by Ann Hui
“I was surprised at how different Ah Ngeen looked,” he said.
I could see what he meant. Instead of her drab village clothes, she was wearing a dress that had been neatly pressed. Her hair had been permed and carefully styled. There was something about the image that haunted me. The way they were stiffly posed, the clothes they were wearing, their blank gazes. It didn’t look like a photo that had been taken just to show to Dad, and family and friends. It looked like it had been taken in an office somewhere. I imagined a professional photographer, in a suit and tie, instructing them on how to pose. It looked like something official. But why?
The photo haunted Dad too, but for a different reason. Seeing Ah Ngeen with her permed hair and fancy clothes, it suddenly dawned on him that where she’d gone to, Canada, must be a very different place. That her life—both her and Ye Ye’s lives—had changed dramatically.
In the time since she’d left, someone at school had shown him a map. He had finally seen just how far this place called Canada was. He finally understood that it was an entirely different country, separated by an ocean and many countries in between.
He wondered what his parents’ lives were like in that new country. Whether they ever felt as hopeless as he did. In their letters, they’d written that they’d given birth to two babies in Canada. They taped a Chinese yuan to one of the letters. “This is from your sisters,” it said.
They’d built new lives and a new family in this new place. He wondered if they ever thought about him, a weed twisting in the wind.
* * *
Just like it had for Ye Ye, Dad’s invitation to Gold Mountain came in the form of a letter.
Around 1972, when he was about twenty-one, he received a letter from Ye Ye.
He was urging Dad to fill out paperwork to start the process to immigrate to Canada. Whatever complication had formerly stood in the way of bringing Dad to Canada had eased. Dad was skeptical. He was ready to leave, but cautious about getting too excited and having his dreams dashed.
But Ye Ye seemed hopeful. “Just fill out the application and see what happens,” he wrote.
What Dad didn’t know was that Canada had elected a new prime minister, a young man named Pierre Trudeau who had established a policy of “multiculturalism” in Canada. Dad had no way of conceiving how a group of strangers in Ottawa, on the other side of the world, could suddenly change his life with a vote.
So Dad walked to the small immigration office on Sai Woo Road in downtown Guangzhou and filled out an application form. It wasn’t far from the alcohol and tobacco shop where he was working full time, as a sales clerk.
And then he waited. A few months passed, and then a letter from the Chinese government telling him to return to the immigration office to fill out some more paperwork. They were giving him a passport. That wasn’t in itself an approval, but it was a promising sign. So he returned to the immigration office to pick up the passport. It was a tiny, one-door office without even a sign on the door. After that, he kept waiting. Months passed. A year. Then two.
Many nights he’d wonder about it, then push the idea out of his mind. “Don’t let yourself get excited,” he told himself.
All this time, he told no one, not even his closest friends or colleagues. Not even Dsee Dai. The revolution had left a lasting mark. Even close friends and neighbours could betray one another. He had seen it for himself with his classmates. He didn’t want to attract any attention.
In 1974, when Dad was twenty-two, he received another letter. This one was a request for official documentation that Ye Ye was, in fact, his father. Ye Ye submitted a letter dated March 23, 1974, signed and submitted with an official Guangzhou seal: “The applicant: Hui Yam Hung, male, born April 19, 1951, living at 12 Datong Road, Guangzhou,” it said in Chinese characters. “Applicant Hui Yam Hung is the son of Hui Man Yen. Hui Man Yen is the father of Hui Yam Hung.”
A few months after that, he was sent for a medical exam at the local government-run clinic. At this point, he let himself get excited. He had heard from others that the results of a medical exam were only good for six months. That meant his approval was likely imminent.
Still, he kept the news to himself.
Finally, in July, an invitation from the Chinese embassy to a meeting. The morning of the meeting, he walked into a room at the embassy. Inside were about eight others sitting around a table. All of them were older than him. Some looked to be in their sixties. All of them, he learned, had also made applications to go to Canada. They all looked as nervous as he felt.
