Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  The bet was on. Joe and two of his friends set out.

  NONE OF THE FAMILY COULD identify when Leip came to find comfort in a nip of alcohol; a bottle of whisky or rye had always stood alongside his health tonics. Nor did they know which came first, his bouts of depression or his propensity for drink. Whatever the trigger, Leip could go from happiness to anger, even fury, as if a light switch had been flipped.

  The rest of the family found it downright bizarre the time he took on the entire family at once. Agnes and the children were having dinner in the kitchen when they heard Leip pound up the stairs. He burst in and tore into them, yelling about all he had to do for them, even wash their dirty laundry. He lambasted them as if they were all lazy and slothful. His booming voice ricocheted off the walls: “I have to do everything for you, as well as do everything else around here!”

  As it was, Leip was always at the children about their chores and how when he was their age he had to work sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. While the girls heard it as nagging, Joe was more sympathetic. He saw it as his father trying to instill the value of hard work and reminding them that money was hard-earned.

  But most disconcerting about this particular outburst aimed at them was Leip’s plaintive plea before he headed back downstairs: “Help me.”

  The family started to worry. Agnes and the older girls finally broached the possibility of a drinking problem with Leip. In the early 1940s, the notion of addiction made news when a fellowship called Alcoholics Anonymous came north over the border into Ontario. The older girls heard that a branch had started up in Toronto and they tried to persuade their father to go, but he refused.

  In spite of her husband’s unpredictable moods, Agnes was steadfast in her efforts to have father and son bond. “Take Joe with you,” she’d say to Leip. Joe, whose temperament took after his mother’s, saw just how keen she was when she took him out of school so that he could accompany his father on a two-day trip to Montreal, when he was scouting chefs to hire.

  When he spent time with his father, typically fishing or hunting, Joe came to take for granted the bottle his father kept handy in his pocket.

  On one such afternoon, the two were out on the water and readying their fishing rods. Joe watched his father and as he would have predicted, Leip choose the heaviest sinker.

  Joe decided to ask why, to see what his father would say.

  “Because no fish is going to want to fight me after being on that sinker!”

  “Aren’t we here to enjoy fishing?”

  “We’re here to CATCH FISH!”

  This is so silly, thought Joe. My father sees life as one fight after another. “Well, I want to give that fish a fighting chance!”

  When the older girls again raised with their mother their father’s drinking, Agnes tried to brush off their worries: “Your father only drinks beer now.” Leip’s flashes of temper seemed to have subsided. He more often took to lying down and napping, though maybe sleep was due to having a drink; or perhaps it was the other way around, that he’d taken a drink to bring it on.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1954, Ruth had a newly minted degree in psychology from the University of Toronto. That same year, the Canadian economy took an unexpected dip. For businesses and residents along the St. Lawrence, a sudden pessimism nationwide about the country’s economic outlook came just as they had to contend with disruption from the construction of the seaway. At school’s end, instead of returning to Brockville, Ruth travelled to Washington, D.C., to participate in a workshop on non-violent ways to end racial discrimination.

  Her mother would not be impressed.

  Ruth’s workshop, which she’d applied for and won a scholarship to attend, was led by Wallace Nelson, a prominent civil rights activist. Wallace had been one of a team that undertook a “Journey for Reconciliation” in 1947, riding interstate buses in the Deep South to test the Supreme Court’s ruling against segregated buses for travel between states. Using that as a model, Ruth’s colleagues visited restaurants, theatres and swimming pools to test access for blacks. Repeatedly, they were arrested and jailed, making national news.

  To Ruth’s disappointment, her mother wrote chastising her for not coming home to help at the restaurant. It was not the first time that she’d gone against her mother’s wishes. When Ruth had completed high school, at Agnes’s urging she’d enrolled in a secretarial course at a business college in Brockville. But, as she confided to her sister Alice, the courses bored her. On a whim, Alice put her sister’s name on a raffle ticket she’d bought to raise money to rebuild the rink at the Brockville Memorial Civic Centre. Ruth won the grand prize, a new Chevrolet, and promptly sold it, using the proceeds to go to university.

