Southern Canton. Most importantly, she confides in Sek-Lung about her first love, an itinerant actor. After promising to return, the actor disappears but remains on her mind for decades. Even though Sek-Lung and Grandmama are close,

in her last years his image came back like a third being in our two lives. He had been magician, acrobat, juggler, and some of the things he taught her she had absorbed and passed on to me through her stories and games. But above all, without realizing it then, her hands conveyed to me the quality of their love.

Sek-Lung understands the profound effect this person had and still has on his grandmother. She not only loves this actor deeply, but also keeps him alive through her recounting of stories and teaching of skills and games to Sek-Lung. Before leaving her, the actor gifts her with a wind chime containing a jade peony. Sek-Lung helps his grandmother construct more wind chimes.

In order to build them, Grandmama collects castoff glass fragments and costume jewelry in alleys and from garbage. This act, however, creates “dissension in our family, and some shame.” Sek-Lung’s embarrassed siblings ridicule and physically harass Sek-Lung for helping his grandmother “poke through those awful things as if...they were beggars!” Eventually, Sek-Lung and Grandmama become secret collaborators or partners in crime.

By their cutting remarks, the family did exert enough pressure so that Grandmama and I no longer openly announced our expeditions. Instead, she took me with her on “shopping trips,” ostensibly for clothes or groceries, while in fact we spent most of our time exploring stranger and more distant neighborhoods, searching for splendid junk.

Unbeknowst to the other family members, Sek-Lung and Grandmama smuggle scavenged items home to wash and save them. Significantly, they become outsiders to the rest of the family. Sek-Lung's siblings treat him poorly, but he finds solace in his grandmother.

In fact, right before tempers erupt among the siblings and Sek-Lung’s father during an already tense evening at home, Grandmama signals to Sek-Lung with “her secret nod: a slight wink of her eye and a flaring of her nostrils” that no one else notices.

Sek-Lung allies with Grandmama because unlike others, he respects her beliefs and ties to the past, her longing for her lost love, and her desire to make wind chimes. He supports this desire by painstakingly steaming and bending bamboos sticks as well as measuring, cutting, and braiding silk threads.

Finally, Sek-Lung and his grandmother are soulmates. During their joyful scavenger hunts, he feels that she become his “spiritual playmate.” In fact, after the two gleefully store their treasured finds—bits of stained glass from a burned-down church—they spontaneously celebrate.

In her joy, she embraced me. Both of our hearts were racing, as if we were two dreamers. I buried my face in her blue quilt, and for a moment, the whole world seemed silent.

After they complete the wind chime to be hung after her death, Sek-Lung realizes her impending mortality and cries. Grandmama comforts him with, “I will always be with you, Little Sek-Lung, but in a different way...you’ll see.” Just before she leaves to die in a hospital, she tells him,

“You know, Little Son, whatever happens I will never leave you.”...So magically strong was her grip that I could not imagine how she could ever part from me. Ever.

After Grandmama passes away and Sek-Lung's father hangs up the last wind chime they made together, Sek-Lung finds the treasured jade peony, the gift from her lost love. Sek-Lung and his grandmother are forever connected like soulmates. In a way, the grandson becomes connected to his grandmother as well as her lost love via the jade peony. At the end, Sek-Lung misses his grandmother but continues to feel her spirit and love.

In my mind’s eye I saw Grandmama smile and heard, softly, the pink centre [of the jade peony] beat like a beautiful, cramped heart.

In The Jade Peony, Sek-Lung and his grandmother share an intimate and loving relationship that is marked by shared adventures and honest conversations.

When the rest of the family mocks Grandmama's desire to create windchimes out of discarded bits of trash, Sek-Lung is her partner in those adventures. Sek-Lung's siblings find their grandmother's actions humiliating and insist that she will teach their youngest brother to be "crazy," too. The family finds Grandmama "inconvenient, unsettling," so she and Sek-Lung begin searching for treasures farther from home to better hide their actions from the family. Sek-Lung is his grandmother's confidante, and she tells him of the juggler she once loved. The young boy and his grandmother share the same spirit; he believes they are "two dreamers," and in their adventures, they become "spiritual playmate[s]."

When Grandmama tells Sek-Lung that death is fighting her body, he is panicked, but she remains "graceful" as she continues to construct the "windchime for her death." The two work meticulously together on the project, determined to choose only the best materials for the windchime. On her last night at home before she is taken to the hospital, Sek-Lung falls asleep by Grandmama's side; she dies just a few days later.

When Grandmama dies, Sek-Lung finds the jade peony in his pocket, which is seemingly the same lucky token that his grandmother always carried with her. She had promised to always be with him, even after she died, and it seems that finding the jade peony in his pocket is the fulfillment of that promise.