Jade Peony by Wayson Choy

The Jade Peony is a touching, multi-voiced novel set in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. It tells the story of three Chinese Canadian siblings—Jook-Liang, Jung-Sum, and Sek-Lung—as they grow up in a world of poverty, racism, war, and cultural conflict. A different child tells each part, giving us a wide range of views on what it means to belong to a family, a culture, and a country that sees you as an outsider. Choy's novel is based on the specific experiences of Chinese Canadian immigrants, but it has a wide emotional range. It shows how identity can change over generations in quiet, often unspoken ways.

The way The Jade Peony is put together is a metaphor for a broken identity. The novel is split into three parts, each told from the point of view of a different sibling. It doesn't have a single, unified story. Instead, Choy focuses on how different Chinese Canadians' experiences are based on gender, age, and personal opinion. Every child has a different idea of what "home" is, both in their minds and in real life. Sek-Lung says, "We were neither this nor that," and "we had to invent a third space of being, of hiding, of dreaming" (p. 204). Choy's book takes place in that "third space," which is a liminal cultural zone.

These breaks are not only between generations, but also between times. The family lives through the chaos of the Great Depression, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and Canada's entry into World War II. But the trauma is taken in in small, personal ways. Political unrest affects fights on the street and talks at the kitchen table. Jook-Liang's dreams of being Shirley Temple are haunted by the fact that she is an outsider. She says, "No matter how good I was at tap dancing, I would never be blonde, blue-eyed, or loved by America" (p. 27). Choy's skill at weaving together the personal and the political makes history not just a backdrop, but a daily struggle.

Grandmothers, Ghosts, and Memory of Culture

Poh-Poh, the family's matriarch, is one of the most emotionally powerful characters in the book. Her old-world superstitions and rituals create both tension and cultural continuity. To the kids, she is both a guardian and a relic, a woman shaped by a China that is more real in their memories than it is in the world. Poh-Poh's death is a turning point in the book. It is not an inheritance of money, but of memory and loss. Jung-Sum says, "She took with her a language I could never speak" (p. 99).

Choy makes the idea of "heritage" more complicated by using Poh-Poh. She tells ghost stories, gives out paper charms, and teaches Taoist logic, which is cultural knowledge that younger people often think is old-fashioned or unscientific. But these practices are true on an emotional and spiritual level. The jade peony itself, a delicate ornament that Poh-Poh made and gave to Sek-Lung after her death, becomes a powerful symbol: not of the past, but of how the past lives on in the present. Sek-Lung remembers her saying, "It was her last mystery, her last gift to me" (p. 159). In this way, The Jade Peony rethinks inheritance not as property or a legacy, but as an emotional object that is soft, fragile, and long-lasting.

Queer Desire and Secret Longings

The Jade Peony is very radical in how it shows queer desire, especially through the second narrator, Jung-Sum. Jung-Sum, who was adopted as a young boy, has trouble with loneliness, self-esteem, and figuring out who he is. He never says what his growing feelings for his friend Frank are, but the way he writes about them in a poetic way gives them weight. "I wanted to hold him and never let go," Jung-Sum says after one fight, "but I didn't know what to say or how to be" (p. 111).

Instead of seeing queerness as a break from the family or community, Choy puts it inside them. Jung-Sum's desire is shaped by his past of being left alone, his need for safety, and his desire to be truly seen. In one of the most moving scenes, Jung-Sum helps Frank bandage a wound, and their silence is more intimate than words: "We did not talk." "But something opened" (p. 114). In a world where racism and homophobia are common but not often talked about, Jung-Sum's desire becomes an act of defiance. It resists the flattening of identity into normative roles, and it insists on the legitimacy of longing even when it cannot be spoken aloud.

Racial Alienation, Nationalism, and War

The most political part of the novel is Sek-Lung's section, which comes last. He is the most assimilated and the most alienated at the same time because he is the youngest child and was born in Canada. The Japanese invasion of China and Canada's entry into World War II make things confusing and cause ideological conflict in his world. Sek-Lung is torn between his loyalty to Canada and his inherited sadness over China's suffering when his family supports Canada's war efforts. "I was Canadian, but I wasn't white," he says. "I was Chinese, but I had never been to China" (p. 213).

Choy skillfully shows how confusing it is to be a diasporic nationalist—what it means to fight for a country that doesn't fully accept you. Racism is everywhere, from kids in the neighbourhood calling each other "Chinky-Chink" to government officials treating the lives of Chinese Canadians as if they don't matter. But the family's love for their country is not blind. It is real, strategic, and based on survival. Kiam, the oldest brother, thinks that joining the army is a way to show loyalty. He says, "We're fighting for respect." "If we die, maybe they'll let us live here" (p. 217). The bitter irony shows the emotional logic of assimilation: the hope that giving up something will make you feel like you belong.

In the end, The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy is a quiet work of art about memory, identity, and resistance. The book tells the story through the eyes of kids, and it shows not only what it means to grow up in a diasporic family, but also what it means to carry the weight of history without being able to name it. Choy gives voice to lives that are often left out of the national story through its broken structure, voices from different generations, and gentle metaphors, like a jade peony or an unspoken touch.

The Jade Peony doesn't just tell a story; it also asks the reader to feel their way through it, to stay in its silences and hauntings. It doesn't give a single definition of home, family, or love, but it does say that complexity is a kind of truth. And for queer readers, Chinese Canadians, and anyone else who is stuck between languages and lineages, that complexity may be the only real inheritance.