Lives of the Family (24 page)

In Montreal, Bernice was as much at home as she was in Ottawa. Her father had been a chef and her mother the maid for a Montreal widow of a captain with the Cunard Line. A generous woman, the widow had given Bernice and her parents their own spacious quarters in her Westmount mansion. When Bernice was young, she and her father would walk through McGill’s Roddick Gates, sometimes stopping to watch the players on the tennis courts. One day, her father pointed to the stately Moyse Hall and the arts building, and said to her, “Maybe someday you can go there.”

After Norman and Bernice were married in 1955, their friends, married and single, Hin among them, continued to drop by her parents’ home in Old Ottawa South in the evenings. They liked the refinement of Stanley Wong’s hospitality, including his offers of liqueurs. Hin was content, untroubled that he was approaching his mid-thirties, unmarried. He was absorbed in his work at the Research Council, where not a day went by that Dr. Herzberg—a future Nobel Laureate—didn’t think they were on the brink of a scientific breakthrough. Hin devoted himself to constructing an atomic and molecular beam laboratory, for which the Research Council had provided an empty room measuring thirty feet by thirty feet.

“
I’M NOT GOING TO
line up all night. I’m a bachelor!”

Hin could not be convinced. Jou-Juoh Lee—“JJ” to his friends—had joined with four friends and was trying to persuade him of a deal that he was certain wouldn’t come around
again. Among those friends, Leslie Wong was in real estate and ought to know.

At nine the next morning at the downtown office of the Crown corporation Central Mortgage and Housing, three hundred lots in Riverview subdivision at Ottawa’s eastern edge would go on sale on a first-come, first-served basis, for two hundred and fifty dollars. The catch was that buyers had to sign a mortgage with the agency for a thousand dollars, to be forgiven if the purchaser built within two years. The agency also designated the type of house—bungalow, one and a half storey, or two storey—depending on the lot. The bargain, said JJ, was in the lot. They were fully serviced; the going price for such lots was two thousand dollars. The agency, set up to stimulate house building in anticipation of the baby boom, had heavily promoted the Ottawa sale in newspapers and on radio. Sure that the lots would be snapped up, JJ and his friends decided to spend the night in line.

Hin declared that he would not be participating. “I’m quite happy being a tenant. I don’t see that as a single man I have need of a house. And I don’t want the hassle of hiring and dealing with a contractor.”

But he laid out why JJ should go ahead: his future was securely in Ottawa, since he had a good job at the Department of National Defence; and he was in a serious relationship that looked headed for marriage. JJ was dating Helen Way-nee. Now divorced, Helen had returned to Ottawa from abroad, to help her aged mother care for June, Helen’s disabled sister.

Like Hin, JJ was not from Ottawa. The two had met at MIT, where JJ, the son of a county governor in China, attended on a full scholarship. The others—Leslie Wong, the
realtor, Donald Sim, a lawyer and another of Jack’s brothers, and brothers Eddie and Bill Joe, one an engineer and the other a restaurateur, were born to Ottawa’s pioneer families. None had stayed in the family business; where once they’d lived in the back of a laundry or above a café in downtown Ottawa or Hull, now they aspired to a suburban home. One could imagine a family life where they’d meet their children’s teachers, help with their homework, read
The Night Before Christmas
aloud together on Christmas Eve—things that their parents, at the mercy of their businesses and struggling with English, didn’t have time for or couldn’t do.

That evening, Hin retired to his own bed.

Early the next morning, he was woken by the telephone. It was JJ. “You can still get in on the sale if you hurry down here.” Apparently, some in line had changed their minds, including two of their friends. Hin roused himself and headed downtown.

NORA STRESSED TO
Hin that, excluding herself and Ann as the hosts, all thirty guests at the party—fifteen men, fifteen women—were “eligible.”

As always, in drawing up her invitation lists, Nora gave careful thought as to which individuals might pair off. She could take credit for at least three introductions that had led to marriages. She decided that Marion Lim and Hin Lew, both fiercely determined people, were a match. Marion’s determination was legendary; everybody remembered how hard she had worked at learning English. As for Hin, he’d realized his dream of going to university on years of his and his mother’s scrimping and saving. His father had turned the success of
his various businesses into ruin, dying penniless and leaving Hin’s mother to raise four young children. In the summers, the youngster Hin worked alongside her, snipping the ends off string beans and weeding between the rows at a market garden. In his teen years, he toiled in canneries up the B.C. coast. His sister, Ann, had a job at a Chinese produce store and at day’s end, brought home yellowed vegetables not fit for sale. To save bus fare during his four years at UBC, Hin rode his used one-speed bicycle to and from their house in Chinatown and the campus, six miles each way.

Nora realized there was an age difference between Marion and Hin of twelve years. That was for them to decide if it mattered. Certainly it didn’t show. Nora thought they’d make a handsome couple, both slender, tall and graceful.

Hin told himself that one had to admire Nora for achieving a balance of single women and men, and in such numbers. He thought about possible outcomes. No one has to come with any intentions, he decided. This is just a social gathering; one can hope for suitable collisions.

