Lives of the Family (13 page)

She was glad of where she’d decided to install the phone, at the base of the stairs. There, it served the café and was also handy for those living above—now just her alone on the
second floor and the kitchen staff on the top floor. When she got Jasper on the line, she liked nothing more than to park herself on the bottom step and chat away. Eventually, they’d have to ring off. “If I could do it over again, I’d learn to drive,” Mabel would tell her brother. After all, Smiths Falls was only twelve miles away.

“
EVERYTHING IS LOST
; they took it all.” That seemed the most that could be said.

People preferred to deal in silence with what was happening to family in China, now that the Communists, within months of taking power in October 1949, had imposed Land Reform on the south. If anything, others thought Jasper Hum ought to be thankful to have escaped with his life—unlike some other husbands who’d returned, Jasper hadn’t waited around to see what the Communists had in store for him; luckily, he’d fled back to Canada.

From the first frightful news stories out of China, it had been apparent that in the province of Guangdong, the former stronghold of the Nationalists, Land Reform was one way for Communist Party cadres to exact revenge on fellow villagers with whom they’d had grievances or had envied. Sojourners like Jasper Hum, who’d invested their savings in houses and land in the village and come back to retire, were obvious targets.

“Lots of people have been killed; lots of people have been tortured.” What more could people say?

Such talk, like a roadblock put up against feelings of helplessness, only upset Jasper more. His emotions had swung cruelly from elation to despair. When the Resistance
War ended in 1945, he’d been overjoyed to learn that his entire household had survived. He made the decision to pack up his life in Canada, ending a twenty-seven-year separation from his wife. Of course, men like him, able to come and go, had always to weigh the “right time” to be in either Canada or China. But whatever the future held under the Communists, no one in either country believed it could be worse than the atrocities and suffering endured during the Japanese occupation.

Jasper was not alone in his sentiments, nor in his decision to go home. Chong-sam Hum, one of the most prominent among the Hum clans in the Ottawa area (he could trace his clan back twenty-eight generations) followed suit. In 1947, a year after Jasper left for China, the well-liked restaurateur in Ottawa sold his Sun Café and moved back to China. But in what would make a fateful difference, Chong-sam had thought to register with Canadian Immigration a wife and two sons who lived in China, even though he had no intention of ever returning with them to Canada.

Jasper had returned triumphantly to his village. By the grace of Harry’s Café, hard work and a Spartan life abroad, he was one of the wealthiest villagers. He moved back into the comfortable house he’d built for his family and that of his now-married brother, Fuen. He owned more than enough
mau tin
to support both, allowing him to rent out parcels to other villagers. He also established a clinic and herbal dispensary for Fuen, whose education as a doctor of Chinese medicine brought distinction to the family. Jasper had only one unfulfilled duty to his ancestors: he had a daughter—now a teenager—but no son. In short order, Fuen and his wife took care
of that obligation. Already parents of a young daughter, they produced two sons in quick succession. Fuen gave the younger one in name to his brother.

Then came the swing to despair. Suddenly, the civil war turned in favour of the Communists. In early 1949, as their soldiers advanced on the south, Chong-sam’s wife, Loo-shee, declared to her husband, “There’s no future for us here.” At her urging, he went back to Canada, planning, once there, to sponsor her and their two sons.

Jasper lingered as long as he dared. He would have liked to stay two months longer, as his wife was expecting their second child. But finally, in early 1950, he fled. He insisted that Fuen come with him to Hong Kong. Although the house, the land and the clinic were in Jasper’s name, he worried that the Communists might mistake Fuen as the owner. “Don’t go back until you’re sure it’s safe,” Jasper told his brother. He had only one worry about Fuen: his predilection for opium. If he gave in to it, reason would desert him.

Back in Canada, the more Jasper heard about the Communists’ retribution against sojourners’ families, the more he feared for the safety of his household there. Yet, going on a year since his return, he had not heard a word from his brother, not even of his whereabouts. Jasper didn’t know what to think, if his brother was being irresponsible, or if he should read something more sinister into the silence. Perhaps the Communists had intercepted his family’s outgoing mail. In his anxiety, Jasper found it impossible, spending his days in front of the hot grill at Harry’s Café while living on the third floor above, to carry on life as normal. He pondered going back to find out for himself the fate of his family, but some of the overseas
bachelors responded in disbelief: “What, are you crazy? What, go to get arrested? Or killed?”

