My Journey Read online

  My mother spoke very little English, but my father spoke fluent English and I had studied English in school. I had another advantage when orienting to this new world: I had grown up watching Batman, Bugs Bunny, Mr. Ed and the delightful Road Runner and the less than aptly named Wile E. Coyote.

  Home on our arrival was a house at 124 Kendal Avenue in the Annex neighbourhood of Toronto, where many grand old Victorian homes had been converted into rooming houses and flats. We occupied the third floor. Downstairs lived the Mah family, whose children had been born in Canada and who knew the ropes. In Hong Kong I had been the bold and audacious leader of the pack, but in this new environment, I went through a period of shyness and held myself back. I would steel myself and sometimes go downstairs and watch hockey with the Mah kids and marvel at the speed of the game.

  When winter came that year, I would often take the subway to city hall and skate under the arches at Nathan Phillips Square—built just five years before the Chow family came to Canada. I think I fell fifty times the first time I put on skates; I came home black and blue. But like all immigrants to a new country, and all teenagers, I wanted to fit in. Knowing how to skate seemed a quintessentially Canadian skill, and it was the first one I acquired. Others would follow: wilderness survival skills, backwoods hiking, whitewater paddling and long-distance cycling.

  Not long after we had settled in Toronto, our family moved to the newly built high-rise neighbourhood of St. James Town, just south of Rosedale, Toronto’s most affluent neighbourhood. St. James Town consists of nineteen high-rise apartment buildings comprising some seven thousand units—all set on a relatively tiny patch of land, of thirty-two acres. We lived on the eighth floor of an apartment building. Our apartment was standard issue: wood parquet floors, a galley kitchen, a balcony with a view of a parking lot and a swimming pool. Our building was only a few years old and still had a shine to it. Densely populated St. James Town was a magnet for newcomers from all over the world, and our building was no different.

  I was still the tomboy who used to arm-wrestle the boys and sometimes win. One thing I did not do was bring my friends home, for home—more than ever—was a tempestuous place.

  The move to Canada was supposed to give us a wonderful new life, but, like many immigrants, we experienced setbacks and shocks. My father, the former school superintendent, and my mother, the former teacher, suffered a perilous decline in both income and status.

  At first, the only work my mother could find was as a seamstress in what can only be called a sweatshop. I worked there, too, for several months, sewing decorative buttons onto blue jeans (as was then the fashion). Then my mother worked as a maid and later in the laundry department of a hotel near city hall. The first job was tough, the second one tougher. The basement laundry at the Delta Chelsea Hotel was noisy and damp, and although my mother worked quickly, as the job demanded, she was unable to avoid the scorn of her supervisor, who was unfair and likely a racist to boot. There were many stations in the laundry—dropping sheets and towels into the machines, hauling laundry out, drying the linen, folding it. Taking out the wet and heavy just-washed linen was the hardest task, and one that often fell to my mother. From working in all that humidity for decades, my mother developed arthritis, which worsened as she aged.

  When she finally retired at the age of sixty-five, after all those years of toil, my mother’s pension was a lump sum of just over three thousand dollars. Later, in my political life, I would come to understand the importance of a good pension plan so that seniors can retire in dignity. My mother’s own story would become a powerful motivating force.

  I wish I could report that when my mother finished her gruelling shift she found respite at home, but there was none. My father could not find a job teaching, though he was qualified and spoke English well. There wasn’t much work for him as a substitute teacher, and when he did get called in, he found it difficult to control the classroom; he complained that Canadian students were not as obedient as those in Hong Kong. He tried pursuing a master’s degree, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He lasted a year delivering Chinese food at low pay. Then he worked for a few months as a taxi driver, but found he couldn’t understand the rapid-fire dispatch orders. He worked occasionally as a labourer, but he never found a niche or made much money, so he was increasingly frustrated and bitter.

