The Year of Finding Memory (3 page)

On April 6, 1914, the day my father and his older brother arrived in Canada, a Vancouver newspaper, the
Daily News Advertiser
, forecast fair and warm weather. Further down the front page, the mayor of Vancouver expressed concern about the large number of Chinese who were entering the country. He emphasized the uncontrollable temper of
Orientals
, proof of their unpredictability, making them unsuitable candidates for immigration. On the same day, the
Vancouver Daily World
carried a story from a canning mill about a Chinese worker who, after being criticized by his white foreman, picked up his superior and in a fit of anger tried to throw him into a boiling cauldron. However, the Chinaman—or “Celestial” as he was called—was restrained and disaster was averted. Compared to the white Canadians, my father and the Chinese men of his generation were small. When I discovered these stories in the Vancouver newspaper archives, it was hard for me to reconcile this portrayal of a violent, impulsive Chinese man with my docile father and others like him whom I had seen over the years whenever I visited Chinatown in Toronto.

I distinctly recall from my early childhood one particular customer who came into my father’s hand laundry, a giant, red-faced man who stomped through the door, stood in front of the wooden counter and banged its surface with a clenched fist until my father appeared. Waving his hand dismissively,
the man leaned against the counter and boomed, “I know. No tickee, no laundree. You find, Charlie. You find.” My father untied and folded back the brown paper from package after package of cleaned and pressed garments until the man recognized his clothes. He never apologized for the extra work he put my father through. And my father never protested. Instead, he nodded his head up and down, a stiff smile plastered across his face. I peeked from behind the curtain that hung over the doorway, separating the service from the washing areas. Blood rushed to my cheeks. But the next time this man came into our laundry with his sack of dirty clothes, my father wrote a name in Chinese characters on each half of the ticket before giving the man’s portion to him. When the man returned for his finished laundry a few days later, again without his half of the slip, my father had to unwrap only one package. The man was speechless and managed to mutter no more than
thank you
as he left the laundry. My father later told me that he’d written the man’s name on his half of the ticket.

“But he doesn’t have a Chinese name,” I said.

“Oh, yes, he does,” said my father. “His name is Mo Noh Suk, No-Brain Uncle. I wrote it on his ticket and inside the collars of his shirts.”

My father may have loathed the lowly position that he occupied in the small towns where we lived, but he never forgot it. He was meek and fearful of authority. Any anger he felt about the treatment he received from his customers and townsfolk he kept to himself. The closest he came to an act of defiance was to bestow an unflattering name in a
foreign language, which he would then inscribe in black ink with a fine-nibbed pen inside their clothes. The notion that someone like my tiny father could so much as threaten, let alone attack, a
lo fon
and lift him off the ground, is so preposterous the thought of it is almost funny.

But there was, in fact, nothing funny about the way that people like my father were perceived by the
lo fons
of that time. The Chinese were considered to be undesirable, perhaps even subhuman. When I researched the records from the ship that brought my father to Vancouver, I found that passengers who were of European descent had specific destinations: cities like Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal; they were recognized as individuals, and as Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic. But the Chinese passengers were a monolithic yellow horde. Every one of them was listed as a Buddhist, and regardless of where the Chinaman stepped off the train, as far as these records were concerned, he was going to Montreal, Montreal being the train’s final stop.

Along with hundreds of other Chinese, my father and his older brother had travelled in steerage for three weeks across the Pacific on the
Empress of Russia.
They and their fellow countrymen were greeted by an embrace of warm, spring air and the sight of snow-capped mountains meeting the sky. But directly in front of them loomed tall white men, shouting and herding them off the ship. I can picture my father: head bent, wearing a dark, quilted jacket, gripping a bamboo suitcase in one hand, the other arm swinging, as he disembarked with all those passengers from China, huddled together, moving in a group. What did these two brothers
who were going to wash clothes in the town of Timmins expect from this place that we Chinese called Gam Sun, the Gold Mountain? Surely they had heard from those who had returned to China about mistreatment at the hands of the white men. Did knowing these stories blunt the sting of the
lo fons’
disdain?

My father often talked about how hard the Canadian government made it for the Chinese to immigrate. I could tell from his tone that he resented it, but at the same time, there was a sense of resignation, as if life offered no other solution. He understood his bottom-rung position in this new world and felt powerless to do anything about it. His days had become an endless cycle of laundry: sorting, washing, ironing. If there were times he might have felt rich, they were on the return journeys to his village in China, where he would have been welcomed as a
Gam Sun huk
, a Gold Mountain guest, whose few words of English spleen, spat out in exasperation in any restaurant, would have brought the most arrogant waiter running.

