Canada's most prominent writer of Chinese heritage has turned her lens to the most common of China's immigrants to our nation.
Denise Chong is internationally acclaimed for bestsellers like The Concubine's Children, The Girl In the Picture, and Egg On Mao. The former Prince George residen'ts research has taken her into clandestine conversations and locations under fear of secret police interventions, or reprisals against her interview subjects. She has shone global spotlights on the details behind the men who defaced the giant portrait of Mao during the Tienanmen Square uprising and also the iconic image of a child (Kim Phuc) screaming from napalm wounds during the Vietnam War. But in her latest work, Lives of the Family - Stories of Fate and Circumstance, she goes into the personal stories of everyday people living in the Ottawa region who came from China to Canada looking for a better way of life.
Through those mundane lives, she uncovers how the mundane is only the extraordinary not yet uncovered.
"It was about to slip into history. Even in my acknowledgments I had to thank 'the late Harry Sim' and 'the late Doris Soong' who helped me with the research, told me their personal stories, but never got to read the book," said Chong.
The first night the book was released, at a launch party in Ottawa where Chong has lived for many years, she got to see the personified effect of a book in which many biographies are intertwined.
"It was an electric evening," she said. "I like to think they could see, in all their stories, that it formed together the immigrant terrain. There is a certain perspective lent from their age, too. Most of them are in their 80s, and there is a generosity of emotion there. They know well that more of their life is behind them than ahead and if a story isn't told it will go with them to their graves."
The Chinese immigrant during that era of history was little different than most other nationalities settling in formative Canada. They guarded their private lives even from other family members. Just like the children and grandchildren of Canadian veterans of the world wars reveal now that their uniformed relatives did not talk much about their overseas experiences, so too were the first waves of permanent Chinese immigrants guarded about their private lives. Chong discovered that most in that demographic came to Canada "due to some kind of upheaval" like the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the Second World War and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Many came due to intense financial hardship, and Canada was a place offering jobs and business opportunities.
But their lives in Canada were often lonely, disconnected, heartbreaking, and tragic. Government policies were deliberately oppressive for Chinese immigrants in particular, but also other ethnic backgrounds. Like the British "stiff upper lip," these Chinese sojourners eked out a life in which "you buried the memories and you focused on the positive," said Chong.
She was therefore profoundly surprised when her interviews gave way to confessions and revelations from elders that even close family members knew nothing of. In the process, the story of Canada was glimpsed as much as China's.
In so many cases it became a clear pattern to Chong, those lives unfolded in the scrabble of cafe kitchens and laundries. The Chinese immigrant to Canada typically operated one of these two businesses, fought through family upheavals back in China while simultaneously negotiated the tug and shove of grasping old ways in a new, often unkind culture. The book also laid bare the racist nature of Canada at the time.
"Canada was just coming of age," Chong said. "It wasn't my intention to provoke that reaction in the reader. It was the immaturity of Canada but after the Second World War, especially, Canada became a much more enlightened society. Canada has really worked quickly on applying a different view [on multiculturalism]."
Chong has lived this transition. She was born in Canada into family dynamics still closely tied to the Chinese social traditions. Her immediate lineage is the subject matter of The Concubine's Children. Her subsequent examinations of Canadian culture via the Chinese link has won her honorary degrees from three universities, (including UNBC, and a place in the Order of Canada.
She comes to her hometown of Prince George for the local launch of Lives of the Family on Wednesday night at Books and Company.
