by Denise Chong
But once a year, on the day the sow’s eight-week-old piglets were sold at market, such worry and strife were forgotten.
On one particular market day, Lai-sim awoke excited to meet Mama at her grandparents’ house. She climbed out of bed and went outside to check the skies. Had it been raining, she would have been sorely disappointed. Market days were the first, fifth and tenth days of the month; if the weather today was bad, few people would bother to go. But the sun was out and Mama wouldn’t have missed this chance to sell the piglets. This year, the pregnant sow had grown so fat that she and Mama had been certain it would have a large litter. Usually it bore as few as two; this year, it bore five. They would have made Mama a nice profit and to celebrate, as always, she would have bought Lai-sim a new dress.
Lai-sim skipped her way to fetch water from the well, her chore to perform at the beginning and end of every day. She then continued home to await her mother’s arrival.
At the house, she found only her grandmother sitting quietly. “Isn’t Mama here yet?”
“I don’t know what’s happening.” Grandmother gestured toward the room that held the chickens. “Your mother has locked the door.” She went to fetch a ladder, leaned it against the wall, looked over and yelled out: “Ai-ya! She did that!”
Lai-sim waited, perplexed, while Grandmother sent for a man in the village known for his strength. He was the local gravedigger and one of the few villagers who was never without work. He easily forced the door open.
Lai-sim peered through the doorway.
Her mother hung from a beam.
That afternoon, the gravedigger had her in the ground.
The next morning, Lai-sim, her face blotchy and swollen from crying, shrank into a corner of her grandparents’ house as a noisy crowd of her mother’s poor relations came to confront her grandmother. Why had there been no funeral? Why had the old lady buried the body so soon?
Grandmother stood Lai-sim and her two brothers in front of her. She jabbed a finger in the backs of the boys, so hard that they lurched forward. “Talk to them. You talk to them.” Lai-sim began to sob hysterically.
“Don’t hide behind the children!”
Sinister accusations rained down. The relatives had come in certainty that Grandmother had dispatched a warm body to the grave.
“She was still alive when you took her down!”
“Why did you let her die? You should have called a doctor!”
Grandmother stared down the crowd. “Get out of here. Go home.”
For three years, Lai-sim endured the teasing of village boys. Like other children whose families had a water buffalo, she minded the beast to and from the meadow, ready to goad it with a stick or pull heavily on the rope around its neck if it strayed off the path into the rice paddy or bent to nibble at the tender new rice shoots along the way. At the point in the route at the base of a scrubby hill where tall sugar cane grasses waved in the breeze, the boys would yell out, “Lai-sim, there’s your Mama!” Lai-sim never dared look, afraid she’d see her mother’s restless spirit.
Mama’s death, like a scuttling black cloud, heralded bad luck. The sow died. Then the chickens. Then came Liberation, when the Communists, in the name of Revolution, persecuted average families and impoverished them. Grandmother died. Lai-sim’s brothers married, and Lai-sim and her aged grandfather were left to scrounge for whatever grew in the wild, the taste of rice only a memory.
THREE YEARS AFTER LIBERATION, a stranger showed up in the village looking for Lai-sim and her grandfather. The woman told them she had come to smuggle the fifteen-year-old girl to the border of the mainland with Hong Kong. Waiting for her on the other side, she said, would be a man named Kim Yee—her birth father.
“How will I know it is him?” Lai-sim asked the woman.
“He will be calling out your name.”
After her mother’s suicide, Lai-sim had been bothered by the thought that Grandmother had remained dry-eyed over the death. Perhaps her grandmother knew what was happening behind the wall of the chicken coop. She wondered, had her mother been terribly ill, maybe dying? She seemed to remember her feeling unwell—and that both women knew they could not afford the expense of a doctor.
The stranger’s arrival in Lai-sim’s life enticed out of her memory her mother’s last words to her, spoken when the two bid good night before going off to separate relatives’. Lai-sim had put it out of mind; how could her mother’s chatter compete with the anticipation of a new dress the next day?
“You have a grandmother and a father in Hong Kong,” Mama had told her. “Someday, you will go to see them.” Now, Lai-sim believed that on the eve of her death, Mama had been preparing her for a future without her, but not without family.
