Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  At the Perth Shoe Factory office, Doris became close friends with a co-worker her age. Eva Devlin’s father had been the Children’s Aid inspector responsible for orphans, then served a term as mayor and was now Perth’s long-serving justice of the peace—a post Eva’s older brother, Eric, would inherit. The Johnstons knew the Devlins best from years of seeing Eric come into the café for candy and hot dogs after school. When Eric graduated to ordering his first T-bone steak and made a choice of “well done,” Jasper came out of the kitchen with his cleaver mid-air, and in broken English declared: “You no get well done, you get medium rare!”

  Not long after Doris joined the office, Eva’s mother died. By then, Eric had enlisted and gone overseas. The girls compared their common fate of keeping company with a surviving parent. Doris confided in Eva how attached she felt to Mabel: “If my mother went anywhere, if she left Perth, I’d have to go too.” But neither Doris nor Eva talked about moving on. It was still possible to dream big in a small town. Eva, known as a tomboy, a girl who could skate as fast as any boy and play softball with the best of them, had ambitions: she was saving her money to take flying lessons and to buy a small airplane. One day, she told Doris, I’ll take you up with me so that we can both see Perth from the air.

  DORIS AND MABEL made regular shopping trips to Ottawa. Their routine took them mainly along Albert Street, along a two-block stretch on either side of Bank Street where a half dozen Chinese-run businesses conglomerated. Interspersed among white-owned establishments—a tire shop, print shop, paper company and the imposing Hunter Building, the first federal office building built by Public Works in Ottawa—were two grocers, a confectionery, a café and a couple of social clubs.

  Their errands included a stop at the Colonial Coach Lines bus terminal to pick up shipments of Chinese foodstuffs for their own table that Mabel had ordered from Chinatowns in Toronto or Montreal. She rarely ordered from Vancouver because of the high freight charges. Next, the two stopped in at the Wongs’. Mr. Sue Wong ran the family store, the Yick Lung, out of the front room of their house, and had installed his wife and seven children in the first-floor back room and the attic. (Another tenant lived on the second floor.) At the Yick Lung, Mabel could purchase staples: rice, soya sauce, tea, preserved sausages and ginseng, sometimes fresh Chinese greens, which came by bus or train from Montreal.

  The store posted no hours; Mr. and Mrs. Wong said that if someone wanted to buy, they were open. But equally important, the Wongs’ store functioned as a community meeting place. Mrs. Wong rimmed the small front vestibule with chairs, providing a place where the local Chinese community, and in particular, its wives and mothers, could alight to visit and chat.

  During the first half-century of the Chinese presence in Ottawa, the number of families in the city were very few. When Canada imposed exclusion in 1923, only six of some three hundred Chinese in Ottawa had either come with their wives or sent for them. The Canadian government had been uncompromising on the day that the law came into effect; as of July 1, any Chinese on board a boat destined for Vancouver or Victoria that was mid-ocean or even in port could not enter the country unless they either had already paid the head tax or held a Canadian birth certificate; anybody else, even a wife coming to join her husband, would be turned back. The six wives in Ottawa were very nearly five: Mrs. Shung Joe’s boat docked in Vancouver just as the Exclusion Act took effect. Her husband drew on his good standing as a member of the Presbyterian Church and enlisted a church official to help plead their case. The head tax was duly paid and Mrs. Shung Joe was reunited with her husband.

  The number of these pioneer wives did fall to five when the owner of the Wing On, who opened the first Chinese storefront on Albert Street in 1914, decided his wife would have an easier life in China. There were only four upon the death of Jack Hum’s wife. Jack himself died a decade later, leaving behind their three teenaged sons. Two of the wives were married to the brothers Sue and Shing Wong, both grocers; the third to Shung Joe, the only one of the original patriarchs—all of whom had started in the laundry business—to remain in it; and the fourth, Joe Sim, the restaurateur in Hull.

