Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  Food was a more clear divide. What Harry served downstairs to customers was not what Mabel cooked upstairs for the family. Upstairs, she cooked rice and a stir fry, for lunch and dinner, every day. Her bok choy and swiss chard came from the plot that Harry tended out back, land he rented from the Walkers, who owned the Perth Courier. Only Mary preferred the food upstairs; China, the country of her birth, had apparently lodged in her taste buds. Her sisters declared the daily diet of rice boring, but they couldn’t get enough of the hamburgers and french fries downstairs. They did avoid one downstairs food: milk. They couldn’t get it down. Many Chinese have not only a distaste for milk but an intolerance to lactose. In Perth, dairy products were the pride of local farmers; the town’s branded “Perth” cheese was sold in Europe. And Mary, having trained to be a nurse, preached milk’s nutritional benefits. She urged her sisters to take some from the café and drink it by the glass at least three or four times a day.

  Doris learned to lean against the prevailing wind blowing backward to China, and her sisters fell in behind her. She decided she was not going to make room in her head for Chinese characters. Besides, she argued, she didn’t have time for that, with having to work in the restaurant and do homework from public school.

  As a young child, Doris once asked her father why he didn’t offer customers Chinese food on the menu. He laughed: “They’d be scared we were trying to poison them!” Doris knew Chinese food wouldn’t make Canadians sick. Take Mary’s friend, Nellie Cohen. Nellie, whose father was a junk dealer, liked to visit upstairs so that she could sneak a taste of Mrs. Johnston’s stir-fried pork. Mary told her sisters that her friend couldn’t have pork at home. Why not? they wondered. Because she’s Jewish, Mary said.

  IN 1919, NO LONGER A widower and married for a second time, Harry returned to find the local economy of Perth booming. He purchased a two-and-a-half-storey building on Gore Street, the town’s main thoroughfare. The building had two storefronts on the ground floor, and living quarters above, where he could house his arriving family, leaving the attic space for any bachelor kitchen staff. Harry kept the tenant on one side of the commercial space, and took over the other. He had the words HARRY’S CAFE printed inside the window and he opened for business.

  One of the first matters of personal business to take care of for his son and brother-in-law was to adopt English names. Harry’s son tried June because it sounded closest to his Chinese name, but soon dropped it for Fred. His brother-in-law, Sang, took the name James, but it almost immediately gave way to a nickname, Jasper—after a hamlet near the St. Lawrence River, where he had seen a memorable hockey game involving the Perth team. Harry put Fred and Jasper to work in the kitchen, the only place for them since they didn’t know a word of English. Similarly, when his wife arrived, she became Mabel and his daughter, Mary, names chosen perhaps by the ladies at church. Harry had wanted Mabel to work out front in the café, to speed her learning English. He promised to step in to interpret if needed, but shy about her ability, Mabel preferred to stay out of sight in the back. She washed dishes and, eventually, took over the daily baking.

  As if a toss of dice had rolled in their favour, Mabel and Harry’s family remained intact in Canada. Had his wife and daughter delayed coming by two years, they’d have been kept out by exclusion. As it was, their male relatives had to follow the more typical path of Chinese men who’d gone abroad: work to save money, save money to visit China, save enough to one day live under the same roof as their family. Jasper had a wife waiting for him there. Fred, however, was unmarried. After his own experience of living separated from his father for his entire childhood, he preferred to have a wife and family here. He went to Ottawa to scout out the possibilities of arranging a wife from one of the handful of Chinese families there, only to find that, like Harry and Mabel, parents were still raising young families. He returned dejected: “Every girl is too young.”

  Fred would make a couple of trips to China, where he married and had a daughter, before finally pulling up stakes in Canada and returning home. Early on, Harry had considered giving his son a share of Harry’s Café, but ultimately decided he’d keep sole ownership. “Fred’s too busy going back and forth to the village,” he told Mabel.

