Lives of the Family (12 page)

Having to watch out for her sister made school stressful for Helen. Her mother had waited until her younger daughter had also reached school age before enrolling June, thinking the two girls could be in the same grade together. But making it home after school was an ordeal. Boys would lie in ambush, their hands clenched around stones in summer—snowballs in winter—waiting for Helen and June to emerge from school. To Helen’s surprise, they yelled “Chink” at them; she didn’t think either of them looked Chinese in the least.

Helen had a vague memory from when she was perhaps five, of a prolonged absence of her father that had to do with China. Her understanding was that he’d gone to visit family he had left behind in Nanjing—his grandmother and a half-brother. That year, the Bremners, since they were taking their own extended trip to Europe, had given Nee the time off. More evidence of her father’s Chinese origins arrived in the form of a parcel from Nee’s grandmother. Sarah and Nee posed their four children in the mandarin-collared silk jackets she’d sent, including one for the baby. Over the years since, until the war halted boat traffic, if ever a letter came from Nee’s family, he’d dash off to the Chinese embassy. He’d ask a cook he was friends with to ask a
favour of a desk officer: to have the letter read to him and pen a reply, enclosing a remittance to supplement what his half-brother earned fixing bicycles.

Helen felt she could fend for herself against the torments of the boys, but they upset June terribly. The teacher, deciding the solution was to keep the boys waiting so long that they’d wander off, detained the girls for fifteen minutes after everyone else was dismissed. The problem took care of itself in third grade. The teachers told Helen that her sister’s classmates found her recurring fits too upsetting, that the school could no longer have her as a student and that her parents would have to transfer June to a school for slow learners.

Relieved of responsibility for her sister, Helen hoped, finally, to make friends. She soon discovered friendship to be out of her reach. A girl who seemed a friend one day would turn her back the next. She overheard loud whispers and giggles among other girls: “Don’t play with her. Her father will chop your head off with a big knife!”

So when a new Chinese student showed up midway through the year in her third-grade class, she was ecstatic. Joe Hum—the Chinese in town called him Little Joe to distinguish him from his brother, Charlie—at fourteen was old to be enrolling in grade three, but his height disguised his age. Helen was deeply disappointed when she discovered she and Joe couldn’t communicate. He couldn’t speak enough English and she couldn’t speak Chinese. Born in Ottawa and sent back to his father’s village in China for his schooling, Joe had been absent from Canada for ten years, long enough to have lost any English he once had. Like Rosina, Jack Sim’s wife, he’d been able to re-enter Canada because he held a Canadian
birth certificate. Just as Joe and Helen began to bridge the language divide, his teacher promoted him several grades, and by the end of the year he was transferred to another school.

Thereafter, Helen gravitated to another outcast like herself. Her ears caught other girls’ talk in the halls and schoolyard about her friend, Ann Hutchins: “She doesn’t have a father!” Ann’s mother, a divorcee, was raising Ann and her sister on what she could make cleaning houses. Doesn’t matter to me, Helen told herself.

IN
1941
,
FINDING HERSELF
part of an entirely new student population at Lisgar Collegiate, Helen felt new eyes judging her. Although small in stature, she was striking, and when she flashed her brilliant smile, she stood out in a crowd of girls.

Helen noticed that from white boys among the “Canadian” students she couldn’t even get a hello. She began to understand why, whether boys or girls, her only friends were Jewish, or half-Jewish: they knew what it was to be discriminated against. She appreciated that one Jewish boy faithfully walked home with her. Neither of them worried that anyone would report to their parents that they spent time together; the Chinese and Jews both believed in marrying their own kind. Helen couldn’t help but make comparisons between her Jewish friends’ families and her own. Quite casually, they invited her into their homes. Their furnishings were as simple as those of her own family, but they were not at all self-conscious about how they lived. Unlike her parents, theirs had some education. Their conversation kept coming back to saving for their children to go to university, hopefully McGill, if they had the marks to qualify under the university’s quota limiting Jewish enrolment.

