Lives of the Family (23 page)

Marion Lim, on the runway modelling T. Eaton Company’s spring fashions, 1958
.
Courtesy Marion Lew

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MARION LIM TOOK THE
bus to the foot of Burrard Street, to the Marine Building, the Art Deco skyscraper on Vancouver’s waterfront. She stepped off the elevator at the floor for the Faulkner-Smith School of Applied and Fine Art and, once inside, asked for Mr. Howard Faulkner-Smith.

The artist didn’t know the teenaged girl: “What can I do for you?”

Marion introduced herself, saying that she’d seen his classified ad seeking a Chinese model.

Both the painter, now in his sixties, and his school, which prepared students for a career in commercial graphic arts, were well known. A graduate of a prestigious art academy in London, England, and the son of a baron, Mr. Faulkner-Smith had immigrated to Canada in his youth. He’d first exhibited his work in Vancouver thirty years earlier, in the 1920s. In the city’s fledgling art culture of the time, patrons preferred landscapes such as his, rendered in watercolours, the trademark medium of English painters, to the work of a controversial new school of painters who called themselves the Group of Seven.

“You don’t look Chinese.” To Mr. Faulkner-Smith, the girl looked European.

Marion was used to this. Even in China, she’d hear people ask her mother: “Is this a girl your husband adopted from Canada?” The ambiguity of her looks came up again at her private school in Canton, where her classmates nicknamed her “Spanish.” And in Canada, waiters in Chinatown sometimes ignored Marion, addressing themselves only to her Chinese friends.

She assured Mr. Faulkner-Smith that she was native to China. She was born Fay-oi Lim and had immigrated to Canada three years before, in 1950. “I’d like to model for you.”

“Very well, since nobody has answered my ad,” the artist said, grudgingly. “But, do you own a
cheong sam
?”

“Of course!” Marion replied. “I’m Chinese!”

AMONG MARION
’
S CLASSMATES
at Vancouver Technical School, the goal upon graduation was a secretarial position. For a Chinese graduate, a bigger hurdle was landing a job outside Chinatown, and somewhere other than a Chinese-owned business.

The Canadian Parliament had extended the vote and other rights of citizenship to the Chinese in Canada by this time, but other barriers of discrimination would be slow to fall. Employers regularly turned away Chinese applicants with “We don’t hire Chinese.” An exception was businesses with a Chinese clientele. When Canadian Pacific Air Lines began flying between Hong Kong and Vancouver, it needed “greeters” at the airport. Arriving passengers had little idea that one of them was none other than the “Yo-yo King,” Harvey Lowe. The voice of the weekly radio show “Call of Chinatown,” broadcast on Vancouver’s CJOR from the Bamboo Terrace
nightclub, Harvey was best known for having won, at the age of thirteen, the first-ever yo-yo world championship, held in London, England. Jeanne Yuen, the friend of Marion’s who could whip up a dress overnight, had Canadian Pacific as a client at the agency where she was a secretary—her job was to verify that applicants to the airline could speak Chinese as they claimed.

Marion’s approach to securing her future remained unwavering:
Learn English, Marion. Learn English
. However discouraged she’d been when her father quashed her dream of going to university, she’d resolved to keep improving her language skills. Knowing that English would always be her second language, she was clear in her mind that when time came for marriage, she did not want a husband who was a recent immigrant like herself. What if we had legal matters or documents to deal with? She wondered if both of us are immigrants, we’d be doubly handicapped; one of us should be able to communicate perfectly in English. Better, she decided, that she marry someone Canadian-born.

One day, Marion was reading a local English daily newspaper and spied an advertisement for courses offered by the Elizabeth Leslie Fashion School. The Vancouver school was the second one opened by its founder, a finalist for the new Miss Canada pageant of 1948. The first, established the year after the competition, was in her hometown of Edmonton.

“For Modelling or for Personal Development,” the ad said.

Personal development; that’s for me. Marion suddenly thought about how she’d put all her effort into improving her ability in English, when obviously, comportment and self-assurance had just as much bearing on one’s success as
an immigrant. She had only to recall the disastrous night out at The Cave, when she and her date sat glum-faced through the entire evening.

