The Jade Peony
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3.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and �40s provides the setting for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid and intense reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant family. They each experience a very different childhood, depending on age and sex, as they encounter the complexities of birth and death, love and hate, kinship and otherness. Mingling with the realities of Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, paper uncles and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family.
Wayson Choy's Chinatown is a community of unforgettable individuals who are neither this nor that, neither entirely Canadian nor Chinese. But with each other's help, they survive hardship and heartbreak with grit and humour.
The Jade Peony was a 2010 Canada Reads Selection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Choy's first novel, a bestseller in Canada, where it won the 1995 Trillium Award, is related by three young siblings who tell of their family's move from China to Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1930s. Cherishing yet bridling against the customs of their elders like Poh-Poh, the matriarchal grandmother who insists that they call their birth mother (their father's concubine) "Stepmother," Jook-Liang, her adopted younger brother, Jung-Sum, and youngest brother, Sek-Lung, struggle to adjust to their uneasily hyphenated Chinese-Canadian lives. Divided into three parts, the novel describes the formation of each child's identity. Jook-Liang, declared a "useless" girl-child by Poh-Poh, aspires to tap dance like Shirley Temple and to otherwise thrive in her new home. Yet she is enthralled by her grandmother's folk tales and her beautiful "Old China" ways. Jung-Sum tries to vanquish the demons of his past by boxing, even as he discovers a disturbing sexual attraction to a male friend. Frail Sekky helps the family heal after the death of Poh-Poh, who was their vital link to the past and the spiritual center of the family. Choy, who teaches English at Humber College in Toronto, adds a heartfelt, beautifully expressed new voice to the growing literature of the Chinese immigrant experience. Readers, however, will wish that he had developed each sibling's destiny further. Did Jung-Sum, for instance, ever express his homosexuality? Perhaps we will find out in a sequel. Meanwhile, Choy's three children, and the details of their lives in the New World, stand for the universal immigrant experience and aren't easily forgotten.
