• 2 Interview with Geoff Hancock, in Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, eds., Other Solitudes: Canadia (...)

This was the generation that actually lived through the dark ages of anti-Chinese racism. They see themselves as Canadians, having earned that right through the railway, the Depression, and World War Two.2

1. The Discarded Bachelor-Man and the Useless Girl-Child

4The narration of Jook-Liang, the only daughter of the family, is mainly devoted to the telling of the three-year friendship she strikes up with Wong Bak, an old Chinese bachelor man, on the night they meet. Liang is five when she first meets Wong in 1933. Most people laugh at or are scared by Wong, ‘a wide-eyed, wet-nosed creature’ (p. 23), whose body was ruined by harsh work on the Canadian Pacific Railway and who now walks with two bamboo canes. But Liang quickly sees in him someone else, a character straight out of the stories told by her grandmother (whom she and her brother Jung call Poh-Poh): ‘A mountain opened, and here, right in our parlour, staring back at me, stood Monkey, the Monkey King of Poh-Poh’s stories, disguised as an old man bent over two canes’ (p. 23).

5The two immediately become the best of friends, and develop a complicity in which Liang gives Wong all the affection the lonely old man needs, and Wong gives Liang all the attention she craves, as a little girl. The adult narrator realizes that without this relationship, they would only have been ‘a discarded bachelor-man’ and ‘a useless girl-child’ (p. 39). They both experience a loneliness and a sense of rejection although their stories are separated by so many years. Wong came to Canada at the turn of the century to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway, as many Chinese men did between the late 1880s and 1923, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and all human traffic from China to Canada was brought to a halt. The Depression was harsh on the abandoned Chinese men: ‘There were no Depression jobs for such men. They had been deserted by the railroad companies and betrayed by the many labour contractors who had gone back to China, wealthy and forgetful’ (p. 17).

6In 1933, Wong is sent to Vancouver from the British Columbia interior because he ‘was too old to live a solitary existence any longer’ (p. 16). The Tong Association directs him to the grandmother’s family because the two elders are from the same village and might know each other, which it turns out they do. As for Liang, she meets Wong just before the birth of her third brother, Sek-Lung, who gets all of the grandmother’s attention because he is constantly sick, but also, and mainly, because he is a boy. Indeed, the grandmother’s motto is that ‘a girl-child is mo yung – useless’ (p. 32), but she stubbornly refuses to teach Liang her admirable weaving skills, because she was beaten into learning them. She scolds Liang for her obsession with tap-dancing, which the grandmother considers a useless activity. Liang only wants to imitate Shirley Temple and to delight Wong at the same time. She ends up hating her grandmother for her discouraging words for girls, but gets her revenge by having Wong to herself most of the time before his final departure.

7By fondly remembering her friendship with Wong and her feeling of being rejected by her grandmother as a little girl, when the rest of the family did not have much time for her, Liang forgives the old woman for all her insults, which hurt at the time, but had a different meaning in her language: ‘I know now she was only warning me to be patient, not to tempt the gods’ (p. 41). As a child, Liang day-dreams of friendship with Shirley Temple (pp. 46-47), but her best friend is Wong Bak, whose ‘familiar bamboo canes tap-tap-tapping on the sidewalk’ (p. 62) are the only echo to her tap dancing. The grandmother, who knows ‘the appeal and danger of dreams’ (p. 39), keeps interrupting Liang’s movie-star daydreams. She is more aware than the little girl that in the real world, she looks not like Shirley Temple, but like a Chinese girl whose family is struggling through the Depression, as the picture in the hall mirror reveals:

Bluntly reflected back at me was a broad sallow moon with slit dark eyes, topped by a helmet of black hair. I looked down. Jutting out from a too-large taffeta dress were two spindly legs matched by a pair of bony arms. (p. 43)

8For all the grandmother’s pestering Liang when she was small, the adult narrator, upon recalling her childhood, is able to see through the Old One’s curses: ‘I think she wished I was one of those rich children she had to serve when she was a young girl back in Old China’ (p. 61). The grandmother was declared ugly at birth, and was never deemed worth having her feet bound, because in Old China, ‘a beautiful girl-child from a poor family is even more useless than an ugly one from a rich family, unless you can sell either one for a jade bracelet or hard foreign currency’ (p. 42).

