Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  Lui-sang’s performance had convinced Canadian Immigration officials once that she was Jin-hai Hum, the middle daughter of the couple in Ottawa who, at the time, rented rooms in Third Auntie’s house.

  Third Auntie said they should stick to the original deal. A calculating woman, she had happened to hear the Hums, when she’d rented them rooms, speak of a daughter who, had she lived, would be fourteen. She had pounced: How many children did Mr. Hum register with Canadian Immigration? Three; he’d neglected to mention that one had died. Mrs. Eng asked to buy the dead daughter’s “slot” for her niece Lui-sang to enter Canada. The girl was sixteen, but being short, could easily pass for fourteen. Besides, authorities likely wouldn’t try to verify the existence of a daughter. The birth or death of a daughter was hardly notable, warranting, at best, a slip of paper with a name on it tucked into the pages of a family’s genealogy book.

  The two families, at loggerheads over where Lui-sang should live, agreed to put the issue to the matriarch of Third Auntie’s family. She lived in Stephenville, Newfoundland, having only recently reunited with Lui-sang’s grandfather after being separated by exclusion for twenty-five years. Afraid of making the wrong decision, the old lady dithered so long that Auntie eventually got her way.

  Within days of moving in with the Engs on Frank Street, Lui-sang met Uncle’s mother. She was so affected by how desperately the young girl wanted to find work in order to send money to her mother that the old woman went straight away to talk to the owner of a café where she herself had worked nights in the kitchen. By week’s end, Lui-sang was hired to work six days a week, eight to five, at the New Astor Café around the corner. She put in long days, beginning with fixing breakfast for the four Eng children. At the restaurant, besides keeping up with dirty dishes, every day she had to peel a hundred pounds of potatoes, push them, potato by potato, through the French Fry chopper, and then work her way through a bushel basket of raw chicken breasts, cutting them into cubes for the next day’s chicken balls. Back at home, exhausted, her arms red and inflamed from the lye in the dishwashing solution, she’d start dinner for the children.

  Now and again, Lui-sang would take a detour on her way home from work to swing by her paper family’s house. Suspecting as much, Auntie barked at her: “Just stay in the house! You go to work, okay. Go to school, okay. But the rest of the time, stay in the house!” Her niece paid no heed. Whereas she was glum and morose at the Engs’, her cheerful self and infectious laugh came back at the Hums. In any event, her paper mother wanted to see her at least monthly; she insisted on handing over to her the proportionate share of the family allowance cheque that she got from the government, payments that would continue until her deceased daughter would have turned sixteen.

  Six months into her life in Canada, Lui-sang’s paper father spoke to her in confidence. His tone was ominous. “Do you know why you were brought to Canada?” She repeated what she’d been told in Hong Kong; her Stephenville grandfather told her mother to send her to Canada to mind Third Auntie’s children: “Third Auntie needs to go outside to work to get more money.”

  “That’s not why. I’ll tell you why. You babysit for a while and then when you’re older, you apply to get your Auntie’s youngest brother to come here to be your husband.”

  Several months later, Mr. Hum brought happy news to Lui-sang: her grandmother had found a bride—a girl in Newfoundland—for her uncle. I’m so lucky, realized Lui-sang. Perhaps fate had taken its first turn in her favour. She redoubled her efforts to learn English. In addition to taking night school classes for new immigrants, she signed up for the remedial English class at the Chinese Christian Mission. Miss Ricker, the deaconess, a former missionary now in her sixties, held sessions on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons; Lui-sang showed up on Sundays, joining six or seven others. When Third Auntie came upon Lui-sang’s notebooks, she collected them and told her children to tear them up. Lui-sang wondered if her aunt feared she’d better herself too quickly.

  LAI-SIM YEE FELT ONLY indifference when told by her grandmother that she was to be sent to Canada to marry. In the five years since her arrival in Hong Kong she had never felt comfortable. Having lived only a rural life and speaking her village dialect, she felt others, with their urban ways and their refined Cantonese, looked down on her. Neither did she feel at home with her extended family in Hong Kong; she was the daughter of First Mother who died years before. But she was as much an outsider because she had “gone out”; a girl who has left her birth family, usually by marriage but in her case because she was adopted out, does not return.