LUI-SANG KNEW THIS MUCH about her friend Lai-sim Leung: that she’d lost her mother when she was a young girl. They’d be talking about the usual, about mothers and babies, about where they might take the children. Her friend would suddenly, if briefly, well up, and but for the movement of her hand to wipe the tears away, it could go unnoticed. As much as Lui-sang missed her own mother in Hong Kong and worried about how her father was bearing up in prison, she had the grace to avoid mention of family that she had, that Lai-sim did not. These are things to keep silent about; you don’t want to make your friend, or yourself, feel worse.
What Lai-sim had once done alone as a new mother, she and her friend Lui-sang now did together. In the summer and well into the warm days of fall, they would meet outside their homes, each with a baby carriage. Lai-sim’s was for Billy, and a few years later, for Jim. Lui-sang’s was for Harvey. Later, Howard and after him, Vincent.
They’d walk down Waverley to O’Connor, then up O’Connor to Sparks Street, where merchants had extended a summertime experiment begun in 1961 of closing the street to traffic to create an outdoor pedestrian mall, a first in Canada. Sometimes they walked farther, across Elgin, past the railway station and the famed Château Laurier, the castle-like hotel opposite, to the Byward Market. There, they loaded the baskets underneath the baby carriages with ears of fresh corn and a large cabbage, maybe a turnip or two, and a big, fatty chunk of pork to be rendered for use as cooking oil. On days they didn’t need to go to the market and the weather was fine, they went up to Parliament Hill. There they’d lay out a blanket on the grass, and let their children play.
Harry Johnston, his wife, Mabel, and their four daughters: Mary (back), and (front, left to right) Lillian, Doris and Louise. Back row: George (a relation) and Fred, Harry’s son from his first wife.
Courtesy Linda Hum
THREE
OBSTACLES
“TELL HER SHE’D BETTER COME real quick.”
When the receptionist at the business school told Doris Johnston that her mother had telephoned long distance from the hospital in Kingston, she feared something dire must have happened with her father’s health.
Clearly, it couldn’t wait until the end of the school week when she’d return to Perth. Most weeks, she remained in Ottawa attending her secretarial course until Friday, then took the train home to Perth, so she could help out at the family café over the weekend. Ever since complications from diabetes had sent her father to hospital, she’d included a visit with him in the weekend too.
Doris’s younger sisters, Lil and Louise, were waiting for her at the café. A cousin would drive the three of them from Perth to Kingston. Doris’s eldest sister, Mary, a nurse at the hospital, and their mother, Mabel, were already at Harry’s bedside.
WHAT WITH THE DEMANDS of keeping Harry’s Café running seven days a week, on top of school and jobs, Mabel Johnston and her four daughters had allowed themselves to think that Harry’s bout of ill health was one crisis being attended to by someone else.
The year was 1940. Harry was sixty-four years old.
If he’d not considered the timing of his death, he knew where he wanted it to happen. He’d spent more of his life in Canada than in China, and yet regarded his family’s stay abroad as temporary. Ev
en having a debilitating accident hadn’t blown him off course. The same held true for Mabel. She too expected that, one day, the two of them and the girls would leave it all behind and go back to China.
That would have surprised most of the townsfolk of Perth. Harry Johnston had been a resident since the turn of the century. He’d begun as a laundryman, sold out to a relative, Joe Fong, and in 1919 opened Harry’s Café. For the past twenty-one years, the locals had been taking coffee at the counter there. Everyone knew the menu by heart: sandwiches, hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, steaks. Even if they were coming in only to pick up a pouch of tobacco, they’d check out the specials of the day—sausages, fried liver and onions were big sellers—or the featured pie, usually raisin, apple or cherry, depending on what Mabel had decided to bake the night before.
