by Ann Hui
Ms. Huang eyed us each time she passed. “That’s it?” she said, tsking at the small helping on my plate. Her eyes widened, an attempt to intimidate. “You should eat more!”
The phone rang and she rushed back into the kitchen. This had already happened a number of times throughout our visit. Each time, the phone would ring and she’d excuse herself. “Hello restaurant,” she said each time into the phone. At first, I assumed they were customers calling in their orders. But each time, she would switch to Cantonese soon after. I realized they were friends, or relatives.
When she returned to our table, I asked her if it was normal for her to receive so many calls in a day.
She hesitated. She seemed to be mulling something over. Whether or not to tell me something.
A few seconds later, she gave a small nod, as if willing herself to continue.
“Today is my birthday,” she said quietly. She used Cantonese slang for “birthday,” literally translating into “cow” and “one,” because the characters, when combined, form the Chinese word for “birth.”
“My fifty-fifth.”
That was why the phone kept ringing. Her relatives from across Canada and China were all calling to wish her a happy birthday.
She smiled shyly.
I was startled. By then, we’d already been talking for well over an hour.
I turned toward Anthony, translating quickly what she’d just said. “It’s her birthday,” I said. His eyes widened in surprise.
“Happy birthday,” he said to her quickly.
“Happy birthday,” I repeated in Cantonese.
I asked her what she had planned for the day.
But Ms. Huang only shrugged.
“I work,” she said. Originally her husband had planned to come for a visit. But just as we had been derailed by the storm—and the lack of ferry service—so too had he.
She shrugged her shoulders again, as if to say, No big deal.
“It’s just a birthday.”
“Will you have cake to celebrate?”
She just laughed, as if the idea was outrageous.
“It’s just like any other day,” she said. “I’ll have dinner after work.”
“By yourself?”
“By myself.”
“What will you eat?”
“There’s a free-range chicken in the freezer that my husband brought on a previous visit,” she said. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
Each time she answered, I translated what she’d said for Anthony. I could see his eyes darting back and forth, looking at her, then imploringly at me. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing as I was, and wondering what we should do.
Ms. Huang looked at both of us, once again taking in our astonished expressions. She paused for a few moments again. It seemed she wanted to gather her thoughts.
This was all normal to her, she explained. “Of course I think about him. And of course I miss them,” she said of her husband and family. But for them, this made sense. It worked for them.
Anyway, her days of living like this were numbered. The kids were trying to persuade them to shut down one of the restaurants.
“They don’t like me being here by myself.” She let out a small laugh. The thought seemed to make her happy. “They say I’m getting older, and if anything happens, nobody will know.”
When the restaurant began clearing out, I asked if she could show me her apartment. She seemed reluctant, but agreed all the same. “There’s not much to see,” she said, leading me down a cluttered hallway. She opened a door and walked into a room filled with stacks and stacks of spare light bulbs, Styrofoam takeout containers and other restaurant supplies. Behind all the storage was a couch and a television. It was her living room.
Just like the restaurant behind us, the space was sparingly decorated. Here, she allowed for a few framed photos. Some pictures from Stacey’s graduation. “This is when she got her master’s,” Ms. Huang said proudly. “That’s Kacy,” she said pointing at another photo. “At a formal.”
Richard had just graduated from university, she said. “I should put a picture of him up too. Hopefully, he’ll have a job soon,” she added.
It reminded me of something she’d said just minutes earlier, in the restaurant. Just moments after I told her about my own dad, and how he’d run a restaurant when we were growing up, she’d nodded, lost in thought.
“This is what we do,” she had said. “We work, work, work until the kids all have jobs. That’s when we stop working.”
* * *
A short while later, we pulled out of the Kwang Tung parking lot and turned back toward the main street. Both of us were silent, lost in thought. Ms. Huang’s words were seared into my brain.
“My life is simple.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“Today is my birthday.”
We drove slowly, following the road to the tip of the coast, then circled back in the direction we’d come. We passed the restaurant again and made our way back onto Main Street. We passed an inn and then a drug store. When I saw a convenience store, I grabbed Anthony’s arm. “Stop,” I said.
“Here?”
I told him I wanted to grab something quickly and stepped out of the car.
In the store, the shelves were piled high with knick-knacks and bags of potato chips. I had hoped to find a birthday cake, but there wasn’t even fresh bread, let alone a bakery section. Finally, I spotted by the cash register a large, round tub of Moritz Icy Squares chocolates. I picked up the tub, pausing to wipe the dust off my fingertips. The price tag read $6.99.
It wasn’t much. But it was something.
Back at Kwang Tung, Ms. Huang was in the kitchen. Once again, she was on the phone.
I waved at her from the doorway, and she looked at me, surprised.
“Hold on a minute,” I heard her say into the phone in Cantonese.
“It’s not a cake,” I said, handing the chocolates to her. “But happy birthday.”
She stared at the chocolates in her hand, in disbelief. A goofy grin spread across her face. Eventually, she threw her head back and laughed. She looked genuinely thrilled.
