“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
It was a snowy evening, the last day of January 1989. I was sitting in front of the TV watching some forgettable program and convalescing from an operation for a burst appendix. I had developed appendicitis on the long journey home from a holiday in Fiji. Initially, the doctor misdiagnosed it as the flu and fatigue from the lengthy flight. Three days later I checked into emergency and they operated on me straight away. Although I was not overly preoccupied by the seriousness of this health problem, everyone told me that it was serious and I could have died.
The telephone rang.
“William, do you know who this is?” the woman at the other end of the receiver asked. “Do you remember me?”
I knew that voice and I did remember her but in my surprise I hesitated in saying yes and only blurted out, “Well, ah….”
“It’s GG!”343
“Of course, I remember you! Are you in town? Are you in Canada?”
The last time I’d seen GG was in 1976. She was a Chinese Malaysian student completing her degree in international studies at McGill. We had met at meetings of the Afro-Asians or the Canada-China Society. We had attended various political activities together and had gone to some social functions with mutual friends from Malaysia and Singapore. At the end of the summer term, she was going to Boston to see a friend. I remember it was a hot, sultry night in August as I drove her to the Voyageur Terminus at the corner of Berri and de Maisonneuve to catch the midnight bus. In front of the bus door, she stood close to me for a long moment, looking straight at me with her big brown eyes and her moist, full, sensuous lips, inviting a kiss. Cowardly, I hugged her goodbye. On the way back to my one-room apartment in the McGill Ghetto, I kicked myself several times for not kissing her.
Thirteen years later she was back—on a six-month sabbatical at McGill—and she wanted to see me. We had dinner the next night. She told me that she had been thinking about us and asked if I knew that she was crazy about me. I didn’t know what to say. I knew she was very expressive but I didn’t expect her to be so bold. I admired her for being able to reveal her feelings so strongly. I wished I could. I was stunned; I was excited; I never thought a woman would feel that way about me. We had a very close and personal discussion over dinner. I am not normally an emotionally accessible person, but I was able to open myself to her. She told me that she was married. Her husband was back in Malaysia but they had an open marriage. I didn’t know what that meant and I became hesitant. Sensing my hesitation, she took the initiative and gave me the kiss that I should have given her thirteen years earlier.
“Let’s go back to your place,” she whispered in my ear.
It was a thrilling and passionate time with GG. Her vulnerability brought out the vulnerability in me; it was very intimate, but the intensity started to cool off after five months, towards the end of June. We ended it over lunch in a restaurant across from her apartment near McGill. It was the moralist in me speaking, as I questioned why, as a married woman, she wanted to have this relationship. She didn’t answer. I was afraid of a long-term emotional entanglement with a married woman, so I said I felt uneasy about continuing. She said she was going home to Malaysia the following week. One of the last things she said to me was, “Listen to your mother; find yourself a good wife.”
I had contracted peritonitis from the burst appendix and I had adhesions surrounding my intestine from the surgery. All this resulted in a three-week stay at St. Mary’s Hospital. Upon leaving the hospital, I was alone in the house. My mother and sisters, Pui Yung and King Sin, took turns cooking for me as I spent the month of January recovering and feeling sorry for myself.
My mother was wearing her worries on her face. “Ah Wee, this situation is not good for you,” she said. “You need to have a wife to take care of you. Listen to your mother.”
Without my knowledge, my mother and sisters had been complicit in pursuing Dong Qing Chen after my mother and King Sin met her during their visit to China in 1987. Pui Yung must have written to Dong Qing pretending to be me because in April 1989, I received a letter from Dong Qing thanking me for my photo and she enclosed a photo of herself. The photo showed a very pretty, happy young woman, innocent and vibrant. My sister wanted me to go to China to meet her.
I told GG about Dong Qing, and when I showed her the photo, I expected some recrimination, but I got the opposite reaction.
“Oh, I am so excited for you. She’s so attractive—just perfect for you.”
GG had a way of making me feel positive about myself.