The name Johnston worked to obscure Harry’s connection to China. When Perth’s Knox Presbyterian Church bestowed the surname to replace his own—Fong, it had been as if to say the church had put China behind him, that it had reset the counter of his history. On May 6, 1899, an item in the Perth Courier reported this renaming under the headline “From Celestials to Britons”: six Chinese laundrymen in town had been naturalized and received Anglo-Saxon surnames. Three, related among themselves, were thereafter known as Hamilton; three others, also interrelated, as Johnston. As if offering evidence of the suitability of the six to live among the town folk, the item lauded their regular attendance at church and how rapidly they were learning English. It further cited the three Johnstons for having “volunteered the loss of their pigtails.… [Now] their shiny black hair is shingled in orthodox Canadian style.”
Like every Chinese emigré of that era, Harry had left China wearing his hair in a queue (compulsory in China as a sign of subjugation to the Manchus), and had stepped ashore with it in Vancouver. Instead of staying on the west coast where the Chinese concentrated, he headed east to find work through relations or clansmen who’d gone before him, or to strike out on his own. Most everywhere, whites were quite happy to have the Chinese wash, dry and iron their laundry—laundering sheets was a particular drudgery, especially in winter. At some point, Harry was joined by his brother. The two migrated ever farther eastward, until the pretty town of Perth enticed Harry to settle. He had a small nest egg to invest in some property and a laundry. Had the news item in the Courier told the real story of Harry’s pigtail, it would have explained that he’d been suffering recurring headaches, worse at night, brought on by years of white people pulling and yanking on his queue, or so he was convinced. One day, he’d had enough and got himself into the chair of the town barber, pointed to the queue and said, “Cut it off.”
While the Hamiltons sold out and moved on (reportedly to Trois Rivières, Quebec), Harry stayed and eventually opened a café. Before exclusion shut the door, he brought out two male relatives, an adult son and his young brother-in-law. Then his young wife, Mabel, and their five-year-old daughter, Mary. The names Harry chose for the three daughters who would be born in Perth suggested yet more attachment to this new land. Harry borrowed the name Doris from the daughter of the publisher of the Perth Expositor, Lillian from the wife of the milliner and Louise from the wife of the butcher.
As if attentive to their children’s Canadian future, Harry and Mabel had welcomed the kindness of Lola and James Rowe, a couple in town who took it upon themselves to be the “Canadian parents” of their girls. Doris surmised that the Rowes had felt comfortable about approaching the Johnstons, the only Chinese family in town, because she’d befriended Earl, the Rowes’ only child, in public school. She had seen the merciless and hurtful teasing inflicted by some boys who took advantage of his being a little slow (Mary explained that Earl had been born a “blue baby”). “Those boys are awful ignorant,” Doris told Earl’s parents. On Sundays, the Rowes would come by—they lived a fifteen-minute walk away—to collect the three younger Johnston girls for Sunday school, where Lola Rowe was a teacher. James worked at Wampole’s, bottlers of the cod liver oil that stood handy in every family’s home.
By all appearances, the soft-spoken proprietor of Harry’s Café, a church-going man, and his wife, who lived with their daughters above their café, had their loyalties close at hand. But in Harry and Mabel Johnston’s minds, it was China’s soil that they longed to have again underfoot, and when their time came, to lie beneath.
“IF YOU CAN’T FIND anybody suitable, then put up a notice that I am looking for a ‘replacement wife.’ ” Harry, then thirty-seven years old, had made it clear to his relatives in China what he was looking for: “She has to be willing to come to Canada to work long hours in my business.” Harry’s brother and cousins labouring alongside him at his Perth laundry scoffed at his expectations: “Who the heck is going to be willing to work that hard!”
The year was 1912 when Harry learned he was a widower, that the wife he’d married and left behind in China to raise their son had died. When he arrived back in the village to mourn her and to remarry, his relatives produced seventeen-year-old Hum Gow-nui. A boisterous and handsome girl, Gow-nui had a solid, square build. Her first thought on meeting the older man that she’d been promised to was that one day she’d be the one left widowed; his son was older than she was.
After four years of life in China with Gow-nui, and the birth of a daughter, Harry prepared to return to Canada to tend to his laundry business. Rather than leave behind his wife and child as he’d done with his first wife, he intended to have his family join him. Gow-nui, anticipating the isolation abroad, proposed that he also take along the older of her two brothers. Harry balked. He’d already decided to bring his son to Canada and was reluctant to finance another ship passage and head tax payment. Gow-nui, not shy about speaking up, compared her husband’s situation abroad with hers: besides any number of male cousins and a brother already there, he’d have his son; she, however, would have no adult relations. “If I’m to go, I need someone who belongs to me. I do not want be all on my own there.”
