The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy



This novel was one of my reading group's selections. Each year we try to use the Vaughan Public Library's book club reading list to cut down on the number of books that we are forced to purchase. As it turned out VPL had a set of Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony, so we were in luck.

I've read several novels about the Japanese experience of internment in Canada during the second world war, and I found this novel interesting because it depicted the experience of being Chinese during this difficult time in Canadian history. It was an interesting opportunity to examine these events from a different, and threatened perspective.

Here's a quick summary of Choy's novel (thanks to Good Reads):

Author Wayson Choy

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s provides the backdrop for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant Chinese family. The siblings grapple with their individual identities in a changing world, wresting autonomy from the strictures of history, family, and poverty. Sister Jook-Liang dreams of becoming Shirley Temple and escaping the rigid, old ways of China. Adopted Second Brother Jung-Sum, struggling with his sexuality and the trauma of his childhood in China, finds his way through boxing. Third Brother Sekky, who never feels comfortable with the multitude of Chinese dialects swirling around him, becomes obsessed with war games, and learns a devastating lesson about what war really means when his 17-year-old babysitter dates a Japanese man.

Mingling with life in Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family. Side by side, her three grandchildren survive hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humor. Like the jade peony of the title, Choy's storytelling is at once delicate, powerful, and lovely.

The Jade Peony was selected by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the "100 Most Important Books in Canadian History" in 2005. It was also an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year in 1998, and was winner of the 1995 Trillium Award (shared with Margaret Atwood).



Great Find: The Lost Daughters of China

Another Value Village Score!!!

While rummaging through the shelves at my local Value Village, I was lucky to find Karin Evans  account of her journey to China to adopt her daughter.  The Lost Daughters of China is the Evans' retelling of her adoption process between America and China in the late 1990's. 

Evans and her husband, unable to conceive children naturally, decide to adopt a baby girl from the Guangdong area of China. Although easy to decide that this is what she wants, her journey through the endless adoption red tape, and her far-away travels to the Peoples Republic of China shows how difficult a process this really is.

During her trip to the southern Chinese state, Evans' discovers that the One-Child policy is the tip of a very complicated social problem. The notion that male children are more valuable is ingrained in the Confusion culture for more than 1000 years. Further, this problematic policy creates such familial strife and suffering for many families who feel great pressure to produce a male child. Child abandonment is an ongoing problem that is a result of the policy that was introduced in the 1980's.

Evan's book is well written. She has done a great amount of research in preparing the context of her work. She sights academics, government studies, poems and literature. I found myself re-reading a few of such passages that were particularly touching.
 
For example, she quotes Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet: "Your children are not your children, they are not of  you, but they come through you. They are the gift of life's longing for itself."And also, a particularly beautiful excerpt from Meng Jia's poem Traveler's Song:

My loving mother, thread in hand,
Mended the coat I have on now,
Stitch by stitch, just before I left home,
Thinking that I might be gone a long time.

How can a blade of young grass
Ever repay the warmth of the spring sun?


One short coming of Evans' book is that there is an obvious absence of information about her daughter's progress in her new home country. How does her daughter feel about being adopted, and how does she cope with the feelings around being adopted? Also, she does become somewhat repetitive towards the end of the book, and I found that a little tighter editing would have been quite helpful there.

Overall this was a good read, but I would consider this only as a starting point for learning other aspects of adoption and the issues surrounding this complicated process.