by Denise Chong
Determined, Janet worked on her English by listening to customers, and eventually, venturing small talk with the neighbourhood regulars. She knew she’d made progress when she could understand the teasing between Clifford Cox and her father-in-law. Clifford would start to talk insurance, and Mr. Lang, after humouring him briefly, would arbitrarily declare the start of Chinese New Year: “Chinese don’t like to talk about death in the new year!”
Janet became matter-of-fact about the strain of life with her in-laws. These are not bad people, she thought. We’re not really warring with each other; we just don’t have much in common.
BY 1965, A DECADE INTO their marriage, Janet and Golden had three children, Arlene, Pearl and David, aged seven, five and two, and Janet was expecting again. That same year, the household suffered a blow that affected the rhythm of daily life much more than the arrival of any baby. Old Mr. Lang suddenly fell ill. For once, Golden, the new owner of a used car, a 1961 Plymouth that he’d bought cheap because it had suspect brakes, didn’t have to rely on a neighbour in a medical emergency. He drove his father to the Arnprior hospital, but a couple of days later, the older man succumbed. The business of running the café left little time for mourning, as the work of four now fell on three.
One day early in her seventh month, Janet’s water broke and, feeling the immediate onset of labour, she told Golden there was no time to drive her to the hospital. Call Dr. Daykin, she said. Tell him to come to the house. Sweating profusely, she lay down on their bed.
Given Janet’s experience with Pearl, Dr. Daykin admitted her to the hospital early with David. Her only memory of Pearl’s birth was a sudden feeling of cold, then of standing on a cloud. She came to at the sound of a nurse’s voice: “You awake? You were in real danger there for a while!” But David had been a full-term baby and his delivery uneventful.
Old Mrs. Lang came into the bedroom. “The doctor hasn’t come yet?” Not seeing him, she left. Janet considered her mother-in-law’s behaviour to be predictable, worrying less about her daughter-in-law being in labour than about keeping her son away until the baby was born.
Left on her own, Janet finally could no longer fight the urge to push.
The baby slid out, face down.
Waiting for a cry and hearing none, Janet panicked. With as much energy as she could muster, she called out: “Help, help!”
Mrs. Lang returned.
“Turn the baby over,” Janet whimpered. “Hurry.”
The old lady approached, then recoiled: “It’s so dirty. Dirty and slimy!” While Mrs. Lang willingly, even happily, minded her three grandchildren, she refused to change a single diaper. Now she strode out of the room.
Janet struggled to sit up. She reached and grasped the baby’s bottom, but the baby squirted away from her. She reached again, but it only slid farther. On her third try, the baby slipped off the end of the bed. She prayed: If this baby lives, it will be God’s doing. Good luck to us all.
Suddenly the baby let out a cry. Dr. Daykin arrived and when he discovered that Janet had delivered the baby on her own, he shook his head. “You both were lucky,” he said.
Janet thought something else ought to be remembered about Peter’s birth—that he was the first Chinese boy to be born in Carp. David, after all, was born in Arnprior. Janet would take ownership of other memories in her life. When her daughters, Arlene and Pearl, were old enough to play dress-up, she went into her closet, collected the high-heeled shoes she’d packed from Hong Hong and never worn, and let the girls play with them. Might as well get some enjoyment from them; one could hardly walk around in heels carrying a pot of hot coffee or pumping gas.
WHEN ARLENE WAS A YEAR from starting high school, Golden and Janet decided they ought to make a move to Ottawa. Carp finally had a new elementary school, built two years earlier to commemorate Canada’s hundredth birthday, but high school students still had to be bussed to Arnprior.
Also influencing Golden’s decision was his sense that the family business held no future for his children. Keeping the café had become more onerous with just three adults, one of them an aging grandmother, and the other two, a busy mother and a father who also held down a part-time job. Golden had parlayed his photography hobby into work making offset plates for the Carp Review.
