Lives of the Family

by Denise Chong

  AFTER HIN’S VISIT TO Vancouver, he and Marion corresponded. Smitten with her, Hin felt self-conscious about his ability to use English expressively. He could write scientific papers of an international calibre, but he was afraid his English lacked elegance. He need not have feared.

  Of Hin’s spoken English, Marion would say it was “perfect.” She thought the written English in his letters confirmed the precision with which he spoke. Completely surprising was his penmanship and fluency in Chinese, a few lines of which he included in every letter. She felt humbled that she, with seven years of schooling in China, should be impressed by how someone born and raised in Canada presented himself in what was her mother tongue.

  IN NOVEMBER OF 1959, after their wedding in Vancouver the year after they’d first met, Marion readied to leave with Hin for their new home in Ottawa—one that Hin had designed himself in the Riverview subdivision. In packing for the east, she made sure to shop for an extra-warm coat for Ottawa winters. She had yet to experience sub-zero temperatures and snow. Once there, she was dismayed to find that even in her new wool coat, her teeth rattled and she shook against the cold.

  Several months later, in defiance of the last lingering patches of snow, a warming sun coaxed out the first crocuses, the purple and yellow and white flowers cheerily announcing spring. When Marion observed people shedding their winter wear in favour of lighter-weight coats, she realized that the coat she’d been wearing all winter was ill-chosen, more suited perhaps to the spring weather. A smile crossed her face. She was thinking of that awkward evening when she’d worn the coral-coloured tiered gown; such missteps were all part of finding one’s way.

  See-fat Hum in China, one year after his release from prison.

  Courtesy Lui-sang Wong

  TWELVE

  ARRIVAL (2)

  AFTER A DECADE LIVING downtown on Waverley Street, Lui-sang and Tsan Wong enjoyed the quiet of their home in the Glebe, a sedate, leafy Ottawa neighbourhood of large, older brick homes set back from the street, an area pleasantly dotted with parks adjoining the Rideau Canal.

  In 1979, their lives were about to change again, in a way they’d hoped for but hardly imagined possible. Thirteen years earlier, Lui-sang had sponsored her mother, Hoi-sui, to come to Canada. As early as a year from now, in 1980—depending on the progress of the paperwork in China—they would add another member to their household: Lui-sang’s father, See-fat. After thirty years in prison, he had finally been released.

  On the eve of her departure for China, where she would return to the village to visit her husband, Hoi-sui sat her daughter and son-in-law down for a serious chat. She wanted them to understand her intentions once she got to China.

  Officials at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa had assured the family that Hoi-sui should have no problems. Go and visit the village, they told her. Get your husband to fill out the form to apply to emigrate from China to Canada. Then, come back to Canada and wait. “These things take time,” they said.

  Hoi-sui confessed her fears. Why had it taken two tries, two applications, before the embassy had granted her a visa so that she could visit her husband? Maybe China’s Communist government had released See-fat but had not declared him “rehabilitated,” so that he still carried the label of capitalist and landlord. Maybe prison authorities would change their minds, and would yet send him back to the forced labour camp at the mine in the Mongolian mountains.

  Tsan and Lui-sang admitted to being nervous themselves that authorities would deny See-fat permission to leave China. If the government didn’t object on political grounds, what if local officials were swayed by greed: as long as he remained there, his family in Canada would keep sending money. The couple didn’t know what to make of a recent letter that See-fat had smuggled out to them. Apparently, every time the postman showed up at his door, neighbours came asking for money. Some well-meaning villagers had suggested that maybe it was better that his family not send him any money: “They said that our family could be hurt, like before.” Even in tiny script, on such a small piece of paper—presumably easier to conceal—See-fat hadn’t been able to write much.

  Hoi-sui couldn’t help but fear for her own safety. Could authorities still hold it against her that she’d escaped from the country? Even now, more than twenty years since she’d fled with her three young children, “What if they say, how did you get to Canada? We didn’t let you out.” In 1978, the world had hailed China’s momentous change of policy, its new “Open Door” to the west. Still, Hoi-sui was afraid; had the authorities released her husband only to lure her back?

  None of the three had any answers.

  Hoi-sui told them she had her plane ticket, so there would be no second thoughts about going. But she wanted her daughter to know she had made up her mind: “If they don’t let me return to Canada or if they don’t let your father out—either way—I will stay with him.” He was sixty-one; she was fifty-eight. As husband and wife, they had already missed most of a lifetime to be together.

