Chapter 6 - by Intikhab Amir

“Survival”

Survival is in human instinct. Men and women make use of it as and when needed. The more it is relied upon it evolves into an art. No other than immigrants know this art the most.

They expose themselves to a host of new experiences and challenges in their new surroundings: their adopted country. Integration into a new social and cultural environment forms a challenge to the newcomers. Attaining economic stability, adjusting to harsh cold weather, and developing understanding about the new area all warrant the immigrants to make use of their vital characteristic.

In Canada, it has been a known phenomenon since the 16th century explorers stepped into this part of the world. Jacques Cartier and his men survived scurvy, harsh weather, and native population, whom he describes, in his narrations, as ‘savages,’ ‘uncivilized’ and ‘aggressors.’

Like the early explorers, in today’s Canada immigrants are putting great effort to survive the cultural and social differences, economic difficulties and harshness of the weather. First generation immigrants not only strive to survive, they make their children – the second-generation immigrants – to make use of their instincts.

The Jade Peony’s sixth chapter reinforces survival seeping deep into the hearts of immigrants. Choy’s novel’s major character Grandmother Poh-Poh’s tenant Old Yuen is also among those immigrants who nourish the art of survival in his next generation. He braces his son Frank to start work in quite an early age. In his native country it is no mean feat to resort to child labor by making one’s sons and daughters to earn livelihood for the family. He does this to better his own conditions. “The only luck he had left was his son, Frank, the boy he took with him to lumber camps and raised: the father taught the boy how to survive, how to fight, how to labor in the mills, how to avoid bad luck.”