In fact, Golden wanted to try his hand at making a living from photo finishing. The Eastman Kodak company had recently introduced colour film, which was growing in popularity among professional photographers, including the portrait and wedding photographer favoured by Ottawa’s Chinese community, Tsin Van, a Chinese national who had settled in town. Inconveniently for Ottawa-based photographers, the nearest processing facility for colour film was in Toronto. Seeing an opportunity, Golden offered colour processing and, in order to attract clients, provided pickup and delivery service. He traded his aged Plymouth for a more reliable used car. As his client base grew, he remembered what his father had said when he made the move to Carp: “The money won’t come to you; you have to go to the money.”
So Golden and Janet purchased a modest postwar house in Ottawa on busy Carling Avenue, one of the city’s main west–east arteries. At the same time as they were selling the café and preparing to move, Janet received unexpected news. Her parents had immigrated to New York City, taking with them her two young brothers but leaving her married sisters behind in Hong Kong. They said they wanted to visit Canada. One of the first things she would stock her new kitchen with, Janet decided, was a set of cookbooks. Already, she imagined the spread she would put on for her visiting family, and equally, the disbelief on their faces.
Three generations—Golden’s mother, the couple and their four children—moved in to the Langs’ new house in Ottawa. Golden decided to set up his business, “Golden Colour Lab,” in the basement. Upstairs, in the living room, on the upper shelf of a built-in bookcase, Janet carefully placed Fook, Luk, Sau, the set of three figurines she’d brought with her so many years ago from Hong Kong.
Lai-sim Leung and her son, Billy, her grandfather, Harry Yee, and Chun Yee (wife of Lai-sim’s brother, Henry) in front of Harry’s Café and Confectionery, Altona, Manitoba.
Courtesy Linda Lim
TEN
LIVES
ONE CAN IMAGINE, for a moment, the process of immigration as similar to passage through a sieve that separates two worlds, the homeland from the new world. The family begins with the weight of yearning for a better life and hopes to be left with the essential attributes of success. For many Chinese who immigrated from China or Hong Kong after Canada lifted exclusion, life abroad seemed like an exile, so isolating that they had to keep reminding themselves why they’d come. Adding to the stress of living abroad, the terms by which they’d entered Canada—as sponsored family members or fiancées—worked to both unite and to separate families. To borrow another analogy from the kitchen, sending a family member abroad was like separating an egg white from the yolk. It allowed a family to treat its parts in different ways, but in its memory, they were still one.
THE MOMENT HIS FRIEND, visiting Hong Kong from Ottawa, departed, the eldest son of the Ha family took out pen and paper to compose a letter to his sister.
He had asked his visitor about this sister, Kwok-chun, or by her Christian name, Marion. Eldest Brother had not seen her in five years, since her marriage in 1958 to the restaurateur Tom-yee Hum of Ottawa. Knowing that Ottawa’s Chinese community was small, he was sure his friend, even if he hadn’t seen her, would have heard something.
Eldest Brother had raised his younger siblings, and though they were now adults, he still took that responsibility to heart. He’d accepted that role when their father, with their mother barely in the grave, stunned his children by announcing that he had a second wife and other young children and that he would be moving them in. Together with the older siblings, Eldest Brother had refused to allow another woman into what had been their mother’s domain. As a consequence, their father, not a man to argue or raise his voice, disappeared from their live
s.
The third youngest of eleven children—of which seven survived infancy—Marion Ha was nine when she lost, in effect, both parents. A beauty with classic almond-shaped eyes and an assertive personality, evident even when young, Marion had had many admirers in Hong Kong but had married the first man she dated. While Eldest Brother personally knew of Tom Hum, he’d been concerned about his sister moving to Canada, where she’d be without family.
In Ottawa, Marion Hum opened her brother’s letter and was amused to read of gossip having travelled so far, of her reportedly looking “alarmingly thin.” That it worried her brother was obvious in the scrawl of his handwriting across the page.
“Don’t tell me your husband has another wife,” he wrote. “Or that he already had one before you, that you’re a second wife. If that’s the case, come back to Hong Kong.”