“Thank you!” she said, following me as I headed back out the door. “Thank you!”
Simple pleasures, I told myself.
* * *
The next morning, we parked our tiny Fiat in the lot beside the St. John’s International Airport. The car, originally white, was now coated in a thick layer of grime. The dirty slush from the Coquihalla Highway, the dust from the Prairies and the grey sludge from the Nova Scotia snowstorm clung to every surface. The lettering on our front plate, “Beautiful British Columbia,” was completely covered in soot.
After eighteen days on the road and 9,625 kilometres, we had completed our journey and were ready to fly home to Toronto. We had eaten more spring rolls and plates of chow mein than I cared to think about. I had a folder in my suitcase filled with the menus of Chinese restaurants we had visited from coast to coast.
As we made our way toward the terminal, I thought about the questions I had set out to answer with this journey. One question—whether these chop suey restaurants were still operating, and whether the tradition of “fake” Chinese still existed—that one had been answered pretty quickly. It had been clear the moment we set foot in Amy’s, back in Vulcan, that the tradition was not only continuing, but thriving.
Another question I’d been hoping to answer: What brought them here? When I’d first set out on this trip, I’d imagined the stories we might hear. Thinking about the size and scale of this country, and of the many thousands of Chinese who have wound up here, I had imagined the stories would differ dramatically. In many ways, they had. The stories had ranged from heartbreaking to awe-inspiring.
But then I thought about the families we’d wound up meeting. I thought about Mayor Choy’s mother, Jean, how she had clasped both my hands in hers, speaking to me in Toisanese and sending us off with a huge grin. Ther
e was Mr. Yu, the Deer Lake restaurant owner who grinned when he spoke about his daughter in university. And Ms. Huang, describing her sick toddler. Their stories of what brought them here and why, I realized, were all the same. And all along, the question I’d been looking to answer had been wrong.
It wasn’t what they came for, but who.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Burnaby, BC.
December 2016
Toward the end of December, Dad was growing restless. He was getting tired of my questions. It was starting to feel like I was asking the same things over and over again, without clear answers.
There was one question in particular he was never able to properly answer: Why had he been left behind all those years ago?
At times, his responses were vague. Once he told me it was because of rules surrounding his residency. Because Dad had lived in Guangzhou, at a different address from Ah Ngeen in the village, she wasn’t able to do their applications together. But that didn’t explain the thirteen-year delay. Another time, he told me Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen had made earlier attempts to bring him to Canada, but that some administrative complication had come up. He didn’t explain what that complication was. Another time, it was something different altogether. He mumbled something about “buying papers.” But, when pressed, he wouldn’t elaborate further.
Mom had given me yet another answer. And so too had one of my aunts. Nobody seemed quite clear on the details.
Because of Dad’s evasive replies, I couldn’t figure out whether he didn’t want to talk about it, or whether there were still details even he didn’t know.
So I drove out to an elementary school in Burnaby to see my Aunt Janice. There was still snow on the ground, and the roads were icy. I made my way gingerly up the sidewalk, climbing a set of stairs toward a blue door. Inside, the walls were covered with brightly coloured drawings and student photographs. From the classrooms came the sounds of kids tittering, of teachers trying to speak over them. I looked around me until I spotted a sign pointing to “Administration”—the principal’s office. Aunt Janice’s office.
Aunt Janice is the older of Dad’s two younger sisters, born fifteen years after him. Looking at her and my dad, it sometimes seemed inconceivable that they were siblings. Their lives and upbringing had been so different. Aunt Janice greeted me in the hallway, wearing fleece pants covered with Santa Clauses, and a necklace made of Christmas lights. I looked around the office and saw that others were wearing bathrobes and flannel too. “It’s pajama day,” she said by way of explanation. Unlike my dad, who always seemed lost in thought, Aunt Janice had a lightness to her. She was clever and always quick with a laugh.
She invited me into her office, and as we sat down, I explained the questions I was trying to answer. I told her that none of us, including Dad, seemed to know much about Ye Ye’s first years in Canada.
She nodded slowly. “He really didn’t talk about it much,” she said.
“He didn’t talk to you about his life in China?”
“Not really,” she said.
“Or about his first few years here?”
She shook her head. She told me about how Ye Ye had worked on Great-Aunt’s farm for the first few years, growing Chinese vegetables, bok choy and choy sum, to be trucked into Chinatown. Eventually he left to work for himself as a carpenter in Chinatown. He developed a reputation for his craftsmanship and became known as the unofficial carpenter for Chinatown restaurants. The Hong Kong Cafe (where the original apple tarts were created). Foo’s Ho Ho Restaurant, with its neon blue-and-red sign. Ming’s, the splashy banquet restaurant on Pender. They were all clients of Ye Ye’s. When Mom and Dad had their wedding banquet at Ming’s, they ate off round red-and-black tables that Ye Ye had built by hand.
