Chapter 1 - by Intikhab Amir

Chaptor-1

Writer Wayson Choy sets the tone of his novel “The Jade Peony” right from its first chapter. The reader can feel - without being able to guess - what he is going to read in the following chapters.

The novel entails the story of a Chinese family living in Vancouver; covering multiple aspects of the immigrants’ lives, their feelings and attempts to preserve their language, native culture and family values in a foreign land to keep their cultural identity intact.

It’s a story, partly, about an old lady, Grandmother or Poh-Poh. The old lady, in line with the Orient culture, holds the sway over the lives of others in the family. “That was the order of things in China,” is how Choy explains Poh-Poh’s omnipotence, particularly, when she decides that her grandchildren would call their mother as “Stepmother.” Her son obeyed


Building up the story around a six-year old Chinese girl, Jook Liang, in the first chapter Choy tries to describe a multicultural environment under which the second-generation immigrants get raised.

Jook-Liang experiences the dual discourse of diversity, something almost every immigrant undergoes, when she learns the Chinese way at home and gets exposed to the Canadian mannerism at school.

With her grandmother, Poh-Poh, making Jook to show respect to the family’s old friend Wong Bak during his visit to the house, the six-year old gets exposed to the Canadian mannerism at Sunday School. While at home she comprehends multiple Chinese urban and rural dialects with her grandmother conspicuous about preserving her native language, at Kingdom Church Kindergarten she learns the British Columbian slang, as she learns to say, “Fart face.”

Apart from providing a peep into the life of a second-generation immigrant of the Chinese origin, Choy also helps his readers to understand the circumstances under which thousands of Chinese selected to immigrate to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and what actually happened to them in Canada.

Dreams of changing their lives by exploiting economic opportunities brought many Chinese to Canada when “in the 1880s every man who was able and capable left his farm and village to be indentured for dangerous work in the mountain ranges of the Rockies.”

“Go to Gold Mountain,” they told one another promising to send wages home, to return rich or die. Thousands coming the decades before 1920 when on July 1st the Dominion of Canada passes Chinese Exclusion Act and shut down all ordinary bachelor-men traffic between Canada and China, shut off any women from arriving and divided families.

What lied ahead for the scores of poverty-stricken Chinese men could only make them to mark July 1st, what Choy writes, as ‘the Day of Shame,’ and not celebrating the birth of Canada.

His description of the conditions and environs in which most of the Chinese bachelors were living, leaves one with an impression of today’s immigrants living in Ghettos.

Choy makes a case against the indifference on the part of the Canadian government, when describing the predicament of hapless Chinese rail worker, who were eventually deserted by their companies, he writes that “ there was a local Vancouver by-law against begging for food, a federal law against stealing food, but no law in any court against starving to death for lack of food.”