You are going to your home. You must be respectful. You must be careful. Do not disobey your husband. Thus to look upon compliance as the correct course is the rule for women.
SIX
Four Years, Four Months, Four Days
AH THLOO: CHINA, 1930–1934
During the years the couple was apart, Ah Thloo had a lot of time to relive their wedding night and the subsequent events. Had she married the right man? It was easy to dwell on the past, easy to stay hurt and rub old wounds until they were raw. It was hard to understand another person, especially when you didn’t know anything about him. How do you build a life with a stranger who is living continents away? Still, she recognized that her life had changed, much for the better, because of her marriage.
What about their relationship; how had it happened? She had been afraid when she first met him. She knew only that he lived in Gim San and was older than she was by nine years. Then his hands lifted the heavy wedding veil from her face, and there he was! His smile was shy, but the warmth in his eyes suggested he was genuinely happy to meet her. But he was so different that first night—the memories from her wedding night still made her angry. She still could not refer to him by name without being reminded of that pain and disappointment. All she could hope for was that he would live up to the meaning of his new name, Libp Thlange, Establish Faith.
But what were her choices? Ah Thloo recalled conversations she had had with Ah Ngange a long time ago. They were initiated shortly after her third elder sister had married but before Ah Thloo had moved into the nui oak.
“Ah Ngange, why do girls have to leave home after they get married? I don’t want to leave you or the family. How will I be able to take care of you?”
“Ah Nui, you are my favourite foot bather! But someday you will want a family and a life of your own.”
Ah Thloo knew she was Ah Ngange’s only foot bather, but it had pleased her to hear the love in the old woman’s voice.
“You must remember what I tell you, even if you don’t understand it now. A woman’s purpose is to create and nurture a ga hieng, a family and a home. This requires a special kind of kien lake, strength, to help her protect what she has created. It comes from deep within. It shows itself during times of greatest foo, bitter suffering. It can carry a woman through the loneliness of separation, mistreatment by a husband, the pain of childbirth, even the death of a loved one.”
“But Ah Ngange, how would I build those strengths?”
“Ah Nui, you already have them!” her grandmother said. “In here, here, and here.” Her work-hardened hands gently touched Ah Thloo’s head, heart, and belly.
“How?”
With a hand on each side of Ah Thloo’s head, Ah Ngange explained. “You are liak, intelligent. Some people, still too old-fashioned, say intelligence is not required in a girl. But don’t you believe it! Girls have to be smart to survive. You are curious, you learn quickly, and you know how to apply your knowledge. All these qualities will help make your life better. Stay true to yourself—never deny your intelligence.”
Moving her right hand to press Ah Thloo’s chest, Ah Ngange continued, “You have shown courage and compassion. You know right from wrong. You help others in need. You have the courage to put your beliefs into motion and to protect the ones you love. From time to time, you may witness things, unjust acts that will anger you. But if you react with anger, you may choose the wrong path. Let your anger pass before you do anything. Always act from compassion and you will never go astray.”
Finally, with her right hand on the girl’s belly and her left hand directly behind, on her back, Ah Ngange made a prediction. In traditional Chinese medicine, this location on the body is a person’s thlem goyne, heart-liver, meaning her core. “You have a great capacity for love. Your love will sustain you, give you greater courage in times of need, and will be returned a thousandfold.”
At the time, Ah Thloo hadn’t understood everything Ah Ngange said, but she had kept the words close to her, trusting in her grandmother’s wisdom.
Shortly before Ah Dang left, he surprised her by insisting she learn to read and write. He had found a school in the neighbouring village of Nga Yieow and had paid the teacher to take her on as a student. He had also talked to his mother, who would get help in the fields so Ah Thloo would be free to attend classes and study.
At first, Ah Thloo was angry—he had done it again, arranged her life without consulting her! Then she remembered Ah Ngange’s words and let her anger pass; it was clear that Ah Ngange was reaching out to guide her. She considered what he had just offered. An education. A chance to use the intelligence Ah Ngange had recognized. Perhaps this man valued intelligence in a woman. That attitude alone raised him up in her eyes more than anything he had said or done after that fateful night, and helped to mitigate the hurt. Perhaps, she dared to think, he can see me as an equal.
