by May Q. Wong
One day, when it was Ah Thloo’s turn to be a raider, the group had chosen the garden of an old crone nicknamed Woo Diek Na, “Screeching Crow.” Her reputation as the meanest woman in the village was as long and legendary as the Great Wall. A rich widow with painful bound feet, she tyrannized her family with her scorching tongue and a ready whip of willow branches. She terrorized the servants and screeched at anyone who passed by her door. She hated children; it was rumoured she ate them as a snack. But her garden grew the largest and sweetest yams around. The old woman left the gardening to servants but occasionally surveyed her holdings, and she arrived, carried on a two-person sedan chair, just as the children were pulling the last yellow root out of the ground at the far end of the plot.
“Aiya! Thieves!” Ah Woo Diek Na shrieked, waving her whip above her head. “You are dead ghosts!” She slapped the front sedan carrier. “Run faster, you lazy turtle! I’ll chop your heads off, you dead kids!”
They might have caught up to the children—if the old woman had stopped jostling the chair, if the front carrier hadn’t kept closing his eyes for fear of losing them to the whip, and if the back carrier hadn’t caught his feet on the roots sticking up from the newly turned soil. Splat! Landing face down on a pile of manure collected as fertilizer, the old crone was abruptly, effectively silenced.
Now it was evening and time to go home. Chuckling at the memory, Ah Thloo also shuddered at their close encounter. But if they hadn’t taken the chance, her companions would have had nothing to eat until late in the day. She had taken only a small piece to be polite and had shared her own light lunch. For this particular day’s lunch, her grandmother had wrapped six cold, litchi-sized balls of rice, flavoured with dabs of shrimp paste, in a bamboo leaf.
The hot, sweet, forbidden yam had been all the more delicious, and her stomach now chortled, not with mirth but in renewed hunger.
Strands of her long, jet-black hair, which had been tightly braided that morning, stuck to her face. With a few deft twists, she rebraided it and bound it with twine to create a loop, keeping it off her neck. Working the twine reminded her of the neat, tasty parcels of donge, large, rice-based dumplings, which her grandmother had wrapped and tied that morning to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival.
Ah Ngange, Father’s mother, had been making preparations over the past few days. She had bought, seasoned, and soaked the special glutinous rice; sorted and soaked dried bamboo leaves; and cleaned, chopped, and marinated the other ingredients that had been carefully hoarded for the occasion. The filling included sausage, marinated pork, pieces of mushroom, salted duck egg yolks, and peanuts.
The bamboo leaves were used to form a pouch. One wet, supple bamboo leaf was folded into a shovel and into it the ingredients were layered between spoonfuls of raw rice, filling it about halfway. Another leaf was folded to enclose the side, and the two upper halves were folded over from the top to cover the filling. A string was wound horizontally and vertically to secure the package, which was shaped like a double pyramid.
Dumped into large pots of water, the dumplings simmered for hours over a coal fire. The packages would swell between the strings as the rice cooked, and when their texture changed from hard to pliable, as tested by Ah Ngange’s seemingly heat-immune bare fingers, they were scooped out of the pots with a long-handled colander made from a coconut shell. Her grandmother always added a special treat for Ah Thloo in the donge, identifying them with a special knot of the twine. They would be ready to eat by the time the girl got home at sundown.
Ah Thloo could almost feel the warm, firm parcel in her hand as she imagined cutting the twine that bound the fragrant bamboo leaves. Inside, she would find a whole salted duck egg yolk, instead of the usual half. She knew what she would bring for lunch the next day and enjoyed the anticipation of sharing it with her companions. The thought made her stomach rumble loudly and her mouth water hungrily.
She repeated her urgings to Ah Ngao: “Come on, you lazy thing! You’ve been wandering the countryside eating all day. Now it’s my turn, and I’m hungry for donge. Let’s go home! You are an ugly, stubborn old thing, but you are my true friend.” She smiled at what she had just said. Perhaps it was silly, thinking about a water buffalo that way, but what was a friend? She had learned it was someone who spent time with you, listened to everything you said without arguing or dismissing your opinions, never told your secrets to anyone else, and never hurt you.
