by Denise Chong
Despite people’s good intentions, it got so that Henry began to feel that the whole town was on him too. If it wasn’t “Henry, your grandfather needs you,” it was “Henry, can you help your grandfather? You know he can’t walk anymore.” Even corns on one’s feet counted as public knowledge in such a small town.
One glorious summer’s day, Henry got a hankering to join friends for a swim at a nearby lake. He took the keys to his grandfather’s 1949 Ford Meteor, which the old man had bought new, and headed down the road. He skidded on the gravel, sending the car glancing off a tree and smashing the windshield. Of course, when he got home, despite his gashed and bloodied cheek, he got an earful from his exasperated grandfather. Not long after that, Henry decided to run away. A day later, a neighbour from Altona, dispatched by his old man, found him in Winnipeg. “Henry, your grandfather wants you to come back; he says he won’t give you shit no more.” Within two weeks, the old man was back to his nagging ways.
He only wants me here to work, Henry concluded.
Nineteen was too old to be living under your grandfather’s thumb. The next time, Henry didn’t run away; he said goodbye and left for Winnipeg. Neither his grandfather nor anyone else from Altona bothered to come after him.
GIVEN THE CHANCE, it would be smart to get out of Hong Kong, thought Marion Ha. The combination of marriage and Canada, she decided, was that chance.
Since she was young, it had been Marion’s ambition to study hard, get high marks and land a good job. She credited her scholarly mother, whose father sent her brothers to school but, unusual for the time, hired a private tutor for his daughter. Marion’s mother went on to become a teacher in the village. At home, she demanded extra from her children. Each had to produce five hundred characters daily for her approval. Later, as a student in Hong Kong, Marion supplemented what she considered to be the poor quality of the school in the colony by becoming a voracious reader, just as happy to read Chinese classics as translations of Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice.
The absence of a mother had made Marion determined to face life with purpose: one had to set a goal, make a plan and act on it. Such was her mother’s strength, to which the Ha children attributed their very survival. She had uprooted the family twice. When the Japanese spilled over China’s northern border, she first moved them from the village to Canton, where their father worked as a high-ranking employee of a French-owned bank. Previously, they saw him only when he came home on weekends. That move saved the family from Japanese bombers and soldier patrols. To protect its banking industry, Canton sheltered bankers in its foreign concession, which remained free from Japanese attack; such concessions were home to expatriates from some of Japan’s Second World War allies, or from countries like France that had surrendered to Germany.
Their mother’s second move came at war’s end. Rather than return to their village, she decided to re-establish herself and the children in Hong Kong, leaving her husband to travel from Canton to the colony on weekends. She’d intended to use the cache of American dollars and jewellery she’d brought to Hong Kong to invest in property, to provide an income for herself and the children. But illness struck before she could do so. Within the year, she was dead. When the children lost their father to his second wife, they’d lived off that money and jewellery until the older siblings could find work. When the Communists took over China, the children, relieved to be safe in Hong Kong, thanked their mother yet again for her foresight.
Single-minded about coming first in her classes, Marion had remained oblivious to boys and romance; only after the fact did she realize she’d been asked on a date. A boy suggested he could take her to a movie, to which she had answered with indignation: “What for? I have my own money if I want to go!” But by the time she was working as a reporter for Wah Kiu Yat Pao, one of the colony’s two Chinese dailies, Marion was well aware of Hong Kong’s status as a bride market. The personal classifieds placed by men in Canada seeking a wife were increasingly popular.
In Marion’s opinion, it was folly to meet blind, by way of an advertisement; better that an introduction be made. So when a friend of her brother’s asked if she’d be a pen pal to Tom Hum, a good friend of his in Canada, she’d already warmed to the idea of an overseas friendship. And so the two began a correspondence. After some months, Tom hinted at a more serious relationship. He’d just opened a new restaurant, which he’d have to work hard at to get it established: “Can you wait a few years for me?” The bluntness of Marion’s reply—“Sorry, you go your way, I’ll go mine”—brought Tom to Hong Kong to woo her. He’d taken six months off, the most he felt he could afford to be away. Marion expected she’d have to decide quickly about marrying Tom, if only because it was too much to ask him to pay another airfare to return for a wedding. Sure enough, he proposed, suggesting that the two marry in Hong Kong and he’d send for her at a later date. But Marion was adamant: “If you leave me behind, I will not marry you.”
