Lives of the Family (17 page)

The most telling way in which the Lors resembled a typical upstanding middle-class family was their participation in the church. As superintendent of Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church, Leip expected his children to earn perfect attendance certificates, and later, to teach classes themselves. All sang in the church choir. Joe took part in the minister’s bible class for teenage boys. Leip demanded piety on Sundays, forbidding his children to read comic books on that day. When he could, he attended Sunday service. Agnes, though devout, preferred to be the one who stayed behind at the restaurant. There were music lessons—piano, violin and organ—the girls joined Girl Guides and Christian Girls in Training, and Joe, cubs, then scouts. Gloria took figure-skating lessons (her talent eventually landing her a career with the Ice Capades). There was a family dog—named Judy. Games of cards—Agnes liked canasta—and Monopoly were played on the living room floor. There were annual forays to get a Christmas tree. In summer, Agnes cut flowers and harvested vegetables from her large garden.

Leip bought a waterfront lot because Agnes said she longed to have a cottage for the children to grow up with. He hired Bob Brown, a farmer whom he used as a handyman at the restaurant, to help him organize the building of a cabin and a dock. Every spring, Leip and the children put in the dock, hung the life buoy and took the boats out of storage. He put in the raft that he’d built himself, anchoring it offshore. Sometimes he took one of the children and set out with his shotgun to go duck hunting. Once he’d gone with another hunter in town after bear, and returned to regale the children with a story of how he got chased up a tree.

THE LOR CHILDREN CAME
to take exception to one singular difference between them and their school friends: their friends had idle hours to meet up and do as they liked. The Lors couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t have to work at the restaurant. From the age of four or five, they were required to help with the laundry, done in the basement. The younger ones shook out the wet linen napkins, the older siblings hung them alongside the tablecloths on the clothesline. As the children became capable of heavier work, like washing, and then dangerous work, like ironing, their chores increased. Upstairs at the restaurant, they folded napkins, laid tablecloths and set the tables. When they could add and subtract, they worked the cash register. If they were too short to reach, they stood on a chair. When they were older still, they waited on tables, not only on weekends, but after school and, on very busy days, over the lunch hour.

There was one Chinese custom that the Lor children hoped their white friends would never learn about: the annual gathering of Chinese at the Brockville Cemetery. Tomb-sweeping day—the ritual of cleaning the tombstones, clearing the ground of weeds and, finally, sharing food that is first offered to the dead—is traditionally carried out around the full moon in the third lunar month. In Canada, spring’s later arrival pushed the rites into May. On the day, about twenty-five Chinese from around Brockville came loaded down with cooked dishes (one year, Leip arranged a barbecued pig from Montreal). The crowd, mostly men, many in jacket and tie, and the women, decked out in hats, headed for “Potter’s Field,” the section of the Protestant cemeteries set aside for those who died destitute or without kin, stillborn babies and convicts.

Amid the overgrowth of tall grass, Leip, standing in for all sons of ancestors, laid out an offering of a steamed whole chicken, roast pork, rice, fruit, tea, chopsticks, bowls and cups. He bowed three times, then trickled a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label around the few lonely tombstones with Chinese inscriptions. Before the crowd sat down for a picnic, one ritual remained: Leip took out the pistol he’d brought and fired a single shot into the air, alerting the dead that the living were here to pay their respects and to scare off evil spirits. Only once before, one December 31, had the pistol come out. At midnight (he notified the police beforehand), his pistol shot was the signal for the festivities and feasting to begin.

Apart from this annual visit to the cemetery, the Lor children’s sense of their Chinese origins faded early on. Agnes and Leip would have liked them to read and write Chinese, but neither had the time to teach them. Once, Leip hired a tutor for the older girls, but gave up when they refused to cooperate. That their parents harboured foreign traditions emerged sporadically, such as the time Agnes boiled chicken feathers to make a solution to soothe an itch for Valerie. Or when Leip showed them the bear claw he’d added to one of his health tonics, herbs infused with alcohol, lined up in large jars that previously held supplies for the restaurant. Or, more frequently, when their father, in an exuberant mood, would wake the entire family to join him in
siu-yeh
, the Chinese tradition of a shared late-night meal. But the children saw those occasions more in terms of their father’s deciding to cook something special, like oysters, breaking his rule of certain foods on the menu being exclusively for customers.

Still, one connection remained to the family’s shared
Chinese roots: the bachelors who worked as kitchen help. The third floor was given over to a dorm for them, but they used a separate back staircase to access it. The children knew none by name, as they addressed them only by the appropriate Chinese titles of respect, which defer to age. Their limited acquaintance with the bachelors came by way of the red envelopes of
li shee
at Chinese New Year’s which the children deposited into their savings accounts, or else by snippets of the bachelors’ conversations that drifted from their stairwell as they passed by the door off the Lors’ eating area—mostly regret about gambling losses at mahjong—which the children hardly understood with their scant knowledge of Chinese.

All in all, the Lor children considered themselves to be as Canadian as any other family in Brockville. It came as a surprise, then, to the older girls, once they came into their teenage years, to realize that the only boys who befriended them were those whom they happened to be seated beside in class. Never did a boy ask them to a school social or dance, and sadly, they understood that it was never going to happen. Apparently there was no avoiding how boys their age, or the boys’ parents, saw them: the Lor girls were Chinese. Suddenly they were on par with another family in Brockville that they had considered they had nothing in common with, the city’s only other Chinese family, the Wongs, a couple with adult children who ran Diana Sweets Café. The realization unearthed a memory of boys yelling “Chinky, Chinky Chinaman!” at them when they were little. “They’re ignorant,” Agnes had advised. “If they stare at you, stare back.”