A VILLAGER COULD NOT BE
faulted for choosing the familiarity of his home over the British colony of Hong Kong. Even Loo-shee, Chong-sam’s wife, was drawn irresistibly by tradition. While waiting to hear from her husband back in Canada, she too had relocated to Hong Kong with their two sons. Although she took comfort in the knowledge that people for villages around regarded her highly as the district high school teacher, she’d worried that the family’s three-storey house might attract the Communists’ attention. But then, she felt the need to return to stand in for her husband at the reburial of his grandmother’s bones, after they’d been exhumed, cleaned and placed in an urn. On the eve of the ceremony, two villagers, now ranking Communist Party cadres, showed up to whisper a warning: “Tomorrow, the Party is going to come to ask you to donate lots of money to the People. You better get out, now!” By dawn, she and her sons were safe again in Hong Kong.

Jasper’s worst fears about Fuen’s vulnerability were borne out. His brother had left Hong Kong and returned to the village for opium, an indulgence—possibly an addiction—for him that could not legally be satisfied in Hong Kong. The British, after regaining control of the colony after 1945, had declared opium a dangerous drug and subsequently banned its sale.

Fuen walked right into danger. Party cadres charged with classifying the peasant households in Jasper Hum’s village labelled his as that of a rich landlord. When the cadres arrested his brother, they demanded that he turn over the Hum
household’s gold. When he denied the family had any, they accused him of hiding it. The more he protested, the more ghastly was his torture. His captors cut off his ears, then they broke his hands, then his feet. A few days later, Fuen died of his injuries, spared the knowledge of the even more gruesome cruelty inflicted on his wife and his sister-in-law, Jasper’s wife.

Cadres in the village subsequently confiscated Jasper Hum’s house, land and clinic, and banished the evicted wives and their children to a windowless, empty shed on their property. The men charged with administering punishment to the two women rounded up the two wives and their four children: Jasper’s daughter, Ling, not quite two (the eldest, a teenager, was away at school in the north of the province); and Fuen’s three: Shui-dan, Hee-jeung and Haw-wong, aged seven, five and four. Forcing the children to watch, they bound their mothers at the ankles, strung them upside down, and took a burning torch, dipped in fat, to their feet and legs. The men showed no compassion, the better to demonstrate they were not obstructing the Land Reform campaign.

After the torturers cut down the women, they tossed them back into the shed; severely burned, they lay moaning and immobile on the dirt floor. The children were left to fend for themselves. At night, the eldest, Shui-dan, trying to keep the other children and their mothers alive, crept out of the shed to scrounge for food and fetch water from the river. Any villagers who offered help would be inviting their own persecution; yet one family, that of the former village administrator who had also been arrested, dared to do so. Sent by her mother, ten-year old Lui-sang Hum showed up nightly with boiled water to be used, she said, to clean the two women’s burn
wounds. From time to time, she brought food, enough for a mouthful for each of the six.

Slowly the two women regained their health.

Four months into the family’s confinement, the cadres released them from captivity. Later that day, Fuen’s wife walked up the mountain, to the edge of a lake, and threw herself in.

MABEL HAD BEEN AS
shaken as Jasper when, finally, a letter came from his wife with news that a year earlier, his brother had died at the hands of the Communists, that his sister-in-law had killed herself, and that everything that he’d spent his life abroad working for was lost. Mabel tried to be consoling: “You and I would have been the first to be killed if we were there. They would have tried to take what was ours away, and we would have fought them and they would have killed us. We worked so hard for our money. We had to live through so much to earn it.”

