Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  ALSO BY DENISE CHONG

  The Concubine’s Children

  The Girl in the Picture

  Egg on Mao

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 Denise Chong

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Chong, Denise

  Lives of the family : stories of fate and circumstance / Denise Chong.

  Issued in electronic format.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36125-7

  1. Chinese—Ontario—Ottawa—History. 2. Chinese—Ontario—Ottawa—Biography. 3. Ottawa (Ont.)—History. I. Title.

  FC3096.9.C5C46 2013 971.3′84004951 C2013-901519-1

  cover design by Leah Springate

  Cover images: floral border © Dariara, playing card paper © Alisbalb, old blank paper © Lukas Pobuda, vintage frame © Ryan Deberardinis, floral background © Hcvchou; all Dreamstime.com.

  Photographs (front, left to right): Golden Lang, Campbell’s Bay, Quebec Courtesy Golden Lang; Tom and Marion Hum, and their children, Victor and Wallace, Ottawa Courtesy Marion Hum; Betty Joe, Margaret Hamilton, Mrs. Shung Joe, Unknown, Ottawa Courtesy William Joe; (back) Harry Johnston and his daughter Doris, Perth, Ontario Courtesy Linda Hum.

  Text images: floral border © Dariara, old blank paper © Lukas Pobuda; both Dreamstime.com

  v3.1

  For my dear friend Diana Lary

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE ~ Arrival (1)

  TWO ~ Layers

  THREE ~ Obstacles

  FOUR ~ Opportunity

  FIVE ~ Between

  SIX ~ Fortitude

  SEVEN ~ Ambition

  EIGHT ~ Outcomes

  NINE ~ Resolve

  TEN ~ Lives

  ELEVEN ~ Home

  TWELVE ~ Arrival (2)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL Chinese immigrants to Canada before and during the era of the head tax, my grandparents hailed from the countryside near Canton in south China. My grandfather came as a “sojourner,” seeking work to support family he’d left behind in his village and planning one day to take a nest egg home to buy land, build a house and retire. Both he and my grandmother lived out their lives in Canada.

  My four siblings and I grew up in the logging town of Prince George in northern British Columbia, where my father had taken a job as a radio operator with the federal government. We were the only Chinese among the families living at the Prince George airport, in housing provided for employees. In reflecting on our experience, I need reminding of our initial surprise at having our attention called—through name-calling and taunts—to our being Chinese. I do remember that it didn’t take long before what we had in common with neighbours and classmates mattered more than our differences. I can, however, pinpoint the moment of our arrival in town.

  It’s midnight on Christmas Eve, 1958. My father, in our 1949 Meteor, drives the deserted streets. We peer over snowbanks looking for 432 George Street. My mother has recalled this street number from fifteen years earlier when she’d addressed an envelope enclosing a note from her mother to a friend working as a chef at a new Chinese café here. We find that café, the Shasta, but it’s closed. My father sees staff at the back sharing dinner around a table, so he knocks at the door. The proprietors, Eleanor and Wayne Chow, whom we’ve never met before, exclaim how happy they are to see some Chinese people and welcome us inside.

  The Chinese café, a monument to small-town Canadian life, is a recurring point of reference in the stories in this book. Like Chinese laundries of an earlier time, these restaurants once dotted the landscape across the country. Of course, south China was not full of laundrymen and restaurateurs. Immigrants, facing discrimination and possessing limited knowledge of English, saw these businesses as opportunities available to them. The Chinese cafés initially served only Western food. Not until after the Second World War, when owners were looking to attract more customers, did they offer both Western and Chinese food—not what the Chinese cooked for themselves, but rather “Westernized” Chinese food such as chicken balls and sweet and sour pork.

  With time, these restaurants inevitably changed hands. Some of the early sojourners packed it in and returned to China. Sometimes their cafés were bought by their staffs. And when they too moved on, that niche was occupied by more recent immigrants.

  FOR MY SIBLINGS and me, our being “Chinese” and China itself, the country of our ancestors, hardly figured in our daily lives. We spoke almost no Chinese and, living where we did, we rarely saw anybody Chinese. Occasionally, we accompanied our father on his volunteer missions to a rooming house in town owned by the Chinese Freemasons that housed a handful of aging Chinese “bachelors.” By the early 1970s, these residents were dying out. One was a man who’d been my grandmother’s on-again, off-again lover for seventeen years, a relationship I only learned of years later when I was researching my family memoir, The Concubine’s Children. At the time of his death, I thought it odd that he’d left instructions to send what remained of his life’s savings—thirty-five hundred dollars—to his wife and son in China. Clearly, these were people from whom he’d spent a lifetime apart, yet to whom he still felt an obligation. For the most part, such ties had been severed. At the time, I also didn’t know that my mother, born in Canada, had a blood sister and a half-brother still alive in China, and neither did she.

