Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  Janet bought a small, cheap set. Each figurine, only three inches high, was a traditionally depicted replica. Fook, a scholar in a turquoise robe, held a baby, symbolizing the harmony that comes with continuing the lineage of family; Luk, clad in the rich red robes of a mandarin, carried the sceptre of office, conveying authority and prosperity; and Sau, an old man, his walking stick enfolded in his yellow robe, carried a peach, the fruit of immortality.

  Not knowing what to expect of the landscape where the Langs lived, Janet considered the secondary purpose of her three celestial deities: as long as she acknowledged that any goodness that came her way was their doing, they would also dispel any hovering bad luck.

  THE DEAL BETWEEN Mrs. Tang in Hong Kong and Mrs. Lang in Canada to marry their children to each other had been struck five years earlier. The Tangs had fled their village ahead of the Japanese, and Mr. Tang had re-established himself in Hong Kong with a taxi business. In 1950, Mrs. Lang had in turn made her way from a neighbouring village to Hong Kong, where she awaited approval from Canadian Immigration to join her husband, a cook at a café in Quebec. The Langs’ third child, Golden, then aged sixteen and the only one of their offspring young enough to qualify as a dependent child, had gone on several months ahead.

  Upon meeting in Hong Kong, the two women agreed that five years later, when Golden turned twenty-one, he would return from Canada to marry Mrs. Tang’s eldest daughter. When the time came to honour the agreement, Golden flew to Hong Kong. However, the Tangs’ daughter, by then nineteen, refused to give up her boyfriend. The mothers then agreed that the Tangs could substitute their second daughter. When that daughter proved even more obstinate than the first, Mrs. Tang promised that by the wedding date set in eight weeks’ time, she would deliver her youngest daughter to the altar.

  Mrs. Tang informed Janet that the ceremony would be at the marriage bureau in Hong Kong’s government offices; Golden was not a Christian. If Janet’s family, members of the Congregation of Christ Church (restored after the Japanese had used it as a horse stable), could not give her a church ceremony, they did orchestrate a formal wedding portrait. The bride, eschewing the traditional cheong sam for a white wedding gown, had one attendant—her cousin—and the groom had five—her father’s chauffeur, her two brothers and her two younger cousins.

  It had not occurred to Janet, a fine-boned, pretty girl, when first told her fate, to protest as her older sisters later told her they had done. Nor did anyone explain what to expect of her domestic life in Canada with her new in-laws. At home in Hong Kong, she’d never so much as boiled water or washed a pair of socks; her family had servants to cook, clean and do the laundry. Janet put no such questions to Golden, whose baby fat made him look more boy than man, and he himself volunteered nothing.

  SINCE HIS FAMILY didn’t own a car, Golden had arranged for Clifford Cox, a retired farmer who sold life insurance, to meet him and his new wife at Ottawa Airport. The ride twenty-five miles west on Highway 17, skirting the city of Ottawa and passing by farmers’ fields dotted with solitary trees, took them to the village of Carp. There, the road, part of the new Trans-Canada Highway, turned into Main Street. A cluster of modest wood-sided houses delineated the village from the surrounding farms. As evident from the outhouses in the backyards, few had indoor plumbing. At the far end of the village, beyond an archway proclaiming the “Carp Agricultural Society,” stood a landmark of the county: a massive red octagonal barn, where, come time for the annual Carp Fair, farmers and their wives presented their best, from show horses and cattle to giant pumpkins and home-baked pies.

  At a red and green sign that read “BA”—for British American Oil Company—Mr. Cox pulled into an expansive gravel lot. A long, flat-roofed single-storey building, an addition to a barn, sat back from two gas pumps. On the wall closest to the barn hung a noisy confusion of signs. The largest, anchored by DRINK COCA-COLA at either end, read GOLDEN CAFE. A faded board indicated RESTAURANT, and another, SNACK BAR. The door to the café extolled the fresh taste of PURE SPRING ginger ale. Mr. Cox stopped the car in front of a tiny porch on the far side. If only by the absence of signage, that half of the addition was identifiable as the café’s adjoining living quarters.