An official told him to sit, so he sat. Another brought out tea to serve to the group. They sat like that for a few minutes, nervously making small talk, until the government official cleared his throat and finally spoke.
“Once you are in Canada, you must be careful to mind your behaviour,” the man said. “Do not do anything to harm the reputation of China in Canada.”
At that, they all turned to each other. That was the confirmation they’d been waiting to hear. It was official. They were going to Canada.
The official directed them to talk among themselves. “Introduce yourselves to each other,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be able to help one another once you’re there.”
The woman beside Dad turned to him to introduce herself. But Dad couldn’t keep up with the conversation. His mind was racing. He tried to mind his behaviour. After all, the officials were still right there, watching. He couldn’t act too pleased. But still, he couldn’t stop a small smile from spreading across his face.
He was going to Canada. Finally.
* * *
The night before Dad left, he went back to Jingweicun for one last visit.
He had already wrapped things up in Guangzhou. He gave Sook Gong his bicycle, what meagre savings were in his bank account and a golden phoenix ring Ah Ngeen had sent him.
Hearing that he would be leaving, neighbours and friends prepared one last dinner, heaping plates of steamed vegetables, a chicken and fish, to send him off on his journey. They took down the dividers between the rooms in Bak Bak’s house and sat all twenty of them around one table, sharing stories and giving him their last pieces of advice.
“Eat more when you’re there,” his aunties told him. The village had just been through another famine, one of the worst ones in years. If there was food there, he should eat it, they said.
They told him to write letters to let them know how he was getting along. A few others told him, “If you have the opportunity, you should come back someday.”
What none of them said to him was, See you soon. It didn’t even seem a possibility. A few former classmates had stolen away to Hong Kong and they had never been heard from again. Forget about a place as far as Canada.
Afterward, they all sat out on the street. The classmates were mostly quiet, not knowing what to say. They had all heard stories of Hong Kong, tales of cash and gold literally lining the streets. But Canada was a complete mystery to them. Even Ah Gong, normally loud and boisterous, was quiet that night.
“Listen to your parents” was all he said. “Work hard.”
The next morning, Dad woke up early to set off for the train station. His boss at the Guangzhou shop had arranged for a car to take him—a luxury. Ah Gong, Bak Bak and an aunt all rode with him. A few of his former classmates also met them at the platform.
At the station, they said their final goodbyes. Ah Gong stuttered, wiping his nose. Bak Bak began to cry. He looked at his grandparents, who had cared for him when there had been no one else. They were already getting older. The hairs around their temples were grey. I may never see them again, he thought.
The train arrived and he stepped on. He settled in his seat before taking one last look at his grandparents still standing on the platform. They both looked frail and small.
The train lurched into a crawl and within moments was hurtling down the tracks. Before he realized it, they were speeding ahead.
Chapter Eleven
Thunder Bay, ON.
Spring 2016
On the eighth day of our trip, we woke up in Thunder Bay, ON. I hadn’t planned any restaurant visits that day, thinking the city, with a population of over 90,000, was too big to fit the definition of “small town.” We had stopped there only as a way to break up the long drive between Manitoba and central Ontario.
But when we woke up that morning, the skies were grey and drizzling. Anthony was grumpy. He’d gotten two speeding tickets the day before.
We’d driven through BC and right through the Prairies without any problems. Not once were we stopped driving through the Rockies, where the speed limit reached 120 kilometres per hour and the roads wrapped around alarming hairpin turns, where we went for hours on open highway between seeing police cars.
But the moment we crossed the provincial boundary into Ontario, the limit on the highway suddenly dropped down to ninety kilometres per hour. It was a limit Anthony had a hard time sticking to. The police, who seemed to be everywhere, took notice. Within the course of a few hours, we were stopped twice. “Don’t they have anything better to do than to troll the highways giving out tickets?” Anthony grumbled under his breath.
