Lives of the Family (3 page)

Soon after his son, Min-hon, was born, Harry left his family and began his second sojourn in Canada. By now, part owner of a café in Chinatown, he diligently sent money to help support his family. He kept Yee-hing in the style to which she had been accustomed: besides the usual personal girl servant for a wife (even poor women had such servants; to be sold into servitude was often the best a girl from a destitute family could hope for), she had a woman servant who did the housekeeping, washed the laundry, shopped and cooked. And he made sure that Min-hon received a good education, sending him to a school in the district town.

In 1930, Canada began a slide into what would become the Great Depression. China, owing to its silver-based currency, was spared—for the moment. Harry decided to pack in his life abroad; a dollar could be stretched many times further in China than in Canada. In the way a gambler might cash in his chips, Harry sold his share in the café, bid his goodbyes and left for China. As Harry liked to say, “Life is a gamble.”

BACK AGAIN IN
Golden Creek village, Harry added to his family when Yee-hing produced a second-born, a daughter.

Sadly, at age three, the girl succumbed to illness.

Now past forty, Yee-hing defied the odds and became pregnant again. For the second time, she delivered a girl. On the arrival of Fay-oi, Harry expressed disappointment with his wife. “You keep producing daughters!”

Harry still had unfulfilled ambition. “I would like more sons,” he declared, and announced his intention to take a second wife—one young and fertile. A wealthy friend of his in Canton arranged to send him a wife from among his seven household servants. At fourteen, Yip Jau-wen was one year older than Harry’s son, Min-hon. Yee-hing wept bitterly. Years later she would confide in Fay-oi: “What could I do about it? I could do nothing.”

At least Harry had the grace to keep his two wives separate; he installed Second Wife in his father’s old house on No. 9 Lane, and left First Wife in the house he’d built on No. 2 Lane. He moved between the houses, uniting his households for mealtimes at No. 2 Lane.

Within weeks, Second Wife was pregnant. The baby, a girl, died just days after birth. A few months later, Second Wife was again expecting.

As Harry bided his time, hoping for a son, he invested in a gambling house with a partner. The venture would turn out to be his undoing; such houses of chance run by men with the “Gold Mountain walk” marked them as targets. In short order, astute gamblers bankrupted Harry’s operation. Chastened, Harry pondered how to make back what he’d squandered. He decided his best option was another sojourn in Canada. First
Wife went to her parents for help; her husband didn’t have money enough for the boat passage.

With his in-laws’ generosity, Harry found himself once again on Canadian soil. His former associates happily took him back as a partner and as head chef in their restaurant business. Devoted patrons timed their dining out for nights when Harry Lim watched over the kitchen. And in Golden Creek, Second Wife delivered her absent husband a healthy boy.

FIVE YEARS INTO
Harry’s third sojourn abroad, the Pacific became a theatre of war. In July of 1937, in an act of aggression that took both China and the international community by surprise, Japan, for years encroaching in the north of China, launched a full-scale military invasion of the country. Its planes swept down from the north, pummelling China’s cities with bombs. By autumn, its armies had stormed into the country’s central cities. Foreigners who escaped before Japan blockaded Chinese ports told of the Japanese burning and plundering, conducting mass executions, and murdering and raping at random, including searching house to house for “flower maidens.”

A year earlier, Min-hon, by then married and, in the hierarchy of a Chinese family, superior to his mother, had uprooted everyone to the Portuguese colony of Macau, along the coast towards Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there with a two-year program in Chinese medicine. He had wanted to study to be a doctor of Western medicine, but his English was woefully inadequate. The family enjoyed life in the colony. They lived in a spacious apartment in a large and airy colonial house set in two acres of luxuriant flowering trees and plants.
A servant came every day to prepare meals for the household, do the housework and walk Fay-oi to and from her primary school. As Min-hon’s course wound down, however, war reached the south of China. It brought floods of refugees into Macau (the colony maintained its neutrality throughout the war) as families fled their cities and villages ahead of the Japanese. In a place already renowned for its casino tycoons and gangsters, lawlessness erupted. Food shortages worsened. Frustrated businessmen shuttered their shops and houses to return to the comparative safety of their rural villages. Min-hon had to curtail his studies. The war had already cut off his father’s remittances from abroad; if they stayed much longer in Macau, they’d starve. Back home in Golden Creek, at least they had their own small garden.

