The first message came on a Thursday evening.
It was a text from Pansy. “Hey Ann. We met with the home nurse and Dad isn’t doing well at all,” it read. “They are taking Dad to the Burnaby Hospital right now. Amber and Mom are with Dad.”
The messages kept getting worse.
“Dad’s tumours have grown and spread.”
“Palliative care.”
On the phone, Pansy recited the long lists of procedures Dad had been through. They repeated the same jargon the doctors had used. “But what does that mean?” I would say, over and over. No one ever seemed to know.
This, I had learned, was the language of cancer. People would ask how Dad was doing, and I’d stumble. I knew what they were really asking: Is he doing better or worse? How much longer does he have? But we didn’t have answers to these questions. So just like my sisters, I would recite the procedures and symptoms. I’d repeat, word-for-word, the latest updates from the doctors, knowing full well I wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear.
Eventually Amber said the words I’d been dreading: “You should get here as soon as possible.”
It was nighttime when I arrived at the hospital from the airport. No one had told him that I’d be coming. They weren’t sure when I’d arrive and worried I wouldn’t make it in time. They didn’t want to get his hopes up.
The hallways were flooded with fluorescent light. My heels clicked noisily as I made my way toward palliative care. As I neared the room, I realized that I was terrified. The last time I’d seen my dad, he’d acted like everything was fine. He was walking slower and taking more naps, but we’d still been able to pretend like everything was normal. Now, I didn’t know what to expect.
“He’s here,” Pansy said quietly, gesturing toward his room. It was a room in the corner, across from the nurse’s station.
Inside, Dad was lying in the bed, his eyes closed. He looked thinner and was wearing a hospital gown. I don’t know why that surprised me. But I thought, Oh, he’s wearing a hospital gown.
I must have made a sound, because he stirred in the bed. His eyes rested on me. He nodded but didn’t speak. I walked over and put my hand in his. He clasped back tightly.
I hugged him gingerly, afraid of jostling the tubes in his arms. Normally when I hugged him—each time I said goodbye at the airport—his entire body would stiffen. Hugging wasn’t natural for either of us, and he never quite knew what to do.
But on this day, he submitted. I pulled away, and he grabbed a tissue to dab at his eyes. I’d never seen him cry before, and I wondered what that meant. Was he happy to see me? Was it grief? Did he see in me some sort of a grim reaper—that my arrival was a sign that his own end was very near?
On TV and in the movies, death seems dramatic. There’s always a flurry of activity. A beeping noise that suddenly becomes insistent. A vital signs monitor goes flat. We’re fooled into thinking that dying is linear and definitive. That most of all, it’s quick.
In reality, those days at the hospital were mostly dull. They were slow. Day after day, we waited. At times, Dad was awake and alert, eager to flip through old family photo albums or tap on his iPad. Visitors would come and go. Sometimes he would sit up to talk with them.
Other times, he would lie there with his eyes closed, only letting out a chuckle every once in a while to let us know he was still there and listening. On those days, I sat and stared. He would sleep and I would watch. My mind would drift, and I’d find myself noticing the smallest details. His skin stretching across his arms—forming parallel lines, like bar codes. In my memories, my dad’s arms were dark and muscular. Now they were thin and pale. Other moments, I would simply sit and stare at the bed linens. I would get angry, then try to understand why. Angry at the bed sheets. Angry at the machine that beeped every time Dad moved his arm even a little. Angry at the nurses for taking so long to come by to readjust the tubes.
Yet he never seemed angry. He told me so, over and over again.
On his good days, we talked about some of the stories he’d recounted for me in the past few months. About growing up in China. About coming to Canada. About the restaurants he’d opened. About Ye Ye. About the mountains he’d faced.
“I have no regrets. I lived a full life,” he told me.
In the quiet moments, I remembered my conversation with Stacey. About her parents and what she owed them. What brought them comfort.
“We’re okay,” I tried to tell him. That he’d given us everything we needed. “All of us are okay.” Anthony and I in Toronto. My sisters. Our mom.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said, over and over.
It happened several weeks later. He got a little bit better, and then a little bit sicker. And then we lost him.
I was back in Toronto that day, so the news came from my sisters. “It happened this morning,” Amber told me over the phone.
The week after that passed like a blur. Another flight. My sisters picking me up from the terminal. The Taiwanese beef noodle shop we stopped at on the way back from the airport. Phone calls with the funeral home. Tracking down documents. Putting things in boxes.
He had been dying for over a year and a half. In that time, I had been grieving every single day. While I stood in line for coffee. When I sat down in front of my computer. On the bus home from work. It had been there during our phone calls, and during those visits home. In every conversation we had, and in every question I asked. Even as he sat there, living, I had been grieving.
