The Jade Peony (6 page)

I pressed my head against one of the fluted porch pillars, leaned my clean dress against its length and listened to the birds chattering in the Douglas fir across the street. I started to daydream about my friendship with Shirley Temple. It was a fact we were both nearly nine years old. If we’d had a chance to meet, it was a fact she would have been my best friend. Besides Wong Suk, I mean. Of course, just as I got into sharing a double banana split with Shirley (and she was just about to tell me how pretty I looked), Poh-Poh’s sharp voice intruded.

“Dress all dirty now.”

Grandmother pulled me away from the pillar and with her other hand presented a large white plate before my eyes: braised chicken feet and cut-up sausage meat bumped up against a chunk of coarse bread. The bread was spread with honey and thick lard.

“Sit down.”

“I’m not hungry,” I protested. Poh-Poh spread out a clean diaper, pushed me down. I sat. She firmly tucked a tea towel under my neck and put another tea towel on my lap. Finally, she pressed the plate on my lap.

“Eat.”

I picked up the hard bread and took a tiny bite. Poh-Poh stood over me, watching. I chewed and made a big swallowing noise. I sensed her waiting for my next question. She had a grandmother’s instinct for being important.

“Where is Wong Suk?” I asked.

“Very late today,” she said, with full authority, hinting at some mystery. “Paper day for Wong Suk.”

“Paper day?”

The old woman looked at me. I had to take another bite.

“Paper, paper, paper,” she said. I was to know that each repetition explained the previous one. She gently rapped my head.

It worked: last Saturday came back into my head.

LAST SATURDAY MORNING
, Wong Suk had taken off his black cloak, leaned his two canes against the wall. He and Father had sat around the oak table, pulling out neatly tied bundles of paper from a heavy brown cardboard case. I could see half-folded documents stamped
CP RAILROAD, B.C. WORK PERMIT
, letters from China, old bills, certificates with Chinese words in black ink, signed with red chop marks... all important papers.

“You kept so much,” Father commented. “Good. Good.”

“Never know what government do,” Wong Suk said. “One day they say Old Wong
okay-okay.
Next day, Wong
stinky Chink.
”

I picked up a paper with official-looking stamps.

“What’s this one?”

“
Tell her,
” Wong Suk urged Father. The two men looked at each other. Father hesitated. Wong Suk nodded, as if encouraging him.

“This certificate says that Wong Suk arrived in Canada when he was twenty—
what?
Not clear here,” Father said.

Wong Suk seemed disappointed. His face was still saying
tell her.
Another sign.
Tell her.
Father turned away, seemed too busy to obey Wong Suk’s plea. Father looked at the year of birth on the certificate and figured out that Wong Suk was
maybe
seventy-five. On another document,
maybe
seventy. In Chinatown, the saying went:
Walk young for young job; walk old for old job.
Father held up another document—a sheet that looked like the first one but gave a different birth year.

“Maybe this paper say five years younger,” Wong Suk sighed, his
tell her
face surrendering to Father’s fidgeting with the papers.

“Or five years
more,
” Father said, respectfully. The two men looked at each other, and Wong Suk gently smiled with pleasure.

Adding years, I knew, made one Honourable. The more life-years relatives and friends added to your paper-years, the more Honourable one became.

I understood all that.

For example, I had always wanted to be older—be fifteen paper-years at least—like Florence Marsden and be stuck-up and wear lipstick and rouge and pencil my eyebrows and get treated to sodas by the boys from the pool hall. Of course, Flo Marsden couldn’t pluck her eyebrows yet.
That
would be really grown-up.

But in all the talk about paper-years, I was baffled about how old the old man really was.

“How old
is
Wong Suk?”

“About the same age as Grandmother,” Father answered.

It was no answer at all. I had witnessed Poh-Poh giving different numbers to different people.

“Poh-Poh, how—?”

“
Ancient,
” Poh-Poh answered. Then she tried to be helpful, looked up at the ceiling to count the years flying away. “Paper-years number... maybe eighty... maybe more.”

I started thinking of my own age, my paper-years, and grew puzzled.

“
Ga-ji nin
—paper-years,” Father said, looking at me, “always different from Chinese years.”

