Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  Once in a while, a customer would walk in while they were having their dinner. “They’d see the food on our plates—steamed vegetables and rice—and they felt badly for us,” Mom said. They didn’t understand that these simple dishes, to Mom and Dad, were the most comforting, and reminded them most of home.

  Every Sunday was a day off. Abbotsford was still heavily religious, and the entire town was shut down on Sundays. So on those days, Mom and Dad would drive their little yellow Chevette around (Dad bought the car from a regular, who owned the used car lot down the street). Some weekends, they would drive the hour west to Vancouver to see Po Po, Uncle Zachary and his kids. Or occasionally, they would see Ye Ye, Ah Ngeen and my aunts. Ye Ye had cooled down, at least enough to let them in for stiff visits.

  Other times, they would head south of the border, driving into Bellingham. The groceries in Bellingham were cheaper and they could stock up with what they needed for the restaurant there. Then they would treat themselves to the brunch buffet at their favourite restaurant in Bellingham, gorging on crab legs and oysters and everything else on offer.

  * * *

  The few orders that did come in at night usually came from the bar across the hall. The bar didn’t have its own kitchen, so occasionally the Legion members, some of them older men who would sit and drink at the bar for hours, would order something to eat to soak up all that liquor. Others had a daily routine, where they would spend a few hours in the restaurant to break up an otherwise full day of drinking.

  Some customers would come in already drunk at nine in the morning, nursing the same cup of coffee until lunch. Others would come in just as Mom and Dad were about to close around nine or ten at night. They’d want to chat, and then sit and want to talk for hours. Dad would silently fume from the kitchen, but Mom never kicked them out. Often these same customers would return a few days later, and maybe order French fries. And then a full meal. And again, and again, until they became regulars.

  Occasionally, the drunk customers would get nasty. Even the seemingly pleasant ones they would otherwise make small talk with in the hallways and on the streets. After a few drinks, they would turn. “You’re a chink!” they would shout at my mom or dad.

  When things got especially bad, the staff from the bar across the hall would sometimes step in to help. And there was a police station down the road, which meant a lot of police officers became regulars. They would stop in throughout the day for coffee, and help out when they saw an especially unruly customer.

  One night, a man Mom recognized as having been to the restaurant before walked in. But this night, he was stumbling and slurring. He stank of liquor. As Mom walked past him carrying two plates of food to a customer, he said he wanted to order food.

  “Please sit down,” she said to him. “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”

  But the man grew irritated, belligerent. He shouted that he was hungry, and that she needed to serve him right away.

  “Why won’t you serve me?” he shouted, so loudly the entire dining room could hear. Loud enough that Dad heard him in the kitchen and came out to the dining room to see what was happening.

  “If you won’t serve me, why do you have a restaurant, you stupid chink?” he screamed. He pointed at the bump protruding from behind Mom’s apron—she was visibly pregnant with my sister Pansy. “Don’t have another kid, you stupid chink!”

  Dad walked straight toward them, placing himself between Mom and the man.

  “You need to leave,” he said in the calmest voice he could manage.

  The man just leered down at Dad, enraged. His face was red and his eyes were wild.

  Panicked, Mom ran behind the counter and grabbed a large tray. She squeezed herself between the man and Dad, covering her pregnant belly with the tray. She began shouting. “I’m calling 911!” she screamed. “I’m calling 911!”

  She kept shouting like this for a few minutes until the man eventually just slumped over. It wasn’t clear whether he felt defeated or simply lost interest. Either way, he turned around and stumbled toward the door.

  I sat there silently, feeling slightly sick as she recounted this. I had assumed they’d had to deal with stuff like this, but never actually heard details.

  “How did you feel afterward?” I asked her.

  She just shrugged. “Many of them only acted that way when they drank,” she said. She didn’t think those occasional incidents and behaviours meant the people themselves were racist—a distinction I found baffling. Why did it matter whether we called them racist, I thought, if their actions were clearly racist?

  But Mom was more interested in explaining their behaviour. Many of them were immigrants themselves, Eastern Europeans who had fled to Canada with their own stories of survival. Even many of the white locals—those who had been born in Abbotsford and lived there their whole lives—were living at or just below the poverty line, she said. They all had their own challenges, and were wondering why their lives hadn’t turned out the way they wanted. They were looking for someone to blame. Mom and Dad stood out. So this made them the target.

  I wondered if she was being overly generous. Or maybe she was simply downplaying the matter. Maybe it was easier for her to explain away the behaviour. She shrugged again. “We had a lot in common, but they looked down on us,” she said.

  * * *

  By their second year at the Legion, Mom and Dad had settled into a routine and started to make friends.

  There was Carl, an older European man who had formerly run the Ukrainian restaurant up the street. His wife had died some years ago. He had spent all his time when he was younger working and didn’t have many friends now that he was retired. The Legion became his regular hangout, and Mom and Dad his friends. Over cups of coffee, they would trade stories from their restaurants about the drunk customers who caused a commotion, or the ones who would come in each day and order nothing but coffee. They also traded recipes—Carl taught Dad how to make cabbage rolls and Dad showed him some of the dishes he had learned to make at the Nanking.

