by Ann Hui
I didn’t even exist.
It started to make sense to me why Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen had stayed quiet about it for so long, and why Ye Ye and Dad were never able to clear the air about it.
Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen had spent decades living as ghosts. For almost twenty years, they had lived in the shadows, in the lives of other people. They had grown used to hiding. Whether it was out of shame, or habit, even after they’d “confessed,” they still kept hiding.
I asked Dad the same thing I’d asked Aunt Janice.
“Wong Mun Goot. Do you know who he was?”
He said he had heard different stories from different people.
“I think he died,” he said.
A few moments later, he changed his mind.
“Maybe he never even existed to begin with.” Then, he added, “No one really knows.”
I was stunned by all of it. By what Aunt Janice had told me. By what Dad was now telling me. He loved this country more than almost anyone I knew. Every Canada Day, he put a Canada flag the size of a sofa in our front yard. Anywhere he went, he wore a little maple leaf pin proudly displayed on his baseball cap.
And yet. Ye Ye’s entry into Canada, which paved the way for Dad and all of the rest of us—it had all started with a lie. All of it had been built on a fake name, on a piece of paper and a man who might have never even existed.
* * *
It snowed the night before I was scheduled to visit Dad’s uncle, Sook Gong. It had also snowed the night before that, and the night before that. There were giant piles of snow everywhere, piled high on the side of the roads and covering the sidewalks with grey slush and sleet.
We’d had to cancel a family dinner because of the weather. Pansy’s car wasn’t able to make it up the steep hill leading up to Mom and Dad’s house. Dad looked forward to these weekly Sunday night dinners. Plus, he was feeling the effects of the latest round of chemo. He’d napped pretty much all day and was still tired. It frustrated him.
“Why don’t you just reschedule?” he asked grumpily. He didn’t want me driving to Sook Gong’s in the snow. “You could always go next week.”
I told him I had a strict schedule and deadline. “There are still things I don’t understand. Things about Ye Ye that only Sook Gong might know.”
“Well, then I’ll come with you,” he said. “Then I can drive.”
I sighed. I suspected there was more to his objection than a concern for safety. In the days since I’d spoken with Aunt Janice, it had become clear how much Dad still didn’t know. I could tell he was curious to hear what Sook Gong had to share. Dad had gone from reluctantly answering my questions to eagerly participating.
So the next morning, we set off in the Toyota hatchback toward my great-uncle’s house in South Vancouver. We pulled up outside the house, with its red-brick exterior and cream-coloured vinyl siding. It had been over a decade since I’d last been here. But as Great-Uncle swung open the door and led us into the foyer, I marvelled at how little it had changed.
The house is a “Vancouver special,” an architectural style popularized in the 1980s and 1990s and designed to maximize every square inch of living space out of Vancouver’s neat, square lots. Just about every relative and Chinese family we knew growing up lived in one of these Vancouver specials. Not only were the houses cheap to build, they allowed for a downstairs suite, which meant grandparents or extended families could all live under the same roof.
Sook Gong led us up the stairs and down the hallway, where the carpets were covered with clear plastic mats. He took us into the kitchen and sat us down next to a box of pineapple buns he had bought that morning from a Chinese bakery down the street. He had just returned home from dropping the grandkids off at school, he said—his way of apologizing that he hadn’t yet prepared tea. As he spoke, he dug around the cupboards, looking for plates, then looking for a kettle to fill with water.
While he did this, I looked from Dad to Sook Gong and back again. I could see how, growing up in Guangzhou, the two had easily passed as brothers. But while Dad arrived in Canada in 1974, Sook Gong had to wait fifteen years longer. He arrived in Vancouver as a middle-aged adult. He came with a wife and three kids to support. Unlike Dad, who had a little bit of time to settle in and learn English, Sook Gong had to get to work right away. He spent decades working at a produce shop in Chinatown before eventually retiring.
We spoke, as always, in Cantonese. Mine stilted, his with just a trace of a Toisanese accent.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“I want to know why Ye Ye left his family behind.”
Sook Gong nodded. He was quiet for a long moment, and I could see Dad stirring in the corner. “People did what they had to do back then,” he finally said.
“Did he write letters?”
“Yes, every year,” he said. “He would write a letter and send some money back.” That was what kept Ah Gong, Bak Bak, Ah Ngeen, Sook Gong and Dad afloat.
“What did the letters say?”
“He told us not to gwa sum.” Gwa sum—hang our hearts. Worry.
Sook Gong had only been a toddler when Ye Ye left. I asked him about everyone who had been left behind.
“Your parents—Bak Bak and Ah Gong. Did they miss him?”
He was quiet again, then opened his mouth to speak. But instead of words, he let out a choked sound. He began slowly shaking his head, back and forth.
“Of course—”
He could still see Bak Bak’s face when she received the letters.
Dad was staring at Sook Gong, listening intently.
Sook Gong continued. Tears began streaming down his face. The words tumbling out in fits and starts.
“We were so poor.”
“There wasn’t enough to eat.”
Ah Gong wasn’t able to support them. Ye Ye thought he could.
“He had to do what was best for our family.”
“He was only in his twenties.”
“It was so hard for him.”
