The Jade Peony (19 page)

Then Grandmama sank back into her pillow and the embroidered flowers lifted to frame her wrinkled face. She placed her hand over mine, and my own began to tremble. I fell fitfully asleep by her side. When I woke up it was dark and her bed was empty. She had been taken to the basement of St. Paul’s Hospital, where the sick Chinese were allowed to stay. I was not permitted to visit her.

A few days after that, Grandmama died of the complications of pneumonia. Immediately after her death, Father came home. He said nothing to us but walked up the stairs to her room, pulled aside the drawn lace curtains of her window, and lifted the windchimes to the sky.

I began to cry and quickly put my hand in my pocket for a handkerchief. Instead, caught between my fingers, was the small, round firmness of the jade peony. In my mind’s eye I saw Grandmama smile, and heard, softly, the pink centre beat like a beautiful, cramped heart.

I
N SEPTEMBER, A MONTH
before Grandmama’s death, everyone was worried about me. I was desperate to start school again, anxious to prove that I was now grown up like my older brothers, Kiam and Jung. But the school doctor rejected my attempt to get back into the classroom.

“Sek-Lung still has breathing problems,” he told Kiam to explain to Father. “I recommend he stay with his home studies and try again next year.”

Father gently nodded his head, and First Brother shrugged his shoulders. There was no argument against the science of medicine. My two older brothers and my older sister Liang were instructed to tutor me at home for another year. The school sent Kiam home with a pile of books and mimeographed worksheets to keep me busy.

Grandmama could tell I was deeply disappointed.

“No cry,” she said, opening a series of jars filled with sharp-smelling powders and stems. “I make you better. Make your lungs stronger.”

“No more herbs!” I protested.

BEING SENT HOME
from school the first time, in Grade One, had been all my fault. Jung had warned me to keep to myself, to mind my own business; and for the most part, Jung’s tough-guy reputation protected me from the school bullies. But after the second week of classes, I forgot Jung’s warning and cheerfully waved my hand in the air to earn a Good Deed Star from Miss MacKinney for cleaning some blackboard brushes during recess.

On the school steps, I stood proudly in my new short pants and clapped the brushes together in the chopping-board rhythm Stepmother used with her cleavers. There was no wind that day. Chalkdust clouds rose in the air and hung thickly about me. Chalk particles rasped my nose and throat, sent me gasping in wild alarm. Two older girls ran to help me. I began to sneeze. Blood poured out of my left nostril. Worried about staining my new short pants, I bent forward and pinched my nose to stop the bleeding, then very quickly doubled up for lack of oxygen.

“Cripes!” one of the big girls said, looking incredulous. “Breathe through your mouth!”

I did.

The two panicked girls pushed me up the wooden stairs and into the school hallway towards the Main Office. When I tripped, both of them grabbed me by my suspenders and dragged my blood-streaked body into the nurse’s office.

Finally, propped against a leather chair, I calmed down enough to gulp down air reeking of iodine. The school nurse put a cold compress on my nose and efficiently wiped the blood off my bare legs. My grey flannel short pants were ruined. She knelt down and made me gargle some blue-tinged, mint-tasting water, but nothing stopped my lung-rattling wheeze. My sister, Liang, was called out of Miss Dafoe’s manual training class to take me home to recover. I knew Liang wouldn’t mind that much; she hated Miss Dafoe, who taught everyone how to read a ruler by whacking their knuckles if they couldn’t point out the quarter-inch mark.

“You’re a damn mess,” Liang said, pulling me along the street. “I’d better not have to wash you up, too.”

Grandmama began boiling up some bitter herbs for me to drink; she held my head back, rubbed my chest with Tiger Balm and made me breathe in a haze of eucalyptus vapours.

Three days later, the Vancouver City Medical Officer visited our home. He undid my shirt and sniffed the air. The Tiger Balm made his nose curl up. He poked about our rooms.

“Is it always this damp?” he asked.

“Only rich not damp,” Father said, in the broken English that he used with white authorities.

The doctor checked all of us for
TB
.

Everyone passed the tests. I didn’t have
TB
but my lungs were tight. I had night fevers.

“Sek-Lung must stay home until he can breathe clearly,” the doctor said.

