Lives of the Family

LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL
Chinese immigrants to Canada before and during the era of the head tax, my grandparents hailed from the countryside near Canton in south China. My grandfather came as a “sojourner,” seeking work to support family he’d left behind in his village and planning one day to take a nest egg home to buy land, build a house and retire. Both he and my grandmother lived out their lives in Canada.

My four siblings and I grew up in the logging town of Prince George in northern British Columbia, where my father had taken a job as a radio operator with the federal government. We were the only Chinese among the families living at the Prince George airport, in housing provided for employees. In reflecting on our experience, I need reminding of our initial surprise at having our attention called—through name-calling and taunts—to our being Chinese. I do remember that it didn’t take long before what we had in common with neighbours and classmates mattered more than our differences. I can, however, pinpoint the moment of our arrival in town.

It’s midnight on Christmas Eve, 1958. My father, in our 1949 Meteor, drives the deserted streets. We peer over snowbanks looking for 432 George Street. My mother has recalled this
street number from fifteen years earlier when she’d addressed an envelope enclosing a note from her mother to a friend working as a chef at a new Chinese café here. We find that café, the Shasta, but it’s closed. My father sees staff at the back sharing dinner around a table, so he knocks at the door. The proprietors, Eleanor and Wayne Chow, whom we’ve never met before, exclaim how happy they are to see some Chinese people and welcome us inside.

The Chinese café, a monument to small-town Canadian life, is a recurring point of reference in the stories in this book. Like Chinese laundries of an earlier time, these restaurants once dotted the landscape across the country. Of course, south China was not full of laundrymen and restaurateurs. Immigrants, facing discrimination and possessing limited knowledge of English, saw these businesses as opportunities available to them. The Chinese cafés initially served only Western food. Not until after the Second World War, when owners were looking to attract more customers, did they offer both Western and Chinese food—not what the Chinese cooked for themselves, but rather “Westernized” Chinese food such as chicken balls and sweet and sour pork.

With time, these restaurants inevitably changed hands. Some of the early sojourners packed it in and returned to China. Sometimes their cafés were bought by their staffs. And when they too moved on, that niche was occupied by more recent immigrants.

FOR MY SIBLINGS
and me, our being “Chinese” and China itself, the country of our ancestors, hardly figured in our daily lives. We spoke almost no Chinese and, living where we did, we
rarely saw anybody Chinese. Occasionally, we accompanied our father on his volunteer missions to a rooming house in town owned by the Chinese Freemasons that housed a handful of aging Chinese “bachelors.” By the early 1970s, these residents were dying out. One was a man who’d been my grandmother’s on-again, off-again lover for seventeen years, a relationship I only learned of years later when I was researching my family memoir,
The Concubine’s Children
. At the time of his death, I thought it odd that he’d left instructions to send what remained of his life’s savings—thirty-five hundred dollars—to his wife and son in China. Clearly, these were people from whom he’d spent a lifetime apart, yet to whom he still felt an obligation. For the most part, such ties had been severed. At the time, I also didn’t know that my mother, born in Canada, had a blood sister and a half-brother still alive in China, and neither did she.

In many ways, immigrants and their families conduct life at a frontier, where what was once strange eventually becomes familiar and commonplace. Finding one’s footing in a new land and visiting a homeland only in memory is universal to the immigrant experience. However, I came to understand that in the history of immigration to Canada, the clichéd successes of those in my parents’ and grandparents’ time—of a better life, of moving up in the world and prospering—came for many at a severe price. For them, home and family were one and the same word. They held them to be inextricably linked, only to see events conspire to separate one from the other.

The stories in this book of pivotal moments in the lives of Chinese families are linked to the arc of the immigrant’s adjustment to life at this frontier. In exploring how I would
document that trajectory, I looked for moments when the forces of history, politics and family combined to bring that immigrant experience into sharp relief.