  In reply to her mother, Ruth made an impassioned argument for the need to advance civil rights in the United States, which she declared had relevance for Canadian society. Three single-spaced typed pages later, she wrote: “With my intelligence, I can find few better fields to put my education to use.” Having warmed up her typewriter, Ruth let her indignation fly.

  I do not understand your phrase: “so far Daddy has helped to give you and Alice a career education, and so far he has not had any returns when he needed it most—it does prove discouraging.” What is it that you require of me? If it is money, why do you recommend that I work a year, earn enough money to carry me through further studies? How can I send money home if I am to save for studies. If it is that you want me home to work in the restaurant, this recommendation doesn’t follow either. Besides, I doubt if Daddy would give me a reasonable amount of responsibility in the restaurant as I would refuse to work otherwise. I cannot be a puppet, which is what I am every time I come home to work in the restaurant. This may sound rather blunt, but I say this with all humility and love, believe me. I cannot be a puppet and at the same time a creative human being.

  IN THE OPINION OF AN OUTSIDER, Leip Lor’s café in Brockville was an anomaly. “Odd that their business is always booming,” Mabel Johnston said to her daughter Doris. “Of course, I don’t have any of the Lors’ expensive dishes on the menu.”

  After the sudden drop in 1954, the economy had picked right back up. Yet, Mabel noticed, her business was falling off. Why, she couldn’t understand. People didn’t seem to be going out to eat as they once were; maybe they were enthralled with television, or maybe they were spending their money in other ways, on automatic clothes washing machines and tumble dryers.

  She tried to take a lesson from her late husband’s nose for opportunity. She remembered how Harry had thought it unusual that American children attending Camp Shomira, the Jewish summer camp on Otty Lake, who came in at day’s end for a candy bar and a soft drink, always left a tip, something Canadian children would never do. He decided to go after the business of their parents when they came on weekends to visit their children. “Jewish people won’t eat a pork chop, but I know they like veal,” he told Mabel.

  Mabel had the idea that she could add to the tourists’ experience by giving away chopsticks. The thought was that they’d keep them, and remember Harry’s Café and come back or advertise for her, but she stopped her experiment when she didn’t see any difference in the traffic to the restaurant.

  How could Leip Lor afford to source the food he offered, she wondered. Local lamb was trouble enough, never mind trying to arrange for fresh lobsters and oysters. Mabel put it down to the Lors’ clientele: “They get all the high-class tourist business up and down the river. They know what the tourists want—expensive, good food.”

  KEEPING TO WHAT TRACES remained of a walking path across the ice, Joe and his two friends made it to the other side. They scrambled up the riverbank and began to walk along the isolated stretch of River Road toward Morristown. They came upon a driver whose car was stuck in a snowbank. The boys offered to help the man and after some effort, they managed to free his car.

  Having heard that the boys had walked across the ice from Brockville, the man said that if they were returning the same way, they ought to b
e thinking about going back as it was getting late. Perhaps the man was concerned that the waning light of day would make a crossing by foot even more treacherous.

  In the sobering presence of an adult, the boys, burying their teenage bravado, agreed among themselves that they ought to take the Ogdensburg ferry back.

  “Can we hitch a ride into town?”

  “How about I take you right to the ferry?”

  The man drove through Morristown. Short of Ogdensburg, he stopped at the border-crossing office of U.S. Customs and Immigration. “I’m turning you boys in.”

  Joe wondered if the man had double-crossed him and his friends because he had something against the Chinese.

  Fortunately, all the boys, including Joe, happened to have border-crossing cards on them. It was common to live on one side and work or have businesses on the other, so locals on both sides of the river were accustomed to crossing freely without need to show a card.

  Only Joe was taken into an interrogation room. He produced his card. Silently he thanked his father; when the United States and Canada ordered the internment of those of Japanese descent, Leip had taken out cards for all his children: “Just in case someone mistakes you for Japanese.”

