Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  One day, Dad returned home excited. He told Mom about a convenience store he’d seen up for sale near the corner of Macdonald and Broadway, in the Kitsilano neighbourhood. Some of their friends owned convenience stores and seemed to be doing well with them. They could take over this one and run it. It would be their own business. Mom trekked out with him to see it. The shop was in a great location, close to the beach and out toward a university.

  But the owners wanted forty thousand dollars for the business. And that didn’t include the cost of all the inventory Mom and Dad would have to buy upfront. They didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money. They looked at lesser locations. But even so, the cost to stock the business with supplies seemed insurmountable.

  So their minds turned to restaurants. It was a business they already knew, and without the same upfront costs. Like Dad, Mom had been assigned by immigration officials to restaurant work. She spoke English, so they had placed her at the Hyatt. Between the two of them, they already knew how to run both the front and back of house.

  They looked at a few available spaces in Vancouver. Each night, Dad would pull out his calculator. He’d sketch out on pieces of grid paper the cost of each restaurant, the monthly rent and projected income. And he’d look at their meagre savings and what they thought they’d be able to borrow from the banks. Each time, he’d look up at Mom, brow furrowed. The numbers didn’t add up.

  Then Uncle Zachary came to them with news about a Chinese restaurant for sale, priced within their budget. The only problem was that the restaurant wasn’t in Vancouver. It wasn’t even in one of the closer suburbs, such as Burnaby or Richmond. The restaurant was about an hour outside of Vancouver, in a town called Abbotsford—a town they had never heard of.

  Abbotsford. When they looked at it on the map, it seemed so far. It would mean leaving behind all their family and friends, for a place they knew nothing about.

  At the same time, it seemed to present a number of opportunities. It was affordable. And, from what they could tell, there wouldn’t be much competition in a place like Abbotsford.

  As an added bonus, working an hour away meant they had an excuse to move out of Ye Ye’s house.

  * * *

  About a week later, Uncle Zachary drove Dad and Mom out to Abbotsford to see the restaurant for themselves. It was the first time any of them had seen the town. When they took the exit off the highway, they were surprised to find long stretches of farmland. It reminded Dad of Jingweicun.

  Even in the town centre, the buildings were no more than two or three storeys. They lined only the handful of main roads. On South Fraser Way, what looked to be the main road, Uncle Zachary slowed his car to a stop, parking next to a white building. It was the Legion Hall, a stucco building with red trim. The restaurant was inside the hall.

  Mom and Dad gawked from the car. The windows were framed with dusty-looking curtains. The sign on the side of the building was sparse. “Legion” was written in black cursive and “Restaurant” in thick block letters. A Pepsi sign hung to the right, above the entrance.

  The signs and building looked faded and dated. The “Open” sign on the door looked hand-drawn.

  I interrupted Mom as she spoke. It occurred to me that I’d only ever seen a couple photos of the Legion, but never one of the exterior. From his spot on the couch, Dad stirred. We thought he’d been sleeping, but apparently he’d been listening the entire time.

  He yawned, then stood up. A few minutes later, he returned with a photo album. He pointed to a picture and handed it to me.

  “Here,” he said.

  I looked at the picture. It was just as they’d described: a dusty-looking building and a faded sign. But something caught my attention when I looked at the restaurant’s sign.

  The word “Legion,” was scrawled in black cursive, just as Mom had said. Beside it was the word “Restaurant” in big block letters. But it was the words underneath that caught my eye.

  “CANADIAN AND CHINISE CUISINE,” the sign read.

  I looked at the words again, spelling the letters out loud, to be sure.

  “C-H-I-N-I-S-E.”

  I looked from the photo, up to my dad, then back at the photo.

  “Dad,” I said, handing him back the photo. “Do you notice anything strange about the sign?”

  He looked at the photo, leaning in close to read the letters.

  “Canadian and Chinese Cuisine,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “You don’t notice anything strange about the spelling?”

  “Chinese Cuisine,” he repeated. “C-H-I-N-I.” His voice dropped. “Oh.”

