Lives of the Family (21 page)

He had asked his visitor about this sister, Kwok-chun, or by her Christian name, Marion. Eldest Brother had not seen
her in five years, since her marriage in 1958 to the restaurateur Tom-yee Hum of Ottawa. Knowing that Ottawa’s Chinese community was small, he was sure his friend, even if he hadn’t seen her, would have heard something.

Eldest Brother had raised his younger siblings, and though they were now adults, he still took that responsibility to heart. He’d accepted that role when their father, with their mother barely in the grave, stunned his children by announcing that he had a second wife and other young children and that he would be moving them in. Together with the older siblings, Eldest Brother had refused to allow another woman into what had been their mother’s domain. As a consequence, their father, not a man to argue or raise his voice, disappeared from their lives.

The third youngest of eleven children—of which seven survived infancy—Marion Ha was nine when she lost, in effect, both parents. A beauty with classic almond-shaped eyes and an assertive personality, evident even when young, Marion had had many admirers in Hong Kong but had married the first man she dated. While Eldest Brother personally knew of Tom Hum, he’d been concerned about his sister moving to Canada, where she’d be without family.

In Ottawa, Marion Hum opened her brother’s letter and was amused to read of gossip having travelled so far, of her reportedly looking “alarmingly thin.” That it worried her brother was obvious in the scrawl of his handwriting across the page.

“Don’t tell me your husband has another wife,” he wrote. “Or that he already had one before you, that you’re a second wife. If that’s the case, come back to Hong Kong.”

So, my brother fears the worst, thought Marion, that the infidelity our mother had to contend with has now befallen me.

Only a hint of her father’s presence had remained with her, a memory of his hand brushing the top of her head. In contrast, especially since Marion had begun her married life in Ottawa, the voice of her mother, which ran deeper than memory, played over and again in her mind.

“No matter what happens to you, don’t cry.”

In the months of her mother’s illness with cancer—which at the time she kept hidden from her family, dismissing it as a chronic “stomach ache”—young Marion preferred sitting in a little chair by her mother’s sickbed to playing with her siblings. At the funeral, when she’d cried so hard that her body cramped up to the tips of her fingers and toes, she’d remembered her mother’s prescient words. She would later reflect that her mother must have realized how terribly this particular child would miss her when she was gone.

She knew that Eldest Brother wished only for her happiness. Even as she and Tom were about to leave for Canada, he’d taken her aside, to remind her yet again that if she wasn’t happy there, she was to write him and he’d find the money for airfare to bring her home.

Marion felt she couldn’t confess to her brother what she had unwittingly got herself into in Ottawa. If she thought its airport terminal looked as welcoming as a warehouse, she was in for a greater disillusion when she saw her marital home. The house that Tom owned with a younger brother—it had been his idea to buy it because he feared his brother and wife and two children might have trouble finding a landlord to rent to them—turned out to be premises shared with a dozen bachelor tenants. His brother’s family had the ground floor. Tom and Marion moved into two rooms on the second floor,
and the bachelors occupied the remaining rooms on their floor and in the attic.

Any expectation Marion might have had that her sister-in-law would be good company was quickly dispelled. The prickly woman preferred to spend her time tending a tiny backyard plot where she grew Chinese vegetables. She said the garden helped to lessen her homesickness for the life in her village in China.

Left to herself, Marion felt wrenched from the active life she’d enjoyed in Hong Kong. Ottawa had no Chinese cinema, no Chinese language television programs, no Chinese bookstores, or newspapers or magazines. Nor did Marion have enough comprehension of English to read the Ottawa dailies; she had to rely on Tom to tell her the news. But he had no time; he worked seven days a week at his restaurant, the Lucky Key. Their social life was non-existent. They didn’t even dine at his restaurant. Tom said he’d have to pay in his own establishment to set the right example for his partners. But he also ruled out their dining at
any
restaurant in town: “That would be like saying my own food isn’t good enough to eat.”

In any event, within two months of their wedding in Hong Kong and one month of arriving in Ottawa, Marion became pregnant. I’m stuck here now, she told herself. She started having babies as fast as nature allowed: Victor was born that winter. When he was only a few months old, she was pregnant a second time, with Wallace. Hardly had he arrived when for the third time in little more than three years, she was pregnant again, with Debbie, who was born prematurely.