Going to school was a joy for Ah Thloo. It gave her something to look forward to, somewhere to get away to, because the atmosphere at home with her mother-in-law was hostile. The house they shared was a single, large, rectangular room, built in haste by her husband’s venerated but long-departed father. The space was divided by pieces of furniture. Ah Thloo’s marriage bed was in one corner behind the thliew jiang, folding privacy screen. It was further surrounded by the chest of drawers, dressing table, and washstand that had been part of her dowry.
Her mother-in-law slept behind her own bedroom furniture in the opposite corner with Ah Moydoy. A lazy girl, Ah Moydoy preferred to stay in and around the house and gossip with anyone who would listen rather than do her share of the work in the fields.
The cooking area occupied another corner. It was set up with the daaw, cooking hearth, a water reservoir, and a food preparation table, on top of which was a large wooden chopping board and cleaver. A small dining table, surrounded by four simple, wooden chairs, took up the remaining space, and constituted the communal living area.
When Ah Thloo did not immediately produce a grandchild, she felt the bite of her mother-in-law’s disdain. The old woman and Ah Moydoy were like the two forks of a viper’s tongue. Ah Thloo was treated like a slave, but school and her teacher were her salvation.
Ah Fonge Dange was the thlange saang, teacher, of the school in Nga Yieow. The village, about a twenty-minute walk from Longe Gonge Lay, was large enough to have a full-time, one-room schoolhouse, with permanent desks, chairs, and a blackboard. It wasn’t unusual to have students of various ages at different levels of learning, but at nineteen, Ah Thloo stood out as a beginner.
Ah Fonge Dange taught the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The students had to buy sets of books, one for each subject. In addition, they learned about the history of China. He kept the students informed of current events by teaching them how to read a newspaper. One day the teacher introduced the class to some writings by a man named Mao, who had been organizing unions in Hunan Province, on the northern border of Guangdong. Mao wrote about a “class struggle” between peasants and their oppressive landlords, who imposed heavy rents and taxes and high interest rates, and used exploitive labour practices, aided and abetted by corrupt officials. Ah Thloo thought back to her years with her fellow cowherds, recalling their abject poverty in comparison to the great wealth of people like the woman whose garden they had raided. What her teacher talked about in class opened her eyes to the world beyond the boundaries of the market towns.
The students learned to read and write the same way they learned arithmetic, by rote. Each day the teacher selected a passage from a book and read it through while the students followed the text with their fingers. At home that night, they would niem see, memorize the text, and prepare to mak see, write the piece from memory, the next day. They also had to be ready to be called on to stand up for an oral recitation.
Applying her mind to the task of learning was a challenge Ah Thloo loved. It took all her concentration to keep up with the class. She already knew she had a good head for numbers, and she soon caught up in the other subjects with children who had been in school for many more years.
In 1931, the teacher had much tragic news to report. That summer, the Yangtze River flooded, killing more than one hundred and forty-five thousand people, while fourteen million refugees were left stranded. In the fall, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, which threatened the sovereignty of China. In 1933, the name of Mao again came up in discussion, this time associated with the Chinese Communist Party, which was being attacked by the government.
At home, when Ah Thloo was nagged by her mother-in-law, or confronted by her sister-in-law, she would recall something new she had learned that day and mull it over. Hard labour and trivial tasks could be endured when her mind was occupied elsewhere, and eventually she devised a plan to buffer herself even more securely.
Ah Thloo’s new home, the nonge toon, rural hamlet, of Longe Gonge Lay, an offshoot of the much larger village of Cha Liang about a ten-minute walk away, had been built by a group of brothers named Wong. A number had made their money working in Montreal, Canada. The second brother, Wong Oy Lan, known as Ah Ngay Gonge, or Second Elder Uncle, had invited his distant relative, Wong Gay Sieng, Ah Dang’s adoptive father, to build there as well, when his family abandoned their ancestral house and village after being targeted by bandits. Unfortunately for his wife, on that trip Ah Gay Sieng stayed in China only long enough to build a small house for her and their son. When he returned home for the last time, he was too sick from cancer to even initiate an expansion of their house before he died.
The hamlet consisted of nine houses, built in pairs, lined up in five rows. Between each row and each two-house block was a lane; each house had a front and back door leading out to the main lanes. Across the lane from one door of Ah Tew May’s house was where Ah Ngay Gonge’s wife and two of his three daughters lived. His eldest daughter, Ah Ngan, had married even before her youngest sister was born and lived in a village an hour’s walk away. She was the same age as Ah Thloo, and they came to know each other later, when Ah Ngan came back to her family’s home during Kong Jien, the War of Resistance against the Japanese.