9The grandmother, like Wong Bak, is a survivor who had to ‘learn or die’, as she was taught by the First Concubine of the wealthy Chinese family she worked for as a child (p. 35). Like Wong, she was often beaten as a child, and the two of them ‘once showed their whip scars to each other, shared healing balms and kind words’ (pp. 63-64). Their bodies were ruined by their lives in Old China, and Wong Bak’s body was further broken by his work in Canada, as he recalls in stories told to Liang and her brother Jung, about ‘how he survived climbing sheer mountain cliffs, how one limb after another got broken’ (p. 58). The last wish of the old-timers is to have their bones shipped back to China, and Wong and Liang’s friendship ends when he leaves Canada for China, taking with him two thousand pounds of bones of ‘the Chinese who died in Gold Mountain’ (p. 65). Liang is very angry when her best friend goes and the adult narrator writes: ‘I did not, then, in the days of our royal friendship, understand how bones must come to rest where they most belong’ (p. 68).

2. Jung-Sum’s ‘Genuine British’ Champion Coat

11The second narrative, that of Jung-Sum, ‘Second Brother’, relates how Jung, as a small child, was abused and beaten by his alcoholic father and how, at four years old, he became an orphan and was adopted, a fearful but defiant boy who kept repressing his pain. His life then changes: feeling cared for by his foster family, he gradually gains self-confidence, while keeping his tough-boy image in order to protect himself. He comes to admire Frank Yuen, a boy a few years older whose father also drinks too much, and whose abused mother died when he was small. Like Jung, Frank is a survivor and learnt fast ‘how to fight, how to labour in the mills, how to avoid bad luck’ (p. 108). He secretly teaches Jung boxing, a way to defend himself as well as to earn respect. Finally, the narrative is about the awakening of Jung’s sexual life, and his realizing that he physically desires Frank. Jung is truly a product of the solidarity that exists in the Chinese community, and thanks to which, by the beginning of his teenage years, he has experienced a form of rebirth. His adoption is based on the strong moral principles of his foster father, as Liang recalls in her narrative: ‘Father always editorialized in one of the news sheets of those Depression years how much the Chinese in Vancouver must help the Chinese. Because, he wrote, ‘No one else will’’ (p. 17).

12News sheets, The Chinese Times newspaper, associations such as the Chinese Benevolent Society or the Tong Association are all part of a network of solidarity among the Chinese that acts as the basis of the organisation of survival. The newspaper address is the best means to reach any individual in the Vancouver Chinese community. The Tong Association organises bone shipments. It organised Jung’s adoption and Wong’s return to Vancouver from the British Columbia interior. The elders of the Tong tried to talk Old Yuen, Frank’s father, into regaining his honour by ceasing to drink and to beat his wife. Old bachelor men room in the association’s buildings. In short, the function of this network is to put broken families back together, to recreate families from bits and pieces (Old Wong very much acts as Liang’s grandfather), to try to overcome the hardships of immigrant life. It acts as a lifeboat that permits the survival – physical or mental – of many.

13The prevailing solidarity is epitomized in the making, or re-making, of a coat for Jung. The redesigning of the hand-me-down garment, which Jung wants to look like an army or navy coat, requires the skills and cooperation of all around his foster mother (whom her four children call ‘Stepmother’):

Father presented me with a set of military-looking brass buttons for the coat. Stepmother washed the coat twice to get rid of Old Yuen’s stale tobacco smells. To dry it, she hung the heavy dripping coat for two days on the back porch laundry line.
Afterwards, studying pictures of military men I’d ripped out from old copies of Liberty and Life, Stepmother stitched up two inches of sleeves; Poh-Poh raised some inches off the bottom, and Mrs. Lim, cutting with sharp butcher scissors, narrowed the two back panels, and Stepmother steadily foot-pumped and turned the wheel of our neighbour Mrs. Chin’s Singer every evening for a week. (p. 94)

14When the coat is finished, it sags and doesn’t look like a champion’s coat at all. The last step, the shaping, is done by Gee Sook, ‘a bachelor-man dry cleaner and tailor’ (p. 96) who enjoys children’s company. He steams the coat so skilfully that it is completely transformed, transforming Jung at the same time when he puts it on: ‘I felt intense heat embrace my shoulders, then curve over my back and drop upon my chest. I felt like a young warrior receiving the gift of his bright armour, a steely-grey coat born from fire and steam’ (p. 101).

15The remaking of the coat is the centre of a ritual during which Jung receives the attention, mothering and fathering of all, and is reincarnated as much as his coat is (p. 102). Jung is turned into a champion, a warrior, thanks to all. He will survive.