When Grandmama was alive, I told her how desperately I wanted to go to school and be grown up like First and Second Brothers. Kiam and Jung came home and opened impressive books, made handwritten notes using long wooden nibholders to scratch out inky words and formulae. Then they dipped the nibs in a screwtop bottle of Bluebird ink. Sometimes Kiam let me press a sheet of blotting paper over his writing, and hold it in front of the hall mirror to see if I could read the words reflected back.

Liang impressed me with her ability to read rapidly, turning the pages of
Beautiful Joe
and
Little Women
with sudden smiles or tears. Sometimes she read aloud to me, simplifying passages for my benefit. I liked the dog story the best.

Watching them all go to school in the morning, I wanted to be taught my lessons by a real teacher like Miss MacKinney, with her shadow of a moustache and her steel-rimmed glasses, whose class I’d been in for those first two weeks. I liked the way she broke into a smile and her blue eyes lit with laughter when she discovered I could read English words (though I could not pronounce the words exactly right). To her I wasn’t any different from the Japanese, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish and Italian boys and girls in her class.

“Nivver mind, Sek-Lung,” Miss MacKinney said. “Ah’ve an accent as weel.”

A year of tutoring me had made my sister and two brothers impatient and touchy. Second Brother Jung pounded the table to get me to spell properly; Sister Liang slammed the Third Reader shut if I asked her to slow down, and First Brother Kiam groaned each time he had to repeat, and repeat, the seven-, eight- and nine-times tables with me. Liang complained that it was unfair that she had all her Chinese School homework, too, because I had only to do English homework. Sometimes Kiam or Jung were cheered by my progress, but I always felt cheated, locked out from the mysteries of Strathcona’s monumental red-brick edifice. On warm days, strolling past the long rows of opened windows, I would turn to Grandmama with earnest longing.

“Listen,” I told her, “they’re singing.”

A piano would pick out a lively tune and a chorus of voices followed like a happy army. The broadleaf maples would rustle in the wind. Grandmama and I would sit down on some steps for a few minutes and look at the North Shore mountains, listening to the trees and the music.

Going to school meant a lot to me.

“You go next year,” Grandmama promised, even as she was weakening under her eighty-third year. “You get stronger.”

“How?”

“We find way.”

AFTER GRANDMAMA’S
funeral at Ocean View Cemetery, I began to look to the ghost of my ancient guardian for help. I knew that Grandmama, though dead and buried in her pine coffin, would never desert me. She would see that I started school next September. I only needed to
see
her, in spirit, to know everything would go well next time. I did not doubt that the Old One had died. I saw Grandmama laid out against the white sheets lining the pine casket, her eyebrows pencilled in, her face waxed. But I did not cry because I knew the Old One would never leave me.

I wandered about the house, absent-mindedly; opened Grandmama’s bedroom door and stared hopefully into the silent cluttered room. Her last windchime caught the morning light and barely moved. Stepmother promised to clean out Grandmama’s room after the Chinese New Year in February. Sister Liang was to have the room for herself. I resented Stepmother’s promise and began a campaign of sulking: how could she give Grandmama’s room away? I refused offers to go to the picture show with Third Uncle and ate barely half my bowl of rice at meals. I grew thin and sulked. I had to be pushed to do anything beyond my solitary make-believe war games. Any time I was taken out of the house, I put on a strange, open-mouthed look and whispered openly to Grandmama.

Chinatown people turned away, muttering behind my back.
Poor Sek-Lung... Spent all his seven years with Poh-Poh... He can’t get over it.

Stepmother’s
mahjon
g-playing lady friends gave her sensible advice, urged her to be patient, and fed me sweetmeats and rare oranges. Father received sympathy from both his political friends and foes. No one wanted to debate China’s future with him; no one wanted to deal with a man who had a haunted son. Kiam and Jung periodically rolled their eyes. Sister Liang refused to take me out anywhere her jitterbugging girlfriends might see or hear me.

The truth was, the Old One’s ghost was tugging at me and would not let me go.

