Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  Although slated to be the one who would protect the elderly couple’s wealth, young Tsan received no favoured treatment. The family instructed the boy to address Old Hum as Bak and his wife as Poh—as elders rather than parents. He shared a room not with children but rather with a woman, a relation of Poh’s, whose husband was in Canada and whose remittances had been cut off by the war. At mealtimes, the Hums placed him at the opposite end of the table with the servants. Like them, he waited silently until the Hum family had finished their meal, at which point the servants could have what was left. By then, not a morsel of meat could be found among the vegetables. Other children in the household had amahs to look after them; Tsan was left to himself. The others had no household duties; before school, late in the afternoon, and again in the evening, Tsan was expected to walk the family’s water buffalo to and from the grazing grounds.

  Increasingly, Tsan felt that the family regarded him as nothing more than a boy servant. At least Old Hum had enrolled him in school, which he looked forward to daily. However, the ongoing war could collapse the routine of daily life at a moment’s notice. If and when the village head got warning of the Japanese army in the vicinity, he sent word through the village so that people could flee. If given enough advance warning, the entire village, taking provisions and using oxen to carry small children, headed for another village. If not, families grabbed some warm clothing and food, and made haste for a cave in the nearby hills. Soldiers on a mission to restock a troop’s provisions could surprise. Several times, a terrified Tsan came face to face in the village with a lo bak hao—the Chinese of the south disparagingly nicknamed the Japanese turnip heads, after the long white root vegetable that was a staple of the enemy’s diet. Tsan once watched some Japanese soldiers help themselves to the village’s fattest pig, then roast it in plain sight of the family that owned it. Soldiers often tramped into houses at will, opening a family’s coops and taking the chickens. Once, before marauding soldiers left the Hum house, several relieved themselves on the floor, creating a trail of filth.

  Because of the war, the village school operated sporadically, closing temporarily or moving to another building, often even another village. After a year or so, Old Hum ended Tsan’s formal schooling, deciding he had enough literacy and numeracy to start learning the business. He began to instruct Tsan on how to read the ledger of his accounts, including rent collections, payment of taxes and excises, and revenues from selling grain. “When you grow up,” he told him, “you will do it all.”

  The grain dealer assigned Tsan the responsibility, which eventually became his alone, of accompanying his wife on twice-yearly collections from their tenant farmers, when the Hums took delivery of shares of their harvests as rent. The merchant’s wife and Tsan set out in the pre-dawn, and went from village to village, across the Hums’ landholdings near and far. With each tenant farmer, the two settled accounts, then employed local porters to carry the payment of grain to a hired boat moored on the river. Back at the family compound, by then nightfall, they employed more labourers to ferry the collected grain to the granary on the second floor of the house, where it awaited Old Hum’s decision on the best time to sell and deliver to market.

  Old Hum pledged to Tsan that in return for his labours, his position in the family would be secure: he would inherit two parcels of the family’s land, fifty mau on the near side of the village, and fifty mau on the far side. He solemnly pointed out that, one day, his portrait would take its place of honour on the Hum family’s ancestral wall, where portraits of the couple’s three deceased sons already hung. Tsan evaluated his life: They don’t treat me badly. I’m not hungry, I have clothes to keep me warm. Yet he wished himself a different fate: I don’t have a mother’s love.

  What little time Tsan had to himself came at sunset. He’d head for the village temple, knowing that at that hour he’d find old men taking in the view. They liked to talk to a child. Sometimes one would share a boiled wild sweet potato. Despite those stolen moments and their company, Tsan felt overwhelmed with loneliness. He tried to keep it at bay by holding fast to fading memories of his mother, his brother and sister, and his grandmother. Before bed, he prayed that they might wander through his dreams.

  Within the Hum household, no one said a word about the family he’d left behind. No letters arrived for him, or if they did, the Hums didn’t pass them on.

  On one of his journeys to collect dues from tenant farmers, a lady who knew him by sight stopped him.

  “I have a bit of news for you.”

