Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  As the restaurant owners had sat across from me telling me their stories, I had often thought about my dad, and how many of the questions I was asking these owners were ones I’d never thought to ask him.

  There were so many gaps in what I knew: What was his life like back in China? How did he wind up in Canada at age twenty-four? And why did he come to Vancouver decades after his own parents?

  * * *

  Growing up, Dad was just “Dad.” In the mornings, he’d drop us off at school in his Honda hatchback. And at night, he’d come home from work, scrape the dried tomato sauce or meat grease off his hands and then begin making our dinner. We’d eat quietly, heads hunched over, the sound of chewing only punctuated by chopsticks clicking against our bowls. Afterward, he’d watch the Cantonese medical dramas and cop shows they played on the Chinese-language channel until it was time for bed. Every day was the same.

  On the weekends, when he wasn’t working his second job as a contractor or his third job as a landscaper, he’d ferry us between lessons or attend our piano recitals and ballet performances. Sitting in his chair, his eyes closed, he’d nod along to the music in his paint-splattered polos.

  He had a few hobbies. He liked to read. And sometimes he’d practise calligraphy, practising his brush strokes by writing classical Chinese poems. Later, he would also take up hiking and travelling. But when we were growing up, pretty much all of his time was spent working.

  He did it all quietly. He didn’t talk about himself. He definitely didn’t talk much about his life before us. He seemed to prefer listening to talking.

  The year I turned twenty-one, I left Vancouver and moved to Toronto with vague ideas of a career in journalism. He drove me to the airport. On the car ride there, he barely spoke a single word. And at the airport, he refused to help me lug my giant suitcases onto the baggage belt. “You’re going to have to do things for yourself now,” he said quietly but sternly. I know he just couldn’t bear to do it himself.

  After that, our conversations were limited to the brief phone calls I would make back to Vancouver—quick exchanges of “Hi, how are you?” before passing the phone over to Mom. Visits home were crowded with other family and friends. On the rare occasion we were alone together, the conversation stayed focused on practical matters. He’d ask about the real estate market in Toronto. Or about the weather we’d been having. Or what I wanted to eat for dinner.

  It seemed like a cliché. The stereotypical Asian dad, stoic and incapable of expressing his feelings. But that wasn’t entirely true. The stereotype wouldn’t explain how, when I was in kindergarten, he was the one to brush and style my hair each morning. It also wouldn’t explain the time he was the only one who could make my cousin Taylor, then still an infant, stop crying by rocking her to sleep, curled up on his chest. Or the many lunches he packed for me during university, when he knew I was busy with studying. The sandwiches he rolled up into neat pinwheels. The carrots he carved into flowers.

  The truth was, I hadn’t spent much time getting to know him as an adult either. I had just treated him as “Dad.”

  But then we got the news.

  For several months in the summer of 2015, doctors had been concerned about a tumour they’d found in Dad’s liver. At the end of July—just a week before Anthony and I had our wedding in Montreal—the results of the biopsy confirmed the diagnosis. It was cholangiocarcinoma, or cancer of the bile duct. At the wedding, after Dad gave his father-of-the-bride toast, I clutched him and cried.

  After the diagnosis, it was one piece of bad news after another, each more dire than the last. On our honeymoon, Anthony held my hands as I read the text from my sister: the cancer was inoperable. Most patients survived for just nine months. There was no hope of a cure.

  Each time, we’d think, How will we cope? And eventually, we’d adjust. And then days later, there’d be another blow. Over and over again, until trauma began to feel normal.

  “I feel fine,” Dad would say. “As long as I can walk, as long as I can eat, I am okay.” He’d go through one cycle of chemo and then the next.

  For the first while, he really did seem fine. Between the chemo cycles, he still went on his Saturday hikes, leading his hiking group up countless trails, the bells he’d sewn onto his backpack to warn away bears jangling behind him. He still shopped at the supermarket and made dinner every Sunday.

  “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” he told us.