  The so-called social clubs were all-male domains. Women did not set foot in such clubs, where gambling and Johnny Walker Red Label were enjoyed in equal measure. Nor did children, except as messengers sent from the nearby Canton Inn. Their job was to get the attention of the bachelor men absorbed in their games of mahjong and dominoes and fan tan, to tell them that a dinner order someone had placed was ready. For a time, Doris and Mabel’s excursions to Ottawa included taking a turn outside the entrances of the clubs with collection tins for war relief in China, a fundraising idea of the pioneer wives. Mabel approved: “Might as well get money from the gamblers going in; they’re not going to have it coming out.”

  Wives needing to get out of the house considered church their only option. Some had been introduced to the religion and the institution of the church by Reverend Gordon Taylor, a Presbyterian minister who travelled around the Ottawa area to fill in for absent clergyman, and made a point of befriending Chinese laundry and café owners and the bachelors who worked for them. Originally from Edinburgh, the Reverend could speak Chinese without an accent and seemed to have a deep knowledge of Chinese history and culture. He claimed that everything he knew he’d learned from a Chinese man in Montreal who’d been a scholar in China but a laundryman here. The Chinese were of two minds about the Reverend: some thought him to be a great man because he’d brought them to the church and given them Christian names. Others saw him as a busybody who was rumoured to meet regularly with Prime Minister Mackenzie King. In his first term as prime minister, King had brought in exclusion.

  Come Sunday, the wives donned their tailored dresses and hats—Mrs. Joe took pride in her stylish hats—and attended the services at Dominion United Church on Metcalfe Street or Knox Presbyterian Church on Elgin. That they understood or spoke little English—other than “Yes” and “No” and “Too much!”—proved no hindrance. One can readily participate at church simply by observing and following suit; you sit or stand or bow your head or pick up the hymn book when everyone else does.

  At Mrs. Wong’s, they were back comfortably in their element, speaking in their native Toisonese. The wives, often with their children in tow, made for the Yick Lung straight from church, knowing they’d find Mrs. Wong there, always on hand to mind the store. Whether to complain or commiserate, they could count on a sympathetic ear from the grocer’s wife. Such compassion sprang perhaps from the wellspring of Mrs. Wong’s trials as a mother living with heartache.

  In 1920, her husband could finance only one head tax and passage for a family member to join him in Ottawa. Mrs. Wong had no choice but to leave behind their only child, a three-year-old girl. She solemnly promised the girl that one day she’d be back with her father, that they’d reclaim her from her grandparents and live again as a family. In Ottawa, Mrs. Wong, filled with longing for her daughter, would sit by the open window in the room that she shared with her husband above his uncle’s Murray Street laundry, weeping at the sound of children at the nearby school. Years passed, during which time Mrs. Wong gave birth to six children. She was pregnant with the seventh when the family readied to return for good to China. They booked their boat passage for the fall, timing it for one month after her due date. That summer, Japan invaded China. The war cut off the family’s communication with the daughter in China, and all chance of returning home anytime soon evaporated.

  If the vestibule was occupied most often by the wives, it served equally as a sanctuary for a few aged bachelors who sat silently sipping tea and smoking a water pipe. Their prospects of outliving the war slipping away, they came to enjoy the atmosphere of family created by visiting wives and the Wong children. The youngest child might play underfoot, but the older Wong children would be helping out, from addressing envelopes in English to Chinese suppliers, to loading up a wagon, or if in winter, a toboggan, to make deliveries to laundrymen whose work lef
t them no time to shop.

  Luck interceded in 1942 to land another immigrant wife in Canada, who took up residence in Ottawa. The government invoked “special considerations” provided for under the Exclusion Act to admit a Chinese family of four as wartime refugees: William (Bill) and Ethel Poy and their children, Neville, aged seven, and Adrienne, aged three. As the threat loomed of a Japanese attack on Hong Kong, Mr. Poy had been one of the volunteer motorcyclists who relayed messages for the Allies between the colony and enemy territory on the mainland. High stakes middle-of-the night negotiations between the Allies and the Japanese, brokered by the Red Cross, to exchange Japanese prisoners for Allied nationals had given the Poy family their ticket out of Hong Kong. Bill Poy’s life had already been one of action and upward mobility. Born in Australia to a Chinese man and a half-Chinese, half-Irish woman, he had been sent as a teenager back to his father’s village in China, but within six months he made his own way to Hong Kong. Bill found success and fame there as an amateur jockey at the Happy Valley Racecourse.

