by Denise Chong
She assured Mr. Faulkner-Smith that she was native to China. She was born Fay-oi Lim and had immigrated to Canada three years before, in 1950. “I’d like to model for you.”
“Very well, since nobody has answered my ad,” the artist said, grudgingly. “But, do you own a cheong sam?”
“Of course!” Marion replied. “I’m Chinese!”
AMONG MARION’S CLASSMATES at Vancouver Technical School, the goal upon graduation was a secretarial position. For a Chinese graduate, a bigger hurdle was landing a job outside Chinatown, and somewhere other than a Chinese-owned business.
The Canadian Parliament had extended the vote and other rights of citizenship to the Chinese in Canada by this time, but other barriers of discrimination would be slow to fall. Employers regularly turned away Chinese applicants with “We don’t hire Chinese.” An exception was businesses with a Chinese clientele. When Canadian Pacific Air Lines began flying between Hong Kong and Vancouver, it needed “greeters” at the airport. Arriving passengers had little idea that one of them was none other than the “Yo-yo King,” Harvey Lowe. The voice of the weekly radio show “Call of Chinatown,” broadcast on Vancouver’s CJOR from the Bamboo Terrace nightclub, Harvey was best known for having won, at the age of thirteen, the first-ever yo-yo world championship, held in London, England. Jeanne Yuen, the friend of Marion’s who could whip up a dress overnight, had Canadian Pacific as a client at the agency where she was a secretary—her job was to verify that applicants to the airline could speak Chinese as they claimed.
Marion’s approach to securing her future remained unwavering: Learn English, Marion. Learn English. However discouraged she’d been when her father quashed her dream of going to university, she’d resolved to keep improving her language skills. Knowing that English would always be her second language, she was clear in her mind that when time came for marriage, she did not want a husband who was a recent immigrant like herself. What if we had legal matters or documents to deal with? She wondered if both of us are immigrants, we’d be doubly handicapped; one of us should be able to communicate perfectly in English. Better, she decided, that she marry someone Canadian-born.
One day, Marion was reading a local English daily newspaper and spied an advertisement for courses offered by the Elizabeth Leslie Fashion School. The Vancouver school was the second one opened by its founder, a finalist for the new Miss Canada pageant of 1948. The first, established the year after the competition, was in her hometown of Edmonton.
“For Modelling or for Personal Development,” the ad said.
Personal development; that’s for me. Marion suddenly thought about how she’d put all her effort into improving her ability in English, when obviously, comportment and self-assurance had just as much bearing on one’s success as an immigrant. She had only to recall the disastrous night out at The Cave, when she and her date sat glum-faced through the entire evening.
Of the ten girls in the four-month course, held three evenings a week, Marion Lim was the only Chinese. Much to her surprise, at the end of the course, the school’s director named her the top-ranked student. Each student had a photo shoot with John Gade, the city’s only high-fashion photographer, so that they’d have a portfolio to launch their careers. What the school didn’t say was that anyone serious about working in the fashion trade in Canada headed to Toronto, a city being transformed by postwar immigrants who’d lived in the great cities of Europe and brought their sophistication with them. The school’s only advice was that if the girls expected to be paid to model, they needed to accumulate experience by volunteering as hostesses for local women’s organizations, charities and community events. Eventually, the school might be able to add their names to its list of models that it referred for paying assignments.
MARION’S NEXT extracurricular course—she was still a high school student—was one in public speaking offered by the U.S.-based Dale Carnegie School, the originator of courses extolling “the power of self-improvement.” As recommended by the fashion school, she also made volunteer appearances to build up her resumé, including modelling for Mr. Faulkner-Smith, who painted several large canvasses of her in her cheong sam. She received more charity requests than she had time for, since her father still expected her to help out at the coat and hat check at W.K. Gardens.
When she graduated from Vancouver Tech, Marion decided to test whether an employer would be prepared to hire her as a model. She took her portfolio to Eaton’s. The department store had come to British Columbia when it bought out the Spencer’s chain in 1948. Mr. Milligan in the personnel department was enthusiastic about using Marion as a model, though he said Eaton’s didn’t have much work: “What we do is put you on the staff list for women’s wear, and then when we have an assignment, we call you.” And call her they did.