  He was silent for a moment. He shook his head back and forth, like he couldn’t believe it.

  But then his chest began to heave up and down. His shoulders were shaking. He was laughing.

  “Frances,” he said, passing the picture to her. He was gasping for air now. “Frances, look.”

  Once she realized what he was pointing at, she grimaced. She didn’t find it as funny as he did. But that seemed to make him laugh even harder.

  He pulled his glasses off his face, cackling with his entire body.

  “We had no idea!” he said. “The people in Abbotsford must have laughed and laughed. And we had no idea!”

  * * *

  Staring from the car window that day, Dad wasn’t looking at the dirty windows or the chipped paint. Instead, he saw the library next door. And on the other side, the office for an insurance company. Across the street, construction crews were building what looked like a new strip plaza. Next to him, he saw a steady flow of traffic, what seemed to be a reasonably busy street. What he saw were customers. Potential.

  Less than a month later, he and Mom signed the contract to purchase the restaurant.

  They paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the business. Of that, thirteen thousand came from their own savings. One thousand came as a loan from one of Dad’s friends, a young man named Hon Ming Woo, whose mother had been one of the eight people in the room with Dad at the Guangzhou immigration office. The rest came from the bank.

  Ye Ye disapproved of the decision. He had worked hard for decades to build a life in Vancouver. He and Ah Ngeen had scrimped and saved and sacrificed to buy a house, a car—unimaginable luxuries compared to their lives back in China. They’d brought Dad to Canada to share in it. They thought they were giving him opportunities they’d never had. And now Dad was turning his back on it all and moving to a small town nobody had ever heard of.

  There was a fight, and then a declaration.

  “If you move out,” Ye Ye told them, “you’re not welcome back.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Glace Bay, NS.

  Spring 2016

  As soon as Anthony and I crossed the New Brunswick–Nova Scotia border, driving over the Missaguash River, fat, lazy snowflakes began dropping down onto our windshield, melting instantly onto the glass.

  It got heavier as we drove deeper into the province. By the time we reached Truro to fill up on gas, it was a blizzard.

  The original plan had been to drive at a leisurely pace toward Sydney. There, on the eastern tip of the province, we had a hotel room booked for the night. It should have been a straightforward, five-hour drive, leaving lots of time to pop into Chinese restaurants along the way. But because of the snow, traffic on the highway had slowed to half speed. And when snow turned to blizzard and it became difficult to see the road, traffic slowed right down to a crawl. One after another, we inched along the highway, each car following the next faithfully into the fog.

  Anthony glanced nervously at the GPS. He muttered under his breath, “It’s still 160 kilometres to Cape Breton Island.” From there, he said, it would be another 130 kilometres to Sydney.

  “Even if we drive straight to Sydney, at this speed it’ll be late by the time we get there,” Anthony said. He was nervous about driving in this weather in the dark. “These tires,” he said, “they’re basically just painted on.”

  We opted
to be safe, abandoning our plans to make any stops.

  It was already dark by the time we approached the Canso Canal Bridge, a narrow swing bridge that would take us onto Cape Breton Island.

  For several hours, we’d been reasonably lucky. A giant tractor-trailer had been right ahead of us, carving fresh tracks into the snow for our tiny Fiat to follow. For those hours, the truck had been our guide. But just as we made our way toward the causeway, the trailer turned off the road toward a gas station. I swung around to look at the gas station. Several other trucks were parked there too. The road leading onto the bridge was empty.

  “Is the road shut down?” I asked.

  “There’s no sign or anything,” Anthony said. “It doesn’t look like it.”

  His fingers were clamped around the steering wheel, his focus entirely on the road. We’d already passed the gas station. There was no choice but to drive forward.

  We drove slowly, warily, onto the bridge.

  About halfway across, a loud crash came from beneath us and I let out a small yelp. The storm waves were crashing up against the side of the bridge. Sheets of water sloshed up and over our car. Anthony just kept driving, stone-faced, keeping a tight grip on the wheel.