The middle daughter, Ah Lien, became Ah Thloo’s best friend in the hamlet during this time and they attended school together. The youngest daughter, Ah Aie, was not even two years old when Ah Thloo moved to the hamlet, but she soon became one of the “girls.” The families produced many boys, all cousins to Ah Lien and Ah Aie, but the hamlet was too small to have a nui oak. Ah Thloo helped the village and herself by inviting the sisters to study and sleep with her, creating a nui oak. At school she was a star student; the girls looked to her for help and they enjoyed each other’s company. They also provided a buffer between Ah Thloo and her spiteful relatives.
Meanwhile, she put her new knowledge to effective use. Ah Dang wrote regularly and always enclosed a money order. She was proud of being able to correspond with him and to manage their financial affairs on her own at the bank in the market town. While he could not always send much money, she was grateful for his financial support. She was very aware of the women around her who lived in poverty, neglected and abandoned by their husbands who were abroad. As the years went by, she started to feel more comfortable about her own husband and their marriage.
• • •
AH DANG: MONTREAL, 1930–1934
When Ah Dang returned to Vancouver on July 14, 1930, he continued to use the immigration receipt under the name of Wong Guey Dang. Some things were not worth changing.
But the city was very different; the Depression had hit hard in British Columbia. Its economy was so dependent on natural resources that when commodity prices for lumber and minerals plummeted, the suffering was widespread.
Layoffs had begun in Vancouver sawmills in 1929, and government agencies responded only reluctantly to Chinese requests for aid. Traditional self-help agencies in Vancouver’s Chinatown, such as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), could not meet the demand from the growing numbers of unemployed Chinese. Local Chinese restaurants supplied meals to the needy. By 1931, 80 per cent of Chinatown residents were idle. Some resorted to begging. It was cheaper to buy them passage back to China than to support them, and as the Depression progressed, the BC government paid for a few hundred men to return to China, stipulating they not come back to Canada for a minimum of two years.
Not long after Ah Dang’s return to Vancouver from China, he received a life-changing letter from Ah Ngay Gonge, who owned a laundry business in Eastern Canada. Ah Dang had maintained contact with him and looked up to him as a surrogate father after Ah Gay Sieng went back to China and died. Now, Ah Ngay Gonge became Ah Dang’s benefactor too. He invited Ah Dang to join him in Montreal because, while the city had not escaped the Depression, more job opportunities existed for Hong Ngange, Chinese people, there.
Ah Dang was ready for a change and this was probably a prudent move. As it was, Ah Ngay Gonge had not left him much choice in the matter; in his letter, he had included a one-way train ticket on the Canadian Pacific Railway from Vancouver to Montreal.
The train left Vancouver in the evening. Unfortunately, it went through the Rocky Mountains in the dark of night. The closest Ah Dang had been to that area was when he had worked in the southeastern BC town of Salmo. He had only heard about the vast mountain range, with peaks so high they never lost their hats of ice and snow, and was disappointed that he would not be able to see them on this journey. Peering out into the growing darkness, he could perceive little outside the window of his bunk. Although the rhythmic click-clacking of the tracks and the undulating motion was making him tired, he felt the need for one last pee.
Balancing his way along the swaying car in the dimly lit hallway toward the washroom, he accidentally bumped into a Chinese porter.
“Pardon me,” Ah Dang said in Chinese. “I was looking down and didn’t see you coming.”
“No, sir, it was my all fault,” responded the porter in a similar dialect. “I apologize for my clumsiness.”
“What’s your family name?” Ah Dang asked.
“My name is Li. I am from Toisan,” replied the porter, understanding that the man had wanted to know where his family was from in China.
“Eh, what? My family name is Wong, from Hoyping. Ah Bak, Elder Sir, we’re neighbours!” Ah Dang guessed the man was older than his own twenty-nine years.
Ah Dang asked Ah Bak about the Rocky Mountains and his job on the train. Just as their discussion led them to talking about their countrymen who had built the railroad, the train whistle blew.
“Craigellachie. This is where the last spike was hammered in, in 1885,” said Ah Bak. “Did you know, not a single Chinese was invited to attend the ceremony?”
