The Jade Peony Summary

Immigration is always challenging: for the host country and for the new arrivals. There are tensions, obstacles, and expectations on both sides. These issues arise when the new country expects conformity and the immigrants anticipate preserving their cultures and traditions. They want to maintain their language, their religion, and their social practices. Dealing with these matters - positively or negatively - leaves a lasting impression on everyone. Wayson Choy considers this in The Jade Peony. It follows the lives of three Chinese immigrants to Canada in the 1930s: Jook-Liang a ten-year-old girl; Sek-Leung, an eight-year-old boy; and Meiying a teenage girl. Each wants to fit into Canadian society and adopt its nuances, but they face internal

and external resistance. Their experiences, while fictional, nonetheless reflect the historical record. Over the last century many Asian immigrants to Canada have encountered remarkably similar feelings and situations. In this story, assimilation sets families against their children’s willingness to change, it fragments the Asian community by othering differences, and it provokes personal identity issues in newcomers. Assimilating Asians into Canadian culture was a complex process rather than a benign one. The author contends, and this paper supports the idea that immigrant families need to be more open and receptive to adopting new cultures and customs rather than clinging to old traditions and standards that work against their children’s advancement.
Assimilation was heavily gendered in the 1930s and females encountered unique problems. There were expectations within families that they wanted to preserve. This meant that young Chinese girls were expected to adhere to traditions that required them to defer to men. For Jook-Liang this meant her grandmother put-down her dreams and demeaned the fact that she was female. Poh-Poh told her: “If you want a place in this worlds,” grandmother’s voice had that exasperating let-me-remind-you-tone, “... do not be born a girl child.” (Choy 127) Her comment reveals her indoctrination in Chinese culture; she expects her granddaughter to continue in the same vein. There is no sense that either of them is in a new place with new norms and opportunities for women. Instead of embracing Canadian values, the woman wants Jook-Liang to hold fast to the old ways. There is no compromise. This pits the two against each other. Although the family is a unit, the new environment offers Jook-Liang something she finds hard to resist: autonomy. Achieving it causes divisions rather than harmony. Ronald Takaki records a similar real-life incident in A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Lilac Chen, a late nineteenth century Chinese female immigrant recalled her father selling her because she was a girl and of little value. “And that worthless father, my own father… locked me in the cabin while he was negotiating my sale.”(Takaki 211) Although Jook-Liang was never sold, she felt undervalued by her family; her voice was never heard. Poh-Poh’s views are reflected in Chen’s story. There was a pervasive patriarchal attitude at work that demeaned women and prevented them from assimilating. Chen was seen as property by her father and exchanged for money. Jook-Liang and Lilac were pushed towards lifestyles that conflicted with their identities as women in North America. Family traditions denied them any personal development. These accounts reveal the harms done by resisting assimilation.
Adapting to a new country is challenging. When it is a during a time of conflict, it magnifies the issue. Sek-Leung or ‘Sekky’, an eight-year-old Chinese boy faces complications with his identity. It stems from the racial prejudices of Canadians held against Asians generally. His step-mother immediately shuts him down when he asks: “Am I Chinese or Canadians?” [She yells back,] “Chinese.” (Choy 149) He has no choice but to be true to his roots. His parents insist on this because the Chinese are treated like the Japanese. His parents see Canadians as obstructions to freedom. Therefore, the boy thinks: “I sometimes wished that my skin would turn white, my hair go brown, my eyes widen and turn blue…” (151) He is willing to abandon his Chinese heritage and adopt the cultural nuances of Canada. This is because he is discriminated against at school by those who consider him Japanese. He feels racial tensions between Canadians and Asians and struggles with his identity. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, “the [Canadian] government feared the many ethnic Japanese on the west coast posed a potential threat in the form of spying or perhaps sabotage.” (Montgomery 3) This passage exposes ill-treatment the Japanese received from the government. Men were sent to hard labour camps, while women and children were sent to internment camps. Most Canadians failed to distinguish Japanese to Chinese and treated both with contempt. Sek-Leung is wary of this, which is why he wants to blend in. He is more comfortable not having to face those problems at that age. Internal identity issues in children prevented them from developing unique and personally-generated identities in their new homeland.
The Chinese community itself encounters related problems concerning how they adapt to or resist their new environment. While they want to be welcomed, they fail to equally welcome other Asians into their lives. The tensions between the Montagues and Capulets in Verona reflect the feuds among Asians groups. The Chinese and Japanese communities are at odds with one another and there are open resentments. Into this tense atmosphere, Meiying, a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl, falls in love with Kazuo, a fifteen-year-old Japanese boy. Although assimilation is supposed to accept and overcome differences, the girl is forced to live two different lives. The first is among the Chinese where she has to reflect their prejudices. The second, is outside, where she seeks a safe place with Kazuo in the Japanese community. This dichotomy challenges her personal identity and compromises it in both cases. Sek-Leung is the only one who knows about her relationship and agrees to keep it a secret:
If her widowed mother, with deep village loyalties and Old China superstitions, found out… she would spit at Meiying, tear out her own hair, and be the second mother to disown her. … If Chinatown found out, Meiying would be cursed and shamed publicly as a traitor; she would surely be beaten up, perhaps branded with a red-hot iron until her flesh smoked and flamed. (Choy 255)
Traditional grudges confirm that Meiying has to conceal her true self because Kazuo is of a different ethnicity.

Rather than following her heart’s desire, she is limited by her mother and by the Chinese environment. She knows they disapprove of “others” and want her to remain Chinese. Uwem Akpan captures the same kind of conflict in his story, “My Parents’ Bedroom” from a collection of short stories in Say You’re One of Them. It features Hutus warring against Tutsis and a Hutu man is forced to decapitate his Tutsis wife to preserve the purity of his Hutu culture. “We must remain one [by cleansing the land of Tutsis] nothing shall dilute our blood. Not God. not marriage.” (Akpan 350) This gruesome scene is far more severe than twentieth century Vancouver, but it echoes how assimilation becomes problematic when mixing races is anathema to the dominant culture. Meiying is stuck trying to please herself and her heritage but winds up pleasing neither. Ultimately, she dies trying to self-abort the fetus she conceives with Kazuo. Her death is the direct result of her family and her country failing to support her wish to be Canadian. Being resistant to compromise and to integrating into other cultures, is a prescription for failure, rather than a solution for immigrants in the

1930s.
In the 1930s, Canada was a country in transition. It wanted a much larger population and turned to immigration to fill that need. It was however, much easier to accomplish in principle than in practice. This was because the newcomers wanted to simply live their old lives in a different setting. They were unprepared and unwilling to take on the practices and characteristics of their new nation. The lives of individuals like Jook-Liang, Meiying, and Sek-Leung reveal some of the challenges they faced as they tried to fit in. Their stories are an accurate depiction of real events that occured during that time. Canada was predominantly a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant country in the 1930s. Anything else was different and quickly othered, which caused some isolation and ghettoization among immigrants. It is what created “Chinatown” in Vancouver. In those places, values and ideas from the “old country” prevailed. This meant that women were degraded, the Chinese despised the Japanese - because their actions resulted in racial prejudice, and Asian immigrants struggled to adapt to their new environment. Assimilation was a problem and it was up to parents to lead their children to opportunities and advantages they never had. Many feared losing their old heritage rather than gaining a new one. The results were often tragic.