Lives of the Family (10 page)

Once settled in Ottawa, Mrs. Poy, as beautiful and elegant as her husband was debonair and dashing, made an occasional appearance at the Yick Lung to call on Mrs. Wong. But Ethel, dropped into a city with a tiny Chinese community, no Chinatown, no Chinese newspapers or books or movies, and mourning what the Japanese had destroyed of her life in colonial Hong Kong where she’d enjoyed a genteel social life, would never feel comfortable in her new home. The wives she joined in Ottawa were almost a generation older. They’d come out of rural China more than twenty years earlier. They spoke their coarse village dialect, not her refined Cantonese; they called whites
lo fan
, portraying them as pale ghosts, instead of the
si yuen
, the more polite term meaning
Western people
that was used by the educated class or those from the city. Her experience of war, if anything, alienated her from the women here. She kept to herself the terror of life under Japanese occupation. She didn’t explain that the reason young Neville ducked for cover every time he saw an aircraft was that he’d been on the rooftop in Hong Kong and had watched the approach of the first Japanese bombers, thinking them to be the British Air Force on another
practice run. Why draw attention to the family’s good fortune, when their relatives, if alive, still had to live with the enemy?

Talk at Mrs. Wong’s stayed within the confines of the familiar, of their lives in Ottawa. Of the six pioneer wives, two had first-born children whom they’d brought to Canada with them. One of the two was Thomas Hum, who took responsibility for his two brothers on the death of their last surviving parent. Nineteen at the time, Thomas took over their father’s café. The other was Jack Sim, chosen by his father, Joe, to run the family business so that Jack’s eight younger siblings could stay in school and, as was their father’s plan, go on to university. Tall and broad-shouldered, with chiselled features, Jack looked like a Chinese movie star. His younger brothers would later dub him the Chinese James Dean.

The Chinese community buzzed with the success of one of their own. Clearly, Jack was clever. As his father had expected, his eldest son bettered him early on, with his command not only of English but of French as well, having graduated from high school in Hull where French was the language of instruction. He started with his father’s Star Café, catering to Hull’s working class. Then, seeing future patrons in the influx of civil servants in Ottawa, he opened the sophisticated Tea Gardens on Sparks Street, between the Mayfield ladies’ dress shop and the Lord Thomas hair salon. Later, Jack would guess right that city folk, new to owning cars, would want to get away from the city, but not too far, and to someplace with a view; Bate Island, with the Remic Rapids wrapping round it, looked west, where the setting sun dropped spectacularly into the river. Jack leased land from the federal government under the bridge to the island, then designed a rustic building with walls of knotted pine, a
nickelodeon and a dance floor. On weekend nights, young people crowded the parking lot of the El Rancho, standing around their cars, enjoying a menu favourite, the chow mein bun, brought by car hop girls in cowgirl outfits. Jack went on to open a fourth restaurant, and when the El Rancho later burned down, he built a new one on the island.

One day Doris and Mabel dropped into the Yick Lung and found Rosina, Jack Sim’s wife, pouring her heart out to Mrs. Wong. She was sure that one of Jack’s white waitresses had her eye on him: “He’s probably running around on me and I can’t do anything about it!” Years before, on the elder Sim’s orders, Jack had made a trip to China to marry, but he’d come back as he’d left, a single man. Ordered back a second time, he returned a married man—with Rosina, who, under exclusion, was able to enter the country by virtue of a Canadian birth certificate. Born in Alberta, she’d been taken as a young child by her parents to their village in China.

Not unlike Ethel Poy, Rosina found it hard to find her footing in Ottawa. She would never learn much English. Among the first to marry into one of the pioneer families, she met few if any Chinese women her age. Rosina wasn’t going to get much, if any, sympathy from her mother-in-law, who, in keeping with Chinese tradition, expected subservience from a daughter-in-law. During Mrs. Joe Sim’s long life—she would live to one hundred and four—the taciturn woman would have little to say of her past in China except for one story: her wedding day. On the day her family carried her in a sedan chair to her new mother-in-law’s house, she parted the curtain to get a glimpse of the man she’d been promised to. She felt dismay to see that he walked with a limp. It turned
out that Joe Sim had sprained his ankle in a recent fall while horsing around with some boys on a rooftop. Yet when Mrs. Sim told the story, this fact mattered not; limp or no limp, she’d already passed the point of no return.

MABEL WANTED HER
daughters to escape her fate in marriage. “I was so much younger than your father. In China a lot of that happened; older men marrying younger women. Then we end up afraid our husband is going to die soon. I want you to marry in the Canadian way. I want you to pick your own husbands. I had to take whatever marriage my parents made for me.”

Mary chose her own husband. She wed Captain Dan Wong, whom she’d met on a trip to Montreal. Sent by the Kuomintang military to study abroad, he was introduced to Mary at a Chinese celebration in the city.

Mabel confessed to her unmarried daughters that she’d fended off propositions of marriage for them more than once. A preposterous one came from a woman who wanted to make a group deal: her three sons for Mabel’s three daughters. A Mrs. Jang, from Woodstock, a town in the rich farmland of southern Ontario, was confident that Mrs. Johnston would find her sons an attractive package: one was a cook, one had joined the Canadian Air Force, and the third, with a diploma from the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, ran the family farm. To avoid offending the woman, Mabel replied that it would be bad luck to have siblings marrying siblings. Bad luck could strike both their families, she said.

While Mabel wanted her daughters to choose their own spouses, she nonetheless wanted them to confine their choices. “Be sure to choose someone Chinese, because that will make
for a better marriage. If you choose a
lo fan
there will be too many differences between you.” Similarly, Mabel advised her daughters to avoid anyone born of a mixed union, and thus, only partly Chinese. “People who are half and half don’t have a good standing; not like our own kind.”

