Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  Jasper’s worst fears about Fuen’s vulnerability were borne out. His brother had left Hong Kong and returned to the village for opium, an indulgence—possibly an addiction—for him that could not legally be satisfied in Hong Kong. The British, after regaining control of the colony after 1945, had declared opium a dangerous drug and subsequently banned its sale.

  Fuen walked right into danger. Party cadres charged with classifying the peasant households in Jasper Hum’s village labelled his as that of a rich landlord. When the cadres arrested his brother, they demanded that he turn over the Hum household’s gold. When he denied the family had any, they accused him of hiding it. The more he protested, the more ghastly was his torture. His captors cut off his ears, then they broke his hands, then his feet. A few days later, Fuen died of his injuries, spared the knowledge of the even more gruesome cruelty inflicted on his wife and his sister-in-law, Jasper’s wife.

  Cadres in the village subsequently confiscated Jasper Hum’s house, land and clinic, and banished the evicted wives and their children to a windowless, empty shed on their property. The men charged with administering punishment to the two women rounded up the two wives and their four children: Jasper’s daughter, Ling, not quite two (the eldest, a teenager, was away at school in the north of the province); and Fuen’s three: Shui-dan, Hee-jeung and Haw-wong, aged seven, five and four. Forcing the children to watch, they bound their mothers at the ankles, strung them upside down, and took a burning torch, dipped in fat, to their feet and legs. The men showed no compassion, the better to demonstrate they were not obstructing the Land Reform campaign.

  After the torturers cut down the women, they tossed them back into the shed; severely burned, they lay moaning and immobile on the dirt floor. The children were left to fend for themselves. At night, the eldest, Shui-dan, trying to keep the other children and their mothers alive, crept out of the shed to scrounge for food and fetch water from the river. Any villagers who offered help would be inviting their own persecution; yet one family, that of the former village administrator who had also been arrested, dared to do so. Sent by her mother, ten-year old Lui-sang Hum showed up nightly with boiled water to be used, she said, to clean the two women’s burn wounds. From time to time, she brought food, enough for a mouthful for each of the six.

  Slowly the two women regained their health.

  Four months into the family’s confinement, the cadres released them from captivity. Later that day, Fuen’s wife walked up the mountain, to the edge of a lake, and threw herself in.

  MABEL HAD BEEN AS shaken as Jasper when, finally, a letter came from his wife with news that a year earlier, his brother had died at the hands of the Communists, that his sister-in-law had killed herself, and that everything that he’d spent his life abroad working for was lost. Mabel tried to be consoling: “You and I would have been the first to be killed if we were there. They would have tried to take what was ours away, and we would have fought them and they would have killed us. We worked so hard for our money. We had to live through so much to earn it.”

  For a time, Mabel tolerated her brother’s despondency. But when he started hanging out with the poker players in the back of one of the shops in Perth, or took off with Howard, Doris’s husband, for a night of gambling and drinking at the social clubs in Ottawa, she decided her brother was in a dangerous tailspin. Mustering the authority of an older sister, Mabel let Jasper have it. She told him he’d moped long enough, that while once he’d been industrious and conscientious, he had turned lazy and uncaring. She ended with a stern rebuke: “Get back on your feet! You still have a family to worry about.”

  Mabel held out the example of their clansman, Chong-sam Hum, who had re-established himself in Ottawa, reunited his entire family and prepared to start over. Sensing the growing popularity of Chinese cuisine, he had got right back into the restaurant business with the Ding Ho and later, the Ho Ho, both on Albert Street. He’d partnered with two savvy Chinese entrepreneurs in Ottawa: Thomas Hum, the son of the pioneer Hum family and descended from the same ancestral village; and Bill Poy, whose family had been admitted as wartime refugees and who’d been a regular at the Sun Café. Thomas and Bill had formed Allied Trading, an import–export company that dealt in goods ranging from fabric and clothing to televisions and polystyrene plastic.

