by Denise Chong
Leip advertised his café as “The Largest Modern Restaurant on the St. Lawrence.” He could stand by the claim: his 121–seat establishment was staffed, at its busiest, by six cooks, two dishwashers, seven waiters and two cashiers. The menu was beyond compare. Within its pages, one could find the standard fare of “Americanized” Chinese food, from chicken balls (but made with delicate coatings that drew raves) to chow mein (including the perennial favourite, the chow mein bun). But as well, it offered cuisine that one would expect to find in the dining rooms of storied resorts and grand hotels, including Malpeque Oysters Rockefeller and seared Nova Scotia sea scallops, and smoked Winnipeg Goldeye. Leip put his signature on his restaurant with the menu’s daily specials, deciding them the night before, according to what he’d bought and had shipped in or what was in season. If venison or bear steak, he had paid a hunter for them. If lamb chops, a local sheep farmer had raised the lamb and butchered it. If sturgeon, an angler had taken it from the St. Lawrence River; if whitefish, from Lake Ontario. Even the frog’s legs were from frogs trapped in the nearby countryside.
Sophisticated diners would recognize Leip’s restaurant as belonging to the tradition first made famous by Ruby Foo’s in Boston. Tired of virulent anti-Chinese sentiment on North America’s west coast, Ruby decamped from San Francisco and in 1923 opened Ruby Foo’s Den in Boston’s Chinatown. Her clientele were well-heeled Jewish families, many of whom managed or owned garment factories. Where timing is everything, Ruby hit the jackpot. First- and second-generation Jews, whose families had emigrated from European cities, saw dining out as a way to indulge their refined palates. Chinese cooking, which never combined dairy with meat, relied on clear broths, and allowed forbidden pork to disappear into say, an egg roll, sat comfortably with Jewish dietary customs. And, “eating Chinese” was at once a compelling bargain and a cosmopolitan experience. Ruby went on to open four more Ruby Foo’s restaurants, including, most recently, one in Montreal in 1945.
A similar attraction drew crowds to Leip Lor’s New York Café. Even the “mileage card”—the souvenir calling card handed out to patrons—suggested one had arrived. On the flip side of a photograph of the posh dining room, with its checkered floor, glass pendant lamps and ceiling fan, a detailed chart set out “DISTANCES FROM BROCKVILLE,” listing mileage from fifty-one cities, towns and villages. Some were as far away as Quebec City and Chicago. Some were only fifteen minutes down the highway: Prescott on the Canadian side, or directly opposite, reachable by a year-round ferry, Ogdensburg on the American side.
THE LORS’ RESTAURANT, open everyday of the year except Christmas Day, opened at half past eight in the mornings, and closed at half past eleven in the evenings Monday to Saturday and at ten on Sundays. The only respite in the long workday came mid-afternoon, when the restaurant closed in the interval between lunch and dinner. In summer, Leip would pile some of the family into his beat-up Dodge and they’d escape to their cottage four miles down the road for a swim or to fish off the dock. By late afternoon, one of them had to be back at the restaurant. The Lors had one standing rule: during opening hours one family member—the children counted, once they were old enough—had to be on the premises. The rule held even when Agnes’s beloved brother Charlie died. One of the daughters was designated to stay behind while the rest of the family went overnight to North Bay for the funeral.
On this cold February day, during the afternoon break, Joe wandered into the living room and came upon his father stretched out on the sofa. Maybe he was tired; how could he not be.
“Joe, would you play the piano for me?”
Joe felt honoured by his father’s request. His mother had been the one to insist that each of the children take piano lessons, which for five had been no small expense. The practising over the years had taken its toll on the piano; each end of the keyboard was missing two keys. Joe pulled back the stool, sat himself comfortably, and considered what to play from his repertoire of the Grade 9 syllabus of the Royal Conservatory of Music. He chose a Bach piece, as the composer’s music seemed both calming and meditative. If played well, Bach’s music would show off his dedication and hours of practice, virtues that his father would appreciate.
