Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  “I’m giving you the name Marilyn. After Marilyn Monroe.”

  Two weeks later, the new Marilyn called on Freda. She couldn’t pronounce her name. She explained: “I can handle the letter ‘r.’ ” Normally, the consonant caused trouble for Chinese speakers, but at Fay-oi’s private high school in Canton, her teachers, many of whom had been educated abroad at universities in the United States or England, had drummed that quirk out of her. But the equally troublesome letter “l” following on the heels of the “r” was too much: her name came out as Mar-ri-ryn.

  Freda saw immediately where to make the alteration. “You’re having problems with the letter ‘l’; we’ll eliminate it. Instead of Marilyn, you’ll be Marion.”

  Fay-oi wanted to put her trust in her father’s friend.

  Freda tried to reassure her. “Marion is a nice name. A simple name, but still, a nice name.”

  FOR CHINESE WIVES and children hoping to emigrate from China to Canada after 1949, much depended on their performance at an interview with Canadian Immigration officers posted in the British colony of Hong Kong. Officials grilled those applying to unite with husbands or fathers in Canada. They tried to trip them up in order to determine if they were who they claimed to be, to see if their answers squared with the answers given by their sponsors. Of course, the applicants also had to pass a health test, the most important part of which was the test for tuberculosis. Every application stamped for approval helped turn a page of history, granting admittance to the first Chinese to immigrate to Canada in more than two and a half decades.

  In the late fall of 1949, Second Mother, fifteen-year-old Fay-oi and thirteen-year-old Younger Brother had presented themselves at the Canadian Immigration offices. The mother and daughter were the only women in the crowded waiting room.

  A young official ushered Second Mother and her two children into an interrogation room. She closed the door. She looked at the teenagers. “So you’re going to join your father in Canada.”

  Yes, replied Fay-oi.

  The woman asked about their relationship to Harry Lim, typing their answers as they spoke. Impressed, Fay-oi wondered if she too could one day be so competent. For all her nervousness beforehand, the questions seemed routine. The official showed no hint that she suspected they might not be telling the full truth. Fay-oi did not volunteer that her father, Harry Lim, had two wives, or that her mother, the first wife, was not the young woman being interviewed with her.

  After thirty minutes, the official closed the file folder on the table, stood up and declared the interview over.

  “When do we come back for our next interview?” asked Fay-oi.

  “Oh, there’s no need for you to come again,” the official said. Smiling broadly, she shook hands all around. “Good luck in Canada.”

  FOR MORE THAN half his lifetime, Harry Lim had navigated a course that he expected would lead him back to China, the land of his birth. Instead, nearing sixty years old—the threshold of revered old age—he was preparing to welcome a wife he’d hardly lived with and two teenaged children, one a son he’d never met, the other a daughter who had no memory of him, whom he’d last seen when she was two.

  Fate had plucked Harry Lim out of China as a young teenager. He was born in the village of Golden Creek in the county of Toisan, in the province of Kwangtung. Located several miles inland up Pond River, one of the hundreds of tributaries of the Pearl River that empty into the South China Sea, Golden Creek was nestled into the base of a mountain (it was more hill than mountain, but locals called it a mountain because it rose abruptly at the flood plain’s edge). Along the village’s ten lanes, squat adobe houses were paired around partly roofed-in courtyards. Larger houses boasted a front door opening onto one lane, and a back door onto another.

  Out the back door and down the lane from Harry’s father lived the family of Lim Jim, of the same clan but otherwise of no direct relation. At some point in the 1890s, Mr. Lim had left his family and the poverty of the village for Canada, known as “Gold Mountain,” where finding work was a prize in itself. A decade later, he returned to China for a one-year visit. During his stay, he took pity on his neighbour’s boy, a gregarious youngster named Lim Chung-foon, and offered to rescue him from an unhappy home life by taking him to Canada. The boy’s only sibling, a sister, had been given away at birth and he’d lost his mother at an early age. His father, who seemed to care most about imbibing homemade rice wine, had remarried and, as often happened, the new wife favoured her own son.