The thought excited me. I started to count my fingers: nine
plus
five...
equals...
fourteen!”

“Am I fourteen?” I asked, imagining fresh apple-red gloss on my lips.

“You
juk-sing
years,” Poh-Poh laughed. “You Canada years.”

“You to be nine years soon,” Wong Suk said, trying to be kind. “Lucky nine.”

Father cleared his throat and all the grownups quickly turned their attention back to the papers on the table. Poh-Poh picked up a washed old bedsheet and began to scissor it into diaper-size squares.

No grownups ever gave you a plain answer, unless they were saying no. I watched Father sort out the packages and decided to look more carefully at the documents. Being in Upper Grade Four at Strathcona, and being one of Miss McKenzie’s Very Best Readers, I could figure out most of the English words. But of course I was unable to pay attention and read the signs. As Poh-Poh always warned me:
Look closely... listen carefully.
I stupidly thought,
There’s nothing left to tell.

Wong Suk’s papers, like Poh-Poh’s, which were stored on a covered shelf in the top lid of a metal trunk, were neatly tied with twine and smelled of moth balls. Father carefully untied each package and folded out only important-looking papers. There were bundled letters with Old China postage stamps, but these he left alone. Father then read off or translated the titles of certain official papers. Wong Suk liked to hear his own history, just like Grandmother; neither of them could read, but both liked to hear what the words on the papers could say.

There were papers dated in the year 18-
something
that said Wong Suk was to pay back, through his labour, the steerage fare from Canton, his bonding tax, plus give back so many years of his wages for shelter, food, and the privilege of being allowed to pay interest on his debts. These contracts had been made years before I was born, signed with Wong Suk’s carved chop stamped in red, stamped and sealed way before Father and Stepmother and my oldest brother arrived in Canada. The papers documented long-term debts, now paid in full.

Wong Suk looked at Father, then at me, then back to Father.
Tell her.

“We must only use the papers that have exactly the same birth month and year,” Father said, softly, like a conspirator.

Wong Suk nodded.

Father selected some papers.

“This one, and maybe this—yes—this one for the Benevolent Society. The Head Tax Certificate for the government—that’s all they need... Some of the rest we can trade or—”

Wong Suk half-whispered, as if it were a delicate matter to mention, “Maybe negotiate with the... the
Tong
—?”

Father looked agreeable. Poh-Poh cleared her throat.

No one would say anything more: a child with a Big Mouth stood beside the oak table. Big Eyes. Big Ears. Big Careless Mouth. A Mouth that went to English school and spoke English words. Too many English words. Poh-Poh looked at me cautiously.

I knew that every brick in Chinatown’s three- and five-storey clan buildings lay like the Great Wall against anyone knowing everything. The
lao wah-kiu
—the old-timers who came overseas from Old China—hid their actual life histories within those fortress walls. Only paper histories remained, histories blended with talk-story. Father said to me, “Jook-Liang, don’t you need some spring air?”

I did. The smell of those documents, packed so long ago and undisturbed between packets of moth balls, prickled my nose. I took my tap-dance book with me and walked out to the front porch and looked up and down the sun-washed street.

I wondered if all the clapboard houses along the street harboured as many whispers as our house did. Those damp shacks decaying on their wooden scaffolding, whose doors you reached only by negotiating rickety ramps—all the one-and two-storey houses parallel along Pender and Keefer, Georgia and Union—did each of those broken, scarred doors lock in their share of whisperings? Some nights I would hear in my dreams our neighbours’ whisperings rising towards the ceiling, Jewish voices, Polish and Italian voices, all jostling for survival, each as desperate as Chinese voices.

I could see the North Shore mountains from our porch and imagined Wong Suk and Father still murmuring behind me, their words lifting against the ceiling. I laid open the
Easy Lessons
book and did a
shuffle-tap-kick.
My best step, my favourite one, was the
full turn, double-tap curtsy.
It involved a furious spinning motion, my starched crinoline noisily swirling above my tip-tap tapping feet—drumbeats, I suppose—to beat out all the whispering.

After Wong Suk finished his business with Father, he came and sat down on the porch steps beside me. He pulled out the Head Tax Certificate, unfolded it carefully, and pointed at the two-inch square photo pasted on the bottom right-hand corner. I looked down and inspected a shoulders-up shot of Wong Suk as a young man. He was wearing a plain shirt.

