Chapter 4
Family Reunification (1950s)
“When family ties are disturbed, devoted children arise.”
You would think that by the middle of the twentieth century it would have been easier for Chinese people to immigrate to Canada. But even after the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947, there were obstacles to family reunification and general Chinese immigration. Order in Council (PC) 2115 stipulated that only Chinese who were Canadian citizens could bring their wives and unmarried children under eighteen into Canada. Europeans were able to bring their families to Canada without being citizens. To make it more obviously unfair, large numbers of postwar refugees and immigrants from Europe were accepted without any family sponsorship.
A.R. Mosher, president of the Canadian Congress of Labour and a prominent member of the Committee for the Repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act, was among those who testified before the Senate Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour in March 1948 to denounce the government’s discrimination against the Chinese.61 His testimony included the following:
To what other conclusion can one come when the law says on the one hand you can bring your wife and children into Canada provided you are of European, South American or United States parentage, so long as you are resident of the country (Order-in-Council 695). And, on the other hand, you must be a Canadian citizen before you can bring your wife and children into the country if you are of the Chinese or Asiatic race (Order-in-Council 2115). If this is not discrimination against people on account of their race then the word discrimination has no meaning.62
With representation by an active group of articulate second-generation Chinese Canadians, including many war veterans and some open-minded white Canadians, the government grudgingly made small changes to PC 2115. It raised the age of unmarried children to twenty-one, then to twenty-five before PC 2115 was finally repealed in 1956. Although the raising of the age did not directly affect my mother and me, it did make it possible for other Chinese to join families in Canada.
Changing the law was only part of the equation. Fear of illegal Chinese immigration led in 1960 to one of the biggest police and security operations in Canadian history, comparable to the raids that would take place under the War Measures Act a decade later.63 Early on the morning of Sunday, May 24, 1960, the RCMP simultaneously raided Chinese communities in sixteen towns and cities across Canada. In Prince George, BC, the RCMP apprehended the entire Chinese population of two hundred and ordered them to complete questionnaires.64 Of the thousands interrogated in the Canada-wide raids, only twenty-four Chinese were charged, with fifteen being fined or imprisoned.65
The Chinese communities were in a state of shock and anger. A month later, organizations from eleven cities across Canada came together to make representation to Ottawa. The delegation met with Davie Fulton, minister of justice, and Ellen Fairclough, minister of immigration, and had a two-hour meeting with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Foon Sien Wong, head of the Vancouver Chinese Benevolent Association (CBA), drew the prime minister’s attention to the gross violation of human rights by the RCMP, who “freely arrest and detain Chinese … they could not see the lawyer retained by the CBA. The situation resembles a country under martial law.”66
The community protests had an effect on the government; it declared an amnesty for all Chinese who had entered Canada illegally before July 1, 1960. The Chinese Adjustment Statement Program was not altogether altruistic on the part of the government; it was more about regulation than atonement. It allowed any Chinese who had entered as “paper sons” to have their case reviewed so these “illegals” could become legitimate and gain Canadian citizenship.
The continued restrictions on Chinese immigration had given rise to the “paper son” phenomenon, which was an ingenious attempt to reunite extended family members separated by the Exclusion Act. When a child was born in China, the father upon his return to Canada would register the child in the hope that the government would eventually allow his family into this country. “Paper sons” were brought into Canada as a way to get around immigration requirements. During the Exclusion Years, when a daughter was born to a Gold Mountain man, the father would register the child as male. After the repeal of the Exclusion Act, many young men or boys in the extended family were brought into the country using these papers. When I was little I heard my father use the term, commenting that the paper son was sometimes more filial than the natural son. All was forgiven in 1960 when the Canadian government instituted the amnesty program to make the “paper sons” legal. Surprisingly, there was also a small number of “paper daughters,” as I learned from the documentary film Paper Sons and Daughters, whose executive producer was Vancouver cultural activist Sid Tan.67
But it was not until 1967 that Chinese immigrants to Canada would be put on an equal footing with other immigrants under the “points system” and independent immigrants could apply to enter Canada. Between June 1960 and July 1970, the status of 11,569 “paper sons” was adjusted and legalized.68 Altogether about 12,000 people came forward before the amnesty program ended in October 1973.
My mother and I came to Canada in 1956. After travelling the thousands of miles via Hong Kong, San Francisco and Vancouver, we finally reached Montreal’s Central Station and ascended the escalator to the concourse. Mother was carrying the suitcase that contained all our belongings in one hand and she held on to me with the other. As we entered the station, I saw two Chinese men, one older and the other much younger. The younger man, who I later found out was my mother’s nephew, rushed over and took my mother’s suitcase.