  We drove onto the island and into total darkness. The lights were out. The storm must have caused a power outage. Between the blowing snow and near pitch-dark, even the highway signs were impossible to make out. It felt like something out of a horror film.

  Ahead of us, the road split. On the left, the road sloped upward and into darkness. On the right, the road also led into darkness.

  Anthony shrugged and chose the road on the right.

  We drove deeper and deeper into the dark, with only the headlights from our little Fiat lighting our way. Anything beyond the few glowing feet ahead of us was impossible to see. I could tell from Anthony’s silence that he was as worried as I was.

  I worried about getting stuck, in the tiny little car, in the middle of the road. I worried we’d get hit. Or worse, that we’d hit someone—or something. Between the snow and the darkness, it would be impossible to see a deer or a moose on the road. Our toy car was no match for a moose. Anthony drove with the hazard lights on, just to be safe.

  “If there’s a hotel or something, do you want to pull over?” he asked. Better to be safe than worry about the money we’d spent on a hotel in Sydney. I nodded, gratefully.

  On my phone, I did a quick search and brightened when I saw there were a few options ahead.

  “Over here, on our right, we should be approaching a motel.”

  He slowed to a crawl as we approached the foggy outline of a strip motel along the highway. But the sign was dark. The lights were out. The building was shuttered.

  “I guess it’s closed for the season.”

  A few minutes later, another motel just up the road. But again, the sign was out. The lights were out. My heart dropped. We tried this a few more times before we realized they were all closed. It was April, and technically still off-season. The entire island, it seemed, was closed.

  So we kept driving, Anthony’s knuckles clamped on the steering wheel. The giant knot growing higher and higher in my throat. All I could think about was that gas station back at the causeway. The bright lights and the warm coffee shop. The parked tractor-trailers and the truck drivers huddled together safely.

  What did they know that we didn’t?

  About half an hour later, we spotted it. A haze of orange light, just off in the distance.

  We kept driving and the light grew brighter. It was a snowplow. We had no idea who the driver was or where they were going. It didn’t matter. For the time being, that driver was the most important person in our world.

  Anthony breathed in quickly and sped up, until we were nestled in the truck’s glow. Safety.

  * * *

  The next morning, we woke up in our warm hotel bed in Sydney. We felt fortunate to have arrived safely. And after a shower and night’s sleep, we felt recharged. But, it turned out, the storm wasn’t finished with us.

  The reason for staying in Sydney was to catch the morning ferry to Newfoundland. But the snowstorm had delayed our sailing. Instead of setting out that morning, we would instead leave twelve hours later, at night. Suddenly we had an extra half-day to spend in Cape Breton.

  Over breakfast, we plotted out our backup plan. The hotel’s dining room overlooked the city’s waterfront. Below us was a long boardwalk promenade and a few tens of metres away, what looked to be a giant violin, about eighteen metres tall. When the waitress wandered over, she explained. “It’s the world’s largest fiddle,” she said, raising her eyebrows, as if to say, Go figure. She was new to Sydney.

  We would have found it strange too, except we had already encountered a number of similar attractions so far on the trip. There was the world’s largest dinosaur, back in Drumheller. Also in Alberta, we’d seen the “world’s largest” pysanka—an impressively detailed nine-and-half-metre tall Ukrainian-style Easter egg. That one was made even more impressive by the fact that it could move, rotating in circles on its perch in Vegreville. Less impressive was the world’s largest perogy in Glendon—a lumpy dumpling hoisted half-heartedly in the air with a giant fork.

  In Shediac, New Bruswick, Anthony had taken photos of me posing excitedly next to the world’s largest lobster. In Nackawic, New Brunswick, I was less enthusiastic about taking photos of the axe.

  The attractions didn’t just stop at the “world’s largest.” There was a giant Canada goose in Wawa, ON (the largest in Canada). And in White River, ON (the town where Lieutenant Harry Colebourn first encountered the little black bear he named Winnie—the bear that would inspire A.A. Milne to write his famous children’s books), a statue of the little bear. Many of them had been built in an effort to draw greater tourism to the tiny towns. Like Vulcan and its Trekkie tourism, the tiny towns hoped to send a signal to drivers passing by on the highway. “We’re here!” the attractions were built to say. “Turn off for a visit!”