At Lisgar, the biggest change that Helen experienced was being in the company of Chinese students for the first time since she’d spent a few months in grade three with Joe Hum. Because the pioneer Chinese families’ businesses, where they lived and worked, were downtown, their children had always been classmates. Those who were the same age were almost like family to each other, a cohort that had gone together through public school and the after-hours Chinese school at the Mission. As well, they had the same after-school and weekend obligations to help out at the family grocery store, laundry or café. In Helen’s grade, the Chinese students numbered three: Joe Hum, whom she’d caught up with; Irene Joe, the second of seven children of the Joes who owned Joe’s Laundry & Cleaners (“Cleaners” was added when dry cleaning came in); and Mabel Wong, the third eldest of the eight children whose family operated the Yick Lung store.

It was difficulty in her physics course that drew Helen into a closer friendship with these three Chinese students. Also finding physics a struggle, they formed a study group and Helen joined in. Such Chinese children could not generally expect help with school on the home front. Quite apart from having quickly surpassed their immigrant parents’ level of education, they had a language gap at home, a combination of their fading ability in Chinese and their parents’ limited English. As a consequence, the children would stumble for a word and struggle to express what they felt. The parents, in turn, would look on uncomprehending, their expressions misinterpreted as stoicism or aloofness. Parent and child were caught in a no man’s land where much was lost in translation.

By the early 1940s, a growing number of the first generation of Ottawa-born Chinese had reached their teen years and were looking for fun outside their homes. Helen and her new Chinese friends passed time walking around Parliament Hill and posing for pictures by the statues. Joe Hum owned a camera, bought from saving what he earned working at his brothers’ Arcadia Grill. In the winter of 1941, some teenaged boys who knew each other from Chinese school formed an exhibition hockey team called the Chinese Aces, to play games in and around Ottawa and raise funds for war relief in China. Some families supplied two sons, and one family, three. To fill out the roster, the team recruited half-Chinese boys; Helen’s brother Alan played goal.

Helen’s friends and other teenagers of Ottawa families were inspired to form a social group at the Mission to organize get-togethers for themselves. They founded the YPS, the Young People’s Society, of which Joe Hum would be elected president, to organize dances and parties at the Mission. Come summer, they planned excursions such as picnics on the twenty-fourth of May, the holiday that marked the birthday of Queen Victoria, at Britannia Beach, where they roasted hot dogs and cooked hamburgers.

Coincidentally with these teens’ coming of age, Ottawa had an influx of Chinese who had come to take government jobs. Helen’s circle would widen. One evening, Joe Hum brought along a friend who was new in town. In 1942, universities across Canada had suspended graduate studies in the basic sciences in order to supply manpower for the government’s secret war research. Through Gan Chu, a graduate of the University of British Columbia, the teenagers subsequently met Dick Pon,
educated at the University of Alberta, and Hin Lew, who had not one but two degrees, from the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. The three were the first Chinese ever to be hired by the National Research Council. With tutoring from such scientists, those in Helen’s study group came through their physics course with top marks.

While Helen might have seemed to lean more to her Chinese side with her Chinese friends, the reverse happened when she was with her white friends. Yet, she felt neither white enough nor Chinese enough to satisfy either group.

SARAH
’
S SISTER
Eva married and moved with her new husband to a town over the border in New York State, sixty miles from Ottawa. Marriage added enough to the distance that her relationship with Sarah would gradually fade away. But coincidentally, after more than a decade of absence from Sarah’s life, their mother had reappeared. Helen had imagined her grandmother to be a stern, formidable lady; she found her nothing of the sort, but a rather ordinary matronly woman.

Mrs. Randall’s reconciliation with Sarah had less to do with her than with one of her other daughters. Marjorie had married a farmer in Uxbridge in southern Ontario. She had suffered a nervous breakdown, and Mrs. Randall was convinced that his drinking had been the cause. Marjorie was admitted to the Asylum for the Insane in Brockville, but her condition, even years later, never improved. What had most grieved Mrs. Randall was the thought of her six grandchildren being deprived of a mother.