My whole family was on my case to visit China to meet Dong Qing. Then the Tiananmen Incident happened in June of that year. China was in turmoil and I had a convenient excuse to put off the trip. My mind was in its own state of turmoil. I was under too much mental stress, trying to intellectualize and analyze the situation. What do I do? Am I ready for an arranged marriage? None of my close friends, who were all non-Chinese, were much help. They all believed in the notion of romantic love. They advised me to be careful. Not to get fooled by pretty looks. Once I brought Dong Qing to Canada, her whole family would follow suit. Did I want that kind of responsibility?
Aside from organizing head tax redress activities and working on Moving the Mountain, my mind was preoccupied with Dong Qing for the rest of 1989. Well, not just her specifically, but the idea of her and the idea of going to China to marry her. I even discussed my situation with Charlie Chin, who was in Montreal for the head tax benefit concert in November of that year. Charlie was staying with me and during a late-night chat he gave me his words of wisdom.
“What’s so bad about marrying someone over there?” he asked. “It’s been going on for generations. It’s worked for our parents and grandparents. If you hang on to that Western mentality, you’ll never be true to yourself.”
Sound advice, but I was still conflicted in my mind, heart and soul. I wasn’t ready to let go of that Western mentality.
I wondered how my father felt when he went back to China to marry my mother in 1925. Those were simpler times, and I am sure he did what was expected without much rumination, and he was probably excited to take a wife as an act of responsible maturity.
Dong Qing and I were exchanging letters on a monthly basis. Finally, at the end of 1989, I decided I would go to China to meet her. I used the excuse of doing some filming for Moving the Mountain as a cover for the trip. (I ended up shooting the opening sequence of the Fong Dang village kids with a Hi-8 camera I bought in Hong Kong on the way.) My sister King Sin arranged to join me in Vancouver, coming from Edmonton, for the flight to Hong Kong; her two sons, Stanley and Pat, originally from Edmonton, were now successful businessmen there. I really appreciated her willingness to travel with me and give me moral support and encouragement.
I would be in China for Chinese New Year; that was when Dong Qing would be on holiday.
Chinese marriages are truly family affairs. Dong Qing’s sister, Dong Ling, was living in New York as a visiting scholar. She asked if she could visit me during the 1989 Christmas holidays, to which I consented. I knew she was protective of Dong Qing and wanted to check out the man that mingyun (destiny) had in mind for her little sister. Since arriving in the US in August, Dong Ling had been having a hard time. For one thing, her stipend from the Chinese government was late in coming and she survived by getting a job as a dim sum cart pusher in a Chinatown restaurant. On top of that, she had to leave her two-year-old son back in Guangzhou with her husband and in-laws, and she cried for him every night.
To take her mind off her problems for the few days that she was here, I introduced her to Canadian winter activities, tobogganing and snowshoeing. It must have been a successful visit. Dong Qing later wrote to me saying that Dong Ling hadn’t had so much fun in such a long time. I had passed the sister test.
I was starting to warm up to the idea of marriage again. It had been five years since my divorce. I missed the companionship and the security of being in a marriage. I missed the idea of being in love. As I prepared to go to China, I had no expectations. Friends cautioned me, but I tried to clear my head of any confusion, trepidation or doubt. I wanted to keep an open mind and an open heart as I entered into this uncharted territory. It would be the adventure of a lifetime but I still feared the unknown emotional prospect that this journey would entail.
My sister and I arrived in Hong Kong on January 21, 1990. We stayed in the British colony for two days to acclimatize and to buy gifts to take into China. The night before we were to enter China, I had the strangest dream: I was skating on Beaver Lake, on Montreal’s Mt. Royal, and I started sinking and falling through the ice. I woke up in a cold sweat. I told King Sin about the dream and she tried to reassure me that I didn’t need to rush into anything, that I should just do what I felt was right. On the train to Shenzhen, we got off at the border station, Lo Wu. I had flashes of memories of my last trip to Lo Wu fifteen years earlier. Then it had been a frontier border crossing; now, it was a modern busy commuter station, part of the Hong Kong mass transit system.
After entering into China, we hopped onto a bus to go to the branch of the Agricultural Bank of China where Dong Qing was working. She would be expecting us. After an hour on the bus, we realized that we were going in the wrong direction. The driver let us off at another branch of the bank. Fortunately, a bank employee knew Dong Qing and phoned her. Dong Qing worked in the accounting department at the head office, so many people knew her. We were told to wait at the branch and Dong Qing would come to get us. I decided to wait outside and take in the atmosphere.