“We Chinese have had bitter lives, eh? I heard that the CCBA collected the bones of more than three hundred corpses and returned them to China for decent burial.”
When Ah Dang got back to his bunk later that evening, he found he couldn’t sleep. There were too many ghosts of his countrymen, whose mortal bones were still waiting to be found and buried properly, wandering the mountains.
• • •
Ah Ngay Gonge welcomed Ah Dang at Montreal’s impressive Windsor Station and offered him a place to stay. His home and laundry business were on St. Hubert Street, not far from the train station. They took the number 150 bus east on Dorchester Boulevard.
To help repay the cost of the train ticket, which Ah Dang insisted on doing, he helped Ah Ngay Gonge with the laundry. He scrubbed the garments on a wood-and-glass washboard until his hands and knuckles were raw from the harsh laundry soap. He learned to mend, starch, iron, fold, stack, wrap, and mark the finished items for each customer. The laundry consisted mostly of men’s white shirts, underwear, and socks. Sometimes, if he was home during the day, he helped out at the counter. During the day he looked for work, mostly in restaurants, but few people were hiring.
Wages for jobs that still existed were low. A full-time electrical technician at the prestigious Marconi Company was paid fourteen dollars a week, while a waitress might work for a few hours a day at forty-five cents per hour. A full meal, consisting of a bowl of soup, two slices of bread with butter, a main course of fish or meat, a spoonful of mashed potato, dessert, and coffee, cost only twenty-five cents, but few people could afford to pay even that amount. Rent for a room was seven dollars a week; a house might rent for twelve dollars a month. Without work and wages, however, many were forced to live rough on the streets or squat in abandoned or condemned buildings. Ah Dang was lucky to be living with Ah Ngay Gonge.
Ah Dang often walked by a large church on Bleury Street that had a noontime soup kitchen. Passing the open door, he saw that the kitchen provided a bowl of soup and two pieces of bread. He had expected to see adults but was shocked to see so many children in the lineup, some clinging listlessly to their mother’s filthy skirts, others sprawling limply on the ground, too hungry and tired to cry. He was reminded of his long-forgotten childhood, before he was reclaimed. His heart ached for the children, but there was nothing he could do to help them.
One of Ah Ngay Gonge’s regular customers noticed Ah Dang’s English. Although he spoke with a strong accent, he was quite fluent. Over the next few weeks, they exchanged a few pleasantries and Ah Dang mentioned his previous work experience; the customer offered him a job as his family’s cook.
Ah Dang was thus reinvented as a domestic servant for a wealthy white family (whose identity is now unknown) who had managed to survive the stock market crash. All his years of cooking in camps throughout BC were finally paying off. After passing a trial period, he was offered a modest monthly wage, most of which he literally socked away, as well as room and board. He stayed with the family until late 1934.
His guide was The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, published by McClelland & Stewart. He wrote his name, Wong Guey Dang, in neat script on the inside page, and he bookmarked pages with small, accordioned booklets of cake recipes distributed by Swans Down Cake Flour. He also collected recipes from the newspaper, written on scrap paper. One of these was a recipe for almond bars. Another was a cocktail recipe, calling for limes, rum, and egg whites.
On his days off, he went sightseeing in the city. When he first arrived in Montreal, Ah Ngay Gonge had taken him to Chinatown, which was then clustered along De La Gauchetière Street West, between St. Laurent and Jeanne Mance, and Dorchester Boulevard and De Vitre. There, Ah Dang was introduced to the major Chinese organizations.
As a hand laundry operator, Ah Ngay Gonge was very involved in the Chinese Association of Montreal, an organization similar to Vancouver’s CCBA. One of its activities was to defend operators’ rights and fight the mounting fees imposed by the provincial government. In Quebec, hand laundries were by far the single largest occupation of the Chinese. They worked long hours, for low returns, and were seen as competing against white women who took in laundry. In 1915, a licence cost fifty dollars, but Chinese operators were charged an extra fifty. In 1932, the association held off a proposed hike of one hundred dollars by the municipal government.