  We all coped in our own ways. Mom fretted from one Chinese doctor to the next, bringing home bundles of herbs and roots she thought might heal him. Pansy kept track of his schedule, managing his dozens of appointments, tests and procedures, and making sure he knew how to prepare for each one. And Amber paid frequent visits, helping out around the house and plotting ways to get him out, even if it was just a walk in the park with her dog.

  From Toronto, I awaited news. I pitched stories to my editors that would allow me to spend weeks or months at a time in Vancouver. But during these visits, I was at a loss for what to do. The day-to-day stuff—the ferrying-Dad-to-appointments, the organizing, the important stuff, my sisters and Mom already had covered.

  I tried to find time alone with him. But he was still Dad. He wasn’t interested in small talk, much less discussing what he was going through. I’d ask how he was, if there was anything he’d want to talk about, and he’d only shrug, as if to say, Would it help?

  More often than not, we’d wind up sitting in silence—Dad watching TV, or slumped over in his chair, eyes closed, lost in thought.

  * * *

  As kids, we pretty much only saw Dad’s parents Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen on holidays. There was always a stiffness to those visits, particularly between Dad and his dad, Ye Ye. I’d heard bits and pieces of arguments over the years. About that one time Mom and Dad went to visit with Pansy, then still an infant, and how Ye Ye wouldn’t let them in the house. By the time I was a teenager, both grandparents had passed away. The day Ye Ye died, Dad started smoking again. He was moody for a long time. Withdrawn. Whatever the two of them had fought over, they’d never managed to resolve.

  No one ever explained what had happened. All I had was what I had gathered through the years—overheard phone calls, the clenched whispers in the kitchen. And Dad didn’t seem to want us to know. Gradually, I pieced together that it all seemed to stem from the same issue. It was the one thing we were never supposed to talk about: Dad had been left behind in China. His parents had come to Canada without him. It wasn’t clear if he knew why. And if he did, he wasn’t sharing.

  Mom had freely shared her own stories over the years. While Dad was cautious and careful, she was outspoken and emotional. Over dinner, or on long car rides between ballet and piano classes, she’d tell me about growing up in Hong Kong—about her father, Ah Ye, and how he’d dreamed of writing for newspapers but died when she was just nine. She’d lower her voice to just above a pained whisper as she described how Po Po had supported her and her three siblings by running a wonton shop in Hong Kong. And how she’d followed her brother, my Uncle Zachary, to Vancouver after he’d immigrated here in 1971.

  But Dad had always kept his stories closely guarded. If someone mentioned Mao, Dad might let out a flash of anger. Or if they mentioned Pierre Trudeau, a burst of approval. Otherwise, he’d only shake his head on the rare occasion we’d think to ask. He’d slowly raise his arm, as if to say, Stop.

  “Duk la,” he’d say, still shaking his head. Enough.

  In the car, Dad kept driving silently. Mom had given up after my umpteenth vague response. She switched on the radio, which crackled the Chinese local news. In my head, an idea was bubbling.

  “Dad, what are you doing tomorrow?”

  His response came in a grunt. “Nothing,” he said in Cantonese.

  Perfect, I thought.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, as Dad was just settling in his favourite spot on the couch, next to the window, and curling in the sun, like a cat, I parked myself on the other c
ouch beside him.

  “I want to know about the Legion Cafe,” I told him. It was a restaurant he’d owned with my mom, in the 1970s, before I was even born.

  Growing up, I’d heard occasional mentions of the Legion. How Mom and Dad had moved out to Abbotsford, about an hour outside of Vancouver and at that point very much a small town. They had owned it for several years, then shut it down. It was one of two restaurants they had run in Abbotsford before eventually moving back to Vancouver. I’d heard a few anecdotes—Dad’s offhand comments about learning to make chicken à la king at the Legion, and laughing about how many hours they’d put in for so little money. But I knew little about the restaurant. I’d seen a picture before—a sepia-toned image of a restaurant counter, with a soda fountain and a “soup of the day” board. Chicken soup and tuna sandwiches. But I didn’t understand how that restaurant fit in with his later life in Vancouver.

  Maybe if I started asking him about food and his restaurants, just as I had in my many interviews on the cross-country trip, I could get him talking about other things too.

