Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  He was quiet for awhile.

  He had no idea how far they’d gone, he said. The idea of Canada was meaningless to him. His situation was no different from his classmates whose parents worked in a neighbouring village, or the others who had smuggled away to Hong Kong.

  Anyway, most of his life was in Guangzhou by then, he said. He’d already grown used to Ye Ye being gone. Now only one more person had left. Ah Gong, Sook Gong and Bak Bak were his family.

  He said this all as if the matter was settled. But I wasn’t convinced.

  I recalled a story he’d told me just days earlier, about the one and only time he and Sook Gong had fought. It had been shortly after Ah Ngeen left, he said. That day, Ah Gong had returned home with a treat for Dad: a brand-new ruler to use at school. Small luxuries like that—school supplies or new clothes—were unheard of for them, and Sook Gong brooded jealously next to Dad.

  “You only spoil him because his parents didn’t want him,” Sook Gong grunted at Ah Gong.

  Hearing this, Dad lunged at Sook Gong. Soon both boys were tumbling on the floor, flailing around and throwing punches in every direction. I guessed the comment had struck a nerve.

  So I pressed on. But Dad only grew defensive. He didn’t want to discuss it any further.

  “I really didn’t even understand what was happening,” he said. “When you’re eleven, you’re like a lump of rice.” It was a typical deflection tactic for Dad: Try to crack a joke to distract me.

  He switched to English. “No feelings.” He put his two palms up to signal the conversation was over.

  Chapter Seven

  Stony Plain, AB.

  Spring 2016

  Anthony and I left our Edmonton hotel early to make it to our morning meeting. The meeting was set for 9:30 with the mayor of the town of Stony Plain, which was about forty minutes outside of the city.

  It was a town with a population of about sixteen thousand, many of them farmers and their families. The town was first settled back in 1881 and christened “Dog Rump Creek.” (It was later renamed, according to local historians, by a pioneer who wisely suggested that “Stony Plain” might be more appealing.

  We pulled up outside of a brown brick building attached to a small hotel on the town’s main road. “Bing Restaurant No. 1,” the sign outside said. We walked inside, into a large dining room with red vinyl tables and wooden chairs. A young woman stood behind the cash register, and we told her we were there to meet with the mayor. A few minutes later, the bespectacled face of William Choy popped out from the window to the kitchen. He smiled and apologized that he was running late. He was wearing a grease-splattered apron.

  Mr. Choy, forty-two, was the mayor of Stony Plain. But he was also the owner of the town’s Chinese restaurant.

  It was a Saturday morning and the dining room was filled with people. A group of men in flannel shirts and baseball caps sat next to cups of coffee. An elderly couple huddled over a newspaper. And at the back of the dining room, through the window, their mayor scrambled around in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the woks and checking on orders. A few minutes later, Mr. Choy, clad in a red T-shirt, the apron still tied around his waist, came out to greet us. Coffee pot in hand, he apologized that he’d be just a few more minutes. He then set about refilling cups.

  When he finally sat down, I asked him about juggling his two jobs. He nodded his head, thinking. He relied a lot on his family, he said, including both of his parents and many of his extended relatives who pitched in when he had to dash out for a meeting or a community event. It was a family restaurant, not just his. But in a way, he’d spent his entire life juggling the restaurant and his outside life. This restaurant, founded by his grandfather Bing Choy in 1970 and later run by William’s dad, Fon Choy, was where he had grown up.

  He walked me through the kitchen, past the wide wok station with room for three woks. He gestured toward a small room off to the side, filled with boxes of restaurant supplies and equipment. As a kid, “This is where I spent most of my time,” he said. William’s parents spent all their time at the restaurant, and so did he.

  He pointed to the desk where he had done most of his homework after school. When he was done with homework or just needed a break, he’d go out to the kitchen to visit with his dad, or help out in the dining room, refilling coffee or running orders to the tables. Even during the school day, he’d come home during lunch break to wash dishes. That was the restaurant’s busiest time, and he was expected to pitch in.