The household divided up, travelling separately. As with every train and river boat leaving Macau, the boat that Fay-oi and her mother took was jammed to overflowing with people and their possessions. The head boatman brooked no exceptions to his rule: “Everybody must sit; nobody can lie down!” His crew pushed on through the night. The constant retching of passengers sick from the fumes of the coughing motor as it struggled against the current kept sleep at bay. Suddenly, a boatload of men, their rifles silhouetted in the moonlight, halted their passage. They forced the loaded boat ashore and ordered everyone off: “Leave everything behind!”

Fay-oi held tightly onto her mother’s arm. She wondered if they were about to be shot.

On shore, two of the gang worked their way through the terrified crowd, speaking to small groups in hushed voices. As soon as the boat’s contents were unloaded, they said, and as
long as no one made any trouble, the passengers would be allowed to return to the vessel and go on their way. Fay-oi buried her head in her mother’s chest. She couldn’t bear the thought of the bandits helping themselves to her wardrobe of school dresses. However, much greater treasure had been left behind on the boat: her mother’s store of jade and gold. Fortuitously, Yee-hing had sewn some cash and jewellery into the lining of the padded jacket she wore.

The family arrived in Golden Creek to find the houses swollen with returning children and relatives. Many had at one time left for the towns and cities to work or open businesses, and now, to escape the rain of firebombs and fighting in the streets, had come back. With so many extra mouths to feed, food was in short supply. Thievery was a constant threat, mostly from desperate residents of nearby villages. The residents of Golden Creek set up a neighbourhood watch at each end of every lane. Min-hon contributed sixteen guns from his father’s collection, normally used for bird-hunting. “Who are you? What’s your name?” demanded those on watch if they spied an unfamiliar face. If they didn’t recognize the name, they fired a shot.

Min-hon and his wife decided that, to relieve the pressure on the family’s limited resources, they would head for Canton, where they would take a chance on finding teaching jobs. When Yee-hing’s cash and jewellery ran out, she sold her wedding gifts, bolts of wool and silk. Eventually, goods counted for nothing; food could only be bought with cash. When the soil no longer turned up sweet potatoes, people scrounged for edible berries, then roots of wild plants. Starvation claimed Golden Creek’s first victims. An old lady and two teenaged brothers, their bodies skeletal, lay dead where they had fallen
outside their home. People who’d come from the city told of worse, of piles of dead bodies. Of parents abandoning their children in public places in hopes that someone wealthy might chance by who would rescue them. And of people driven mad with hunger: a mother, thinking her baby to be a plucked chicken, had put it into a hot wok. People believed these stories, apocryphal or not, because they had witnessed unimaginable deprivation and loss.

The villagers of Golden Creek grew anxious, expecting the Japanese eventually to target their village. Sure enough, the day came. Fay-oi, then seven or eight years old, heard a stampede of feet by the house and the tense voices of mothers hurrying their children. Alone in the house with her mother, who was ill and confined to bed, Fay-oi ran outside. Neighbours said the Japanese had struck at the houses clustered at the bend in the river. From the rooftop terrace, Fay-oi saw for herself: a large military boat moored there and smoke billowing from houses nearby.

She rushed to rouse her mother. Yee-hing had not eaten for days and had been coughing up blood. “
Mama
, everyone is going to the mountain.”

“I’m too weak.” Go, she said weakly. Go, quickly.

“If you’re going to die,
Mama
, I want to die with you.” Fay-oi crawled under the covers of the bed that mother and daughter had shared ever since Harry left for Canada.