  She said she had a son who went to school in the district market town. In such towns, which could serve as many as thirty satellite villages, stray bits of information about lost family members eventually found a nesting spot, in the way that swirling leaves settle into a pile.

  The news was not good. Tsan’s grandmother had succumbed some time ago to starvation. His mother, weakened by hunger, could hardly walk. Tsan asked after the welfare of his brother and sister. The woman knew nothing of their existence.

  WHEN LIBERATION CAME in 1949, Tsan felt certain that trouble—big trouble—was coming. In the Hums’ village and in villages where he collected grain payments, when the Kuomintang and the Communists had been fighting for control of the country, he had heard people chanting: “Kill Communists! Long live Chiang Kai-shek!”

  When a new Communist order came to the Hums’ village, local Communist Party cadres confiscated Old Hum’s entire landholdings.

  Expecting worse to come, Tsan decided not to wait around. Confident that the Hums, given the sudden chaos in their own lives, wouldn’t care if he were to disappear, he made for Canton. In the crowded city, he could more easily disappear into anonymity. He found work in a barber shop, sweeping the floor and cooking for the boss, who let him sleep on a cot in the back. Within a year, the teenager was himself cutting hair. In his spare time, he strolled the streets taking note of storefronts with signs advertising courses in a trade. Once he’d saved enough money, he planned to come back and sign up for one of them.

  Then one day, he had a surprise visitor at the barbershop.

  His sister, by now married, had tracked him down. Overjoyed, Tsan asked after the rest of the family. She answered the mystery of why the woman on his grain collection route had known nothing of her or his brother: they were more often far away, as each walked great distances from home to find salt to buy, which they then carried home to resell for money to buy food. She reported that after the war ended with Japan, their brother and mother had fled to Hong Kong. When Liberation came and suddenly it was dangerous to be rich, their mother had asked the Hums to relinquish Tsan. Twice she asked, twice they refused. Then his sister learned that he had fled and she traced him, finally, to the barber shop in Canton. Six months later, Tsan had enough for a rail ticket to Hong Kong, where he was reunited with his family at last.

  IN JANUARY 1956, Tsan bid goodbye to his mother, promising he’d send money regularly from Canada to support her and his brother and sister. She gave him a Canadian twenty-dollar bill, saved from years of li shee, that a nephew in Vancouver sent every Christmas. Tsan planned to spend it on stamps, to mail letters home from Canada.

  Fourth Uncle met Tsan on arrival at the airport in Toronto and drove him not to London, as he’d expected, but rather to nearby Exeter. The town was best known for its canning factory that processed brand-name peas, corn, sauerkraut and tomatoes. Fourth Uncle owned a share in the Exeter Grill on the main street. He carried in Tsan’s bag for him, dropped it on the floor and pointed up the stairs. “You live upstairs, you work downstairs,” he said, then turned on his heel; he had to get back to his job as a cook at the hospital in London, thirty miles away. A moment later he reappeared: “One last thing, don’t go out. You might get into a fist fight out there.”

  After a year of working seven days a week, and spending no money outside of haircuts and a movie or two, Tsan again lamented the utter loneliness of his life. He remained in penury and debt to Fourth Uncle, worki
ng off the cost of bringing him to Canada—seven hundred dollars for the air fare, plus eighteen hundred to buy the “slot” for a sponsored son. (The going rate was the age on the birth certificate times one hundred dollars.) Seeing no future for himself in Exeter and seeking an escape route, Tsan canvassed the other helpers in the kitchen. “Try to get into the United States; there’s good money there,” they said. This was wishful thinking at best. The United States had replaced exclusion with an annual quota that held Chinese immigration to a trickle.

  Tsan asked his mother to obtain some addresses from a man in Hong Kong who had relations in their village and who was known to have sons and nephews in eastern Canada. Citing this acquaintance and a great-great-grandfather that they had in common, Tsan wrote to a restaurant owner, Stanley Wong of Ottawa, asking for work. A genial, refined and cultivated gentleman, a skilled amateur actor and a chef, Stanley had realized his ambition of owning a restaurant that served Chinese cuisine when he and his part-Irish, part-Chinese wife, the former Marion Bristol Sinn, came with their young family from Montreal in 1941 to start the Canton Inn. The first restaurant to serve Chinese food in Ottawa, it remained a favourite haunt of diplomats and politicians. “Come on over to Ottawa,” Stanley replied. He put Tsan up with the kitchen help in a dorm room above the Canton, and started him washing dishes, but quickly promoted him to kitchen helper, then cook’s helper.

