My Journey Read online

  My Journey

  A MEMOIR

  OLIVIA CHOW

  For Beatrice and Solace, in loving memory of their Grandpa Jack

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 Blue Pool Road

  2 St. James Town

  3 Political Awakening

  4 The Two Dans

  5 Into the Fray

  6 “Four Nanoseconds”

  7 The House on Huron

  8 Food for Thought

  9 Children First

  10 Giving Voice to the Voiceless

  11 Bully in Black

  12 In Search of Safe Shelter

  13 Win Some, Lose Some

  14 The Politics of Engagement

  15 The Redress Express

  16 Lessons Learned

  17 Hard Blows

  18 Back on My Feet

  19 A Better Life for Beatrice and Solace

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I follow the sun as it begins to rise over Toronto, and I start running east, along College Street. In black shorts and T-shirt, I jog by university students with backpacks heading to their classes, nurses and doctors in their whites entering the hospitals, cyclists in the bike lanes. My iPod is playing Jesse Cook, Latin guitar music I used to listen to with Jack Layton, my late husband, while we watched sunsets and danced on our back porch. Soon I cross Jarvis Street, not far from the high school I attended when I came to Canada.

  Farther along, I run by Allan Gardens, a park with a Victorian greenhouse I used to visit as a teenager. I cherished the glass-walled conservatory’s earthy damp smell and the warmth and quiet of the place. In those days, I lived with my parents in the St. James Town neighbourhood, just up the street on Sherbourne. My dad still lives there, and I wonder if I could get him to come out later for a walk in the park and to visit the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival churches, St. Peter’s Anglican and St. Andrew’s Evangelical Lutheran. They were designed by architect Henry Langley, who also designed the Toronto Chinese Baptist Church that my dad still attends weekly in Chinatown.

  I run north on Parliament Street, then east again on Winchester Street, past elegant front yards full of hostas, cheerful black-eyed Susans and feathery reed grasses yielding to the breeze.

  I am almost at Jack’s final resting place, the Necropolis cemetery in Cabbagetown. I run past the Necropolis Chapel—also designed by Langley—and wonder whether I should pause and step inside. Maybe another day. I stop procrastinating, run through the gates and get there. To the spot where Jack’s ashes are buried under a headstone of pink granite I ordered from Quebec and which is also the base for the bronze sculpture I created in the year after his death. Within seconds of entering the cemetery, I see Jack’s smiling face staring at me. Perhaps I captured his likeness too well, because he looks so much like his joyful and cheerful self, and yet he is not moving. When he was alive, Jack was always in motion, always bursting with energy.

  I fuss around the headstone with the little garden I planted, pulling out weeds, checking the plants. Is the bamboo growing too tall? Are the white mums still flowering? Should I add more of the purple lavender that Jack’s mom so adores?

  As I bid my farewell, I see a fellow with a camera taking a photo of the bronze sculpture. Of Jack.

  My iPod is playing “Stand by Me,” one of Jack’s favourites, and I feel a deep sadness. I am sprinting now because I know that if I can absorb this sadness in the next few minutes, it will pass and soon I will be able to listen to the same song without the sorrow. I know I can slowly strip the sadness from all the songs, all the full moons, the scents, sights, light and sounds that all remind me so much of Jack—and then return to them as just the beautiful memories they are.

  As I run, I reflect on how blessed my life has been. I turn my gaze towards the sky and I think of words from the Book of Job—words that helped me as I struggled to regain the balance in my life and understand the past few years.

  “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness?”

  Accepting the mysteries of life and death and living in the moment help me contain the sadness of loss. And I think, instead of “stand by me,” perhaps on my next run, my stepson, Mike, will “run by me.” He has been training to do a half-marathon, something his dad always wanted to do but never found the time to train for.

  Jack was a swimmer. Later on, I must take our grandchildren, Beatrice and Solace, for a swim. Maybe bring them and their mother, my stepdaughter, Sarah, to the big pool at the Central YMCA just north of College Street where I am now headed, running westward.

  My sprint is fuelled by a change of tune and tempo on my iPod: Jimi Hendrix is playing “Crosstown Traffic” and then “Valleys of Neptune.” In all my years with Jack, I could never figure out why he liked Hendrix. But now that Jack is gone, I can appreciate the soulful angst—I get it now.

  I pass the College Street subway entrance and jog by as people stream in—it’s rush hour, and they will be packed like sardines. Maybe soon the Toronto Transit Commission will have to take a page from Japan and hire staff to cram more people into the overfilled cars.

  Maybe there is a reason why I am gradually listening less to my Arcade Fire and Adele in favour of the music of the sixties that Jack so loved. The sixties, a period of hope and optimism, when Canada had governments that believed in “caring and sharing.” When the Canada Pension Plan and medicare—programs that are the essence of our country—were born.

  In the last blocks of my five-kilometre run, I listen to the words of the Youngbloods’ song “Get Together,” sung at Jack’s funeral, and smile at its call to love one another. Such a beautiful thought. I think of Jack’s last message: Love is better than anger.