  A wave of disappointment washed over Janet. In her naïveté, she had assumed that Golden’s parents lived in a city like Hong Kong with high-rises, trams and taxis, and a street life that carried on day and night. Where were all the people? This place is empty farmland, she thought: I’ve gone back fifty years.

  For the next three years, hardly a day would go by that Janet didn’t dissolve in tears. Convinced that her mother had married her off to “get rid” of her, especially since her family rarely bothered to write, she confided nothing in her obligatory letters home. Of this she was certain: nobody living with her knew of her sadness.

  “We have everything at home,” Golden had said in Hong Kong. But Janet saw that “everything” turned out to be chopsticks and little else. But rarely did they come out. The family habitually ate whatever her father-in-law, who did most of the cooking, had prepared on the café side—their only kitchen. That meant hamburger steak with mashed potatoes, gravy and carrots. In summer, he sometimes cooked a stir-fry for the family from the bok choy, lo bok, snow peas and swiss chard that he harvested from his garden out back, but he saved most of the space for lettuce, tomatoes, beans and carrots for the café. The rare luxury of rice was dulled by having to eat from the heavy white dishes used at the café.

  What bonded the family was constant work, seven days a week. Besides staffing the café and gas pumps, someone had to meet the Colonial Coach buses when they came through, twice a day in each direction, on their Ottawa–Toronto route; the company paid the Langs to accept parcels, to be given to the driver. At the same time, the buses discharged passengers as anxious to use the café washroom as to buy candies and drinks and snacks during the short rest stop. Then there was the housekeeping and laundry, the garden to tend; and in the cold weather, the stove on the café side to be stoked with wood by day and coal by night, and the front door and the gas pump area cleared of snow. Plus, the Langs had duties as landlords. They rented out the barn—for now, to a neighbour who used it to park his Canada Bread delivery truck—and two small apartments behind the family’s rooms, where the land fell away toward the river then rose to the railway track. The apartments attracted transients, who often disappeared in the night, leaving rent unpaid; or sometimes had to be evicted for fear their rowdiness and drunken behaviour would offend the neighbours, with their strict Presbyterian attitudes. Carp was a “dry” town.

  Except for the reading material she’d brought, and read many times over, Janet found little diversion in the village. Its only other commercial enterprises, all small, were Moore’s IGA grocery, Arnold’s Meat Locker, which sold only frozen meat, Lucas’ Convenience Store, a barber shop, a post office and a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia. On her first Sunday in Carp, Janet walked alone up the steep hill to St. Paul’s United Church. She’d thought church might give her a chance to wear the outfits she’d brought from Hong Kong. She was wrong; the dress and hairstyles of the local farmers’ wives had not even caught up to the fashions in old Hollywood movies.

  More than anything, Janet’s despair came from sheer loneliness. Neither her in-laws nor her husband engaged her in conversation. Once she had dared to ask if she could try cooking—she wanted to learn, and moreover she craved Chinese cuisine. Her in-laws wouldn’t let her near the stove: “We can’t trust you.” They only spoke to her to lecture or complain about what she had or hadn’t done.

  Janet kept her sadness from her husband, and anyway, she didn’t expect sympathy. Perversely, her isolation became valuable to her; she came to treasure, even guard it. She decided she would do what her in-laws asked of her and not talk back or utter a word of complaint. Neither would she speak to them unless they spoke to her first.

  OF THE FORTY-FIVE YEARS that old Mr. Lang had lived in Canada, he had spent forty as a “ma
rried bachelor.” He’d first left his village in 1910 to join an older brother in Vancouver who had lined up work for him as a cook for a doctor’s family. He’d returned to China in 1915 to marry, and finally, eight years later, having repaid his brother for the expense of bringing him over, had saved enough to pay his wife’s boat passage and head tax. He was too late: Mrs. Lang’s steamship was mid-ocean when the Exclusion Act was passed, and when the ship came into port, Canadian authorities sent her back to China. At thirty-three, Mr. Lang, not yet a father, made the first of three visits to his wife before the war with Japan halted travel across the Pacific. Each of those visits produced a child, the youngest of whom was Golden.