  There was also a retired schoolteacher in her seventies who came in often. She and Mom would chat for hours over coffee. As Mom got closer to delivering Pansy, the woman helped prepare her. She taught Mom what she’d learned from teaching—about when the baby’s brain development was most active, the best methods for teaching babies, and whether it would be a problem to speak both English and Chinese with a newborn.

  One winter day, in the thick of her pregnancy, Mom watched as heavy sheets of snow fell outside the restaurant. The restaurant and streets were dead silent, and they were debating whether to shut down the restaurant for the day. Just as they were getting ready to close, Mom saw a car turn the corner and slow down to park in front of the restaurant. It was the retired teacher, walking gingerly toward the restaurant carrying a large platter in her hands.

  “What are you doing here?” Mom asked.

  The woman lifted the lid from the platter and steam rose up, carrying with it a vaguely perfumed scent. It was egg custard. My mom had been having pregnancy cravings the day before. She’d gone on and on to the woman about the milk custard she used to eat in Hong Kong. So the woman had made for Mom her own version of custard—a thicker European version. Mom almost wept, she was so grateful. She took a large spoonful. It was warm and sweet and delicious. It tasted like home.

  * * *

  On August 15, 1978, Pansy was born. Mom looked down at this squirming baby, her hair matted and wild, her face red from crying. The same way Po Po had looked at Mom. The way Ah Ngeen had looked at Dad.

  The plan, at least at first, was to keep Pansy at the restaurant. Maternity leave wasn’t even an idea that crossed their minds. Dad couldn’t run the cafe on his own and they couldn’t afford to hire a waitress. So they cleared out some space in the storage room. They put her bassinet and diapers between the canned vegetables and boxes of coffee filters.

  All day long, Mom would run back and forth. In the dining room, she’d wait tables
and serve customers just as she had before. Only now she’d have to run into the storage room every few minutes to check on Pansy as she slept. Mom would run herself dizzy going back and forth between customers and the screaming infant. Every feeding or diaper change would set things back in the restaurant. She was exhausted.

  As Pansy grew older, she became more curious by the day. She grew out of her bassinet, so they set up a small bed in the storage room instead. This they put behind a baby gate, to prevent her from running out into the dining room or kitchen during service.

  One day, Mom left her like that in the storage room. She was only gone for a few minutes to check on customers. But when she returned, she saw that Pansy had grabbed hold of something, and was spreading it everywhere, including on herself. All over her hands and face was a white powder, smeared in giant circles.

  Mom scanned the room, frantically trying to figure out what it was. She called Dad over from the kitchen to help. The bag of flour was intact and untouched, still sitting on the shelf. So were the baking soda and the cornstarch.

  Eventually, her eyes fell on a mouse trap that had been set up in the corner of the room. She pointed it out to Dad, and he walked over to pick it up. He flipped it over, emptying the contents. Into his hands fell a white powder that looked just like the stuff on Pansy’s face.

  Rodenticide.

  They raced to the hospital.

  At the hospital, they relayed to the nurses what had happened. Their stone-faced reactions said it all: Are you kidding me?

  And then Mom and Dad sat there in anguish. They thought about what they could have done differently. They couldn’t believe how careless they’d been.

  Eventually, the doctor came out to say Pansy was fine. It didn’t look like she had swallowed or ingested the powder. She had just been playing with it, smearing it on her cheeks like makeup.

  He put Pansy, still squirming and laughing, into my mom’s arms. Then they went home.

  They made the decision to hire a babysitter the next day.

  * * *

  After a few years in Abbotsford, some of the locals grew used to seeing Mom and Dad around, walking up the street pushing Pansy in her stroller. But others still treated them like a curiosity.

  There were only a couple of other Chinese families in town that Mom and Dad knew of. There was the family who ran the restaurant at the Park Inn, the “fancy” Chinese place. They met briefly, the other family popping in to say hello as soon as my parents took over the Legion. But as soon as they heard that Mom and Dad didn’t play mah-jong, they quickly lost interest. My parents never heard from them again.

  And there was one other Chinese man who moved in briefly, not long after my parents. He opened a Chinese restaurant across from Sevenoaks mall called Victory. But not long after, he was at the Legion, complaining to Dad about how there were no customers in Abbotsford. Soon, he was leaving the lights off in the restaurant to avoid paying the electricity. Then he packed up and left Abbotsford altogether.

  But around 1980, a curious thing happened. Around that time, news surrounding the Vietnam War was changing. The stories were now focusing on the devastation the war had caused, and the many homes and lives it had destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were fleeing their country in boats, while groups like the UN, and countries like Canada, came to their aid.

  Tens of thousands of these “Vietnamese boat people” wound up in Canada as refugees. And because of Abbotsford’s large religious community, about two hundred of these families wound up there, many of them sponsored by local churches.

  Almost overnight, there were hundreds of other East Asians in Abbotsford. Sure, they were from an entirely different country with a different culture and history. But they looked a little like my parents—at least to the locals in Abbotsford. Like Mom and Dad, they too were outsiders.

  Suddenly my parents found that they stuck out just a little bit less.