  “Why Abbotsford?” I asked.

  “How did you learn to cook the food?”

  “Is that where you learned to cook?”

  At first, he shrugged off my questions. He ignored them, then pretended he was taking a nap. But when it became clear I wasn’t giving up, and that I wouldn’t let him watch his TV show in peace, he let out a long sigh. He stood up and wandered toward the front room of the house. A few moments later, he returned with a dark brown binder. Holding his reading glasses in his hand, he crouched down on the floor over the binder.

  I had seen that brown binder hundreds of times before. It had always been there, sitting on the bookshelf in the room we called “the piano room” because of the grand piano we had always complained about having to practise on—the piano that Dad worked three jobs and my mom the night shift to pay for.

  I crouched down on the floor next to him. This binder, he explained, was how he learned how to cook “Western” food. Before working in his first kitchen, he told me, he’d had no idea what a lasagna was. He could barely pronounce the word. Nor did he know how to properly truss a chicken, or what turkey “dressing” meant. He’d relied on this binder and his collection of cookbooks to figure it out.

  Flipping through the pages, he showed me sheet after sheet of plain white paper. On them, he’d carefully recorded in his neat, all-caps handwriting the recipes he’d learned over the years. “Quiche Lorraine.” “Chicken Liver Pate.” “Cream Puffs.” He could have written the recipes in Chinese, but he wanted to do them in English, to do it “properly.” So there was “Pazza Sauce” with “Mints” (mince). And “Cream Dip” with notes such as: “Can make in to crab. Shrimp or what ev.” He’d learned by watching his colleagues, or tearing recipes out of magazines. Every time he saw something he liked, he put it in the binder.

  “I think it’s in here somewhere,” he mumbled in Cantonese as he thumbed through the pages.

  His eyes scanned down page after page. Occasionally he would say something under his breath, then flip to the next page.

  Finally, he stopped on a page, taking a long moment to read it.

  “I only have the second page,” he said finally. He handed it to me, a thick sheet of greying paper. The text was typed out with a typewriter. It was the menu from the Legion.

  “COMBINATION SPECIAL,” it said in all-caps letters across the top. The rest was organized into a grid. There was a “Dinner for 2,” “Dinner for 4” and so on.

  I scanned the page up and down, trying to make sense of it. “What is this?”

  “The Legion,” he said. “You asked about the Legion.”

  I scanned it again, reading it more carefully this time.

  There was no chicken soup on this menu. No turkey sandwiches or BLTs.

  My eyes focused instead on two words that repeated themselves over and over across the page: “chop suey.”

  “Dinner for 2” included chicken chop suey.

  “Dinner for 4” had beef chop suey.

  “Dinner for 6” had vegetarian chop suey.

  I studied the rest of the page. There was chicken chow mein, egg rolls and sweet and sour pork.

  I blinked hard, then turned the sheet over. There it was, in all-caps letters across the top. “CHINESE FOODS.”

  I looked at Dad, still sitting across from me crouched over the binder.

  “Dad.”

  He looked up.

  “The Legion Cafe—it was a Chinese restaurant?”

  He scrunched his face. “It was mixed. It was a mixed restaurant,” he said.

  I was stunned. Never before had I heard about the Legion serving Chinese food. Never before had I known my parents had run a Chinese restaurant. All those years growing up, my dad would turn up his nose at chop suey–type Chinese restaurants. “This is fake Chinese,” he would say. Even when I’d gone on my cross-country road trip, he had seemed puzzled that I should travel all that way just to write about chop suey restaurants. Neither he nor Mom had mentioned that they’d owned one.

  I shook my head slowly, back and forth, trying to gather my thoughts. “Why didn’t you guys say anything?”

  Dad looked back at me and shrugged. “I thought you knew.”

  A few moments later, he added, “Actually, we had two.”

  Two Chinese restaurants. He kept talking, but I was no longer focusing on what he was saying. All I could think was this: just months earlier, I had travelled over nine thousand kilometres, through snow and sleet. For eighteen days, I had lived out of a suitcase, driving from one small town to the next, interviewing all those Chinese families. All of it to learn the stories behind Chinese restaurants. To each of the families, I had asked the same question, over and over: “How did you wind up in this place?”

