by Chan Hon Goh
And then I was born.
The secret is in the landing; as Kitri in Don Quixote.
CHAPTER 3
BIG RED
On the night that my mother went into the hospital with labor pains, my father was performing at the company’s theater in Beijing. After the curtain went down he jumped onto his bicycle and rode as fast as he could towards the hospital. On the way he looked up and saw a full moon, huge and glowing red. On the morning of the first of February I was born. My parents named me Chan Hon – Hon is the color red, and Chan means “to rise.” One of the first stories I can remember being told is how I got my name. “I’d never seen the moon shine so brightly as on the night that you were born,” my father told me.
Beijing is one of the largest cities in the world, but the world of my early childhood was very small. The apartment we lived in was part of a complex of several buildings with a cement wall around it. Everyone who lived there was either a dancer or affiliated with the ballet company in some way – musicians, costume makers, production people. Less than a block away was the ballet company’s rehearsal studios. Although our second-floor apartment had two bedrooms, there was a housing shortage in Beijing and another couple occupied one of them. We shared the bathroom, and our family had the larger bedroom with a little balcony. Although Chinese people didn’t keep pets, my father, who had an unusual love of animals, used to feed the pigeons there. My parents slept in a double bed and I had a cot. I remember drowsing off to sleep while one of my parents would be reading by lamplight on the other side of the room.
That complex was my world. In the common yard all the kids would play with elastic skip ropes, making up elaborate combinations of movements. We played pick-up sticks with old popsicle sticks, tossing them on the ground and trying to pick them up one at a time without disturbing any of the others. My mother didn’t like me to collect the sticks – she thought they were dirty and might carry dangerous germs like tuberculosis – and I remember that once an older girl gave me some of her sticks, which she had washed, because I didn’t have any. I put all of them in a cardboard cigarette box (at that time, all the men in China smoked cigarettes) and carried them happily home. But when I got up again from my nap I discovered that my mother had thrown them away. I was so mad and made such a fuss and felt so mistreated that finally my mother went out and, even though we had no extra money for such things, bought me a set of the packaged sticks sold in stores. But they weren’t the same – nobody used packaged sticks. How unjust the world could be sometimes!
My name, in Chinese characters.
When I was about four and not yet in school, my Mother taught me how to write in calligraphy my nickname, Da Hong, which means “Big Red.” I wasn’t called big because I was big – in fact, I was a small child – but because I was the first born. One day our neighbor was painting his door frame in bright purple, and I borrowed one of the smaller brushes and painted my name on the white wall beside our own door. After all, without my name by the door how would any of the other kids find me? But my parents were horrified. Not only did my name on the wall violate our privacy, but it brought attention to us, when in China the important thing was to show that you were just like everybody else. And because paint, like so many things, was hard to come by, they had to wait a number of weeks before finding some white paint to cover over my purple name.
Imitating a photo of Aunt Soo Nee – in my nightie, my wool socks, and my mother’s pointe shoes.
I suppose that I had a little stubborn streak as a child, with my own definite ideas. I would get indignant if my parents couldn’t convince me that what I wanted to do was wrong. But most of the time I was happy in our little world, playing with the other kids, looking for my mother or father in one of the rehearsal halls. Being an only child, I was always looking to make friends. I wanted people to like me and I wanted to fit in – traits that have never left me. But on my own, I could keep myself busy too. Sometimes when my parents were in rehearsal or teaching, I’d stay in the apartment and open my mother’s shoe box. I’d slip on her pointe shoes and dance around the apartment, holding myself up and imitating the ballet dancers. Actually, wearing pointe shoes when you are too young can be damaging to the feet, and I sometimes got blisters or broken skin on my toes. Was I thinking about becoming a ballerina? Probably I was just having fun pretending, and what was more likely for me to imagine? Dancing was just a part of life; it was what my parents did every day, what they talked about. Sometimes my mother, who began teaching not long after I was born, would bring me with her to the studio. Sometimes I’d get to see a performance. Those Revolutionary ballets might have become dull to my father, but they were exciting to me and I would dance in the aisles of the theater.
As much as the dancing, it was the stories that thrilled me when I was a kid. For that same reason I loved the Chinese musicals that we saw on television. It wasn’t until I was about five that televisions became affordable enough for people like us to buy one, and there weren’t a lot of programs. But I just adored those musicals, with stories a lot like the Revolutionary ballets. One was about a farmer and his daughter who aided the Revolution by hiding a soldier in the house, deceiving the evil landlord. Somehow I was able to remember the songs afterwards and I would imitate the actors, singing and gesturing in a manner that quite impressed my parents. In fact, it made them think that I might have a future as a singer, and later in Canada I did take some singing lessons. But what I was really responding too, just as I did with the ballets, was the emotional drama of the characters.