Marion considered how to reply to the letter from her brother. She told him he could put his mind at ease; he was
reading too much into her weight loss: “I’m busy that’s all—I keep having babies!” She kept the tone light, asking him to send her some best-quality dried Chinese mushrooms and rice noodles; she missed the ones as fine as silk thread, that soften within seconds of being immersed in cold water.

If Marion had written honestly of her feelings about life in Canada, she would have said that she was a prisoner of boredom. I feel as if I’m locked up, she’d told herself. Her days passed in monotony. The weekly shop for groceries was the only time she got out of the house—but even then, especially in winter, she had to force herself. Once a week she made the effort of dressing the children, getting them down the stairs and the little ones into the pram, and making the long walk from their house on Lisgar to Bank Street, to the IGA grocery store. The public health unit where she took the children for their immunizations was nearby, so it was a route she knew well. Then it was back to the house, a mile and a half in all. Rarely could she muster the enthusiasm to walk with the children in the other direction, up to Albert Street to pick up something from the Chinese confectionery there. Apart from the extra three blocks’ walk each way, she didn’t think it worth going because the selection was limited and the quality poor, the exception being the cured Chinese sausages that came from Montreal.

No matter what happens to you, don’t cry
. Marion was not going to cry. But if she did, she told herself, it would be because precisely nothing happened. Certainly her life didn’t measure up to her Chinese name, which combined the character for “heroine” with that for “valuable.” Yet how prophetic the choice of her Christian name. Her sister had suggested
Marion, inspired by the calypso song on everybody’s lips at the time:

That, Marion decided, was her sentence: sifting the sands of time, her days shaped only by babies and children. If something doesn’t change, she told herself, I’m going to go crazy.

LIFE HERE IS WORSE THAN JAIL
, eighteen-year-old Henry Yee told himself.

When one of the boys on the football field would hand off the football to him, he’d run and run, sometimes right past the end zone. He would hear the boys yelling at him, “Stop!” but he couldn’t stop. He’d imagine himself running straight out of Altona, one deke right past fields where Holstein and Shorthorn cattle grazed, one deke left past fields of swaying grain, then straight on some seventy miles, and he’d be in the big city of Winnipeg, giving his grandfather the slip, so he wouldn’t have to put up with his nagging any more.

“He gives me hell and shit all the time. Every minute!” Henry complained to Earl Dick, the teenaged son of the owner of the garage and car dealership next door to his grandfather’s business, Harry’s Café and Confectionery. He confided the same to Earl’s father. “He’s not a happy person. No matter what I do, I can’t please him.”

From afar, in Hong Kong, Henry had understood that his grandfather was getting old, feeling the ache in his bones, and lamenting the hard work of his café and store. When Canada
announced the end of exclusion, Henry’s father had written to him: “
Baba
, I’m too old to come to Canada; do you want to get my son over to help you?”

That was three years ago.

His grandfather’s establishment, on one half a counter with seven booths and on the other, grocery shelves with a meat box in the middle, was a seven-day-a-week concern. Grandfather Harry did the cooking and baking. Other than the young boy who washed dishes, a white middle-aged waitress was the only paid staff. Henry had to work both sides of the business. Often he could be run off his feet: he’d have a customer in the café, another at the meat box waiting to make a selection, which he had to wrap, weigh and price, and customers from both sides lined up at the cash. In any lull, Henry was expected to keep the grocery shelves stocked—mostly canned tomatoes, carrots, peas and green beans. Plus, twice a week when the restaurant took delivery of meat from Canada Packers, he had to help his grandfather cut it up for display.

Of all the days of the week, Henry most dreaded Sundays, for everybody else, a day of rest. For him, a fifteen-hour work day lay ahead. In addition to minding the café and store, he also had to mop, clean and wipe down everything, from the floor to the shelves, the booths to the meat box. Henry took to secretly hiring the dishwasher to help him. For twenty-five cents, the boy was willing to come in early to wash the floor. Henry left his bedroom window open and a rope dangling, with one end attached to his toe, as he slept on a mattress on the floor. The boy’s tug signalled him to rise and quietly let him in; a knock at that hour would wake his grandfather.