“Liang,” Wong Suk said, “what you see?”

There was a man in a white shirt. There was no sign of the black woollen cloak he wore in most weathers, the same kind of woollen cloak gentlemen in England wore. I was disappointed. For some reason, I had expected the cape to show up on his shoulders even in the old photograph, something that was simply always a part of him, like his two arms and two crooked legs.

But that was foolish, just because I had always known Wong Suk with his grand cape. I had heard the story of the cape, heard him tell it many times. Heard him talk-story about it when Poh-Poh mended it for him, or when Stepmother patiently restitched the lining and patched up the secret pocket for the tenth time.

Wong Suk had inherited the cloak when I was five years old, from a man named Johnson who lived in Victoria. Roy Johnson had once been Wong Suk’s Number Two Boss Man “in olden
CPR
day,” as Wong Suk referred to the years after 1885 when he helped build one of the last sections of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.

Johnson was over six feet tall, a
dai huhng-moh gui
—a giant red-haired demon—who, on his deathbed decades later, remembered Wong Suk as a friend. Johnson asked Chinese old-timers in Victoria if a man whose birth-name was Wong Kimlein, famous for his monkey face, was still alive.

“No one else could have such a face,” he said, and with the fingers of each hand pulled at the corners of his mouth to demonstrate.

“Yes, yes,” they said, and told Johnson everything. Monkey Man was living in Vancouver in one of the rooming places near the Winter’s Hotel in Gastown, a place run by the Chinese Benevolent Society. They said he could write to any B.C. old-timer in care of the
Chinese Times
newspaper. Then Roy Johnson gave instructions to his oldest son to have a message translated into Chinese writing by one of the Chinese elders, and to send this message to Wong Kimlein.

Wong-Suk told me, “Johnson bess-see Boss Man,” and with a flourish threw the cloak around himself, remembering why a demon on his deathbed would call him friend. Of course, Wong Suk sat back in our big cane chair and told us the story.

IT BEGAN
, he said, in one of the last rail camps set up to extend the
CPR
rails to Granville, now called Vancouver. Wong Suk that early winter evening was taking a heavy sack of supplies back to one of the few remaining Chinese work camps in the interior of British Columbia, and—as he told the story—noticed a sudden shadow, looked up, and saw an eagle flying angrily overhead. It circled majestically and sent down a screeching sound, soared, then swooped down so close that Wong Suk recalled forever the loud snap of its bent beak and the oncoming rush of its broad powerful wings.

Wong Suk ducked his head quickly. As he did so, his eye caught sight of something between the tracks ahead, something humped up against a distant reflecting curve of rail. Wong Suk thought the lump on the track was a wild animal, maybe worth some extra money—its spleen or heart or liver could be sold for medicine. Instead, as Wong Suk hurried along with his heavy sack, feeling lucky, he just as quickly felt his heart turn on him. It was a human shape lying inside the tracks, a giant body slumped low against the steel track. He could make out the head positioned on the rail, waiting to be crushed. The head had red hair. Wong Suk recognized at once that it was Johnson, Number Two Boss Man.

Wong Suk later learned that Johnson had shared his last bottle of whisky with a new drinking partner. The two ended up wandering drunkenly along the tracks. Johnson’s new friend became abusive, knocked him down from behind; when he refused to stay down, the friend took out a handy pocketknife and cut him up for his lack of co-operation. Whoever it was took Johnson’s pocket change and a gold watch. Whoever it was also took his wool jacket and his new vest, then neatly leaned his head against the steel rail and left him to die.

When Wong Suk dropped his sack and stood over the slug of a body, the giant’s orange beard was already beaded with ice, his breath shallow, his nostrils frost-clotted; the left side of his head was swollen purple. His shirt had been cut open; his chest criss-crossed with thin lines of blood scabbing from the cold. Luckily, Roy Johnson had drunk enough to keep his blood from freezing. At this point of the storytelling, Wong Suk always laughed and rubbed his tummy and smacked his lips.

“I think maybe find dead animal—maybe big, big deer—make good food—make good medicine—make stew.”