  As the one who’d given her granddaughter away the first time, the old lady had no qualms about doing it again. She saw her chance when Canada introduced a program in 1955 allowing Chinese men in Canada holding Canadian citizenship to sponsor a fiancée. Lai-sim knew nothing of the man she was to marry, only that her grandmother and his had concluded a deal to send her as a COD bride.

  On December 10, 1959, eight days after Lai-sim arrived in Ottawa (the program’s rules specified that a marriage had to take place within thirty days), she married Yu-nam Leung, a thin man whose subdued manner was the opposite of her chatty nature. The couple moved into Mr. Kung’s rooming house on Frank Street. Ten months later, they had a squawling infant boy, Billy.

  Lai-sim’s experience in Canada echoed the isolation she’d felt in Hong Kong. At first, she’d felt hemmed in by the cold and her fear of slipping on the snow and ice. Then, more so by her lack of English. When she did venture out with Billy, knowing she wouldn’t be able to ask directions never mind comprehend the answer, she circled the same nearby blocks.

  Yu-nam’s fourteen hour days at his dishwashing job left Lai-sim only the company of the baby. Her one slim hope of turning up something lucky in Canada seemed to have evaporated. She’d written to an address in Altona, Manitoba, to the husband of the grandmother who’d sent her abroad. She asked after an older brother from her birth family, named Mun-fei, whom she understood to have gone to work for him. If the family in Hong Kong was hostile towards her, perhaps, throught Lai-sim, the siblings she had yet to meet might feel differently. When no reply came, she tried again. She wondered if her rudimentary Chinese was the problem; she’d had only a fifth-grade education. Again she received no response.

  When Billy was only months old, Lai-sim received news of Mun-fei. A brother-in-law in Canada told her that Mun-fei had moved to Winnipeg, and that he went by the name Henry. The two siblings had a tearful reunion by telephone. We were inseparable as children, Henry told his sister: “Grandma never told me she was giving you away.”

  Soon, Lai-sim created her own version of an extended family. First she added Henry, whom she persuaded to move to Ottawa, then she found him a wife in Hong Kong whom he sponsored as his bride. The extra helping hands proved a lifeline for Lai-sim and Yu-nam when he was confined to hospital for six months with tuberculosis. Lai-sim got the family on welfare. In order to keep up remittances to their families, she got a job under the table, washing dishes at the Ding Ho Café. There, she put in twelve-hour shifts on nights that Henry had off from the kitchen at the Cathay House Restaurant, so that he could mind Billy for her.

  Yet Lai-sim still had time to dream. On her walks in the neighbourhood, she watched a high-rise go up. If I had money, I’d like to own a building like that, she told herself. She passed by storefronts on Bank Street and imagined the premises as her own café. With her eye for opportunity, she spied a chance to become a homeowner when her grandfather retired to Ottawa. He took a room in a boarding house one street over, on Waverley. Lai-sim had the idea that she and Henry, whose wife, Chun, by then was expecting their second child, could afford to buy that very house. The smallest on the block, it was in the least desirable location, bordering Colonial Furniture’s parking lot. She got Henry to talk to the landlord, a Jewish gentleman, who agreed to sell. Their grandfather loaned Lai-sim her share, and paid Henry’s from his pending inheritance of the proceeds from the sale of the Al
tona café. With that, Lai-sim Yee became a homeowner, living a few steps from the woman she recognized from Frank Street.

  “IF I’M NOT ON THIS SIDE, I’m on that side,” Lai-sim Leung and Lui-sang Wong instructed their families, should anyone need one or the other and have to go looking for her.

  “Or, if I’m not on that side, then I’m on this side.”

  Like two twittering birds on a wire, the women surveyed the landscape of their shared present, the newness of their lives in Canada. At their backs was China, from which they had escaped and could not, perhaps ever, return. The two friends did not bring up the past that was China. Everyone knows you can’t have a good life in wartime. And that it was bad when the Communists came. To bring up the past would be to talk about it too much and not enough at the same time. Memories push up and then you have to push them back down.