  Stanley fell ill with a brain tumour that same year, in 1957. As his health rapidly deteriorated, he told his partners: “Tsan Wong is a good boy; make sure you keep him.”

  TSAN PUT ON A SUIT AND TIE, Brylcreemed his hair into a perfect wave, and headed down to the Chinese Mission. He called on the deaconess, Miss Ricker, and made a donation to the Sunday school—the fee for attending her remedial English classes on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. He also asked her to recommend a tutor for introductory French; he’d set his sights on earning a promotion to the Canton’s dining room, and he wanted to extend a courtesy to politicians who were French-speaking of greeting them with “Bonjour, comment ça va.”

  What had propelled Tsan to the Mission was his mother’s rebuff of his suggestion that he go to Hong Kong to look for a bride. In his letter, he named others in Ottawa who’d done the same. Like him, they knew they were out of the running when it came to Canadian-born Chinese girls. Tom-yee (Tom) Hum, for example, six years after emigrating from Hong Kong to Ottawa, went for a visit and returned with his new wife. Tsan had expected to hear that his mother was already lining up prospective wives. Instead, she wrote, “Don’t come back to Hong Kong to marry, not yet. You’re different than other boys. They are rich. You are not.”

  Tsan understood: Tom, his competition in the Hong Kong bride market, who had once waited on tables at the Ding Ho, could boast of owning a share of the Lucky Key Restaurant. That’s when it struck Tsan. He’d been living in Canada for three years and had acquired almost no English. If he only spoke Chinese, not only was he never going to make it out of the kitchen; he would always be the lowest paid on staff.

  SOME TIME LATER, at one of his English classes at the Chinese Mission, Tsan met a teenaged girl, newly arrived in Ottawa. He attended twice weekly; when she could make it, she came on Sunday afternoons. Before long, he was walking her home to her Auntie Eng’s on Frank Street, where she minded the couple’s four young children. Sometimes he walked her the long way around so that she could drop by her paper parents, whom she readily admitted she felt closer to. She confided that, like Tsan, she had entered Canada under a false identity; her real name was Lui-sang Hum. He began to court her, writing her letters. They’d take walks together around Dow’s Lake near the Central Experimental Farm, or if they dared to splurge—both sent most of their pay cheques to family in Hong Kong—they treated themselves to a roast beef dinner at the Embassy Café.

  Lui-sang’s grandmother saw how happy the two were in each other’s company. “He’s a good boy,” she told her granddaughter, eyeing him as a prospective husband. She noted approvingly that, while Tsan Wong didn’t yet own a house or a car, he had recently acquired a one-sixth share of the busy Canton Inn. Upon the death of its previous owner, Stanley Wong, the couple’s only son, Donald, had taken over its management. But after two years, he’d told his mother, “It’s not for me.” On his deathbed, Stanley had said their son didn’t have to take it on: “If he doesn’t want to do it, please don’t feel it has to be passed on.” Stanley’s widow sold the Canton to six of the staff, all of them either relations or, like Tsan, clansmen.

  With some trepidation, Tsan wrote to his mother in Hong Kong to tell her of his impending marriage. “Don’t worry,” she wrote back. “Your brother and sister should soon be able to support themselves; you won’t have to keep sending money home.”

  At the Chinese Mission, Miss Ricker happily took charge of the arrangements. She was delighted, not to say chuffed, at this union of two people who had first met at her remedial English class. As with all her students, Miss Ricker had bestowed on them new Christian names, the better to help them make their way in a new country. Ever respectful of teachers, Tsan and Lui-sang readily agreed to the names she chose for them.

