Lives of the Family (9 page)

“Save money from the good times to cover the bad times,” Harry counselled Mabel. “Remember, business isn’t good in the winter; people don’t want to dine out when the weather is bad. By the month of May, when the weather is better, people come around again. The cottages open in July. Tourists start arriving, passing through town.”

Mabel had always dreaded this day, when Harry would leave her. Their daughters began to bawl.

Harry seemed so terribly sad. “I don’t want to go. I’m going to miss my girls.” In the end, Harry Johnston’s heart belonged not so much to China as to his family.

A LONG WHILE AFTER THEIR
father’s death, Doris and her sisters asked their mother about something that hadn’t occurred to them before. If their father and Peter had been the only two sons, why were they referred to in Chinese as First Uncle and Fourth Uncle? What happened to Second Uncle and Third Uncle?

Mabel had no idea. She explained that she had come late into their father’s life as his second wife, to replace the first, who had died. Their Uncle Fred was the son of First Wife.

All of this was news to them. They were mystified by something else: why didn’t their father’s son and brother or other men, who had lived like bachelors on their third floor, bring their wives with them to Canada? Or send for them? Why hadn’t Uncle Jasper brought his wife and daughter here, so that they wouldn’t have to live under the Japanese in China?

Mabel couldn’t believe she had to state the obvious. “Because the Canadian government isn’t letting any more Chinese in!”

Now Doris was entirely confused. She had always thought it had to do with money, that it was cheaper for husbands to keep a wife in China. When she was a little girl, that was the only talk she’d ever heard from men like her uncles. All such truths out of the mouths of bachelors hid the larger truth—that the government had decided those of Chinese origin or descent weren’t worthy enough to call themselves Canadians.

Young women volunteering their stenographic skills for “Canadian Aid to China (1947)”: (left to right) Lillian Johnston, unknown, Louise Fong Johnston, Margaret Joe, Mary Wong, Helen Kealey, Doris Yuen
.
Courtesy Linda Hum

OPPORTUNITY

A REGULAR AT HARRY
’
S CAFÉ
, William Relyea, the office manager at the Perth Shoe Factory, chatted to Doris over his daily coffee at the counter. If she was interested, he had an opening in the office; she could put to use what she’d learned at the business school in Ottawa.

Doris had cut short her secretarial course when her father died. She’d done so without hesitation, clear in her mind that she wanted to be at her mother’s side to help sort through Harry’s affairs. Except for the day of his funeral, Harry’s Café stayed open for business as before, and Jasper, as head cook, kept the menu as it had always been. Now almost a year later and soon time for the family to remove the black arm bands of mourning, Doris felt that she and her mother understood her father’s dealings well enough to keep things on track. And with her own sacrifice, of coming back home to lend a hand, Lillian and Louise had been able to stay in school.

The Perth Shoe Factory was one of Perth’s largest employers. Its two hundred operators normally produced seven hundred pairs of women’s shoes a day. In the First World War, it had supplied army boots for the Canadian military, and now
that Canada had followed Britain into war against Germany, it was gearing up to do the same again.

Doris asked Mabel’s opinion about the office job. Mabel had originally advised her daughter to go to the business school in Ottawa, seeing as the family couldn’t afford to send her to university. Mabel urged her to take the job. Quite apart from leaving Doris free to work nights and weekends at the café, the position would give them both a window into how employers run a business. Mabel had no idea what was a typical wage or what to do with a pay cheque. She still didn’t quite understand how banks worked.

The wartime economy created a bonanza and not just for factories churning out military equipment. The war rapidly transformed Ottawa, once built on lumber fortunes and in the last century the centre of the timber trade in Canada, into a government town. Needing personnel to run its wartime programs, the government hired as quickly as people could apply. Lillian saw a chance to move to the city. She persuaded Louise to join her in sitting for the federal government’s entrance examination for stenographers. Both easily passed. In Ottawa, the sisters rented rooms at the YWCA (its goal, it assured parents whose daughters had to live away from home, was “keeping our girls good”) until they could find an apartment to share.