Now that it was over, all we had were boxes. Bags. Unopened crates of crystal tableware. Kitchen equipment that hadn’t been touched for decades. Bottles and bottles of Johnnie Walker and Courvoisier XO—gifts he’d received and saved over the years. The blanket wrapped in plastic. Rooms full of things he had spent decades storing away. Remnants of a life spent saving.
Dad didn’t want a funeral. He’d spent enough time sitting through ceremonies and sermons. He knew we’d spent enough time grieving. He wanted a celebration.
So at the very end of the week, we all gathered—Mom, my sisters, Aunts Janice and Jennie, Sook Gong and all of our cousins. All of the closest family and friends who had come together in Dad’s last days. We met for dim sum at Dad’s favourite restaurant. From his cellar, Amber and I had picked the nicest bottle of cognac. We poured it into teacups, passing it around the tables.
We told them that it was from one of the bottles Dad had been saving. And then we all raised our glasses to toast.
The most lasting memory I have of my dad—before the hospitals, before the wheelchair and the IVs and medical tubes—was from a December day we decided to drive back to Abbotsford.
It had been years since Mom and I had been in Abbotsford. When I was growing up, we would all take annual trips back around Christmas to visit their old friends. But those visits tapered off over the years. Eventually, Dad was the only one who still made the trip, checking up on their rental properties and collecting rent from tenants. But shortly after Dad got sick, he’d sold the Abbotsford houses. And now he hadn’t been for over a year either.
I myself was curious to visit. Now that I knew more about their Abbotsford lives, I wanted to see the streets with those stories in mind. I wanted to see their apartment on Pauline Street, the Park Inn and the Legion.
So that morning, we jumped into the car. Dad insisted on driving. But as he switched on the windshield wipers to clear away the snow, something caught his eye. One of the wipers was broken—the top had snapped off from the bottom. I turned and looked at him, as if to say, What now?
Without a word, Dad opened the car door and walked back toward the house. I turned around and looked at Mom, sitting in the back seat. She looked back at me and shrugged. A few moments later, Dad emerged from the house. He had a roll of packing tape in his hand.
With one hand, he held the two pieces of the wiper together. With the other, he secured the two pieces together with an elastic band. Then he took the packing tape, wrapping it around and around and around until the wipers held together. He got back into the car, and I tried to maintain a straight face.
“Um, Dad. Do you think that’s safe?”
He turned to me and nodded with complete confidence. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not even snowing anymore.”
“Yeah, but—”
He interrupted, lifting his hand in a dismissive wave. “I’ll go to the garage later,” he said. “This is just for now. To get to Abbotsford.”
It was typical Dad. He’d find ways to fix just about anything using whatever he had on hand. Sometimes it was a coat hanger. Other times it was packing tape. Relatives jokingly nicknamed him MacGyver. He was the master of making the best of what he had.
On the highway, Dad pointed to the landmarks that he remembered.
“On this side,” he said, pointing at a forested spot like any other lining the highway, “is where the people digging gold would go to sell.” We were in Fort Langley, near the site of one of the first Fraser Valley gold discoveries in the 1850s. In that time, over thirty thousand men poured into the area in search of gold.
As we continued on Highway 1, I eyed the speedometer nervously. Over the past decade, Dad’s driving had grown slower, more cautious, to the point where I’d sometimes have to remind him, gently, “Dad, you’re driving thirty on a fifty road.” If it was one of us behind the wheel, he’d clutch the handle above the passenger side window nervously, shooting us disapproving looks. But today, as he sped farther and farther away from Vancouver, I watched the speedometer teeter near 120—fast enough to blow past dirt-encrusted trucks on the road.
I wondered if it was muscle memory, from all those days and nights when he’d race back and forth between the cities. All of those Sunday nights over the years, speeding back after a visit with Po Po or Ah Ngeen, with two exhausted toddlers in the back seat.
So I didn’t say anything. Dad was energized, more excited than I’d seen in months. He was talking faster, his head swivelling back and forth as he drove. We passed sprawling farmland, abandoned trailers. I asked him what he thought of this place when he first saw it in the 1970s. After all, he had only just arrived a few years earlier in Vancouver, eager to adopt the city and all of its cosmopolitan amenities.
But Dad shrugged. “I spent a lot of time on farms growing up,” he said, “I was used to it. Dirt ground. Growing stuff. I was used to it.”
But did coming out to Abbotsford feel like taking a step back?
“No,” he said. “I knew we wouldn’t be here for long.” He figured they’d stay for ten years, tops. It reminded me of what Ms. Li in Boissevain had said to me—about life being made up of many decades.
“It was just what we had to do,” Dad said.
We were getting closer. Abbotsford was twenty-two kilometres away, a sign read. Not long after, another sign: “Abbotsford: City in the Country.”
Dad pointed to a sprawling suburban-style development looking out of place amid the farmland. “That’s new,” he said. From the back seat, Mom gawked at a giant new shopping complex on our left, with a Cineplex theatre and an H&M store. “None of this was here before,” she said. “It was just hills.”