Life would have been more idyllic if I could have just stayed in our little apartment, but both my parents worked, and their performance schedules (my father in lead roles, my mother in minor ones because of her arthritis) often kept them too busy to take care of me. And so in my earliest years I often stayed with a nanny who lived just across the street from our apartment, a grandmotherly woman whose children had already grown up. I liked her well enough; what I detested was the daycare that my parents put me into when I was about five. At this daycare, where the kids also slept at night, it was as regimented – or so it felt to me – as if I had suddenly joined the army. I remember saying to one of the caregivers, “I’m not ready to go to sleep. Can you read me a story?” And her reply: “No story. Everybody has to go to bed now.” The bungalow room with the row of little beds was very dark, and I was used to falling asleep with a light on (it is a habit I still have). To have a little more comfort, I asked my mother to bring me an extra blanket on one of her weekend visits. The blanket, I knew, would smell of home. I never learned to like the daycare any better and, after a month with my parents in the summer, I screamed all the way there on the first day back. My mother’s heart softened and she let me return to the nanny across the street for the rest of the year.
After that came grade one, my first year of school. My parents, who had particular values, made a point of enrolling me in a smaller school with a good reputation rather than the one near our apartment. They had to say that my permanent address was actually my grandmother’s in order for me to get in. In that year, I started to learn to write the complex Chinese calligraphy, practicing by trying to make all the strokes and marks of each character inside the lines of a box. Here, as in all the subjects, I had a great eagerness to get good marks and win the approval of my teachers and parents. Of course whenever I did well or wrote a little poem I would be praised by the adults, and I was always hungry for such words. This need carried through to my early years of ballet training when I hoped for a good word from my father, who was my teacher, or from the visiting choreographers and teachers who would come to class. It was as if I couldn’t judge myself and always needed someone to confirm for me that I was a worthy person. And in grade one, I liked hearing that I was a good girl and a smart one.
That was why I was so eager to earn my red scarf. Red is the symbol of Communism and in school a red scarf, like a girl-scout badge but even more meaningful, said that you were a valuabl
e, worthy person who matched the ideals of the Communist child. And if you didn’t get one – well, that implied that you were a poor student, a bad learner, and maybe even not Communist in your way of thinking. Having such a need for approval, I wanted to be among the first group in my class to earn one, and so I tried hard to be nice to the other kids, to succeed in my studies, and to help with cleanup and other chores. As a result I got chosen as one of the first group.
My first red scarf – the cotton one. We sent this photo to my dad in Vancouver.
My mother had kept her own red scarf all those years, a beautiful silk one instead of the usual cotton, but my parents were not sure if I ought to wear it. Being a good Communist meant not standing out too much, not making yourself different or special in any way, and my parents feared that the silk scarf would make it look like I was showing off. And so they decided against it and found an old cotton scarf, with a little rip in it. My aunt ironed it smooth and I wore that one instead. Only later did my mother decide it would be all right for me to wear the silk scarf.
Having met my paternal grandmother for the first time just days before this photo was taken, I was on my best behavior for our outing to the Great Wall.
This desire of mine to be a good girl who won praise was balanced by my stubborn streak and a strong personal sense of right and wrong. This side of me came out on the eve of my father’s retirement from dancing. The professional life of a dancer is not long, and my father was by then past thirty-five and had a back problem. Like my mother, he had started to teach, and when I was five or six he decided it was time to give up dancing altogether. Perhaps he was also just tired of the limited roles he was allowed to dance, or he was already considering leaving China and thought that the government would not let him dance once he requested permission for us to emigrate. For his last show he was to play the male lead in The White Haired Girl, the role of the neighbor who becomes a soldier and saves the white-haired girl and her family.
We were preparing to go to the theater when my maternal grandmother accused me of doing something. I cannot now remember what she claimed I did, but I can relive perfectly the pained outrage I felt on being falsely accused. My grandmother would not back down and admit that she might be wrong, and so I went into a fit of hysterical crying, as if that might prove my innocence. As a result we were late for the performance, missing the first act in which my father had his most spectacular dancing. We saw only the second act, and that from high up in the balcony, because my mother was always nervous watching my father and didn’t like to sit too close. And so I can remember nothing of my father’s performance that night, only the burning sensation of having been wronged, and to this day I am sorry that I have no recollection of my father’s last dance.
I could not have imagined that I would one day leave this little world behind; I could hardly imagine that there even was another world beyond this one. During the Cultural Revolution people in China were rarely allowed to visit other countries, and even within China it was necessary to have special permission to travel. Only once did we get to see some of the country, when I was seven and my father’s mother came to visit us from Canada. We all went together on a tour of four Chinese cities.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was on that tour that my grandmother urged my father to try to bring us all to Canada, where there would be so many more opportunities and a greater promise of a good life for me. My father’s other relatives also ended up urging him to try to emigrate, even though it was a risk even to tell the Chinese government that you wanted to leave. Asking permission to leave was considered a criticism of the country, and although the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end – even the Chinese government would eventually admit that it was a catastrophe – those who dared to criticize the country still risked being punished. My father spent many tormented nights agonizing over what to do. Could we start a new life from nothing? Would he remember the English he had learned so long ago in London, and would my mother and I be happy? How would he earn a living? He was thirty-seven and his own dancing career had come to an end, but he had found a new calling as a teacher. To leave behind the world of the Central Ballet and all their dancer friends was almost impossible to imagine. And yet what was there really for us in China? The country had been at a virtual standstill for years. He did not know what I might do when I grew up, but how many choices would I even have in China? If we were in Canada, our family could make a new start, and he could take care of his aging mother in Vancouver. Yes, we must leave, Father decided.