When Joe’s performance ended, Leip expressed his gratitude. Joe rose, pushed the stool back in place, and told his father he was going out to get some air. His father responded by saying, “If anything happens, promise me you’ll make sure you take care of your mother.” Odd thing for Dad to say, Joe thought. He grabbed his winter coat, planning to walk over to Delaney’s Bowling Alley to see if anybody he knew might be hanging out at the pool tables there.
LEIP LOR’S SUCCESS IN Brockville followed on that of his father, who’d brought him to Canada and later returned to China in the same year that Leip married Agnes. In 1909, father and son had been toiling, unhappily, in Havana, Cuba, when a compatriot from a neighbouring village in China, who had a laundry in Brockville, got word to him that the city had room for a second laundry. Settled by United Empire Loyalists who escaped the American Revolution by coming north, Brockville, the first city to be incorporated in Ontario—in 1832—boasted an array of factories on its waterfront, from tinsmiths to shipbuilding.
The elder Lor paid the Canadian head tax for himself and his twelve-year-old son, and opened Kwong Sing Laundry at the cheaper-rent end of King Street. His sign promised “First Class Service,” and to win his customers’ confidence, he attired his bachelor workers in immaculate white shirts and crisply pressed trousers. He allowed Leip two years of schooling, then put him to work in the laundry. When the elder Lor sold out twenty years later, he passed his investments of a piggery and some land near Brockville to his son.
By then, Leip had shifted his own obligations from China to Canada. He’d followed the familiar pattern of marriage in China, leaving behind a pregnant wife on his return to Canada. Shortly after the birth of a daughter, his wife died, leaving relatives to raise their child. A decade later, Leip decided he wanted to remarry in Canada. He asked a friend in the missionary society to help find him a Chinese wife, and a contact at the Presbyterian Church in North Bay turned up Agnes Young, a tall, striking girl with the posture of a dancer. She was twenty, twelve years Leip’s junior. After corresponding for a few months, the two married. Leip was impressed by her evident cleverness; Agnes was persuaded that “since he’s a Christian, he must be okay.”
From the start, Leip and Agnes divided the responsibilities in their new restaurant. Leip, the face of the business, ran the kitchen. He dealt with the cooks and did all the buying, travelling every few weeks to Montreal, sometimes including a side trip to Ottawa. In Montreal, he picked up general delivery mail destined for various relations and bachelors. On his way back, he’d stop to deliver it at their cafés and laundries.
Agnes focused on the customers. She scheduled the waiters and cashiers, did the payroll, and at close of day balanced the day’s cash receipts and transactions, staying up half the night if necessary to get it right. And, once Leip decided the next day’s specials, she typed the daily menu insert, which she then left for one of the children to copy on the Gestetner machine in the morning, the only time they ventured into their father’s basement office.
The personalities of this husband and wife team appeared to be complementary: Leip was outgoing, with a loud and resonant voice—he was capable of raising it to astounding volumes—to match his sociable, cigar-smoking ways. Agnes was charming, soft-spoken, both self-assured and shy. Yet when it came to the business, they were highly competitive. Leip had great confidence in his business acumen, as she did in her own. Like his family’s success, hers had been proven over two generations. Her family’s road from China to Canada had travelled through Philadelphia and Boston, where her father had been a merchant, and then to Montreal and finally North Bay, where he’d opened a laundry and a café. When Agnes was five, her mother, newly widowed, took her young family back to China, thinking she could stretch the family’s savings further there, only to de
cide two years later that a better future for her children lay back in the restaurant and laundry in North Bay. With her encouragement, Agnes would graduate from a business college in North Bay, and work as a secretary at a local insurance company.
Leip, mostly self-educated, had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education, well short of what Agnes had achieved. But when it came to business, he relied on intuition and gut feeling. Agnes prided herself on constantly thinking of ways to “improve” the family’s business. She relished checking out the competition. Whenever she took shopping trips to Montreal, she dined at Chinese-owned restaurants. If Ruth was along, she would pen “reviews” for her mother.
