Lives of the Family (2 page)

In Ottawa, these families created a microcosm of what they’d had in China, where some had come from the same or adjacent villages. Evidence appears in the recurring surnames; Hum, for example, shows up frequently. The explanation is in the pattern of migration from villages dominated by one clan; the clan may be able to trace back to a shared ancestor but its members may or may not be relatives. Like a market town in China, Ottawa functioned as a place where Chinese living outside the city came for supplies, typically to one well-known Chinese-owned store that doubled as a community gathering place. And, given the importance of economic fortunes to the immigrant’s success, Ottawa provided jobs and created boom times as a result of a growing public service that was required to meet the needs of the wartime and then the postwar economy.

EACH OF THE FAMILIES
in these pages is emblematic of the migrant in the immigrant; on the move not only from their homeland to a new land, but from their past toward an uncertain future. Taken together, their stories travel the arc of that adjustment. The path they take lurches—it starts, it stops, even reverses in the face of happenstance and events unforeseen and amid a churning mix of setback and achievement. It may take an entire lifetime or more to see progress, but with each individual family come defining moments that reveal the temperament needed to glimpse and reach for the promise of a future. Each of their stories honours a shared history.

Harry Lim’s household in China: (front row) Second Mother (in white) and her son; First Mother (in black) and her children, Fay-oi, and (back row) Min-hon, and his wife
.
Courtesy Marion Lew

ARRIVAL
(
1
)

FAY-OI LIM, RESIGNED TO HER
limited choices, selected a white jacket, made of taffeta and trimmed in gold thread, and a long black skirt. Another hand-me-down. Not in the sense of faded colours, frayed edges or telltale adjusted hemlines, but rather of formal wear long out of style. Certainly not something seen in the hallways at school. At least it fit.

She was resolved not to utter a word of complaint. To do so would show ingratitude to the family of her father’s benefactor. Lim Jim, a clansman who had been responsible for bringing her father to Canada years ago, was now both neighbour and landlord to them in Vancouver. He owned two houses side by side on Grant Street; he and his wife lived in one and he rented the other to Fay-oi’s father, so that Second Mother, Younger Brother and Fay-oi could be installed in a home as soon as they arrived from China. Lim Jim’s wife had been unfailingly kind; she came by every day to see how they were doing. She had noticed that Fay-oi dressed for school in mandarin-collared
cheong sams
. When she learned that the teenager owned no Western-styled clothing, she took it upon herself to ask her daughter Priscilla and her granddaughter Evelyn to go through their closets to see what they had no use for anymore, items they wouldn’t wear again.

In China, when Fay-oi needed new clothing she asked her mother to buy material and they’d take it to a tailor to be made up. She had assumed she’d do the same in Canada to assemble a new wardrobe—one that would suit the fashions on the streets of Vancouver.

Once here, Fay-oi realized she’d miscalculated.

She knew that her father had spent a great deal of money to bring her, Second Mother and Younger Brother from China. At the last minute—saying he couldn’t wait for them to get here—he’d changed their boat tickets to costly plane tickets. But the extent of her father’s financial sacrifice became clearer when Fay-oi saw that among the thirty-two students in Miss Howard’s class, one of two classes designated for new immigrants at Seymour Elementary School, she was one of only three girls. Few fathers indulged in the extravagance of bringing a daughter from China; sons were the rule. And they didn’t move into a house like she did; they shared rented rooms with their fathers. To a one, her male classmates spoke of their eagerness to be finished school so that they could find work to repay their fathers for the expense of getting them out of China.

Fay-oi told herself it was unreasonable to ask her father to spend yet more money on her for new clothes. Regardless, she felt terribly self-conscious.

COMPOUNDING HER
awkwardness was her name. When she introduced herself to someone her age who was Chinese but born here, because they spoke little Chinese they would mishear or mispronounce her name. She’d go through the same routine: explain that “fay” was the character meaning intelligent, and that “oi” was the character meaning love. Not that it helped
them to remember. They didn’t go by Chinese names. Like anyone born in Canada, they had English names.

