by May Q. Wong
ELEVEN
Father Rejuvenated, Mother Baptized
AH THLOO: MONTREAL, 1965
It was late on a winter afternoon, and Ah Dang and Ah Thloo were shopping downtown for Christmas presents. It would take them more than an hour to get home, so he said to his wife, “You must be hungry. Let’s go have something to eat.” She thought, Dinner out. What a pleasant treat!
Ah Dang had very pedestrian tastes in food. He ate like a Canadian teenager: Kraft peanut butter and orange marmalade on whole wheat bread, Velveeta cheese, kosher all-beef frankfurters, and applesauce. Every day, at home or at work, he drank either Red Rose or Po-Neh tea. If he was at home for an “offu day,” which is how the family referred to his day off work, he would bake an apple pie or roast a joint of beef. Unless it was at a banquet, he rarely ate in Chinatown. He used to say he was tired of eating restaurant food.
A typical “offu day” with the children, playing at the War Memorial on Park Avenue, 1956.
T.S. WONG, MONTREAL
On the shopping afternoon, he took his wife to a restaurant on St. Catherine Street. He ordered coffee and a muffin for himself and asked her what she wanted. She could not read the menu and had no idea what to order. Shocked and disappointed, all she could murmur was, “I’m not hungry.”
• • •
AH THLOO AND AH DANG: MONTREAL, 1955–1966
Ah Thloo and Ah Dang were celebrating their first Chinese New Year together when their third and last child was conceived. It was a surprise, for she was forty-four and he was fifty-three, ages when most of their predecessors had become grandparents.
For the first time, both the pregnancy and the birth were hard on Ah Thloo. She had to give birth in a hospital: she was weak and produced no milk. Their daughter was born on October 12, 1955. The hospital required that a name for the child be recorded on a birth certificate before the mother and baby could be released to go home. It was disconcerting for the parents, as they would normally have waited for the one-month Choot Ngiet Gat How ceremony to announce a name. But these were the Canadian customs.
A pregnant Ah Thloo at the Botanical Gardens with Ah Wei, 1955.
GD WONG, MONTREAL
Like her sister before her, the baby was given the middle name of Quen. Her first name was May, meaning “beautiful.” Coincidentally, the word “may” in Chinese also sounds like the word for “final” or “last.”
A month after the baby was brought home, Ah Dang wrote to inform his mother and parents-in-law about the birth of another granddaughter and enclosed money for celebratory feasts. Despite Ah Thloo’s inability to breastfeed the baby, and their initial fears for its health, the child thrived, first on formula, then on cow’s milk. Ah Dang reported that the baby was fat and active when presented to their friends, on the occasion of her one-month haircutting event.
Ah Tew May wrote back to say she was glad her Gowdoy, as she always referred to her grandson, Ah Wei, had a new playmate. Ah Shee, Ah Thloo’s mother, then aged seventy-five, wrote on behalf of Ah Poy Lim, seventy-eight, and herself, sending polite congratulations to their son-in-law and daughter. Three years later, Ah Shee would be dead, and her husband would be living as a hermit in a hut away from the village, visiting his former home only to get food. He died in 1960, at the age of eighty-three, a once proud and capable man, overcome by the unrelenting social, economic, and political upheavals of his times.
Christmas at Bagg Street, 1959.
ROBERT WONG, MONTREAL
The younger generation, when informed by Ah Thloo, responded with enthusiasm about the baby and with concerned inquiries about her health. If her daughter Ah Lai, goddaughter Ah Ngan Jean, or godson Ah Sang were surprised, no one mentioned it, and each sent a small gift along with good wishes. Not too long afterwards, Ah Lai started her own family.
Ah May’s birth rejuvenated Ah Dang. He gave her a twenty-four-carat gold charm bracelet, hung with delicately tinkling bells and small animals at her one-month ceremony, to welcome her. He now had the chance to witness a child of his grow from infancy to school age and adulthood. At first, whenever he got home from work late at night, he would relax by smoking and watching her as she slept. When she coughed each time he lit a cigarette, he stopped, “cold turkey,” a pack-a-day habit he had started more than thirty years earlier. As she grew, his hands would search for hers to hold whenever they went out. He was making up for lost time, when there was no family member he could touch and cherish. He recorded the lives of his two younger children on his camera and, later, in movies.
Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Ah Dang bought a three-storey residential building on Bagg Street, a short side street off St. Laurent Boulevard, in an area of Montreal known as The Main. Since they had come to Canada, the Wong family had been living in rented rooms on de Bullion Street, but when Ah Thloo mentioned that rats had brushed her feet, scurrying around the bedroom while she fed the baby at night, it was enough to spur Ah Dang to find another place.
The house cost fourteen thousand dollars; he paid half down and got a mortgage from the vendor, Myer Patofsky, a tailor, at 6 per cent interest for the remainder, until 1972. It was thirty-four years to the month after he had landed in Vancouver, four years since he had become a citizen, and only a year since he had been elevated from a mere waiter to a restaurant keeper. Now he was a home owner!
No other Chinese lived on the street. The neighbours were older European immigrants, mostly Jewish, from Poland or Hungary, probably Holocaust survivors. Everyone there wanted to be Canadian, but nobody quite knew how; the children ate what their parents cooked—food from their countries of origin—and at home they spoke the language of their parents’ parents. Few of them spoke English. Ah Thloo did not go out to socialize with the neighbours, except to greet the elderly ones on either side of her, who always said, “Hello!” as she passed. They wouldn’t let her refuse their gifts of candies and cookies, and took every chance to pat Ah Wei’s and Ah May’s heads.
Only a few of the families had children, and all of them somehow learned to speak English, even without any native English speaker around. Ah May played with the girls who lived on the street while Ah Wei spent time with the neighbourhood boys he knew from school, but everyone was kept indoors after dusk.
All the parents kept a close eye on the children; they never went into one another’s houses. If Ah Wei or Ah May happened to be on a neighbour’s front stoop at mealtime, Ah Thloo would call out, “Ah We-iii, Ah Maa-ay, come home and eat.” Her children were expected to drop whatever they were doing and leave immediately. If they did not, she would just keep on calling. In that neighbourhood, everyone’s mother yelled out. Across the street, Muscha’s mother, an anxious Hungarian, would call out her daughter’s name every hour. They lived on the second floor and had a bird’s-eye view of the street, so Muscha just had to stand up to be seen and assure her mother she hadn’t been taken away.
The house on Bagg Street was a typical Montreal triplex, with a wooden staircase leading to a balcony on the second floor. One door off the balcony led to the second-storey apartment, while another opened to a flight of indoor stairs to the third-floor apartment. The Wongs lived on the ground floor, number 74 and leased the two upstairs apartments, mostly to Chinese families related to them in some way.
This house had rats as well, but the rodents stayed behind the walls and under the floorboards. Each evening, the family heard them scratching and scurrying from one end of the building to the other. A trapdoor in the floor of the bathroom opened into a crawl space under the house where Ah Dang, and later Ah Wei, laid rat traps baited with smelly Swiss cheese.
Ah Thloo and Ah May shared the front bedroom on one side of the main entrance hall. They slept in twin beds, facing a window that looked out to the front garden, where Ah Thloo planted vegetables. Ah Dang had a double bed in the adjoining room. There was no wall between the rooms, but a plastered crossbeam on the ceiling separated the spaces.
Ah Wei had his own room down the
hall, off the living room. He had a view of the backyard—really just a dirt patch where not even dandelions grew. The three balconies faced onto the back. A sweet Jewish widow lived on the second floor of the house across from the Wongs. She used to throw down bags of candy and tried to engage Ah Thloo in conversation; Ah Thloo would eventually smile back, wave, and say, “Hello, howyu?”
The room across the hall from the front bedroom was Ah Thloo’s refuge. It stored all the precious things she had brought from China. It was also her workroom, where she could sew household items and clothes for herself and the children on a black Singer treadle machine.
One half of the room was lined with jars and tin boxes filled with traditional Chinese ingredients for health, long life, and vitality. Ah Thloo could have stocked an herbalist’s shop. There were gallon-sized Mason jars that held whole snakes pickled in brandy to fortify it for its vitalizing effects; she would ladle a small cup for the adults to sip at Chinese New Year. She also made rice wine, letting it ferment in the jars; it exuded a sour, bitter smell whenever the lid was opened. Again, the wine was drunk only on special occasions.