  Lui-sang and Tsan told nothing of this to their three sons. They didn’t want them to worry that they might never see their grandmother again; she’d lived with the family since before two of them were even born. Canada, and more particularly Ottawa, was the only home they’d known. Yet if everything went as planned and events came full circle, they would begin to understand what it means to have an immigrant past. They’d see that for the migrant, to leave one shore and to arrive at another is neither the beginning nor the end. If they should be so lucky, they’d become part of the calculus of their grandfather’s negotiation between the familiar and the strange, the old and the new. And perhaps one day, when the time came to write themselves into the narrative of the lives of the family, they would see that even a lifetime isn’t the end of the tale.

  As far as the Wongs’ three boys, Harvey, Howard and Vincent, were concerned, Grandma was going to visit her husband and he was going to come to Canada to live with them. The youngest, Vincent, aged nine, wondered which room his grandfather would end up taking, if he or one of his brothers would have to give up their space.

  Adrienne (centre) and Neville Poy (right) with friends in the backyard of the Poys’ first home in Ottawa.

  Courtesy Adrienne Clarkson

  EPILOGUE

  THE WRITER Ursula Le Guin ends her 1979 essay on narrative, “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Or, Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?” with a story that, as she explains in her concluding comments, has been retold by a boy:

  But by remembering it he had made the story his; and insofar as I have remembered it, it is mine; and now if you like it, it’s yours. In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.… [W]e will all come to the end together, even to the beginning: living as we do, in the middle.

  The tales in these pages of the immigrant’s life are a tribute to life lived in the middle—finding one’s bearings while longing for home, remaking one’s future while wrestling with memory.

  These being the final pages, I leave the reader with a brief return visit to some of the people in these stories.

  See-fat Hum arrived three years after his wife’s visit to China to a greeting party of thirty family and friends at the Ottawa Airport. His grandson Harvey would write a high-school composition about the meeting entitled “A Night to Remember.”

  Eva Devlin, whom Doris Johnston worked with at the Perth Shoe Factory, realized her ambition of earning a pilot’s licence and owning a small airplane. On the afternoon of September 15, 1949, Eva was to take Doris for her first-ever plane ride and show her Perth from the air. At the last minute, a large party of Americans arrived to dine at Harry’s Cafe and, reluctantly, Doris cancelled her date with Eva. Eva took to the skies, but on making her approach to land, her plane went into a spin, nose-dived into the ground and disintegrated on impact.

  Mabel Johnston, who took over Harry’s Café in 1940, was a millionaire by the time of her death in 1965.

  The girl who ran away from Barry’s Bay, only to be tu
rned back by old Mr. Lang in Carp, hitchhiked all the way to Vancouver a few months later.

  Golden Lang stood by during his Christmas holidays in 1971 to develop the first photographs taken of the baby born to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife, Margaret, a son whom they named Justin.

  Jasper Hum’s widow, Margaret, was given back her husband’s house when the Chinese government began returning confiscated property after 1979. She offered it to her niece, Shui-dan. Shui-dan didn’t want it, saying that it held too many bad memories for her.

  Marion (née Lim) Lew saw her mother again in China after thirty-two years, in 1982. She decided to ask her mother, before the answer was lost to the grave, if she was of mixed blood. Her mother said only that, while pregnant with Marion, she’d seen a beautiful white child and had kept the image uppermost in her mind.

  Agnes Lor was named Brockville’s “Citizen of the Year” in 1984. Her son, Joe, likes to think of her as the first feminist he knew.

  Adrienne Clarkson, the youngest child of the Poy family, to whom the Canadian government granted refugee status, achieved the exceptional and became Canada’s twenty-sixth governor general, a posting she held from 1999 to 2005.

  Gertrude Hum, widowed in 2005 from her husband, Joe, who’d once formed a study group of Chinese students at Lisgar Collegiate, had “B. Comm.” engraved on her husband’s tombstone, knowing how proud he was of his degree.

  Lai-sim Leung fulfilled her dream and in 1968 bought the Capital Café, later renaming it the Ging Sing, in Ottawa. In part, she did it to provide work for some of her five newly arrived relatives from Hong Kong. In 2005, she lost the business when fire consumed the building. At first devastated, Lai-sim later had an epiphany: “I am free now.”

