Lives of the Family (5 page)

One of these women was Lui-sang Hum. She had come at the age of sixteen in 1958. A bright-eyed girl with cherubic cheeks, she lived like a domestic under the thumb of Mrs. Eng, whom she addressed as Third Auntie—the third-born among her mother’s siblings. She and Mr. Eng had financed Lui-sang’s immigration to Canada. Mr. Eng waited on tables at the Ho Ho Café, and Third Auntie stayed at home with their four young children, all under the age of six. The Engs owned their own home on Frank Street, and from time to time rented rooms out. Lui-sang lived with them for four years, until she married Tsan Wong, a part owner of the busy Canton Inn.

The other was Lai-sim Yee, who arrived on Frank Street in 1959 at the age of twenty-one. She came to marry Yu-nam Leung, a cook who divided his time between the Cathay House restaurant downtown and its owner’s second restaurant, the Sampan, out in the suburbs. The Leungs began their married life in two matchbox-like rooms. Their landlord, Mr. Kung, whose new laundromat business was doing well, had turned his fourplex into a rooming house of sorts. A kindly man, he helped many new arrivals with their immigration paperwork. He’d pick them up from the airport and sometimes offer to run an errand in his new Chevy. The Leungs’ household expanded: by the fourth year, they would be two couples, each with a child, sharing two rooms, with no kitchen other than a hotplate and the bathroom sink.

In the summer of 1963, Lui-sang moved one block to the north, to Waverley Street. Lai-sim followed a few months
later. Their street view was much the same as before—the side of Colonial Furniture and its gravel parking lot. Once again, they lived across from each other. But where they once had been tenants, now they were homeowners, each with her own street address and her own front door. Lui-sang, who owned the larger house, adorned with decorative brickwork, had her own covered front porch large enough to sit in. Lai-sim’s plain, even shabby, red brick house, was smaller, but with six rooms—tiny, mind—spread over two and a half floors, her extended household was no longer tripping over one another.

On Waverley Street, a new neighbourliness seeded the ground between the two women. It didn’t take long before one or the other could be seen scurrying across the street to visit. Eventually, over the ten years that they would both live on Waverley Street, the hour wouldn’t matter, early morning or late—very late—into the night. Nor the elements, rain or shine. Both determinedly beat a path to the other’s door. “My sister! My best friend!” they’d say. In English, as if marking the friendship as homegrown, in Canada.

IN THE WAKE OF THE
Canadian government’s lifting of exclusion, new Chinese immigrants arrived with an identity that was determined by the connection that got them into the country: as a wife or a dependent child reuniting with a husband or parent, or promised as a bride. These identities suggested that the familial relationship was the referee of their lives. In reality family stories set against the tragic and sometimes brutal history of the previous decades had been sagas of loss and dislocation. So, given the opportunity, someone
resourceful might try to realign fractures in the family narrative to restore or recast the original, or construct a new one. To do so, however, might compel one to unearth memory. Or alternatively, to bury memory.

“We’ll do whatever we have to, to keep up your story, but if you want to stay in Canada, you better move in with us.” Chiu Hum and his wife and their two daughters, who’d come to visit Lui-sang at the Engs’ immediately upon her arrival, pressed her to move from Third Auntie’s to their house. A well-known cook among Chinese café-owners, Mr. Hum warned her of the zealousness of the RCMP: they were rumoured to arrive unannounced to ask to see immigration documents and would take anyone caught out as paper sons and daughters straight out to the airport and put them on a plane—although nobody actually knew of anyone to whom this had happened.

Lui-sang’s performance had convinced Canadian Immigration officials once that she was Jin-hai Hum, the middle daughter of the couple in Ottawa who, at the time, rented rooms in Third Auntie’s house.

Third Auntie said they should stick to the original deal. A calculating woman, she had happened to hear the Hums, when she’d rented them rooms, speak of a daughter who, had she lived, would be fourteen. She had pounced: How many children did Mr. Hum register with Canadian Immigration? Three; he’d neglected to mention that one had died. Mrs. Eng asked to buy the dead daughter’s “slot” for her niece Lui-sang to enter Canada. The girl was sixteen, but being short, could easily pass for fourteen. Besides, authorities likely wouldn’t try to verify the existence of a daughter. The birth or death
of a daughter was hardly notable, warranting, at best, a slip of paper with a name on it tucked into the pages of a family’s genealogy book.