  Rousing himself to begin anew, Jasper plotted with his sister how to reassemble the remnants of his household in Canada. He had to first get himself naturalized. And he had to get the family out of his village to Hong Kong, the port of exit. All easy compared to the problem of how to support them once they arrived here.

  Jasper wanted to open his own café, which was impossible without partners. But a cook who’d only worked in his family-run business and in a small town wouldn’t attract investors like Tom Hum and Bill Poy. They were out of his league: Tom Hum drove a Chrysler, smoked cigars and had a riverfront home with a swimming pool, and a cottage on Meech Lake; Bill Poy drove a Studebaker, lived on picturesque Mountain Road in Aylmer on the Quebec side and owned a cottage on McGregor Lake. Both men had business and social connections outside the Chinese community.

  Mabel and Jasper mapped out what he had to do. He’d have to leave Perth to gain experience in other cafés. And stay with the small towns. Life in such close quarters would force him to improve his English; in a big city like Ottawa, one could get by with Chinese only. Plus, he’d be able to keep his eyes and ears open for another small-town café that might be for sale, or a town with room for a second restaurant, and for potential partners willing to invest their sweat in a business.

  Then came the matter of Fuen’s orphaned children. Jasper’s plan was to pass off the three young children as his own, as long as he could obscure their ages to credibly claim that in three years at home he’d fathered four children. Sadly, he decided it was impossible to say that Shui-dan, the brave girl who had almost single-handedly kept the family alive, was his. He sent word to his wife in China, asking her to break the news to his niece that he could not include her in his application.

  More than four years from the date Jasper first began the process, his wife and the remaining three children—his own daughter, Ling, and Fuen’s two sons—made it to Hong Kong for their interview with Canadian Immigration officials. All were approved subject to passing their medical tests. On that score, officials rejected the younger of the two boys, the one originally given in name by Fuen to his brother, determining that he displayed symptoms of autism.

  ON A SATURDAY NIGHT in October, 1957, Jasper waited until the last customer left the Astor Café, then upended the chairs and swept the floor, making a head start on the day ahead. At three in the morning, one of his partners, George Fong, drove him to Ottawa. Jasper had never learned to drive either.

  Five hours earlier, at ten in the evening, Margaret Hum and two children, Kenny Hum, aged nine, and Linda Hum, aged seven—the names they would later take in Canada—drew stares as the only Chinese among the passengers arriving at Ottawa Airport. Linda and Kenny themselves were wide-eyed. Awed by how tall and white Canadian people looked, they were shocked when the men and women began to throw their arms around each other and kiss. “Mama, what are they doing?” asked Linda. Such public intimacy was unseen in China.

  Margaret piled herself and the children into a taxi. Outside the Cathay House restaurant, the designated meeting place, she had to negotiate the children around inebriated men who’d stumbled out of nearby bars. Inside, they found the cook from their village who was expecting them.

  At four in the morning, Jasper came through the door. He cried hardest when for the first time, he looked into the face of his daughter, Linda. The young girl could not take her eyes off the man whom she understood to be her Baba. All she knew about him was what her mother had said: that he loved to cook, that he’d doted on her two male cousins when he was in the village.

  The sun had not yet risen over the horizon when the family arrived in Smiths Falls. George Fong turned off the wide main street onto A
berdeen Street, coming to a stop in front of the house that Jasper had rented for his family. He deposited his wife and the children there and shortly afterward left to open the café for the day.

  Mid-morning, a neighbour, one of two spinsters who shared the house next to Jasper’s, knocked at the door. They held out a large cellophane-wrapped fruit basket to Margaret. To show her manners, she nudged the basket back. The neighbour extended it again. The basket passed back and forth between them, one woman speaking only English, the other only Chinese. Finally, judging she’d shown an appropriate degree of unworthiness, Margaret accepted it.