  In Lim Jim’s own early years in Vancouver, he had established himself as one of Chinatown’s more successful merchants, selling to the Chinese throughout British Columbia. His store, Gim Lee Yuen, carried imported Chinese herbs and dried and preserved vegetables at first. Over time, Lim Jim added goods such as linens, mahjong sets, slippers and dishes to his shelves.

  Lim Jim financed young Chung-foon’s ship fare to Canada (once in Canada, the boy adopted the name Harry) and arranged payment of the five hundred dollar head tax due upon entry. It was a formidable sum, equal to two years’ wages for a Chinese labourer in Canada. The boy proved industrious. From a labourer’s job in a sawmill on the banks of the Fraser River, he moved to a job as a cook at a chop suey house in Vancouver’s Chinatown and, in recognition of his talents, was promoted to head chef.

  After a decade, Harry had savings enough to visit China and stay for about two years. He took as a wife a delicately pretty girl named Chung Yee-hing. Her well-to-do parents owned a successful garlic-producing farm and had promised their daughter, a beloved and only child, to the son of a wealthy family. But after the obligatory background check by a matchmaker to confirm the suitability of the union, the young man’s parents, suspecting mixed blood in the girl’s ancestry, called off the arrangement. Yee-hing’s parents had little choice but to settle for a lesser match. Which was how Harry Lim, born into a poor family, came to marry above his station.

  With her first pregnancy, Yee-hing delivered the all-important son necessary to continue the lineage. Besides “watering the roots,” Harry achieved the peasant’s dream of “tiles over one’s head.” His house, the first to be raised in Golden Creek in his generation, spoke well of his sacrifice of toil abroad. Two and a half stories high and built of brick, the house had modern touches like glass in the windows and tiles on the floors—red clay tiles to warm the first floor, ceramic tiles on the second to keep it cool underfoot in the intense summer heat. A second set of stairs from the master bedroom on the second floor led to the rooftop terrace, which spilled over with potted chrysanthemums. From there, one could enjoy the sunrise and sunset and marvel at the orb of the sun reflected in the wide tranquil river. At the nearest bend in the river, a ten-minute walk away, one could catch a ferry going upriver to the district market town or downriver to the coast, where farther to the west lay Hong Kong, the departure point of ships bound for Vancouver.

  Soon after his son, Min-hon, was born, Harry left his family and began his second sojourn in Canada. By now, part owner of a café in Chinatown, he diligently sent money to help support his family. He kept Yee-hing in the style to which she had been accustomed: besides the usual personal girl servant for a wife (even poor women had such servants; to be sold into servitude was often the best a girl from a destitute family could hope for), she had a woman servant who did the housekeeping, washed the laundry, shopped and cooked. And he made sure that Min-hon received a good education, sending him to a school in the district town.

  In 1930, Canada began a slide into what would become the Great Depression. China, owing to its silver-based currency, was spared—for the moment. Harry decided to pack in his life abroad; a dollar could be stretched many times further in China than in Canada. In the way a gambler might cash in his chips, Harry sold his share in the café, bid his goodbyes and left for China. As Harry liked to say, “Life is a gamble.”

  BACK AGAIN IN Golden Creek village, Harry added to his family when Yee-hing produced a second-born, a daughter.

&nbs
p; Sadly, at age three, the girl succumbed to illness.

  Now past forty, Yee-hing defied the odds and became pregnant again. For the second time, she delivered a girl. On the arrival of Fay-oi, Harry expressed disappointment with his wife. “You keep producing daughters!”

  Harry still had unfulfilled ambition. “I would like more sons,” he declared, and announced his intention to take a second wife—one young and fertile. A wealthy friend of his in Canton arranged to send him a wife from among his seven household servants. At fourteen, Yip Jau-wen was one year older than Harry’s son, Min-hon. Yee-hing wept bitterly. Years later she would confide in Fay-oi: “What could I do about it? I could do nothing.”

  At least Harry had the grace to keep his two wives separate; he installed Second Wife in his father’s old house on No. 9 Lane, and left First Wife in the house he’d built on No. 2 Lane. He moved between the houses, uniting his households for mealtimes at No. 2 Lane.

