一家餐馆 五十三年

The subjects of this interview are the Chinese immigrant couple Mr. and Mrs. Chow. Mr. Quan-zhong Chow was born in 1937, and his wife, Chung-ping Chiu, was born in 1945. The Chows are from Kaiping, Guangdong.

Three Generations of Overseas Chinese from Kaiping

Mr. Chow immigrated to Canada in 1958 from Kaiping, Guangdong, by which time his father was already settled in Canada, while his wife, Chung-ping Chiu, immigrated in 1965. They came to Canada by way of Hong Kong, but in fact both of them emigrated from mainland China — something that was rare and rather difficult at the time. The reason Mr. Chow was able to immigrate to Canada was that his grandfather had come to Canada long before, and his father had come at the age of nine and settled here afterward. So by the time Quan-zhong Chow immigrated, his father had already established something of a foothold here. In those days, if a new immigrant was young, they could apply for citizenship fairly quickly, so Quan-zhong Chow became a Canadian citizen a year later.

Back in their hometown of Kaiping, Guangdong, the Chow clan was relatively well-off; their family had even built a locally famous diaolou (fortified tower), much like the famous tower of the bandit lord Huang Si in the film “Let the Bullets Fly.” Although the tower no longer belongs to the Chows, it still stands today as an important piece of historical and cultural heritage, and a designated heritage site under local protection. Overseas Chinese families like the Chows are very representative of the qiaoxiang — the emigrant home regions — of Guangdong and Fujian. The assets these overseas Chinese held in their hometowns were earned through hard toil and struggle in the South Seas or the Americas; they were by no means ill-gotten gains wrung from exploitation. These men bore not only the risks of crossing distant oceans and the heavy price of gruelling labour, but also the pain of years of family separation, with only letters carried back and forth to bridge the distance. A film that has recently been very popular on the mainland, “A Love Letter to Grandma,” tells the story of overseas Chinese from Chaoshan; though it is set in the South Seas, it closely mirrors the experiences of many Guangdong emigrants — all of them struggling abroad, then sending their savings home, while their wives and daughters mostly remained in the old country. In time the winds shifted and the world changed, and the wealth these overseas Chinese had painstakingly accumulated over many years was no more — the fate, perhaps, of individuals and families caught up in a great age.

Five Hundred Dollars in Head Tax

There is something else extraordinary about the Chow family’s immigration story: Mr. Chow’s grandfather came to Canada even earlier, and he was among those who immigrated by paying the five-hundred-dollar head tax (and thus also belongs to the group of immigrants who should later have been owed compensation). The notorious Chinese Immigration head tax was a racially discriminatory policy against Chinese people in Canadian history, and a great stain on Canada’s record. Speaking of the Chows’ early immigrant experience, racial discrimination against Chinese people in Canadian society was in fact still fairly common at the time — for instance, they had encountered situations where they were called “Chinaman.” Chinese people were discriminated against for all sorts of reasons; for example, in that era, marriages between Chinese and white Canadians were very rare. Quan-zhong Chow’s own experience in his youth was that if a Chinese man (and at that time there were very few Chinese women of marrying age in Canada) dated a white girl, that white girl would be looked down upon by others.

China Doll and Four Thousand Dollars

When Mr. Chow first came to Canada, he worked for a while in Toronto’s Chinatown to adjust to his new surroundings, and two years later came to Kingston to work at his uncle’s restaurant. At that point Quan-zhong Chow could barely speak English, so after his uncle’s restaurant closed, he went back to Toronto’s Chinatown, where he worked and studied English for two years before returning to Kingston. Kingston’s Chinese community was very small at the time, and many people worked at the well-known Royal York Cafe; he too worked there, both in the kitchen and out front. Quan-zhong Chow was very fortunate to have a white Canadian friend whose family worked at the Royal Bank. They owned a restaurant property that they had first rented to a Chinese man, but three months later that man broke his word and skipped out without paying the rent. Because this white friend trusted Chow’s character so completely, he simply handed Chow the keys and rented him the restaurant unconditionally. And so Quan-zhong Chow was fortunate enough to begin his own venture in the restaurant business, naming his restaurant China Doll. By then Mr. Chow was already getting on in years — well into his twenties and still unmarried, with no white girls to date. The friend who had rented him the restaurant seemed even more anxious about it than he was, asking him, “What are you thinking? Do you mean to stay a bachelor forever?” Chow said he could only go back to Hong Kong to find a bride, but a penniless man is a hero stymied. That warm-hearted, old-fashioned white Canadian friend said, “I’ll lend you the money to go back and find a wife — this is the most important matter in life.” And so he generously lent Quan-zhong Chow four thousand dollars, and with that borrowed four thousand dollars plus a little of his own savings, Mr. Chow returned to Hong Kong and began the happy story of meeting, marrying, and starting a family with Chung-ping Chiu.