At the Perth Shoe Factory office, Doris became close friends with a co-worker her age. Eva Devlin’s father had been the Children’s Aid inspector responsible for orphans, then served a term as mayor and was now Perth’s long-serving justice of the peace—a post Eva’s older brother, Eric, would inherit. The Johnstons knew the Devlins best from years of seeing Eric come into the café for candy and hot dogs after
school. When Eric graduated to ordering his first T-bone steak and made a choice of “well done,” Jasper came out of the kitchen with his cleaver mid-air, and in broken English declared: “You no get well done, you get medium rare!”

Not long after Doris joined the office, Eva’s mother died. By then, Eric had enlisted and gone overseas. The girls compared their common fate of keeping company with a surviving parent. Doris confided in Eva how attached she felt to Mabel: “If my mother went anywhere, if she left Perth, I’d have to go too.” But neither Doris nor Eva talked about moving on. It was still possible to dream big in a small town. Eva, known as a tomboy, a girl who could skate as fast as any boy and play softball with the best of them, had ambitions: she was saving her money to take flying lessons and to buy a small airplane. One day, she told Doris, I’ll take you up with me so that we can both see Perth from the air.

DORIS AND MABEL
made regular shopping trips to Ottawa. Their routine took them mainly along Albert Street, along a two-block stretch on either side of Bank Street where a half dozen Chinese-run businesses conglomerated. Interspersed among white-owned establishments—a tire shop, print shop, paper company and the imposing Hunter Building, the first federal office building built by Public Works in Ottawa—were two grocers, a confectionery, a café and a couple of social clubs.

Their errands included a stop at the Colonial Coach Lines bus terminal to pick up shipments of Chinese foodstuffs for their own table that Mabel had ordered from Chinatowns in Toronto or Montreal. She rarely ordered from Vancouver because of the high freight charges. Next, the two stopped
in at the Wongs’. Mr. Sue Wong ran the family store, the Yick Lung, out of the front room of their house, and had installed his wife and seven children in the first-floor back room and the attic. (Another tenant lived on the second floor.) At the Yick Lung, Mabel could purchase staples: rice, soya sauce, tea, preserved sausages and ginseng, sometimes fresh Chinese greens, which came by bus or train from Montreal.

The store posted no hours; Mr. and Mrs. Wong said that if someone wanted to buy, they were open. But equally important, the Wongs’ store functioned as a community meeting place. Mrs. Wong rimmed the small front vestibule with chairs, providing a place where the local Chinese community, and in particular, its wives and mothers, could alight to visit and chat.

During the first half-century of the Chinese presence in Ottawa, the number of families in the city were very few. When Canada imposed exclusion in 1923, only six of some three hundred Chinese in Ottawa had either come with their wives or sent for them. The Canadian government had been uncompromising on the day that the law came into effect; as of July
1
, any Chinese on board a boat destined for Vancouver or Victoria that was mid-ocean or even in port could not enter the country unless they either had already paid the head tax or held a Canadian birth certificate; anybody else, even a wife coming to join her husband, would be turned back. The six wives in Ottawa were very nearly five: Mrs. Shung Joe’s boat docked in Vancouver just as the Exclusion Act took effect. Her husband drew on his good standing as a member of the Presbyterian Church and enlisted a church official to help plead their case. The head tax was duly paid and Mrs. Shung Joe was reunited with her husband.

The number of these pioneer wives did fall to five when the owner of the Wing On, who opened the first Chinese storefront on Albert Street in 1914, decided his wife would have an easier life in China. There were only four upon the death of Jack Hum’s wife. Jack himself died a decade later, leaving behind their three teenaged sons. Two of the wives were married to the brothers Sue and Shing Wong, both grocers; the third to Shung Joe, the only one of the original patriarchs—all of whom had started in the laundry business—to remain in it; and the fourth, Joe Sim, the restaurateur in Hull.

The so-called social clubs were all-male domains. Women did not set foot in such clubs, where gambling and Johnny Walker Red Label were enjoyed in equal measure. Nor did children, except as messengers sent from the nearby Canton Inn. Their job was to get the attention of the bachelor men absorbed in their games of mahjong and dominoes and fan tan, to tell them that a dinner order someone had placed was ready. For a time, Doris and Mabel’s excursions to Ottawa included taking a turn outside the entrances of the clubs with collection tins for war relief in China, a fundraising idea of the pioneer wives. Mabel approved: “Might as well get money from the gamblers going in; they’re not going to have it coming out.”