He needed cheering up, so we decided to go for pancakes.
We pulled up to Hoito Restaurant, and I double-checked that we had the right address. The restaurant was in the basement of a three-storey building otherwise labelled “Finlandia Club”—a Finnish labour temple built in the early twentieth century for the Finnish workers who settled in Thunder Bay to work in the logging camps. The club was a place for the workers to gather, and Hoito, a restaurant to give them a taste of back home.
We pulled open the doors to find a large cafeteria-style room with wooden furniture. When the pancakes arrived, Anthony’s eyes grew wide.
“Whoa,” he said. “I was not expecting that.”
These were like no pancakes I’d ever seen. Each one was just a few millimetres thick and covered almost the entire surface area of the plate. I doused mine in syrup, then took a bite. The centres were soft and chewy, and the edges crispy. They were delicious. Despite my best efforts, I was only able to finish about a quarter of the plate.
While we sat there trying to digest our pancakes, Anthony suggested we look for a Chinese restaurant in Thunder Bay.
“Why not?” he said. “Since we’re here.”
I did a quick search on my phone, scanning through the results quickly. The names were all starting to blur together. Chinese Express, Golden Wok, Oriental Garden. Beneath each name was a rating—whether customers deemed the place a two- or three-star restaurant. And beneath that was its category type. Most were simply listed as “Chinese” or “Restaurant.”
But one result caught my eye.
Under category it said “Chinese, Skating Rinks.”
Skating rink?
I clicked on it. Ling Lee’s Chinese Cuisine, the place was called. “This place,” I said, handing the phone to Anthony. “Let’s go here.”
Five minutes later, we pulled up to a grey building with a sign that read “Port Arthur Curling Club.” Inside, we climbed up a flight of stairs to find a large, open area overlooking the ice rinks below. On one side was a wood-panelled bar, decorated with trophies and a league schedule. And on the other side was a takeout-style window with a sign: “Ling Lee’s Chinese Cuisine.” Next to it was a buffet table with heat lamps hung above large chafing dishes. It was a Chinese restaurant.
* * *
It was the early 1970s and the board of directors of the Port Arthur Curling Club had a problem on their hands.
Business at the rink was going well. Despite competition from another club just a ten-minute drive away, Port Arthur had its own established group of regulars, thanks to its over-eighty-year history. But it was the dining room and restaurant business on the second floor that troubled the board. They had tried running the restaurant themselves. But it wasn’t making money. Over time, it had become more trouble than it was worth.
One day, some of the board members stopped in at the bar at the Dragon Room, then a popular Chinese restaurant. As usual, the place was packed. Customers flocked to the dining room for the dry spareribs (“served with spice salt and lemon wedges, $1.90”) and char suee bok toy (“an authentic favorite”).
Chinese food, by then, had become one of the most popular types of cuisine for eating out not only in Thunder Bay, but across North America. For many of the city’s mostly blue-collar residents, going to a “Western” restaurant didn’t make sense. They could make meatloaf or turkey sandwiches themselves at home. But Chinese restaurants were exotic. They fit with the new, more cosmopolitan worldview Canadians were beginning to develop, influenced by Nixon’s visit to China, where he famously sampled from a platter of Peking duck, and the opening of Canada’s doors to immigration from China, Europe and other parts of the world.
Seeing the success of the Dragon Room gave the board members an idea. They approached its manager, a young man named Ling Lee, with a proposition: Would he consider taking over the restaurant at the curling club? He agreed almost immediately.
Mr. Lee was hardly a stranger to bold decisions, his daughter, Norina Karschti, told me. She was working in the kitchen of Ling Lee’s when we walked into the restaurant.
At fifteen, her father had followed his father from Guangdong to Saskatoon, despite not knowing any English. He slowly learned the language and, a few years later, moved to Ontario on a lark. He’d been shown a photograph of a pretty young Chinese woman and was told she lived in Kenora, ON. So he set out looking for her. By the time he turned nineteen, he and the woman in the picture, May Lee, were married.