As the older man approached, I held on to my mother’s leg, but she pushed me forward towards him and said, “Go say hello to your Baba.” For the first time I nervously called my father “Baba.”
My parents were in their early fifties when they started to share the joys and sorrows of living together again. Government legislation had robbed them of their youth as a couple. Now they would have to get to know each other again as they embarked on the next phase of their simple and remarkably pragmatic life. This was the start of our family reunification.
Age had been catching up to a large number of the Gold Mountain men; by 1951, 34.5 per cent of the Chinese in Quebec were over fifty-five. This was one of the pressing reasons to bring their wives and children to Canada. Many of the elderly men were ailing and they longed for their wives to comfort them in their remaining years. The Chinese population in Quebec grew from 1,90469 to 4,79470 in the 1950s, an increase of 152 per cent.
My mother, my brother and I were part of those statistics. Ging Tung, my brother, had arrived first in 1950 as one of the 1,036 Chinese—all women and children—who were permitted to enter Canada that year.71
Now that he had his youngest son in Canada too, my father wasted little time in making up for the lost years. Shortly after I arrived in Canada, he began taking me on twice-weekly walks to drum up business. One hand holding mine, and the other holding a dirty white canvas gunnysack over his shoulder, he would tell me about what life would be like in Canada and encourage me to go to school and get a good education.
The gunnysack was big enough to hold a child. It had brass riveted loops strung with a thick, strong cord to tie in the contents. He carried this sack up and down rue Willibrord and the avenues of Verdun, Fourth, Third, Second and First, cutting through the back lanes as he walked from one street to another. He climbed the spiral outdoor staircases, with the wrought iron railings, and knocked on the glass pane in the middle of the wooden framed doors, asking if there was laundry to be washed and ironed. He rolled up the dirty clothes with the sleeves of a shirt or the corners of a sheet and slipped in the knot a piece of paper with the address of the customer.
On our walks, he would tell me how cold and snowy the winters are. Never having seen snow, I asked what it was like. He said snow is white, cold and wet. I released his hand and ran ahead. I asked, how white, is it as white as the fence, as white as the window frame, as white as this car? He would always say, “whiter.” This was April; I would have to wait another eight months to see for myself.
Father was very thoughtful in not enrolling me in school right away. He wanted time for me to adjust to this strange and foreign environment. He tried to enroll me in the nearby French school (École Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes), on Fifth Avenue behind our laundry, but they would not accept me.72 My father, with his limited knowledge of French, couldn’t understand why and only said to me, “Because we’re Chinese.” It could also have been because I was not Catholic. However, he managed to enroll me at an English school, four blocks away—St. Willibrord—that was also Catholic.
After a lifetime of experience in Canada, Father would use that simple phrase, “because we’re Chinese,” to explain away the many obstacles that stood in the way of advancement for the Chinese in this country. Father’s outlook was shaped by his Confucian beliefs and his life experience in Canada. He was Canadian and Chinese at the same time—a Chinese Canadian. As someone who had never thought about retiring in China, he brought his family here to be Canadians.
My father enrolled me in grade 1 at St. Willibrord since I didn’t speak any English. I was eight when I went to my first class there in September. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve always been two years older than my contemporaries. I’d already had two years of schooling in Hong Kong, and the non-language subjects, like math, were a breeze. My ability to pick up languages was put to the test, though. When I arrived in Montreal, everyone in Chinatown commented that my mouth was full of Cantonese. Within half a year, the Cantonese was replaced with English, and with Toishanese at home and in Chinatown.
In the 1950s, the people in the working-class Verdun area of Montreal were evenly split in speaking English and French. The students in my class represented the immigrant population. They were mainly postwar Europeans, Irish, Scottish, Italians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. I was the only Chinese boy in the school from grade 1 to grade 7.
St. Willibrord divided the boys and girls into two buildings. There was a Chinese girl at the school, Germaine Wong, who later became an executive at the National Film Board. With the division of the sexes—separate entrances and schoolyards—we never saw each other at school. But in a display of the obvious, the school placed us side by side to walk down the church aisle for our First Communion.
Germaine’s parents had a laundry in the eastern part of Verdun near Regina and Ethel streets. Germaine and her mother came to Canada at about the same time as us. My mother occasionally visited her mother and to hear my mother talk so glowingly of Germaine, I was sure they were planning our matrimony.
As the reunification of my family meant that we were one of the few families in the Montreal Chinese community, my father would bring us to Chinatown every Sunday to show us off. I met many of the old-timers, the lo wah kiu, who knew my father from the early days. Many of them were still alone. They would pat my head and stroke my face just to remember what the smooth skin of a child felt like.
