A Chinese-Canadian Tapestry

In Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, the award-winning non-fiction author Denise Chong tells the story of Chinese immigrants and their adjustment to life in Canada during a time when their opportunities were limited.

Chong’s first work in the area of family history focused on her own. The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided, which became a bestseller, explored the life of Mayying, her fiery maternal grandmother, whose life was marked by betrayal, gambling, alcohol- ism and sexual misadventure. This time around, through interviews, letters and archives, Chong expands the scope and recounts the small struggles for dignity, the good life and sense of belonging of several families of Chinese immigrants in various parts of Canada.

Her protagonists, Chong shows, are at times left with little opportunity for any agency. But despite their confinement, they do strive. And many of their successes arise because they are able to rely on people like themselves for survival. The families seek each other across a strange and sometimes bleak Canadian landscape where even a slippery Ottawa sidewalk can present itself as an obstacle. Families are reunited. New ones are formed from the broken pieces of tragedy. Their lives become deeply intertwined and, as a result, Chong ends up shaping a genealogical tapestry that at times favours the overall pattern of their immigration rather than the warps and wefts of her subjects’ individual stories.

In the first chapter, readers are introduced to 15-year-old Fay-Oi Lim. In 1950, her father, already in Vancouver, beckons her to immigrate to Canada with his second wife and a stepbrother. To do so, Fay-Oi must leave behind her own biological mother, or First Mother, and pose as the daughter of her Second Mother. Alternatively, she is offered the chance to come later as a wife of another Chinese man. Either way, the bargain demands that she strip away portions of her identity and adopt another. Once reunited with her father, she tentatively adopts the name Marilyn. When she dis- covers she cannot pronounce the “l”, a family friend bestows upon her the name Marion.

On the other side of the country, Chong intro- duces readers to the Fongs of Perth, Ontario. The clan adopts an English name, Johnston, and runs Harry’s Café. Working in the kitchen is Hum Sang, brother to the family matriarch, Mabel Johnston. Sang on arrival decides to go by James, then Jasper. When he finds out his older brother has been killed by communists in China, Jasper passes off his nephew as his son and brings him to Canada. The boy, age seven, takes the name Kenny. And so the stories go on, jumping from one family to another, from one person’s perspective to another, like so many shuttles on an ever-expanding loom. And the thread of Fay-Oi, if a reader can remember her, re-emerges only near the end of Chong’s book to make a connection to the Johnstons, again, if the reader remembers them.

That is not to say that Chong fails to uncover fascinating lives. Indeed, there are standouts such as the young Ruth Lor, who in the spring of 1954 fails to return home to work at the family restaurant and joins the American civil rights movement in Washington DC. Ruth’s story tantalizes. A reader can imagine Ruth’s struggle with internalized rac- ism and, more significantly, how she may have confronted her own prejudices and stereotypes of black people. Indeed, Ruth’s summer of escape and social awakening could well be the stuff of a whole novel but in Lives of the Families her arc is truncated into a mere anecdote and one fragment of a tart let- ter from Ruth to her mother, “I cannot be a puppet, which is what I am every time I come home to work in the restaurant. This may sound rather blunt, but I say this with all humility and love, believe me. I cannot be a puppet and at the same time a creative human being.”

Chong acknowledges in the book’s introduction that she avoided the gaudier, more arabesque life histories, like Ruth Lor’s, when she encountered them in her research. She explains, “I honed in on the lone Chinese family and their restaurant in a Canadian town as a way to convey the immigrant experience. Behind that sign on the business, and in the rooms behind or the apartment above, the everyday life of the family would test their ability to adapt.”

As a result, the book is both big and small, inti- mate and distant, and it comes together in a way that I can best describe as anti-epic. Lives of the Families shares the many features of an epic. It has a sweeping scale covering decades, a large cast of characters, and a number of historical and social forces—laws like the Chinese head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act, and ground-shifting events like Japan’s invasion of China, the Second World War and the communist takeover of China—that act with the capriciousness of gods to motivate, hin- der, upheave and ulti- mately haunt Chong’s protagonists. But the author eschews grand gestures and focuses on a domestic sphere. It is a close, muted world of café kitchens, back booths and upstairs apartments, where loss and even great hor- ror are deflected by both the author and her subjects. Of a pair of neighbours, Chong writes: “The two friends did not bring up the past that was China … to bring up the past would be to talk about it too much and not enough at the same time. Memories push up and then you have to push them back down.”

Chong’s insistence on pushing up and then pushing down, favouring doggedness over brilliance, to weave an emblematic whole of the Chinese Canadian experience rather than highlighting the bright strands, suggests a near- Tolstoyan reading of immigrant history. Leo Tolstoy exhorts in the last line of War and Peace, that it is “essential to surmount a consciousness of an unreal freedom and to recognise a dependence not per- ceived by our senses.”

With Lives of the Families, Chong brings those connections, some strong, some weak, to the fore.