So, my brother fears the worst, thought Marion, that the infidelity our mother had to contend with has now befallen me.
Only a hint of her father’s presence had remained with her, a memory of his hand brushing the top of her head. In contrast, especially since Marion had begun her married life in Ottawa, the voice of her mother, which ran deeper than memory, played over and again in her mind.
“No matter what happens to you, don’t cry.”
In the months of her mother’s illness with cancer—which at the time she kept hidden from her family, dismissing it as a chronic “stomach ache”—young Marion preferred sitting in a little chair by her mother’s sickbed to playing with her siblings. At the funeral, when she’d cried so hard that her body cramped up to the tips of her fingers and toes, she’d remembered her mother’s prescient words. She would later reflect that her mother must have realized how terribly this particular child would miss her when she was gone.
She knew that Eldest Brother wished only for her happiness. Even as she and Tom were about to leave for Canada, he’d taken her aside, to remind her yet again that if she wasn’t happy there, she was to write him and he’d find the money for airfare to bring her home.
Marion felt she couldn’t confess to her brother what she had unwittingly got herself into in Ottawa. If she thought its airport terminal looked as welcoming as a warehouse, she was in for a greater disillusion when she saw her marital home. The house that Tom owned with a younger brother—it had been his idea to buy it because he feared his brother and wife and two children might have trouble finding a landlord to rent to them—turned out to be premises shared with a dozen bachelor tenants. His brother’s family had the ground floor. Tom and Marion moved into two rooms on the second floor, and the bachelors occupied the remaining rooms on their floor and in the attic.
Any expectation Marion might have had that her sister-in-law would be good company was quickly dispelled. The prickly woman preferred to spend her time tending a tiny backyard plot where she grew Chinese vegetables. She said the garden helped to lessen her homesickness for the life in her village in China.
Left to herself, Marion felt wrenched from the active life she’d enjoyed in Hong Kong. Ottawa had no Chinese cinema, no Chinese language television programs, no Chinese bookstores, or newspapers or magazines. Nor did Marion have enough comprehension of English to read the Ottawa dailies; she had to rely on Tom to tell her the news. But he had no time; he worked seven days a week at his restaurant, the Lucky Key. Their social life was non-existent. They didn’t even dine at his restaurant. Tom said he’d have to pay in his own establishment to set the right example for his partners. But he also ruled out their dining at any restaurant in town: “That would be like saying my own food isn’t good enough to eat.”
In any event, within two months of their wedding in Hong Kong and one month of arriving in Ottawa, Marion became pregnant. I’m stuck here now, she told herself. She started having babies as fast as nature allowed: Victor was born that winter. When he was only a few months old, she was pregnant a second time, with Wallace. Hardly had he arrived when for the third time in little more than three years, she was pregnant again, with Debbie, who was born prematurely.
Marion considered how to reply to the letter from her brother. She told him he could put his mind at ease; he was reading too much into her weight loss: “I’m busy that’s all—I keep having babies!” She kept the tone light, asking him to send her some best-quality dried Chinese mushrooms and rice noodles; she missed the ones as fine as silk thread, that soften within seconds of being immersed in cold water.
If Marion had written honestly of her feelings about life in Canada, she would have said that she was a prisoner of boredom. I feel as if I’m locked up, she’d told herself. Her days passed in monotony. The weekly shop for groceries was the only time she got out of the house—but even then, especially in winter, she had to force herself. Once a week she made the effort of dressing the children, getting them down the stairs and the little ones into the pram, and making the long walk from their house on Lisgar to Bank Street, to the IGA grocery store. The public health unit where she took the children for their immunizations was nearby, so it was a route she knew well. Then it was back to the house, a mile and a half in all. Rarely could she muster the enthusiasm to walk with the children in the other direction, up to Albert Street to pick up something from the Chinese confectionery there. Apart from the extra three blocks’ walk each way, she didn’t think it worth going because the selection was limited and the quality poor, the exception being the cured Chinese sausages that came from Montreal.
