Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  In Canada, the aunt had told them, Cindy would start with a clean slate. It didn’t matter that her parents were factory workers, or that they had been born in rural villages. If Cindy studied hard and did well, she could have the same opportunities as everyone else.

  They weighed that against what they would give up in Guangdong: their friends, their families—all of their comforts and everything they knew. Still, the decision seemed obvious.

  It was Christmas day when they arrived in Winnipeg. It was cold and the city felt dirty. Their aunt came to pick them up from the airport, whisking them past flashing lights and signs they couldn’t understand.

  * * *

  Sitting across from me, Ms. Lin glanced at Cindy. The little girl, now eleven, was sitting at the table next to us, pretending to draw. Every few moments, she snuck glances at us from behind the backrest of her chair. A few times, she wandered over to our table, listening to parts of our conversation.

  Almost five years had passed since that day at the Winnipeg airport. Ms. Lin and her husband had spent the first three years in Winnipeg learning English and working various odd jobs, she in the factory that builds Greyhound buses and he in the local EQ3 warehouse assembling furniture.

  Then one of his cousins asked if they wanted to take over the lease at a Chinese restaurant she was running in a town called Vulcan. Initially Ms. Lin was scared. She had grown accustomed to Winnipeg. She liked her English teacher and had begun making friends and starting a life in the city. She and her husband had figured out where to buy their Chinese vegetables and other groceries. Neither had ever heard of this town called Vulcan. But this was another opportunity. Instead of working in factories, they could work for themselves.

  So they moved. Now, they’d been here for two years. “It’s quiet here, but it’s very nice,” Ms. Lin said in Mandarin. They were just two years into the ten-year lease, but she wasn’t yet sure if the family would stay permanently in Vulcan. Business had been good at first, but then things slowed down. They’d had to lay off their one waitress and were now running everything themselves, with the occasional help of their nephew, the teenaged server.

  She looked around the dining room at the dark green carpet and the heavy wood chairs. The work was hard, she said. Most days, they started at eight in the morning and kept working until midnight. Her husband was in the kitchen, and she took care of the dining room. When Cindy wasn’t in school, she often spent her days in the restaurant. It was a gruelling schedule.

  If they stayed here for the full ten years, Ms. Lin said, she hoped they might eventually buy a house. Cindy, she said, would study hard and go to a good university. Then she would get a good job—far, far away from dirty factory work or long, exhausting hours in a hot, smelly restaurant. Cindy, she hoped, would work in an office with heat in the winters and air conditioning in the summers. She’d have steady hours and good pay.

  Ms. Lin switched to English. “A good job,” she said. “Not like me.”

  The couple sitting near us signalled for the cheque, and Ms. Lin excused herself and walked out toward them.

  With her mother gone, Cindy once again peered at me. She gave me a smile, and I smiled back at her.

  A few minutes later, the couple stood up to leave.

  It seemed like it was time for us to leave too, so we made our way toward the cash register to pay and thank Ms. Lin for her time. From that vantage point—Ms. Lin’s perch near the entrance—there was a clear view across the highway of the Trek Station. Sitting inside Amy’s, and talking with Ms. Lin, I had almost forgotten where we were.

  Anthony couldn’t help himself. “What do you think of all the Star Trek stuff?” he asked her.

  We studied the white building, with its oddly shaped curves and circular windows.

  But when we turned back at Ms. Lin, she was staring blankly at us. She seemed to have no idea what Anthony was talking about. I recalled Ms. Lin telling me, “All day, from morning to night, we work.” It suddenly dawned on me that, with all her time spent in the restaurant, she had never noticed or paid any mind to the town’s eccentricities. It may as well be any town. Work was work was work.

  She stared back at us and repeated the English words, letting them roll off her tongue slowly: “Star Trek?”

  Chapter Four

  Jingweicun, Guangdong, China.

  1924–52

  “How do you say it?” I asked Dad over and over, making him repeat the name. We were both leaned over the kitchen table, peering at my laptop.