  Two hours later, Joe finally emerged to rejoin his friends. “You’re being deported,” an official told the three, putting them in a car and making sure they boarded the ferry in Ogdensburg.

  By the time Joe reached King Street in Brockville, it was twilight. He was late. He should have been back well before five, to help out at the restaurant. He noticed that the restaurant’s neon sign, with its more than two hundred bulbs surrounding the letters spelling out the name of the café, wasn’t lit. Something has to be wrong, he thought. Years ago, Joe’s father invested in a generator to make sure the sign could always be lit. Of course, his parents argued about that. Agnes said the kitchen ought to have first claim on the generator. “The sign is more important!” Leip thundered.

  Joe hurried his step. He started up the stairs, but before he reached the top, his mother appeared.

  At the sight of her slumped shoulders, Joe knew that whatever it was, it was terrible news.

  “He used a gun.”

  Agnes said it happened at four o’clock. One of the bachelors working in the kitchen had heard the muffled shot of the pistol, run downstairs to the basement and found Leip’s body in his office.

  Agnes and Gloria had been upstairs in the apartment but they hadn’t seen Leip go downstairs; nor had the kitchen help seen him go down the basement. He could have gone unnoticed, if he’d used the back staircase and the outside entrance to the basement.

  Nobody but Leip ever went into the backroom of the basement where he stored his guns in a locked cabinet. The rest of the family regarded it as a storeroom of “expensive Chinese stuff.” It held porcelain and rosewood carvings, mostly deities and buddhas, the provenance of which was forgotten, likely left behind by Leip’s father.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE FUNERAL, Agnes, sorting through her husband’s papers in his office, made a startling discovery. The New York Café owed its creditors a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

  Struggling to understand why her husband had been driven to take his own life, Agnes told Joe of an unsettling incident that she’d recently witnessed. She’d gone into the kitchen of the restaurant and happened upon Leip having a run-in with one of his chefs.

  “You’re not my boss,” the chef sneered.

  Having to put up with such lip from chefs was part and parcel of owning a restaurant. Chefs were a temperamental lot, given to fits of pique. Jack Sim, whose success at running his restaurants in Hull and Ottawa got him elected head of the Canadian Restaurant Association, always said that staff was the biggest challenge in the business, and that of all the staff, the kitchen was the most troublesome: “Say something wrong to the chefs, and they take off their apron and they’re gone.”

  “I could buy you out tomorrow,” the chef taunted.

  Normally, Leip would have given back as good as he got, his voice alone commanding authority. He said, quietly, “Go to hell.”

  How had the tables turned? Agnes and Joe spoke of how Leip had rescued many a bachelor trapped here by exclusion and the war, or down on their luck. From the days when he had a laundry, he’d given them a meal and a bed and often, work. Some had lived on the third floor for decades.

  Agnes raised with Joe the only option she saw for the restaurant: to declare bankruptcy.

  Joe thought of what “taking care” of his mother meant. I better hang around here, he told himself. Bankruptcy would leave his mother with nothing. “I’ll put off school,” he said. “I want to do it.” They both knew what he meant; he’d help her prove that she could run the restaurant.

  Agnes was suddenly optimistic. “None of your dad’s creditors are going to run us out of town.”

  A thousand people filled First Presbyterian Church to overflowing for Leip Lor’s funeral. It reached Agnes’s ears that the wife of her husband’s brother with the café in Gananoque was telling relatives that Agnes drove her husband to his death, because she hadn’t behaved like a good Chinese wife.

  Days later, Joe stood amid the dust of renovations at the restaurant. He and Agnes, accepting that people could be superstitious about where a suicide has taken place, had agreed that he ought to make the place look different. Joe began by ripping out the booths, but he left the partition hinges on the walls, as if leaving an artifact of his father’s time.

  It would take Agnes three years to turn the restaurant around and clear the debt.