  In many ways, immigrants and their families conduct life at a frontier, where what was once strange eventually becomes familiar and commonplace. Finding one’s footing in a new land and visiting a homeland only in memory is universal to the immigrant experience. However, I came to understand that in the history of immigration to Canada, the clichéd successes of those in my parents’ and grandparents’ time—of a better life, of moving up in the world and prospering—came for many at a severe price. For them, home and family were one and the same word. They held them to be inextricably linked, only to see events conspire to separate one from the other.

  The stories in this book of pivotal moments in the lives of Chinese families are linked to the arc of the immigrant’s adjustment to life at this frontier. In exploring how I would document that trajectory, I looked for moments when the forces of history, politics and family combined to bring that immigrant experience into sharp relief.

  LIVES WERE AFFECTED MOST during the period from 1923 until 1962. The year 1923 was the beginning of exclusion, when Canada replaced the head tax with the Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration. Sojourning “bachelors” already in Canada could leave and re-enter the country, but they could not bring wives and children to Canada. The law also denied resident Chinese in Canada the right to become naturalized, and labelled all Chinese, immigrants or Canadian-born, as “alien.” This inhospitable legislation would remain in place for twenty-four years; by comparison, the average lifespan in China then was about forty years. The year 1962 saw Canada
introduce new immigration regulations, which would expand the categories of admissible Asians. That led to further changes in 1967 that eliminated discrimination with respect to immigration on the basis of race or country of origin.

  Over those years of restricted Chinese immigration, world events unfolded with calamitous effect. In 1937 Japan invaded China, marking the start of China’s Resistance War. That war became part of the global conflict of the Second World War, in which Canada was soon involved. For the duration of the war, all civilian traffic halted across the Pacific. On V-J Day in 1945, Japan’s surrender simultaneously ended the war in China and once again overseas Chinese could travel to their homeland. However, peace did not come to China. At war’s end, the Kuomintang government and the Chinese Communist Party, which had formed a united front to fight the Japanese, resumed their fight against each other.

  In 1947, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, allowing that exclusion was “objectionable,” repealed the act; but, he defended maintaining greater restrictions on Chinese immigrants than on European immigrants because “the people of Canada do not wish … to make a fundamental alteration to the character of our population.” Canada permitted Chinese immigration again under its “Rules for Asiatics”: Chinese men holding Canadian citizenship could sponsor wives and underage children. A brisk illegal trade began in “paper families.” So-called paper sons and daughters came to Canada under fraudulent sponsorship; the real offspring were either still in China or had died.

  The civil war in China came to an end with the Communists’ victory in 1949, which they would herald as China’s “Liberation.” Like overseas Chinese, much of the population of south China was staunchly anti-Communist. Within months, the Communists brought their radical program of “Land Reform” to the south. The program to confiscate land from landlords and redistribute it to the poor had won peasants in the north to the side of the Communists during the civil war. In the south, the Communists used Land Reform to label anyone standing in their way as landlords or capitalists. As a consequence, many Chinese with relatives abroad had escape on their minds. The British colony of Hong Kong became the all-important, and only, exit port.

  In 1955, the Canadian government, recognizing that exclusion had shrunk the Chinese population in Canada and created a shortage of Chinese women, allowed men to sponsor fiancées, a provision that gave rise to “COD brides”—the groom’s family bore the costs of the woman’s passage and paid “cash on delivery,” the traditional “bride price” due her family upon her arrival in Canada. Hong Kong became the major bride market. By the mid-1950s, the colony was plagued by overcrowding and workers laboured under deplorable conditions. Its residents were also eyeing a way to leave the colony for better prospects in North America.

  I HONED IN ON THE lone Chinese family and their restaurant in a Canadian town as a way to convey the immigrant experience. Behind that sign on the business, and in the rooms behind or the apartment above, the everyday life of the family would test their ability to adapt.

  Fear mongering over “yellow peril” on the west coast had led the federal government to impose the drastic measures of the head tax and exclusion. The farther east Chinese sojourning and immigrant men went, the more they left behind anti-Oriental sentiment. Toronto and Montreal had eastern Canada’s largest Chinese populations—still tiny, however, in comparison with that of Vancouver or Victoria.

  The families in these stories went farther into the frontier; they settled in and around the Ottawa area, including villages and towns up the Ottawa Valley and on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, and down to the St. Lawrence River. Ottawa had Chinese-owned laundries as early as the late 1890s, and later, confectioneries and cafés, but no Chinatown (until the influx of immigrants from Hong Kong in the late 1960s). When exclusion took effect, Ottawa’s Chinese families could be counted on one hand. In communities nearby, other than the family or two that owned a café, often the only other Chinese in town were bachelors who worked for them.

  In Ottawa, these families created a microcosm of what they’d had in China, where some had come from the same or adjacent villages. Evidence appears in the recurring surnames; Hum, for example, shows up frequently. The explanation is in the pattern of migration from villages dominated by one clan; the clan may be able to trace back to a shared ancestor but its members may or may not be relatives. Like a market town in China, Ottawa functioned as a place where Chinese living outside the city came for supplies, typically to one well-known Chinese-owned store that doubled as a community gathering place. And, given the importance of economic fortunes to the immigrant’s success, Ottawa provided jobs and created boom times as a result of a growing public service that was required to meet the needs of the wartime and then the postwar economy.