My grade 1 teacher was Elizabeth Power. She took me under her wing and became my godmother. One day she spoke to my father about having me baptized since I was the only non-Catholic in the class. I was learning my catechism and preparing for First Communion and Confirmation. My father agreed. In my parents’ traditional Chinese view of pleasing all the gods, to have another god to protect their son was a good thing.
After my First Communion, I became a fervent Catholic. Every Sunday, I went to Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Church at the corner of Verdun and Fourth Avenue, across the street from our laundry. I felt mortified as everyone stared at the little Chinese boy walking up the aisle to sit in the front pew. I sat in the last row once, but the priest motioned me to come up front. Adding to the embarrassment, he reserved the front seat just for me. My faith sustained me through the ordeal. I was so zealous that I later became an altar boy at Verdun’s St. Thomas More Catholic Church.
As an adventurous eight-year-old kid wandering around a strange neighbourhood, everything was new and fascinating. When I think about the neighbourhood today, I can appreciate its multicultural nature. Across the street from Harry’s Laundry, the name my father continued to operate under, was the Italian Sisto Shoe Repair; next to him was the French Canadian Paul’s Barber Shop. The first time he cut my hair, Paul told me that he’d never cut hair so thick and coarse; he proceeded to give me a brush cut. There was the English Verdun Wool Store, too, and around the corner was the rotund Scottish woman’s Ross Fish and Chips; next to her was a Jewish haberdashery where my godmother bought me the suit for my First Communion. They all got to know me as I wandered in and out of their shops.
The Neighbourhood 1¢ to 5¢ Store was a wondrous place and it became my favourite hangout. It had aisles of knick-knacks on display tables, and against the walls were shelves stuffed with goods from floor to ceiling. The elderly European man with an accent of unknown origin let me browse for hours, allowing me to touch and smell the trinkets and toys in the store.
I walked the four blocks to school. In winter, when it was especially cold or snowy, my parents gave me the nickel for the bus fare. As the only Chinese boy in the neighbourhood, I was a familiar sight to the local residents. A few times, I was harassed by some of the bigger boys. One day, I was chased through the lanes by a group of three or four of them, yelling “ching, ching, maudit chinois.” As they cornered me, a larger boy stepped between us. He shouted something in French and drove them away. The teenager’s name was Pierre Chatel. He lived on our street and his father was a customer of our laundry. He became my protector.
No Chinese childhood in those days was complete without going to Chinese school. I had to do double duty. On Saturday, I went to the Chinese Catholic school, and on Sunday, I had to attend the Chinese school at the YMCI. My father continued his weekly tradition of visiting the YMCI that he started thirty years before. The language of instruction was Toishanese at the YMCI and Cantonese at the Catholic school. The textbooks came from Taiwan or Hong Kong with the lessons consisting of morality tales about filial piety, friendship and service to the community. Not much of the Chinese stuck with me.
There was little space to play whenever I brought friends home to the laundry. Eventually, I ended up hanging out at my friends’ houses until after supper; then I returned home to do my homework on the ironing table. During the summer when I wasn’t bicycling around town or playing baseball with the neighbourhood kids, I whiled the time away at the Verdun library. Books fascinated me. A few years before, when I was in Hong Kong, there was a reading library on the ground floor below our apartment. It was literally a hole in the wall—a storefront without the store or the front and with no depth. Wooden shutters opened exposing shelves of books along the wall. These were graphic novels, with torn pages taped and blackened from overuse. My mother gave me the 5¢ to pay the owner for the privilege of spending an hour reading the comics while sitting on a small wooden stool. My favourite books were Monkey King and stories of martial artists like Wong Fei Hung.
The Verdun Library was located on the second floor of the new City Hall situated on Verdun Avenue between First and Willibrord. I have fond memories of sitting down to read books on geography, which took me to places otherwise inaccessible. They formed a sense of wanderlust in me at an early age. I read the complete Hardy Boys series that was available at the library—some twenty-odd books. After that I got into the Nancy Drew series, until some kids laughed at me for reading girls’ books.
My parents had difficulties learning to live together. They were set in their own ways after being apart for so many years. But the common economic struggle and the ingrained desire to keep the family together provided the motivation. I have happy memories and can only be thankful for my parents’ ability to sacrifice for the sake of the family.
Life in a Chinese hand laundry was tough. There was the gruelling work and the cramped living conditions inside the laundry. But it was also the place that my parents and I bonded and forged our sense of family, as we shared a common, unique experience. At the same time, what we had was representative of many Chinese families that eventually re-established during those years.