So began Marion’s professional modelling career. As Eaton’s made Marion’s name, the photographer John Gade and the fashion school funnelled ever more assignments her way. A model in Vancouver could earn as much as a hundred dollars for a day’s assignment, which was what Marion’s former classmates at Vancouver Tech working as secretaries could hope to make in a month. An evening assignment could earn her another seventy-five dollars. She became even busier when Eaton’s took its fashion shows on the road around the province to show off prêt-à-porter wardrobes, sell the collections, bolster the store’s image and reward devoted catalogue users. Always, Marion was the last model to walk down the runway, and in a show-stopping outfit.
From the start, Vancouver fashion writers gushed over Marion. “Vancouver’s Own and North America’s Most Beautiful Oriental Model,” wrote one. Another described her as “exotically lovely” and a “China doll.” Marion was the face of the Vancouver Eaton’s “Touch of the Orient” collections and of Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ “Fastest Routes to the Orient” advertising campaigns. In some of her more lucrative assignments, her lips advertised Max Factor lipsticks, and her smooth hands tempted the housewife to buy the newest convenience of domesticity, the automatic dishwasher.
MARION FUMBLED FOR the phone. She’d worked long hours the day before, with a modelling assignment in the morning and an appearance in the evening, and was sleeping in.
Nora Lowe paid no attention to the grogginess in Marion’s voice: “Marion, I’m throwing a big party tonight. You have to come.”
“I don’t have the energy to go out tonight. I was out late last night.”
“Ann Mark’s brother is here from Ottawa. He’s a good friend and I want you to meet him.”
Nora prided herself on being the first person whom Chinese of her generation would call when visiting from out of town. Nora knows everybody, people said, acknowledging as well that she liked nothing more than to bring people together. And so when Ann, a married friend, mentioned that her brother, Hin Lew, was in from Ottawa to visit their aged mother, Nora’s party planning kicked into gear. Is your brother married yet? Nora asked. No, he was still a bachelor.
“I can’t go, Nora. I’m too busy.”
That was not how Nora regarded life; not even Marion Lim could be too busy for a party. Life was meant to be full. Nora’s widowed mother had raised her to keep occupied; she and her eight siblings, besides public school, had private tutoring in Chinese and lessons in piano, music theory, violin, swimming and figure skating (with a chauffeur to ferry them to and from). While studying at UBC, Nora had found time for flying lessons. “The in-between times are for partying” was her motto. She and her husband, Harvey Lowe, the “Yo-yo King,” had a house designed for entertaining, with a ballroom that could accommodate one hundred. It had a sprung wood floor and a fully stocked bar.
“I’m not hanging up until you say yes.”
Marion knew if she said no and rang off, the telephone was only going to ring again.
“WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO find you a Japanese girl!”
Hin Lew’s friends said it only half-teasingly. They were concerned. Their career physicist friend had shown little interest in shed
ding his bachelorhood, something they each had taken care of long ago. At this rate, they told each other, no girl we know is going to be left.
Sixteen years earlier, in 1942, when Hin first arrived in Ottawa, the Chinese friends he made were mostly younger than him. They were of a generation still registering firsts: that year Robert (Kuey) Wong became the first offspring of Ottawa’s Chinese families to graduate from university, earning a commerce degree from Queen’s University. When Hin completed his undergraduate studies at UBC in 1940, a total of eighteen Chinese students were enrolled at the university.
At first, Hin had regarded Ottawa as only a hiatus between his master’s degree and his doctorate. Yet, in leaving Vancouver, the city of his birth, other than return visits every few years to his sisters and mother, he sensed he was leaving the west coast behind for good. The reason was the exhilaration he’d felt on coming east at encountering less discrimination in Toronto, and when he made the move to Ottawa, less again. In Toronto, he’d been emboldened enough to take out a white girl; nobody speared him with a censorious look. In Ottawa he found attitudes among Chinese and whites alike to be even more relaxed. He’d wondered at the time if those war years would be the best in his life, when he boarded with the kindly Mrs. Cowan and her family in Old Ottawa South off Bank Street; she’d bake his favourite pie, apple custard, and he’d help her clean up in the kitchen while they chatted.