  EACH OF THE FAMILIES in these pages is emblematic of the migrant in the immigrant; on the move not only from their homeland to a new land, but from their past toward an uncertain future. Taken together, their stories travel the arc of that adjustment. The path they take lurches—it starts, it stops, even reverses in the face of happenstance and events unforeseen and amid a churning mix of setback and achievement. It may take an entire lifetime or more to see progress, but with each individual family come defining moments that reveal the temperament needed to glimpse and reach for the promise of a future. Each of their stories honours a shared history.

  Harry Lim’s household in China: (front row) Second Mother (in white) and her son; First Mother (in black) and her children, Fay-oi, and (back row) Min-hon, and his wife.

  Courtesy Marion Lew

  ONE

  ARRIVAL (1)

  FAY-OI LIM, RESIGNED TO HER limited choices, selected a white jacket, made of taffeta and trimmed in gold thread, and a long black skirt. Another hand-me-down. Not in the sense of faded colours, frayed edges or telltale adjusted hemlines, but rather of formal wear long out of style. Certainly not something seen in the hallways at school. At least it fit.

  She was resolved not to utter a word of complaint. To do so would show ingratitude to the family of her father’s benefactor. Lim Jim, a clansman who had been responsible for bringing her father to Canada years ago, was now both neighbour and landlord to them in Vancouver. He owned two houses side by side on Grant Street; he and his wife lived in one and he rented the other to Fay-oi’s father, so that Second Mother, Younger Brother and Fay-oi could be installed in a home as soon as they arrived from China. Lim Jim’s wife had been unfailingly kind; she came by every day to see how they were doing. She had noticed that Fay-oi dressed for school in mandarin-collared cheong sams. When she learned that the teenager owned no Western-styled clothing, she took it upon herself to ask her daughter Priscilla and her granddaughter Evelyn to go through their closets to see what they had no use for anymore, items they wouldn’t wear again.

  In China, when Fay-oi needed new clothing she asked her mother to buy material and they’d take it to a tailor to be made up. She had assumed she’d do the same in Canada to assemble a new wardrobe—one that would suit the fashions on the streets of Vancouver.

  Once here, Fay-oi realized she’d miscalculated.

  She knew that her father had spent a great deal of money to bring her, Second Mother and Younger Brother from China. At the last minute—saying he couldn’t wait for them to get here—he’d changed their boat tickets to costly plane tickets. But the extent of her father’s financial sacrifice became clearer when Fay-oi saw that among the thirty-two students in Miss Howard’s class, one of two classes designated for new immigrants at Seymour Elementary School, she was one of only three girls. Few fathers indulged in the extravagance of bringing a daughter from China; sons were the rule. And they didn’t move into a house like she did; they shared rented rooms with their fathers. To a one, her male classmates spoke of their eagerness to be finished school so that they could find work to repay their fathers for the expense of getting them out of China.

  Fay-oi told herself it was unreasonable to ask her father to spend yet more m
oney on her for new clothes. Regardless, she felt terribly self-conscious.

  COMPOUNDING HER awkwardness was her name. When she introduced herself to someone her age who was Chinese but born here, because they spoke little Chinese they would mishear or mispronounce her name. She’d go through the same routine: explain that “fay” was the character meaning intelligent, and that “oi” was the character meaning love. Not that it helped them to remember. They didn’t go by Chinese names. Like anyone born in Canada, they had English names.

  Fay-oi came up with a plan. It depended on Freda Lim. Twenty-eight years old, Freda was married to Wally, a cook and a good friend of her father’s. Fay-oi had a couple of favours to ask. She wanted to make her own clothes; could Freda teach her to sew? And she felt uncomfortable having only a Chinese name; could Freda give her a Canadian name?

  On both counts, Fay-oi believed she’d be in good hands. Freda Lim had a stellar reputation as a dressmaker and, being Canadian-born and raised, she could be trusted to choose a name. Freda’s early success was well known; at the age of twenty, single and living in Victoria, she’d had her own design and dressmaking shop. Then she’d married and moved to Vancouver, started over in her own home and soon had both Chinese and white customers. In Fay-oi’s eyes, Freda was a modern woman.

  Freda would have been happy to give Fay-oi sewing lessons, but with three young children underfoot, she couldn’t possibly find the time: “It’s hard enough for me to keep any regular hours for my business.”

  However, Freda rose to the challenge of giving Fay-oi an English name. She liked this outgoing girl. She sized her up: tall and slender with a beautiful face, though not in the classic Chinese sense. Fay-oi had an olive complexion rather than pale porcelain-like skin, and freckles. A generous mouth instead of a round one. High cheek bones set off large eyes. Her nose had a high bridge, especially uncommon among the Chinese. Her height and looks must come from her mother, thought Freda. For her taste, Fay-oi’s father, Harry Lim, a short man, could best be described as average-looking. His daughter, on the other hand, would turn heads.