  After breakfast, we decided to get back in the car and drive around the island a bit. There was still a blanket of fresh snow covering most of the smaller roads and trails, so the obvious sightseeing options, such as the Cabot Trail, were off the table. Instead, we’d have to stick to the highways and cities. As we drove around, we passed a large Chinese restaurant called Huang’s. It had a giant green, pagoda-style facade with yellow and red accents. The name “Huang’s” was spelled out in huge, bright-red letters. It looked like what you might expect if Disney were to build a Chinese restaurant.

  It reminded me of a similar-looking restaurant we had passed in Truro the day before. That restaurant, The Chow Family restaurant, also had a pagoda-like facade, painted in green, yellow and white. Its owners, too, had spelled out their restaurant’s name in bright, cartoonish lettering. The more I thought about it, the more the two restaurants seemed eerily similar.

  And then, a few minutes later, in Glace Bay, another Chinese restaurant. This one had a modest exterior, unlike the other two, but the name caught my eye. It was called Huang Family Restaurant. At this point, I was curious. Anthony parked outside the restaurant and walked over to the nearby Tim Hortons. Meanwhile, I made my way inside.

  Inside, the waitress, a middle-aged white woman, seated me at a small table near the front with faded banquettes and paper printed placemats. At the back was a door leading to the kitchen.

  There was a menu at the table I glanced at very quickly—chow mein and chicken balls.

  The waitress turned around to head back to the bar. But before leaving, I noticed her eyeing me up and down. After a few moments, she returned with a laminated piece of paper. “This is for you—just in case,” she said. I looked down. It was a different menu, written in Chinese. I looked at this one carefully. It was full of “authentic” Cantonese dishes. It was a second menu, meant for Chinese customers.

  As I scanned the menu, a thin, middle-aged Chinese man with a salt-and-pepper mustache walked o
ut from the kitchen and through the dining room. I heard him giving instructions to the waitress in English, something about his car needing repairs, before heading back toward the kitchen.

  He was the restaurant owner, Allen Huang. I flagged him down and asked about the two menus. I’d seen two menus in Chinese restaurants in cities like Vancouver or Toronto before, but not in any of the smaller towns we’d visited on this road trip. He laughed and responded in Cantonese. When he’d first started this restaurant back in 1993, it had been a chop-suey-only restaurant. It was chicken balls and spring rolls and fried rice.

  He was amazed at first by the food, he said. In China, everything he cooked was made from fresh. A chicken went from flapping its wings to steamed on a plate in less than half an hour. But here, people were fine with everything cooked from frozen, and even expected it. He gave me a look as if to say, Can you believe it?

  He paused for a moment. The waitress was back to deliver news on the car repairs. There were delays. “No,” he said firmly in English. “I need it by this afternoon. Tell them that.”

  He turned back to me. Glace Bay had been entirely white when he moved here. It was a former coal-mining town, and his was the only Chinese restaurant. So his business relied on chop suey and chow mein. But four years ago, that changed. An old junior high school in Glace Bay was converted into a private English-language school. Suddenly the town found itself playing host to hundreds of young people from all over the world who were looking to improve their English before heading to university in Sydney. Many of those foreign students were from China.

  A few of them walked into Mr. Huang’s restaurant expecting a taste of back home, but found themselves confused by the chop suey menu. Ever the entrepreneur, Mr. Huang realized these students were a market, so he created his second menu.

  The waitress came back with good news on the car. Mr. Huang smiled and stood up to follow her.

  Before he left, I remembered the over-the-top restaurants I’d spotted in Sydney—the cartoon-like decor and the brightly coloured signs. I asked him about them, whether the restaurant with the similar name, The Chow Family restaurant, and then the one that shared Chow’s similar decor, Huang’s Restaurant, were connected with his. He grinned.