Lives of the Family by Denise Chong

relatives, if alive, still had to live with the enemy?
    Talk at Mrs. Wong’s stayed within the confines of the familiar, of their lives in Ottawa. Of the six pioneer wives, two had first-born children whom they’d brought to Canada with them. One of the two was Thomas Hum, who took responsibility for his two brothers on the death of their last surviving parent. Nineteen at the time, Thomas took over their father’s café. The other was Jack Sim, chosen by his father, Joe, to run the family business so that Jack’s eight younger siblings could stay in school and, as was their father’s plan, go on to university. Tall and broad-shouldered, with chiselled features, Jack looked like a Chinese movie star. His younger brothers would later dub him the Chinese James Dean.
    The Chinese community buzzed with the success of one of their own. Clearly, Jack was clever. As his father had expected, his eldest son bettered him early on, with his command not only of English but of French as well, having graduated from high school in Hull where French was the language of instruction. He started with his father’s Star Café, catering to Hull’s working class. Then, seeing future patrons in the influx of civil servants in Ottawa, he opened the sophisticated Tea Gardens on Sparks Street, between the Mayfield ladies’ dress shop and the Lord Thomas hair salon. Later, Jack would guess right that city folk, new to owning cars, would want to get away from the city, but not too far, and to someplace with a view; Bate Island, with the Remic Rapids wrapping round it, looked west, where the setting sun dropped spectacularly into the river. Jack leased land from the federal government under the bridge to the island, then designed a rustic building with walls of knotted pine, anickelodeon and a dance floor. On weekend nights, young people crowded the parking lot of the El Rancho, standing around their cars, enjoying a menu favourite, the chow mein bun, brought by car hop girls in cowgirl outfits. Jack went on to open a fourth restaurant, and when the El Rancho later burned down, he built a new one on the island.
    One day Doris and Mabel dropped into the Yick Lung and found Rosina, Jack Sim’s wife, pouring her heart out to Mrs. Wong. She was sure that one of Jack’s white waitresses had her eye on him: “He’s probably running around on me and I can’t do anything about it!” Years before, on the elder Sim’s orders, Jack had made a trip to China to marry, but he’d come back as he’d left, a single man. Ordered back a second time, he returned a married man—with Rosina, who, under exclusion, was able to enter the country by virtue of a Canadian birth certificate. Born in Alberta, she’d been taken as a young child by her parents to their village in China.
    Not unlike Ethel Poy, Rosina found it hard to find her footing in Ottawa. She would never learn much English. Among the first to marry into one of the pioneer families, she met few if any Chinese women her age. Rosina wasn’t going to get much, if any, sympathy from her mother-in-law, who, in keeping with Chinese tradition, expected subservience from a daughter-in-law. During Mrs. Joe Sim’s long life—she would live to one hundred and four—the taciturn woman would have little to say of her past in China except for one story: her wedding day. On the day her family carried her in a sedan chair to her new mother-in-law’s house, she parted the curtain to get a glimpse of the man she’d been promised to. She felt dismay to see that he walked with a limp. It turnedout that Joe Sim had sprained his ankle in a recent fall while horsing around with some boys on a rooftop. Yet when Mrs. Sim told the story, this fact mattered not; limp or no limp, she’d already passed the point of no return.
    MABEL WANTED HER daughters to escape her fate in marriage. “I was so much younger than your father. In China a lot of that happened; older men marrying younger women. Then we end up afraid our