Wives needing to get out of the house considered church their only option. Some had been introduced to the religion and the institution of the church by Reverend Gordon Taylor, a Presbyterian minister who travelled around the Ottawa area to fill in for absent clergyman, and made a point of befriending Chinese laundry and café owners and the bachelors who worked for them. Originally from Edinburgh, the Reverend could speak Chinese without an accent and seemed to have a
deep knowledge of Chinese history and culture. He claimed that everything he knew he’d learned from a Chinese man in Montreal who’d been a scholar in China but a laundryman here. The Chinese were of two minds about the Reverend: some thought him to be a great man because he’d brought them to the church and given them Christian names. Others saw him as a busybody who was rumoured to meet regularly with Prime Minister Mackenzie King. In his first term as prime minister, King had brought in exclusion.

Come Sunday, the wives donned their tailored dresses and hats—Mrs. Joe took pride in her stylish hats—and attended the services at Dominion United Church on Metcalfe Street or Knox Presbyterian Church on Elgin. That they understood or spoke little English—other than “Yes” and “No” and “Too much!”—proved no hindrance. One can readily participate at church simply by observing and following suit; you sit or stand or bow your head or pick up the hymn book when everyone else does.

At Mrs. Wong’s, they were back comfortably in their element, speaking in their native Toisonese. The wives, often with their children in tow, made for the Yick Lung straight from church, knowing they’d find Mrs. Wong there, always on hand to mind the store. Whether to complain or commiserate, they could count on a sympathetic ear from the grocer’s wife. Such compassion sprang perhaps from the wellspring of Mrs. Wong’s trials as a mother living with heartache.

In 1920, her husband could finance only one head tax and passage for a family member to join him in Ottawa. Mrs. Wong had no choice but to leave behind their only child, a three-year-old girl. She solemnly promised the girl that one day she’d be back with her father, that they’d reclaim her from her grandparents
and live again as a family. In Ottawa, Mrs. Wong, filled with longing for her daughter, would sit by the open window in the room that she shared with her husband above his uncle’s Murray Street laundry, weeping at the sound of children at the nearby school. Years passed, during which time Mrs. Wong gave birth to six children. She was pregnant with the seventh when the family readied to return for good to China. They booked their boat passage for the fall, timing it for one month after her due date. That summer, Japan invaded China. The war cut off the family’s communication with the daughter in China, and all chance of returning home anytime soon evaporated.

If the vestibule was occupied most often by the wives, it served equally as a sanctuary for a few aged bachelors who sat silently sipping tea and smoking a water pipe. Their prospects of outliving the war slipping away, they came to enjoy the atmosphere of family created by visiting wives and the Wong children. The youngest child might play underfoot, but the older Wong children would be helping out, from addressing envelopes in English to Chinese suppliers, to loading up a wagon, or if in winter, a toboggan, to make deliveries to laundrymen whose work left them no time to shop.

Luck interceded in 1942 to land another immigrant wife in Canada, who took up residence in Ottawa. The government invoked “special considerations” provided for under the Exclusion Act to admit a Chinese family of four as wartime refugees: William (Bill) and Ethel Poy and their children, Neville, aged seven, and Adrienne, aged three. As the threat loomed of a Japanese attack on Hong Kong, Mr. Poy had been one of the volunteer motorcyclists who relayed messages for the Allies between the colony and enemy territory on the
mainland. High stakes middle-of-the night negotiations between the Allies and the Japanese, brokered by the Red Cross, to exchange Japanese prisoners for Allied nationals had given the Poy family their ticket out of Hong Kong. Bill Poy’s life had already been one of action and upward mobility. Born in Australia to a Chinese man and a half-Chinese, half-Irish woman, he had been sent as a teenager back to his father’s village in China, but within six months he made his own way to Hong Kong. Bill found success and fame there as an amateur jockey at the Happy Valley Racecourse.