Lives of the Family Read Online Free PDF Page B

immigrant girl had to go into her trunk from China to find something to wear.
    On the evening of Marion’s date, at the appointed hour, the boy knocked at the door of the Lims’ house. Marion appeared in her splendour.
    She had expected his approval. Why, she wondered, did he look so crushed?
    At The Cave, they passed under the large neon sign over the entrance and through the doors, and went down the stairs into the semi-darkness of a cavernous grotto with white plaster stalactites hanging from the ceiling.
    The boy’s friends had already claimed a table near the dance floor and stage. Suddenly, Marion understood why her date was so miserable; the two other girls in their party were in knee-length skirts and twin sweater sets.
    Marion and her date sat in stony silence.
    Whenever the club’s roving spotlight came near, she shrank from it. Every time she looked at her watch, not ten minuteshad passed since she’d last checked it. She couldn’t wait for the evening to end.
    Years later, when Marion moved to the other side of the country and found herself shivering through an Ottawa winter, she’d be amused that yet again she’d erred in what to wear. Coming from Vancouver, she had never imagined the season could deliver such icy temperatures and snow. Never mind, she told herself, I’ll know for next year.

    Lui-sang Hum during her first winter in Ottawa
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Courtesy Lui-sang Wong

TWO
    LAYERS
    MANY OF THE Chinese immigrants who had arrived in Ottawa in the 1950s settled near the downtown core. Rents were cheap, owing to all the commerce mixed into the residential blocks. Within a mile of Parliament Hill, on residential streets off busy, shop-lined Bank Street, a handful of houses were home to families, often multiple families, of Chinese origin. On Waverley and Frank streets a pocket of such immigrants lived in the shadow of the cavernous Colonial Furniture. Owned by the Cohen family, the store straddled two buildings: one used to be a turning and lathing mill, and the other a car dealer’s showroom for Packards and Studebakers. Colonial’s sign, which stretched two stories high and overhung the sidewalk, made it impossible to miss.
    For four years, two young women, who had immigrated to Canada within the same year, lived across from one another on Frank Street. They knew each other by name and said hello when they crossed paths on the street. One was married, one was not. One had been sponsored as a bride, the other as a dependent child. They were not friends; however, given how sparse the Chinese were among the city’s overwhelmingly white population, if you were Chineseand if ever you passed another Chinese person, you made eye contact and you smiled as if you had known each other for a long time.
    One of these women was Lui-sang Hum. She had come at the age of sixteen in 1958. A bright-eyed girl with cherubic cheeks, she lived like a domestic under the thumb of Mrs. Eng, whom she addressed as Third Auntie—the third-born among her mother’s siblings. She and Mr. Eng had financed Lui-sang’s immigration to Canada. Mr. Eng waited on tables at the Ho Ho Café, and Third Auntie stayed at home with their four young children, all under the age of six. The Engs owned their own home on Frank Street, and from time to time rented rooms out. Lui-sang lived with them for four years, until she married Tsan Wong, a part owner of the busy Canton Inn.
    The other was Lai-sim Yee, who arrived on Frank Street in 1959 at the age of twenty-one. She came to marry Yu-nam Leung, a cook who divided his time between the Cathay House restaurant downtown and its owner’s second restaurant, the Sampan, out in the suburbs. The Leungs began their married life in two matchbox-like rooms. Their landlord, Mr. Kung, whose new laundromat business was doing well, had turned his fourplex into a rooming house of sorts. A kindly man, he helped many new arrivals with their immigration paperwork. He’d pick them up from the airport and sometimes