There was a cacophony of automobile horns, bicycle bells and whistles; the street was crowded with people, bikes, carts and vehicles all competing for the same square foot of space. I thought about the China that I visited fifteen years ago and the idealism that had clouded my perception. It was much more orderly then, as people marched in step; today, it was chaotic but vibrant and full of energy.
When I saw Dong Qing approaching, after all the anticipation, I was overwhelmed. She looked like a gorgeous movie star—and she still does, with wavy light brown hair flowing in the breeze. She wore no makeup—she always looks more beautiful without makeup. With well-formed lips, and when she smiles, little dimples form at the corners of her mouth. Her laughter is so refreshingly sweet and infectious. When I hear that laugh, it makes me happy because I know she is enjoying life. She spoke to us laughingly, saying that it was difficult for anyone to find their way around Shenzhen with so much construction. At first impression, I thought she had dyed her hair. When I’d visited New York’s Chinatown a few years back, I’d seen Chinese girls who had dyed their hair blond; I was under the naive belief that all Chinese people had naturally black hair, so I immediately assumed a version of the New York fad had caught on in China. I discovered, though, that Dong Qing’s chestnut brown hair colour was natural.
We met up with Dong Qing’s mother for lunch at a local restaurant. After lunch we saw my sister off. She would spend Chinese New Year with her sons in Hong Kong. On the way back to Dong Qing’s apartment, we shopped for the evening meal. She turned out to be a great cook. She shared a two-bedroom apartment with a fellow bank worker who had left to spend New Year’s with her family. Dong Qing and her mother slept in the roommate’s room while I took her room.
Even though Dong Qing’s mother was from Toishan and Dong Qing knew the dialect, we had some problems communicating, since my vocabulary was from the era of my parents. Dong Qing also spoke Cantonese and Mandarin, so we used a mixture of Toishanese and Cantonese.
Dong Qing cooked a delicious meal with fresh produce bought at the market. After supper, her mother suggested that we go out while she cleaned the dishes.
Shenzhen in 1990 was one big construction site, a fishing village turned boomtown, after Deng Xiaoping had designated it as a Special Economic Zone in 1980. There were people who obtained official status to work in Shenzhen and there were others who migrated from the regions who were there illegally trying to ride the economic tide of development; some made it and many others did not.
As we walked near the train station, I stood out as a foreigner with my clothes and bearing. An aggressive beggar carrying a baby accosted me, shouting loudly at me, grabbing onto my sleeve and refusing to let me go. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t shake free and I didn’t want to get physical because of the baby. Dong Qing quietly and sympathetically spoke with the man; this calmed him down. She gave him some money and urged him on his way.
We then carefully navigated our way around construction debris and the crowded streets and we ended up inside the quiet tranquility of Lychee People’s Park, named for the many lychee trees growing there. We sat on a bench and we talked, and talked and talked, about life and aspirations. We talked about life in China and life in Canada. We talked about the surprises that life brings us and we talked about how we’d arrived at this moment. We both blamed it on our mothers. With long moments of silence, we were engrossed in each other’s thoughts and had not noticed that darkness had fallen. There were no lights in the park, and attendants with flashlights were walking around shooing young lovers and other stragglers out; they were to lock the gates at 10 p.m.
On the way back to her apartment, I felt a warm connection with Dong Qing. My fears and anxieties were slowly evaporating.
The next morning, Dong Qing, her mother and I went to the station to take the train to Shaoguan, their hometown. The city, with a population of 700,000, was the northern gate of Guangdong province, just south of Hunan.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced at the train station. It was the day before the Chinese New Year and the building was jammed with people hauling luggage and packages to take home, parents hanging onto their children as they struggled to get on trains to go visit the grandparents. Dong Qing, being experienced in these situations, had purchased the tickets days in advance but it was not early enough to get “soft” seats and we ended up in the regular cars. We were squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder as we inched our way to the platform. Timidly, I hung on to Dong Qing and her mother, as I feared being separated in the crowd. Everyone else seemed to take it in stride as they patiently pushed and jostled their way forward without the orderliness I was used to in Canada or even in Hong Kong. This was no time to be courteous; if you let up for one second, you would be left behind.
