Chapter 3 - by Intikhab Amir

"... bones must come to rest where they most belong."


Survival is what every immigrant strives for even after spending years in the adopted country.
They find integration difficult into the new society because of multiple reasons. In the case of Choy’s Chinese characters in the Jade Peony it seems their strong bonds with their native culture and society, economic hardships, and the language barrier hampered their assimilation. Grandmother and her old friend from China Wong Bak could not integrate because they could not remove themselves from their past.
Bak, who came to Canada as a rail worker, spent most of his youth and old age in British Columbia, but he returns to the place he belongs to. Even Grandmother, too, couldn’t shed her memories of the time she spent in China.
In their effort to preserve their past in the new country, immigrants maintain a storage of their documents, which keep reminding them who they were? where they came from? That’s what Choy has tried to build on his story in Chapter-3 of the Jade Peony. “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.”
Only paper, he writes further, histories remained, histories blended with talk-story, which the immigrants keep telling again and again. Choy’s reflections on this topic are really close to every immigrant’s real life. Immigrants hold stacks of documents related to their education, career, birth certificates, etc. These documents keep their memories about their countries afresh. Whenever, they see these documents they, in their imagination, get to the place they belonged to.
Wong Bak’s journey back to main land China via Hong Kong with the ‘bone shipment,’ speaks more than what one reads over here. “… Understand how bones must come to rest where they most belong,” leaves little doubt what Choy implies here.