Lives of the Family (11 page)

BETWEEN

WHEN HELEN ENROLLED AT
her new high school, Lisgar Collegiate Institute, a grey stone, turreted building in downtown Ottawa, she decided to choose her own surname. All through school, her family name had been recorded at the whim of her teachers as Ling or Way or Nee.

Helen’s father gave his name variously as Ling Way and as Ling Nee. He had no concern for how it was anglicized or spelled. When he’d first arrived in Ottawa two decades earlier, in 1921, and taken a room above a shoe store on Bank Street, the canvasser for the city directory listed him as Ling Way. It would have been lost on the canvasser to explain the Chinese convention of placing surnames first: that Ling was the surname; Way was the given name shared with his brothers. In fact, the directory listing omitted the other half of his given name, Nee, which was his alone.

Neighbours were equally confused about how to greet Helen’s mother, born Sarah Randall, and addressed her as Mrs. Way or Mrs. Nee. The Lings lived in the Jewish quarter of the city, centred around Chapel Street, and straddling the neighbourhoods of Sandy Hill and Lowertown, east of Parliament Hill. That was where Sarah Ling had finally
found a landlord willing to rent to her. Apart from the occasional French-speaking family, the neighbourhood remained a Jewish enclave.

Helen’s older sister, June, and her younger brothers, Alan and Douglas, faced the same problem with their teachers, which led to the awkwardness of family members’ having mismatched surnames. Only one recorded surname in the family did not change: that of baby David, on whose tombstone was carved
David Ling
.

When it came time to register at Lisgar, Helen wrote her surname as Way-nee. Knowingly or not, her use of a hyphen conveyed her feeling of living between the side of her that was “Canadian”—white—and the side that was Chinese.

AUNT EVA WAS THE ONLY
member of the Randall family who remained on speaking terms with her sister, Sarah, after her marriage to Nee Ling. She’d insist to the teenaged Helen: “Your mother was a friendly, outgoing girl.” To Helen, Aunt Eva seemed to be talking about a different person. She didn’t know her mother to socialize with anybody. Not even coffee or tea with a neighbour. She wasn’t sure if that was because her mother was a loner or because she was snubbed.

Her father was hardly home, except on Sundays. Nee served as head chef and baker on the household staff of a family prominent in the wholesale lumber business, the Bremners. Six days a week, he rose at dawn to take the streetcar to the Byward Market, hoping he was early enough to beat other cooks and café owners to the pick of produce, fish at Lapointe’s and meat at Aubrey’s. His day ended at ten at night, later on evenings when the Bremners entertained. Regardless of the
hour, once off work, Nee made a beeline for the social clubs on Albert Street.

Alone with the household chores, Sarah had her hands full. By night, she slept with one ear to June, ready to race to her side if she heard the telltale thrashing or gurgling of the seizures to which her daughter was prone. Even if the night passed without incident, Sarah slept fitfully. When the weather turned cold, she had to get up an hour earlier to get the wood stove burning in the kitchen and stoke the coal furnace in the basement. Until Nee finally had the money to put down on a house, the trying task of finding a new apartment always fell to her. She’d moved the family three times, the first after they’d lost everything when embers in the wood stove in the grocery store caught fire and the entire building burned down.

For almost as long as Helen could remember, depression hovered over her mother. Nobody actually said so; she guessed as much because her mother sometimes took to her bed midday.

“I don’t have the energy,” Sarah would sigh. She said it in response to nothing in particular; it was as if she’d accepted that anything of interest in her life had already happened.

WHEN HELEN WAS
old enough to beg a story about her parents’ wedding day, her mother allowed that she and her father had been married in a church. She added ruefully, “There were no guests at our wedding.” Helen’s mother wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of family on her side, apart from her sister Eva. The moment Sarah Randall announced her decision to marry Nee Ling, her widowed mother and all but one of her three sisters disowned her.