  THE ARREST OF See-fat Hum had been an ambush.

  On the eve of the lunar new year of 1950, the Hum family unlocked all doors and opened all windows, to let go of the old year and welcome the new. Like everyone at the table, eight-year-old Lui-sang eagerly anticipated the traditional fat choy soup. The new year’s greeting of Kung hey fat choy! bestows a wish of good fortune and prosperity while conjuring thoughts of the rich soup, laden with thin strands of black moss fungi, bean curd strips as fine as silk, pungent mushrooms, oysters and salted turnip.

  Suddenly, two policemen, brandishing rifles, barged in. They hoisted See-fat out of his chair. “You are going to jail! You are an enemy of the People! You do bad things against the Revolution!” As they manhandled him out the door, Lui-sang wailed after her father, “Baba!” But her mother, Hoi-sui, declared that she was unafraid; she felt certain that the Communist Party cadres in charge would soon see their mistake and release her husband.

  See-fat had been arrested because of his position as the village’s financial administrator. Yet, he held that job at the behest of the villagers. In 1937, by order of the Nationalist government, the village lost its Kuomintang county administrators to the war effort against the Japanese. The people of the village asked See-fat’s father if he’d consider giving up his son to the job, since he’d gone to a reputable military school and was the best-educated man in the village.

  A week after his arrest, an aunt with contacts in the Communist Party brought dire news: See-fat was to be shot the next morning. She hastily added that she knew the route by which the police would lead See-fat out of the village. They could go there and watch for him to pass by, so that they could see each other’s faces one last time.

  Hoi-sui, stricken, said she could not bear to go. She was four months along in her pregnancy and feared the anxiety of the moment would cause her to miscarry.

  The aunt spoke solemnly to Lui-sang, giving instructions for the morning. Where to go, where to stand. “Hang on to your little brother with one hand, and your little sister with the other, and wait for your father to come.”

  The next morning Lui-sang’s younger siblings, one six and the other three, could not understand why they stood at the roadside. Finally, she saw their father, walking with his hands bound together behind his back. “Baba!” she called out. His eyes met hers, then he said, “Listen to your mama and look after your little brother and sister.”

  Back at home, Hoi-sui, who had remained behind with her youngest child, aged two, asked of Lui-sang, “You saw your father go away?” She nodded.

  Yet no confirmation was ever delivered to Hoi-sui of her husband’s death.

  Life under the Communists grew more dangerous. In the south, the Party, seeking to carry out Mao’s Land Reform campaign, classified households as rich households or poor households. The rich were labelled landlords and condemned as capitalists who exploited the poor. As obvious as protruding nails, the “rich” were sojourners who’d gone to Gold Mountain, and spent what they’d earned there to build a house, two even three stories high, and to buy land. Once admired, they were now vilified.

  The Communists labelled the absent See-fat Hum as a landlord, and confiscated his family’s farm and the store where they sold their farm products. “Where did you get the money?” they asked his wife. They answered the question themselves: “You took it from the People for yourselves!” Hoi-sui protested, telling them what they already knew—that their farming operation and their two-storey house were built with what See-fat’s father had saved in his decades abroad, working at his brother’s laundry in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cadres did not stop with the family’s business. A work team came to help themselves to the family’s furniture and farm implements. When they removed the garden tools that Hoi-sui used to tend the plot beside the house, she was defiant: “What? I’m supposed to hoe my garden by hand? And how shall I do that?” The leader answered by striking her on the side of the head with his rifle butt. Next, the Communists confiscated the house, and the family joined other evicted families crammed together in idle storage and animal sheds in the village.

  The cruelty visited on a neighbour, a sojourner’s family like theirs but much wealthier, added to the family’s anguish about See-fat’s fate. They could more easily face the possibility of death by a bullet to the back of the head than a gruesome drawn-out death like that of their neighbour. The patriarch of that family, also surnamed Hum, presided over a large household that included young children who were Lui-sang’s playmates. He’d fled ahead of the Communists back to Perth, Ontario. By the time the Communists had finished torturing his younger brother, his body was so broken and bloodied that his captors had to heave him into a basket and carry him on a shoulder pole to move him.