Gow-nui’s was a family that had experienced loss many times over. Of the sixteen children her mother had borne, only four survived. Two of those were daughters and married; two were sons, both at home. The younger boy, Fuen, had just started school. The older, Sang, an industrious boy five years Gow-nui’s junior, would make a good worker, she told her husband.
When Harry wavered, Gow-nui delivered an ultimatum: Take Sang or I won’t go.
Harry relented. The Hum family, not wanting one of the last two sons to go abroad unmarried, arranged Sang’s wedding on the eve of his departure. His teenaged bride was left behind to live with them. In 1921, about a year or so after Gow-nui’s husband, his son and her brother had left for Canada, she and her daughter followed.
Gow-nui felt she was setting sail into an uncertain future. Quite apart from the yawning age difference between them, she considered that Harry had a weak constitution, his constantly cold hands a bad sign.
A MAN WHO SPOKE only when absolutely necessary, Harry often declared his position on family matters with only five words: “We’re going back to China.” It was as if the words were a constellation by which he took his bearings. If returning was not the family’s destiny, it was the prevailing wind that sculpted the contours of their lives in Canada.
He and Mabel raised their girls with the intention of preparing them for life in China. Mabel wanted them to have some ability to read and write Chinese.
She regretted her own illiteracy, relying on Harry to read letters from home to her and to script write of reply. She couldn’t read the Chinese newspapers from Toronto or Montreal that visitors passing through town left for him to read. Of her daughters, she had less concern about Mary, for whom Chinese was her first language. However, Mabel fretted about how to make sure the younger three received some education in Chinese culture. Had they lived in Ottawa, she and Harry would have sent the girls to the after-hours Chinese school at the Chinese Mission. The five Chinese families there had pooled their resources to hire a
teacher. Mabel decided Harry should be the one to teach his daughters. He dutifully returned from a shopping trip to Montreal (it had a tiny Chinatown while Ottawa had none) with calligraphy brushes, ink cakes and a set of elementary readers.
Doris objected on behalf of the three girls: “We don’t need to learn Chinese. What for? We live in Canada!”
“We’re going back to China.”
Living in Perth, it was entirely possible for the girls to go months on end without seeing another Chinese face, other than a male relative in town. Never mind that the girls had been targeted with racial slurs of “Chink” by the same boys who tormented Earl Rowe, Harry had an additional worry about his children: “I’m scared you’ll forget you’re Chinese.”
To remedy that, in the late fall or early winter, once business slowed after the last of the cottagers on nearby lakes were gone, Harry did what every Chinese who either owned a car or could hire a taxi and driver was fond of doing: he took his wife and daughters to visit other Chinese families. Although he saw these visits as benefiting his daughters, he took such drives as much for Mabel, knowing that she longed to see Chinese faces and hear Chinese spoken. Harry took a circular route to towns where he knew people, toward Ottawa and through the Ottawa Valley, down along the St. Lawrence River to Brockville, then back to Perth. He’d stop wherever he came across a Chinese-owned café. Occasionally, a visit turned up a surprise if they came across a bachelor in the kitchen with the surname Fong or Hum. “We’re related!” they joked. Nonetheless, the trips always fell short of one goal; the moment they were out of sight of the adults, the younger generation reverted to English. Just as learning to read and write Chinese fell by the wayside, the girls’ language skills rusted away.
If by visiting another family, Doris and her sisters were supposed to identify with some Chineseness, as far as she could tell, being Chinese had to do with not spending money. When she and her sisters campaigned for a bicycle, their father had responded predictably, “We’re going back to China.” Doris thought the same frugality must explain why the Sims, who were the most well-off Chinese family in the Ottawa area, crammed their family of nine children into the rooms above their Star Café in Hull and ate their daily meal off a roughly hewn picnic table. (Anyway, Doris still found a way to secure a two-wheeler; the Rowes offered her Earl’s bicycle after he’d outgrown it.)