For a time, Mabel tolerated her brother’s despondency. But when he started hanging out with the poker players in the back of one of the shops in Perth, or took off with Howard, Doris’s husband, for a night of gambling and drinking at the social clubs in Ottawa, she decided her brother was in a dangerous tailspin. Mustering the authority of an older sister, Mabel let Jasper have it. She told him he’d moped long enough, that while once he’d been industrious and conscientious, he had turned lazy and uncaring. She ended with a stern rebuke: “Get back on your feet! You still have a family to worry about.”

Mabel held out the example of their clansman, Chong-sam Hum, who had re-established himself in Ottawa, reunited his entire family and prepared to start over. Sensing the growing popularity of Chinese cuisine, he had got right back into the
restaurant business with the Ding Ho and later, the Ho Ho, both on Albert Street. He’d partnered with two savvy Chinese entrepreneurs in Ottawa: Thomas Hum, the son of the pioneer Hum family and descended from the same ancestral village; and Bill Poy, whose family had been admitted as wartime refugees and who’d been a regular at the Sun Café. Thomas and Bill had formed Allied Trading, an import–export company that dealt in goods ranging from fabric and clothing to televisions and polystyrene plastic.

Rousing himself to begin anew, Jasper plotted with his sister how to reassemble the remnants of his household in Canada. He had to first get himself naturalized. And he had to get the family out of his village to Hong Kong, the port of exit. All easy compared to the problem of how to support them once they arrived here.

Jasper wanted to open his own café, which was impossible without partners. But a cook who’d only worked in his family-run business and in a small town wouldn’t attract investors like Tom Hum and Bill Poy. They were out of his league: Tom Hum drove a Chrysler, smoked cigars and had a riverfront home with a swimming pool, and a cottage on Meech Lake; Bill Poy drove a Studebaker, lived on picturesque Mountain Road in Aylmer on the Quebec side and owned a cottage on McGregor Lake. Both men had business and social connections outside the Chinese community.

Mabel and Jasper mapped out what he had to do. He’d have to leave Perth to gain experience in other cafés. And stay with the small towns. Life in such close quarters would force him to improve his English; in a big city like Ottawa, one could get by with Chinese only. Plus, he’d be able to keep his
eyes and ears open for another small-town café that might be for sale, or a town with room for a second restaurant, and for potential partners willing to invest their sweat in a business.

Then came the matter of Fuen’s orphaned children. Jasper’s plan was to pass off the three young children as his own, as long as he could obscure their ages to credibly claim that in three years at home he’d fathered four children. Sadly, he decided it was impossible to say that Shui-dan, the brave girl who had almost single-handedly kept the family alive, was his. He sent word to his wife in China, asking her to break the news to his niece that he could not include her in his application.

More than four years from the date Jasper first began the process, his wife and the remaining three children—his own daughter, Ling, and Fuen’s two sons—made it to Hong Kong for their interview with Canadian Immigration officials. All were approved subject to passing their medical tests. On that score, officials rejected the younger of the two boys, the one originally given in name by Fuen to his brother, determining that he displayed symptoms of autism.

ON A SATURDAY NIGHT
in October, 1957, Jasper waited until the last customer left the Astor Café, then upended the chairs and swept the floor, making a head start on the day ahead. At three in the morning, one of his partners, George Fong, drove him to Ottawa. Jasper had never learned to drive either.

Five hours earlier, at ten in the evening, Margaret Hum and two children, Kenny Hum, aged nine, and Linda Hum, aged seven—the names they would later take in Canada—drew stares as the only Chinese among the passengers arriving at Ottawa Airport. Linda and Kenny themselves were wide-eyed.
Awed by how tall and white Canadian people looked, they were shocked when the men and women began to throw their arms around each other and kiss. “
Mama
, what are they doing?” asked Linda. Such public intimacy was unseen in China.

Margaret piled herself and the children into a taxi. Outside the Cathay House restaurant, the designated meeting place, she had to negotiate the children around inebriated men who’d stumbled out of nearby bars. Inside, they found the cook from their village who was expecting them.

At four in the morning, Jasper came through the door. He cried hardest when for the first time, he looked into the face of his daughter, Linda. The young girl could not take her eyes off the man whom she understood to be her
Baba
. All she knew about him was what her mother had said: that he loved to cook, that he’d doted on her two male cousins when he was in the village.