The Jade Peony Character Analysis

Generally, it is hard for a person, who is stuck inside the third space, to deal with the relationships from two different cultures, and the result of such a situation is that this person would be marginalized as an outsider by his or her group. In the novel The Jade Peony, Sek-Lung is depicted as a character who feels that it is hard to blend inside himself either Chinese or Canadian culture, and his closest relationship with Poh-Poh also makes him marginalized by other family members. Thus, Sek-Lung is considered as an outsider from both China town and Canadian society and even in his own family.
As a Chinese child who was born in Canada, Sek-Lung is living in an immigrant family, and he gets attracted by the local culture so that
He was born in Canada and the different environment in which he grows up makes him different from other Chinese people so that he cannot be a fully Chinese person like others. First of all, he knows very little about Chinese. For example, he feels a headache about family ranking and Chinese kinship terms which are contained in the Chinese culture and he uses wrong titles for other family members. He mentions in the third part of the book that “I would say ‘Third Uncle’ instead of ‘Great Uncle’” (Choy 145). Stepmother and Poh-Poh both think that Sek-Lung being confused about the way to call people is brainless. That is how Chinese people think about him and that makes Sek-Lung feel a sense of loss because he is poor in Chinese so that he cannot fully understand Chinese values. In the second place, Sek-Lung is worshipping everything foreign. That is entirely different from learning foreign culture. In the book, Sek-Lung wants to be a Canadian rather than Chinese and he wants to have an appearance like white people. “I sometimes wished that my skin would turn white, my hair go brown, my eyes widen and turn blue, and Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor next door would adopt me and I would be Jack O’Connor’s little brother” (Choy 151). This kind of idea makes Sek-Lung feels marginalized in the Chinese group due to the conflict of his appearance and his wish that pushes him to be an outsider to the Chinese. What’s more, Suk-Lung does not like the Chinese language. For instance, he has the strongest reaction to Chinese language of all the characters in the book and that makes him be outside the Chinese group. He thinks that Chinese is harder than English. He says “English words seemed more forthright to me, blunt like road signs. Chinese words were awkward and messy, like quicksand” (Choy 150). That means he likes English much more than Chinese. Thus, it can be seen that Sek-Lung has strong western ideas which are