Hin did his part for Canada’s war effort, working for the National Research Council on the use of ultrasound to detect submarines, experimenting in the Ottawa River right behind the NRC’s building. At the end of the war, he left to pursue his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Four years later, he returned to the Research Council to resume working alongside one of the world’s leading molecular physicists. Dr. Gerhard Herzberg had first come to Canada when he’d been forced from his academic post in Nazi Germany because his wife, Luisa Dettinger, was Jewish.
The biggest difference Hin found from his earlier time in Ottawa was the livelier social scene among unmarried Chinese. Young people in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto organized weekend excursions and exchanges and trips away. Ottawa’s appeal had much to do with the fun-loving Taiwanese ambassador who hosted parties and balls at the embassy residence. A golfer, he often invited the Chinese youth to be his guests at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, where, he pointed out—not without some smugness—Chinese were welcomed as club members but Jews were not.
The children of Chinese families in Ottawa had always taken it as a given that they’d have to look elsewhere else for their wife or husband. We’ve grown up together, they said. We’re like sisters and brothers. Not only was the community very small, but certain surnames predominated. As the Chinese saying went, “You don’t cook beef with beef.” Other unspoken biases narrowed their choices. In the way that those who learned to play bridge henceforth eschewed the game of mahjong, on one side of a divide were café owners, on the other laundrymen. Or, on one side, Canadian-born Chinese, and on the other, newer immigrants who’d come after exclusion, via Hong Kong.
But while courtships among Ottawa’s Chinese families were the exception, on Hin’s return he was mesmerized by one girl, Bernice, whose parents, Stanley and Marion Wong, owned the Canton Inn restaurant. Descended from Irish grandparents on her mother’s side, the fair-skinned Bernice thought she didn’t look Chinese at all. What mattered to her many Chinese suitors was that she was uncommonly pretty, and she had charm to go with her beauty.
On group cycling trips to the Gatineau Hills, Hin would try to manoeuvre his bike to ride alongside her, all the while noticing the sidelong glances of every other male. Bernice was only sixteen, still in high school, and Ottawa’s youth adhered to doing everything in a group, from cycling and hiking to skiing and skating. Still, Hin made his move. He secured two tickets to a performance of the famed Sadler’s Wells Ballet on the Ottawa stop of their debut North American tour, featuring Margot Fonteyn in Sleeping Beauty, and invited Bernice. She readily accepted. The two paired off frequently after that within the group, and Hin also tutored her in subjects at school. However, a year later, when Bernice left for McGill University, Hin lost out to a rival from Ottawa who was enrolled at McGill. Norman Sim, one of the five Sim boys, and brother of restaurateur Jack, was in his second year studying enginerring there.
In Montreal, Bernice was as much at home as she was in Ottawa. Her father had been a chef and her mother the maid for a Montreal widow of a captain with the Cunard Line. A generous woman, the widow had given Bernice and her parents their own spacious quarters in her Westmount mansion. When Bernice was young, she and her father would walk through McGill’s Roddick Gates, sometimes stopping to watch the players on the tennis courts. One day, her father pointed to the stately Moyse Hall and the arts building, and said to her, “Maybe someday you can go there.”
After Norman and Bernice were married in 1955, their friends, married and single, Hin among them, continued to drop by her parents’ home in Old Ottawa South in the evenings. They liked the refinement of Stanley Wong’s hospitality, including his offers of liqueurs. Hin was content, untroubled that he was approaching his mid-thirties, unmarried. He was absorbed in his work at the Research Council, where not a day went by that Dr. Herzberg—a future Nobel Laureate—didn’t think they were on the brink of a scientific breakthrough. Hin devoted himself to constructing an atomic and molecular beam laboratory, for which the Research Council had provided an empty room measuring thirty feet by thirty feet.