  Once settled in Ottawa, Mrs. Poy, as beautiful and elegant as her husband was debonair and dashing, made an occasional appearance at the Yick Lung to call on Mrs. Wong. But Ethel, dropped into a city with a tiny Chinese community, no Chinatown, no Chinese newspapers or books or movies, and mourning what the Japanese had destroyed of her life in colonial Hong Kong where she’d enjoyed a genteel social life, would never feel comfortable in her new home. The wives she joined in Ottawa were almost a generation older. They’d come out of rural China more than twenty years earlier. They spoke their coarse village dialect, not her refined Cantonese; they called whites lo fan, portraying them as pale ghosts, instead of the si yuen, the more polite term meaning Western people that was used by the educated class or those from the city. Her experience of war, if anything, alienated her from the women here. She kept to herself the terror of life under Japanese occupation. She didn’t explain that the reason young Neville ducked for cover every time he saw an aircraft was that he’d been on the rooftop in Hong Kong and had watched the approach of the first Japanese bombers, thinking them to be the British Air Force on another practice run. Why draw attention to the family’s good fortune, when their relatives, if alive, still had to live with the enemy?

  Talk at Mrs. Wong’s stayed within the confines of the familiar, of their lives in Ottawa. Of the six pioneer wives, two had first-born children whom they’d brought to Canada with them. One of the two was Thomas Hum, who took responsibility for his two brothers on the death of their last surviving parent. Nineteen at the time, Thomas took over their father’s café. The other was Jack Sim, chosen by his father, Joe, to run the family business so that Jack’s eight younger siblings could stay in school and, as was their father’s plan, go on to university. Tall and broad-shouldered, with chiselled features, Jack looked like a Chinese movie star. His younger brothers would later dub him the Chinese James Dean.

  The Chinese community buzzed with the success of one of their own. Clearly, Jack was clever. As his father had expected, his eldest son bettered him early on, with his command not only of English but of French as well, having graduated from high school in Hull where French was the language of instruction. He started with his father’s Star Café, catering to Hull’s working class. Then, seeing future patrons in the influx of civil servants in Ottawa, he opened the sophisticated Tea Gardens on Sparks Street, between the Mayfield ladies’ dress shop and the Lord Thomas hair salon. Later, Jack would guess right that city folk, new to owning cars, would want to get away from the city, but not too far, and to someplace with a view; Bate Island, with the Remic Rapids wrapping round it, looked west, where the setting sun dropped spectacularly into the river. Jack leased land from the federal government under the bridge to the island, then designed a rustic building with walls of knotted pine, a nickelodeon and a dance floor. On weekend nights, young people crowded the parking lot of the El Rancho, standing around their cars, enjoying a menu favourite, the chow mein bun, brought by car hop girls in cowgirl outfits. Jack went on to open a fourth restaurant, and when the El Rancho later burned down, he built a new one on the island.

  One day Doris and Mabel dropped into the Yick Lung and found Rosina, Jack Sim’s wife, pouring her heart out to Mrs. Wong. She was sure that one of Jack’s white waitresses had her eye on him: “He’s probably running around on me and I can’t do anything about it!” Years before, on the elder Sim’s orders, Jack had made a trip to China to marry, but he’d come back as he’d left, a single man. Ordered back a second time, he returned a married man—with Rosina, who, under exclusion, was able to enter the country by virtue of a Canadian birth certificate. Born in Alberta, she’d been taken as a young child by her parents to their village in China.

  Not unlike Ethel Poy, Rosina found it hard to find her footing in Ottawa. She would never learn much English. Among the first to marry into one of the pioneer families, she met few if any Chinese women her age. Rosina wasn’t going to get much, if any, sympathy from her mother-in-law, who, in keeping with Chinese tradition, expected subservience from a daughter-in-law. During Mrs. Joe Sim’s long life—she would live to one hundred and four—the taciturn woman would have little to say of her past in China except for one story: her wedding day. On the day her family carried her in a sedan chair to her new mother-in-law’s house, she parted the curtain to get a glimpse of the man she’d been promised to. She felt dismay to see that he walked with a limp. It turned out that Joe Sim had sprained his ankle in a recent fall while horsing around with some boys on a rooftop. Yet when Mrs. Sim told the story, this fact mattered not; limp or no limp, she’d already passed the point of no return.