  At first, Mom and Dad greeted this with amused detachment. They felt sympathy for these newcomers, but were so busy just trying to run their restaurant and keep afloat themselves. Mom was also pregnant with a second child, Amber. So they gave them little thought.

  But one day, a Vietnamese man walked into the Legion. He was the first of the refugees to come into the restaurant. Many of them had taken jobs on the farms and didn’t have money to be eating at restaurants. But that day, the man approached Mom timidly, greeting her with a smile and introducing himself.

  He explained that his family was staying with a white family from the church. They were kind and generous, he said. They had treated his family warmly and given them a place to live and food to eat. But day after day, the meals the family fed them were so completely foreign. He wanted nothing more than a bowl of steamed white rice. He glanced up at her nervously.

  Mom went into the kitchen to tell Dad, who scooped a generous mound of plump white rice into a bowl. The both of them returned to the dining room, then watched as the man gulped down the contents in big, greedy bites. Afterward, he thanked them over and over again.

  Mom shook her head. “Anytime,” she said. “Come back with your family anytime.”

  From that point on, the man would return periodically with his wife and kids in tow. Each time, Mom and Dad would serve them rice with steamed Chinese vegetables, or broth made out of pork bones, or whatever else they were able to scrape together. The dishes were mostly Chinese, not Vietnamese. But there were commonalities. Vietnam had, after all, once been a Chinese colony. Rice and noodles. The wok. Stir-fries. Soy sauce.

  Gradually, some of the man’s friends began to frequent the cafe as well. As they got to know each other, Mom would try to give them stuff, trying to pass on some of their old household items, like Pansy’s old baby clothes or other things they no longer needed around the house. But they always refused. The clothes, the household items—all of that stuff they were already getting from their sponsor families. The food was what they wanted. It was the food that comforted them.

  They also began turning to Mom and Dad for advice. A few of the Vietnamese men moved into construction, doing repairs on houses and buildings in the area. They asked Dad about starting a business—how to find the right forms to fill out, how to do their basic accounting. “Ah Hong Goh,” or “Big brother John,” they would call him.

  It seemed like such a short time ago that Mom and Dad had been the newcomers. They had been the ones fumbling around trying to figure out how to start their lives in a new place. Friends and strangers had stepped in to help them and to provide advice. And now they were the ones giving advice.

  It hadn’t always been easy, but this country and this community had been good to them, allowing them to move in and start their new lives. Mom and Dad felt grateful for this. Now, they were grateful for the chance to pass this on. It made them feel good.

  * * *

  In 1981, the company that ran the Park Inn, the “fancy” Chinese restaurant in Abbotsford, called my parents. They wanted to know if Mom and Dad would want to take over. They walked over to take a look. They’d walked past the hotel many times in the past. It was just a five-minute walk from the Legion, and they’d gawked enviously at the lobby and huge dining room.

  But that day they walked inside, into the dining room. They took in the mahogany wood tables, oak chairs with upholstered cushions. Compared with the Legion, with its vinyl chairs and the counter Dad had built out of plywood, the Park Inn looked like a five-star restaurant. It was without a doubt the fanciest place in Abbotsford.

  They decided to sign on, on a trial basis. Mom and Dad would come on board as employees before deciding whether or not to take over altogether.

  From the first day, they were shocked at how different things were at the Park. There were easily three times as many customers passing through each day. But here, they had staff—cooks to help Dad out in the kitchen, and waitresses out in the dining room to help Mom with the orders. And the Park was only open for breakfast and lunch. Suddenly, they we
nt from working twelve hours each day to eight or nine. By this time, Mom and Dad had two kids, so this meant they had time to actually spend with my sisters each night.

  After a few months, they agreed to take over the restaurant completely.

  At first, Dad took the same approach as at the Legion. He kept things the same as they’d always been, using the same recipes and methods as the former owners. But they had seen by then in Vancouver that the most fashionable Chinese restaurants had buffets or “smorgasbords.” The all-you-can-eat style of dining, popularized in Quebec in the 1960s by Chinese restaurateur Bill Wong, had spread all over Canada. For many customers who walked into the Park, it was what they expected from a Chinese restaurant.

  So Dad decided to do a buffet. The restaurant already had warming tables and other equipment from its catering business. And it made his job easier. Instead of cooking every order individually, he and his cooks could prepare all of the dishes at once and only replenish throughout the day as necessary. It also limited the number of menu items he had to have available to customers, cutting down the number of ingredients he had to order and have on hand. The customers liked it too.

  Taking over the Park meant a bigger income. Mom and Dad were keen savers, and just two years after starting the Legion, they’d bought their first home, a brand-new split-level on Astoria Crescent. With the money they were making at the Park, they were even able to buy a second home, an investment property they rented out on Geneva Court near the hospital. For the first time in either of their lives, they were comfortable. They were earning steady incomes and could afford small luxuries they’d never before imagined.

  Every once in a while, Dad would look over at the buffet tables and think of Jingweicun. He’d remember eating boiled yams day after day. He would think back to those days on the farm, of how sparingly he’d had to portion his classmates’ pork. If there’s food, you should eat it, his relatives had told him before he left.