More often, Chinese parents made it perfectly clear that intermarriage was taboo: “If you marry a
lo fan
, I will disown you.” Or, “If you marry a
lo fan
, I will break both your legs.”

Yet even on the west coast, marrying within the Chinese race posed a challenge. Exclusion was accomplishing what the head tax had failed to do—it was shrinking the Chinese presence in Canada. The declining number of Chinese in the country, who remained overwhelmingly male, exacerbated the shortage of women of marriageable age. The same held true in the United States. As a consequence, Chinese on both sides of the border went on wife-hunting trips to Vancouver and San Francisco in the west, and New York in the east. Anywhere outside of big cities, a Chinese family could be the only one in town. And, more often than not, the bachelors in town were relatives, and working for them.

Some well-meaning ladies from the church in Perth took it upon themselves to offer Doris advice. “Don’t go for any of the boys that come to your restaurant. After they leave your restaurant, they go to the bars. You’ve got a good mother; listen to her and marry someone Chinese.”

DORIS DID VISIT
Ottawa on her own to see Lil and Louise, and more frequently once they had their own apartment. When they had lived at the YWCA, she rarely went, not only because she had nowhere to stay but because they couldn’t
afford to eat out; they were counting pennies just to buy meals at the cafeteria there. It had taken Lil and Louise several months to secure their own place. “It’s already rented,” they’d be told. With so many new employees joining the government, the market was tight. But they started noticing that when another prospective tenant arrived to view an apartment, someone who wasn’t Chinese, that person would be shown the space. Finally, Lil and Louise met a Jewish man with a basement apartment he was happy to rent to them.

At work, Louise’s boss urged her to put Fong back into her name, in front of Johnston. “Don’t ever give up the Chinese part of your name,” he told her. Doris shrugged off the name change. “I like Johnston,” she said. “I was born with it; it’s on my birth certificate.” Her sisters, enjoying the wider circle of friends and colleagues in Ottawa, both Chinese and white, pestered her to leave the small town for the city. We can find you a steno job like ours, they told her.

Doris didn’t dispute the attraction of benefits like medical insurance and a pension. And as long as she didn’t marry—she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to—she’d have job security; federal regulations required women to resign their positions when they married.

“You should get out of the shoe factory,” Lil said.

“I’d miss buying shoes at a discount. I can get seconds there for two dollars.”

“You can’t spend your free time in the restaurant. What kind of social life is that.”

“The customers are real nice. Some come every day.”

“It’s kids who come every day; you’re selling candy and sodas to kids after school.”

“Nobody likes the soda fountain anymore,” Doris said. “They’re full of gas. People like to buy soft drinks in a bottle.”

What Doris didn’t say was that she was proud of how she and her mother had coped after Harry’s death. She saw her mother and herself as partners, not unlike men who ran businesses together. She’d been the one initially to acquaint herself with the investment properties that Mabel inherited. Generously, two gentlemen in Perth, both regulars at the café, one who worked at the Post Office and another at the Customs Office, patiently explained deeds and leases, tax bills and filings. “If ever you get stuck, just come to us,” they told Doris.

Plus, she appreciated the security that life in a small town offered; people looked out for each other. And her mother had come a long way. For the sake of managing the café and the properties, Mabel worked hard at improving her English and developing business smarts. It didn’t take long for Doris to see that of the two of them, her mother had the better head for handling money and investments.

IF DORIS DIDN
’
T LEAVE TOWN
to seek the company of other Chinese, they came to her, always stopping in at Harry’s Café when passing by Perth. Some came specifically to call on her. Charles Hum, the middle of the three orphaned Hum brothers, made the drive from Ottawa accompanied by some relations. They came to sound out Doris on the possibility of marriage between her and Charles.

These particular Hums were well set financially. Besides the Ontario Café, located on valuable real estate on the corner opposite the train station and the Château Laurier, Thomas had opened a second café, the Arcadia Grill with the attractive
Art Deco facade on Bank Street. The novelty of air conditioning helped make the Arcadia hugely popular. Thomas assigned his brother Charles to be the soda manager there; their younger brother, Joe, still in school, lived in a room above the restaurant and helped out after school and on weekends.

I have a chance to marry into the Hums, Doris realized. At the shoe factory, marriage was often a topic of conversation. One day, the girls in the office told Doris about the woman she’d replaced. They spoke of how the bosses had decided to get rid of her because she was costing the company money; she kept getting everything wrong. Typing
blue shoes
instead of
black shoes
and vice versa, that sort of thing. “Her older sister’s smart enough,” Doris said. “Must be, to have married the high school principal’s son.”

Charles Hum was short; Doris envisaged a husband who’d be tall. Mabel advised her to keep her distance, suggesting there was a rumour of a history of tuberculosis in the family.

Another day, a carload of adults from the Soong family, originally from Montreal, showed up on their way from a family event to their home in Almonte, a mill town on the Ottawa River. Doris, meeting the family for the first time, was impressed with how easygoing and friendly they were. And she was rather taken with two handsome and athletic-looking brothers among them. In particular, Tommy, the older and taller of the two.

As it happened, the younger of the Soong brothers, Howard, began to court Doris. She asked her mother’s opinion of him. “Well, you like him, that’s what matters. He’s too skinny to suit me,” said Mabel. When he proposed, Mabel was pleased for Doris. She had only one reservation: Howard liked to gamble. “Gamblers only think of themselves,” she warned.

Christmas at the Way-nees. Sarah Way-nee (centre); Hin Lew (jacket and tie); Sarah’s four children (from left to right), Helen, June, Alan and Douglas; Irene Joe (second from right); unknown
.
Courtesy Hin Lew