  Over the years, Mr. Lang migrated east from Vancouver. By 1949, he was working at a coffee shop in Goderich, near Lake Huron in southern Ontario. Then a friend asked him to help out at his café on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. After a stint at the Royal Café in Campbell’s Bay, a couple of hours upriver from Ottawa, he moved ten miles farther to Fort Coulonge, to the Coulonge Café. One of the partners, Lem Howe, asked Mr. Lang to replace him while he went to Hong Kong to look for a wife. From Fort Coulonge, Mr. Lang and Mr. Howe’s partner, Joe Lee, began the process of bringing their families from China. Mr. Lee applied for his wife (a cousin of Mr. Lang); and Mr. Lang for his wife and Golden.

  The first to arrive in Fort Coulonge were Golden and Mr. Howe and his new wife.

  Golden had no memory of his father, whose last visit to China had ended when he was only a baby. The teenager saw that if he didn’t quickly learn English, he’d have only his father’s adult friends to speak to, a prospect he didn’t relish. One of the first locals he met was the Anglican minister, Monsieur Emard, who took his supper at the café while waiting for the Ottawa train with the daily mail, which he would distribute to his parishioners in Yarm, Stark’s Corners, Charteris, Shawville and Otter Lake. Seeing the tedium of Golden’s eleven-hour days at the café, the minister took the young man under his wing and extended an invitation to visit him and his wife. When he saw Golden’s face light up at his collection of black and white photographs, the minister offered to teach him how to take pictures and develop them.

  Within a year, Messrs Lang, Howe and Lee all had their wives in Canada, and the three families shared the living space above the Coulonge Café. The Howes were also expecting their first child. Mr. Lang knew it was time to move on again. The café could hardly support two families, never mind three. The next time Gerry Finer, who serviced nickelodeons in cafés around the area, showed up, he asked, “You know of any cafés for sale? In a small town?” He knew of only one. “Keith McMurtchy runs a lunch and gas bar in Carp; he wants out of the business.” Lem Howe, whose English was better than Mr. Lang’s, travelled with him to Carp to negotiate the purchase. He and Mr. McMurtchy settled on thirteen thousand dollars; Mr. Lang, superstitious about an unlucky number, deducted one dollar from the price.

  Carp was a village of farmers where Armstrong was the most common name on the mailboxes. The village’s first and only Chinese family for as long as they would remain there, the Langs had a cultural divide of their own. Just as Mr. Lang had lived most of his and his wife’s marriage on his own in Canada, Mrs. Lang had lived akin to a widow in China. She’d raised three children on her own, two of whom were left behind in China and whom her husband hardly knew. With their reunion, Mr. and Mrs. Lang were resuming a marriage in its waning years, and reuniting as parents of their youngest child, who was already on the brink of adulthood. Their only shared experience was rooted in the mores of old China.

  As for their son, Golden, he was capturing images of his own new reality, that of the present. When the Langs moved to Carp, he’d bought himself a Brownie camera. He set up developing equipment in the family bathroom, and would shut the door tight when he was at work. Into this company of strangers stepped Janet.

  WHEN JANET WAS STILL a newlywed, her mother-in-law had crudely grabbed her ankle, shaking it like a loose table leg. “So skinny, just like Mrs. Lee said. You won’t be giving birth to any babies.”

  Janet felt wounded; Mrs. Lee, whom she’d met once, had seemed so friendly.

  “She got a good look at you, walking up her staircase.”

  On that particular day, Golden had a friend take the two of them on an outing so that he could show Janet the two cafés where his father had worked and where he and his mother had first lived when they came to Canada. The day had been a picturesque tour through some mill towns along the river, ending up in Fort Coulonge, originally a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. At the café there, Janet had accepted Mrs. Lee’s invitation to tour the living quarters on the second floor. Now Janet realized that the café owner’s wife clearly had her own eyes elsewhere.

  By her second miscarriage, Janet began to think her mother-in-law was right. Maybe her ninety-four pounds were too slight to carry a baby to term. She had lost the first baby at six months along, the second at four months.

  Now she was pregnant for the third time in less than three years of marriage. Dr. Daykin, Carp’s only doctor, whom she saw in his home office up the street, said he would schedule her for monthly injections of synthetic hormones, which he hoped would prevent a miscarriage. But he was firm that Janet had to do her part: “Go home and relax, put your feet up. Get lots of sleep and rest.”