16The coat is not only a symbol of rebirth and of survival of the community. It also conveys a measure of revenge by the Chinese on British Canadians. The original coat was bought by Old Yuen from one of the best shops in town, with money won at gambling:

During the Depression and the opening of the war years, you could only buy such a classic coat on Granville Street, in one of those men’s stores where a salesman in a black suit sniffed at Chinamen who asked for the bess-see – the best – and who proudly pulled out a thick roll of folding money. It was money earned from a labour camp’s honest sweat or won from gambling, or from playing a longshot at the Hastings Park races, but it was enough money to have the salesman go to the back room and pull out his best stock. (p. 93)

17Yuen’s purchase of the coat was an act of defiance towards the British Vancouver establishment. This value of revenge takes an ironic turn during the remodelling of the coat when Jung’s grandmother, as the very final touch, stitches back onto the lining the label she had noticed the boy liked so much, and which reads: ‘Genuine British’. The label also depicts ‘an old windjammer under sail in a stormy sea’ (p. 102). The claim to British purity, courage and spirit of conquest is subverted and appropriated for the second time by a Chinese boy-turned-man, who then ‘march[es] home proudly’ (p. 103).

18A key scene comes to complete Jung’s rebirth after he has inherited the transformed coat. One night, when Frank Yuen is drunk, he challenges the younger boy and the two end up wrestling in the Tong Association assembly hall. The gods of fortune stand guard on Jung: ‘They looked fierce and cast long shadows on the back wall, doubling their size. At night, Poh-Poh told me, they came alive and worked as guardians for the Tong members and fought back evil spirits’ (p. 113). Although he is smaller and younger than Frank, Jung defeats him, finding unsuspected courage to threaten him with the knife Frank was carrying. From then on, Frank calls Jung ‘champion’ or ‘little brother.’ The conclusion of the fight not only establishes Jung’s respectability; it also brings back a painful moment to him, followed by a form of healing: as buried memories of his father beating him resurface, he breaks down, while Frank comforts him, rocking him in his arms.

3. Sek-Lung’s Playing Grounds

20The third narrator, Sek-Lung, is the sickly third son of the family. For several years, because he could not go to school or play with others, he stayed at home and got all of his grandmother’s attention. He did not study and was considered brainless, while craving his peers’ company. His mother resents the grandmother’s closeness to Sek-Lung, and, like her husband, finds him a difficult child. Things get worse after the grandmother’s death, because Sek-Lung considers that ‘with Grandmama gone, everyone was my enemy’ (p. 193). The resentment of the accident-prone boy is directed at everyone, but especially at the Japanese enemy he imagines in his war games. By evoking his childhood’s fantasy world of foes and friends, the adult narrator points out the growing confusion, but also the fascination, generated in the process of the child gradually becoming aware that the dividing line signalling difference is a blurry one at best.

21Boys’ games in the family are profoundly marked by the history of conflicts between the Chinese and the Japanese back in the Old World. In her narrative, Liang remembers her two eldest brothers, in 1933, playing a propaganda toy called ‘Enemies of Free China,’ imported from Hong Kong by one of their uncles. The aim of the game is to smack the head of three enemies – a warlord, a communist and a Japanese soldier – before moving the victorious Chinese ahead. The adult narrator says: ‘All three [enemies] had ugly yellow faces, squashed noses and impossible buck teeth’ (p. 20). As for Sek-Lung, he used to play imaginary war games when he was on his own. After his health improved, he played with neighbourhood children, when he was eight years old, in 1941:

Our war games went on unabated, fed by movies, spy comics, drum-beating parades, trading cards, fund-raising drives, recruiting posters and war toys of every kind. I had a dozen tin American pursuit bombers and British fighter planes. I remember how pleased I was to trade away an early Curtis B-24 and a chipped-wing Hurricane... for three chunky Sherman tanks for much-needed ground support. (p. 172)

22The children’s world is shaped by the adult world, and absorbs all its prejudices and thirst for retaliation. In their games, Sek-Lung and Alfred Stevorsky’s gang are the ‘good guys’ who fight the Nazis and the Japanese, which leads them to make mischief in the neighbourhood.

23Miss Doyle, the schoolteacher, speaks the children’s language – that of war games – and knows how to channel their energy by calling herself their General and addressing them as her soldiers (pp. 173-174). She thrills them by reading to them sections from letters sent by her brother, John Willard Henry, a fire marshal in London. Even after her brother is killed, the fiction of a gentlemen’s war continues, and the letters are read, relating ‘the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in the gentle light of her brother’s rescue stories’ (p. 178). She speaks the children’s language, but only to tell them stories of courage and valour, not stories of war, thus subverting their language to obtain the very best from them. Her role in the climate of anti-Japanese feeling, especially after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, is to make sure, along with other teachers, that Japanese children do not get beaten up in the schoolyard.

