Coming to Gold Mountain

In Auschwitz there stood a building that housed all the valuables confiscated from the inmates. Inmates and prison guards alike referred to the building as “Kanada.” Early Chinese immigrants to this country felt they were bound for “Gold Mountain.” Josef Škvorecký, the Czech-Canadian novelist, once told me that, “when my wife and I escaped to Canada, we soon realized we’d come to a country without issues. Not entirely, of course—there is no such thing—but as close as you can get.” My father often said that, if he and my mother did nothing else for my brothers and me, they did bring us to Canada. We had fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution, and we had come from a prosperous family, “but never in the history of the world,” he said, “has there been a country as comfortable and accepting and open-minded and prosperous as this one—not for everyone, not for absolutely everyone, but for the less fortunate we have programs.”

What is it about this best of all possible worlds that sets us apart from previous and other cultures? British writer Pico Iyer (who now lives in Japan) once described our country as post-national. The moniker is an apt one and bears further consideration. I believe Canada has moved from being a prenational country to being a post-national one, without ever stopping at national. The centre does not hold as well as it might in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, India or France, to name a few. Part of the reason, I think, is that we are new at the identity game, and provinces like Ontario, especially centres like Toronto, invite and even encourage immigrants to preserve the essence of their ethnic origins: serve their foods, hold their festivals, write about their own faraway places. To be Hungarian is to be Hungarian first and Other second. To be American is to be American first. Is it possible that we do not insist on or impose a national identity on newcomers because we do not have a distinctive one, or at least one we can define distinctly? The real question—and I say it without irony—is this: do we really need to keep pushing the identity gods in Canada? Does doing so not serve merely to highlight our lack of certainty about who we are? We should be invoking the confidence gods, if anyone.

More importantly, do we need a strong and defined national identity? If anything, not having much of an identity has taught us tolerance and mutual respect and has allowed us to appreciate and enjoy these differences. Nationalism is divisive. It makes us think of being Other as being different, possibly inferior, possibly threatening.

Hence, we have by accident and evolution and prosperity developed this best of all possible places. We live in a liberal world with universal health care, social security, public education and welfare—none of it perfect—but inspired by lofty ideals.

Was this state of affairs always the prevailing one? Actually, in recent history, when we still thought we were just British and French and had swept the aboriginal peoples off to inhospitable corners of this vast land, we were not quite as open-minded, nor half as decent or even polite as we are now.

It was to the shores of this not-yet-brilliant country that the families of Judy Fong Bates, Richard Valeriote and George Sipos came, from China, Italy and Hungary respectively. All settled in towns outside of Toronto: Allandale, London and Guelph. All three have recently given us memoirs about their experiences.

In The Year of Finding Memory, Judy Fong Bates opens with the discovery, in the summer of 1972, of a box of papers under her father’s bed, not long after he had hanged himself in the basement. He came years before to Canada because the “Gold Mountain might at least provide him with a fighting chance for a better life.” But he came at a time when the outsider remained an outsider—a “Chink” he was called, and a “coolie”—someone who had to pay a head tax to settle here. Fong Bates’s aim in writing this exquisite and moving memoir is to understand what it was her father and mother left behind in the old world and what life must have felt like for them in the new. Certainly, the author’s own experience of Canada—she was a young girl when she came with her mother—was not like the experience of the relatives, including half-siblings, who were left behind.

The author artfully weaves together two narrative strands, alternating between the emerging life in Canada and the one back home. She manages the latter exploration by twice returning herself with her lo fon (white) husband in recent years to the birthplaces of her father and mother in China. Sometimes she just wants to see things, smell the air in her homeland, walk its narrow alleyways. Fong Bates writes, “I knew the China of my parents’ generation no longer existed. But just maybe, if I maintained my vigilance, I might string together these fleeting moments and capture some essence of it.”

Judy Fong Bates herself has become a hybrid of the two cultures, a true heir of both—and an appreciative heir at that. She says of herself in her memoir that English “claimed my soul” while Chinese remained a language locked in her childhood, a language of “primary colours.” It is English that provided the shading that came with adulthood, and Canada that provided the perspective that Fong Bates needed to see the old world anew. Ironically, on her first pilgrimage to the land of her birth, she finds her father’s old place has “nothing to do with me or who I was. If anything, I felt even more like an outsider.” As a young girl in school, the author was always “the little Chinese girl,” and now, in China, she is the citizen of Gold Mountain returned, the “visitor.” She has returned from her “safe, tidy planet” to a place her husband describes innocently as “so old.”

More difficult even than making herself at home in small-town Ontario at a time when the Fongs were as much of an oddity as Fong Bates’s husband Michael is in small-town China, the author had to watch her unhappy parents, whose “marriage had nothing to do with love and everything to do with survival,” fight off both outer and inner demons. The author tells us that, “through sheer force of will, I had a happy childhood.”

Nevertheless, the “peaceful order,” prosperity and contentment her parents dreamed of eluded them. When they sent photographs home from their new home in Acton, Ontario, they posed in front of someone else’s property, someone more established, naturally. When people neglected to pick up their clean clothes from the family laundry, the author’s father waited five years before trying on the unclaimed clothing himself.