The two wed at Hong Kong’s city hall. Marion was twenty-one; Tom was thirty-one. She had yet to meet any of his family. She knew that the Hum name was well respected in Ottawa. In 1897, Tom’s grandfather, Mong Hum, and his brother, Kwong, both laundrymen, became the first Chinese in the city to take out their naturalization papers. In 1925, the brothers, who at that time owned the Wing On confectionery on Albert Street, got together with laundryman Shung Joe, and Sue Wong, the grocer at the Yick Lung store, and purchased forty plots at Beechwood Cemetery, to be reserved for bachelor men who died destitute and without next-of-kin, thereby establishing a Chinese section of the cemetery. Had it not been for exclusion, Tom, born in China, would have been a third-generation Canadian. But in the eight years since he emigrated to Canada in 1949, he went from waiting on tables at the Ding Ho Café (downstairs from the Wing On) to opening the Lucky Key restaurant in an Ottawa suburb.
Canada had tipped Marion’s decision in Tom’s favour. In the years of trying to make sense of her parents’ marriage, what she’d learned had soured her on life as a married woman in Hong Kong. She’d come to a verdict on the island colony. If you’re someone who is poor here, she decided, you work hard for the rich. If you’re rich, then you keep a second wife or a mistress, or both.
Marion learned that her mother and her older siblings had long known about her father’s philandering. By her siblings’ account, they’d asked their mother why she didn’t have it out with their father. Her reply had been matter-of-fact: “Your father is a man who loves women. If we argued and he didn’t come home, where would I go, with so many children?” She went so far as to defend him, praising him for keeping his affairs outside the home, and without fail, returning on weekends to their marital bed.
When Marion and Tom had first begun to write to each other, they exchanged photographs. Contemplating the image of the slight man, with his hair precisely parted and a shy, even worried expression, Marion told herself, this is the face of an honest man. The kind who would keep a wife, who wouldn’t look at another woman—not like my father.
IN WINNIPEG, Henry fell in with the wrong crowd, gambling for the first time in his life. He had arrived knowing nobody, and before long, whatever he earned he mostly left behind at the gambling clubs. He drifted from job to job, working the kitchens of Chinese-owned cafés or waiting on tables in coffee shops. Four years passed in this way.
One day, while behind the counter at the Exchange Café, Henry received a surprise telephone call from his brother-in-law. Gordon Lee had arrived at the train station. He’d flown from Hong Kong to Vancouver, then boarded the train to Winnipeg. He was on his way to Altona, to work for Henry’s grandfather, and wanted to meet for coffee.
Like Henry, Gordon had entered the country as a paper son. He had engaged in a further deception, that he was single; Canada’s rules allowed sponsorship only of unmarried dependents.
Henry and Gordon had last seen each other a decade ago in Hong Kong, when Gordon and Henry’s older sister had wed.
As he expected, Henry got a s
colding from his brother-in-law, about the family having heard little or nothing from him since he’d left Altona. He didn’t mean letters; since Henry couldn’t write Chinese, no one expected a letter. Rather, he meant remittances. Regular at first—Henry had sent home thirty out of the forty dollars he earned each month—they’d become sporadic, then stopped altogether.
“We wondered if you were dead.”
“I’ve been a bad guy.” Henry confessed; he’d got into a habit of gambling. “If I win, I send money. If I lose, I don’t.”
That matter settled, Gordon announced that he had “big news” for Henry.
Henry couldn’t think what family news, good or bad, would affect his feelings one way or another. His obligations to help support them aside, he felt no emotional attachment to any of them. Of his birth family, he had only his father and two sisters. His father’s attentions had long ago been elsewhere: he’d recently remarried, to a girl young enough to be his daughter, and was raising a second family of three children. His eldest sister had married Gordon, and thus was “gone out.” His youngest sister had been adopted out when she was three years old and no one had spoken of her since. He had no idea of her fate.