  Jasper would work a decade at the café, all the while remitting money to support his wife and younger brother at home. Then he made two visits over six years. Each time, he took a healthy sum to invest in mau tin, and by his second trip, would build a house with two separate staircases, one for his own family and, when he married, one for that of his younger brother, Fuen. After Jasper’s first visit, his wife lost a baby in childbirth; on his second visit, his wife gave birth to a daughter.

  The narrative that contained the lives of the sojourning man or family relied on a certain amount of luck to arrive at its desired end. On that score, of Harry and Mabel’s fellow travellers, Jasper was the one to have the most luck on his side. When Harry’s brother Peter was ailing with tuberculosis, Harry had pragmatic advice: “You better go home, get your wife to look after you.” Peter agreed; better to be sick in China where expenses could be kept down. The next word Harry received came from Peter’s son. He wrote that he’d gone to meet his father’s steamship, only to hear from the ship’s crew that his father had died during the crossing and been buried at sea: “I didn’t know how I was going to tell Mama.”

  Harry also heard by letter that his only son, Fred, had been felled by “heatstroke.” Mabel had to break the news to the girls, who’d been close to him. The younger three couldn’t understand how someone could die of heatstroke. “Doesn’t matter what the cause of death is,” Mabel told her daughters. “People at home always say, ‘Heatstroke killed them.’ ”

  BY 1936, OF THE THREE male relations who’d come abroad with the Johnston family, only Jasper was in Perth, recently returned from a visit to his wife and younger brother in China. Harry and Mabel had three children aged thirteen and younger still living at home; Mary was enrolled in a year-long nursing program at Queen’s University. Harry and Mabel continued to steer a course that would, they hoped, take the entire family back to China.

  Then fate delivered a hit on their blindside. How else to explain what was a freak accident?

  The day had begun like any other, if only because Harry clove to routine. Routine gave rigour to the handling of his financial affairs. In settling his accounts, he was especially punctual and Monday was the day he paid the tobacconist, Mr. Depuis. Harry turned west out of the door of the café and headed up Gore Street.

  The tobacconist’s shop was a block and a half up the street. On his way, Harry walked past A.V. McLean’s Grocery, Flour and Feed store, past the barber shop, then, at the edge of the Little Tay River Bridge, the bakeshop, where passersby could look through the window and watch the doughnuts sizzling in oil. Past the bakeshop and over the bridge, the street began to climb a gradient, more pronounced if one’s eye followed the rising line of rooftops and chimney stacks. Harry crossed the bridge and went into Mr. Depuis’s shop.

  Harry was alone that day. Normally, one or more of the girls accompanied him, combining his errand with their own, to deposit the money they’d earned working the front cash—less the tithe Harry insisted they pay to the church—into a savings account at the Royal Bank.

  While Harry and Mr. Depuis were concluding their business, a salesman drove into Perth with a delivery for Hulbert’s stationery store. He parked on Gore, uphill from Hulbert’s, crossed the street and went into the stationery store.

  Moments before Harry left the tobacconist’s shop, another driver returned to his car parked in front of the salesman’s, started it, reversed, and then pulled into traffic and drove away.

  Afterward, the talk was that, had the salesman taken the precaution of turning his wheels into the curb, his car would not have rolled into the street. People speculated that he had left his car in neutral or neglected to engage the hand brake. And that the other driver, in backing up to pull out, had nudged the salesman
’s car just enough to start it rolling.

  Some passersby noticed the car start to move and yelled out as it gathered speed. Harry, hearing people shout behind him, turned to look but didn’t understand what the commotion was. He neither saw nor heard the driverless car, as it veered across the street. It finally came to a stop against the Tay Bakery, pinning Harry against the wall.

  The surgeon in Perth tried to save as much as he could of Harry’s crushed right leg. He amputated just above the knee. But on account of Harry’s diabetes, the wound wouldn’t heal. Finally, the hospital in Perth sent for the orthopaedic surgeon to come down from Ottawa. Dr. Armstrong removed more of Harry’s leg, to the mid-thigh, and when further complications set in, he cut it off right at the pelvis.