  Within weeks, Second Wife was pregnant. The baby, a girl, died just days after birth. A few months later, Second Wife was again expecting.

  As Harry bided his time, hoping for a son, he invested in a gambling house with a partner. The venture would turn out to be his undoing; such houses of chance run by men with the “Gold Mountain walk” marked them as targets. In short order, astute gamblers bankrupted Harry’s operation. Chastened, Harry pondered how to make back what he’d squandered. He decided his best option was another sojourn in Canada. First Wife went to her parents for help; her husband didn’t have money enough for the boat passage.

  With his in-laws’ generosity, Harry found himself once again on Canadian soil. His former associates happily took him back as a partner and as head chef in their restaurant business. Devoted patrons timed their dining out for nights when Harry Lim watched over the kitchen. And in Golden Creek, Second Wife delivered her absent husband a healthy boy.

  FIVE YEARS INTO Harry’s third sojourn abroad, the Pacific became a theatre of war. In July of 1937, in an act of aggression that took both China and the international community by surprise, Japan, for years encroaching in the north of China, launched a full-scale military invasion of the country. Its planes swept down from the north, pummelling China’s cities with bombs. By autumn, its armies had stormed into the country’s central cities. Foreigners who escaped before Japan blockaded Chinese ports told of the Japanese burning and plundering, conducting mass executions, and murdering and raping at random, including searching house to house for “flower maidens.”

  A year earlier, Min-hon, by then married and, in the hierarchy of a Chinese family, superior to his mother, had uprooted everyone to the Portuguese colony of Macau, along the coast towards Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there with a two-year program in Chinese medicine. He had wanted to study to be a doctor of Western medicine, but his English was woefully inadequate. The family enjoyed life in the colony. They lived in a spacious apartment in a large and airy colonial house set in two acres of luxuriant flowering trees and plants. A servant came every day to prepare meals for the household, do the housework and walk Fay-oi to and from her primary school. As Min-hon’s course wound down, however, war reached the south of China. It brought floods of refugees into Macau (the colony maintained its neutrality throughout the war) as families fled their cities and villages ahead of the Japanese. In a place already renowned for its casino tycoons and gangsters, lawlessness erupted. Food shortages worsened. Frustrated businessmen shuttered their shops and houses to return to the comparative safety of their rural villages. Min-hon had to curtail his studies. The war had already cut off his father’s remittances from abroad; if they stayed much longer in Macau, they’d starve. Back home in Golden Creek, at least they had their own small garden.

  The household divided up, travelling separately. As with every train and river boat leaving Macau, the boat that Fay-oi and her mother took was jammed to overflowing with people and their possessions. The head boatman brooked no exceptions to his rule: “Everybody must sit; nobody can lie down!” His crew pushed on through the night. The constant retching of passengers sick from the fumes of the coughing motor as it struggled against the current kept sleep at bay. Suddenly, a boatload of men, their rifles silhouetted in the moonlight, halted their passage. They forced the loaded boat ashore and ordered everyone off: “Leave everything behind!”

  Fay-oi held tightly onto her mother’s arm. She wondered if they were about to be shot.

  On shore, two of the gang worked their way through the terrified crowd, speaking to small groups in hushed voices. As soon as the boat’s contents were unloaded, they said, and as long as no one made any trouble, the passengers would be allowed to return to the vessel and go on their way. Fay-oi buried her head in her mother’s chest. She couldn’t bear the thought of the bandits helping themselves to her wardrobe of school dresses. However, much greater treasure had been left behind on the boat: her mother’s store of jade and gold. Fortuitously, Yee-hing had sewn some cash and jewellery into the lining of the padded jacket she wore.