“Your little sister is married and living in Ottawa.”
Henry was speechless when he heard that news. The middle child of three, he was five when he’d last seen her. The three siblings had just lost their mother. The family, thinking they were protecting his feelings, told him a lie, that his mother was sick and gone for a few days when in fact she had died. Soon after that, his grandmother took away his little sister, Lai-sim, and returned home without her, producing in her stead a sack of rice and some sausages.
Gordon told Henry that Lai-sim had been trying to track him down. She’d written to their grandfather in Altona, but the old man had thrown out her letters, with the excuse that he couldn’t read Chinese.
Although Henry had been working a scant two months at the Exchange Café, the owner obliged by granting him the month off he asked for to visit his sister in Ottawa. Henry had never been east of Winnipeg, but he felt like he was going home.
“WE NEED OUR OWN PLACE.” Marion tried to persuade Tom that four years of living with his brother was enough, that they ought to buy their own home. He was hesitant, wondering how his brother would fare and not wanting to leave him and his family on their own.
“Don’t worry,” said Marion.
The Lucky Key restaurant was doing well, helped by its prime location opposite the entrance to busy Westgate Shopping Centre, the city’s first, on Carling Avenue. Tom found a bungalow on Fisher Avenue not far from the restaurant, in the suburb of Queensboro (later renamed Westboro). Marion’s conversations with neighbours helped to improve her English and she learned to drive.
Yet again, Marion saw Tom and herself as the perfect match: where he could see detail, she could see the big picture. Where he was timid, she was brave. Without courage, she often reminded him, you can’t have success.
HENRY AND LAI-SIM looked and sounded like siblings: both stocky and round-shouldered and prone to a slight chubbiness, both with an almost identical timbre to their voices that could convey, with equal depth, sorrow or joy. Both wept freely at the sight of each other. Lai-sim had no memory of Henry; he told of how he used to carry her around their village, strapped to his back.
The two visited in her home, in the two small upstairs rooms that Lai-sim and her husband, Yu-nam Leung, and their baby, Billy, rented in the rooming house on Frank Street.
The siblings had been separated for twenty years, yet so much of their lives in that time had followed the same trajectory. Both had lost the only mother they’d known. Both had been raised by grandparents, Henry by a grandmother gone nearly blind, who’d lived her entire married life separated from her husband in Canada; Lai-sim by her surviving adoptive grandfather. Both had fled their villages after Liberation, escaping to Hong Kong.
Their grandfather’s life abroad had begun decades before in Timmins, in northern Ontario, and eventually, led to Altona. After Liberation, Harry Yee had urged his extended household of nine, including adults and children, to escape to Hong Kong: “I will support you all.” Within months, Harry was no longer on his own; his grandson, Henry, arrived in Canada to work alongside him.
By the time the stranger smuggled Lai-sim, with nothing but the clothes on her back and sandals of dried citrus peel on her feet, to the border of Hong Kong to meet her birth father, Henry had Altona in his rear-view mirror, and was about to slide into an idle life of gambling in Winnipeg. He explained to his sister why he’d left his grandfather: “I had a bed, I had food; I couldn’t complain, but I didn’t feel he cared about me.”
Lai-sim shared the same sentiment about her life in Hong Kong, before she was dispatched to Canada as a bride to Yu-nam. A relative of the family in Hong Kong had shamed Grandfather Harry’s wife into taking her back into the family: “You eat well, but you leave your poor granddaughter in China to starve?” In Hong Kong, when Lai-sim wasn’t at her factory job, sewing children’s clothes and cowboy pants, she was expected to babysit her half-siblings and cousins and to clean house. But she too felt unloved: “Grandmother and Second Mother were superstitious about a girl coming back into the family; they thought I might bring bad luck.”
In their month together, the two siblings shed as many tears in laughter as in sorrow. Lai-sim told of having arrived in Ottawa in the dead of winter, thinking the whiteness to be sand. She wondered why people didn’t chop down the bony leafless trees for firewood, only to be astonished the following spring to see them turn green. Henry said in Altona the overnight snowdrifts could pile so high against the door of the restaurant as to trap him and his grandfather inside. He’d have to crank the phone to call a neighbour for help.