  The police came round to see Mabel to tell her that the salesman, on his first day on the job, didn’t have insurance. People in Perth remarked on how Harry kept up his good humour: “He’s not a complaining man.” Mabel took note that in this trying time for the family, nobody stepped forward to help her and Jasper at the restaurant. Thinking about how generous Harry was, in donating money and food to help people in need or to civic campaigns, she felt a twinge of bitterness. “People will help their own kind, but they won’t help me. They probably think ‘Let the Chinese help themselves.’ ”

  Before the accident, Mabel had been ever more insistent that Harry avoid heavy physical work. With one of his trouser legs folded up and pinned above the knee, it was clear she wouldn’t have to nag him anymore.

  TWO YEARS AFTER Harry’s accident, Japan invaded China. In a matter of weeks, the war cut off civilian traffic across the Pacific. No one could send remittances to their relatives or relay them through middlemen; nor could they get word of their families. The only certainty was uncertainty. Harry and Mabel didn’t know if any of their relatives at home were still among the living, if they should be optimistic or despairing, hopeful or grieving. This state of not knowing produced a kind of paralysis.

  Finally, Harry and Mabel grimly assembled Doris, Lil and Louise.

  “We’ll have to wait out the war,” Harry told them. “We can’t go home. Not yet.”

  The girls jumped for joy. “We want to stay in Canada. We were born here!” Doris felt relieved at her father’s pronouncement, almost glad of the Japanese invasion.

  The way Harry managed the stairs in his building after the accident served as an apt metaphor for China’s place in the narrative of his family. Going up or down, he took the stairs the same way: he placed his bottom on the first step, then either lifted or dropped himself from one to the next. So, if he was resting, which he had to often because of pain in his phantom foot and leg, it wasn’t possible to tell in which direction he was headed.

  As war dragged on, Harry and Mabel settled on hopefulness, though perhaps involuntarily, as if it were a twitching muscle with a stored memory.

  MABEL SAT AT HER husband’s bedside in the Kingston hospital, anxiously awaiting her daughters’ arrival. Every time a member of her family got into a car, she couldn’t help but imagine the worst.

  Her husband’s accident aside, she still felt the emotional trauma from having been in a car accident herself fifteen years earlier, in her first-ever car ride. Joe Fong, the laundryman, had bought a Model T, and offered to take Mabel and Louise, still a babe in arms, out for a spin. It was his first car and he lost control; the vehicle went off the road and overturned. They walked away from the accident, but from time to time, Mabel suffered severe stomach pains. She’d recently had some x-rays and the doctor came back puzzled at what he saw. “Your liver is flipped over!”

  Mabel breathed easier when her daughters walked in the door.

  Harry lasted a few days, enough time for a goodbye with his family.

  “I’ve provided for you, Mabel. You’ll have income to raise the family. I bought six properties for you.”

  “What properties, Harry? What am I going to do with them?” Mabel had paid no attention to what Harry owned other than their building, with their café on one side and their tenant, the T. Eaton Company, on the other. “I don’t know anything, Harry. I don’t know anything about money. I don’t even know how much we need to live over in this country.”

  Indeed, Mabel had never handled cash—not in China, not in Canada. Anything she wanted to buy, she went next door to Eaton’s catalogue store, and ordered it. Her daughters did the same. Whatever they wanted or needed—such as crutches for Harry—didn’t have to be in the catalogue; the ladies would have the Eaton’s buyer shop for them. They charged any purchases to the Johnstons’ “account,” or more precisely, deducted it from the monthly rent that Eaton’s head office owed Harry Johnston for the lease of the space.

  Harry explained that he had kept meticulous records of his financial and business affairs, both of the café and of the commercial properties he owned downtown. But he’d written every entry in Chinese. Yet again, his wife had reason to bewail her illiteracy.