  The family arrived in Golden Creek to find the houses swollen with returning children and relatives. Many had at one time left for the towns and cities to work or open businesses, and now, to escape the rain of firebombs and fighting in the streets, had come back. With so many extra mouths to feed, food was in short supply. Thievery was a constant threat, mostly from desperate residents of nearby villages. The residents of Golden Creek set up a neighbourhood watch at each end of every lane. Min-hon contributed sixteen guns from his father’s collection, normally used for bird-hunting. “Who are you? What’s your name?” demanded those on watch if they spied an unfamiliar face. If they didn’t recognize the name, they fired a shot.

  Min-hon and his wife decided that, to relieve the pressure on the family’s limited resources, they would head for Canton, where they would take a chance on finding teaching jobs. When Yee-hing’s cash and jewellery ran out, she sold her wedding gifts, bolts of wool and silk. Eventually, goods counted for nothing; food could only be bought with cash. When the soil no longer turned up sweet potatoes, people scrounged for edible berries, then roots of wild plants. Starvation claimed Golden Creek’s first victims. An old lady and two teenaged brothers, their bodies skeletal, lay dead where they had fallen outside their home. People who’d come from the city told of worse, of piles of dead bodies. Of parents abandoning their children in public places in hopes that someone wealthy might chance by who would rescue them. And of people driven mad with hunger: a mother, thinking her baby to be a plucked chicken, had put it into a hot wok. People believed these stories, apocryphal or not, because they had witnessed unimaginable deprivation and loss.

  The villagers of Golden Creek grew anxious, expecting the Japanese eventually to target their village. Sure enough, the day came. Fay-oi, then seven or eight years old, heard a stampede of feet by the house and the tense voices of mothers hurrying their children. Alone in the house with her mother, who was ill and confined to bed, Fay-oi ran outside. Neighbours said the Japanese had struck at the houses clustered at the bend in the river. From the rooftop terrace, Fay-oi saw for herself: a large military boat moored there and smoke billowing from houses nearby.

  She rushed to rouse her mother. Yee-hing had not eaten for days and had been coughing up blood. “Mama, everyone is going to the mountain.”

  “I’m too weak.” Go, she said weakly. Go, quickly.

  “If you’re going to die, Mama, I want to die with you.” Fay-oi crawled under the covers of the bed that mother and daughter had shared ever since Harry left for Canada.

  In the stillness of the house, the two clung to each other. They awaited the inevitable: the sound of breaking glass as the enemy broke through the first door, the clang of the slatted metal of the second door sliding across, the smashing of the wooden lock and the creak of the massive timber door swinging aside. Boot steps on the ground floor, then hastening up the stairs. Soldiers bursting into the bedroom. Instead, the silence gave way to the rustle of the leave
s and the music of songbirds. A few hours later, Fay-oi heard the relieved chatter of returning villagers. She ran out: Why had they come down off the mountain? They said that from on high among the pine trees, they had seen Japanese soldiers board their boat and move on down the river. They snickered at the Japanese: maybe they were too lazy to make the ten-minute walk from the river’s edge to Golden Creek.

  Eight years after Japan had invaded China, the occupation ended; that same day, Japan announced its unconditional surrender in the Pacific War, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still, the people of China would have no respite from conflict. Hardly were the Japanese gone when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists renewed their civil war.

  AS BAD AS THINGS in China may have looked to Harry, he saw his prospects in Canada only improving. He and several partners had renovated a property on Vancouver’s Pender Street and renamed it W.K. Oriental Gardens (W.K. stood for wah kew, a term to describe “overseas Chinese”). Richly decorated with wood panelling and rows of tasselled silk lanterns hanging from the ceiling, the restaurant was located up a wide staircase on a second floor, evoking a tradition in Canton that sharing food and conversation is to be enjoyed away from prying eyes and the din at street level. By the mid-1940s, W.K. Gardens had become one of Chinatown’s busiest restaurants. Its four-page menu offered Canadian and Chinese dishes, from T-bone steak with a choice of seven styles of potatoes (French fries to potatoes au gratin), to nine variations on chop suey. Sundays were given over to Chinese cuisine with a set banquet menu. Waiters rolled out rounds of plywood to enlarge the tables and seat as many as five hundred guests. Several nights a week, the restaurant offered a popular ticketed “Dine and Dance” evening, to the swing music of a big band.