  LINDA WAS A TEENAGER before she brought up with her mother their ordeal at the hands of the Communists. She had previously broached the subject of what had happened with her stepbrother, Kenny. He insisted that he remembered nothing. He doesn’t want to remember, Linda told herself.

  Mother and daughter picked through the shards of memory.

  Though she was only two at the time, Linda could clearly remember clinging to the legs of her cousin, Shui-dan.

  “I can still see you and Auntie, tied up and hanging upside down. There are three or four men. They dip something in a flame and burn you, starting at your feet.”

  “I wanted to close my eyes but they said they’d kill you if we turned our heads away or if we didn’t stop crying,” Linda told her mother. “I can’t forget your screaming. I remember that they came back and did it again. I remember that in the shed, you and Auntie couldn’t move.”

  Margaret showed her daughter the burn scars that reached to her navel.

  “Don’t ever forget Shui-dan,” Margaret said of the girl left behind in China.

  Of course, Linda never would. Life got better for them after the Land Reform campaign ended and the Communists again allowed remittances from relatives overseas. In the two years before the rest of the household left for Hong Kong, the cousins had a happy time playing together, climbing trees and playing tag. “Shui-dan was such a tomboy; she wasn’t scared of anything!”

  Margaret continued, giving what would be the last word.

  “On the day the Communists released us, your Auntie said she was going to the market. She said she couldn’t wait to see good food. She never came back. When I found out that she had gone up into the mountains and drowned herself, I thought, ‘If only I was stronger, I would kill myself.’ Then I thought, ‘I can’t, I have four children to raise.’ I looked at you, you were so young. I couldn’t leave you.”

  THE PEOPLE OF Smiths Falls could not have guessed that this reunited Chinese family had survived a terrible past, defined by separation, cruelty and death. They did not know that Margaret Hum suffered constant pain and discomfort from her burn scars, and recurrent infections in her legs and abdomen.

  Her neighbours, the two spinsters, might have noticed that she loved to wear pretty dresses. They might have thought it strange that even in summer she covered her legs in opaque leotards. But they made no comment; they did not share a language. Their conversations were in the exchange of what went over the fence from their gardens, rhubarb and asparagus in one direction, bok choy and lettuce in the other.

  Only one visitor knew more. Lui-sang Hum, whose family had been neighbours of the Hums in the village, had come from China the year after them. When she found out that the children she had once played with were living in Smiths Falls, she had someone drive her from Ottawa to pay a visit one Sunday. (It was her day off from her job at the New Astor Café, owned by an Ottawa branch of the Hums. They had added the “New” to distinguish it from the café owned by Jasper Hum in Smiths Falls.) Of course, she made no mention of the horror of the shed, and neither did they.

  Tsan Wong in Exeter, Ontario.

  Courtesy Tsan Wong

  SEVEN

  AMBITION

  TSAN WONG FOUND IT A particular challenge to fix in his mind the name of the Blue Funnel steamship that had brought his paper father from China to Canada. All the ships of the line had Greek names like Philoctetes and Protesilaus. He wouldn’t err on the date that his paper father had last visited China, however, as that was easy to calculate by when he had fathered his son, Wong Wing-ham, born eighteen years ago, in 1938. In front of Canadian Immigration officials, Tsan would have to shave three years off his real age. At least, he told himself, my paper father and I have the same surname.

  If all went well, Tsan would live in London, Ontario, with Fourth Uncle, who’d bought the paper for him to go to Canada. Tsan studied diligently. He memorized the paper family’s lineage. He assembled the details of their village to recreate it in his mind: number of rows of houses, location of the fish pond, names of neighbours on all sides; which direction the house faced; what each room was used for; who slept where. On it went.

  In December 1955, when Tsan passed the interview with Canadian Immigration in Hong Kong, he sent a one-word telegram to Fourth Uncle: OKAY. That was the signal to send money for the airfare.

  “YOU’RE GOING TO CANADA?” Tsan’s colleague in the apprenticeship program at the British-owned Taikoo Dockyard could not hide his surprise. “What are you going to do there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe work in a laundry, maybe a restaurant.”