24By relating his schooldays in Miss Doyle’s class, the adult narrator is able to see her not just as the authoritative General she used to play, but mainly as the good-hearted woman she was above all:

We were an unruly, untidy mixed bunch of immigrants and displaced persons, legal or otherwise, and it was her duty to take our varying fears and insecurities and mould us into some ideal collective functioning together as a military unit with one purpose: to conquer the King’s English, to belong at last to a country that she envisioned including all of us. (p. 180)

26The prevailing hatred against the Japanese among the Chinese community, which worsened after Pearl Harbor, takes a dramatic turn in the love affair between Meiying, a young Chinese neighbour of the family, and her Japanese boyfriend, Kazuo. Sek-Lung ends up being looked after by Meiying because he almost caused a fire by imaginarily ‘bombing’ a fantasy Burma Road occupied by the Japanese – in other words, he struck two matches and set fire to a pile of newspapers. His parents decide never to leave him on his own after school again, and arrange for a neighbour, Mrs Lim, to look after him. As Mrs Lim is too busy to look after the boy, she puts her daughter, Meiying, in charge.

27Sek-Lung is deeply impressed with Meiying’s knowledge of war toys, and although she is a girl, he has to admit he enjoys his times with her. She takes him out of the boundaries of Chinatown to Powell Ground, in Little Tokyo, where she can meet Kazuo. The young lovers’ encounters are disapproved of by the other Japanese in the park, increasingly so as the tension mounts on the Pacific war front. As for Sek-Lung, each time he accompanies Meiying, he feels that he has confronted the enemy, no less. He imagines being a spy, telling on Meiying, because he knows that she has entrusted him with a highly dangerous secret. Despite his contradictory feelings about the situation – his fondness for Meiying and his unavowed admiration for Kazuo on the one hand, and his hatred of all Japanese on the other –, he never betrays this secret, because he deeply respects Meiying. She entertains him well, buying him comic books and sweets, encouraging him to read. She becomes very popular among his friends too, settling disputes about the efficiency of weapons, or teaching them how to form alliances (pp. 225-226). With Meiying, Sek-Lung ends up learning that an alliance with a friend can prevail over hatred for the enemy, although he feels like a traitor for not revealing her secret. The dividing line between friend and enemy, like the one between Chinatown and Little Tokyo, is not as clear to Sek-Lung as he was first made to think.

28When the Japanese are about to be deported to inland British Columbia, Kazuo and Meiying have to say goodbye to each other. Meiying decides to abort her early pregnancy and dies in doing so. Sek-Lung ends his narration with a scene in which he brings some support to his mother, who, with Meiying’s death, has lost her closest friend. This echoes, in contrast, the opening section of the narration, when the mother kept losing her temper with Sek-Lung, wishing her girlhood friend Chen Suling was there to support her and teach him a thing or two. Both scenes suggest that the mother’s loneliness and her accumulated frustrations probably contributed to Sek-Lung being a difficult child. One of her frustrations is that all her children, including the two she gave birth to, call her ‘Stepmother’, because her mother-in-law decided it was simpler for everyone, given the complicated history of the family (the eldest son, Kiam, is from a first marriage, and Jung was adopted after Jook-Liang’s birth and before the births of Sek-Lung and of another still-born child). It is also a way for the grandmother to make sure that the mother is reminded, each time her children address her, that she is only her husband’s second wife (pp. 131-132 & 235).

30Choy’s narrative choices enable him to look anew at a period of Chinese-Canadian history that has too often been hushed by Chinese-Canadians, as well as being simplified and misunderstood by other Canadians. The necessity of Choy’s endeavour is stressed by Paul Yee:

• 10 Yee, p. 348.

Our parental generation wanted to protect and shelter us from the negative parts of our history. They’d say, yes, there was racism, but we don’t want you to grow up with a chip on your shoulder. We want you to be equal, and as Canadian as the white kid down the street. What that attitude did was to gut us. It did not give us a soul to write from. We need to go back to recover our history. It was a major mistake not to recognize our history. Those years of hardship will give us the power to write. Only recently have we come to reclaim that history in dribs and drabs.10

31In dribs and drabs, the childhood memories of Choy’s three narrators mature, take individual shape and meaning, shed light on each other, on the history of the Vancouver Chinese community and, eventually, on Canadian history. The initial fragmentation of the narrative gradually finds cohesion in the multiple healing effects brought by words to personal and collective past wounds.