The two families, at loggerheads over where Lui-sang should live, agreed to put the issue to the matriarch of Third Auntie’s family. She lived in Stephenville, Newfoundland, having only recently reunited with Lui-sang’s grandfather after being separated by exclusion for twenty-five years. Afraid of making the wrong decision, the old lady dithered so long that Auntie eventually got her way.

Within days of moving in with the Engs on Frank Street, Lui-sang met Uncle’s mother. She was so affected by how desperately the young girl wanted to find work in order to send money to her mother that the old woman went straight away to talk to the owner of a café where she herself had worked nights in the kitchen. By week’s end, Lui-sang was hired to work six days a week, eight to five, at the New Astor Café around the corner. She put in long days, beginning with fixing breakfast for the four Eng children. At the restaurant, besides keeping up with dirty dishes, every day she had to peel a hundred pounds of potatoes, push them, potato by potato, through the French Fry chopper, and then work her way through a bushel basket of raw chicken breasts, cutting them into cubes for the next day’s chicken balls. Back at home, exhausted, her arms red and inflamed from the lye in the dishwashing solution, she’d start dinner for the children.

Now and again, Lui-sang would take a detour on her way home from work to swing by her paper family’s house. Suspecting as much, Auntie barked at her: “Just stay in the house! You go to work, okay. Go to school, okay. But the rest
of the time, stay in the house!” Her niece paid no heed. Whereas she was glum and morose at the Engs’, her cheerful self and infectious laugh came back at the Hums. In any event, her paper mother wanted to see her at least monthly; she insisted on handing over to her the proportionate share of the family allowance cheque that she got from the government, payments that would continue until her deceased daughter would have turned sixteen.

Six months into her life in Canada, Lui-sang’s paper father spoke to her in confidence. His tone was ominous. “Do you know why you were brought to Canada?” She repeated what she’d been told in Hong Kong; her Stephenville grandfather told her mother to send her to Canada to mind Third Auntie’s children: “Third Auntie needs to go outside to work to get more money.”

“That’s not why. I’ll tell you why. You babysit for a while and then when you’re older, you apply to get your Auntie’s youngest brother to come here to be your husband.”

Several months later, Mr. Hum brought happy news to Lui-sang: her grandmother had found a bride—a girl in Newfoundland—for her uncle. I’m so lucky, realized Lui-sang. Perhaps fate had taken its first turn in her favour. She redoubled her efforts to learn English. In addition to taking night school classes for new immigrants, she signed up for the remedial English class at the Chinese Christian Mission. Miss Ricker, the deaconess, a former missionary now in her sixties, held sessions on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons; Lui-sang showed up on Sundays, joining six or seven others. When Third Auntie came upon Lui-sang’s notebooks, she collected them and told her children to tear
them up. Lui-sang wondered if her aunt feared she’d better herself too quickly.

LAI-SIM YEE FELT ONLY
indifference when told by her grandmother that she was to be sent to Canada to marry. In the five years since her arrival in Hong Kong she had never felt comfortable. Having lived only a rural life and speaking her village dialect, she felt others, with their urban ways and their refined Cantonese, looked down on her. Neither did she feel at home with her extended family in Hong Kong; she was the daughter of First Mother who died years before. But she was as much an outsider because she had “gone out”; a girl who has left her birth family, usually by marriage but in her case because she was adopted out, does not return.

As the one who’d given her granddaughter away the first time, the old lady had no qualms about doing it again. She saw her chance when Canada introduced a program in 1955 allowing Chinese men in Canada holding Canadian citizenship to sponsor a fiancée. Lai-sim knew nothing of the man she was to marry, only that her grandmother and his had concluded a deal to send her as a COD bride.

On December 10, 1959, eight days after Lai-sim arrived in Ottawa (the program’s rules specified that a marriage had to take place within thirty days), she married Yu-nam Leung, a thin man whose subdued manner was the opposite of her chatty nature. The couple moved into Mr. Kung’s rooming house on Frank Street. Ten months later, they had a squawling infant boy, Billy.