  The first character in the name of the village wasn’t a common Chinese word, and as such didn’t have an obviously romanized spelling. For several minutes, I guessed, googling variations that made sense.

  J-i-a-n-g

  Z-e-n-g

  Z-h-e-n-g

  When that yielded no results, we decided to just try to find it on the map. He stood over my shoulder while I studied a map of southern China, telling me to move my cursor up or down, zoom in and out.

  He read out the names of cities and regions as we scrolled past them. “Zhongshan, Jiangmen—a little bit more,” he said.

  “Toisan!” he called out triumphantly. The county he was from. “Okay, almost.”

  I zoomed in on an area labelled “Shuibuzhen” on the map. Dozens of little villages appeared on my screen, with two main highways cutting through them.

  “Jingweicun! There!” He was excited now, pointing at the screen.

  He couldn’t believe his tiny village was on this map. He called out to Mom in the next room. “Frances! Hey Frances! Look, you can see Jingweicun on this!”

  I zoomed in farther and farther, as close as I could get, and switched the map to satellite view.

  The village was in fact just a few clusters of homes, spread out over large swaths of rural land parcels. He asked me to zoom in on each cluster, but furrowed his brow at each one.

  “This could be it—no. Maybe this one—no.”

  He was trying to find his old house but couldn’t. He’d been back to Guangdong and Jingweicun many times in recent years. He had seen firsthand much of the change that had happened in his old village—new developments filled with brand-new houses just down the street from the old dirt houses where he’d grown up.

  He kept searching, mumbling under his breath, and I took in the image in front of me. It was fuzzy, just a haze of grainy greens and greys. There wasn’t much there other than farmland, a few shacks and dirt roads.

  “This is where you lived?” I asked my dad.

  He nodded.

  “This is where Ye Ye lived?”

  He nodded again.

  “And this is where his dad lived too?”

  “They all lived there,” he said. “As far as I know, all of our ancestors lived in Jingweicun.”

  I turned the image over and over in my head. It was just a tiny speck on the map, a few dirt roads, a jumble of ramshackle homes built of mud, all of it surrounded by rice paddies. This was where we were from. So how had we wound up here?

  * * *

  For the first two decades of Ye Ye’s life, Jingweicun was his entire world, Dad told me.

  Like most of the kids growing up in the village, Ye Ye was allowed a few years of schooling. But by about age ten, he was expected to work just like everyone else. And like everyone else in the village, and every one of his relatives before him, that work meant farming.

  His first job was watching the pigs. Near the house was a rickety hut in which one of the neighbours kept his pigs. It was Ye Ye’s job to care for them. From morning to night, he’d haul water back and forth, with the buckets propped up on his shoulders. At night, he and Bak Bak, his mother, would eat alone in their hut.

  Much of the time, Ah Gong, Ye Ye’s father, was gone. “Away” was all Ye Ye knew about where his dad had gone. One neighbour told him Ah Gong was working in Singapore. Another said Indonesia. Yet another said Holland. To Ye Ye, it hardly mattered. Away was away. Every few years, Ah Gong would resurface. He’d stay awhil
e with Ye Ye and Bak Bak and tell stories of his time abroad working as a carpenter—the buildings he’d built, and the entryways he’d carved out of wood. He’d talk about the friends he’d made and the sights he’d seen.

  Once in a while, Ye Ye would hear the words “Gold Mountain.” That’s where Ah Gong had gone. It was what the neighbours told him too: “He’s gone to Gum San.”

  Gum San. Gold Mountain. Ye Ye tried to imagine this place, a land paved with gold.

  Other villagers had sons, nephews and other relatives who had also gone to Gold Mountain. The men in neighbouring villages had gone to Gold Mountain too. Over the course of decades, tens of thousands of young men had left this tiny part of China for Gold Mountain. These four siyup counties were so poor that the villages could only feed their sons by sending them away. Some villages were so poor they sent away all their young men. Gum San wasn’t just one place. It could be Canada, or the United States, or Australia, or Holland. It just meant “away.”