Dad wasn’t the only one who had sacrificed. Ye Ye had sacrificed too.
And then Sook Gong said the words Dad had waited to hear, what he may have gradually come to understand, but that Ye Ye had never said out loud.
“He had no choice,” Sook Gong finally said. “He did the best he could.”
I looked to Dad, expecting him to jump in or to cut Sook Gong off. Tears normally made Dad uncomfortable.
But instead, Dad lowered his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to watch.
In the background, the refrigerator was buzzing. Somewhere off in the distance, the sound of children playing outside.
The two of them sat there without speaking. They sat there, in shared silence and in shared grief.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Toronto, ON.
January 2017
In a crowded Starbucks in the underground mall beneath Toronto’s Financial District, I sat waiting. It was late January, and each time someone walked into the coffee shop, I looked up, scanning their face.
But instead of Stacey Huang, it was another man dressed in an immaculate suit. Or a group of women in pencil skirts with giant purses, their heels sparkling despite the snow and slush outside. Students with lumpy backpacks, cutting through the mall on their way to campus.
I checked the inbox on my phone.
“I’m wearing a pink shirt and a white sweater,” she had emailed to say. So far, no one there matched the description.
I checked my phone again. 3:35 p.m. She was five minutes late.
I was feeling anxious. It had taken almost two months to arrange this meeting with Stacey. And many months before that to track down her email address and work up the nerve to contact her. Stacey was the daughter of Ms. Huang from Fogo Island—the young woman who, as a toddler, had been hospitalized in Toisan. She was the Huangs’ second-born, who grew up on Fogo Island and moved to Toronto after university.
The road trip article had appeared in The Globe and Mail in June 2016.
It had been published with a large photo of Ms. Huang, and her story had been featured prominently in the piece. Afterward, I’d sent a copy of the paper to Ms. Huang. I hadn’t expected to hear back and never did. In the months following, I often wondered what she’d thought of the story. I wondered what her kids thought. Time after time, I’d thought to myself about how I would feel if I were in their shoes.
I understood what it was like having immigrant parents—parents with imperfect English. I knew the responsibility of fending off pushy salespeople at the door. I knew the feeling of seeing my parents rendered temporarily helpless by a cashier, or a bank teller, or a government letter. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I’d heard a reporter had shown up at their door, and then I’d woken up to find their story and all the bare details of their lives exposed in a national newspaper. I worried that I had betrayed her mother, especially now that I realized I’d revealed so little of myself.
But when Stacey finally wrote back to me, she was kind. “I’d be happy to chat with you,” she said. It took a few more weeks of back-and-forth to pin down a date. She was travelling, and then I was travelling. Each time she took more than a few days to respond to my emails, I would start to worry. “Maybe she’s read the story again,” I said to myself. Maybe she’d decided it was awful. Or that I was awful.
I was anxious to talk to Stacey for a lot of reasons. I wanted to hear what she and her mom thought of the story, and whether there was an update on the family’s situation, whether they were still running both restaurants, and if Ms. Huang was still running the Fogo restaurant alone. I was also curious to meet Ms. Huang’s daughter. Ms. Huang’s story had left me deeply moved, and I wondered what the experience had been like for her children.
There were other questions I hoped Stacey might help answer. By now, it had been nearly a year since my initial visit to Fogo. In the many months in between, I had discovered how closely her family’s story paralleled my own. Standing there in the Kwang Tung Restaurant a year earlier, Ms. Huang’s experience had seemed so alien. And now I knew our family’s stories were in many ways the same.
Just as I reached down to check my phone again, I spotted a young woman entering the shop. She had long, straight black hair. A white cardigan and a pink shirt. Stacey. I walked up to greet her, pausing to shake her hand. She had a round face with the same narrow eyes and high cheekbones as her mother. It almost felt like I already knew her.
“You look just like your mother,” I told her.
She responded with a laugh. She’d heard it countless times before.
* * *
“I was like, ‘It makes it sound so sad,’” Stacey said, with a little laugh. “And you happened to be there on her birthday.” Her voice trailed off. She was describing reading her mom’s story in the paper for the first time.
She’d been living in Toronto for the past two years. As soon as she graduated with her master’s degree, she moved out to Vancouver for a job. She lived and worked there for a few years before coming to Toronto. Here, she worked on the thirtieth floor of the gleaming office tower above us. She was a physiotherapist, treating executives and athletes at an elite private clinic.
Talking to her here, just another smartly dressed young woman in the middle of downtown Toronto, seemed like an impossible juxtaposition with my meeting with her mother. I tried but failed to conjure up the image of that faded restaurant on the quiet island where she’d grown up.
“It just made her sound like the loneliest person on the planet,” she said in a quiet voice.
She thought for a while.
A lot of her parents’ choices might strike others as odd, Stacey said. The decision to live separately the way they did, the decision to work 365 days a year and never close their restaurants. The fact that they never, ever spent any money on themselves.
“My mom would wear out her shoes,” she said. “Same as my dad. He owned, like, four items of clothes and washed them constantly.”
It reminded me of my own parents.