Ah Dang joined the Wong Wun Sun society, a clan association; it was a place for members to socialize and exchange news about China and their families. The stories from China brought mixed reactions. On the positive side, the Kuomintang Nationalist government was trying to bring order out of the chaos that had marked the warlord period. Ministries were created to deal with international affairs, such as war and regaining Chinese sovereignty in foreign relations, as well as with domestic issues of finance, education, and justice. But in 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and established the puppet government of Manchukuo. A year later, the Japanese established a military presence in Shanghai, and while the incident did not lead to war, the Japanese made their way into northern China through demands and negotiations. However, instead of repelling the foreign invaders, General Jiang spent his resources fighting the Chinese Communists, raising great indignation among students and intellectual activists within China and elsewhere.
With growing frustration, Ah Dang watched the advance of the Japanese by reading Chinese newspapers. While Ah Thloo, his mother, and her adopted daughter were relatively safe in the south of China, he felt it would be only a matter of time before the determined Japanese forces overtook the whole country, if Jiang continued to ignore the foreign threat while fighting his personal civil war.
As a diversion from the news of China, Ah Dang looked into activities offered by the churches serving the Chinese population of Montreal. The Chinese Catholic Mission had existed since 1918; its greatest contribution was the mission hospital, run by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and funded by the Chinese community. Initially established to deal with the worldwide influenza epidemic, the mission bought a building on Lagauchetière Street West two years later, to serve as a hospital for chronically ill, single men with no relatives. The mission sisters and doctors volunteered their services. There was also an outpatient dispensary, where Chinese from as far away as Halifax came for treatment. Ah Dang would later donate funds to help build a new hospital on St. Denis Street, away from Chinatown.
The Chinese Presbyterian Mission was started in 1897 by Chan Nam-sing and Joseph Thompson, missionaries from China. Whereas Catholics were more apt to follow dogma, dismissing all ancient Chinese traditions, Pastor Chan was more flexible. He did not pressure the Chinese to abandon ancestor worship, and interestingly, he and his family followed the Chinese lunar calendar and celebrated Chinese New Year; when his son, Paul, was born, they celebrated the child’s one-month birthday by giving out dyed red eggs. He also allowed non-Christian Chinese to be buried in Mount Royal Cemetery. The Presbyterian Church offered Canadian-born Chinese a kindergarten,
a band, a Canadian Girls in Training group, a Chinese school, and a young people’s society.
Montreal started to recover from the Depression in the mid-1930s. Ah Dang watched with fascination the construction projects of the day, including the Jacques Cartier Bridge linking Montreal with Longueuil on the south shore and the Sun Life Assurance Company building on Dominion Square. When it was completed in 1933, it was the tallest building in the Commonwealth. During the Second World War, the Bank of England stored five billion dollars, including gold bullion, there, and the vaults were rumoured to have held the British Crown Jewels. Little did Ah Dang know then that he would own property across the square from the Sun Life building.
In 1932, the city passed a resolution to establish the botanical gardens, which became one of the best-known botanical gardens in the world. It was one of Ah Dang’s favourite places to visit. He also enjoyed spending quiet afternoons sitting by the pond at La Fontaine Park, reading a newspaper or feeding the ducks.
After 1891, when the major department stores moved from the business district of Old Montreal to St. Catherine Street, between Bleury and de la Montagne, that location became the bustling centre for shopping, with Henry Morgan’s, Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and Ogilvy’s. Of these, Ah Dang considered Ogilvy’s the most prestigious, its products the most exclusive. If he could shop there, he would know he had made it. However, he was disappointed to find that as he strolled through their menswear department one day, the sales clerks refused to serve him. It may have been because of his race—he never found out why.
A few years later, he returned to Ogilvy’s, walked deliberately to the men’s fine clothing section, and bought a cashmere sweater. With cash. Just to show them he could.
• • •
AH THLOO AND AH DANG: CHINA, 1934–1935
In October 1934, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai led the Communist Red Army troops on a ten-thousand-kilometre trek from Jiangxi Province in the south to create a stronghold in Shaanxi in the north. They were fleeing Kuomintang attacks. One hundred thousand people started the trek but only four thousand completed it. Known as the Long March, the dangerous journey, which ended in October 1936, built the reputations of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, as well as many of the country’s subsequent leaders.
In the same month in 1934, Ah Dang left Canada for China to visit his family. He had saved his money and it was time to show off his wealth by expanding the house for his mother and his wife. His intention was to add on to the existing, single-room structure by building around and up. He would ask his father-in-law, Ah Poy Lim, to help. With his building skills and local knowledge, the older man could draw up the plans, find appropriately skilled labourers, and obtain the finest materials, all at the best prices.