As stubborn as Leip was about giving ground on any matter, Agnes never held back on her opinions. The two clashed often, their arguments sometimes erupting into loud and prolonged rows. The Lor children accepted this tension between their parents, as if their reliably opposed opinions created the vitality and energy that kept the café thriving.
“EVERYONE KNOWS OUR FAMILY,” Agnes reminded her children. “Your father is respected in this town.” As a newlywed, Agnes had been impressed that people tipped their hat to her husband. And not just ordinary folk, but police, lawyers and judges. After hours, the police would invite Leip to ride along with them on their patrols. He’s famous, trusted and well liked, Agnes noted. And he was a leader. Leip was elected head of the local business association and was often quoted in the Brockville Recorder and Times. Agnes, always stylishly attired in an outfit that showed off her trim waist, with her hair swept up in a chignon, forbade her daughters from wearing shorts or baring their arms in public. Each time an adult they didn’t recognize passed them on the sidewalk with a “Hello, Miss Lor,” the daughters had to concede the wisdom of their mother’s lessons in modesty. In case Agnes missed something in teaching her children social graces she instructed them: “When you go to white people’s homes, watch what they do.” In North Bay, she had benefited from the tutoring of a proper English family.
The most telling way in which the Lors resembled a typical upstanding middle-class family was their participation in the church. As superintendent of Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church, Leip expected his children to earn perfect attendance certificates, and later, to teach classes themselves. All sang in the church choir. Joe took part in the minister’s bible class for teenage boys. Leip demanded piety on Sundays, forbidding his children to read comic books on that day. When he could, he attended Sunday service. Agnes, though devout, preferred to be the one who stayed behind at the restaurant. There were music lessons—piano, violin and organ—the girls joined Girl Guides and Christian Girls in Training, and Joe, cubs, then scouts. Gloria took figure-skating lessons (her talent eventually landing her a career with the Ice Capades). There was a family dog—named Judy. Games of cards—Agnes liked canasta—and Monopoly were played on the living room floor. There were annual forays to get a Christmas tree. In summer, Agnes cut flowers and harvested vegetables from her large garden.
Leip bought a waterfront lot because Agnes said she longed to have a cottage for the children to grow up with. He hired Bob Brown, a farmer whom he used as a handyman at the restaurant, to help him organize the building of a cabin and a dock. Every spring, Leip and the children put in the dock, hung the life buoy and took the boats out of storage. He put in the raft that he’d built himself, anchoring it offshore. Sometimes he took one of the children and set out with his shotgun to go duck hunting. Once he’d gone with another hunter in town after bear, and returned to regale the children with a story of how he got chased up a tree.
THE LOR CHILDREN CAME to take exception to one singular difference between them and their school friends: their friends had idle hours to meet up and do as they liked. The Lors couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t have to work at the restaurant. From the age of four or five, they were required to help with the laundry, done in the basement. The younger ones shook out the wet linen napkins, the older siblings hung them alongside the tablecloths on the clothesline. As the children became capable of heavier work, like washing, and then dangerous work, like ironing, their chores increased. Upstairs at the restaurant, they folded napkins, laid tablecloths and set the tables. When they could add and subtract, they worked the cash register. If they were too short to reach, they stood on a chair. When they were older still, they waited on tables, not only on weekends, but after school and, on very busy days, over the lunch hour.
There was one Chinese custom that the Lor children hoped their white friends would never learn about: the annual gathering of Chinese at the Brockville Cemetery. Tomb-sweeping day—the ritual of cleaning the tombstones, clearing the ground of weeds and, finally, sharing food that is first offered to the dead—is traditionally carried out around the full moon in the third lunar month. In Canada, spring’s later arrival pushed the rites into May. On the day, about twenty-five Chinese from around Brockville came loaded down with cooked dishes (one year, Leip arranged a barbecued pig from Montreal). The crowd, mostly men, many in jacket and tie, and the women, decked out in hats, headed for “Potter’s Field,” the section of the Protestant cemeteries set aside for those who died destitute or without kin, stillborn babies and convicts.