  Three years passed before the well-connected aunt claimed to have found reliable information about the verdict in See-fat’s case. She reported that a struggle session had been held against five prisoners, See-fat among them. The packed audience divided itself in half: on one side sat the poorest from their village, who sprang to their feet to denounce, assail and humiliate each prisoner in turn. On the other were those less poor, who knew enough to shout slogans and look enthusiastic but otherwise to keep their mouths shut. When the judges called for a verdict in each case, cries erupted of “Shoot him!” The judges confirmed the death sentence, and guards took the condemned outside, to be shot immediately. Last to face the crowd was See-fat. Each speaker began by repeating the familiar litany of accusations; but curiously, their pronouncements only obfuscated See-fat’s crimes. Many spoke about how, as the village administrator, he had managed the community fish pond. The administrator’s responsibility was to levy and collect annual fees from each family to purchase hatchlings for the pond, and at season’s end, to decide the distribution of fish. But with the soaring inflation brought on by the war, families had seen their savings evaporate. Speaker after speaker, from both sides of the hall, rose to attest that See-fat never hesitated to ante up on behalf of the poor, and often delivered food parcels to them from his family’s farm.

  “The poor people saved your husband’s life,” said the aunt. “As long as they could see daylight through the windows, they were going to keep talking, until they knew it would be too dark to take him out to be killed.”

  See-fat received a sentence of life in prison.

  THE ONLY Mama that Lai-sim had ever known told her the story of her adoption when she was a little girl. The story was embedded in her memory as if anchoring a beginning, so that life could continue, lovingly, in the middle.

  “You were born in 1937, in the first year of the Resistance War. Your family, the Yees, were poor. They owned no land and had depended on money sent from a grandfather in Canada, a lifeline cut off by the war. Your mother, pregnant for the fourth time, gave birth to a boy. Within weeks, she and the baby had died of starvation. You were three at the time. Your father was widowed, so your grandmother was left to care for you, your brother, aged five, and your sister, aged six. But your grandmother suffered from failing eyesight and she worried about how she would care for all you children and keep you all fed. She decided to giv
e one away. I gave your family a sack of rice and some sausages in return for you.”

  Lai-sim had a replacement mother but no father—he had died of smallpox before the war—two older brothers, also adopted, and paternal grandparents. Grandfather had been a sojourner, working abroad in a mine in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He might have been there still had he not returned to mourn his son, only to end up trapped in China by the Resistance War.

  As everybody did during the war, they lived with the ache of hunger, some days worse than others. Lai-sim saw that, but for a twist of fate, she could have been one of the girls that she and Mama would pass by on the way to market, an hour’s walk away. Abandoned by their families, her age and younger, they wandered aimlessly, clothed in rags, dirty and barefoot. Some she saw fall, and she knew death was hovering. When the war ended eight years later, Grandfather, his savings long gone, wanted to use his head tax certificate to go to Canada to find work again, but on account of his advanced years Grandmother and Mama had refused to let him go.

  The routine of Lai-sim’s household remained unchanged. By day, the family gathered at her grandparents’. By night, as was common for a family short of space, its members slept separately. The house could accommodate only the two elders, as one corner was given over to the sow—the family’s most important source of income—and another to chickens, kept in cages stacked high, behind walls that went halfway up to the peaked roof. Mama bunked in with adult relatives; the children slept together elsewhere, girls in one bed, boys in another.

  Lai-sim had no thought that their household was in desperate straits. They had a small plot of land and a water buffalo to work it. However, she did know of relatives on Mama’s side poorer than them. When the twice-yearly rice crop came in, those relatives, who lived some distance away in another village, would show up to accept rice from Mama. They never lingered; Grandmother would yell at them: “Go home! You go home!” Afterward, she and Mama always had a vicious argument.