Ah Dang arrived in the hamlet exactly four years, four months, and four days after he had left. The word for four, thlay, is a bad word in Chinese—it sounds like thlay, the word for dead. For Ah Thloo, November 5, 1934, felt a bit like death, for on that day, she lost her freedom.
When Ah Dang arrived, he immediately changed the living arrangements. At least, he tried to. While it was relatively easy to move Ah Tew May and Ah Moydoy across the lane, into his benefactor’s house, he did not have the same level of cooperation from his wife. He never asked why the two neighbour girls were sharing his marriage bed with Ah Thloo; he just acted.
As before, Ah Dang used the strap. Again, Ah Thloo fought back, and this time, she lashed back with her tongue as well. Living in the house with Ah Tew May and Ah Moydoy had taught her how to hurt with words. She had buried away all the snide remarks they had made about him over the years, all the secrets about him as a boy, and she dredged them up to use against him. As before, he was stopped short by her ferocity—and now by her words.
After that, Ah Thloo was even more adamant that the girls stay with her; she needed them to protect her from her husband. He gave up, temporarily. He had other things to attend to and soon forgot the incident.
Ah Dang asked his father-in-law to quickly build a small, temporary shelter for himself and Ah Thloo while work continued on the main house. He also agreed to have his elder brother-in-law, the artist Ah Gim Yoke, decorate the house with tiles and paintings. The two got along well, and Ah Dang was glad to help improve his brother-in-law’s precarious financial situation. Their congenial relationship led them to have a photograph taken together.
Ah Dang (on the right) and artistic brother-in-law Ah Gim Yoke, 1935.
UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER STUDIO, CHINA
Neighbours share a meal in the main room. Ah Lai is second on the right, writing, 1986.
ROBERT WONG, CHINA
Building materials and labour were cheap. The Depression had reached China, especially in the manufacturing sector; in Shanghai alone, more than one million people were out of work. In the countryside, if cash was not available, one could at least work for a bowl of rice at the end of the day. Labour cost only half a yuan (seventeen cents) per day per person. A three hundred-pound bag of cement was less than one and a half yuan (fifty cents). Ten thousand bricks could be bought for only one hundred yuan (thirty dollars). Ah Dang’s father-in-law oversaw the building and kept a meticulous list of materials in a string-bound, rice-paper booklet.
The small house was completed in a matter of days, and somehow, Ah Dang was able to coax Ah Thloo into living there with him. There was no room for the sisters; they had to return to their own home.
Ah Thloo was relieved to live apart from Ah Tew May, the devil she knew, but it was like jumping from the wok into the fire, to live with this strange, volatile man by herself. Still, he was calmer now and was solicitous with her. Once more, duty called and she complied. They maintained a relatively harmonious household, and the goddess Kuan Yin, “One Who Sees and Hears the Cry from the Human World,” blessed them with a peace offering: Ah Thloo became pregnant. When Ah Dang learned of this, he made sure she had the best medical care money could buy from the surrounding market towns. He asked his mother to cook nourishing broths, and the pregnancy proceeded with ease.
The main house was built in record time; it was large, more spacious than any other house Ah Dang would ever live in. It was deliberately plain from the outside, with grey brick walls and thick, iron-reinforced wooden doors. All the windows on the first floor of the two-storey building were secured with vertical iron bars, and the house was attached on one side to its neighbour. All this was done to discourage bandits and other invaders.
The ground floor was divided into three sections. The front door opened into the first section, which had two rooms. One was a cooking area. The other was a storage room, with two windows to let in light and air. In the corner by the door, a bamboo ladder climbed upstairs.
From the kitchen, a doorway led into the original hiang aie, main room. A large opening, cut in the ceiling, made this room bright and gave it a feeling of airiness. Upstairs, a banister with green dowelling and a red railing surrounded the opening. Emerald-green and white decorative tiles, designed by Ah Gim Yoke, lined the balcony and the rest of the ceiling. He also created large paintings, of birds and scenery, on the walls above eye level in the downstairs room.
At one end of the room, on the other side of the wall from the kitchen, was a reservoir. Water, drawn from the communal well and carried by wooden buckets suspended at either end of a bamboo pole, was stored here. A dining table stood next to it and a staircase at one end of the room led to the second floor.