Still worried about the trauma of adjusting to the new world, even in the more liberal, broad-minded Canada of today, Fong Bates, on her journey home, finds herself discouraging her niece Kim from emigrating from China. She is concerned the world here will still be inhospitable. Kim would be far from her friends, would not be able to “haggle in markets” or “harvest fresh ginger” or help out in “her sister’s tidy herbal pharmacy.”

Inevitably, while the author searches for some “epiphany” to explain her life, the magic discovery she makes is that her father from “old” China and her husband from “young” Canada would likely have become fast friends “through their love of … simple pleasures,” like a fine garden. Of course, it is the universals of character that transcend cultural differences.

Richard Valeriote’s Alice Street is as different in tone, ambition and psychological depth from The Year of Finding Memory as a memoir can get, but it does not aspire to be more than it is. It is the story of the 15th child of 16 in a family of immigrants from the Calabria region of Italy to Guelph, Ontario. The author’s misfortune is that he is born only months before the stock market crash of 1929 and the arrival of the Great Depression. His generous father forgives customers who visit his little grocery store, and his mother remains deeply faithful and charitable, even in the darkest hours.

Although he does not feel the outsider’s sting as sharply as did Fong Bates in Allandale and Acton, Valeriote is nevertheless a victim of prejudice too at a time when it was, if not acceptable, still commonplace. When Valeriote enters grade 11, a teacher asks those “who are not of English, Irish, or Scotch heritage” to stand up. The author stands, along with a few others, then sits again. The teacher then asks those who are not Protestant to stand, and the author finds himself once again on his feet with a couple of Jewish kids and one who is Greek Orthodox. It is these students the teacher singles out for punishment, especially through unfair marking of assignments and tests. Later, Valeriote’s first love has to reject him when her Anglican parents learn that he is “one of sixteen children, and Catholic.”

Reminded too often of his origins and hardened by poverty, Richard Valeriote becomes the most self-reliant of boys. When he starts work in the family store, he finds he can peddle the discarded fruit and vegetable baskets and burlap sacks on the side for a few pennies each. Even more dramatic, later in life, when through utter determination he has found his way into McGill medical school, Valeriote returns home to Guelph essentially to ask anyone he has met or knows of for funds to complete his education. Extraordinary as it may seem now to young Canadians who expect their ivory towers to be filled to the brim with bursaries, loans and grants, in the early 1950s, the author could not even get a bank loan to be repaid with interest. The Guelph bank manager looks sympathetically upon the young student, though, and lends him $200 of his own money. Another family acquaintance does the same, without even accepting a promissory note. A wealthy doyen of the town, though, known to be generous with young people, turns down Valeriote because the young man is a Catholic. Soon after, the author finds himself staring at a working horse on the winter street, identifying with the beast of burden.

Richard Valeriote’s Alice Street is a sobering reminder that the institutionalized kindness and understanding we have now come to expect and enjoy stood out in an earlier time as individual acts of sympathy, charity and hope, as unforgettable as their counterparts: acts of prejudice and disdain.

Although George Sipos’s The Geography of Arrival is also a memoir composed by a naturalized Canadian, it reads more like a series of linked short stories evoking the London of the author’s youth. At first, we think we are roaming the now familiar terrain of the outsider. In “Archaeology” and “Loupe,” the family of new arrivals discovers a toy hockey player at the bottom of their box of cornflakes. The father speculates that the worker at the cereal factory must have taken his boy with him to work one day, and the plastic player was dropped and lost in their cereal box. But weeks later, when another hockey player turns up in the next box, the Siposes feel foolish. The author’s mother gets a job in a toothbrush factory, which personalizes toothbrushes with dentists’ names, but when the inscription fails or is crooked, the brush is discarded. Throughout his youth, Sipos brushes his teeth with seconds, toothbrushes from “crooked dentists.” He says, in “Loupe,” that having left behind “the disaster of Europe,” what defined “the country we had come to” is “banana splits,” as simple and brilliant an innovation as the country itself. Like Fong Bates, the Siposes send home a photograph of the mother at Loblaws, holding a pineapple, exotic, unnameable, impossible to find in Budapest. In “Corvair,” the author’s jubilant father, halfway across the Atlantic, stands with his family by the railing of the ship carrying the Sipos family to Halifax and triumphantly flings the key to their Budapest apartment into the ocean.

Very much of the rest of The Geography of Arrival unapologetically and unself-consciously defines the landscape of the author’s youth and is highly impressionistic. The shadows of branches on a wall fleetingly remind the author of shadows on a Hungarian wall. The model of the Cutty Sark the author assembles and paints meticulously ends up crossing this country from London to Vancouver on the back of a moving truck. A choir-master who cares about music makes the author care too and teaches him that “some things matter.” A bust of Socrates guarding the public library reminds Sipos of an age-old truth: that “true wisdom is knowing we know very little.”

In this way The Geography of Arrival is saying that its protagonist belongs right where he is, that he is assimilated and moves about this good country as other people move although each has a unique perspective. Like a river, Sipos tells us, the “incomprehensible may not save us in the end, but it can, in its way, carry us through.”

Even if we Canadians have not yet arrived, we seem to be pointed in the right direction.