We veered off at the exit, past warehouses selling farm equipment and seeds, and drove beneath a billboard advertising the Abbotsford Agrifair.
“You see that liquor store?” Dad asked a few minutes later, as we drove down one downtown street. “That’s where the other Chinese restaurant, the Fraser Valley Inn, was.” He was talking about another Chinese restaurant that later opened up in Abbotsford.
We drove toward Astoria Crescent—the street where we lived in Abbotsford. He pointed to a stretch of highway. “There used to be more trees here,” he said. “The deer would be running back and forth.” He pointed to an ice rink. “That’s where we used to take you guys skating—we bought you skates here,” he said.
Then he turned onto a quiet suburban street. He slowed to a stop next to a white split-level with dark blue trim. This was the house where they’d lived when I was born. I had no recollection of it. “They took out my siding,” Dad said, rolling down the window to take a closer look. The ice-cold air hit our faces, jolting us awake after the long drive. He nodded in approval. A set of white icicle lights hung from the trim and a dark Pontiac sedan sat parked in the driveway.
I tried to remember living in this house. This was where I would have spent the first year of my life. All I could come up with were the images from our photo albums. The picture of Pansy and Amber building a snowman on the front lawn, using navel oranges on his belly in place of buttons. The picture of me taking my first wobbly steps on the carpet, my chubby knees peeping out beneath a polka-dotted dress.
With a sigh, Dad rolled up the window. He was ready to move on. He turned the car around, heading back toward old downtown.
After turning off McCallum Road at McDougall Avenue, he took a sudden left onto Pauline Street. Near the corner was a grey stone building designed to look like a medieval castle. The windows were shaded by green-and-white striped awnings. “Dragon Fort,” the sign said in bright red lettering. It was a giant, new-looking Chinese restaurant. Dad all but ignored it, instead pointing to the empty lot next to it. It wasn’t clear if it was a parking lot or just vacant. The lot was mostly paved over, with just a few small patches of grass sprouting up here and there. A dumpster was placed in the centre.
“This is where our first apartment was,” he said.
We continued down the same street. He slowed to a park outside a grey-brick Travelodge.
He squinted at the sign on the side of the building. “Yok—yuk yuk?” he said.
“Yuk Yuk’s,” I said. “It’s a comedy club.”
But he’d stopped listening. He’d already opened his driver’s side door and was halfway out, barrelling toward the Travelodge. I followed, confused. Mom trailed us both, a few steps behind. I still wasn’t sure why we had parked here, why Dad was so intent on being here. Suddenly Dad stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Pointing at one side of the hotel, which was now being used as a liquor store, he turned and looked at me. “That’s where the restaurant was.”
“Wait,” I called out as he rushed ahead. “This was… the Park Inn?”
But Dad was already headed inside, pulling open the wooden doors to reveal a gleaming lobby with tile floors and crystal chandeliers overhead. When I caught up, he was already talking to the young receptionist at the front desk. The building had been a Travelodge for at least a few years, I heard her say. The owners before that were the same people to whom the hotel had been sold when my parents left.
We chatted with her a few minutes, asking about the area and the building.
“Is the downstairs still a banquet hall?” Dad asked.
She nodded.
“Is the place across the street still a bar?” he asked.
“It’s the Townhall,” she said. Still a bar, just a fancier one, with craft brews and a gluten-free menu.
“Sometimes, when I would come back to Abbotsford for a visit, I would go there for a beer,” my dad said. “I was hoping I might run into my old customers.”
We walked around the corner, carefully avoiding the patches of ice on the sidewalk. On our left, we passed a small park. “I used to take Pansy here,” Mom said quietly. A few seconds later, we slowed again to a stop, this time in front of a beige brick and stucco building.
“This is it,” Dad said. “The Legion.” Mom looked up in surprise. She looked at Dad, then back at the building again. She looked confused.
The original building that housed the old Legion had been taken down, he said. Now there was a new building. On one side of the building was a Subway restaurant. On the other, roughly where the Legion had once been, was a sushi restaurant. Its name, “Kojan,” was spelled out in big block letters.
The restaurant was at the edge of the brick plaza. It was still late morning and the parking spaces in front of it were empty. The fluorescent “Open” sign wasn’t yet lit. Out front was a middle-aged woman with short black hair, carrying a bucket. It looked as if she was about to start cleaning the windows and glass door. I approached her and asked if she was the owner. She looked confused. I wasn’t sure if she’d understood me after she turned around and walked back into the restaurant, leaving Mom and Dad and I standing outside in the cold.
But a few moments later, a different woman with youthful skin who wore a puffy vest came out to meet me. She introduced herself as Ruth Park. I explained to her why we were there. I pointed to my parents and told her how they used to run the restaurant on this same site. English was Ruth’s second language, so it took a few minutes before the puzzled expression disappeared from her face.