Sarah Randall and Nee Ling married in 1922. She was twenty-two, he was twenty-seven. She turned their first home, the couple of rooms above a confectionery store on the corner of Somerset and Russell, into their own cozy place. She did all the work herself, the plastering and painting, and the hanging of wallpaper and pictures.

Then, in the first year of their marriage, the couple suffered a tragedy. Soon after giving birth to David, Sarah had an attack of appendicitis. While she recovered in hospital from the appendectomy, Nee decided he’d surprise his wife: to welcome her home, he’d fatten up their baby.

In China, fat equalled prosperity.

To Chinese who’d come to Canada as children, milk loomed like the bogeyman of their earliest memories. Neville Poy dreaded the morning arrival of the glass bottles on the stoop of their row house where his family lived on Sussex Street. His mother, Ethel, pleased at the sight of the clotted cream pushing the paper cork above the lip of the bottle top, would extract the cream, and as if it were a dose of medicine, would feed it to her two young children. Knowing they turned up their noses at drinking milk by the glass, she made it the extra ingredient in her cooking, pouring it liberally even into baked Virginia ham.

To Nee’s palate, milk had a repugnant taste and smell. However, when it came to his trade of French cuisine, milk, butter and cream were essential. If milk was good for a baby, Nee surmised that cream was better. He ended up rushing David to hospital. The baby’s bloated stomach was pumped, but he did not survive. Sarah came home to an empty baby basinette.

Aunt Eva said her sister rallied after David’s death, that she had become pregnant again almost immediately and felt
fortunate when June was born. Then the baby started having seizures. Eva kept telling her sister that June had a congenital problem, that she was born mentally handicapped, that seizures were part of it. But Sarah didn’t agree. “I blame myself,” she’d always say. It had happened in winter. She had the baby in her arms and went to climb aboard the streetcar. She slipped on the ice and down they both went, June’s head catching the side of the streetcar. The epileptic fits began soon afterward.

BY APPEARANCES ALONE
, Sarah and Nee Ling made an odd pairing. As a rule, men are the taller of a couple; she had six or seven inches on him in her stocking feet. Not only was theirs an interracial marriage between a Chinese men and a non-Chinese woman, but even more unusual, Sarah’s origins were English. The local Chinese often said, “French girls go for the Chinese.” As they understood it, such a girl probably saw a relationship with a Chinese man as having decent odds for success, maybe better than if she threw her lot in with a French Canadian. Chinese men had a strong work ethic and were sure to be savers. And any with the ambition to start a laundry or a café always lived and worked on the premises, so she’d have a roof over her head.

Sarah Randall, the daughter of a lineman for the Ottawa Hydro and Electric Commission, had met Nee Ling at the Chinese Mission. She was one of the well-meaning women who volunteered to bring their evangelism to the “heathen” Chinese, beginning with teaching them English. An attractive blue-eyed brunette with an alabaster complexion, she had an artistic temperament. She liked to sketch, taught herself to play the piano, and sang in the church choir. The Mission was
in the neighbourhood of her church, Dominion United, and a bakery she patronized. It was also close to the house where the Joes lived and ran their hand laundry, where once a week she dropped off and picked up the Randall family’s sheets.

By the time Sarah met Nee Ling, he had joined the household staff of the wealthy Bremner family. Nee had worldly experience far broader than anyone Sarah might have imagined meeting. In 1908, Nee, aged fourteen and pining for adventure, ran away from his home in the central Chinese city of Nanjing and made it to Shanghai, where a captain in the navy took him on as a cabin boy. He worked his way up, and eventually became a chef for the navy. He had a repertoire of dishes from around the world, and particular skill in French cuisine, including the art of making
petits fours
, acquired during a lengthy deployment in Marseille. Nee had also picked up a smattering of foreign languages, including Japanese, French and English. In 1921, he jumped ship in Montreal. Within less than a year, Nee’s evident talent landed him in the brief employ of J.R. Booth, head of one of Canada’s richest families. A powerful lumber king of the Ottawa Valley, Booth supplied the wood to build Canada’s Parliament buildings. J.R. had family and business connections with the Bremners, where Nee ended up, joining a staff that included a chauffeur, housekeeper, maid and gardener.