Fay-oi came up with a plan. It depended on Freda Lim. Twenty-eight years old, Freda was married to Wally, a cook and a good friend of her father’s. Fay-oi had a couple of favours to ask. She wanted to make her own clothes; could Freda teach her to sew? And she felt uncomfortable having only a Chinese name; could Freda give her a Canadian name?

On both counts, Fay-oi believed she’d be in good hands. Freda Lim had a stellar reputation as a dressmaker and, being Canadian-born and raised, she could be trusted to choose a name. Freda’s early success was well known; at the age of twenty, single and living in Victoria, she’d had her own design and dressmaking shop. Then she’d married and moved to Vancouver, started over in her own home and soon had both Chinese and white customers. In Fay-oi’s eyes, Freda was a modern woman.

Freda would have been happy to give Fay-oi sewing lessons, but with three young children underfoot, she couldn’t possibly find the time: “It’s hard enough for me to keep any regular hours for my business.”

However, Freda rose to the challenge of giving Fay-oi an English name. She liked this outgoing girl. She sized her up: tall and slender with a beautiful face, though not in the classic Chinese sense. Fay-oi had an olive complexion rather than pale porcelain-like skin, and freckles. A generous mouth instead of a round one. High cheek bones set off large eyes. Her nose had a high bridge, especially uncommon among the Chinese. Her height and looks must come from her mother, thought Freda. For her taste, Fay-oi’s father, Harry Lim, a
short man, could best be described as average-looking. His daughter, on the other hand, would turn heads.

“I’m giving you the name Marilyn. After Marilyn Monroe.”

Two weeks later, the new Marilyn called on Freda. She couldn’t pronounce her name. She explained: “I can handle the letter ‘r.’ ” Normally, the consonant caused trouble for Chinese speakers, but at Fay-oi’s private high school in Canton, her teachers, many of whom had been educated abroad at universities in the United States or England, had drummed that quirk out of her. But the equally troublesome letter “l” following on the heels of the “r” was too much: her name came out as Mar
-ri-ryn
.

Freda saw immediately where to make the alteration. “You’re having problems with the letter ‘l’; we’ll eliminate it. Instead of Marilyn, you’ll be Marion.”

Fay-oi wanted to put her trust in her father’s friend.

Freda tried to reassure her. “Marion is a nice name. A simple name, but still, a nice name.”

FOR CHINESE WIVES
and children hoping to emigrate from China to Canada after 1949, much depended on their performance at an interview with Canadian Immigration officers posted in the British colony of Hong Kong. Officials grilled those applying to unite with husbands or fathers in Canada. They tried to trip them up in order to determine if they were who they claimed to be, to see if their answers squared with the answers given by their sponsors. Of course, the applicants also had to pass a health test, the most important part of which was the test for tuberculosis. Every application stamped for approval helped turn a page of history, granting admittance to
the first Chinese to immigrate to Canada in more than two and a half decades.

In the late fall of 1949, Second Mother, fifteen-year-old Fay-oi and thirteen-year-old Younger Brother had presented themselves at the Canadian Immigration offices. The mother and daughter were the only women in the crowded waiting room.

A young official ushered Second Mother and her two children into an interrogation room. She closed the door. She looked at the teenagers. “So you’re going to join your father in Canada.”

Yes, replied Fay-oi.

The woman asked about their relationship to Harry Lim, typing their answers as they spoke. Impressed, Fay-oi wondered if she too could one day be so competent. For all her nervousness beforehand, the questions seemed routine. The official showed no hint that she suspected they might not be telling the full truth. Fay-oi did not volunteer that her father, Harry Lim, had two wives, or that her mother, the first wife, was not the young woman being interviewed with her.

After thirty minutes, the official closed the file folder on the table, stood up and declared the interview over.

“When do we come back for our next interview?” asked Fay-oi.