  Canadians are generous; we believe we can create a fair and balanced society. So how can we come together to form a government that reflects our values? How can we persuade government to invest in children and public transit and to help generate good jobs so that no one is left behind? Jack and I always asked those questions, and sought the answers. I still do.

  This gets me thinking about all the calls and meetings on today’s agenda. I am running south on Huron Street, towards the house where I have lived for years—so many happy years with Jack. I need to open the door for a caregiver who helps look after my elderly mother. So I pick up speed and run home.

  As I write these words, I realize that I have used the present tense, as I so often do when I speak. My first language is Cantonese, and in Chinese languages there is no past or future tense, just a sort of infinite tense. Jack is now part of that infinite tense. But I live in the present tense, and the stories in this book are my stories. Stories from the journey that has brought me here today. My journey, so far.

  CHAPTER 1

  Blue Pool Road

  Naughty, spoiled, rebellious and lazy, I was a terrible student.

  I actually managed to fail Grade 3.

  Father’s Day, 2013. I am celebrating with my father and mother at the Dim Sum King Seafood Restaurant, in the heart of Toronto’s Chinatown, this day packed with happy, chattering families.

  I help my father, Wilson Wai Sun Chow, now suffering from dementia, while my mother, Ho Sze Chow, picks dishes of dumplings and ducks’ feet from the passing carts, shouts greetings to friends and urges us all to eat everything in sight. We are an ocean, a continent, a half-century away from Father’s Day in my first home, in Hong Kong, on Blue Pool Road i
n the community of Happy Valley. That magical name seems straight out of a children’s book—the kind I devoured as a little girl.

  There was then a dark and unsettling side to my life, and only when I was older did I fully grasp the cause. But as a child I was able to counter this mysterious black menace by creating my own world, one bathed in light. I convinced myself that I led a charmed life, marked by play, books and toys. And chocolates.

  When my father, a highly respected school superintendent, made official visits to schools, he would be showered with gifts—usually luxurious gifts of chocolates. Boxes of them, tins filled with them, all colour-coded. Thin silver paper housed square or rectangular solid chocolates, while fine gold paper encased circular chocolates—nutty on the outside, creamy on the inside. These chocolates were fit for a princess, and because I was the centre of my father’s universe, they were bestowed upon me. The sight or smell of chocolates still brings back memories of Hong Kong.

  My father was a very talented, artistic and well-read man who chose to name me, he later admitted, for the olive colour of my skin at birth and also for a royal character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

  As elsewhere in Hong Kong in those days, where you lived reflected your class and status. Working-class people lived in overcrowded tenements at the bottom of the mountain, where the smog would settle. The rich lived at the top of the mountain, in spacious residences where cool breezes freshened the air and where the views were spectacular.

  The Chow family lived halfway up the mountain—in the middle between those two extremes—and we were, indeed, firmly middle class. My father earned a good salary as a senior public servant, and my mother worked as an elementary school teacher, so we had a very comfortable family income. And we enjoyed a comfortable life, with a roomy apartment and a live-in housekeeper who did all the cooking and cleaning. Ours was a tight-knit community because most of the people living in the apartment complex were professionals, civil servants or educators like my mother and father. Every apartment was the same, with the housekeeper’s living quarters right behind the kitchen and the laundry room.

  Our household then seemed to revolve around me. But the Chow family tree was much more complicated than just father, mother and little Olivia.

  My mother has had an extremely hard life, and in talking to her about my own journey as I wrote this book, I have learned more about hers. She lost her own mother to dysentery during the Japanese invasion of China that started in 1937 and lasted until Japan’s surrender in 1945. My grandfather Ho, a silk merchant with five other wives and families to support, had disappeared to escape the invaders. When my maternal grandmother died, my mother was just thirteen years old. She had no money to bury her mother and was left to take care of herself and her two younger brothers, Ah Sing and Ah Ball. My mother survived by smuggling sugar, soap and oil, using a boat between Zhongshan and Macau.

  This was a dangerous time. Japanese soldiers would come every night to look for “flower girls” to rape. My mother and other girls would hide in a mountain of hay at the back of a storage area while Japanese soldiers stabbed into the hay with bayonets to flush them out. She tells of smudging coal on her face so, if she was found, she would look horrific to the soldiers.

  My mother’s older sister had gone to another part of Guangdong, Qujiang, and later on my mother took her two brothers there, a dangerous trip through the occupied territory. Qujiang was the headquarters of the regional Chinese army, which had retreated there to escape the Japanese invaders. My mother joined the army and was teaching singing when she met Chow Nam Shang, a soldier whom she later married.

  A year later, the Japanese planned to invade the area and again my mother fled, this time with her new husband. They had to hide in a ditch to escape the advancing Japanese army. Those were awful times, as on countless occasions my mother witnessed Japanese soldiers shooting indiscriminately. But again, she survived.

  After the invasion, my mother and her husband settled in Guangzhou, where she gave birth to my brother Yu Ching Chow, later known as Andre. In the late 1940s, when my brother was about a year old, his father was killed by the Communists, in action during the civil war.