Lai-sim’s experience in Canada echoed the isolation she’d felt in Hong Kong. At first, she’d felt hemmed in by the cold
and her fear of slipping on the snow and ice. Then, more so by her lack of English. When she did venture out with Billy, knowing she wouldn’t be able to ask directions never mind comprehend the answer, she circled the same nearby blocks.

Yu-nam’s fourteen hour days at his dishwashing job left Lai-sim only the company of the baby. Her one slim hope of turning up something lucky in Canada seemed to have evaporated. She’d written to an address in Altona, Manitoba, to the husband of the grandmother who’d sent her abroad. She asked after an older brother from her birth family, named Mun-fei, whom she understood to have gone to work for him. If the family in Hong Kong was hostile towards her, perhaps, throught Lai-sim, the siblings she had yet to meet might feel differently. When no reply came, she tried again. She wondered if her rudimentary Chinese was the problem; she’d had only a fifth-grade education. Again she received no response.

When Billy was only months old, Lai-sim received news of Mun-fei. A brother-in-law in Canada told her that Mun-fei had moved to Winnipeg, and that he went by the name Henry. The two siblings had a tearful reunion by telephone. We were inseparable as children, Henry told his sister: “Grandma never told me she was giving you away.”

Soon, Lai-sim created her own version of an extended family. First she added Henry, whom she persuaded to move to Ottawa, then she found him a wife in Hong Kong whom he sponsored as his bride. The extra helping hands proved a lifeline for Lai-sim and Yu-nam when he was confined to hospital for six months with tuberculosis. Lai-sim got the family on welfare. In order to keep up remittances to their families, she got a job under the table, washing dishes at the Ding Ho
Café. There, she put in twelve-hour shifts on nights that Henry had off from the kitchen at the Cathay House Restaurant, so that he could mind Billy for her.

Yet Lai-sim still had time to dream. On her walks in the neighbourhood, she watched a high-rise go up. If I had money, I’d like to own a building like that, she told herself. She passed by storefronts on Bank Street and imagined the premises as her own café. With her eye for opportunity, she spied a chance to become a homeowner when her grandfather retired to Ottawa. He took a room in a boarding house one street over, on Waverley. Lai-sim had the idea that she and Henry, whose wife, Chun, by then was expecting their second child, could afford to buy that very house. The smallest on the block, it was in the least desirable location, bordering Colonial Furniture’s parking lot. She got Henry to talk to the landlord, a Jewish gentleman, who agreed to sell. Their grandfather loaned Lai-sim her share, and paid Henry’s from his pending inheritance of the proceeds from the sale of the Altona café. With that, Lai-sim Yee became a homeowner, living a few steps from the woman she recognized from Frank Street.

“
IF I
’
M NOT ON THIS SIDE
, I’m on that side,” Lai-sim Leung and Lui-sang Wong instructed their families, should anyone need one or the other and have to go looking for her.

“Or, if I’m not on that side, then I’m on this side.”

Like two twittering birds on a wire, the women surveyed the landscape of their shared present, the newness of their lives in Canada. At their backs was China, from which they had escaped and could not, perhaps ever, return. The two friends
did not bring up the past that was China. Everyone knows you can’t have a good life in wartime. And that it was bad when the Communists came. To bring up the past would be to talk about it too much and not enough at the same time. Memories push up and then you have to push them back down.

THE ARREST OF
See-fat Hum had been an ambush.

On the eve of the lunar new year of 1950, the Hum family unlocked all doors and opened all windows, to let go of the old year and welcome the new. Like everyone at the table, eight-year-old Lui-sang eagerly anticipated the traditional
fat choy
soup. The new year’s greeting of
Kung hey fat choy!
bestows a wish of good fortune and prosperity while conjuring thoughts of the rich soup, laden with thin strands of black moss fungi, bean curd strips as fine as silk, pungent mushrooms, oysters and salted turnip.

Suddenly, two policemen, brandishing rifles, barged in. They hoisted See-fat out of his chair. “You are going to jail! You are an enemy of the People! You do bad things against the Revolution!” As they manhandled him out the door, Lui-sang wailed after her father, “
Baba
!” But her mother, Hoi-sui, declared that she was unafraid; she felt certain that the Communist Party cadres in charge would soon see their mistake and release her husband.