“Oh, there’s no need for you to come again,” the official said. Smiling broadly, she shook hands all around. “Good luck in Canada.”

FOR MORE THAN
half his lifetime, Harry Lim had navigated a course that he expected would lead him back to China, the land of his birth. Instead, nearing sixty years old—the threshold
of revered old age—he was preparing to welcome a wife he’d hardly lived with and two teenaged children, one a son he’d never met, the other a daughter who had no memory of him, whom he’d last seen when she was two.

Fate had plucked Harry Lim out of China as a young teenager. He was born in the village of Golden Creek in the county of Toisan, in the province of Kwangtung. Located several miles inland up Pond River, one of the hundreds of tributaries of the Pearl River that empty into the South China Sea, Golden Creek was nestled into the base of a mountain (it was more hill than mountain, but locals called it a mountain because it rose abruptly at the flood plain’s edge). Along the village’s ten lanes, squat adobe houses were paired around partly roofed-in courtyards. Larger houses boasted a front door opening onto one lane, and a back door onto another.

Out the back door and down the lane from Harry’s father lived the family of Lim Jim, of the same clan but otherwise of no direct relation. At some point in the 1890s, Mr. Lim had left his family and the poverty of the village for Canada, known as “Gold Mountain,” where finding work was a prize in itself. A decade later, he returned to China for a one-year visit. During his stay, he took pity on his neighbour’s boy, a gregarious youngster named Lim Chung-foon, and offered to rescue him from an unhappy home life by taking him to Canada. The boy’s only sibling, a sister, had been given away at birth and he’d lost his mother at an early age. His father, who seemed to care most about imbibing homemade rice wine, had remarried and, as often happened, the new wife favoured her own son.

In Lim Jim’s own early years in Vancouver, he had established himself as one of Chinatown’s more successful merchants,
selling to the Chinese throughout British Columbia. His store, Gim Lee Yuen, carried imported Chinese herbs and dried and preserved vegetables at first. Over time, Lim Jim added goods such as linens, mahjong sets, slippers and dishes to his shelves.

Lim Jim financed young Chung-foon’s ship fare to Canada (once in Canada, the boy adopted the name Harry) and arranged payment of the five hundred dollar head tax due upon entry. It was a formidable sum, equal to two years’ wages for a Chinese labourer in Canada. The boy proved industrious. From a labourer’s job in a sawmill on the banks of the Fraser River, he moved to a job as a cook at a chop suey house in Vancouver’s Chinatown and, in recognition of his talents, was promoted to head chef.

After a decade, Harry had savings enough to visit China and stay for about two years. He took as a wife a delicately pretty girl named Chung Yee-hing. Her well-to-do parents owned a successful garlic-producing farm and had promised their daughter, a beloved and only child, to the son of a wealthy family. But after the obligatory background check by a matchmaker to confirm the suitability of the union, the young man’s parents, suspecting mixed blood in the girl’s ancestry, called off the arrangement. Yee-hing’s parents had little choice but to settle for a lesser match. Which was how Harry Lim, born into a poor family, came to marry above his station.

With her first pregnancy, Yee-hing delivered the all-important son necessary to continue the lineage. Besides “watering the roots,” Harry achieved the peasant’s dream of “tiles over one’s head.” His house, the first to be raised in Golden Creek in his generation, spoke well of his sacrifice of toil abroad. Two and a half stories high and built of brick, the house had modern
touches like glass in the windows and tiles on the floors—red clay tiles to warm the first floor, ceramic tiles on the second to keep it cool underfoot in the intense summer heat. A second set of stairs from the master bedroom on the second floor led to the rooftop terrace, which spilled over with potted chrysanthemums. From there, one could enjoy the sunrise and sunset and marvel at the orb of the sun reflected in the wide tranquil river. At the nearest bend in the river, a ten-minute walk away, one could catch a ferry going upriver to the district market town or downriver to the coast, where farther to the west lay Hong Kong, the departure point of ships bound for Vancouver.