  TO BRING A STEADY INCOME into the family while still saving for university, Joe applied for a job that fall at one of Brockville’s largest manufacturing plants. Phillips Cables produced copper rods and insulated wires and cables. Its two-hundred-foot smokestack was a landmark in Eastern Ontario. A manager hired Joe on condition that the plant’s doctor certify that he was in good health.

  The doctor warned the new employee that work on the factory floor was not easy: “You know, Joe, it’s not going to be like working in the family restaurant. White people live differently.”

  Joe was hired on for thirty-nine dollars a week. He worked a shift from Monday to Friday, which left his evenings and weekends free to help out at the restaurant. He decided that the doctor at Phillips Cables was right: working in the factory was different; it was a lot easier than working at the restaurant.

  Janet and Golden Lang and their infant daughter, Arlene, and Golden’s parents.

  Courtesy Golden Lang

  NINE

  RESOLVE

  ON THE PLANE’S DESCENT, a stewardess announced that Anchorage would be a refuelling stop only. The flight, which had originated in Hong Kong, was en route to Vancouver. Janet peered out the window at the ground below. She could see nothing to suggest a human landscape—not a building, not a person, nothing but whiteness. She could not even make out where the sky met the ground.

  Please don’t tell me I’ve died, she prayed. Don’t tell me this is heaven.

  All around her sat strangers. She included her new husband, seated beside her, in that category.

  “That’s snow down there,” he told her.

  So God wasn’t at hand after all. Still, she hoped she wasn’t going to end up in a place like this.

  At least she would have a few things to remind her of the life she’d left behind. In Hong Kong, when she’d been packing to go abroad, her new husband had invited her to make use of room in his luggage. Earlier that summer, he’d flown from Ottawa for their wedding and had brought two oversized suitcases, one of which he’d deliberately left half empty. Janet took a last look to see what else she’d like to take. She regretted most that marriage had cut short her schooling, all the more so because her parents had not enrolled her until she was ten. She’d only had six years of school. Her elder sister had shrugged off her complaint: “We all started late.” Only the two youngest of the five siblings—the boys—had been educated from an earl
y age. Into the space in her husband’s suitcase, Janet crammed what she could fit of her school texts, novels and magazines.

  Even now, halfway to her destination on the other side of Canada, she felt as if she was not Janet Tang, the sixteen-year-old girl who’d only known city life, but another girl who’d been abruptly plucked from school and a month later married off to Golden Lang, twenty-one, originally from a village on the mainland, in China.

  Perhaps the reality of her situation was all the harder to grasp because her mother, when speaking to Golden, continually used the third person to refer to her, even when she was standing right there.

  In the two months between the wedding and the young couple’s departure for Canada, on September 3, 1955, Mrs. Tang had taken charge of preparations for her daughter to set up house abroad. But as it turned out, Golden didn’t think his parents, who owned and ran a café near Ottawa, and with whom he and Janet would be living, lacked for anything.

  “What about dishes? Every bride should at least have dishes in her dowry.”

  “We have everything at home.”

  “What about chopsticks?”

  “No, no, we have lots of stuff like that.”

  “Will she need some good dresses?” asked Janet’s mother, by which she meant cheong sams. No, said Golden, giving Janet her first hint that her life was about to take a direction very different from how she’d lived in Hong Kong, the city of her birth.

  Nonetheless, Mrs. Tang filled Janet’s trunk with a new wardrobe. She took her to the tailor, who made up some padded silk jackets intended to keep her warm against the cold in Canada, and as well, a dozen stylish “American” outfits in different colours. Mrs. Tang bought crinolines to be worn with full, gathered skirts, and a dozen pairs of high-heeled shoes.

  Janet contemplated the stark landscape outside the plane window and was suddenly glad of what, at the last minute, she’d thought to add to her luggage. She had run downstairs from their high-rise apartment to the busy street, where any number of shops sold porcelain figurines of Fook, Luk, Sau, the three immortals who represented everything one could want from life. Most every home displayed them; if properly placed, the three rested at a height no lower than shoulder level and in a position where they could cast their eyes upon those entering a room.