  So it was that, come the wedding, Miss Ricker took care of the details of the service and personally made the white-bread rolled sandwiches, the cake and the squares that were served at the reception following. On the day, she put on her best dress, a hat and pearls, and when the photographer posed the wedding guests for a portrait with the bride and groom on the steps of the Mission, she joined in. In her mind, it was a pleasure to launch Gordon and Kathy into married life.

  Agnes Lor and her five children: Alice (on her right) and Ruth (on her left) and (front, left to right) Joe, Gloria and Valerie. Others: Harry (Agnes’s brother) and May, daughter of Leip Lor’s first wife.

  Courtesy Ruth Malloy

  EIGHT

  OUTCOMES

  IN THE WINTER OF his last year of high school, Joe Lor wasn’t sure what he’d do after he graduated, whether in the fall he’d go on to university and, if so, what he’d study. His three elder siblings had already gone out into the world. Alice had studied nursing at McGill, had married and was working in Toronto. Ruth had earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto, was about to return to study social work, and had been a freelance writer and photographer, filing stories for the Globe and Mail from such far-flung places as Frobisher Bay in Canada’s north and Brazil. Valerie was also in Toronto, in her second year at teachers’ college. Only Joe and Gloria were still at home. At twelve, Gloria had a few years yet.

  Like all the Lor children, Joe was born in Brockville. His first, and only, home was the apartment where his parents, Leip and Agnes, had begun their married life, above the New York Café. Their marriage and the family’s restaurant were each going on thirty years.

  Joe’s older sisters had known that sooner rather than later they’d leave their hometown, if only because they weren’t going to find husbands there. So he knew that life as he’d known it had to change. But comfortingly, during holidays and summers, when his sisters returned from university, their lives settled back into the rhythm of the family business. Just as the siblings did in their early childhood when they needed a parent to come upstairs to the apartment, one of them would take the broom, upend it, and bang on the floor to get the attention of a family member in the restaurant below. The five children still gravitated to the booth at the back, where they once did their homework, competing for space with their mother’s paperwork and leaving their father to his office in the basement.

  Perhaps when you’re far down the sibling order, change comes harder. But that was thinking further ahead than Joe needed to. It was only February. He had a few more months to make any decision.

  DESPITE LIVING IN A small town like Brockville, Joe had no sense that he was cut off from the world. In fact, the opposite was true. Come spring, once the ice broke up, the modern era of water transport, international commerce and tourism would sail i
nto view. In a few weeks—as early as April—the recently completed St. Lawrence Seaway would open, linking the river with the five Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. The official opening later this summer, on June 26, 1959, was going to be an international event, presided over by no less than Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, President Dwight Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth.

  The five years of construction to widen and deepen the channel between Montreal and Lake Ontario had been a mammoth spectacle in itself: the river had to be diverted to accommodate the building of locks and canals and, in advance of the controlled flooding, houses picked up and moved. But now that the seaway was finished, of all the river towns where one might watch the parade of ocean-going freighters, cruise ships and pleasure craft, Brockville arguably offered the best prospect; the river here was at its narrowest, less than a mile separating Ontario and New York State.

  All of which boded well for business at the Lors’ New York Café. Even before the seaway, one only had to see the volume of summertime traffic through town to recognize that Brockville attracted its share of tourists and big-city spenders. Its waterfront was a departure point for tours and cruises of the Thousand Islands, tree-covered granite hilltops of the southernmost reaches of the Canadian Shield that broke the water’s surface. Thirty miles upriver, centred around Alexandria Bay, New York, these islands and the banks of the St. Lawrence were home to “Millionaires’ Row,” named for the summer mansions of industrialists and socialites from New York, Boston and Chicago who left city life behind and came for “the season.”

  Leip and Agnes Lor’s New York Café was on King Street, a five-minute walk up from the tour boat pier at the end of Broad Street. Within a sixty-five-mile stretch of the King’s Highway on the Canadian side, no fewer than five cafés, located in Brockville, Prescott, Morrisburg, Ganonoque and Iroquois, carried the same name, and were owned by Leip Lor or men related to him. He owned a share in three; he and his younger brother were sole proprietors of their own respective cafés.