Of the ten girls in the four-month course, held three evenings a week, Marion Lim was the only Chinese. Much to her surprise, at the end of the course, the school’s director named her the top-ranked student. Each student had a photo shoot with John Gade, the city’s only high-fashion photographer, so that they’d have a portfolio to launch their careers. What the school didn’t say was that anyone serious about working in the fashion trade in Canada headed to Toronto, a city being transformed by postwar immigrants who’d lived in the great cities of Europe and brought their sophistication with them. The school’s only advice was that if the girls expected to be paid to model, they needed to accumulate experience by volunteering as hostesses for local women’s organizations, charities and community events. Eventually, the school might be able to add their names to its list of models that it referred for paying assignments.

MARION
’
S NEXT
extracurricular course—she was still a high school student—was one in public speaking offered by the U.S.-based Dale Carnegie School, the originator of courses extolling “the power of self-improvement.” As recommended by the fashion school, she also made volunteer appearances to build up her resumé, including modelling for Mr. Faulkner-Smith, who painted several large canvasses of her in her
cheong sam
. She received more charity requests than she had time for, since her father still expected her to help out at the coat and hat check at W.K. Gardens.

When she graduated from Vancouver Tech, Marion
decided to test whether an employer would be prepared to hire her as a model. She took her portfolio to Eaton’s. The department store had come to British Columbia when it bought out the Spencer’s chain in 1948. Mr. Milligan in the personnel department was enthusiastic about using Marion as a model, though he said Eaton’s didn’t have much work: “What we do is put you on the staff list for women’s wear, and then when we have an assignment, we call you.” And call her they did.

So began Marion’s professional modelling career. As Eaton’s made Marion’s name, the photographer John Gade and the fashion school funnelled ever more assignments her way. A model in Vancouver could earn as much as a hundred dollars for a day’s assignment, which was what Marion’s former classmates at Vancouver Tech working as secretaries could hope to make in a month. An evening assignment could earn her another seventy-five dollars. She became even busier when Eaton’s took its fashion shows on the road around the province to show off
prêt-à-porter
wardrobes, sell the collections, bolster the store’s image and reward devoted catalogue users. Always, Marion was the last model to walk down the runway, and in a show-stopping outfit.

From the start, Vancouver fashion writers gushed over Marion. “Vancouver’s Own and North America’s Most Beautiful Oriental Model,” wrote one. Another described her as “exotically lovely” and a “China doll.” Marion was the face of the Vancouver Eaton’s “Touch of the Orient” collections and of Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ “Fastest Routes to the Orient” advertising campaigns. In some of her more lucrative assignments, her lips advertised Max Factor lipsticks, and her
smooth hands tempted the housewife to buy the newest convenience of domesticity, the automatic dishwasher.

MARION FUMBLED FOR
the phone. She’d worked long hours the day before, with a modelling assignment in the morning and an appearance in the evening, and was sleeping in.

Nora Lowe paid no attention to the grogginess in Marion’s voice: “Marion, I’m throwing a big party tonight. You have to come.”

“I don’t have the energy to go out tonight. I was out late last night.”

“Ann Mark’s brother is here from Ottawa. He’s a good friend and I want you to meet him.”

Nora prided herself on being the first person whom Chinese of her generation would call when visiting from out of town. Nora knows
everybody
, people said, acknowledging as well that she liked nothing more than to bring people together. And so when Ann, a married friend, mentioned that her brother, Hin Lew, was in from Ottawa to visit their aged mother, Nora’s party planning kicked into gear. Is your brother married yet? Nora asked. No, he was still a bachelor.

“I can’t go, Nora. I’m too busy.”

That was not how Nora regarded life; not even Marion Lim could be too busy for a party. Life was meant to be full. Nora’s widowed mother had raised her to keep occupied; she and her eight siblings, besides public school, had private tutoring in Chinese and lessons in piano, music theory, violin, swimming and figure skating (with a chauffeur to ferry them to and from). While studying at UBC, Nora had found time for flying lessons. “The in-between times are for partying” was
her motto. She and her husband, Harvey Lowe, the “Yo-yo King,” had a house designed for entertaining, with a ballroom that could accommodate one hundred. It had a sprung wood floor and a fully stocked bar.

“I’m not hanging up until you say yes.”

