大女儿留在台山 三十年后才团聚

The third Chinese elder we interviewed was Wing-kwan Lui. Mr. Lui was born in 1933 and is 93 this year — healthy, clear of hearing and sharp of sight, in even better shape than the two Mr. Lees we interviewed earlier, and still able to drive himself around town.

Mr. Lui’s path closely resembles that of the two Lees. All three are from Taishan in Guangdong and emigrated to Canada by way of Hong Kong; they spent many years living together in Kingston and became friends, and they still go out for coffee together now and then, occasionally dropping by a nearby casino for a hand or two.

Mr. Lui arrived in Kingston in 1952. He had left Taishan for Hong Kong in 1949, and three years later emigrated from Hong Kong to Canada. Unlike many of the other Chinese who emigrated to Canada around the same time, however, he was already a married man — by the time he reached Canada he already had a daughter, who stayed behind in the village to live with his parents. What he never expected was that, once he had come to Canada, the sea would keep them apart: more than twenty years passed before his eldest daughter could finally join him in Canada.

From Montreal to Kingston

When Mr. Lui first came to Canada he went to Montreal, because his father-in-law was living there at the time; later his father-in-law moved back to Hong Kong, and Mr. Lui came to Kingston, where he started out working in a laundry.

Canada in those days had not yet grown as prosperous and developed as it later became. Home washing machines and dryers were not yet common, and even households with a car and a house of their own were few. So the laundry business, like the restaurant business, was a service trade that society depended on; many of the early Chinese immigrants to Canada likewise ran laundries or restaurants.

Mr. Lui worked in the laundry for more than three years. It was during this period that his wife came to Canada, and from then on their home was settled for good in Kingston — but his eldest daughter remained back in Taishan, and was not reunited with them until the 1980s. He and his wife worked hard in Kingston (his wife has since passed away, as have the two Mr. Lees), and later had three more sons and a daughter in Canada.

Mr. Lui’s descendants are flourishing now, and he says proudly that he has 10 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren. His family has put down roots and branched out here, fully part of Canadian society and growing from one generation to the next.

Seventy-Five Cents an Hour, Two Hours for a Steak

Mr. Lui began his working life in the laundry. The work in those days was fairly hard, because back then laundries were not self-serve — in the one where he worked, they handled the wet washing themselves and contracted out the dry cleaning to others.

In those days, whether in the laundry trade or the restaurant trade, wages were very low — seventy-five cents an hour, working out to roughly 35 to 45 dollars a week. The pay was low, but so were prices: you could reportedly get a steak for $1.99. Measured against how prices and incomes have changed over all these years, that was the equivalent of a little over two hours’ wages for a steak; Ontario’s minimum wage today is $17.60 an hour, so two hours is $35, and $35 for a steak today is not unreasonable either — so as the tide rises all boats rise with it, and the growth rates of prices and incomes are still comparable.

As Mr. Lui recalls, the Chinese in the restaurant trade worked extremely hard in those days, with no days off all year round, but their diligence paid off reasonably well — bit by bit they all became owners in their respective trades rather than employees. When the Chinese opened restaurants, they often bought the premises outright rather than renting; and very often a group of friends would pool their money to buy a place together, rather than one person taking out a loan. In a small city like Kingston back then, there were about six or seven laundries and more than twenty restaurants — these were the service trades where the Chinese were concentrated.

Three Restaurants, One Golden Dragon

Mr. Lui went on to work in the restaurant trade for many years, doing everything both in the kitchen and out front. Restaurants in those days were mainly a Chinese-Western hybrid — for a simple reason: there was no market for pure Chinese food (the Chinese in those days were frugal and did not eat out). These Chinese-Western restaurants were open from morning to night, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with everything from sandwiches and hamburgers to spring rolls and fried rice on the menu.

The first restaurant they opened was called Mandarin, the next was called Home of Shanghai, and then in 1972 a few of them went into partnership on a fairly successful one, the Golden Dragon (金龙) — which stayed open for more than twenty years, and which he handed over only before he retired. This Golden Dragon restaurant is the very same Golden Dragon mentioned in Howard Lee’s story — a partnership business of Kingston’s older generation of Chinese, where the stories of several families come together.

A Shrewd Landlord

Like many of the older Chinese, Mr. Lui was also a shrewd real estate investor. At one point he owned six properties, all of which he has now sold. The first house he bought for 12,000; the second for 50,000 — this kind of good-value real estate was the Chinese investment of choice at the time, safe and with a decent return.

Only After Reform and Opening Up Could His Eldest Daughter Come

In retirement Mr. Lui became a great traveller who knew how to enjoy life, visiting nearly every part of Canada; he also returned to mainland China five times in all, lingering happily over its major cities and scenic landmarks. But he returned to his home village of Taishan only once — perhaps because there was no sense of returning home in glory: he had been only sixteen or seventeen when he left, and by the time he went back there was hardly anyone left who knew him.

There may also have been another layer of resentment toward the old country: his eldest daughter had lived in Taishan all those years, and with mainland China closed off at the time, he had no way to bring his daughter and his parents to Canada — all he could do was send money back regularly.

It was only when China began its reform and opening up, when Deng Xiaoping’s policies started to take effect — by which time his father-in-law had already passed away in Hong Kong — that they were able, under the terms of his father-in-law’s will requiring his estate to be inherited, to bring his mother and eldest daughter to Canada. By then his eldest daughter was already 30 years old.

But his daughter later married and started a family in Canada, and went on to run a very successful restaurant business of her own, opening several restaurants in Toronto and elsewhere — a long-delayed blessing for the family, you might say.

The First Generation and the Second

The boys in his family still helped out at the restaurant in their free time in the evenings and on weekends, which is a little different from the Mr. Lees we interviewed earlier. But what is similar is this — their children basically cannot speak Chinese, whether Cantonese or Mandarin.

Mr. Lui’s children all received a higher education. He has been very successful in raising the next generation — he says he paid for all of his children’s university costs. These children are all doing well now, all working in professional careers across various fields, though none of them carried on the family’s restaurant trade.

From the Fifties to Today

Speaking of Chinese or Asian immigration, in Mr. Lui’s memory there were very few in the 1950s and 1960s, and no proper Chinese community activities to speak of — though setting up a few tables of mahjong, or even some gambling, was still doable. From the 1970s on, Chinese immigration began to grow: Chinese began to appear working in government agencies, universities, research institutions, and factories and businesses; some refugees from Indochina also came to Kingston; and later still came the wave of international students and new immigrants that began in the 1980s. Only then did Kingston’s Asian community begin to flourish.