Daily life in the laundry began around 6:30 a.m. After a breakfast of steamed bread and coffee or tea, my parents set to work ironing and, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, preparing the clothes for washing. They sorted the dirty laundry—smelly underpants soaked in dry urine or caked with excrement; crumpled sheets stained with menstrual blood—it was a messy job but that was what a laundryman or laundrywoman was expected to do.
My parents washed the clothes with an old round wringer washer and by hand in a large galvanized steel tub. The washing was done in the kitchen, or, rather, my mother cooked in the back room used for washing. The smell of bleach and hot steam overpowered the smell of food cooking on the stove. My parents worked until past midnight on wash nights. My mother took on some other work outside the house, so I can imagine how tired she must have felt.
It was just the three of us. In winter, I looked forward to wash night, because it meant there would be warmth coming from the coal burning pot-bellied stove used to dry the clothes. There was no other source of heat.
My father did not want me to learn the laundry business, although he did teach me to use the abacus. Making the laundry tickets was one chore Father asked me to do. I did it the same way that his father taught him. I used a brush with ink from an ink stick. There was a series of eighty Chinese characters. I would write the numbers one to one hundred under the character at the two edges for each series of tickets. These would be the customers’ tickets—half torn off for the customer and half tucked into the pile of dirty laundry. Father hoped that I would learn some more Chinese by writing the characters.
My father never asked me to do any of the physical work in the laundry. He was adamant that I would work hard to study for school and get good grades. He wanted my mind to think about university and getting a professional job. But there was one other thing that my father asked me to do to earn a little spending money: I delivered the packages of clean laundry on our street. The women of the house smiled as they answered the door and rewarded me with a tip of a nickel or a dime.
At the time, Harry’s Laundry charged 17¢ for a starched and ironed shirt, and 15¢ for a sheet.
My family was poor but we were not impoverished. I never felt a sense of poverty. Being Chinese, I sensed that we simply did not have or do the same things as white people. My father didn’t have money to buy a car. Conditioned by a life of exclusion in Canada, my father never thought about owning property.
My school friends told stories about their summer vacations at the cottage in the Laurentians, or at the beach in Maine. My parents never took a vacation. I spent my summers bicycling around Montreal—taking journeys like the nearly twenty-mile ride to my grandfather’s laundry in the east end—and playing baseball, until I reached fourteen. That year, my father felt it was time I got a job, not just to earn money but to appreciate what it was like to work and be responsible for myself.
In the summer of 1962, there was talk on the street that a hiring hall, at Atwater just below St. Antoine, was taking on casual labourers to deliver flyers. I went with a friend at 6:30 a.m. We were selected with a group of four or five others. My friend and I were the only kids. We got into the back of a panel truck, which drove north to Rosemere. After ten hours, we got back to the office. The boss doled out the money—pay for six hours. I protested. I had worked at least eight hours, not counting the time of travel. “You only worked six hours, kid. Take it or leave it.” The pay was $4, for the day’s work. This was my first lesson in exploitation and the surplus value of labour.
I refused to be deterred from joining the working class. I got a job as a busboy at Ruby Foo’s through my brother-in-law, Jackson Ing, who was a waiter there. Ruby Foo’s was a famous Montreal landmark. It was a Chinese restaurant, owned by Jews, on Décarie Boulevard, not far from the old Blue Bonnets racetrack. The restaurant was elegant with red velvet–covered booths and carpeted floors. The smell was different from the restaurants in Chinatown. It smelled clean with a whiff of French wine. The customers were the upper crust of Montreal society. Celebrities and sports stars came to be seen with other celebrities. It had all the accoutrements of a five-star restaurant: a sommelier to promote the best wines; a chef who pushed around a cart where he could cut roast beef or make flambés; a Eurasian cigarette girl in a form-fitting cheongsam.73 Sometimes I scored the breadboy shift. The breadboy carried heated rolls and bread in a metal box hung around the neck in front of the body. The breadboy shift got you out of the heavy lifting of the busboy. The busboy was the gofer; he had to clean and set the tables, and then take the heavy stack of dishes, with cups, glasses and cutlery packed onto an oval tray carried on the shoulder into the kitchen for the dishwasher. Not a few times, a tray slipped and fell making a crashing noise, which for some inexplicable reason drew applause from the restaurant clientele.
After a couple of summers, I defected from Ruby Foo’s to move up to a waiter’s position next door at Bill Wong’s, another upscale Chinese restaurant. The owner, Bill Wong, was born in Montreal, and his Toishanese parents had paid the head tax. He was the father of Jan Wong, whom I knew later at McGill University before she went on to become a journalist. Although my father had exiled me from laundry work, I kept up the tradition of Chinese Canadians by working in restaurants. I financed my university education by working as a waiter during summers and weekends.