After my grandmother’s visit, my parents told me that there was a possibility of us moving to Canada, but that I should not mention it to anyone. They themselves did not mention it again for at least six months, and so I never thought about it. Only when my father received his permission papers to leave China did they speak to me about it again. The government had withheld permission for my mother and me, trying to make the decision more difficult for my parents. But they decided that if my father went first, the government would relent and allow us out as well. And so in one month’s time my father would leave us for Vancouver, Canada. He would have a chance to establish himself and, with luck, we would eventually receive our own permission papers and be able to join him. How long would that be? My parents didn’t know.
The prospect of traveling to another place was exciting to me, and yet I hardly knew what to think. I simply had no mental image of what Canada was going to be like and how it might be different from China. We saw no Western television, movies, or books of any kind. Because wanting to leave the country was almost considered being a traitor, my mother didn’t even want to point out the new country on a map. My father was heading off into unknown territory and one day – or so we hoped – we would follow him.
In costume for a photo shoot in the park.
CHAPTER 4
SLOW BIRD
My mother and I lived in Beijing without my father for a year. It was unusual for a child not to have both parents around, and even stranger that one of them had gone abroad. I was careful not to speak about my father or of our hope of joining him when talking to the other kids.
Meanwhile, we knew that my father was struggling to earn a living and establish himself in this mysterious city called Vancouver. While he considered trying to return to a career in dance, none of the three major Canadian dance companies – the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens – was in Vancouver. In truth, when it came to the arts, Vancouver was more on the level of a town than a big city. But to move somewhere else meant not being near his mother, and he wanted to look after her. Besides, at his age he would not have had many years left to perform. So instead, he made up his mind to try to establish a teaching career. His own experience studying in Singapore, in London, and with the Russian master in China, as well as his dance career with the Central Ballet and his subsequent study for teaching, gave him a background virtually unmatched by anyone in Vancouver.
He was fortunate to earn the position of ballet master to the Anna Wyman Dance Company. It was a small company of less than a dozen dancers who performed in contemporary works rather than ballets, but my father led them in morning classes to improve their technique. That alone wasn’t enough work for him to support himself, never mind a wife and child, and so he began to teach classes at already-established dance studios – not to professionals, but to housewives looking to keep fit, as well as kids. This hard work was less than artistically satisfying for someone used to dancing and teaching at the highest levels. After a while he had enough loyal students to begin conducting his own classes in a basement studio.
For twenty years my father had needed to worry only about dance; the government had taken care of everything else. Now he had to pay his studio rent, find and keep new students, not to mention feeding and clothing himself and a hundred other things (including worrying about us) that kept him constantly exhausted and under stress. An artist by temperament, he suddenly h
ad to learn how to be an entrepreneur. Being a dancer gave my father an unusual background for an immigrant, but he had all the same immigrant’s cares weighing heavily on his shoulders. He had to struggle to communicate, having discovered that his English was much poorer than he had hoped. He had to learn all the little things – how to take a bus or shop for food – that people raised in Canada took for granted. And although he was lucky to have his sister Soo Nee and her family in Vancouver to stay with, he still had to deal with feelings of isolation and loneliness. The West was more free, but it could also be a much harder place to survive. Neglecting to take care of himself, he lost weight and his hair grew past his ears.
In the spring of 1977, my mother told me that we had finally gotten our papers to leave China. We still needed our airline tickets, but we could expect to depart in a month’s time. How happy I was! The thought that I would soon see my father made every other aspect of leaving unimportant. All I could imagine was seeing him again. I didn’t think about leaving the other kids behind or what I would have to learn in my new life. My grandmother said to me, “You will have to learn English. You should work hard so as to do well in school and not get left behind.” But I didn’t pay much attention.
It is always harder to learn a language as an adult and to adapt to a new life, so my mother was, if anything, going to face even greater hardships and challenges than I would. But she didn’t have time to think about that. She ran about the city getting the necessary stamps and signatures, and doing everything else needed to prepare for our departure. A week before we were set to leave she decided to take us both to get our hair done so that we would look nice when we saw my father for the first time. I had never had anything but a basic cut with bangs, and I felt tremendously excited. And so one afternoon the two of us went to the beauty parlor and had our hair permed. A huge helmet-like machine was placed over my head; it felt as if my hair was being electrocuted. Afterwards, my mother was devastated; our heads had been turned into huge curly balls, Afro styles that just didn’t suit us. I didn’t really mind, but back home my mother kept wetting our curls to try to keep them down.