Inside the train car, it was the same bedlam. None of the seats were reserved; it wouldn’t have mattered even if they were. Seats meant for two people bore four, each perching a piece of rear end on the vinyl. The aisles were packed, and if people found space underneath a seat, they would crawl into it. The man standing next to me joked, “Better not go to the toilet; you’ll never get back and you will lose your seat.”
We arrived in Shaoguan in the late evening; the temperature was unusually cold at four degrees Celsius. Dong Qing’s father and brother met us at the station with a government-provided van and driver.
The year 1990 was auspiciously the Year of the Horse, Ma. It is also Dong Qing’s mother’s family name. Ma Peiqing is from a head tax family. Her father and grandfather were Gold Mountain men and both paid the head tax when they immigrated to Canada in the early 1900s to settle in Edmonton, which remains an enclave for the Mah (Canadian version of Ma) clan. Ma Peiqing was born in Basha, Toishan, in 1930. Shortly after her one-month birthday celebration, her father returned to Canada. Due to the Exclusion Act, the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution and other historical circumstances, her father never saw her again. After Liberation, Peiqing studied medicine and became an obstetrician/paediatrician to serve the new China. She had an opportunity to leave China with her three children during the Cultural Revolution when her husband was sent to the countryside. Even though her parents were waiting for her in Hong Kong, and despite the hardships caused by the Cultural Revolution, Peiqing could not leave her husband.
Dong Qing’s father, Chen Zhongshu, was an old Communist revolutionary. He had joined the anti-Japanese resistance at age fourteen as he travelled through Guangdong looking for his older brother, whom he discovered had been captured and killed by the Japanese. His brother was a well-respected Communist cadre, so the comrades took in the young Zhongshu and trained him to be a resistance fighter and Communist organizer. Although the People’s Liberation Army did not have official rankings, based on his responsibilities it seems Zhongshu eventually rose to the equivalent rank of a colonel. Zhongshu’s older sister was also a Communist revolutionary and she organized students at the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou. She was betrayed, captured and executed by the Kuomintang.
After the anti-Japanese war, Zhongshu, in his early thirties, ascended in the administration to become the mayor of Shaoguan. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s, he ran afoul of the Party leadership when he criticized cadres from other regions of China who took up leading positions in Shaoguan, saying that they did not understand local conditions.344 He was sent to a factory for reform through labour.
Already labelled as a dreaded rightist, he was again targeted for criticism during the Cultural Revolution and sent to the countryside. Throughout these ordeals, Zhongshu never wavered in his loyalty to the Communist Party. When the Cultural Revolution was repudiated, he was rehabilitated and appointed to the Agriculture Commission and then the United Front Commission, working with other political parties, overseas Chinese and foreign organizations. In 1981, Zhongshu was nominated to run for mayor of Shaoguan again. This time his name was put on the ballot with seven others, but the people of Shaoguan voted him in as their mayor once again. He remained at this post until retirement in 1990. The Chinese government then designated him an Old Revolutionary Hero for his contributions to the revolution.
Since June 4th was still fresh in people’s mind, I took the opportunity to ask my prospective father-in-law what he thought about the Tiananmen incident. He gave me a pat Party response. China had gone through much social and political upheaval over the past half century: foreign occupation, anti-Japanese resistance, civil war, political campaigns and the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese people were wary of more turmoil leading to chaos, especially with ideologies borrowed from the outside. The people mainly supported the government’s efforts to maintain a peaceful order and to prevent anarchy.
I told him about my participation in the Marxist-Leninist movement in Canada. He seemed to be familiar with the international movement and the role played by the Chinese Communist Party. He said China has learned not to meddle in the internal affairs of foreign countries. He also gave a harsh assessment of the people who participated in the Marxist-Leninist movement in the West. He said those people were just “playing at revolution.” I didn’t question his appraisal; he had gone through an earth-shaking revolution that claimed the lives of two of his siblings.
It seemed people didn’t sleep much on New Year’s Eve, as firecrackers sounded all night long to scare away the bad omens and welcome the good spirits. After a hearty New Year’s breakfast of jook with pork and thousand-year-old egg, mantou and fried dough, I got up the nerve to ask Dong Qing for our first date.