  The few who returned to their villages came back with unimaginable luxuries, like Singer sewing machines, jackets and brand-new clothing. They brought back money to build houses and schools and parks. Those are the ones people called “Gold Mountain men.” The young men in the villages would eye these men with envy. They wanted one day to be Gold Mountain men too.

  But how could Ah Gong be a Gold Mountain man, Ye Ye wondered. He would leave for years at a time, each time coming back with just a few coins in his pocket. The other Gold Mountain men sent money back to their families. They sent letters with enough money in them to support their wives and children in Jingweicun. But the envelopes from Ah Gong contained nothing but letters. Each time he returned to Jingweicun, he came back with less than when he’d left.

  “Ah-peen,” other relatives would later tell me, in a lowered voice. Opium. That was the reason Ah Gong never had anything to send back. He’d spent all his money on drugs.

  So Bak Bak and Ye Ye were on their own. It was up to Ye Ye to support the family. They worked each day on their farms. Most days, they had enough to eat.

  * * *

  One day in 1949, when Ye Ye was twenty-five, Bak Bak went to meet with the village matchmaker. It was time for Ye Ye to marry. The matchmaker suggested a young woman from a neighbouring village. Her parents were farmers too.

  At the matchmaker’s house, Ye Ye saw her for the first time. She was eighteen, with straight black hair and a wide face. Ah Ngeen. They shared a pot of tea, sitting awkwardly on each side of a table while the relatives watched. Soon after, they were married. And less than a year later, in 1951, Dad was born.

  That’s when the letter arrived.

  It was from Ye Ye’s “great aunt.” Whether she was really an aunt, or any kind of blood relation, no one seems to be sure, but she was from Jingweicun so it was all the same anyhow. She had left many years earlier and now owned her own farm in Canada.

  She was looking for another worker on her farm, she wrote. Ye Ye could go work for her if he wanted. She was offering him the chance to go to Gold Mountain.

  It was around here where Dad’s retelling began to grow fuzzy. There were gaps he was missing. Questions he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.

  “What exactly was the offer?” I asked.

  “Why him?”

  “Did he understand what he was getting into?”

  “Why would he leave then, when his son had only just been born?”

  But Dad only shrugged. “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he genuinely didn’t know or if he was being intentionally vague. Either way, it seemed there was much more to the story.

  He didn’t tell me what else was in that letter. All he told me was this: Ye Ye’s answer to the great aunt’s letter was yes.

  Soon after, he boarded an airplane and left Jingweicun for Canada.

  He went alone.

  Chapter Five

  Drumheller, AB.

  Spring 2016

  About an hour and a half after leaving Vulcan, we reached the Canadian Badlands. Surrounding us in every direction were rocky canyons. Thousands of years of erosion revealed clay-coloured stripes. According to the signs, coal and dinosaur bones had been discovered here going back to the nineteenth century.

  Anthony squinted as he drove, taking it all in. “Can you imagine settling in this place?” he said. As a history buff, he’d always been fascinated by the Prairies and by the pioneers who first headed west to build this “western front.” The Ukrainians and Poles came in large groups, lured by promises of cheap land and a new beginning.

  We took in the gnarled rock formations off in the distance.

  A few minutes later, we saw the town signs for Drumheller. Like Vulcan, this town had found its own brand to draw tourists. In this case, it was dinosaurs. Drumheller’s welcome sign was concrete, with the town name engraved in thick block letters and flanked by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Capitalizing on the dinosaur bone discoveries in the Badlands, Drumheller now calls itself the “dinosaur capital of the world.” We drove through the town, taking in the dinosaur figurines that greeted passersby from street corners, park benches and bus stops.

  Hovering over the entire town was a giant green Tyrannosaurus rex, twenty-five metres tall. We climbed the staircase built into the spine of the T. rex, up into the observation deck built into its jaw. Looking out, the town sprawled in front of us, with tidy-looking parks and homes, and the Badlands in the distance.