Enclosed in individual, large, airtight tin boxes were dried abalone, sea cucumber, seahorses, shrimp, sharks’ fins, scallops, seaweed, and sea grass. There were also dried mushrooms, lily stalks, wood ear fungus, herbs, dates, red goji berries, ginseng roots, hard round teacakes, and clusters of birds’ nests. Every day, she would make delicious soups using some of these ingredients. Others were reserved for special occasions. Yen waw gaang, birds’ nest soup, and nguey chee gaang, sharks’ fin soup, were favourite dishes eaten during New Year celebrations or birthdays.
The largest item in the room was a deep blue, metal travel trunk with brass bands and studs, which Ah Thloo had brought from Hong Kong. In it was a silk-covered comforter, stuffed with cotton, used only on very cold nights. It was fuchsia-pink on one side and turquoise on the other. The inside of the trunk, lined in blue silk, had an enduring fragrance from the bags of dried cinnamon sticks stored there.
Besides the traditional Chinese medicines, Ah Thloo had brought with her many of the traditional ways of preserving foods, one of which was to use the hot Montreal summer temperatures to cure food outdoors. Ah Dang made a special pressing rack, as well as a drying box, from wood lined with chicken wire and metal mesh to keep out flies. The door swung out and was secured with a wooden dowel and extra wire. The box was hung from a hook out on the back balcony.
After marinating strips of fatty pork belly in a mixture of gin, spices, sugar, and soy sauce, Ah Thloo strung the meat on a cotton string, using a large darning needle, and hung it in the box. This cured pork belly was called lap ngoke, and a small piece was all that was needed to add rich flavour to a dish. Sometimes she hung a whole marinated duck that had been split in half and pressed flat in the homemade rack. Lap ap, the cured duck, was a delicacy that made Ah Dang’s mouth water just thinking about it.
The European neighbours, especially the nice Jewish lady across the backyard, were very interested in the processes and were always asking Ah Thloo what was in the box. However, being wary, she would feign ignorance, shrug her shoulders, and smile blandly before retreating into the house.
Ah Thloo shopped for groceries every few days. She received a portion of Ah Dang’s weekly pay and managed the household from her own bank account. Although she had a refrigerator, all Chinese like to eat fresh foods, and shopping was a good excuse to get out of the house. She had a number of expandable string bags to carry the groceries. Until Ah May joined Ah Wei at Devonshire Elementary School, she accompanied Ah Thloo everywhere.
The Warshaw Grocery on St. Laurent, where Ah Thloo bought fruit, vegetables, and staples, was only two blocks from the house. Rice and Chinese vegetables like bok choy and gai lan could then be found only in Chinatown, where the family went every weekend.
Meat was selected from the Hungarian butcher shop a few doors down the street, where the clean smell of fresh sawdust was a counterpoint to the metallic odour of blood and the aromas of various spices. Ah Thloo might buy a piece of pork, cut from a leg displayed in the cooler. The meat was wrapped in a sheet of pink paper that was waxed on the inside and tied with a piece of string.
Processed meats were sold on the other side of the store. Tubes of round sausages were displayed behind the counter: long, short, thick, thin, fatty, dry, dark, light, all suspended from a railing hung from the ceiling. The salty, spicy, savoury smells from that side of the store always tantalized Ah May’s nose and tastebuds, but Ah Thloo, unfamiliar with the food, and being frugal, never bought any.
On the counters were displays of silk stockings (the kind that were held up by a garter belt) and fine hairnets in various colours. There were European confections, hard fruit candies with liquid centres, brightly coloured marzipan that was shaped into fruits or animals, and black liquorice drops.
The next stop was on Roy Street, where Waldman’s Fish Store and Liebovich Poultry were located. At the time, Waldman’s was just a cold warehouse filled with tanks of fish and shellfish such as lobsters, crabs, and prawns. Rows of trays on long tables held different varieties of fresh fish, covered in chipped ice. Some still twitched, their mouths kissing the air, seeking water. The floors ran with water and scales and occasionally blood and guts. Ah Thloo walked around the tables, poking eyes with a bare finger and lifting gills to see how fresh the fish were. The chosen fish was wrapped in newspaper.