The couple settled in Thunder Bay, where he found work in various Chinese restaurants. By his early thirties, he was managing the Dragon Room. And by the time the Port Arthur club board approached him, he was ready for a place of his own.
So he said yes. In 1973, Ling Lee’s in Port Arthur Curling Club was opened.
Now Ms. Karschti ran the restaurant. After she’d finished explaining the restaurant’s history, I asked her a question I hadn’t yet dared ask any of the other restaurant owners. Like me, Ms. Karschti was Chinese but born in Canada. Like me, she was married to a non-Chinese husband, and spent the majority of her time around non-Chinese Canadians. She understood what it was like to navigate between the cultures.
“Is it strange to you, selling Chinese food that you know isn’t actually Chinese?”
She chuckled.
At Ling Lee’s, the specialty was “Bon Bon ribs”—a made-in-Thunder-Bay invention of spareribs coated in allspice and MSG, then deep-fried quickly and spritzed with lemon. It was one of the dishes that helped make Mr. Lee so popular he was hired by the local cable TV station to host his own cooking show. Each week, he invited viewers into his kitchen to show them the secrets of cooking “Chinese food.”
She told me how her father became the face of chop suey cuisine for Thunder Bay. He was so successful at spreading the brand that, in most Canadian minds, those chop suey dishes were Chinese. So eventually, when he decided he wanted to introduce Thunder Bay to another, authentic Chinese restaurant, the response was lacklustre.
“We tried,” Ms. Karschti said. “People just didn’t want to go for that.”
What was originally an authentic-only menu became two, with one devoted to chop suey. And gradually, two menus became one again—chop suey dishes only.
“He was so frustrated by that.”
* * *
It was nearing lunchtime, and we could hear the clanging of wok paddles banging against hot steel in the Ling Lee kitchen. The two cooks inside were busy getting the buffet ready for the lunch rush. A few regulars were already sitting at tables, watching for the lights above the buffet line to light up.
Downstairs at the curling rinks, the lights came on with a sudden click. Two men in fleece vests and pants walked out onto the ice, lining up their rocks for a game.
Ms. Karschti sat at one of the dining tables, surveying th
e scene. She flagged down a waitress to remind her about an upcoming visit from health inspectors.
This restaurant, and this restaurant life—it had never been part of her plan, Ms. Karschti explained to me. It was her father’s dream, not hers. She had never intended to take over the family business.
But that was just it. It was a family business. Even more so than the food, she said, Chinese restaurants are defined by the families that run them.
It was something we would hear echoed over and over. The first Chinese men who opened these restaurants did so in order to create jobs for themselves. Eventually they realized the restaurants created jobs for their families too. Suddenly, they were giving themselves jobs, and also their brothers and nephews and children.
Growing up in Thunder Bay, Ms. Karschti said, her parents left her and her sister at home alone while they were working. They regularly worked sixteen-hour workdays, from about ten a.m. until about two a.m. every single day. It was her sister, eight years older, who took care of her. The year Ms. Karschti turned fourteen, her sister got married and moved away. And then she was alone.
Because of this, she wanted to get as far away as possible from the restaurant life. The restaurant was the reason why she never saw her parents. It was the reason they were always so exhausted. It was the reason why they were stuck living in this place, one of just a few Chinese families in town. And the latter was the reason why she was bullied at school and called a “chink.”
She finished school and got a job with the provincial government. But in the late 1990s, around the time Ms. Karschti was in her early thirties, the ministry she worked for underwent major restructuring. It looked like she was going to lose her job. At the same time, her parents were getting older. Her dad had spent a lifetime building up the restaurant. He couldn’t bear the thought of turning it over to a stranger, or worse, shutting it down. It was his legacy.
So she agreed to come help out, on a temporary basis.