  Worse was the violence. My father had been beating my mother even before I was born, but these beatings now escalated as new strains and pressures rocked them both. My father had been managing his life quite well in Hong Kong despite the irrational anger that darkened the home front. But now, in that eighth-floor apartment in St. James Town, faced with disappointment and shame, his fury boiled over. The paranoia that had emerged back in Hong Kong now manifested itself in new and terrible ways. Again, my mother bore the brunt.

  One night, when she was asleep, he hit my mother’s head with a lamp and left an awful gash. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill her. He was neither athletic nor tall (just five foot seven), but he was strong when he was in a state. So many times when we were living in that St. James Town apartment, I put myself between my warring parents or pulled my father off when he was battering my mother. One time I almost lost control: I grabbed a lamp and had it raised, intending to hit him. Something stayed my hand.

  This may seem strange but I have to say: my father was otherwise a wonderful and generous father, always kind to me and nurturing. I eventually managed to separate the quintessentially decent man from his sometimes quintessentially indecent behaviour. He did unforgivable things to my mother and my brother. I was in my late thirties and early forties when I was finally able to forgive him. It took me that long to discover what state of grace is—it’s achieving the peace and freedom of living in the moment, and not allowing past wrongs to colour the present.

  Even as he struggled with his demons, my father remained creative. Music was his one solace. He has composed music for hundreds of songs, using biblical passages or poems in both Chinese and English—the romantic poetry of Byron was his favourite. For years he was in the church choir at the Toronto Chinese Baptist Church and he was happiest when he was performing and composing. When Jack and I were married, my father composed a beautiful song for our wedding, using the words of the poem “Friendship” by Elizabeth Jennings, which has themes of gentleness, respect, trust and awe.

  But my father’s creative impulse, while vibrant, could not subdue or soften the anger and emotion roiling inside him. One day I had the idea of secretly recording what he was saying in hopes that when his ravings were played back to him, he would fathom, finally, how ill he was. But he was too far gone to be helped in this way.

  I rarely brought friends home lest they see for themselves the yelling, the nonsensical mumblings of my father and the depressing environment in our apartment. But on the few occasions that I did invite friends over, my father would follow them back to their own homes and try to befriend them along the way. He would stay at their houses and refuse to leave. Needless to say, this was supremely embarrassing to me as a teenager.

  This was a period in my life of great loneliness and great shame. For us, no help was forthcoming. I did try speaking to someone in the guidance department at Jarvis Collegiate, where I was then a student, but that got me nowhere. My mother could not speak English, so she couldn’t seek help either. Like so many immigrant families, we were on our own in a new land with no relatives or friends to help us.

  My father finally had a mental breakdown and landed in a psychiatric ward. He was totally paranoid, imagining that people were trying to poison or drug him. Various doctors posed different theories about what was wrong before they decided on electroshock treatments and medication that profoundly affected his ability to function normally.

  I think back to those times and I wonder how differently things might have gone for my parents had there been comprehensive support, counselling and psychological help—beyond what my father got in a hospital when the crisis point had already been reached. The isolation that we felt as a family is something I have never forgotten. Later, as an immigrant support worker who became engaged with the community socially and politically, I did all I could to propose and enable organizations such as Chinese Family Life Services of Metro Toronto and the Hong Fook Mental Health Association so that people in my father’s shoes would have access to a wide range of mental health supports. My own experience within an immigrant family had stamped me, and when I became an elected official, I did all I could to change patterns and to find solutions.

  In those teenage years, I was longing for some sort of escape, but there was none to be had. My mother had gone from having a housekeeper in Hong Kong to being a maid in a Toronto hotel. My father, meanwhile, had struggled in vain to find a good job and couldn’t handle the stress. So life was hard. But one summer, when I was sixteen, I saw an opportunity to escape. I saw an ad calling for a junior forest ranger. Against the wishes of my parents (my mother, especially, was horrified at the idea), I went up north to work in the wilderness for the summer—planting trees, clearing and cleaning portage routes and campgrounds—for five dollars a day.

