The Jade Peony (10 page)

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.

“
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.

“Impossible!” she said.

The Old One slowly lifted her tea cup and gently focussed on me, her gaze full of knowing mystery.

WHEN I WAS FOUR
years old and brought on the train from a town called Kamloops to this family, it was the Old One at the Vancouver train station who first looked askance at me like a shrewd farmer’s wife.

“Too thin,” she complained to the dark-suited, solemn Tong Association official, Mr. Chang, who held me up for her to see. As the train noisily chugged away from the station, she squeezed my upper arm and blasted over the noise, “Cost too much to fatten him.”

“I feed myself,” I shouted, in a
Hoiping
accent. “Mommy lets me feed myself!”

Mr. Chang put me down. I grabbed at my suitcase to run away. The Old One pulled me back by my shirt collar. Mr. Chang stood solemnly on guard, his heavy foot pressed down on my suitcase. The Old One bent her head down.

“Your daddy and mommy dead,” she said, adjusting her Toisanese.

A strand of hair fell over the Old One’s narrow eyes and made me think of the cunning Fox Lady my mother had warned me about. The gut-hungry Fox, a demon, took on many shapes and disguises to ensnare little children for her supper. To the Fox Lady, the bony crunch and sweet flesh of small, well-fed children tasted best of all. But any smart child could expose and outsmart the Fox Demon soon enough.

The demon creature loved to take on its favourite disguise of a friendly elderly old lady. Like a helpless grandmother, Mother told me, begging for a small child’s assistance to cross a stream or to help her reach into a deep sack to retrieve some candy. When a child could not perceive any danger, the Fox Lady grew full of satisfaction and delight, her teeth dripped with saliva; her furry tail began wagging impatiently, pushing away at her ankle-length black skirt. And that was the clue, Mother warned me: Look for the furry tail waving frantically.
Always look behind.

The Fox Lady at the train station took hold of my hand and held me in front of her. Her eyes narrowed. I imagined the back of her dress moving, side to side.

“Who feeds you now?” the disguised Fox Lady said, her eyes twinkling, just as I was told they would, though her voice might have been more friendly.

I said nothing. I stared back to hide my growing fear. Her furry tail would poke out from under her skirt and start wagging like crazy. Then everyone at the train station would see it was the Fox Demon and attack her, poke out her gleaming eyes, rip her apart, and cut off her foxtail. The tail would hang on my suitcase like a trophy.

“
Aaiiiyyyah,
the boy’s a mute!” the Fox Lady exclaimed to Mr. Chang. Mr. Chang was being totally fooled by the cunning demon. I knew I had to say something.

“I feed myself now,” I repeated, loudly, for the Fox Lady always pretends she is very deaf, so you will bring your delicious young head within biting range of her row of razor-sharp teeth. I shouted even louder: “
I FEED MYSELF
!”

The startled old lady jumped back. People in the station turned their heads to look at us. Perhaps they’d already spotted her fox tail. She let my hand go, but her keen eyes kept appraising me. No one came near us.

“So Jung-Sum thinks he doesn’t need anyone,” she said to Mr. Chang. I glared at them both. The Old One started moving her lips again.

“Mr. Chang, the boy is fine,” the wrinkled lips said. “We’ll take him.”

I darted behind the foxy old lady to look at the many folds of her skirt. Nothing moved. No furry tail appeared, no wagging motion whatsoever, only the extended long fingers of her old hand, stretched behind her back, offering to take my hand.

“Let’s go,” Mr. Chang ordered.

I put both my hands on my suitcase and followed them out to a taxi. In the distance, another train whistle blew as its engine chugged away.

“I’m your new Poh-Poh,” the old lady said to me in the back of the taxi, as Mr. Chang settled in the front seat. “That’s what you call me from now on.”

That afternoon, in the house of the Old One, I met a little girl with a moon face, who kept staring at me from behind the Old One’s ankle-long skirt. I was only a little taller, but knew I could handle her if I had to. Lady foxes had little foxes. She held onto the head of a Raggedy Ann doll and poked its head at me as if the doll could see, too.

“Jook-Liang is your new sister,” the official said. “Your
Sai Mui,
your Little Sister.”

Liang slept in a room with her grandmother, Poh-Poh. Everyone spoke with an accent, a tone or two different, though I understood the same dialect.

“Jung-Sum,” Mr. Chang said, positively. “You’ll get used to your new family very quickly.”

Things change. This is the way things are, I said to my four-year-old self, and accepted that I was not in Kamloops any more, but in Salt Water City.

The man and woman who earlier had seen me at the Tong Association office both smiled at me nervously and said that this was their house, too. This man and the thin, graceful woman beside him were now taking care of me, along with Poh-Poh. I was to call the woman, who wore a pretty print dress,
Stepmother,
and the man
Father.

“You have a family again, Jung,” the man who was my new father said. “Forget everything else.”

He reached out to pat my head, but I darted away just in time.
The Head Fox,
I thought to myself. But when the Head Fox, with his slightly balding head and round face, turned back to talk with Mr. Chang, I was disappointed. He had no tail.

Mr. Chang said that I must be well-behaved. I now belonged in this house, belonged with these people. I remember I looked past each of them to see if my mommy and my daddy would suddenly appear.

“He’s done that everywhere we’ve taken him,” the Tong official said. “The boy still thinks his own parents will come back for him. It’s been six months.”

“Let him look,” the Old One commanded.

When Stepmother and Father first showed me the rooms in this house, they watched me get down on my knees to catch any moving shadow under the beds. I walked inside the small closets and pushed aside racks of clothes,
nothing there,
and looked behind the large dressers,
nothing;
I peered behind doors and stand-alone wardrobes but the faces of my mother and my father were not anywhere.

That first night in Salt Water City I was given a cot to sleep in, set up in a small room with my new brother, Kiam, who was almost twice my four years and a head taller than me. Stepmother said the adults were going downstairs to have some tea and sweetmeats. Everyone left Kiam and me alone in the small room to first put away my suitcase things. There wasn’t much, just a few pieces of underwear and shirts, two sweaters, a toy cowboy that was supposed to be Tom Mix, and a snake with a clay head. The snake had a long accordion body made of black and green paper. Its head hung from a string tied to a stick, so that it curled like a real snake. But the snake’s paper body was badly crushed even though its head was intact. There were also three pairs of socks, two with holes in them, and a pair of shoes that didn’t fit me any more.

Kiam got to business right away. “Your side of the room stops here,” he said, pointing to a red line he had crayoned on the linoleum floor, “except when you have to get your clothes from that dresser over there by the window.” He asked me if I knew anything about British football or muscle building and showed me some cuts on his knees from playing football. He thought I was too weak to be
his
brother, a
real
brother, so it was his plan to make me strong and tough. He was going to be eight in two weeks, he said, and wanted me to know his rules, and not being a sissy was one of them. His baby sister Liang did not count for much, but if I was going to be a real Second Brother, I had to put on some more weight. He crossed the red line and punched me in the chest to see if I could take it. I hardly felt anything; I was wondering where I was and how I got here and where my mommy and my daddy were.