Aunt Janice’s memories of Ye Ye rounded out Dad’s descriptions. She saw the strict, stubborn side—how he would lose his temper, once throwing their plastic Christmas tree in the garbage because Janice and Jennie took too long to put it away. But she also knew the charismatic side: the Ye Ye who loved to tell jokes and charm his clients into becoming regulars. She told me about how he loved the Chinese opera and volunteered his time building sets. He would take her and Jennie along to job sites on the weekends and feed them apple tarts while he was working.
I asked why she thought he was so reluctant to talk about his past. I told her it was the same with my dad.
“Do you think it’s specific to our family?” I asked.
She thought about it before shaking her head no.
I wondered whether it was cultural—whether it was a Chinese idea. Perhaps it was tied to Ga chou but ho ngoi yeung—the idiom that translates, roughly, to “don’t spread your family’s troubles.” Perhaps they saw some kind of shame in talking about their struggles.
She shook her head again, thinking it over. She suspected it might be generational.
“I think that generation just felt like, what’s happened, happened,” she said. “They didn’t see the point in dwelling on the past. They just wanted to move forward.”
Then she added another idea, one I had never considered before. Maybe it was their way of protecting us from the trauma that they’d been through. Maybe they wanted to keep our lives untouched by the pain of their pasts.
Aunt Janice had kids too, my cousins Matthew and Cameron. I could tell she was thinking about them as she said this. She was nodding her head now. She seemed to understand it better than I ever could.
* * *
Almost an hour after I’d first arrived in her office, Aunt Janice mentioned three words that stopped me in my tracks.
She was talking about Ye Ye’s arrival in Canada, and Great-Aunt’s help in getting him here. Before I knew it I heard her say the same thing Dad had said once before: “Bought the papers.”
I stopped her. “What does that mean?”
“You know he bought papers from Great-Aunt, right?”
It was roughly what Dad had said once before. But when I’d asked him to explain, he had shut down the conversation. I had assumed he was referring to a payment Ye Ye gave to Great-Aunt to help cover the cost of sponsoring his immigration.
“Yes, but what does that mean?”
She explained how she had stumbled across the papers as a kid. They were documents for Ye Ye—citizenship papers, and health records. But some of the documents had different names on them. Some had his given name: Hui Man Yen. But others had a different name altogether: Wong Mun Goot. It was a name she’d never heard before.
Confused, she asked Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen about it.
“That was my name before,” Ye Ye told her.
Before what?
Gradually, it all came out. Great-Aunt’s offer to Ye Ye had come with one major condition. He’d had to give up his own identity.
“He was a paper son,” Aunt Janice said to me.
As soon as she said this, I let out a small breath.
I’d heard the term before. I’d learned about “paper sons” in history class, and come across it countless times in my research. After the head tax, and later the Chinese Exclusion Act, it was nearly impossible for Chinese to enter Canada—the first and only time the country excluded an entire group based solely on race. Even after the act was lifted in 1947, immigration was open only to the spouses and children of Chinese already in Canada. I’d read about how this led some Chinese who were desperate to come to Canada to do so illegally and “buy the papers” of those who were already here. How citizenship documents for husbands and sons and nephews were bought and sold to those desperate enough to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for them.
Each time I’d read accounts of these events, they had felt so distant, so far removed from my own life. I’d always thought they were the stories of the lo wah kew, the early Chinese-Canadians whose family names were engraved on Chinatown buildings. The events felt like chapters from a long-ago past. Never had I imagined any of it had touched our own family.
“So who was Wong Mun Goot?” I as
ked Aunt Janice.
She shrugged. She’d heard he was Great-Aunt’s son, but that he’d returned to China for a visit, and gotten into some kind of trouble. She’d heard that maybe he was in jail there. But in truth, she wasn’t sure. “No one really told us,” she said. “There were only stories.”
Back at home, I asked Dad about it.
As soon as I said the words “bought his papers” and “paper sons,” he let out a long sigh. It seemed as if he’d been dreading this conversation.
“Did you know Ye Ye was a paper son?”
Dad nodded his head slowly. For his first few years in Canada, everyone was hushed about it. But eventually Dad had pieced it together. That was the reason the family had split up.
Ye Ye had come to Canada as Wong Mun Goot, a bachelor. That was why he’d left Ah Ngeen and Dad behind.
When he finally brought over Ah Ngeen, he was only able to do so because he’d applied for her as his girlfriend, not his wife.
“Do you remember that photo I showed you?” Dad asked. That black-and-white photo of Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen all dressed up. The first time he saw Ye Ye’s face.
That photo, he explained, had been their “wedding photo.” They had staged a fake wedding to make their marriage official in Canada.
This was why they’d had to leave Dad behind. Neither of their fake identities in Canada accounted for a son. According to the Canadian government, Dad didn’t even exist. It was only later, after the government granted amnesty to these “paper sons,” that they could finally give up the charade. Between 1960 and 1972, about 12,000 Chinese came forward to the Canadian government about their real identities and have their status “adjusted.” It was only after Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen had confessed that they were finally able to bring Dad to Canada, legally.
I listened as he told me all of this, letting his words sink in.
Wong Mun Goot.
Fake identities.
A fake wedding.