  “That was our free time, I guess,” he said. “Working.” There wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice.

  From there, he led me down a narrow staircase, into the dim basement. It was unfinished, and mostly used as extra storage space for the kitchen. Boxes of dried egg noodles and large bags of rice were stacked against the edges. This was where he had played, he said. The rare times he had friends over, this was where they would hang out. They’d use the boxes and bags of ingredients as props in their games of hide and seek. I asked if that was strange for the other kids and their parents—for them to be playing in the basement of a restaurant. But he shook his head. Most of his friends lived on farms, he explained. When he played at their homes, they were climbing and hiding around bales of hay. It wasn’t all that different.

  We sat down at a table in a second dining area, a large space Bing’s used to host banquets and other community events. Today, it was empty. Anthony sat down next to me. William was the first English-speaking restaurant owner we’d encountered so far, and Anthony was happy to finally be able to follow along with the conversation.

  I asked William about the black-and-white framed photographs that were hung up all over the dining room. “Fengman in Guangdong,” he said. “That’s where we’re from.” His grandfather Bing had started the restaurant in 1970, but it wasn’t until the restaurant was successful that he brought the rest of his family over from China. William and his parents came to Canada in the winter of 1980. William was six.

  He doesn’t remember much about his first days in Canada. He’s pieced together bits and pieces from the images in his own mind and what relatives have told him. They say he wasn’t happy about coming here, about leaving behind one set of grandparents and meeting a new set he’d never even realized existed. He doesn’t remember being unhappy, though.

  He does remember that some kids wouldn’t play with him or his brother when they first started school. They were the only Chinese kids there, and didn’t speak English. But other kids did play with them—mostly just the girls. “We were different,” he said, with a shrug.

  Anyways, it all sorted itself out a year or two later, he said, when the other boys realized William liked sports too.

  “Then it was, ‘No, you’re not that different after all.’”

  If anything, his parents probably had a harder time adjusting, he said. William and his brother were simply pulled aside for an hour each day in school, shown English-language flash cards and taught their ABCs. Soon, they were speaking as fluently as anyone else in town. But Jean and Fon arrived as fully-formed adults. Locals tried to pitch in, coming by the restaurant and offering them short English lessons while they ate. “Cheque,” they would say, pointing to the cash register. “Cup,” they said, pointing to the dishware. “Coffee.” But even now, Jean spent most of her days in the kitchen, preparing food and avoiding the dining room because of her limited English.

  William graduated from university with a degree in teaching in the late 1990s. But the economy was sputtering. Finding a job would have meant leaving Stony Plain, his family and his community. Instead, he stayed, continuing to work at the restaurant. In 1997, he officially took over as owner.

  Since then, he’s spent almost all of his days here. In the mornings, he chatted with his customers and neighbours as he poured them coffee. When they came by in large groups for lunch, he’d listen in as they complained about their days and traded gossip. Bing’s was not only one of the most popular restaurants in town, but one of th
e only restaurants in town. “It’s the heart of the town,” one of the regulars told us.

  Bing’s was where people went to gather, to trade news and talk about what was going on in the neighbourhood. And William had the front seat for all of it.

  Over time, he’d become a fixture in Stony Plain. So in 2007, he ran for and won a seat on the town council. In 2010, he was re-elected. And in 2012, he ran for mayor and won. He’s held the seat since. The restaurant, it had turned out, had been the perfect launching pad for his political career.

  For a few minutes, I sat back and watched as Anthony and William chatted. About half a year before our meeting, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had ousted Stephen Harper’s Conservatives from the federal government. Stony Plain’s local Conservative MP at the time, Rona Ambrose, had risen to become the interim federal party leader. Anthony and William chatted for a few minutes about what they thought might happen next, whether Ms. Ambrose might want to stay in the role or move on, as rumoured, to provincial or municipal politics.

  At that point, I interjected, looking directly at William. “Would you ever consider running either provincially or federally?” I asked.