“Ahhh,” she said eventually. A large grin spread across her face. She extended her hand toward Dad, and he shook it.
“1976,” I said. “That’s when they opened their restaurant.”
She nodded, impressed. She invited us inside—an offer Dad declined. He hadn’t entirely recovered from walking in the cold, it seemed. He said he’d rest with Mom instead in the car.
So I followed Ms. Park into the restaurant. It was a large dining room, with dozens of tables scattered across the floor and a row of booths along one side. There were a few of the usual signs of a Japanese restaurant—a sushi bar against the back wall flanked by paintings of cherry blossoms. But the rest of the dining room was decorated in shades of burnt amber and terracotta, and with dark wood furniture. It looked Mediterranean.
“This used to be an Italian restaurant,” Ms. Park said. Her family had taken over the space less than two years earlier, converting it to a Japanese restaurant. She had no idea about the history of the property before that. She didn’t know that the property had once been a Legion, or that there had once been a Chinese restaurant here. She’d never before heard of the Legion Cafe.
Ms. Park’s family was from South Korea, she said. They’d been in Canada since 2002, when her husband, a pastor, began studying at Trinity Western, a Christian university in nearby Langley. A few of their friends in Korea had been to Canada before and told them it was a good place for a sojourn. The original plan had been to return to Korea after his studies, she said. But by that time, their two sons, now twenty-two and twenty-five, were reaching middle school. “It felt like it was too late to go back to Korea,” she said. They decided instead to stay in Canada.
I asked if she liked living in Canada.
“Both good and bad,” she said.
What was the good?
“In Korea, everybody—the relationships are very close,” she said. Her English was good enough to get by, but hesitant. She spoke slowly.
“Everyone is always watching you, asking questions. Here, I feel freer.”
I nodded. Ms. Huang had said something similar on Fogo. And that was part of the reason Mom and Dad had left Vancouver for Abbotsford. It was part of the reason I’d left Vancouver all those years earlier for Toronto. To get away from expectations. To build a life I thought was entirely mine.
As we sat talking at one of the tables, a young man stood behind the sushi counter, slicing bright green avocados for lunch service.
She gestured toward him as she spoke. Her son, she said. “In Korea, there’s so much competition in studying. You have to study hard and pay fees,” she said. The schools here were better for her sons. They loved it here.
We sat talking for a few more minutes, until a family of customers walked in just before noon. Ms. Park perked up, smiling at the customers and walking over to speak briefly with the servers. She pushed some buttons on the cash register, getting the business started for the day. She had to get back to work, and I took that as my cue to leave.
“Thank you,” I said to her before I left. There were other things I wanted to say. I wanted to offer her some assurance that the gamble that she and her husband had made would pay off. I wanted to tell her that it had worked out for my own parents and my own family. That maybe there was still some good luck to be found on this site.
But I couldn’t promise her any of that. I didn’t know whether this would work out for her family. For every family that found Gold Mountain, there were many others who didn’t. There were the many faded restaurants I had visited that seemed on the verge of shutting down. There were towns where one after another, the storefronts were shuttered. Where the restaurant owners greeted me with glum faces. The owners who shook their heads, no, when I asked to hear their stories. The ones who seemed ashamed to be found.
I had no idea whether it was hard work, or timing, or just good luck that might lead to success for Ms. Park and her family. Perhaps they’d already found it. Perhaps this restaurant, and the lives they were already leading in Abbotsford, were exactly what they’d been looking for. So instead I just thanked her, again and again. “Good luck,” I said as I headed out the door. I meant it.
Soon after, we were back in the car, heading to Vancouver on Highway 1. As we sped toward the city, we passed under a railway bridge with a green sign: “CP Rail.”
“The cycle just goes on and on and on,” I said to Dad. I relayed back to him what Ms. Park had told me. I told him about how she and her husband had come from Korea, how they’d decided to stay for their sons. I told him how she didn’t say it, but I could tell how difficult it must have been for her. How I couldn’t pretend to understand, but only try to imagine how difficult it must have been, learning a new language and trying to build a new life in a new country. How much I admired her.
He nodded, but stayed silent. I couldn’t tell if he was tired, or thinking.
He looked ahead and just kept driving.
He was speeding ahead, the speedometer ticking dangerously above the limit. Anxious to be home.
From the rear-view mirror, a glint. The mountains behind us, catching us the light.
“They’re so beautiful,” my mom gasped, craning her neck to look out the back window. She was right.
Beneath the snowcaps were the trees that had made it through the long cold winter. They had since lost their leaves and the bare branches reached up and out toward the sun. They were shining amber. With the light bouncing off them, they looked as if they’d been set ablaze.
From a distance, from where we were they looked as if they were made of gold.