“Don’t go back to Winnipeg. Come and live with me,” Lai-sim begged her brother. “I can’t speak English; you could translate for me.” Henry decided to do the honourable thing by his boss at the Exchange Café: go back to work and give him two months’ notice.
IN THE FALL OF 1964, Marion Hum, still new to the game of mahjong, told her newfound friends that her baby, her fourth, due in December, would keep her away for a while. They understood; when a mother has young babies, she has no time.
In Hong Kong, Marion’s older siblings had all played mahjong—they’d had a couple of sets at home—but she had studiously avoided the game, preferring to pore over her books. But one day in Ottawa, a woman she’d met through one of the wives of Tom’s partners invited her to her house, offering to teach her the game. Marion accepted. My life is so dull, why not? she said to herself. She’d joined in a couple times, taken the bus across town, the stop on Bank Street where she should alight easily identifiable by the landmark of the Colonial Furniture store. From there, it was a short walk to the woman’s house on James Street.
Among those new acquaintances around the mahjong table, Marion met Lai-sim Leung. She traced the beginning of their friendship to several weeks later, during her stay in hospital when she gave birth to Lynda. As it happened Lai-sim had a friend also in hospital, and she came twice a day to deliver a hot meal of rice to her.
Marion and Lai-sim promised to see each other again over mahjong. Lai-sim said she had two others who could make up a foursome: Chun, the wife of her brother, Henry, who shared their house, and as well, Lui-sang Wong, who lived just steps away on the same street. Marion knew of Lui-sang, who was known to her husband. When Tom had been in Hong Kong courting her, as a favour to Lui-sang’s paper family, also of the surname Hum, he’d escorted the young teenager she was then to Canadian Immigration for her interview.
Of course, said Lai-sim, all of us are busy mothers, still having babies, with no time. And for now, she was also holding down a job washing dishes, in order to keep up her remittances to her family in Hong Kong. She said Lui-sang had a big house, with a large second-floor veranda, an enjoyable place on a summer’s evening and big enough for a card table. Maybe one day, s
he could host a game. Marion said she could be counted on to come back to the game. “I’d have gone mad,” she said, “if I hadn’t learned to play mahjong.”
More than that, all the pairs of hands shuffling the tiles, reaching for them, stacking them, and then starting anew, was not just comforting, but like a kind of life force. Lai-sim already had in mind a name for the mothers who could come together over a mahjong date: the sisterhood.
Marion Lim, on the runway modelling T. Eaton Company’s spring fashions, 1958.
Courtesy Marion Lew
ELEVEN
HOME
MARION LIM TOOK THE bus to the foot of Burrard Street, to the Marine Building, the Art Deco skyscraper on Vancouver’s waterfront. She stepped off the elevator at the floor for the Faulkner-Smith School of Applied and Fine Art and, once inside, asked for Mr. Howard Faulkner-Smith.
The artist didn’t know the teenaged girl: “What can I do for you?”
Marion introduced herself, saying that she’d seen his classified ad seeking a Chinese model.
Both the painter, now in his sixties, and his school, which prepared students for a career in commercial graphic arts, were well known. A graduate of a prestigious art academy in London, England, and the son of a baron, Mr. Faulkner-Smith had immigrated to Canada in his youth. He’d first exhibited his work in Vancouver thirty years earlier, in the 1920s. In the city’s fledgling art culture of the time, patrons preferred landscapes such as his, rendered in watercolours, the trademark medium of English painters, to the work of a controversial new school of painters who called themselves the Group of Seven.
“You don’t look Chinese.” To Mr. Faulkner-Smith, the girl looked European.
Marion was used to this. Even in China, she’d hear people ask her mother: “Is this a girl your husband adopted from Canada?” The ambiguity of her looks came up again at her private school in Canton, where her classmates nicknamed her “Spanish.” And in Canada, waiters in Chinatown sometimes ignored Marion, addressing themselves only to her Chinese friends.