Amid the overgrowth of tall grass, Leip, standing in for all sons of ancestors, laid out an offering of a steamed whole chicken, roast pork, rice, fruit, tea, chopsticks, bowls and cups. He bowed three times, then trickled a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label around the few lonely tombstones with Chinese inscriptions. Before the crowd sat down for a picnic, one ritual remained: Leip took out the pistol he’d brought and fired a single shot into the air, alerting the dead that the living were here to pay their respects and to scare off evil spirits. Only once before, one December 31, had the pistol come out. At midnight (he notified the police beforehand), his pistol shot was the signal for the festivities and feasting to begin.
Apart from this annual visit to the cemetery, the Lor children’s sense of their Chinese origins faded early on. Agnes and Leip would have liked them to read and write Chinese, but neither had the time to teach them. Once, Leip hired a tutor for the older girls, but gave up when they refused to cooperate. That their parents harboured foreign traditions emerged sporadically, such as the time Agnes boiled chicken feathers to make a solution to soothe an itch for Valerie. Or when Leip showed them the bear claw he’d added to one of his health tonics, herbs infused with alcohol, lined up in large jars that previously held supplies for the restaurant. Or, more frequently, when their father, in an exuberant mood, would wake the entire family to join him in siu-yeh, the Chinese tradition of a shared late-night meal. But the children saw those occasions more in terms of their father’s deciding to cook something special, like oysters, breaking his rule of certain foods on the menu being exclusively for customers.
Still, one connection remained to the family’s shared Chinese roots: the bachelors who worked as kitchen help. The third floor was given over to a dorm for them, but they used a separate back staircase to access it. The children knew none by name, as they addressed them only by the appropriate Chinese titles of respect, which defer to age. Their limited acquaintance with the bachelors came by way of the red envelopes of li shee at Chinese New Year’s which the children deposited into their savings accounts, or else by snippets of the bachelors’ conversations that drifted from their stairwell as they passed by the door off the Lors’ eating area—mostly regret about gambling losses at mahjong—which the children hardly understood with their scant knowledge of Chinese.
All in all, the Lor children considered themselves to be as Canadian as any other family in Brockville. It came as a surprise, then, to the older girls, once they came into their teenage years, to realize that the only boys who befriended them were those whom they happened to be seated beside in class. Never did a boy ask them to a school social or dance, and sadly, they understood that it was never going to happen. Apparently there was no avoiding how boys their age, or the boys’ parents, sa
w them: the Lor girls were Chinese. Suddenly they were on par with another family in Brockville that they had considered they had nothing in common with, the city’s only other Chinese family, the Wongs, a couple with adult children who ran Diana Sweets Café. The realization unearthed a memory of boys yelling “Chinky, Chinky Chinaman!” at them when they were little. “They’re ignorant,” Agnes had advised. “If they stare at you, stare back.”
I hate being Chinese, the girls told each other.
AT DELANEY’S BOWLING ALLEY, one of the friends that Joe met there suggested they go for beers “across the bay,” code for crossing the river to the village of Morristown on the American side. In New York State the boys were legal. The minimum drinking age there was eighteen; in Ontario, it was twenty-one. All four boys were up for it, until someone suggested that they walk across the ice.
One of them balked.
Had it been January, a month earlier, he’d have been game. A prolonged cold snap could freeze the river at Brockville from one bank to the other. Back in the 1940s, people routinely walked across to avoid paying for the horse-drawn sleigh ferry that operated between Morristown and Brockville.
But this winter had not been a severe one. By late February, with fluctuating temperatures creating pockets of open water, to walk clear across was tempting fate. To go by road over to the other side involved taking the Prescott–Ogdensburg ferry, which ran year-round, then doubling back to Morristown.
“Two cases of beer if we make it.”
“There and back?”