  From Toronto I took an eleven-hour bus ride over a thousand kilometres northwest to Wawa—the town at the east end of Lake Superior famous for its twenty-two-foot-long Canada goose monument alongside the Trans-Canada Highway. I then travelled many more kilometres to a wilderness camp not far from Lake Superior. I was in the company of other girls my age and a cook—an eccentric old fellow who used to feed pancakes to the black bears that hung around the camp. My experience with the ranger program was a turning point in my life, as it has been for thousands of other youth. (I’m sad to report that the Province of Ontario announced in the summer of 2013 that it was selling the cam
ps and closing the residential junior forest ranger program that had been going strong since 1944.)

  This camp would lead to other camps in other summers, church camps run by the Toronto Chinese Baptist Church, or Outward Bound courses. In one, I spent three days alone on an island. Another saw me rappel down a cliff. I was picking up useful skills—how to navigate in the forest, how to survive in the bush and how to paddle a canoe, at first on a lake and then down rapids, Class I and up to Class III, the truly challenging ones.

  Up north I fell madly, passionately in love—with the Canadian wilderness. During my first years in Toronto, when I was deeply involved with the Toronto Chinese Baptist Church, I had read a great deal about the Promised Land. And here it was. When I was in the North I felt in touch with the divine, and that connection has endured.

  From never seeing stars in the middle of Toronto, I was suddenly seeing millions of them, plus northern lights, and watching beautiful sunsets and admiring the magnificent colours in the Canadian Shield. Even the blackflies, horseflies, deer flies, sandflies and mosquitoes seemed lovely to me. Though bitten, I was smitten.

  This was a life-changing experience. I came to appreciate nature. I came to have a sense of Canada—of being a Canadian. I came to understand those words we sing in our anthem—the true North, strong and free.

  I also came to acquire a sense of the infinite—of being part of something huge and powerful, pure and beautiful, this vast land with its boreal forest, its Great Lakes and thousands of pristine rivers. I came to understand that there was a powerful force bigger than me, bigger than my family problems. I found a sense of peace and belonging I had never felt before. And I began a lifelong love affair with the wilderness.

  And it wasn’t just tranquility I loved. One summer, on one of my canoe trips, we encountered a massive storm. I sat under a rock cliff and watched the approaching thunderclouds. The sky darkened, the wind picked up speed and howled. The power of the wind, the rain and the lake mesmerized me for hours. I marvelled at the smallness of my being in the face of such immense force and put my own problems in proper perspective.

  An immigrant to a new land is always looking for home, in whatever form. For me, home—our apartment in St. James Town—was a place marked by angst and sometimes violence. So I sought a sense of belonging elsewhere.

  School, for one. Jarvis Collegiate dates from 1807 and is the oldest secondary school in Toronto. Conn Smythe, the long-time owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, went to Jarvis, as did newspaper magnate Roy Thomson and author Ernest Thompson Seton.

  I owe that old school a great deal. They took a little immigrant kid and made her feel loved. The school had an interesting mix of students—some the born-in-Canada sons and daughters of immigrants; some kids like me, “just off the boat”; and some the offspring of elite Rosedale families with expectations of rigorous academic standards. There were also a few kids from a low-income area called Regent Park.

  My mind was really opened at Jarvis, and it was there that I began to acquire true self-discipline by taking challenging math courses (triple math, we called it) and physics. After skipping Grade 8, I had come to the school primed to study, and study I did. I was getting perfect marks in physics, and once I became accustomed to those marks, nothing less would do. The bar had been set. Besides, by now I had acquired pure discipline, and that was a good thing, for I had the Hong Kong kids who got 100 per cent in math breathing down my neck.

  But while I was excelling in math and physics (where discipline helped) and art (which came naturally to me), English remained a hurdle. Pronunciation, especially, was hard in the beginning. I would slide down low in my seat so my English teacher would not ask me to read aloud. One day I was asked to read from To Kill a Mockingbird, a book I still adore. But that day was a disaster. I stumbled, turned beet red and could not wait for the ordeal to end.