I told her about my parents and their dishcloths. And about how, even a decade after I’d moved out, I’d still find my mom wearing hand-me-downs, not from other relatives or friends, but from us. The clothes they had bought us as teenagers—studded T-shirts and brightly coloured Gap parkas we’d long since discarded—my mom was now wearing as her own.
Stacey nodded in recognition. These were decisions they had made, she said, and they were content with them. “My mom’s never, ever shown me any signs of regret,” she said. “She’s never like, ‘I wish I had done this instead.’”
Despite the challenges of living in Fogo, Stacey said, the life they’d built there was still better than what they would have had in China. For all of them.
But things had changed since my last visit, Stacey told me. Her younger brother, Richard, had recently moved back in.
My heart lifted. “So she’s no longer living alone?” I asked.
“Not for now,” Stacey said. Richard had just graduated from university and was figuring out his next move. Until then, he was living in the apartment with his mom and helping out at the restaurant.
And there was more.
She told me how, a few months earlier, her mom had called her, asking for a favour.
“Your auntie just bought a house in a new development in Oshawa,” Ms. Huang said to her. “She said we should buy one too. Can you go look at it?”
Stacey was surprised. Her parents had talked about retiring near Toronto. But they’d always talked about it as something in the far-off, distant future. It never seemed serious. They’d also never before mentioned Oshawa, about an hour’s drive away.
“Just go look at it,” Ms. Huang said.
So Stacey agreed. What was the harm in looking?
At eight a.m. on the morning that Stacey planned to set off for Oshawa, she received a phone call from her mother’s friend—the auntie who had recently bought a house in the same development.
“I’m in line at the developer’s,” the auntie told her. “I saved you a place in line.”
Stacey was confused. “I thought the office didn’t open until eleven,” she said. “Line?”
“Just get down here,” the woman said.
When Stacey arrived, there was a huge line wrapped around the developer’s offices. Her auntie waved frantically from the front. Moments later, when the doors opened, a saleswoman began rattling off information. Stacey hadn’t known what to expect, but she hadn’t expected this. The Toronto-area real estate market was in the middle of a major boom, and suddenly she was thrust to the very forefront of it. For decades, prices had inched up and then, in the past year, skyrocketed—especially in suburban areas like Oshawa. Houses were being bought sight unseen, while others sold in frantic bidding wars for hundreds of thousands of dollars over their asking price. The saleswoman pressured Stacey to make a decision.
“We have four plots available,” the woman said. She pointed to maps and layouts on the wall. “Here, here, here and here. Which do you want?”
Stacey was overwhelmed. She’d thought she was there to look at pictures and maybe take home a brochure. She picked up her phone and called her mom.
“They said there are only four houses left,” she told her. “They say we have to buy one now or they’re going to sell out.” She added, quickly, “We can always wait for the next phase to come out.”
But her mom barely hesitated. “Well,” she said, impatiently, “just buy one then.”
So they bought a house. A brand-new, four-bedroom, detached house. It has a backyard, a front lawn and a basement.
Once it’s built, Mr. and Mrs. Huang will wind down their two restaurants. They’ll retire and move in, living together for the first time in decades. Their daughter will be just an hour away. The picture-perfect retirement they’d always dreamed of.
Bitter first, sweet later.
* * *
It was nearing the end of the workday and the cafe swelled with more and more peo
ple. Beside Stacey and me, the espresso machine hissed and gurgled, exhaling long breaths of steam. By then, we’d been sitting for almost an hour. There was still something I wasn’t sure how to ask.
I explained to her the larger purpose behind our meeting. I told her about learning about my own family’s connection to Chinese restaurants. How I was trying to understand my dad’s history and how I hoped it might help me better understand him.
“My dad’s sick,” I said finally. I told her how he’d been slowing down. How he’d been skipping more of his Saturday hikes. How sometimes, when he answered the phone, he seemed to barely have enough energy to answer my questions.
I spoke slowly, unsure of how to proceed. “I guess what I’m trying to figure out is, what now?”
I knew I was being unclear. So I continued.
Her parents, like mine, had spent all their lives sacrificing. They had scrimped and saved for decades, giving it all to their kids. I recounted to Stacey how, even after my family had moved out of Abbotsford—even after Dad had become head chef at a big restaurant in Vancouver—the sacrifices never stopped. I told her how, when Expo 86 came to Vancouver, my dad took a side job supervising the overnight kitchen operations at Cara, which was catering several of the pavilions. Each day, he’d work a full day at the restaurant, then report for the night shift at Cara at around ten p.m. From there, he’d work until morning, overseeing the kitchen line. Afterward, he’d drive straight back to the restaurant, napping for just a few hours before he started work all over again.
Stacey nodded, listening. A few times, her eyes flickered with recognition.
I told her how, as I was growing up, Dad often had two, three, even four different jobs—restaurant, contracting and landscaping jobs—working evenings, weekends and all hours of the day. Eventually, he’d retired. But he’d never stopped scrimping.
“So now, here we are,” I said, gesturing around me at my five-dollar latte, at the crowd of women in their shiny heels and the men with their briefcases, at the gleaming office towers above us with their marble foyers and contemporary art collections. This place we were both living in that felt worlds away from the lives of our parents.