Working at these jobs, I experienced the class nature of society. The owners and most of the customers were of a different class from those that served them. My coworkers were mainly immigrants, Greeks and Chinese, who had families to support. Most of them worked in the restaurants as their lifelong job, like my brother-in-law, who worked for thirty years at Ruby Foo’s to raise six children and finance their university education. Those of us who worked there part-time while going to school looked forward to graduation, to get away from the drudgery of restaurant work.
It was only in my university days that I really got a sense of how little money my father made operating the laundry. When applying for a student loan, I asked him for his annual income. He thought about it and said, “Oh, maybe $1,000.” I didn’t believe he made so little. It didn’t seem right, so I wrote $5,000, the median Canadian income, on the application.
My father managed his expenses from week to week. I don’t remember him doing income tax returns, so he must have earned less than the amount required to pay income tax. I later discovered that he cleared about $25 a week. My mother often chastised him for his parsimonious ways. She said he had no ambition for the future. This was a source of friction between them.
Father’s personal frugality was built up over a lifetime of saving money, either for a trip back to China or to send money back to the family. He never spent anything on himself. Much of his clothing came from customers who never came to pick up their laundry. Despite that, my father was a generous man when it came to community service. He contributed and participated actively in the war effort. He was generous with his time and money in the Chiu Lun Gong Sol. One of the few times he travelled, he went with my mother to Vancouver to take part in the opening of the new headquarters of the Gong Sol in 1971. Years later, when I was perusing my graduation yearbook from Loyola High School, I was surprised to find my parents’ name listed as donors and patrons of the school.
My father did something else for me that changed my life. For my high school years, this kid from working-class Verdun, son of a poor Chinese laundryman, got to go to Loyola High School, a prestigious Jesuit private school that served the English elite in Montreal. Ed Kirk was my grade 7 teacher, and he must have seen something in me because he tutored me and three other students to write the Loyola entrance exam.74 I was the only one of the four accepted. I later learned that my father had asked Father Thomas Tou of the Chinese Catholic Mission to write to the school. Every time he saw me in Chinatown, Father Tou beamed with pride that I was attending Loyola. I know now that my father did not have the money for the steep tuition, so I must have received a scholarship or bursary. It was the four years at Loyola that opened up my view of the world.
My father never talked about the past with me. He preferred to tell positive stories of his work in Chinatown with his fellow clansmen. Now I understand why he was reticent to speak about the past. The period of exclusion and separation from family was lonely, painful and humiliating. Why would a father tell these things to his son? He did not have any bitterness. He accepted his fate with stoicism. He endured, survived and triumphed. My father had suffered for years from thrombosis in his legs from standing at the ironing table all his life, and he finally retired in 1976 at age seventy-two.
During the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, my father wanted me to take him on a road trip in my new Saab. It was just the two of us. As the world came to the Games, we left town during the construction holidays, the last two weeks of July. At every roadside diner where we stopped for lunch, he ordered a fried egg sandwich; it was the only Western food that he liked. By then I was involved in political activities and had not spent much time with him in the past few years. The road trip provided us an opportunity to catch up. He told me that he wanted to see some relatives, friends and village cousins that he hadn’t seen in a long time, in New York City and in Washington, DC. He didn’t tell me at the time but he had been diagnosed with cancer.
My father never said so but I knew he was proud of me. Despite pleas from my father and mother, I didn’t get a graduation photo taken, nor attend the commencement ceremony when I graduated from McGill with a bachelor of engineering degree. I felt a tinge of filial piety when I graduated from Carleton University, and I had my grad photo taken resplendent in my master’s cap and gown. I gave the photos to Father. A few months later, I visited the Chiu Lun Gong Sol and, to my astonishment, he had framed and hung my grad photo on the wall alongside those of past Gong Sol presidents and elders. I was angry with him for putting me on display and demanded the photo be taken down, but he never did. It was only after his death, when my mother retrieved his belongings from the Gong Sol, that she brought the photo home.
Father died in October 1982 at age seventy-nine. His death broke my connection with the past and the Chinese community in Montreal. When he was alive, he was my link to Chinese Canadian society. At the time of his death, I was deeply involved as an activist organizer outside the Chinese community, so I was not conscious of my Chinese-ness and what the community meant to me. It would be a few years before I felt the need to reconnect with his past and to search for my own identity. I didn’t realize how little I knew about his past until he died. I needed to find out how he lived and to discover his legacy. I would begin to touch his past when I became involved in the head tax redress campaign, and when I made the film Moving the Mountain. It was only after his death that I felt such strong admiration for him.