Guey Dang Wong and Tue Sue Wong, circa 1970.
FEELOW STUDIO, MONTREAL
My parents’ unique voices are an integral part of me. It was almost impossible to get Daddy to talk about his childhood or about his early life in Canada, but occasionally, if I was very insistent, he would dole out tidbits. Unlike the search for fonder memories, he never tried hard to recapture the details of the difficult parts of his life. “Too long ago, now,” he would say dismissively in his pidgin English. “I can lememba no more.”
I have supplemented my memories of his snippets by recording conversations over the years with my mother, family, and friends, and adding to that information by searching through long-forgotten documents, examining old photographs, reading history books, and collecting government records. These artifacts are like small, uneven patches woven together in a quilt, which I hope has created an understandable pattern of the life my father lived.
Like the music of favourite songs, I can still clearly hear my mother’s voice telling me the stories of their separate lives. We lived together for thirty-nine years, with a brief interlude, but it was only during the last sixteen years, when she came to live with my husband and me, that I paid close attention and understood the significance of her life’s history. I didn’t start writing until after Mommy had passed away, and over the eight years it has taken to complete it, she spoke to me in my dreams, urging and encouraging.
Mommy only ever spoke Chinese to me. At first, Daddy spoke only Chinese too, but I have stronger memories of his English. I hope to bring them closer to the reader by including Chinese words and sentences in their native Hoyping dialect and my father’s use of pidgin English. I created the phonetic spelling of the Hoyping words and because they are based on my own elementary fluency, I take full blame for any inaccuracies. The Glossary with English and Pinyin will help the reader with translations. The names of places, other than the villages my parents knew (in Hoyping), are written in Pinyin (e.g., Beijing rather than Peking).
I have provided only a sliver of the political, social, and cultural influences that touched my parents’ lives, both in China and in Canada. They certainly lived in interesting times—any omissions and errors in recording that history are mine alone.
Guey Dang Wong and Tue Sue Wong, circa 1970.
FEELOW STUDIO, MONTREAL