  This time, Janet felt it necessary to speak to her mother-in-law, to tell her what the doctor had advised. Mrs. Lang’s response was swift: “Work still has to get done. Okay, you’re pregnant, but until a baby comes, everybody has to work.”

  THE HIGHWAYS OF NORTHERN Ontario linked villages that had their heyday in the lumber trade at the turn of the century. Now, as before, they also brought travellers seeking the amenities of Ottawa. In this way, Highway 60 introduced old Mr. Lang to Mr. Tam, who ran a café 125 miles from Ottawa in the village of Barry’s Bay, on the shores of Kamaniskeg Lake near Algonquin Park. The two men had first met when Mr. Tam, on his way to Ottawa, had stopped in at the Golden Café. Later, Mr. Tam invited the Langs to the wedding and reception of his son and a girl from Hong Kong. He also invited Janet and Golden, as he wanted Golden to take pictures.

  On the wedding day, the Tams’ chartered bus collected guests en route, ending up at Ottawa’s Cathay House restaurant, the only place large enough to accommodate a banquet. Bill Joe, a son of the laundryman Shung Joe, had taken over ownership and management from its original sixteen shareholders. He had not only expanded the restaurant but added a second kitchen dedicated to the Chinese food on the menu and headed by an expert chef from Montreal.

  One day, to Janet’s surprise, the Tams’ new daughter-in-law showed up in a highly agitated state at their door in Carp. Janet was alone; the others were on the café side. The girl had hitched a ride on a transport. The truckers all knew “Goldie’s place”: on any given night, as many as five or six drivers chose the Langs’ lot as the place to park their rigs and catch a few hours’ sleep.

  The girl said life was so unbearable with her mother-in-law that she’d tried to kill herself by walking into the lake. She pleaded with Janet: “Help me buy a bus ticket to Vancouver.” She had an uncle there who would take her in.

  Janet was wide-eyed. “I don’t know where to buy a ticket, or even how to buy one.” The girl explained that it was money she needed; she had only the tips she’d earned in her father-in-law’s café.

  At this point, Mr. Lang came through the doorway from the kitchen.

  The girl was bemoaning how she felt like a prisoner. She said Mrs. Tam was holding her Hong Kong passport and the jade and gold jewellery that she’d brought with her to Canada. And, she confessed, she was pregnant: “If I don’t escape now, how will I be able to after the baby is born?”

  Mr. Lang was outraged. “You cannot run away! Chinese people never do such things!” He dialled the café in Barry’s Bay and spoke to Mr. Tam, who immediately sent his son down to Carp to collect his runaway wife. Janet later heard that the next day, the girl had to be
restrained again from throwing herself into the lake.

  As her third pregnancy advanced, Janet sought out a neighbour, Greta Armstrong, who had a one-year-old. The language barrier meant they didn’t get far in conversation, but Janet was interested in learning how to knit. She wanted to have two sets of baby outfits ready. Between Greta and Lillian Reid, who delivered the mail and whose husband drove the Canada Bread truck, Janet was also introduced to quilting and pie-making.

  One day in her seventh month, Janet had to make a dash to the toilet. She had passed blood. By the time Dr. Daykin arrived, she was already pushing. He was just in time to preside over the birth of a five-pound baby girl. Clifford Cox obliged with his car and delivered mother and baby to the hospital, half an hour away, in Arnprior. After a week in the incubator, the baby was ready to go home.

  Janet’s crying bouts ended with Arlene’s birth, as she now had somebody other than herself to talk to. In time the toddler was charting an indiscriminate course between the living quarters and the café and Janet began to relinquish some of her isolation. When she’d come upon her mother-in-law in conversation with her husband, she would interject: “Is there news?” She persisted, even though Mrs. Lang always gave her the brush-off, telling her it was none of her business.

  Janet found her own ways to get news. She read the weekly Chinese newspaper from Toronto that Mr. Lang subscribed to. She made a concerted effort to read the daily Ottawa Journal and the weekly Carp Review. She’d been excited when Mr. Lang bought a radio, thinking it would speed her learning of English, but to her disappointment, he kept it on the café side to provide music for the customers.