The burden of Marjorie’s plight fell on Mrs. Randall, who ended up raising five of her six grandchildren. The loneliness of
it echoed her own struggle to raise four young daughters when she was left a widow. After Mr. Randall’s death, she couldn’t be home for her girls as much as she wanted because she had to find a way to support them. Fortunately, her husband’s employer, Ottawa Hydro and Electric Commission, gave her a job cleaning their downtown head office. Of course, linemen knew their job to be highly dangerous and they took it at their own risk. But the company took pity on Mrs. Randall. Bad enough that her husband, a strapping tall man, was electrocuted, but he’d waited four hours to be rescued, while impaled on one of the pole’s climbing rungs. He’d never had a chance, suffering for months in hospital before he succumbed.

“Your husband is the only decent son-in-law,” Mrs. Randall told Sarah. She took it as faint praise. She believed her mother’s change of heart had occurred only because the sins of one son-in-law now paled against those of another: being Chinese was not as bad as being a drunkard.

As is the nature of families, the layers of guilt and blame, remorse and regret become, in the end, fictions that torment. Nothing seemed to save Sarah Ling from a slow but determined retreat into herself. Perhaps she knew that, though life had not unfolded as expected, or as hoped, it still held possibility, because from time to time she’d suddenly blurt out: “Oh, I wish I could run away and leave the bunch of you!” In those moments, she showed a spark of life. Of course, she’d never do such a thing. How many times had Helen heard people say to her mother, “You should put June in a home”? She knew what her mother must have thought—that June already was home.

Jasper Hum at work at Harry’s Café, Perth, Ontario
.
Courtesy Linda Hum

FORTITUDE

WHAT ADVICE HAD
he given her on his deathbed? “Save money from the good times to cover the bad times.” But in the decade since the end of the war, the good times, brought on by an expanded public sector rolled on; the government needed workers to help prepare for the postwar economy. Canadians everywhere were enjoying growth and prosperity. Coming out of the war, Canada demonstrated that it had one of the strongest economies among Western nations. Canadians were working fewer hours and earning more, enjoying new social welfare benefits like family allowances and unemployment insurance. In this mood of new-found optimism, they began to have the families they’d postponed, starting a baby boom.

“The dollars are flying all over,” said Mabel Johnston. She had taken advantage of her own stockpile of cash to renovate the interior of Harry’s Café. She upgraded the countertop to a green linoleum, edged in chrome, re-covered the swivel seats in dark green vinyl and hung a huge mirror on the wall so that it reflected the shelves of coloured glassware for the soda fountain. And she added two jukeboxes, topping one with a slab of marble on which she could roll out the pastry for her pie crusts. But Mabel was proudest of two additions
to the café: a built-in icebox and a telephone. She hired Perth’s best carpenter to design and construct the icebox; he’d also worked on the addition to the town’s Jergens soap factory. As for the telephone, she astutely predicted that boaters vacationing nearby would enjoy the convenience of phoning in their take-out orders of sandwiches and cold drinks for a day on the water. And, later, they could phone again to order dinner to take back to their cottages, to save themselves the bother of cooking.

Mabel couldn’t have predicted, however, that the greatest benefit of the telephone was that it allowed her to keep tabs on her brother Jasper. She’d been able to follow him around for the four years after he’d left Harry’s Café to work in various restaurants in the Ottawa Valley, including the Quebec side of the river. By the sound of his voice on the other end of the telephone, Mabel could tell if he was the Jasper she’d always known—someone who worked hard, who cared about others more than himself. Now that he had his own café, she wanted to believe that he’d stay focused. A year ago, he and several partners, including Doris’s husband, Howard, had opened the Astor Café in Smiths Falls. Her brother had to hang on only a few more months, until the date Mabel circled on the calendar—October 19, 1957—when his family would arrive in Canada. Until that happened, however, Mabel intended to keep a watchful eye. In what seemed a lifetime ago, she had bargained with Harry to keep Jasper in her life; everything that happened afterward turned on that selfish decision.