When she was alive, Grandmama had taught me that spirits and ghosts were everywhere because the Chinese were such an ancient people; so many Chinese people had died that their ten-thousand million ghosts in Old China inhabited “the ways of the Han people.” Whether one was a peasant or royalty, Grandmama said, Old China people took it for granted that these ghosts lived constantly alongside them.

They were mischievous spirits and frightening demons, these good and bad ghosts. They could upset, or bring into harmony, the
yin
and
yang
forces—the
fung-suih,
the
wind-water
elements that helped to balance our “hot” and “cold” natures.
Wind-water
shaped our destiny, cured our illnesses, brought good or bad fortune. How else to ensure good fortune? How else to ensure good health and keep away from bad? Wasn’t the Old One slowly bringing back my laboured breathing to normal with her mix of ancient herbs and balms? Didn’t each mix require an external balance, like wind and water, her fingers massaging the
che
“energy” points located on the bottom of my feet?

“Bad and good ghosts,” Grandmama had told me, “know those points, too.”

Grandmama also had told me that in Vancouver only a small population of Chinatown ghosts could bother with us, really no more than a hundred or so, and most of these were somewhat confused by not being able to go with their bones back to Old China.

Inevitably, as a reward for my faith, the Old One came back, as she had promised, to help me in my resolve to start school when next September came.

In late January, three months after her burial, things began to happen to me which the family preferred to call “incidents.”

The back door would suddenly swing shut by itself, in exactly the way Grandmama (when she was alive) had shut it to prevent chills from creeping up her back.

“It’s Grandmama,” I insisted.

“The humidity,” First Brother Kiam cut in, matter of factly. “Damp weather swells the wood.”

“The house is very drafty,” Father said. “It’s an old house.”

“The wind again,” Stepmother said, pulling her sweater to her.

“It’s both,” Second Brother Jung nodded, looking at everyone else but me.

Sister Liang said nothing but stared at me, unsettled and unsure. I sidled up to her and whispered, “Did the door ever shut on its own when Grandmama was living with us?” Liang’s eyes widened.

Once, before lunch, I saw the Old One on the staircase, as if waiting for me. She was wearing her favourite blue quilted jacket, one hand on the worn oak bannister. I called out to Second Brother Jung. He ran to my side, stopped, and stared up at the staircase. It was empty, though he was not sure of an indistinct shadow like a veil, flitting away.

One cloudy afternoon, at precisely 3
P.M.
(I can still hear the hall clock chiming), the Old One came back to visit me again. This time when I called out, Stepmother rushed out of the kitchen and stood by my side; she looked up and down the hallway, at nothing.

My actually seeing Grandmama on our staircase and in the hallway became the subject of debate in the family. No one wanted to believe me, though no one really wanted to doubt me either, for the world of Chinatown was the world of
what if...

That is,
what if
Mrs. Jong hadn’t sensed there was something wrong one day and so decided not to sit in that seat by the exit on the Hastings streetcar, the very seat that a truck minutes later slammed into?
What if
Mr. Chan hadn’t dreamt twice of the numbers 2-4-6-9, the very ones that won the numbers lottery?
What if
the Soon family hadn’t, each of them, dreamed of their village home burning down; how would they have known to warn the family by cable to get away, three weeks before Japanese bombers actually devastated the empty house?

If visions and good sense didn’t combine to make us pay attention, what then was the meaning of anything? Grand-mama would have understood perfectly: signs and portents were her lifeblood. She had always said to her friend Mrs. Lim, “You only need to pay attention.”

I overheard big Mrs. Lim across the road ask First Brother Kiam, “Have there been any more
incidents?
”

I couldn’t hear First Brother’s answer, but Mrs. Lim’s strong voice shouted back, “Usually these things last for a year or two.”

Kiam groaned.

Then one spring day, on a hot dry afternoon, the three front parlour windows mysteriously slammed shut:
Bang! Bang! Bang!

“It’s Grandmama,” I announced, and everyone glared at me.

Father quickly “fixed” the front windows: he put a building brick on each of the three narrow window ledges to hold them open when we needed fresh air. Each ungainly brick stood precariously on a thin ledge, waiting to fall.

“Father,” Kiam politely warned, “shouldn’t you use smaller bricks?”

“Why?” Father shot back. “And have Poh-Poh push them over like feathers?”