In all the years she had looked after the animal, she had never been bitten, gored, kicked, stepped on, or thrown off its back. Ah Ngao had always been gentle with Ah Thloo, and always—eventually—responded to her directions and exhortations. Slowly, he turned his head and body in the direction of the village and lumbered forward.
“Oo deah, thank you, Ah Ngao!”
She did not consider the other cowherds to be her friends, especially not the boys—they always thought they were superior to her. She could not talk to them the same way she talked to Ah Ngao, but she would enjoy their brief, joint adventures for now. They would soon separate, for the time was drawing near for her to move to the nui oak, the mysterious place where girls became women and left to become wives.
The back of a Head Tax Certificate.
Since 1885 Canada, and particularly British Columbia, has been faced with the problem of Oriental immigration—especially Chinese, Japanese and East Indian. The objections to Orientals is not so much racial, social, or religious, as chiefly economic; accustomed as they are to long hours, low wages, and a low standard of living, the Asiatics are able to underbid the white man in selling his labour.
—Stewart W. Wallace, editor, Encyclopaedia of Canada
THREE
Father Reborn
The head tax receipt was more than a proof of payment, a certificate of immigration, or a passport: any Royal Canadian Mounted Police or immigration officer could, at any time and place, demand to see this document. A failure to produce it immediately might be cause for incarceration or deportation. Measuring approximately eight and a half by eleven inches, it was not an insignificant piece of identification to carry around.
• • •
AH DANG: CANADA, 1921–1923
Ah Dang sailed to Canada on the once-famous Empress of Japan. When it was launched in 1891 to deliver mail between Britain and Canada, the 148-metre ship was a model of efficiency, speed, and elegance. During the voyage, as he watched, listened to, and sometimes chatted with the many Chinese crew working on board as stewards and kitchen and laundry staff, Ah Dang learned about its illustrious history and current capacity. In 1897, the ship had set a speed record for the North Pacific, sailing thirteen hundred kilometres in only ten days. It had served as a luxury liner, cargo ship, and even an armed First World War merchant cruiser carrying Chinese labourers to and from the Western Front. It had transported cargoes of tea, silk, opium, and general merchandise, but the company that owned the ship made the bulk of its money from the passengers in Asiatic steerage.
By the time Ah Dang sailed on the ship, it was far past its prime. He travelled with a distant cousin from his hamlet, a nephew of Ah Ngay Gonge, his father’s benefactor. On September 20, 1921, the teens boarded the ship in Hong Kong. It stopped in Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama before arriving in Vancouver on October 10, 1921, taking twice as long to complete this shorter trip as it had during its heyday. Unfortunately for its passengers, the ship was not known for its stability, and rolled heavily in rough weather. Since the route took it through the North Pacific, past the Aleutian Islands toward Vancouver, gale-force winds, rough seas, and ice tested the constitutions of all on board during that fall crossing.
Advertisements had once extolled the fabulous amenities offered by the Empress of Japan. For the thirty-one saloon or first-class passengers on that trip, Ah Dang learned, the ship was still a luxurious floating palace, providing the best in furnishings, comfort, and food. Meals apparently offered a different daily assortment of foods, with foreign names like hors d’oeuvres, salmon,
cheese, coffee, and wine.
While boarding, Ah Dang had stolen glimpses of the staterooms, equipped with beds, chairs, and individual electrical fans. He and his Chinese compatriots were hurried past covered promenades, with comfortable chairs and tables between potted palms. He never got to see the dining saloon, which the stewards described as having coloured-glass windows, its walls covered in silk, and floors made of smooth, polished wood.
Ah Dang and his cousin had accommodations in an open berth at one end of the main deck. These sparsely furnished cargo areas were designated solely for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asiatic men. At one time, the ship could carry up to seven hundred such passengers, spread throughout the two lower decks, but Ah Dang and his cousin shared the main deck compartment with only a hundred and ten others.
