The Jade Peony

Jook-Liang narrates this entire part in hindsight. The events of this chapter take place in 1933, when Jook-Liang is 5 years old. She states that at the time, she “only had two brothers to worry about. Kiam and Jung were then ten and seven years old. Sekky was not yet born, though he was on his way” (13). She states that her Grandmother, whom she calls Poh-Poh, was actively praying for a boy at the family’s Tong Association Temple during this time. Jook-Liang also states that Mrs. Lim, their neighbor, would later recall that Jook-Liang expressed hope for another girl.

Jook-Liang reveals that she calls her actual, biological mother “Stepmother,” due to custom. Stepmother was 7 years old in war-ravaged China when robbers killed most of her family. After being taken to a Mission House, then reclaimed by the village clan, she was ultimately sold into Jook-Liang’s father’s Canton merchant family. They fed and housed her while grooming her to be a proper wife and caretaker for Jook-Liang’s grandmother, who was living with Jook-Liang’s father in Canada. When the time was right, Stepmother was sent to Canada on a steamship. Although she had been groomed, she nonetheless arrived as an uneducated woman with a “village dialect” (13).