  “Save money from the good times to cover the bad times,” Harry counselled Mabel. “Remember, business isn’t good in the winter; people don’t want to dine out when the weather is bad. By the month of May, when the weather is better, people come around again. The cottages open in July. Tourists start arriving, passing through town.”

  Mabel had always dreaded this day, when Harry would leave her. Their daughters began to bawl.

  Harry seemed so terribly sad. “I don’t want to go. I’m going to miss my girls.” In the end, Harry Johnston’s heart belonged not so much to China as to his family.

  A LONG WHILE AFTER THEIR father’s death, Doris and her sisters asked their mother about something that hadn’t occurred to them before. If their father and Peter had been the only two sons, why were they referred to in Chinese as First Uncle and Fourth Uncle? What happened to Second Uncle and Third Uncle?

  Mabel had no idea. She explained that she had come late into their father’s life as his second wife, to replace the first, who had died. Their Uncle Fred was the son of First Wife.

  All of this was news to them. They were mystified by something else: why didn’t their father’s son and brother or other men, who had lived like bachelors on their third floor, bring their wives with them to Canada? Or send for them? Why hadn’t Uncle Jasper brought his wife and daughter here, so that they wouldn’t have to live under the Japanese in China?

  Mabel couldn’t believe she had to state the obvious. “Because the Canadian government isn’t letting any more Chinese in!”

  Now Doris was entirely confused. She had always thought it had to do with money, that it was cheaper for husbands to keep a wife in China. When she was a little girl, that was the only talk she’d ever heard from men like her uncles. All such truths out of the mouths of bachelors hid the larger truth—that the government had decided those of Chinese origin or descent weren’t worthy enough to call themselves Canadians.

  Young women volunteering their stenographic skills for “Canadian Aid to China (1947)”: (left to right) Lillian Johnston, unknown, Louise Fong Johnston, Margaret Joe, Mary Wong, Helen Kealey, Doris Yuen.

  Courtesy Linda Hum

  FOUR

  OPPORTUNITY

  A REGULAR AT HARRY’S CAFÉ, William Relyea, the office manager at the Perth Shoe Factory, chatted to Doris over his daily coffee at the counter. If she was interested, he had an opening in the office; she could put to use what she’d learned at the business school in Ottawa.

  Doris had cut short her secretarial course when her father died. She’d done so without hesitation, clear in her mind that she wanted to be at her mother’s side to help sort through Harry’s affairs. Except for the day of his funeral, Harry’s Café stayed open for business as before, and Jasper, as head cook, kept the menu as it had always been. Now almost a year later and soon time for the family to remove the black arm bands of mourning, Doris felt that she and her mother understood her father’s dealings well enough to keep things on track. And with her own sacrifice, of coming back home t
o lend a hand, Lillian and Louise had been able to stay in school.

  The Perth Shoe Factory was one of Perth’s largest employers. Its two hundred operators normally produced seven hundred pairs of women’s shoes a day. In the First World War, it had supplied army boots for the Canadian military, and now that Canada had followed Britain into war against Germany, it was gearing up to do the same again.

  Doris asked Mabel’s opinion about the office job. Mabel had originally advised her daughter to go to the business school in Ottawa, seeing as the family couldn’t afford to send her to university. Mabel urged her to take the job. Quite apart from leaving Doris free to work nights and weekends at the café, the position would give them both a window into how employers run a business. Mabel had no idea what was a typical wage or what to do with a pay cheque. She still didn’t quite understand how banks worked.

  The wartime economy created a bonanza and not just for factories churning out military equipment. The war rapidly transformed Ottawa, once built on lumber fortunes and in the last century the centre of the timber trade in Canada, into a government town. Needing personnel to run its wartime programs, the government hired as quickly as people could apply. Lillian saw a chance to move to the city. She persuaded Louise to join her in sitting for the federal government’s entrance examination for stenographers. Both easily passed. In Ottawa, the sisters rented rooms at the YWCA (its goal, it assured parents whose daughters had to live away from home, was “keeping our girls good”) until they could find an apartment to share.