AFTER HIN
’
S VISIT TO
Vancouver, he and Marion corresponded. Smitten with her, Hin felt self-conscious about his ability to use English expressively. He could write scientific papers of an international calibre, but he was afraid his English lacked elegance. He need not have feared.

Of Hin’s spoken English, Marion would say it was “perfect.” She thought the written English in his letters confirmed the precision with which he spoke. Completely surprising was his penmanship and fluency in Chinese, a few lines of which he included in every letter. She felt humbled that she, with
seven years of schooling in China, should be impressed by how someone born and raised in Canada presented himself in what was her mother tongue.

IN NOVEMBER OF
1959, after their wedding in Vancouver the year after they’d first met, Marion readied to leave with Hin for their new home in Ottawa—one that Hin had designed himself in the Riverview subdivision. In packing for the east, she made sure to shop for an extra-warm coat for Ottawa winters. She had yet to experience sub-zero temperatures and snow. Once there, she was dismayed to find that even in her new wool coat, her teeth rattled and she shook against the cold.

Several months later, in defiance of the last lingering patches of snow, a warming sun coaxed out the first crocuses, the purple and yellow and white flowers cheerily announcing spring. When Marion observed people shedding their winter wear in favour of lighter-weight coats, she realized that the coat she’d been wearing all winter was ill-chosen, more suited perhaps to the spring weather. A smile crossed her face. She was thinking of that awkward evening when she’d worn the coral-coloured tiered gown; such missteps were all part of finding one’s way.

See-fat Hum in China, one year after his release from prison
.
Courtesy Lui-sang Wong

ARRIVAL
(
2
)

AFTER A DECADE LIVING
downtown on Waverley Street, Lui-sang and Tsan Wong enjoyed the quiet of their home in the Glebe, a sedate, leafy Ottawa neighbourhood of large, older brick homes set back from the street, an area pleasantly dotted with parks adjoining the Rideau Canal.

In 1979, their lives were about to change again, in a way they’d hoped for but hardly imagined possible. Thirteen years earlier, Lui-sang had sponsored her mother, Hoi-sui, to come to Canada. As early as a year from now, in 1980—depending on the progress of the paperwork in China—they would add another member to their household: Lui-sang’s father, See-fat. After thirty years in prison, he had finally been released.

On the eve of her departure for China, where she would return to the village to visit her husband, Hoi-sui sat her daughter and son-in-law down for a serious chat. She wanted them to understand her intentions once she got to China.

Officials at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa had assured the family that Hoi-sui should have no problems. Go and visit the village, they told her. Get your husband to fill out the form to apply to emigrate from China to Canada. Then, come back to Canada and wait. “These things take time,” they said.

Hoi-sui confessed her fears. Why had it taken two tries, two applications, before the embassy had granted her a visa so that she could visit her husband? Maybe China’s Communist government had released See-fat but had not declared him “rehabilitated,” so that he still carried the label of capitalist and landlord. Maybe prison authorities would change their minds, and would yet send him back to the forced labour camp at the mine in the Mongolian mountains.

Tsan and Lui-sang admitted to being nervous themselves that authorities would deny See-fat permission to leave China. If the government didn’t object on political grounds, what if local officials were swayed by greed: as long as he remained there, his family in Canada would keep sending money. The couple didn’t know what to make of a recent letter that See-fat had smuggled out to them. Apparently, every time the postman showed up at his door, neighbours came asking for money. Some well-meaning villagers had suggested that maybe it was better that his family not send him any money: “They said that our family could be hurt, like before.” Even in tiny script, on such a small piece of paper—presumably easier to conceal—See-fat hadn’t been able to write much.

Hoi-sui couldn’t help but fear for her own safety. Could authorities still hold it against her that she’d escaped from the country? Even now, more than twenty years since she’d fled with her three young children, “What if they say, how did you get to Canada? We didn’t let you out.” In 1978, the world had hailed China’s momentous change of policy, its new “Open Door” to the west. Still, Hoi-sui was afraid; had the authorities released her husband only to lure her back?

None of the three had any answers.

Hoi-sui told them she had her plane ticket, so there would be no second thoughts about going. But she wanted her daughter to know she had made up her mind: “If they don’t let me return to Canada or if they don’t let your father out—either way—I will stay with him.” He was sixty-one; she was fifty-eight. As husband and wife, they had already missed most of a lifetime to be together.

Lui-sang and Tsan told nothing of this to their three sons. They didn’t want them to worry that they might never see their grandmother again; she’d lived with the family since before two of them were even born. Canada, and more particularly Ottawa, was the only home they’d known. Yet if everything went as planned and events came full circle, they would begin to understand what it means to have an immigrant past. They’d see that for the migrant, to leave one shore and to arrive at another is neither the beginning nor the end. If they should be so lucky, they’d become part of the calculus of their grandfather’s negotiation between the familiar and the strange, the old and the new. And perhaps one day, when the time came to write themselves into the narrative of the lives of the family, they would see that even a lifetime isn’t the end of the tale.

As far as the Wongs’ three boys, Harvey, Howard and Vincent, were concerned, Grandma was going to visit her husband and he was going to come to Canada to live with them. The youngest, Vincent, aged nine, wondered which room his grandfather would end up taking, if he or one of his brothers would have to give up their space.