I hate being Chinese, the girls told each other.

AT DELANEY
’
S BOWLING ALLEY
, one of the friends that Joe met there suggested they go for beers “across the bay,” code for crossing the river to the village of Morristown on the American side. In New York State the boys were legal. The minimum drinking age there was eighteen; in Ontario, it was twenty-one. All four boys were up for it, until someone suggested that they walk across the ice.

One of them balked.

Had it been January, a month earlier, he’d have been game. A prolonged cold snap could freeze the river at Brockville from one bank to the other. Back in the 1940s, people routinely walked across to avoid paying for the horse-drawn sleigh ferry that operated between Morristown and Brockville.

But this winter had not been a severe one. By late February, with fluctuating temperatures creating pockets of open water, to walk clear across was tempting fate. To go by road over to the other side involved taking the Prescott–Ogdensburg ferry, which ran year-round, then doubling back to Morristown.

“Two cases of beer if we make it.”

“There and back?”

The bet was on. Joe and two of his friends set out.

NONE OF THE FAMILY COULD
identify when Leip came to find comfort in a nip of alcohol; a bottle of whisky or rye had always stood alongside his health tonics. Nor did they know which came first, his bouts of depression or his propensity for drink. Whatever the trigger, Leip could go from happiness to anger, even fury, as if a light switch had been flipped.

The rest of the family found it downright bizarre the time he took on the entire family at once. Agnes and the
children were having dinner in the kitchen when they heard Leip pound up the stairs. He burst in and tore into them, yelling about all he had to do for them, even wash their dirty laundry. He lambasted them as if they were all lazy and slothful. His booming voice ricocheted off the walls: “I have to do everything for you, as well as do everything else around here!”

As it was, Leip was always at the children about their chores and how when he was their age he had to work sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. While the girls heard it as nagging, Joe was more sympathetic. He saw it as his father trying to instill the value of hard work and reminding them that money was hard-earned.

But most disconcerting about this particular outburst aimed at them was Leip’s plaintive plea before he headed back downstairs: “Help me.”

The family started to worry. Agnes and the older girls finally broached the possibility of a drinking problem with Leip. In the early 1940s, the notion of addiction made news when a fellowship called Alcoholics Anonymous came north over the border into Ontario. The older girls heard that a branch had started up in Toronto and they tried to persuade their father to go, but he refused.

In spite of her husband’s unpredictable moods, Agnes was steadfast in her efforts to have father and son bond. “Take Joe with you,” she’d say to Leip. Joe, whose temperament took after his mother’s, saw just how keen she was when she took him out of school so that he could accompany his father on a two-day trip to Montreal, when he was scouting chefs to hire.

When he spent time with his father, typically fishing or hunting, Joe came to take for granted the bottle his father kept handy in his pocket.

On one such afternoon, the two were out on the water and readying their fishing rods. Joe watched his father and as he would have predicted, Leip choose the heaviest sinker.

Joe decided to ask why, to see what his father would say.

“Because no fish is going to want to fight me after being on that sinker!”

“Aren’t we here to enjoy fishing?”

“We’re here to CATCH FISH!”

This is so silly, thought Joe. My father sees life as one fight after another. “Well, I want to give that fish a fighting chance!”

When the older girls again raised with their mother their father’s drinking, Agnes tried to brush off their worries: “Your father only drinks beer now.” Leip’s flashes of temper seemed to have subsided. He more often took to lying down and napping, though maybe sleep was due to having a drink; or perhaps it was the other way around, that he’d taken a drink to bring it on.

IN THE SPRING OF
1954, Ruth had a newly minted degree in psychology from the University of Toronto. That same year, the Canadian economy took an unexpected dip. For businesses and residents along the St. Lawrence, a sudden pessimism nationwide about the country’s economic outlook came just as they had to contend with disruption from the construction of the seaway. At school’s end, instead of returning to Brockville, Ruth travelled to Washington, D.C., to participate in a workshop on non-violent ways to end racial discrimination.

Her mother would not be impressed.

Ruth’s workshop, which she’d applied for and won a scholarship to attend, was led by Wallace Nelson, a prominent civil rights activist. Wallace had been one of a team that undertook a “Journey for Reconciliation” in 1947, riding interstate buses in the Deep South to test the Supreme Court’s ruling against segregated buses for travel between states. Using that as a model, Ruth’s colleagues visited restaurants, theatres and swimming pools to test access for blacks. Repeatedly, they were arrested and jailed, making national news.

To Ruth’s disappointment, her mother wrote chastising her for not coming home to help at the restaurant. It was not the first time that she’d gone against her mother’s wishes. When Ruth had completed high school, at Agnes’s urging she’d enrolled in a secretarial course at a business college in Brockville. But, as she confided to her sister Alice, the courses bored her. On a whim, Alice put her sister’s name on a raffle ticket she’d bought to raise money to rebuild the rink at the Brockville Memorial Civic Centre. Ruth won the grand prize, a new Chevrolet, and promptly sold it, using the proceeds to go to university.