  He didn’t seem taken aback by the question. I suspected he’d been asked about it in the past.

  Ever the politician, he remained coy. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either.

  Instead, he just smiled. Smiled, I took it, because he knew that all of those opportunities were open to him.

  “The door’s not closed,” he said.

  Chapter Eight

  Guangzhou, China.

  1961–65

  The year Dad turned twelve, Ah Gong gave him a new chore. “You’ll be the cook,” he said.

  Everyone had to have a job, Dad said. Sook Gong already had other chores, and that left cooking to Dad.

  Had he shown an interest in cooking at the time? A favourite food?

  Dad let out a bitter laugh. “Who had a favourite food?” he said. “We were grateful to have any food.”

  The house they shared with the Laus had just three bedrooms inside. The kitchen was outdoors, at the end of a shared corridor, and covered with a metal awning that hung off the building. It wasn’t much, just a round charcoal stove. Everything else—buckets of water, pots and bowls—he would haul out from inside the house.

  For the first few days, Ah Gong stood beside Dad, showing him how to light and tend to the charcoals. “The art of tai foh,” Ah Gong called it. Watching the fire. That was the trickiest, most important part. Ah Gong showed him how to use a match to burn bits of scrap wood and paper. Once he had a small flame, he would light the charcoals, using a hand-held fan to help things along. Depending on the wind and how much kindling they had, this could take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour.

  The more time Dad spent in the kitchen, the better he got at watching the fire. Eventually, he could tell just by looking at the charcoals whether the temperature was right. At a glance, he could see from the intensity of the glowing amber stones whether a pot of rice was likely to burn. The steam rising from the pot and the nutty smell of jasmine wafting through the air were all he needed to know the rice was ready.

  With the rice cooked, he would heat the wok until it was searing hot. Into the wok he would pour a bit of oil, then drop in a colander’s worth of freshly washed vegetables. The wok would hiss and sizzle as he poked gingerly at the greens with a pair of chopsticks, trying to avoid the oil splatter. Eventually, they’d wilt and glisten brightly. When everything was finished, he would leave a pot of water on the stove to come to a slow boil before the charcoal died down. No use in wasting a good fire.

  “Hoi toi,” Dad would shout. Prepare the table! This was the signal to Sook Gong to pull out the table, normally folded away between meals in their cramped apartment.

  Each month, Ah Gong received liangpiao, government-issued coupons for their food allotment. For the three of them, that meant about twenty-five pounds of rice and about one pound of meat (usually pork). Vegetables didn’t require coupons, so day after day, lunch and dinner were more or less the same meal: steamed rice and vegetables. Twice a day, Dad made this meal. Every day. Burning bits of wood and paper. Lighting the charcoal stones. Simmering rice on a stove. Watching the fire. Boiling the water.

  He didn’t know it then, but this training would prove useful over and over again.

  * * *

  As Dad and I sifted through the photographs in Dad’s basement, one caught my eye. It was a black-and-white image, showing a girl with a ruddy face and pigtails, about sixteen, pouring a wooden bucket into a large trough to feed pigs. In the background, two young men had poles propped on their shoulders with baskets filled with rocks on either end. It looked like something out of National Geographic.

  “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “My classmates,” he said.

  He explained how he had reached high school just as the country began undergoing rapid change. Mao and his Red Guards were purging “imperialists” and suspected “elites” from the government. Students were forced to relocate from their schools in the cities to work the land in the villages. Dad and his classmates were mandated to spend part of the year helping out at rice farms during harvest.

  Starting in high school, Dad would travel twice a year along with his entire class to a small village a few hours outside the city. This was a photo from one of those trips.

  From dawn to dusk, the group would work out on the fields, harvesting rice and planting vegetables. The students would wade out into the rice paddies and spend hours hunched, cutting the stalks individually with a knife and pulling them out, one by one. At night, they would fall asleep in a giant common room on cool beds made of grass and hay, covered with bedding and blankets they brought themselves.

