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The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy
By Natalie Johal
Set in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the Great Depression, Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony is among the works of fiction selected for CBC’s Canada Reads list for 2010. Released in 1995 to much critical acclaim, The Jade Peony is Choy’s debut novel. Its revival is timely, and its content is still pertinent.
The Jade Peony metamorphosed from a short story written and submitted in a UBC creative writing class taught by now-famous Canadian writer, Carol Shields, in 1977. The short story was then published in 1979, long before it took the form of a novel.
As a novel, The Jade Peony is split into three distinct narratives as told by three siblings from the same Chinese immigrant family—Jook-Liang, the ‘Only Sister,’ Jung-Sum, the ‘Second Brother,’ and Sek-Lung, the ‘Third Brother.’ Each one relays a childhood that is shared yet, at the same time, varied by such factors as sex and gender expectation, birth order, and illness.
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Choy deals with difficult subject matter: our government’s mistreatment of the earliest Chinese migrants, classism, gender disparity, racial conflict, and wartime poverty and paranoia. He navigates his way through the troubled and often neglected history of Chinese Canadians without slathering each page with woe and lament, however. Putting such a difficult story to paper without leaving the reader burdened by the gravity of it all is a formidable task, and one that Choy accomplishes flawlessly.
The Jade Peony is the story of all immigrants, caught in the endless in-between of a becoming a ‘new’ people trying to preserve whatever possible of the ‘old ways.’ This dance, never quite mastered, is somehow set to music by the attentive ears of Wayson Choy.
The other Canada Reads finalists are:
Marina Endicott’s Good To a Fault;
Douglas Coupland’s Generation X;
Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski;
and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.
Natalie Johal writes book reviews for Kelowna.com each week, covering a wide range of contemporary fiction and non-fiction. She will seek out illuminating and relevant pieces of writing and hopes to assist readers in finding their next favourite book. Johal is a graduate of UBC-Okanagan and has recently returned to Kelowna after going on to study Journalism and Mass Communication in Australia.
Tags: the jade peony, wayson choy