“I’M NOT GOING TO line up all night. I’m a bachelor!”
Hin could not be convinced. Jou-Juoh Lee—“JJ” to his friends—had joined with four friends and was trying to persuade him of a deal that he was certain wouldn’t come around again. Among those friends, Leslie Wong was in real estate and ought to know.
At nine the next morning at the downtown office of the Crown corporation Central Mortgage and Housing, three hundred lots in Riverview subdivision at Ottawa’s eastern edge would go on sale on a first-come, first-served basis, for two hundred and fifty dollars. The catch was that buyers had to sign a mortgage with the agency for a thousand dollars, to be forgiven if the purchaser built within two years. The agency also designated the type of house—bungalow, one and a half storey, or two storey—depending on the lot. The bargain, said JJ, was in the lot. They were fully serviced; the going price for such lots was two thousand dollars. The agency, set up to stimulate house building in anticipation of the baby boom, had heavily promoted the Ottawa sale in newspapers and on radio. Sure that the lots would be snapped up, JJ and his friends decided to spend the night in line.
Hin declared that he would not be participating. “I’m quite happy being a tenant. I don’t see that as a single man I have need of a house. And I don’t want the hassle of hiring and dealing with a contractor.”
But he laid out why JJ should go ahead: his future was securely in Ottawa, since he had a good job at the Department of National Defence; and he was in a serious relationship that looked headed for marriage. JJ was dating Helen Way-nee. Now divorced, Helen had returned to Ottawa from abroad, to help her aged mother care for June, Helen’s disabled sister.
Like Hin, JJ was not from Ottawa. The two had met at MIT, where JJ, the son of a county governor in China, attended on a full scholarship. The others—Leslie Wong, the realtor, Donald Sim, a lawyer and another of Jack’s brothers, and brothers Eddie and Bill Joe, one an engineer and the other a restaurateur, were born to Ottawa’s pioneer families. None had stayed in the family business; where once they’d lived in the back of a laundry or above a café in downtown Ottawa or Hull, now they aspired to a suburban home. One could imagine a family life where they’d meet their children’s teachers, help with their homework, read The Night Before Christmas aloud together on Christmas Eve—things that their parents, at the mercy of their businesses and struggling with English, didn’t have time for or couldn’t do.
That evening, Hin retired to his own bed.
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p; Early the next morning, he was woken by the telephone. It was JJ. “You can still get in on the sale if you hurry down here.” Apparently, some in line had changed their minds, including two of their friends. Hin roused himself and headed downtown.
NORA STRESSED TO Hin that, excluding herself and Ann as the hosts, all thirty guests at the party—fifteen men, fifteen women—were “eligible.”
As always, in drawing up her invitation lists, Nora gave careful thought as to which individuals might pair off. She could take credit for at least three introductions that had led to marriages. She decided that Marion Lim and Hin Lew, both fiercely determined people, were a match. Marion’s determination was legendary; everybody remembered how hard she had worked at learning English. As for Hin, he’d realized his dream of going to university on years of his and his mother’s scrimping and saving. His father had turned the success of his various businesses into ruin, dying penniless and leaving Hin’s mother to raise four young children. In the summers, the youngster Hin worked alongside her, snipping the ends off string beans and weeding between the rows at a market garden. In his teen years, he toiled in canneries up the B.C. coast. His sister, Ann, had a job at a Chinese produce store and at day’s end, brought home yellowed vegetables not fit for sale. To save bus fare during his four years at UBC, Hin rode his used one-speed bicycle to and from their house in Chinatown and the campus, six miles each way.
Nora realized there was an age difference between Marion and Hin of twelve years. That was for them to decide if it mattered. Certainly it didn’t show. Nora thought they’d make a handsome couple, both slender, tall and graceful.
Hin told himself that one had to admire Nora for achieving a balance of single women and men, and in such numbers. He thought about possible outcomes. No one has to come with any intentions, he decided. This is just a social gathering; one can hope for suitable collisions.