In the stillness of the house, the two clung to each other. They awaited the inevitable: the sound of breaking glass as the enemy broke through the first door, the clang of the slatted metal of the second door sliding across, the smashing of the wooden lock and the creak of the massive timber door
swinging aside. Boot steps on the ground floor, then hastening up the stairs. Soldiers bursting into the bedroom. Instead, the silence gave way to the rustle of the leaves and the music of songbirds. A few hours later, Fay-oi heard the relieved chatter of returning villagers. She ran out: Why had they come down off the mountain? They said that from on high among the pine trees, they had seen Japanese soldiers board their boat and move on down the river. They snickered at the Japanese: maybe they were too lazy to make the ten-minute walk from the river’s edge to Golden Creek.

Eight years after Japan had invaded China, the occupation ended; that same day, Japan announced its unconditional surrender in the Pacific War, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still, the people of China would have no respite from conflict. Hardly were the Japanese gone when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists renewed their civil war.

AS BAD AS THINGS
in China may have looked to Harry, he saw his prospects in Canada only improving. He and several partners had renovated a property on Vancouver’s Pender Street and renamed it W.K. Oriental Gardens (W.K. stood for
wah kew
, a term to describe “overseas Chinese”). Richly decorated with wood panelling and rows of tasselled silk lanterns hanging from the ceiling, the restaurant was located up a wide staircase on a second floor, evoking a tradition in Canton that sharing food and conversation is to be enjoyed away from prying eyes and the din at street level. By the mid-1940s, W.K. Gardens had become one of Chinatown’s busiest restaurants. Its four-page menu offered Canadian
and Chinese dishes, from T-bone steak with a choice of seven styles of potatoes (French fries to potatoes
au gratin)
, to nine variations on chop suey. Sundays were given over to Chinese cuisine with a set banquet menu. Waiters rolled out rounds of plywood to enlarge the tables and seat as many as five hundred guests. Several nights a week, the restaurant offered a popular ticketed “Dine and Dance” evening, to the swing music of a big band.

At the end of the Second World War, Harry Lim played a waiting game. If Canada reversed its immigration policy and began re-admitting Chinese, he could think about getting his family out of China. Chinese-Canadian soldiers had supported the British defence of Hong Kong against the Japanese and had paid a heavy price in casualties, both in battle and in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. China had fought on the side of the Allies, and Chinese men and women in Canada had voluntarily enlisted to help Canada’s war effort. The United States had repealed its own exclusion act in 1943. How much longer could Canada hold out?

In 1947, the Canadian parliament relented. It lifted exclusion and restored the right of Chinese immigrants already resident in the country to become naturalized. The government announced that Chinese men who had acquired Canadian citizenship could apply to sponsor wives and dependent children.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1949
, Fay-oi arrived home on vacation from her school in Canton. Her mother greeted her, looking grave: “I have a surprise for you.” She handed her a letter postmarked from Canada. Its contents shocked Fay-oi; her father
had sent instructions for herself, Second Mother and Youngest Brother to prepare to immigrate to Canada. However, he added, “if you’re not sure about leaving your mother now, you can always come later, as someone’s wife.”

Fay-oi evaluated her life in China. No compelling reason presented itself for her to leave. The family had survived the war years. Min-hon had secured their future. He had dutifully followed their father’s advice: if and when the strife of war subsides, add to the family’s holdings of
mau tin
. Someone could steal a water buffalo or empty another’s larder, but cultivated land, which earned rental income, stayed put. But above all, Fay-oi was rejoicing in life as a family unit again. A year or so before the war ended, Min-hon and his wife had moved Yee-hing and Fay-oi from the village to live with them in a district market town near Canton. The couple had received an offer to establish a new school there. The job came with a large house set in a spacious garden with a lemon tree, a papaya tree and an apple tree amid the flowering shrubs. When Min-hon had proposed that mother and daughter join them, Yee-hing packed two suitcases without hesitation, locked the doors of the house on No. 2 Lane and gave the key to a relative.