LIVES WERE AFFECTED MOST
during the period from 1923 until 1962. The year 1923 was the beginning of exclusion, when Canada replaced the head tax with the Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration. Sojourning “bachelors” already in Canada could leave and re-enter the country, but they could not bring wives and children to Canada. The law also denied resident Chinese in Canada the right to become naturalized, and labelled all Chinese, immigrants or Canadian-born, as “alien.” This inhospitable legislation would remain in place for twenty-four years; by comparison, the average lifespan in China then was about forty years. The year 1962 saw Canada introduce new immigration regulations, which would expand the categories of admissible Asians. That led to further changes in 1967 that eliminated discrimination with respect to immigration on the basis of race or country of origin.

Over those years of restricted Chinese immigration, world events unfolded with calamitous effect. In 1937 Japan invaded China, marking the start of China’s Resistance War. That war became part of the global conflict of the Second World War, in which Canada was soon involved. For the duration of the war, all civilian traffic halted across the Pacific. On V-J Day in 1945, Japan’s surrender simultaneously ended the war in China and once again overseas Chinese could travel to their homeland. However, peace did not come to China. At war’s end, the Kuomintang government and the Chinese Communist Party,
which had formed a united front to fight the Japanese, resumed their fight against each other.

In 1947, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, allowing that exclusion was “objectionable,” repealed the act; but, he defended maintaining greater restrictions on Chinese immigrants than on European immigrants because “the people of Canada do not wish … to make a fundamental alteration to the character of our population.” Canada permitted Chinese immigration again under its “Rules for Asiatics”: Chinese men holding Canadian citizenship could sponsor wives and underage children. A brisk illegal trade began in “paper families.” So-called paper sons and daughters came to Canada under fraudulent sponsorship; the real offspring were either still in China or had died.

The civil war in China came to an end with the Communists’ victory in 1949, which they would herald as China’s “Liberation.” Like overseas Chinese, much of the population of south China was staunchly anti-Communist. Within months, the Communists brought their radical program of “Land Reform” to the south. The program to confiscate land from landlords and redistribute it to the poor had won peasants in the north to the side of the Communists during the civil war. In the south, the Communists used Land Reform to label anyone standing in their way as landlords or capitalists. As a consequence, many Chinese with relatives abroad had escape on their minds. The British colony of Hong Kong became the all-important, and only, exit port.

In 1955, the Canadian government, recognizing that exclusion had shrunk the Chinese population in Canada and created a shortage of Chinese women, allowed men to sponsor
fiancées, a provision that gave rise to “COD brides”—the groom’s family bore the costs of the woman’s passage and paid “cash on delivery,” the traditional “bride price” due her family upon her arrival in Canada. Hong Kong became the major bride market. By the mid-1950s, the colony was plagued by overcrowding and workers laboured under deplorable conditions. Its residents were also eyeing a way to leave the colony for better prospects in North America.

I HONED IN ON THE
lone Chinese family and their restaurant in a Canadian town as a way to convey the immigrant experience. Behind that sign on the business, and in the rooms behind or the apartment above, the everyday life of the family would test their ability to adapt.

Fear mongering over “yellow peril” on the west coast had led the federal government to impose the drastic measures of the head tax and exclusion. The farther east Chinese sojourning and immigrant men went, the more they left behind anti-Oriental sentiment. Toronto and Montreal had eastern Canada’s largest Chinese populations—still tiny, however, in comparison with that of Vancouver or Victoria.

The families in these stories went farther into the frontier; they settled in and around the Ottawa area, including villages and towns up the Ottawa Valley and on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, and down to the St. Lawrence River. Ottawa had Chinese-owned laundries as early as the late 1890s, and later, confectioneries and cafés, but no Chinatown (until the influx of immigrants from Hong Kong in the late 1960s). When exclusion took effect, Ottawa’s Chinese families could be counted on one hand. In communities nearby, other than
the family or two that owned a café, often the only other Chinese in town were bachelors who worked for them.