  Of course, depending on how one holds the tapestry of life up to the light, different threads can catch one’s attention. I wove them into stories I made mine, but now they are yours.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I OWE THE ORIGINS OF this book to the community spirit of the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre (OCCSC), a non-profit organization, which since 1975 has provided settlement services to newcomers, immigrants and refugees. Among its founders were children of Ottawa Chinese pioneers, including William (Bill) Joe. His childhood home, Joe’s Laundry & Cleaners, featured on this book’s cover, was a place where new arrivals could count on a meal and a place to rest their head. In 2011, the OCCSC received a modest grant from the government of Canada under a program of redress for the head tax, to create an educational website on the history of Ottawa-area Chinese pioneers. The OCCSC commissioned me to develop that website, LivesOfTheFamily.com. As I delved into my research, I was struck by the tenacity of individuals, often against the odds dealt by history and politics. From there, my idea for a book of linked stories on a theme of the lives of immigrant families in small-town Canada took root on the enthusiasm of my agent, Jackie Kaiser, and Anne Collins and Craig Pyette of Random House Canada. My life is enriched by three such thoughtful individuals, each passionate about their work. I feel fortunate to be an author with Random House Canada.

  When I began this book, early Chinese cafés and businesses in the Ottawa area had mostly passed into history. The second generation of families who’d settled here was giving way to a third. I am grateful for the generosity of each and every family member who shared memories with me. I was privileged: many, if not most, were giving voice to their memories for the first time. My appreciation goes to families and individuals in these pages and on the website, and many more whom I interviewed and on whose experience I drew. You faced my endless questions, you dusted off family albums and pulled out shoe boxes of photographs and documents, you laughed, you wept. Some were teachers to me: the late Harry Sim, Robert Hum, the late Doris Soong, Joe Lor and Hin Lew. Linda Hum and Arlene Lang accompanied me to their hometowns. Lui-sang Wong, Lai-sim Leung and Marion Hum fed me. I owe thanks to friends that families made before they arrived in Ottawa, and who shared their recollections with me. I include among them Eric Devlin, Jeanne Yuen, Earl Dick, Ann Parsons, Nora Loe and Freda Lim.

  Thank you to those who lent photographs for my research, with special mention to Hin Lew. Photographs are reprinted here by permission. Along with video clips, many more can be viewed on the website. At the OCCSC’s launch of that website, Robert Hum, Bill Joe, Joe Lor, Neville Poy and Gladys Wong gave mesmerizing accounts of life lived behind or above the family business and of their childhoods during and after the Second World War.

  On sources, I benefited from an unpublished essay by Professor Jean-Guy Daigle of the University of Ottawa, written in 2000, entitled “From Survival to Success: The Chinese in Twentieth-Century Ottawa.” I wish to acknowledge private memoirs or writing by Joe Hum, Marion Lew and Harvey Wong. I drew upon the website “Chinese-Canadian Women 1923–1967: Inspiration, Innovation, Ingenuity” (mhso.ca/ChineseCanadianWomen) produced by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario. I relied on Valerie Mah’s speech “The Chinese Shop in the Canadian Context” to the “Counter Cultures” conference at Ryerson University in 2011. The excerpt from Ruth Lor’s letter to her mother in “Outcomes” is reprinted with her permission. The song “Marianne” quoted in “Life” topped the charts in 1957 in the recording by Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders. The quotation in the epilogue from Ursula Le Guin is from “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Or, Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?” a paper she presented at a symposium on narrative at the University of Chicago in 1979.

  I wish to pay tribute to the leadership, support and camaraderie of a group that came together under the aegis of the OCCSC: Bill Joe, Jonas Ma, Sharon Kan, Yew Lee, Robert Yip and Albert Tang, who were committed to seeing through a project to safeguard a place in the historical record for Ottawa-area Chinese families as part of the story of Canada. The well from which I drew stories for this book is bottomless; many more stories are there for the telling.

  I dedicate this book to Diana Lary, a scholar of Chinese history. I benefit from her wisdom and learn much from all her books, including her recent work, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Diana is a dear friend and a mentor.

  I cannot thank my mother enough: she was always ready on e-mail and at the end of the telephone, prepared to canvass her friends, to answer my questions about Chinese language, traditions and food. And, thank you with love to my husband, Roger, and my children, Jade and Kai. “How’s the writing going, Mom” was encouragement enough.

  DENISE CHONG is the author of The Concubine’s Children, a family memoir; The Girl in the Picture, a story of the napalm girl from the Vietnam War; and Egg on Mao, a portrayal of human rights in China. She lives with her family in Ottawa. In 2013, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.