If the fish were deemed unworthy, Ah Thloo took Ah May to Liebovich Poultry, referred to as Lie Giek Doy, Crippled Boy’s. This store was a small space filled with old, dirty metal cages, stuffed with chickens of all shapes, colours, ages, and sizes. There were ducks, pigeons, and turkeys as well. The birds’ body heat increased the temperature and enhanced the smell of the cramped, steamy room. The aroma was a mixture of chicken droppings, warm blood, and faintly fishy, faintly burnt feathers. Ah Thloo chose not to pay the extra charge for slaughtering, so with its wings trussed and feet tied together, the clucking chicken was stuffed into a string bag.
Loaded with the makings of a meal, mother and daughter walked home. Once Ah Dang was awake, Ah Thloo went about dispatching the chicken, always a noisy job, as the chicken inevitably squawked. However, she was efficient and sure-handed with her sharp, wooden-handled cleaver, chopping the head off in a single blow.
Whatever foods Ah Thloo could not make, she bought in Chinatown. Leong Jung, at 92 De La Gauchetière West, was a favourite grocery store. A gentle-spoken, white-haired man called Ah Lee Bak and his two sons owned it. Ah Thloo’s family was always welcomed with a cup of tea, poured from an oversized ceramic pot that was kept warm in a woven and lined tea cozy. The adults would exchange news and Chinatown gossip, while Ah May wandered through the aisles.
On the floor were rows of open burlap bags overflowing with exotic-smelling herbs and spices, square metal buckets of fresh tofu swimming in water, and rectangular wooden boxes of fresh garden vegetables. On shelves along the walls were stacked large tins of preserved vegetables, meats or fish, and sauces, as well as earthen jars filled with pungent salted black beans or thick molasses. In the back corner of the store, suspended on a black hook a foot long, in a frame that looked like an upended metal coffin, hung a whole roasted pig, smelling deliciously of a special blend of spices. As the day wore on, chunks would be cut from its carcass—the most desirable parts from its savoury ribs, topped with a coat of crispy, light, crackled skin. Ah Thloo splurged on a piece of the savoury pork from time to time. From the ceiling were hung cured meats and strings of the store’s famous homemade lap cheong, Chinese sausages. They had several varieties, including, duck, chicken, pork, and even one that was like a blood sausage. At home, Ah Thloo would cut a sausage into chunks and steam them on top of rice, the rich, sweet flavour and oil permeating the whole pot. Having arrived from China with recent memories of starvation, she at first enjoyed the fatty bits. Later, when she was more health conscious, she meticulously excavated each piece of ha
rd white fat before cooking the meat.
Occasionally, she shopped downtown, travelling everywhere by bus, making use of Montreal’s efficient transit system. A single, inexpensive fare could take her all the way across the island, transferring from one bus to another. During the ride, Ah Thloo stayed vigilant, taking note of landmarks so she could remember the way home. She shopped mostly in the department stores on St. Catherine Street. Henry Morgan’s Store and Eaton’s, where they had a “no questions asked” refund policy, were her favourites.
Although Ah Thloo took some English lessons at the Chinese Presbyterian Church, she learned much of her English from watching television and late-night movies. Ah Dang bought a small, black-and-white television set with rabbit-ear antennae. During the day, Howdy Doody was on, and in the evenings, Ah Thloo and the two children watched shows such as Red Skelton, I Love Lucy, and Ed Sullivan. Ah Thloo learned to laugh with the televised laugh track. Late at night, she watched movies, accompanied by Ah Wei on the weekends, after Ah May had gone to bed. Ah Thloo never let on how much she actually understood of the English dialogue, preferring to speak to the children in Chinese.
• • •
The year 1955 was the start of a rewarding time for Ah Dang. In addition to the birth of his daughter, he was becoming successful in his relatively new career as a businessman. For work, he groomed himself carefully. His nails were neatly trimmed and clean. He brushed his hair and added a fragrant pomade to hold it in place. He wore formal dress socks, sometimes held up with garters, and kept his leather shoes polished to a hard shine. On the way to work, he always wore a fedora, which changed with the seasons—a felt one in the winter and straw in the summer. He always wore a suit, usually grey, with a white shirt and tie, sometimes a bow tie.
At the restaurant, Ah Dang replaced his suit jacket with a white cotton jacket, trimmed in maroon, to distinguish him from the waiters, who had jackets with green accents. He worked the till at the front of the restaurant and helped serve when required, but unless he mentioned it, few customers would have known he had a stake in the business.