Lives of the Family (14 page)

The sun had not yet risen over the horizon when the family arrived in Smiths Falls. George Fong turned off the wide main street onto Aberdeen Street, coming to a stop in front of the house that Jasper had rented for his family. He deposited his wife and the children there and shortly afterward left to open the café for the day.

Mid-morning, a neighbour, one of two spinsters who shared the house next to Jasper’s, knocked at the door. They held out a large cellophane-wrapped fruit basket to Margaret. To show her manners, she nudged the basket back. The neighbour extended it again. The basket passed back and forth between them, one woman speaking only English, the other only Chinese. Finally, judging she’d shown an appropriate degree of unworthiness, Margaret accepted it.

LINDA WAS A TEENAGER
before she brought up with her mother their ordeal at the hands of the Communists. She had previously broached the subject of what had happened with her stepbrother, Kenny. He insisted that he remembered nothing. He doesn’t want to remember, Linda told herself.

Mother and daughter picked through the shards of memory.

Though she was only two at the time, Linda could clearly remember clinging to the legs of her cousin, Shui-dan.

“I can still see you and Auntie, tied up and hanging upside down. There are three or four men. They dip something in a flame and burn you, starting at your feet.”

“I wanted to close my eyes but they said they’d kill you if we turned our heads away or if we didn’t stop crying,” Linda told her mother. “I can’t forget your screaming. I remember that they came back and did it again. I remember that in the shed, you and Auntie couldn’t move.”

Margaret showed her daughter the burn scars that reached to her navel.

“Don’t ever forget Shui-dan,” Margaret said of the girl left behind in China.

Of course, Linda never would. Life got better for them after the Land Reform campaign ended and the Communists again allowed remittances from relatives overseas. In the two years before the rest of the household left for Hong Kong, the cousins had a happy time playing together, climbing trees and playing tag. “Shui-dan was such a tomboy; she wasn’t scared of anything!”

Margaret continued, giving what would be the last word.

“On the day the Communists released us, your Auntie
said she was going to the market. She said she couldn’t wait to see good food. She never came back. When I found out that she had gone up into the mountains and drowned herself, I thought, ‘If only I was stronger, I would kill myself.’ Then I thought, ‘I can’t, I have four children to raise.’ I looked at you, you were so young. I couldn’t leave you.”

THE PEOPLE OF
Smiths Falls could not have guessed that this reunited Chinese family had survived a terrible past, defined by separation, cruelty and death. They did not know that Margaret Hum suffered constant pain and discomfort from her burn scars, and recurrent infections in her legs and abdomen.

Her neighbours, the two spinsters, might have noticed that she loved to wear pretty dresses. They might have thought it strange that even in summer she covered her legs in opaque leotards. But they made no comment; they did not share a language. Their conversations were in the exchange of what went over the fence from their gardens, rhubarb and asparagus in one direction,
bok choy
and lettuce in the other.

Only one visitor knew more. Lui-sang Hum, whose family had been neighbours of the Hums in the village, had come from China the year after them. When she found out that the children she had once played with were living in Smiths Falls, she had someone drive her from Ottawa to pay a visit one Sunday. (It was her day off from her job at the New Astor Café, owned by an Ottawa branch of the Hums. They had added the “New” to distinguish it from the café owned by Jasper Hum in Smiths Falls.) Of course, she made no mention of the horror of the shed, and neither did they.

Tsan Wong in Exeter, Ontario
.
Courtesy Tsan Wong

AMBITION

TSAN WONG FOUND IT A
particular challenge to fix in his mind the name of the Blue Funnel steamship that had brought his paper father from China to Canada. All the ships of the line had Greek names like
Philoctetes
and
Protesilaus
. He wouldn’t err on the date that his paper father had last visited China, however, as that was easy to calculate by when he had fathered his son, Wong Wing-ham, born eighteen years ago, in 1938. In front of Canadian Immigration officials, Tsan would have to shave three years off his real age. At least, he told himself, my paper father and I have the same surname.

If all went well, Tsan would live in London, Ontario, with Fourth Uncle, who’d bought the paper for him to go to Canada. Tsan studied diligently. He memorized the paper family’s lineage. He assembled the details of their village to recreate it in his mind: number of rows of houses, location of the fish pond, names of neighbours on all sides; which direction the house faced; what each room was used for; who slept where. On it went.

In December 1955, when Tsan passed the interview with Canadian Immigration in Hong Kong, he sent a one-word
telegram to Fourth Uncle:
OKAY
. That was the signal to send money for the airfare.

“
YOU
’
RE GOING TO CANADA
?” Tsan’s colleague in the apprenticeship program at the British-owned Taikoo Dockyard could not hide his surprise. “What are you going to do there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe work in a laundry, maybe a restaurant.”

A cheerful youth with a broad smile, Tsan allowed that going to Canada had not been his idea. He explained that a brother of his grandfather on his father’s side lived in Canada and had sent for him. His suspicion was that this was his mother’s doing, that she’d written to Fourth Uncle asking him to find a way to get her son to Canada, not the other way around.