It has only recently occurred to me that because my father returned to China five times, he would have seen that long stretch between Vancouver and Toronto eleven times. And yet I have no recollection of his speaking about the countryside. He never mentioned the Rockies, the Prairies or even the vastness of the land itself. I remember the first time I travelled across the country by car and my sense of awe as I discovered the immensity of this place I call home. How did the white passengers react to the group of brown-skinned men dressed in strange clothes, some of them with
queues down their backs? Was there hostility, indifference or both? Did my father and his brother even look out the window of the train? Were they thinking of their homeland? Or were they already preoccupied with making themselves as unobtrusive as possible?

I stood in the bright, June sunlight for a long time, contemplating Second Uncle’s small, plain stone. My husband trimmed the grass around its edge and finished planting the red geraniums. Their cheerfulness felt too forced next to the dull grey marker. In the past, whenever I had visited this grave, it had been out of deference to my brother. On that particular visit, I was overcome by my own sadness. The unending loneliness of those two men’s lives overwhelmed me. Michael put his arm around my shoulders.

TWO

M
y family made its journey from China to the Gold Mountain over a period of more than forty years. Whether my father had hoped to have his first wife and their children join him after the Great War, I do not know. The Exclusion Act of 1923 prevented him and other Chinese from sponsoring family for immigration. After the Second World War, in part because of the Chinese-Canadian contribution to the war effort, the government repealed this hateful act and allowed the Chinese to bring immediate family members across the Pacific and finally reunite.

In 1947, my father travelled back to China to marry my mother, a woman twenty years his junior, planning to spend the rest of his life in his homeland, living in comfort, surrounded by family. He was confident that the Kuomintang would prevail and continue to govern China. After the end of the war, the Communists and the Kuomintang, now no longer united against the Japanese, resumed their struggle for
control of the country. But even when a Communist victory in China appeared inevitable, my father prayed for their defeat. My mother recognized the need to leave while there was still the opportunity. At her insistence, my father left China on August 22, 1949, and returned to the Gold Mountain for the last time, leaving behind his family and my mother, who was pregnant with me. Four months later, when he was fifty-seven, his last child would be born under China’s new government. Ever since, my mother referred to me as a Child of the Revolution.

My father had departed with a heavy heart, realizing that a future under China’s new rulers was even less predictable than one in a cold, northern land, a place where he had known only hardship and the contempt of others. Given my mother’s middle-class background, her level of education and my father’s status as a land owner, we would have been severely persecuted under the Communist regime. My parents would have been tortured and possibly executed, and once I was a teenager, I would have been sent out to the countryside for re-education through forced labour.

Shortly after his return to Canada my father became a Canadian citizen. He was then able to begin the arduous process of applying for permission to have eligible family members join him. According to the immigration laws of the time only spouses and single children under the age of twenty-one could be sponsored. Hing, my father’s oldest son was married and in his early thirties. Jook, his daughter, was under twenty-one, but married. Because of age and marital status
the government classified them both as independent and ineligible, no longer my father’s responsibility. Shing, the second oldest, joined our father in 1951. My mother, Ming Nee, Doon and I fled our small market town in southern China in 1953. Between them my parents had six children. I was three years old and had no insight into the torment the adults in my family must have felt as they faced the likelihood that some of them would never see each other again. In the spring of 1955, after two years in Hong Kong, my mother and I arrived in Canada; Doon would follow a few months later. With Ming Nee’s arrival in 1958, our family exodus from China ended, leaving us to live the rest of our lives on opposite sides of the world, divided by geography and politics.

For my parents, the letters that travelled back and forth across the Pacific were a lifeline connecting them to China. When they received news from home, they became excited and told me who had just married, who was ill, who had had a baby, how much everyone was suffering under the Communists. But I didn’t care about the Communists. The names soon lost their faces and became meaningless sounds, forgotten the moment they were uttered. My mind was brimming with names like Helen, Susie, Jimmy, Cathy and Bobby; with stories of Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk. My days were spent playing baseball, tag and hide-and-go-seek. Everything about China began to recede, cleaved from the person I was becoming.

My parents never learned to speak English. Shing and Doon both speak it poorly, and Ming Nee, who attended a
few years of school in Canada, prefers to read the Chinese newspaper and to watch Chinese television, though she functions well in English. I am the only one of the family who speaks English without accent and with native-like fluency. Even though my siblings and I belong to the same family and generation, I find myself separated from them not only by our age difference, but also by education, culture, language and memory. They talk with vividness and clarity about life back in China and about our brother and sister who remained, letters linking their lives in Gam Sun to the homeland. I, however, remember almost nothing.