  A cheerful youth with a broad smile, Tsan allowed that going to Canada had not been his idea. He explained that a brother of his grandfather on his father’s side lived in Canada and had sent for him. His suspicion was that this was his mother’s doing, that she’d written to Fourth Uncle asking him to find a way to get her son to Canada, not the other way around.

  When his mother broke the news to him, Tsan was dismayed. He didn’t want to give up his job as a machinist in Hong Kong. On his own initiative, he had applied for the same five-year apprenticeship program in which his older brother was already enrolled. Two years in, unlike his brother, he’d kept his marks above eighty-five percent, the threshold of eligibility to work for the parent company in England. With that goal in mind, he had been using a beginner’s phrase book to learn English, matching up phrases like Chee saw hai bin do ah, when one wanted to use the facilities, with “Where is the WC?”

  He wanted to refuse Fourth Uncle, but his mother insisted he could not. A widow, she worked at the shipyard as well, sweeping floors and collecting garbage. Tsan’s job, while secure, was poorly paid. Everywhere in the colony, times were tough; disquiet about low wages, long working hours and overcrowded living conditions had spilled into frightening, large-scale riots. “Go, go,” Tsan’s mother told him. “You can get rich faster there than here.”

  UNTIL TSAN WONG HEARD from Fourth Uncle, Canada had passed only fleetingly through the orbit of his life, when he was a young boy. His adoptive father, Old Hum, a landowner and prosperous grain dealer, had been grooming him to take over the family business. One day, Old Hum brought out a dusty ledger, a record of money owed him from loans he’d made to bachelor men in Canada over the three decades when he himself had lived there. Now in his seventies, he had left for Canada before the turn of the century and made his way to Montreal, where he opened one of the city’s first hand laundries. The arrival of Chinese men like him coincided with a spike in Irish and Jewish immigrants, each profiting by offering separate services to an emerging white middle class. The ledger showed that the amounts outstanding were substantial: fifty dollars here and there, even one hundred dollars. “Someday,” Old Hum told the boy, “you can get that money back.”

  A series of misfortunes in Tsan’s birth family had landed him in the household of Old Hum and his wife. When war came to China, Tsan’s father and mother, with three young children in tow, had joined the tide of villagers from Guangdong province pouring into the colony of Hong Kong. In 1941, facing the threat of a Japanese attack, the government of the colony required all refugees who’d taken up residence there to prove that they had six months’ provisions to sustain themselves. If not, they would be forced to return to China. Tsan’s father fell ill and died, leaving his widow no choice but to leave the colony and return to their vi
llage.

  Back home, the destitute widow saw only one way to keep herself and her two sons and a daughter from starvation: she would have to give up one of them. A fellow villager put her in contact with Old Hum, who was known to have extensive holdings, and to whom many tenant farmers in and around her own village paid rent. As it happened, Hum was looking to adopt a son, a boy who would be his protegé in the family’s business. The Hums were not without sons of their own, but three of four sons had died young, before marrying. Old Hum judged the surviving son, though married with children, unreliable because he was addled by an opium habit.

  The widow decided to give away the younger of her sons, six-year-old Tsan, because she considered him the brighter of the two. Unbeknownst to the boy as he set out with his mother on a six-hour walk to the Hums’ village, he would not be making the return trip with her.

  Mother and son arrived at the Hums’ compound and found it dominated by a large two-storey house, with the usual fish-farming pond in front, surrounded by several outbuildings. The adults exchanged greetings and sent Tsan off to explore the fish pond. He amused himself by watching for carp to break the surface of the shallow water. Finally, having lost interest, he wandered up to the house only to discover his mother gone. In tears, he returned to the pond. Evening fell, but he could not be pried from the water’s edge. One of the manservants from the household came to console him: “Don’t cry, don’t cry. Your home is here now.”