  Back in the car, we drove down Centre Street, passing a seniors’ centre and a thrift shop. The town had the nostalgic feel of a summer town from the 1970s, with faded gift shops, laser tag and a small movie theatre. But as we made our way around, I realized the only other cars we had seen were the ones parked in the parking lots. Some of the storefronts appeared shuttered. And there wasn’t a single person walking on the sidewalks. It was a town of about six and a half thousand—large enough for its own Wal-Mart and McDonald’s—but its town centre felt even quieter than Vulcan’s.

  We parked in front of Diana Restaurant on Centre Street. Sandwiched between an Econo Lodge and a salon, the restaurant didn’t look like much. It was housed in a plain beige-brick building that could have been a dentist or medical supply office. But inside, it was like a 1960s film set that had since gone untouched. This was the glamorous Chinese restaurant from Hollywood movies, all dim lighting, wood carvings and beaded curtains. The walls were covered with heavy, brocaded wallpaper and Chinese watercolours. The banquettes were bright red and plastic. Paper dragons with golden beards and long red tails hung from the ceiling. An empty buffet table sat abandoned in the corner.

  By that time, it was mid-afternoon and the restaurant was near-empty. We’d already had lunch back in Vulcan and were too full for a second meal. But I still wanted to order something. Behind the counter, I spotted a poster advertising bubble tea. Perfect.

  A woman who looked to be in her thirties, with short, neat hair, approached. I ordered a taro bubble tea to go. She nodded, then disappeared into the back. A few minutes later, she returned with my drink.

  “You’re the owner here?” I asked her in Mandarin.

  She nodded quietly. She was shy but seemed intrigued when I explained why I was asking.

  We chatted politely for a few minutes as I sipped my drink. I’d chosen quickly, defaulting to taro flavour only because it had been my favourite as a teenager. When made fresh from the root and mixed with milk, taro becomes sweet and fragrant. But the drink I’d been handed was clearly made from a powder. It was sweet and dessert-like, but dense and chalky.

  Her name was Linda Xie, she said. In China, she had worked as an accountant. She was quiet and reserved, and seemed like she’d be happy sitting behind a desk crunching numbers. She and her husband, Peter Li, had come to Drumheller ten years earlier, from Datong, a city in Shanxi province in China. Peter’s uncle was already running a restaurant in Drumheller, and offered to sponsor them.

  A few minutes later, a man with a Budd
ha-like face and build walked into the restaurant. It was Peter. At first he was puzzled to see the two of us sitting there, but as soon as he heard my (very poor) Mandarin, his face quickly gave way to a puckish grin. Unlike Ms. Xie, Mr. Li was boisterous and outspoken.

  He sat down with us, leaning back against the seat like he could sit all day. “What do you want to know?” he asked. “I’m happy to tell you everything.”

  Ms. Xie, who had dutifully put up with my questions, seemed grateful for his arrival. She quickly stood up and excused herself.

  There was only one table that was otherwise occupied—a family of four having a leisurely lunch. They glanced up curiously at us from time to time, looking from me to Mr. Li and back to me again before returning to their food.

  Back in China, Mr. Li said, he was a budding chef. As in the brigade system in European kitchens, the most lavish Chinese restaurants relied on highly regimented systems. He spent years training in yue cai, Cantonese cooking, refining his skills in some of the biggest restaurants around Beijing. These were restaurants with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of seats. (A restaurant called Xihulou in Hunan is often described as the largest restaurant in the world, with 5,000 seats and over 300 chefs). The restaurants had multiple dining rooms, spread across multiple floors and escalators in between.

  Mr. Li worked in some of these huge restaurants, with their multiple kitchens, alongside hundreds of other cooks. Each cook had honed their skills for several years in each specific function. One would wash the vegetables. Another wielded the steamers. Yet another was in charge of stir-fries. Others simply ran back and forth between those cooks, fetching spoons or dishes or fresh ingredients. It all came together in a finely tuned system to ensure each and every dish came out precisely the way it had for hundreds of years.