Contrary to what Mrs. Randall might have imagined, the family of her disowned daughter appeared more white than Chinese. To white people, the children born of Sarah and Nee were “half-breeds.” To the Chinese, they were
ban min bao—
“half white bread.” But it was not enough to apply the label. A judgment was called for. Did so-and-so look more white or
more Chinese? The verdict on the Ling children was that they looked more white.

In the Ling household, English, not Chinese, was spoken. When Nee Ling first arrived in Ottawa, he’d gone to the Mission not for English lessons but to find others with whom he could practise Toisonese, which the Chinese here spoke. Attuned as he was to his native Shanghainese, he found Toisonese as strange as a foreign language. Although he would never learn to speak it, for a brief time, he enrolled his sons, Alan and Douglas—not June or Helen; he wasn’t going to spend such money on a daughter—in after-hours Chinese school at the Mission, where they would learn the dialect.

On the family’s table, usually the last place an immigrant surrenders his or her past, Sarah only ever set out knives and forks. Chopsticks were kept in the cutlery drawer, but they lay unused. On nights when Sarah cooked, she made shepherd’s pie. If she put more effort into it, liver with tomato sauce and mashed potatoes. On the Sundays when the Bremners called Nee in to work, Helen would walk her siblings the several blocks to their mansion on Laurier Avenue. Nee would show his children what he was preparing for the family and their guests, typically roasted partridge or pheasant. Then he would sit them down at a table in the kitchen, and set out cake and ginger ale for each of them. Members of the Bremner family always came into the kitchen to say hello to the four children. At Christmastime, they sent over dolls for the girls and toy trucks for the boys. Throughout the year, they set aside gently used clothing for Mr. Ling to take home—once, a fur coat. As Sarah did with every item of clothing, she took apart the coat at the seams in order to get maximum use of the material, to re-make it into something else.

On the Sundays that Nee had to himself, the family spent the day together. In summer, he would hire a taxi for two hours to take them to a favourite recreational area for Ottawans, the government’s Central Experimental Farm. The driver would go up and down Morningside Lane and Cow Lane, Ash Lane and Birch Lane. Nee would have the taxi wait while they visited an Englishman with whom he was acquainted, who lovingly tended a large garden plot.

On Sunday nights, if Nee was up for cooking, Sarah’s spirits lifted. She’d park herself at the piano and play hymns, coaxing the children to sing along with her. Or she’d return to a sketch of a still life she’d started. In the kitchen, the chop-chop-chop of Nee’s cleaver produced dinner. If by chance, on the previous Friday, a neighbour’s child had knocked on the door—“Please, Mrs. Way, can you buy this chicken from my mother?”—then Nee turned what had been intended for someone’s Sabbath dinner into what the family knew to be his favourite dish: steamed chicken with lily buds. When the table was cleared for dessert, he might bring out a fancy cake or a selection of elegant
petits fours
he’d made for a party at the Bremners that week. The occasion would be worthy of the good china kept in the glass-door cabinet. And tea, served in the silver tea set kept on display on the sideboard. After dinner, the whole family, Sarah looking smart in one of her good dresses, on which she’d pinned a shiny brooch, and wearing one of her good hats, took the streetcar downtown to attend the evening service at Dominion United Church. After the service, Helen and the children continued home by themselves; Nee settled in at one of the social clubs, one street over, for a night of gambling.

“
RIGHT FOOT
, June, start on your
right
foot.”

Every day, the teachers at Osgoode Street School made Helen’s sister walk up and down the hall for half an hour. Helen could hear them out there, trying to change her sister’s left-handedness to right-handedness. She thought it odd that the school should worry less about June’s obvious mental handicaps—she was incapable of carrying on the simplest conversation without repeating the same thing over and over—and more about which hand she used to pick up a pencil.