No matter what happens to you, don’t cry. Marion was not going to cry. But if she did, she told herself, it would be because precisely nothing happened. Certainly her life didn’t measure up to her Chinese name, which combined the character for “heroine” with that for “valuable.” Yet how prophetic the choice of her Christian name. Her sister had suggested Marion, inspired by the calypso song on everybody’s lips at the time:
All night, all day, Marianne
Down by the seaside siftin’ sand
That, Marion decided, was her sentence: sifting the sands of time, her days shaped only by babies and children. If something doesn’t change, she told herself, I’m going to go crazy.
LIFE HERE IS WORSE THAN JAIL, eighteen-year-old Henry Yee told himself.
When one of the boys on the football field would hand off the football to him, he’d run and run, sometimes right past the end zone. He would hear the boys yelling at him, “Stop!” but he couldn’t stop. He’d imagine himself running straight out of Altona, one deke right past fields where Holstein and Shorthorn cattle grazed, one deke left past fields of swaying grain, then straight on some seventy miles, and he’d be in the big city of Winnipeg, giving his grandfather the slip, so he wouldn’t have to put up with his nagging any more.
“He gives me hell and shit all the time. Every minute!” Henry complained to Earl Dick, the teenaged son of the owner of the garage and car dealership next door to his grandfather’s business, Harry’s Café and Confectionery. He confided the same to Earl’s father. “He’s not a happy person. No matter what I do, I can’t please him.”
From afar, in Hong Kong, Henry had understood that his grandfather was getting old, feeling the ache in his bones, and lamenting the hard work of his café and store. When Canada announced the end of exclusion, Henry’s father had written to him: “Baba, I’m too old to come to Canada; do you want to get my son over to help you?”
That was three years ago.
His grandfather’s establishment, on one half a counter with seven booths and on the other, grocery shelves with a meat box in the middle, was a seven-day-a-week concern. Grandfather Harry did the cooking and baking. Other than the young boy who washed dishes, a white middle-aged waitress was the only paid staff. Henry had to work both sides of the business. Often he could be run off his feet: he’d have a customer in the café, another at the meat box waiting to make a selection, which he had to wrap, weigh and price, and customers from both sides lined up at the cash. In any lull, Henry was expected to keep the grocery shelves stocked�
��mostly canned tomatoes, carrots, peas and green beans. Plus, twice a week when the restaurant took delivery of meat from Canada Packers, he had to help his grandfather cut it up for display.
Of all the days of the week, Henry most dreaded Sundays, for everybody else, a day of rest. For him, a fifteen-hour work day lay ahead. In addition to minding the café and store, he also had to mop, clean and wipe down everything, from the floor to the shelves, the booths to the meat box. Henry took to secretly hiring the dishwasher to help him. For twenty-five cents, the boy was willing to come in early to wash the floor. Henry left his bedroom window open and a rope dangling, with one end attached to his toe, as he slept on a mattress on the floor. The boy’s tug signalled him to rise and quietly let him in; a knock at that hour would wake his grandfather.
Henry had no complaint about hard work, only resentment at having no free time. His grandfather took time off to bowl and curl; Henry figured he deserved the same. But when he did decide to join friends, to play football, shoot pool, or hunt rabbits at someone’s farm, the moment he walked back in the door the old man would be on his case; he didn’t think “play” was good for building a young man’s character.
Perhaps owing to Altona’s history as a close-knit Mennonite community, Henry’s friends and their parents took no sides between the old man and the boy. When he’d arrived in town, everyone clamoured for a first sighting of “the Chinese boy,” his arrival doubling the town’s Chinese population. For the fifteen months that Henry attended school, enthusiastic children from kindergarten up vied to be the one to hold up English vocabulary flashcards for the gregarious boy with the large innocent eyes. They were amused at his first English words: O’Henry (Harry Yee said that he’d assigned his grandson the name Henry after his best-selling candy bar), hamburger, hot dog, french fries, pork chops, strawberry short cake—all items on the café’s menu.