She suggested that we bicycle and take in the sights around Shaoguan. They were a two-bicycle family, so each of us had a bike. We pedalled out of town and through the countryside for about fifteen miles to Nan Hua Di, a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple where we stopped for a luo song vegetarian lunch. Then we headed for the Maba Man Museum.345
On the way back to Shaoguan, we got lost and ended up at one of the hot springs for which Shaoguan was famous. We decided to try the therapeutic baths. The bath section for men was separated from the women’s section. I decided to bathe in the hot spring water where I was lulled to sleep by the pleasant sensation of the geothermal bath. After over an hour, I realized it was getting late and quickly got dressed and rushed out to the lobby where Dong Qing was patiently waiting. She was worried about me but the attendant assured her that I was still inside. She explained that most Chinese did not use the baths because the tubs were not clean. She had just had a shower and come back out. I was impressed by her patience and consideration.
Dong Qing asked people along the way for directions to the road for Shaoguan. The locals kept saying, “It’s not too far,” to encourage us to keep going. We finally found our way back to the main road and we reached home at dusk. Altogether we biked thirty miles that day and Dong Qing was suitably impressed that at my age I had the stamina to do such a long bike ride. Little did she know that I was training in Hung Gar kung fu and had trained extra hard before any overseas trip to build up my conditioning. Nevertheless, Dong Qing must have thought about the difference in our ages: I was forty-one and she was twenty-eight.
Dong Qing had grown up during the Cultural Revolution; she was the youngest of three children and had developed an independent and self-reliant spirit in the midst of instability.
I was starting to learn her family story. Her father had been sent to the countryside for re-education and he only got permission to go home for a few days at a time, sporadically. Her mother worked long hours at the hospital, shifts lasting up to thirty-six-hours, because many of the staff were criticized and sent away for re-education, thus causing a personnel shortage. Dong Qing spent her early years in the hospital’s nursery and daycare and when she started school, she, her sister and brother were left to take care of the household. On top of the long hours, Peiqing had to attend political study sessions that went late into the night.
The Chen family had little money but it didn’t matter; everyone else was in the same boat. The children did all the housekeeping and Dong Qing learned how to cook the meals. Being the youngest, she was assigned to do the shopping and queued up every month with the ration coupons to buy the necessities of rice, oil and the limited amount of 250 grams of pork per person per month. Starting at age six, she had to wake up in the middle of the night to queue up at 4 a.m. for the shop that opened at 6 a.m. She was grateful for an aunty next door who roused and accompanied her for the pre-dawn trek to the government store. If she was late, the shop could run out of supplies and they would have to go without for the month. Families also raised chickens and ducks for the eggs and the occasional poultry dinner. Dong Qing recalled the children would be given two boiled eggs to celebrate a birthday.
Even though her brother, Xia Yang, later entered culinary school and became a professional chef, Dong Qing’s creative talents in the kitchen earned her the title of cook for the family.
The same year that Dong Qing turned eighteen, Deng Xiaoping announced the Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen. Many young people saw this as a great opportunity for their careers and there was fierce competition for jobs in the southern city bordering Hong Kong. Dong Qing had enrolled in the accounting program at the local university in Shaoguan. One of her mentors was offered a posting in Shenzhen; he saw the industriousness in Dong Qing and asked if she wanted to work at the Agricultural Bank in China’s new boomtown. She jumped at the opportunity to exercise her free spirit, to leave home and to create a new life 250 miles away. While working at the bank, she completed her degree in accounting.
We had a delicious and plentiful New Year’s meal with all the traditional dishes—including the mandatory chicken, complete with beak and feet. The Cantonese word for chicken is gai which sounds like the word for life as in hau sai gai—a good life. Later I noticed that one of the two chickens that Dong Qing’s paternal grandmother was raising on the balcony was gone. The chicken had sacrificed its life so we could have a good life. It must in fact have been the rooster, since there was no more crowing after New Year’s Day.