  “Grass?” I asked.

  Their beds were made of grass, strewn on the ground to soften the surface, he explained. “It was gruelling labour.”

  Luckily, he explained, he was spared from the worst of it.

  The first year they made the trip to the rice farms, Dad happened to be a class representative, a student councillor of sorts. His teacher had taken a shine to him and also knew that Dad could cook. So each day, as his classmates set out for another hot, sweaty day in the rice paddies, Dad was assigned to stay behind and cook. Preparing three meals a day for dozens of people in a hot kitchen wasn’t easy, but he was far better off than his classmates, who came back each night with dirt-streaked faces and aching muscles.

  Every day, he cooked the same three meals. For breakfast, a boiled yam. For lunch, steamed vegetables with rice. For dinner, more vegetables and rice. With the money pooled together for food, Dad would make daily trips to the market for fresh vegetables and rice. And each day, he would set a bit aside, so that at the end of each week, he could afford to splurge on a few pounds of pork for everyone—a treat. These meals his classmates would eat gratefully, gulping down the accompanying soup with giant slurps.

  But it wasn’t enough to buy everyone’s goodwill. One day, he woke up in the morning to ready the pot of water for the yams. As he set to work, he heard one of the other boys in his class loudly grumbling.

  “Each day, we go out and work, and he gets to stay inside,” the boy said, pointing and glaring at Dad. “It’s not fair.”

  The teacher thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t fair, he decided. So he had the two of them switch places. The classmate stayed behind to cook the meals and Dad set out along with the rest of his classmates to work in the fields.

  Just as Dad suspected, it was back-breaking work. As he gripped the knife to cut the rice stalks one by one, his hands began to ache. His lower back soon grew sore from standing in the same position. By the time he sat down for lunch, his arms and legs felt like they were on fire. And, like everyone else, he was starving.

  They marched into the lunch room, grumpy and tired, watching greedily as the bowls of steamed rice and vegetables were brought out. As soon as Dad receive
d his bowl, he lifted it gratefully to his mouth. But from the first whiff, it was clear something wasn’t right. Instead of jasmine, the rice smelled acrid. He looked closer at the bowl. Some of the rice grains were fluffy and white, but others were hard and crunchy, their centres still translucent and raw. The rice had been cooked unevenly. Others around Dad noticed too. A few cursed under their breaths.

  The boy who had cooked the meal glanced around uneasily, slumping down in his seat. Everyone grumbled, but they were tired and hungry and finished their meals anyway. They still had work to do.

  But hours later, another disappointment.

  At dinner, the rice bowls, normally heaping full, were barely filled to the tops. The classmates murmured, confused. But Dad took in the rice bowls, and the smell that was wafting from the bowl, and figured out what had happened. The boy had burnt the rice. The meagre portions were all he had managed to salvage. Unlike Dad, this boy had not spent hours learning to tai foh. He did not know, as my father did, how to tell just from the colour of the charcoal whether the fire might cause the water to boil. He did not know what shade of amber would lead to burnt rice. And the pitiful portions in everyone’s bowls had proved that.

  After that, there were no other complaints. Dad was reassigned to the kitchen.

  Chapter Nine

  Boissevain, MB.

  Spring 2016

  While planning the trip, I became obsessed with trying to find a single answer that could explain the spread of Chinese restaurants across the country. I wondered if there was a single starting point or a single place responsible for the ubiquity and uniformity of these tiny restaurants.

  The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee traces the activities of many Chinese restaurants in the United States back to a small area of New York City’s Chinatown under the Manhattan Bridge. In that Chinatown, she writes, a handful of Chinese employment agencies are clustered around a single bus station. There, restaurants and restaurant jobs are posted on bulletin boards. Entire lives and families are uprooted and rearranged over long-distance calls at a phone booth, often ending with the question: “Can you leave tonight?” Each day, Chinese men and women arrive at the agencies with their suitcases packed, prepared to jump on a bus to a new job and new city at a moment’s notice.