Lives of the Family (18 page)

In reply to her mother, Ruth made an impassioned argument for the need to advance civil rights in the United States, which she declared had relevance for Canadian society. Three single-spaced typed pages later, she wrote: “With my intelligence, I can find few better fields to put my education to use.” Having warmed up her typewriter, Ruth let her indignation fly.

IN THE OPINION OF AN OUTSIDER
, Leip Lor’s café in Brockville was an anomaly. “Odd that their business is always booming,” Mabel Johnston said to her daughter Doris. “Of course, I don’t have any of the Lors’ expensive dishes on the menu.”

After the sudden drop in 1954, the economy had picked right back up. Yet, Mabel noticed, her business was falling off. Why, she couldn’t understand. People didn’t seem to be going out to eat as they once were; maybe they were enthralled with television, or maybe they were spending their money in other ways, on automatic clothes washing machines and tumble dryers.

She tried to take a lesson from her late husband’s nose for opportunity. She remembered how Harry had thought it unusual that American children attending Camp Shomira, the Jewish summer camp on Otty Lake, who came in at day’s
end for a candy bar and a soft drink, always left a tip, something Canadian children would never do. He decided to go after the business of their parents when they came on weekends to visit their children. “Jewish people won’t eat a pork chop, but I know they like veal,” he told Mabel.

Mabel had the idea that she could add to the tourists’ experience by giving away chopsticks. The thought was that they’d keep them, and remember Harry’s Café and come back or advertise for her, but she stopped her experiment when she didn’t see any difference in the traffic to the restaurant.

How could Leip Lor afford to source the food he offered, she wondered. Local lamb was trouble enough, never mind trying to arrange for fresh lobsters and oysters. Mabel put it down to the Lors’ clientele: “They get all the high-class tourist business up and down the river. They know what the tourists want—expensive, good food.”

KEEPING TO WHAT TRACES
remained of a walking path across the ice, Joe and his two friends made it to the other side. They scrambled up the riverbank and began to walk along the isolated stretch of River Road toward Morristown. They came upon a driver whose car was stuck in a snowbank. The boys offered to help the man and after some effort, they managed to free his car.

Having heard that the boys had walked across the ice from Brockville, the man said that if they were returning the same way, they ought to be thinking about going back as it was getting late. Perhaps the man was concerned that the waning light of day would make a crossing by foot even more treacherous.

In the sobering presence of an adult, the boys, burying their teenage bravado, agreed among themselves that they ought to take the Ogdensburg ferry back.

“Can we hitch a ride into town?”

“How about I take you right to the ferry?”

The man drove through Morristown. Short of Ogdensburg, he stopped at the border-crossing office of U.S. Customs and Immigration. “I’m turning you boys in.”

Joe wondered if the man had double-crossed him and his friends because he had something against the Chinese.

Fortunately, all the boys, including Joe, happened to have border-crossing cards on them. It was common to live on one side and work or have businesses on the other, so locals on both sides of the river were accustomed to crossing freely without need to show a card.

Only Joe was taken into an interrogation room. He produced his card. Silently he thanked his father; when the United States and Canada ordered the internment of those of Japanese descent, Leip had taken out cards for all his children: “Just in case someone mistakes you for Japanese.”

Two hours later, Joe finally emerged to rejoin his friends. “You’re being deported,” an official told the three, putting them in a car and making sure they boarded the ferry in Ogdensburg.

By the time Joe reached King Street in Brockville, it was twilight. He was late. He should have been back well before five, to help out at the restaurant. He noticed that the restaurant’s neon sign, with its more than two hundred bulbs surrounding the letters spelling out the name of the café, wasn’t lit. Something has to be wrong, he thought. Years ago, Joe’s father invested in a generator to make sure the sign could
always be lit. Of course, his parents argued about that. Agnes said the kitchen ought to have first claim on the generator. “The sign is more important!” Leip thundered.

Joe hurried his step. He started up the stairs, but before he reached the top, his mother appeared.

At the sight of her slumped shoulders, Joe knew that whatever it was, it was terrible news.

“He used a gun.”

Agnes said it happened at four o’clock. One of the bachelors working in the kitchen had heard the muffled shot of the pistol, run downstairs to the basement and found Leip’s body in his office.

Agnes and Gloria had been upstairs in the apartment but they hadn’t seen Leip go downstairs; nor had the kitchen help seen him go down the basement. He could have gone unnoticed, if he’d used the back staircase and the outside entrance to the basement.

Nobody but Leip ever went into the backroom of the basement where he stored his guns in a locked cabinet. The rest of the family regarded it as a storeroom of “expensive Chinese stuff.” It held porcelain and rosewood carvings, mostly deities and buddhas, the provenance of which was forgotten, likely left behind by Leip’s father.

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE FUNERAL
, Agnes, sorting through her husband’s papers in his office, made a startling discovery. The New York Café owed its creditors a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

Struggling to understand why her husband had been driven to take his own life, Agnes told Joe of an unsettling incident
that she’d recently witnessed. She’d gone into the kitchen of the restaurant and happened upon Leip having a run-in with one of his chefs.

“You’re not my boss,” the chef sneered.