The next day, Dong Qing’s father displayed his Communist style of work and sat the whole family down, including grandma, to meet with me as he poured steaming hot tea for everyone and passed around watermelon seeds. Dong Qing’s brother welcomed me to the family. I realized that they wanted to know my intentions towards Dong Qing, as they were very concerned for her happiness. Sensing my unease, Zhongshu said, “You don’t have to rush into anything but you have come a long way to meet Dong Qing so you must have some feelings for her.”
Unlike the old days of my father, we actually discussed the pros and cons of marrying a Gim Shan Haak346 and what it would be like for Dong Qing to re-establish her life in Canada and how difficult it would be for her. She said very little during the meeting. Finally, after about an hour, Zhongshu brought the meeting to a close by saying that it was now up to Dong Qing and me.
That afternoon, Dong Qing and I went out to do some shopping. It was raining, so I held the umbrella for both of us. She hung onto my arm to stay dry. It felt cozy and affectionate. In the evening, as she sat on the bed in her room, I asked if she wanted to marry me and move to Canada. For a long moment, she kept her eyes looking at the floor and then finally murmured, “Hau” (yes). I sat on the bed and held her, but she turned her head away when I tried to kiss her. Her modesty would not allow it; she did not know me well enough to be kissed.
This was the last day of January; my flight back to Canada was on February 9, so the next eight days would be a whirlwind as we scrambled to make the marriage official.
Dong Qing had to go back to Shenzhen for work, and we would register the marriage there, since she had to obtain permission from her work unit for marriage and to change her civil status. She wrote out the application letter for the bank and showed it to her mother. Peiqing scolded her for making the letter so dry—“You need to add some words of love and affection!” I chuckled and said that I would have written it the same as Dong Qing.
There were many forms to be completed, photos to be taken for the marriage certificate and a medical examination with the doctor attesting that I did not have AIDS or suffer from any mental disorder before the marriage would be approved. We were on tenterhooks waiting for the red tape to be cleared.
One evening, Dong Qing and I went back to the Lychee Park and I brought out the diamond ring that my mother had given me for her. As I placed it on her finger, she asked me if I was having second thoughts, and said that we didn’t have to go through with this if we didn’t want to. Despite the uncertainty and not knowing what the future would bring, I told her that I wanted to go through this with her. She said she had the same feelings.
She wanted to tell me about her shortcomings. She mentioned some words in Chinese that I didn’t understand, so she brought out her electronic translator whose synthesized voice squeaked “capricious.” I didn’t even know what capricious meant in English, so I said that’s not a bad trait. Then she asked about my shortcomings. I said I was moody. She replied that was probably from not being able to discuss my feelings with my family and that I kept a lot of things inside myself. She had hit the mark. I thought to myself, “She understands me, she’s my soul mate. Now, I have to marry this woman.”
On February 7, all the paperwork and medical certificates were approved. The marriage was registered and the marriage certificates issued; it was official. The next day would be my last in China. We woke up early to go to the government offices to obtain Dong Qing’s exit papers. We were happy as we held hands walking down the street and feeling that everything would be fine.
When I arrived back in Montreal, I applied to bring Dong Qing to Canada.
It would take a year and a half for the Canadian government to grant her the immigration papers to join me. But in 1991, I was finally able to go to China to accompany Dong Qing on her journey to her new home. Before leaving China, we decided to take our belated honeymoon in the city of Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan. It was the first time we’d been alone, without the support of family and friends. We spent a week touring around Kunming and in that time started to bond as a couple, relying on each other to get around. She translated from Mandarin for me. I only had my Lonely Planet guidebook to offer.
Before Dong Qing came to Canada, I discussed with my nephew Stanley in Hong Kong how things would be tough for her: she would be starting all over again, learning a new language, making new friends, finding work. What Stanley said still sticks with me to this day, “Then why don’t you move to China and you take the burden of doing all those things?”
More recently I asked Dong Qing, “How do you think we would have done if I had moved to China, instead of you moving to Canada?”
“I think you would have done fine, with a master’s degree in engineering, you could have taught at the university; if we had bought my apartment at that time for $10,000, it would be worth a million dollars today; and like my colleagues, I would have become a multi-millionaire during the boom years, with my contacts in the banking business.”
Instead, we happily settled into a somewhat unorthodox middle-class life in Canada.