Marion knew if she said no and rang off, the telephone was only going to ring again.

“
WE
’
RE GOING TO HAVE TO
find you a Japanese girl!”

Hin Lew’s friends said it only half-teasingly. They were concerned. Their career physicist friend had shown little interest in shedding his bachelorhood, something they each had taken care of long ago. At this rate, they told each other, no girl we know is going to be left.

Sixteen years earlier, in 1942, when Hin first arrived in Ottawa, the Chinese friends he made were mostly younger than him. They were of a generation still registering firsts: that year Robert (Kuey) Wong became the first offspring of Ottawa’s Chinese families to graduate from university, earning a commerce degree from Queen’s University. When Hin completed his undergraduate studies at UBC in 1940, a total of eighteen Chinese students were enrolled at the university.

At first, Hin had regarded Ottawa as only a hiatus between his master’s degree and his doctorate. Yet, in leaving Vancouver, the city of his birth, other than return visits every few years to his sisters and mother, he sensed he was leaving the west coast behind for good. The reason was the exhilaration he’d felt on coming east at encountering less discrimination in Toronto, and when he made the move to Ottawa, less again. In Toronto, he’d been emboldened enough to take out a white girl;
nobody speared him with a censorious look. In Ottawa he found attitudes among Chinese and whites alike to be even more relaxed. He’d wondered at the time if those war years would be the best in his life, when he boarded with the kindly Mrs. Cowan and her family in Old Ottawa South off Bank Street; she’d bake his favourite pie, apple custard, and he’d help her clean up in the kitchen while they chatted.

Hin did his part for Canada’s war effort, working for the National Research Council on the use of ultrasound to detect submarines, experimenting in the Ottawa River right behind the NRC’s building. At the end of the war, he left to pursue his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Four years later, he returned to the Research Council to resume working alongside one of the world’s leading molecular physicists. Dr. Gerhard Herzberg had first come to Canada when he’d been forced from his academic post in Nazi Germany because his wife, Luisa Dettinger, was Jewish.

The biggest difference Hin found from his earlier time in Ottawa was the livelier social scene among unmarried Chinese. Young people in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto organized weekend excursions and exchanges and trips away. Ottawa’s appeal had much to do with the fun-loving Taiwanese ambassador who hosted parties and balls at the embassy residence. A golfer, he often invited the Chinese youth to be his guests at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, where, he pointed out—not without some smugness—Chinese were welcomed as club members but Jews were not.

The children of Chinese families in Ottawa had always taken it as a given that they’d have to look elsewhere else for their wife or husband. We’ve grown up together, they said. We’re like
sisters and brothers. Not only was the community very small, but certain surnames predominated. As the Chinese saying went, “You don’t cook beef with beef.” Other unspoken biases narrowed their choices. In the way that those who learned to play bridge henceforth eschewed the game of mahjong, on one side of a divide were café owners, on the other laundrymen. Or, on one side, Canadian-born Chinese, and on the other, newer immigrants who’d come after exclusion, via Hong Kong.

But while courtships among Ottawa’s Chinese families were the exception, on Hin’s return he was mesmerized by one girl, Bernice, whose parents, Stanley and Marion Wong, owned the Canton Inn restaurant. Descended from Irish grandparents on her mother’s side, the fair-skinned Bernice thought she didn’t look Chinese at all. What mattered to her many Chinese suitors was that she was uncommonly pretty, and she had charm to go with her beauty.

On group cycling trips to the Gatineau Hills, Hin would try to manoeuvre his bike to ride alongside her, all the while noticing the sidelong glances of every other male. Bernice was only sixteen, still in high school, and Ottawa’s youth adhered to doing everything in a group, from cycling and hiking to skiing and skating. Still, Hin made his move. He secured two tickets to a performance of the famed Sadler’s Wells Ballet on the Ottawa stop of their debut North American tour, featuring Margot Fonteyn in
Sleeping Beauty
, and invited Bernice. She readily accepted. The two paired off frequently after that within the group, and Hin also tutored her in subjects at school. However, a year later, when Bernice left for McGill University, Hin lost out to a rival from Ottawa who was enrolled at McGill. Norman Sim, one of the five Sim boys,
and brother of restaurateur Jack, was in his second year studying enginerring there.