  All the while, I had barely managed to scratch the surface of my own family’s story.

  That was when I realized my journey wasn’t yet over.

  Chapter Three

  Vulcan, AB.

  Spring 2016

  On the third night of our trip, Anthony and I had dinner with my family at a Malaysian-Chinese restaurant in East Vancouver. The restaurant was an unfussy spot, with walls painted green and televisions mounted to the walls. My sisters, Anthony and I chatted about our trip so far, about our two days in Victoria, and our plan to drive west for eleven hours straight the next day. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad studied the menu.

  I overheard pieces of their conversation. They were trying to decide which dishes were most economical.

  “The rice is on special.”

  “This one comes in a huge plate.”

  A few moments later, they landed on the Hainanese chicken—whole poached chicken with rice cooked in pandan leaves. It would taste just as good as leftovers with rice the next day.

  When the waitress came over, Mom and Dad ordered for us all: char kway teow, roti canai, Hainanese chicken, satay chicken skewers and steaming bowls of laksa. Soon, our table began to pile up with dishes. Smoky, pan-fried rice noodles, flaky fried flatbreads we dipped into golden curry sauce and ate with our hands, and noodles swimming in coconut curry broth. Dinner in Vancouver with my parents almost always meant Chinese. Still, that almost always meant something different.

  The 1980s and 1990s introduced Canada to a new kind of Chinese. Unlike the previous waves of mainly poor, rural Chinese, now there were hundreds of thousands of middle-class and wealthy Hong Kongers fleeing to Vancouver and Toronto ahead of the looming 1997 China handover.

  This group included some of Hong Kong’s most highly skilled, highly trained Cantonese chefs. These chefs, together with the affluent newcomers, propelled a boom of excellent Cantonese restaurants in the cities—places where glimmering rock cod and spiny king crab were scooped live out of squeaky-clean tanks (not like the cloudy-water Chinatown places), steamed expertly and served over pressed white tablecloths.

  This was the Vancouver I grew up in. After we moved to Burna
by when I was in high school, it was as common to hear Cantonese or Taiwanese in our cafeteria as English. Many of my classmates were “CBCs” like me—Canadian-born Chinese whose parents had come from the poor areas of southern China decades earlier. But many others were newcomers and so-called “satellite kids.” Their parents set them up with brand-new houses and cars, then returned to Taiwan or Hong Kong for work. The student parking lot was filled with BMWs and Mercedes, in stark contrast to the Toyotas and Chryslers in the teachers’ lot.

  The sudden arrival of these new Chinese resulted in tensions, just as they had a century ago. These newcomers weren’t content settling in the East Vancouver areas around Chinatown, or working-class south Vancouver. Some of them bought homes in the city’s toniest neighbourhoods, traditionally white areas like Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy. When they immigrated, some tore down the existing homes, building new ones in their place. They wanted the types of homes they could never have back in crowded Hong Kong—brand-new houses with lots of space.

  This led to some ugly stand-offs—racial tensions disguised as complaints about so-called “monster homes.” The concerns, according to some local residents at the time, had nothing to do with race. They had to do with real estate and heritage preservation, with the character of the homes, the trees and bad taste.

  But the subtext was just barely below the surface. “The face of Vancouver is changing far too quickly,” said one letter written to a Vancouver city councillor at the time. “We—the fairly reasonable people—fear the power that the Hong Kong money wields. We resent the fact that because they come here with pats of money they are able to mutilate the areas they choose to settle in,” she wrote. “These people come—with no concern for our past.”

  More recently, the influx of Chinese newcomers has been from mainland China. This included some of the hyper-wealthy fu er dai, a new class of Chinese—the children of China’s nouveau riche. These new new Chinese have faced their own backlash, especially the wealthiest ones. Again, the tensions have been framed around housing, with many locals blaming the wealthy Chinese for skyrocketing real estate prices.