  Seeking a better life, my mother, a young widow, returned to Hong Kong with Andre and married her second husband: my father, Wai Sun Chow. He was the sixth of ten children, the son of a domineering mother. His father had died when my dad was quite young, and there was no father figure in his life. My father and mother had known each other during their school years and, in the beginning at least, they got along well.

  My mother loved Andre dearly and sacrificed a great deal for him. And at first my father accepted his stepson. Andre has an early memory of his mother and stepfather walking somewhere with him. “They were holding my hands, one on each side,” he remembers.

  But family peace and solidarity did not last. In my teenage years, after we had left for Canada, I would learn why. My mother revealed to me that while my father was married to her, he had maintained another household, with a woman called Lau, and they had a daughter, perhaps my age. And there was also a son, but the paternity of that child was very much contested by my father.

  I have to say, in my father’s defence, that most successful men in Hong Kong, even today, have a mistress. It was and is like a badge of honour. And polygamy—prevalent in China for thousands of years—was only one generation back. My own maternal grandfather, remember, had six wives.

  Amid all this turmoil at home, my mother gave birth to another son. The infant was just days old and still in the hospital when he became listless and developed a fever. A few days later, he died. My mother believed that the medical staff were tardy in detecting her son’s symptoms and that the treatment had been inadequate. The hospital later claimed that the baby’s blood type and my mother’s were mismatched, and the cruel consequence was that my mother’s immune system attacked her own infant’s red blood cells in utero. The loss of his newborn son must have been devastating to my father and may also explain his choice of my name: at the beginning of Twelfth Night, Olivia is grief-stricken at the loss of her only brother.

  Just as my mother bore the brunt of my father’s anger, my brother Andre would come to suffer from his indifference and vindictiveness. The relationship between father and stepson had been good in the early years, but somehow things went sour—perhaps because my father had no room in his affections for anyone but me.

  My father also beat my brother, mostly by kicking him. While I was writing this book in the summer of 2013, Andre told me that he would apply red dye to his skin after these beatings to draw attention to his injuries and to ensure that the bruises were visible to all—and especially to my mother. To alleviate her sorrow and as a form of escape, my mother became briefly addicted to the ancient Chinese game of mah-jong. She would go out to play all day and return home just before my father came back from work. So my brother was mostly alone after school.

  My brother fed me and took care of me when my mother was out at her games. He was doing triple duty—as my brother and caregiver, as son and as my mother’s protector in her battles against my father. The situation was so tense at home that Andre suffered from constant stomach problems caused by stress and was often sick with a host of illnesses—smallpox, sores and hepatitis A among them.

  When I was two and my brother was twelve, we moved to Blue Pool Road and into an apartment much bigger and more prestigious than the one we had before. My dad didn’t want his new middle-class neighbours to know about my brother, so even though Andre did well at school, my father would not allow him to continue his studies and insisted that he learn a trade—tuning pianos. My brother was a gifted pianist who had perfect pitch and he should have been encouraged in his music lessons, not elbowed into an apprenticeship. Of course he declined. My mother, naturally, objected to this harsh treatment of her son and persuaded friends to take in Andre. Only twelve then, he was shunted from one home to another, three in all.

  Later on, when my b
rother finished high school, he wanted to go to university. As civil servants, my parents were entitled to send their children to study in England at very low cost. But my father refused to support the application. My mother had to borrow a lot of money from friends to send Andre to the United States to study electrical engineering. She went back to school and earned advanced certification so she could make more money teaching, enabling her to fund her son’s education while paying back all her loans. Eventually, Andre won a scholarship in the United States, but my mother was burdened with these debts for years—all because of my father’s inexplicable hostility to Andre.

  What was there not to love about Andre? Ten years older than me, he was studious, meticulous, patient, obedient—everything I was not. My ideal brother treated his toys with care while I abused mine.

  My brother had reason to be bitter, but he put aside his own treatment at the hands of my father. By his actions, he let me know: you, my little sister, are the apple of my eye. Until he left home, he would meet my school bus and give me a piggyback ride up the hill so I wouldn’t have to walk. He would let me pull his hair and he played with me all the time. We went to the park on weekends and always had ice cream. He spoiled me and gave me any treats I wanted. He was my playmate and protector. One of the few crystal-clear memories I have of my early childhood was Andre’s departure from Blue Pool Road. I can see him still, going out the door with his luggage and looking back at me as I wept and screamed for him to stay. Although he would return for weekend visits, he no longer lived with us. It felt as though my guardian angel had abandoned me.

  A troubled man, my father had many blind spots, and my mother had a fiery temper.

  Here was the source of the mysterious darkness I alluded to earlier. Our apartment in Happy Valley was a combat zone, and the combatants were my mother and father. I didn’t know then what they fought about, but I can speculate now. The newborn son they had to bury and whose fault it was that he died. The stepson my father at first accepted and then rejected. My behaviour and performance at school. My father’s jealousy, my mother’s suspicions and her discovery of my father’s other family.