When his mother broke the news to him, Tsan was dismayed. He didn’t want to give up his job as a machinist in Hong Kong. On his own initiative, he had applied for the same five-year apprenticeship program in which his older brother was already enrolled. Two years in, unlike his brother, he’d kept his marks above eighty-five percent, the threshold of eligibility to work for the parent company in England. With that goal in mind, he had been using a beginner’s phrase book to learn English, matching up phrases like
Chee saw hai bin do ah
, when one wanted to use the facilities, with “Where is the WC?”

He wanted to refuse Fourth Uncle, but his mother insisted he could not. A widow, she worked at the shipyard as well, sweeping floors and collecting garbage. Tsan’s job, while secure, was poorly paid. Everywhere in the colony, times were tough; disquiet about low wages, long working hours and overcrowded living conditions had spilled into frightening,
large-scale riots. “Go, go,” Tsan’s mother told him. “You can get rich faster there than here.”

UNTIL TSAN WONG HEARD
from Fourth Uncle, Canada had passed only fleetingly through the orbit of his life, when he was a young boy. His adoptive father, Old Hum, a landowner and prosperous grain dealer, had been grooming him to take over the family business. One day, Old Hum brought out a dusty ledger, a record of money owed him from loans he’d made to bachelor men in Canada over the three decades when he himself had lived there. Now in his seventies, he had left for Canada before the turn of the century and made his way to Montreal, where he opened one of the city’s first hand laundries. The arrival of Chinese men like him coincided with a spike in Irish and Jewish immigrants, each profiting by offering separate services to an emerging white middle class. The ledger showed that the amounts outstanding were substantial: fifty dollars here and there, even one hundred dollars. “Someday,” Old Hum told the boy, “you can get that money back.”

A series of misfortunes in Tsan’s birth family had landed him in the household of Old Hum and his wife. When war came to China, Tsan’s father and mother, with three young children in tow, had joined the tide of villagers from Guangdong province pouring into the colony of Hong Kong. In 1941, facing the threat of a Japanese attack, the government of the colony required all refugees who’d taken up residence there to prove that they had six months’ provisions to sustain themselves. If not, they would be forced to return to China. Tsan’s father fell ill and died, leaving his widow no choice but to leave the colony and return to their village.

Back home, the destitute widow saw only one way to keep herself and her two sons and a daughter from starvation: she would have to give up one of them. A fellow villager put her in contact with Old Hum, who was known to have extensive holdings, and to whom many tenant farmers in and around her own village paid rent. As it happened, Hum was looking to adopt a son, a boy who would be his protegé in the family’s business. The Hums were not without sons of their own, but three of four sons had died young, before marrying. Old Hum judged the surviving son, though married with children, unreliable because he was addled by an opium habit.

The widow decided to give away the younger of her sons, six-year-old Tsan, because she considered him the brighter of the two. Unbeknownst to the boy as he set out with his mother on a six-hour walk to the Hums’ village, he would not be making the return trip with her.

Mother and son arrived at the Hums’ compound and found it dominated by a large two-storey house, with the usual fish-farming pond in front, surrounded by several outbuildings. The adults exchanged greetings and sent Tsan off to explore the fish pond. He amused himself by watching for carp to break the surface of the shallow water. Finally, having lost interest, he wandered up to the house only to discover his mother gone. In tears, he returned to the pond. Evening fell, but he could not be pried from the water’s edge. One of the manservants from the household came to console him: “Don’t cry, don’t cry. Your home is here now.”

Although slated to be the one who would protect the elderly couple’s wealth, young Tsan received no favoured treatment. The family instructed the boy to address Old Hum as
Bak
and
his wife as
Poh
—as elders rather than parents. He shared a room not with children but rather with a woman, a relation of
Poh
’s, whose husband was in Canada and whose remittances had been cut off by the war. At mealtimes, the Hums placed him at the opposite end of the table with the servants. Like them, he waited silently until the Hum family had finished their meal, at which point the servants could have what was left. By then, not a morsel of meat could be found among the vegetables. Other children in the household had
amahs
to look after them; Tsan was left to himself. The others had no household duties; before school, late in the afternoon, and again in the evening, Tsan was expected to walk the family’s water buffalo to and from the grazing grounds.

Increasingly, Tsan felt that the family regarded him as nothing more than a boy servant. At least Old Hum had enrolled him in school, which he looked forward to daily. However, the ongoing war could collapse the routine of daily life at a moment’s notice. If and when the village head got warning of the Japanese army in the vicinity, he sent word through the village so that people could flee. If given enough advance warning, the entire village, taking provisions and using oxen to carry small children, headed for another village. If not, families grabbed some warm clothing and food, and made haste for a cave in the nearby hills. Soldiers on a mission to restock a troop’s provisions could surprise. Several times, a terrified Tsan came face to face in the village with a
lo bak hao
—the Chinese of the south disparagingly nicknamed the Japanese
turnip heads
, after the long white root vegetable that was a staple of the enemy’s diet. Tsan once watched some Japanese soldiers help themselves to the village’s fattest pig, then roast it in plain sight of the family
that owned it. Soldiers often tramped into houses at will, opening a family’s coops and taking the chickens. Once, before marauding soldiers left the Hum house, several relieved themselves on the floor, creating a trail of filth.