In contrast to what he heard about the food for first-class passengers, Ah Dang and his travelling companions were offered the same meal of rice mixed with meagre bits of thlonge, day in and day out. It was not very tasty, and the helpings were small. However, they soon learned that the real food would arrive late in the evening, delivered by the kitchen staff. For about twenty cents a bowl, they could buy rice cooked with aromatic Chinese sausage or salted duck eggs. Between the two teens, they occasionally splurged and bought a couple of bowls of this Chinese comfort food, hoping to get information from the staff about the ship and, most importantly, about their destination.
When the ship landed in Vancouver, the upper-deck passengers alighted at their leisure while the steerage passengers were counted. At last, they too disembarked, but they were herded like prisoners directly to an immigration building at the bottom of Burrard Street, known to the Chinese as the “Pig Pen.” On board, they had been warned about having to wait in this no man’s land until their papers were verified, the five-hundred-dollar head tax was paid, and a picture was taken for their identity document. The process could take months. No one knew the reason for the delays, but everyone who had been through it was convinced that the Chinese interpreters were waiting to be paid graft before processing any new immigrants.
The boys were ready to watch each other’s backs and their few personal belongings. At the immigration station, they were held behind locked doors among frustrated, angry men and boys, already fed up with waiting, who fought to secure their daily rations of bread and sugar. They were each assigned a metal bed; they had to wrap their quilts around themselves to do double duty as mattress and blanket.
Taking in his surroundings, Ah Dang couldn’t help but notice that the walls were covered in Chinese characters, some carved, some elegantly painted in ink, some written in crude, dark strokes the colour of dried blood. One quote in particular echoed his own thoughts: “I have always yearned to reach the Golden Mountain. But instead, it is hell, full of hardship. I was detained in a prison . . . Who can foretell when I will be able to return home? March, 1919.”
Ah Dang spent his nineteenth birthday behind bars. October to February were four months of confinement and starvation in a cold, dank, dreary building in a chilly, damp, rain-drenched city by the sea. Who would have believed it of Gold Mountain?
Ah Dang’s Head Tax Certificate.
Once the head tax money was paid, the immigration office issued a receipt and the individual was allowed to “land” and enter Canada. Finally, the call came for Ah Dang to have his photograph taken. Knowing this was the final step before he would be released and reunited with his father, he dressed carefully in the Western clothing Ah Gay Sieng had sent for the journey. It included a dark tie, patterned with butterflies on a field of small flower petals. In the portrait, his eyes look directly at the camera, as if in challenge. Some people still look innocent at nineteen, but Ah Dang had lost his innocence in childhood. Did his hard, cold eyes reflect his indifference or perhaps his readiness to face the coming difficulties of living in a foreign land that did not want him?
With his head tax paper, Ah Dang reinvented himself once more; he officially existed in a way that he had not in his homeland. The Canadian officials anglicized his Chinese name, Wong Guey Dang, by writing it phonetically in English. With the recording of his birth date, he was reborn, for he had no previous records from China that verified his being. This was his passport to a new life.
Ah Dang had landed. The form he held in his hands was definitive proof, his receipt for the price of admission to Gold Mountain. His father, Ah Gay Sieng, had paid the five hundred dollars, an exorbitantly high cost in many ways. Back then, the amount would have bought two houses in Canada. It would have been more than enough to build a mansion in China for Ah Tew May, his wife, to live the rest of her life in splendour, but instead he used it to buy his adopted son’s way into Canada. When Ah Tew May learned of her husband’s intentions, she had additional reasons to resent the boy.
• • •
Why did the Chinese so willingly pay such a high price to leave China? Most would say, “To make a better life for my family.” There was a century-long mass emigration from China between 1849 and 1949, known as the Chinese Diaspora.