  MABEL WANTED HER daughters to escape her fate in marriage. “I was so much younger than your father. In China a lot of that happened; older men marrying younger women. Then we end up afraid our husband is going to die soon. I want you to marry in the Canadian way. I want you to pick your own husbands. I had to take whatever marriage my parents made for me.”

  Mary chose her own husband. She wed Captain Dan Wong, whom she’d met on a trip to Montreal. Sent by the Kuomintang military to study abroad, he was introduced to Mary at a Chinese celebration in the city.

  Mabel confessed to her unmarried daughters that she’d fended off propositions of marriage for them more than once. A preposterous one came from a woman who wanted to make a group deal: her three sons for Mabel’s three daughters. A Mrs. Jang, from Woodstock, a town in the rich farmland of southern Ontario, was confident that Mrs. Johnston would find her sons an attractive package: one was a cook, one had joined the Canadian Air Force, and the third, with a diploma from the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, ran the family farm. To avoid offending the woman, Mabel replied that it would be bad luck to have siblings marrying siblings. Bad luck could strike both their families, she said.

  While Mabel wanted her daughters to choose their own spouses, she nonetheless wanted them to confine their choices. “Be sure to choose someone Chinese, because that will make for a better marriage. If you choose a lo fan there will be too many differences between you.” Similarly, Mabel advised her daughters to avoid anyone born of a mixed union, and thus, only partly Chinese. “People who are half and half don’t have a good standing; not like our own kind.”

  More often, Chinese parents made it perfectly clear that intermarriage was taboo: “If you marry a lo fan, I will disown you.” Or, “If you marry a lo fan, I will break both your legs.”

  Yet even on the west coast, marrying within the Chinese race posed a challenge. Exclusion was accomplishing what the head tax had failed to do—it was shrinking the Chinese presence in Canada. The declining number of Chinese in the country, who remained overwhelmingly male, exacerbated the shortage of women of marriageable age. The same held true in the United States. As a consequence, Chinese on both sides of the border went on wife-hunting trips to Vancouver and San Francisco in the west, and New York in the east. Anywhere outside of big cities, a Chinese family could be the
only one in town. And, more often than not, the bachelors in town were relatives, and working for them.

  Some well-meaning ladies from the church in Perth took it upon themselves to offer Doris advice. “Don’t go for any of the boys that come to your restaurant. After they leave your restaurant, they go to the bars. You’ve got a good mother; listen to her and marry someone Chinese.”

  DORIS DID VISIT Ottawa on her own to see Lil and Louise, and more frequently once they had their own apartment. When they had lived at the YWCA, she rarely went, not only because she had nowhere to stay but because they couldn’t afford to eat out; they were counting pennies just to buy meals at the cafeteria there. It had taken Lil and Louise several months to secure their own place. “It’s already rented,” they’d be told. With so many new employees joining the government, the market was tight. But they started noticing that when another prospective tenant arrived to view an apartment, someone who wasn’t Chinese, that person would be shown the space. Finally, Lil and Louise met a Jewish man with a basement apartment he was happy to rent to them.

  At work, Louise’s boss urged her to put Fong back into her name, in front of Johnston. “Don’t ever give up the Chinese part of your name,” he told her. Doris shrugged off the name change. “I like Johnston,” she said. “I was born with it; it’s on my birth certificate.” Her sisters, enjoying the wider circle of friends and colleagues in Ottawa, both Chinese and white, pestered her to leave the small town for the city. We can find you a steno job like ours, they told her.

  Doris didn’t dispute the attraction of benefits like medical insurance and a pension. And as long as she didn’t marry—she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to—she’d have job security; federal regulations required women to resign their positions when they married.