Henry had no complaint about hard work, only resentment at having no free time. His grandfather took time off to bowl and curl; Henry figured he deserved the same. But when he did decide to join friends, to play football, shoot pool, or hunt rabbits at someone’s farm, the moment he walked back in the door the old man would be on his case; he didn’t think “play” was good for building a young man’s character.

Perhaps owing to Altona’s history as a close-knit Mennonite community, Henry’s friends and their parents took no sides between the old man and the boy. When he’d arrived in town, everyone clamoured for a first sighting of “the Chinese boy,” his arrival doubling the town’s Chinese population. For the fifteen months that Henry attended school, enthusiastic children from kindergarten up vied to be the one to hold up English vocabulary flashcards for the gregarious boy with the large innocent eyes. They were amused at his first English words: O’Henry (Harry Yee said that he’d assigned his grandson the name Henry after his best-selling candy bar), hamburger, hot dog, french fries, pork chops, strawberry short cake—all items on the café’s menu.

Despite people’s good intentions, it got so that Henry began to feel that the whole town was on him too. If it wasn’t “Henry, your grandfather needs you,” it was “Henry, can you help your grandfather? You know he can’t walk anymore.” Even corns on one’s feet counted as public knowledge in such a small town.

One glorious summer’s day, Henry got a hankering to join friends for a swim at a nearby lake. He took the keys to his grandfather’s 1949 Ford Meteor, which the old man had bought new, and headed down the road. He skidded on the
gravel, sending the car glancing off a tree and smashing the windshield. Of course, when he got home, despite his gashed and bloodied cheek, he got an earful from his exasperated grandfather. Not long after that, Henry decided to run away. A day later, a neighbour from Altona, dispatched by his old man, found him in Winnipeg. “Henry, your grandfather wants you to come back; he says he won’t give you shit no more.” Within two weeks, the old man was back to his nagging ways.

He only wants me here to work, Henry concluded.

Nineteen was too old to be living under your grandfather’s thumb. The next time, Henry didn’t run away; he said goodbye and left for Winnipeg. Neither his grandfather nor anyone else from Altona bothered to come after him.

GIVEN THE CHANCE
, it would be smart to get out of Hong Kong, thought Marion Ha. The combination of marriage and Canada, she decided, was that chance.

Since she was young, it had been Marion’s ambition to study hard, get high marks and land a good job. She credited her scholarly mother, whose father sent her brothers to school but, unusual for the time, hired a private tutor for his daughter. Marion’s mother went on to become a teacher in the village. At home, she demanded extra from her children. Each had to produce five hundred characters daily for her approval. Later, as a student in Hong Kong, Marion supplemented what she considered to be the poor quality of the school in the colony by becoming a voracious reader, just as happy to read Chinese classics as translations of
Jane Eyre
or
Pride and Prejudice
.

The absence of a mother had made Marion determined to face life with purpose: one had to set a goal, make a plan and
act on it. Such was her mother’s strength, to which the Ha children attributed their very survival. She had uprooted the family twice. When the Japanese spilled over China’s northern border, she first moved them from the village to Canton, where their father worked as a high-ranking employee of a French-owned bank. Previously, they saw him only when he came home on weekends. That move saved the family from Japanese bombers and soldier patrols. To protect its banking industry, Canton sheltered bankers in its foreign concession, which remained free from Japanese attack; such concessions were home to expatriates from some of Japan’s Second World War allies, or from countries like France that had surrendered to Germany.

Their mother’s second move came at war’s end. Rather than return to their village, she decided to re-establish herself and the children in Hong Kong, leaving her husband to travel from Canton to the colony on weekends. She’d intended to use the cache of American dollars and jewellery she’d brought to Hong Kong to invest in property, to provide an income for herself and the children. But illness struck before she could do so. Within the year, she was dead. When the children lost their father to his second wife, they’d lived off that money and jewellery until the older siblings could find work. When the Communists took over China, the children, relieved to be safe in Hong Kong, thanked their mother yet again for her foresight.