Having to put up with such lip from chefs was part and parcel of owning a restaurant. Chefs were a temperamental lot, given to fits of pique. Jack Sim, whose success at running his restaurants in Hull and Ottawa got him elected head of the Canadian Restaurant Association, always said that staff was the biggest challenge in the business, and that of all the staff, the kitchen was the most troublesome: “Say something wrong to the chefs, and they take off their apron and they’re gone.”

“I could buy you out tomorrow,” the chef taunted.

Normally, Leip would have given back as good as he got, his voice alone commanding authority. He said, quietly, “Go to hell.”

How had the tables turned? Agnes and Joe spoke of how Leip had rescued many a bachelor trapped here by exclusion and the war, or down on their luck. From the days when he had a laundry, he’d given them a meal and a bed and often, work. Some had lived on the third floor for decades.

Agnes raised with Joe the only option she saw for the restaurant: to declare bankruptcy.

Joe thought of what “taking care” of his mother meant. I better hang around here, he told himself. Bankruptcy would leave his mother with nothing. “I’ll put off school,” he said. “I want to do it.” They both knew what he meant; he’d help her prove that she could run the restaurant.

Agnes was suddenly optimistic. “None of your dad’s creditors are going to run us out of town.”

A thousand people filled First Presbyterian Church to overflowing for Leip Lor’s funeral. It reached Agnes’s ears that the wife of her husband’s brother with the café in Gananoque was telling relatives that Agnes drove her husband to his death, because she hadn’t behaved like a good Chinese wife.

Days later, Joe stood amid the dust of renovations at the restaurant. He and Agnes, accepting that people could be superstitious about where a suicide has taken place, had agreed that he ought to make the place look different. Joe began by ripping out the booths, but he left the partition hinges on the walls, as if leaving an artifact of his father’s time.

It would take Agnes three years to turn the restaurant around and clear the debt.

TO BRING A STEADY INCOME
into the family while still saving for university, Joe applied for a job that fall at one of Brockville’s largest manufacturing plants. Phillips Cables produced copper rods and insulated wires and cables. Its two-hundred-foot smokestack was a landmark in Eastern Ontario. A manager hired Joe on condition that the plant’s doctor certify that he was in good health.

The doctor warned the new employee that work on the factory floor was not easy: “You know, Joe, it’s not going to be like working in the family restaurant. White people live differently.”

Joe was hired on for thirty-nine dollars a week. He worked a shift from Monday to Friday, which left his evenings and weekends free to help out at the restaurant. He decided that the doctor at Phillips Cables was right: working in the factory was different; it was a lot easier than working at the restaurant.

Janet and Golden Lang and their infant daughter, Arlene, and Golden’s parents
.
Courtesy Golden Lang

RESOLVE

ON THE PLANE
’
S DESCENT
, a stewardess announced that Anchorage would be a refuelling stop only. The flight, which had originated in Hong Kong, was en route to Vancouver. Janet peered out the window at the ground below. She could see nothing to suggest a human landscape—not a building, not a person, nothing but whiteness. She could not even make out where the sky met the ground.

Please don’t tell me I’ve died, she prayed. Don’t tell me this is heaven.

All around her sat strangers. She included her new husband, seated beside her, in that category.

“That’s snow down there,” he told her.

So God wasn’t at hand after all. Still, she hoped she wasn’t going to end up in a place like this.

At least she would have a few things to remind her of the life she’d left behind. In Hong Kong, when she’d been packing to go abroad, her new husband had invited her to make use of room in his luggage. Earlier that summer, he’d flown from Ottawa for their wedding and had brought two oversized suitcases, one of which he’d deliberately left half empty. Janet took a last look to see what else she’d like to take. She regretted
most that marriage had cut short her schooling, all the more so because her parents had not enrolled her until she was ten. She’d only had six years of school. Her elder sister had shrugged off her complaint: “We all started late.” Only the two youngest of the five siblings—the boys—had been educated from an early age. Into the space in her husband’s suitcase, Janet crammed what she could fit of her school texts, novels and magazines.

Even now, halfway to her destination on the other side of Canada, she felt as if she was not Janet Tang, the sixteen-year-old girl who’d only known city life, but another girl who’d been abruptly plucked from school and a month later married off to Golden Lang, twenty-one, originally from a village on the mainland, in China.

Perhaps the reality of her situation was all the harder to grasp because her mother, when speaking to Golden, continually used the third person to refer to her, even when she was standing right there.

In the two months between the wedding and the young couple’s departure for Canada, on September 3, 1955, Mrs. Tang had taken charge of preparations for her daughter to set up house abroad. But as it turned out, Golden didn’t think his parents, who owned and ran a café near Ottawa, and with whom he and Janet would be living, lacked for anything.

“What about dishes? Every bride should at least have dishes in her dowry.”

“We have everything at home.”

“What about chopsticks?”

“No, no, we have lots of stuff like that.”

“Will she need some good dresses?” asked Janet’s mother,
by which she meant
cheong sams
. No, said Golden, giving Janet her first hint that her life was about to take a direction very different from how she’d lived in Hong Kong, the city of her birth.

Nonetheless, Mrs. Tang filled Janet’s trunk with a new wardrobe. She took her to the tailor, who made up some padded silk jackets intended to keep her warm against the cold in Canada, and as well, a dozen stylish “American” outfits in different colours. Mrs. Tang bought crinolines to be worn with full, gathered skirts, and a dozen pairs of high-heeled shoes.