancer who understood the harmonious flow of wind-water forces.

“If only your Father had asked him for advice about your Grandmother’s burial,” Mrs. Lim shook her head, “Poh-Poh wouldn’t be bothering you now.”

The long-haired geomancer looked older than Father. He had narrow eyes and waved his hand in the air and sniffed for emphasis, like the doctor at school who had tapped my chest and told me to take a deep breath. The bald-headed monk bowed to Father; he had a long face and spoke in a clipped dialect unfamiliar to me. The services of the monk and the geomancer were called upon (I was told years later) because of my stubbornness.

The two men put on white gowns over their own clothes; they planted burning incense sticks in the red clay bowls placed at the east and west corners of Grandmama’s room. Smoke trailed upward; rhyming whispers rose into the solemn air. The family was now being prepared to surrender Grandmama, as Mrs. Lim told me, to let the Old One go.

The long-haired geomancer and the bald-headed monk, Third Uncle, Mrs. Lim, and even Uncle Dai Kew, encouraged our household to
bai sen
for future prosperity, for good health and long life. To think of the Grand Old One. To pay our respects to Grandmama. Having done all this, Father felt satisfied and assumed my silliness would stop.

But it didn’t.

I SAW GRANDMAMA
three more times. So did Mrs. Lim, who swore it was no mere shadow drifting between our house and the O’Connors’ next door. Liang went pale, said she felt a chill that day, even though it was sunny and hot. Kiam looked sympathetic. Jung said he thought the back door just now shut by itself.

“You forgot to chain it,” Father said, looking to Stepmother for support.

Stepmother said nothing. It was no use arguing with the Old One, dead or alive.

I took a deep breath.

“Grandmama wants us to
bai sen
once more,” I blurted.

Kiam groaned. Father turned away. But that April afternoon in our parlour Uncle Dai Kew raised his voice.

“What harm could it do?” he argued, putting down his Bible. “You can respect your mother and still be modern.”

Uncle Dai Kew turned his Bible to a page showing some women bowing at the feet of Jesus.

“Look here, look at the white people here. Look at them in the church, bowing all the time, and they run electric motors.”

Father relented.

“I bring you incense tomorrow,” Third Uncle said. “I bring you special wine and paper money to burn. The Old One will never fear poverty in the other place.”

“I’ll make steamed chicken with black mushrooms,” Stepmother said. “That was the Old One’s favourite dish.”

“I’ll ask Mrs. Lim to bring red sauce for good luck,” Father said. “Everything should go well.”

The next afternoon, Stepmother set up one of the small end tables in the parlour, put down a white cloth, and on it placed dishes of food, a red clay bowl and Grandmama’s picture. On each side of the picture, Father hung small banners with black and gold-edged Chinese characters on them. The Buddhist monk came again and bowed before the picture. He lit sticks of incense.

We each took a turn and bowed three times, paying our respects to Grandmama’s formal portrait; then, and hereafter, the monk assured Father, it would be all right for everyone to talk directly and loudly to the Old One.

Using a formal dialect, Father greeted her, and burned a sheaf of gold and silver paper money. Flames curled into the air.