  I had some close friends during those first few years in Canada, but not many since I remained shy. I desperately wanted to fit in, so I joined the basketball team and the track team, specializing in the hurdles and sprints but not distinguishing myself in either. Bell-bottom jeans were all the rage then, but I had no money. So I took the jeans I already had, opened them up with scissors and inserted a piece of denim before sewing them up again. The result looked strange and actually set me apart—not what I had had in mind. But this was one measure of my desperation.

  The real connection came through my teachers, some of them quite gifted. One was a demanding and innovative English teacher who would invite some of his students to his farm property for weekend retreats, where we would discuss at greater length the novels we were reading. This was in the early seventies, and though this practice would be absolutely forbidden now, I found it was a fabulous way to delve deeper into literature, and it opened up a whole new world for me.

  Books like Orwell’s Animal Farm and Golding’s Lord of the Flies got me thinking: Are we born evil, or not? Are we born good, or not? Who wins when the two collide? The villain in Orwell’s satire issues a commandment that reads, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Really?

  By the time I was in Grade 12, I was reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment and went about inserting lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” into my paintings. I am eternally grateful to that English teacher. He was kind and shy but demanding—the hardest-marking teacher I had ever encountered. A 70 from him was a good mark. He challenged us and pushed us to think hard. He introduced me to more work by the existentialists (Camus, Kafka, Kierkegaard), and another world opened up for me.

  Art was my other great passion. My father had been artistically inclined, and from childhood on, I was always drawing. In fact my father had moved our family from the Annex neighbourhood to St. James Town so I could attend a high school that taught art. My father was functioning well enough in those days, and by the little bit of supply teaching he had done and by asking questions, he had learned where his daughter could study art.

  I was active in the school’s art club, and my paintings were hung in the corridors. I was also learning to do Chinese brush painting, and every Saturday morning I would take life drawing classes at Central Tech high school. Art was a passion of mine and, soon enough, a paying proposition. Money was tight at home, so I always had part-time jobs. For a few years I worked two or three shifts a week as a cashier at the Shoppers Drug Mart at Bloor and Spadina, in midtown Toronto. But I was also working for an artist with an entrepreneurial bent. This fellow employed men who knocked on doors around Toronto selling “original art” out of vans. In fact, he had about eight ink-drawing designs (Toronto City Hall, the Rideau Canal and Parliament Hill, a sailboat, a farm), which he would reproduce via a silkscreen process; I would then lay overtop a fresh coat of watercolour. Presto—original art.

  During my last year of high school, my family needed more money—we could barely survive on my mother’s income. Though we watched every penny and worked hard for every dollar, I knew I needed a job that paid better than what I was earning as a cashier. At first I tried my hand at telephone soliciting—selling newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I was good at this, but I thought I could earn even more working in a restaurant.

  That’s where the Old Fish Market Restaurant (since closed) came into play. I started working there as a hostess, and in 1975, when I was of drinking age, I became a waitress. I had no idea of the names of beers and cocktails, nor did I know how to open a bottle of wine. I would learn to perfect the task over the next five years. My job as a waitress and hostess taught me how to approach people warmly, people of all sorts, and how to defuse any kind of problem. I had been a shy student in high school and did not socialize a lot. This job forced me to be outgoing. I had to put on a smile and greet customers—even when the kitchen was a torrent of yelling and screaming.

  In many ways, it was a perfect job for me. I was a little manic and hyperkinetic, I was high-energy and I had spent too much of my childhood playing. Now it was time for work. The restaurant was downtown, by the St. Lawrence Market, and close to the theatres, so it was always busy. The key was to be calm in the face of chaos. Anyone wanting to learn how to multi-task should consider being a server, at least for a time. In later years, when I became involved in politics, I was able to draw on this experience.