Through most of the eighteenth century, China enjoyed an economic boom—the country was self-sufficient and a trade surplus existed. The exports of highly sought-after teas, silks, porcelain, and other Chinese decorative items far outweighed the imports of European and American goods. Chinese merchants, farmers, and manufacturers prospered, along with the national coffers.
Alarmed at the mounting deficit, British and American merchants devised a strategy to import opium from the British colonies in India into China in the 1760s. The drug was easily accessible, and a growing proportion of the nation, in all parts of society, became addicted, until the trade imbalance was reversed. Silver, the currency of international commerce, was drained from China. While the Chinese government tried to curb the addiction problem by banning the import, production, and smoking of opium, British and American merchants continued to smuggle it in, in cooperation with unscrupulous Chinese officials and criminals.
When the Chinese government legally destroyed a shipment of contraband opium in Guangzhou in 1839, Britain declared war. China’s inevitable loss in the First Opium War virtually crushed the independence of the nation. It had to submit to crippling indemnity payments in silver and the granting of excessive demands. Borders were forcibly opened to foreign missionaries. The principle of extraterritoriality was extended, exempting all Westerners from the laws of China, no matter the seriousness of their crimes. Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain. Other treaty ports, like the one in Guangzhou, were established in Amoy, Fuzhou, Shanghai, and Ningpo. Unfortunately, this pattern—aggression, China’s defeat, and its concessions to foreign victors—was to occur a number of times over the next century.
The burden of indemnity had a trickle-down effect, which fell heavily on the peasant farmers. As the largest sector of the population, they bore the brunt of the taxation. Although the value of bank notes fell against the rise in the value of silver being drained from the national treasury, the level of taxation on harvests remained the same.
Some peasant farmers might have owned land, but most paid for the use of leased land with a percentage of whatever they harvested. Only aye jee, landlords, with their ability to collect rents and sell large amounts of produce (collected from their various tenants), made money.
With the devaluation of silver, landlords required higher payments, demanding up to half of the crops. Tenants descended further in arrears through borrowing at usurious rates, some as high as 30 per cent for six months. As the debts rose, bankrupted peasants eventually lost whatever land they had leased, while landowners took advantage of their increasing liabilities and amassed more and more property. Peasant farmers were major participants in the mass exodus from China.
Overpopulation in South China was another driver of emigration. Along the coast of East Guangdong, a population of more than four million people occupied an area of just under four thousand, five hundred square miles. This was almost nine hundred persons p
er square mile, and some areas had even higher densities. Since the local population grew all its own food, this level of crowding was unsustainable.
Peasants rebelled against the high taxes and increasing poverty. To escape the unrest, uncertainty, and unbearable burdens, migrants left China in record numbers, estimated at fifteen million or more.
Their move to North America came in waves, starting with the United States. The California Gold Rush of 1849 sparked the first wave, drawing more than twenty thousand Chinese to California by 1852. The first Chinese came to Canada via the United States, and when gold was discovered in the lower Fraser River in British Columbia in 1858, large numbers came directly from China. By 1879, some four thousand Chinese were living in the province, more than half of whom had settled in Victoria’s Chinatown.
The building of the westernmost section of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought the next wave of Chinese immigration. Chinese workers, who had built the American railways, had earned the reputation of being willing, reliable, and industrious; more than fifteen thousand were recruited between 1880 and 1885.
It was treacherous and dangerous work. The Chinese, with their smaller statures that enabled them to crawl into cramped spaces, were sought after to lay blasting materials for only marginally higher pay. Living in makeshift tents along the route of the railroad, hundreds died from cold winter conditions, malnutrition, sickness, and accidents. The construction company estimated that at least six hundred Chinese workers died, or more than four workers for every mile of track laid along that part. The Chinese worked for less than half the going rate paid to white workers, and it has been estimated that hiring Chinese workers saved the government three and a half million dollars. Due to the workers’ work ethic, tenacity, and ingenuity, the railroad was completed five years ahead of schedule.