Not only people used this room—chickens, geese, pigs, and even calves lived there as well. It was not the most sanitary arrangement, but when bandits roamed the area, inside the house was the safest place for the animals. On the other side of the hiang aie was the third section, again divided into two rooms, used mainly for storage.
There were four rooms on the second floor—two on either side of the landing. Ah Dang and Ah Thloo had a room on one side of the balcony while Ah Tew May and Ah Moydoy slept in a room on the other side. The other two rooms were for storage, where large ceramic urns kept rice and other foodstuffs dry and safely away from hungry rodents and insects. The upstairs rooms were particularly handy during the flood season, when the ground floor could fill with brackish water partway up the stairs. A portable coal-burning stove served as the cooker whenever the family had to live upstairs. To the left of the stairs stood the indoor ancestral shrine and at the far end of the house, facing the communal bamboo garden, was an open deck, part of which was enclosed as a lookout area and safe room.
No bathrooms were built into the house, as no infrastructure existed in the small hamlet for plumbing, for either incoming water or outgoing waste. The hamlet’s well did not provide enough water to allow for baths; those people who did wash made do with sponge baths, using a small basin. The communal toilet was at one end of the hamlet, under a shelter built of woven bamboo. It consisted of a very large ceramic pot, standing about four feet high, accessed by brick steps. Night soil was still the main source of fertilizer.
Ah Dang and Ah Thloo had a few months to move in all the furniture, which had been stored in various neighbouring houses, before their first child was born. Although the midwife had an excellent reputation, when she came to help Ah Thloo deliver the baby, Ah Dang insisted she wash her hands with soap he had brought from Canada and in hot water that had been boiled. He also insisted that the sheets and blankets for the birth and baby swaddling be washed with hot, soapy water. He had learned the importance of hygiene in the home of his white employers in Montreal.
The first child was born on the twenty-eighth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, in 1935. Ah Thloo, thinking her husband might be disappointed with a female, was ready to defend the child’s life with her own, but she was pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been concerned only for the health of the baby, not its sex. Whenever he held the infant, his face lit up with delight. He smiled broadly and his eyes sparkled. Another piece of the puzzle that makes up this man, the father of our daughter, Ah Thloo thought.
Ah Tew May was also transformed by the baby. At first, she derided Ah Thloo for giving birth to a mere girl, but Ah Thloo reminded the older woman of her own children. Also, children have a way of melting even the hardest of jade-cold hearts. After so many years, here was a baby to care for, to amuse, and to entertain. Ah Tew May seemed to forget herself; her tongue lost its sharpness. The words she spoke to the baby were sweet, and she carried on in the same tone when she was speaking to Ah Thloo. With the baby, her attitude was one of tenderness. With her daughter-in-law, Ah Tew May was now solicitous, always offering to help whenever the baby needed cleaning or wanted to be picked up. However, with her adoptive son, she still struggled to bite her tongue. Now and again, Ah Dang and Ah Thloo thought they saw Ah Tew May’s mouth twitch upwards at the corners, especially when she was engaged with the baby.
During the baby’s gat how, the one-month ceremony, she was named Lai Quen, “Most Beautiful.” After the child underwent the traditional hair-cutting ceremony, she was officially presented to the world to receive gifts. With the completion of his house and the start of his family, Ah Dang could have made plans to leave, but he stayed two more months after the celebration.
Although he had been away from Canada for only thirteen months, as if to hurry his return he was surrounded by bad omens. Both the Yangtze and Yellow rivers flooded, while in thirteen other provinces in China, droughts caused devastating crop failures. Ah Dang worried about the dreaded possibility of the Japanese arriving in the south. The Communist Red Army was still making its way north. If actual war broke out, he could be stuck in the country, of no use to his family. At least if he was in Canada, he could work and send remittances.
He had not bought any land. Ah Thloo leased a plot of land to grow vegetables and she had used his remittances carefully to purchase rice, as well as some chickens and pigs to raise for market. She was always able to negotiate a price that included a large chunk of fresh meat to bring home, so the family had not gone hungry over the past few years. He was proud of her.
Before departing, he entrusted Ah Thloo with the remainder of his funds, hoping it was enough to outlast whatever happened, until he could send more money. Cursing the Chinese generals and Japanese invaders for endangering the lives of his family, and the Canadian government for keeping him apart from them, he made a reluctant departure.
This time, their separation was even longer.