A Blind Marriage

Chung-ping Chiu was a beauty in her youth. Looking back, she laughed and said that she had been young and naive at the time. She came to know Mr. Chow through his older sister; in those days marriages were not love matches but traditional arranged marriages — blind marriages, sight unseen. She said that before the wedding she had seen only one small black-and-white photograph of Mr. Chow, barely bigger than a finger, and then she walked into the wedding hall with him and became a daughter-in-law of the Chow family. After they married, Mr. Chow brought his new bride to immigrate to Kingston. In 1965 the Chow family arrived in Kingston, and he then opened a new Chinese restaurant; because he could not bear to part with the old one, he named it New China Doll. This restaurant of the Chow family stayed open for more than fifty years. Back then, a week’s income from working in a restaurant was only about 250 dollars — the income was low, but prices were remarkably low too. For instance, in the old Chinatown area of Toronto, a room could be rented for as little as five dollars a month. So working in the restaurant business was enough to get by; Chinese people were hardworking and able to endure hardship, and the restaurant trade could not only support a family but also build up savings.

New China Doll, Fifty-Three Years

Mr. Chow’s New China Doll became the longest-running Chinese restaurant in Kingston, not closing and being sold off until 2017. The Chows raised three daughters and one son, and the children often helped out at the restaurant during their school years. But when the time came to wind the restaurant down, not one of the children was willing to take over the business. Of course, all their children had higher education in Canada — three of them graduated from Queen’s University — and they clearly all chose careers at a higher professional level. Mr. Chow’s children have all now settled into their own families and careers, and fortunately the Chows’ son works at Empire Life right here in Kingston, so they can look after one another.

According to the Chows’ recollections, Kingston was in fact a very welcoming place for Chinese immigrants, and they rarely encountered racial discrimination. Over their many years in the restaurant business, they made some Canadian friends; over the more than fifty years of the restaurant’s life, they had many longtime regular customers, and when the restaurant closed for good, the local Kingston television station even ran a story on it. As Mrs. Chow revealed with a laugh, Mr. Chow was fixated on two things. One was playing mahjong — after a full day of work he might come back late at night to a room above the restaurant to find a few companions for a game; it was his hobby, and it was also how he kept clear of the vice of gambling. The other fixation was the restaurant itself. For all those years he went to the restaurant every morning and came home very late, day in and day out, the same as ever. He proudly pointed out that almost no one in Kingston had run their own restaurant for fifty-three years the way he had. Mrs. Chow joked that without the restaurant, it was as if his life lost its meaning. Even after he had joint surgery, for example, he came out of the hospital not to go home but to swing by the restaurant first.

Putting Down Roots

So strictly speaking, there was never a fixed point at which Quan-zhong Chow formally retired, because even after he had sold off the restaurant, he often went by to take a look around. Mr. Chow had little interest in travel; of the dozen or so cruises organized by the Chinese association, he went on only two, and he never again returned to mainland China or to his hometown. When his children travelled back to China, he wrote down his own name and the names of his family members for them to ask after in the old village — but no one there remembered them anymore. Although the building of his ancestral home still stands, apart from the modern heritage-protection plaque it has nothing to do with the Chow family any longer. A family that began in Kaiping, Guangdong, put down roots in Canada and carried on, generation after generation — a story that also stands for the unbreakable bond between Chinese people and this beautiful country of Canada.