My Journey Read online

  On the other hand, there was stress in waiting on tables. I would have what those who have worked in the restaurant business call “waiter dreams,” in which the anxieties of serving play out. My own waiter dream had to do with how to fillet a whole rainbow trout—an item on the menu at the Old Fish Market. Trout tastes amazing, but this fish has to be cooked just right. Overcooked, it loses the flavour, but if it’s undercooked, the meat won’t come off the bones. When filleting tableside, cutting off the head looks terrible, but retaining the head while deboning requires skill—surgical precision, really—owing to fragile bones immediately behind the fish’s head. When my task was done well and elegantly, I would get good tips and satisfaction; when I did it badly, I worried that customers would choke on the fine bones. In my dream, perfection always eluded me.

  By Grade 13, I knew I had to get top marks if I hoped to enter a top-tier post-secondary institution such as the University of Toronto. My father’s inability to control his nonsensical, loud mumblings was making it impossible to study at home, so I moved out and shared an apartment with a boyfriend.

  I should explain that ours was a platonic relationship. All through high school, I had male friends, but at the time I was a fundamentalist Christian and I insisted on certain rules. No sex before marriage was one of them. As a seventeen-year-old, I was very strict about this. In this older student’s house, we slept separately—so even my mother had no objections to my new living arrangement. The relationship, though chaste, was romantic, at least at the outset. This fellow had walked into the drugstore where I worked one day and began reciting a beautiful Chinese poem to me (his BA was in Chinese literature, and he was pursuing his MA in poetry at U of T). He was a quiet, thoughtful, considerate man with no particular ambitions—which seemed ideal to me at the time.

  An added bonus was that his place was like a sanctuary—quiet and free of turmoil. Again it seemed ideal. But unfortunately, I am easily bored, and I soon became restless with our relationship. After a year, I ended it, citing our different temperaments. I was competitive and didn’t want to waste one moment of my life, whereas he was content with a slower pace, and accomplishments mattered less to him. By that time, though, I had been accepted to the University of Toronto and was back living at home in St. James Town.

  I loved the process of learning, and one of my favourite places on campus was the tranquil neo-Gothic library at Emmanuel College, with its stunning stone-framed arched windows and its gorgeously ornate carved-wood ceiling—so unlike the modern, oppressive concrete of the Robarts Library on the same campus.

  I devoured my courses in philosophy and religion. Then a devout Christian, I was obsessed with the question that if God is all-loving and good, why does he allow evil to exist? What does free will mean, and what role do prayers play? How does art intersect with worship? What other forms of worship are practised by other religions and how do those practices relate to their gods? I set out to find the answers and took six courses instead of five (as full-time students were allowed to do). I skipped the first-year introductory courses and went right into Emil Fackenheim’s Philosophy of Religion, John Meagher’s various courses on theology and the New Testament, and Arthur Gibson’s study of Ingmar Bergman and especially his “Silence of God” trilogy of films. I was a seeker looking for answers in the New Testament and in the films of Bergman (I bought all the screenplays and pored over the dialogue).

  And just as music was solace to my father, art was solace to me. Although I was intellectually satisfied and challenged by my university professors, I wanted to explore my creativity and engage my hands as well as my brain, so while still studying part-time at U of T, I took sculpture courses at the Ontario College of Art from 1976 to 1978. The last year of my academic life, 1978–79, I spent at the University of Guelph (because it had an excellent sculpture department), and I graduated from there with an honours BA in fine arts. At one point I had my own darkroom while I studied photography. Sculpting remains to this day a great source of pleasure to me. In my early twenties, I was a sculptor with a studio, with lots of clients. I made eagles in flight, polar bears, horses, deer, beavers and even cats. Hundreds of these sculptures were cast from my originals and sold in hotel shops.

  I absolutely love clay. I love how the clay changes right before my eyes and how the act of sculpting links my brain and my hands. I love the feel of wet clay. When, many years later, I sculpted the face of my late husband, Jack Layton, there existed in my head a map of what he looked like when he was smiling. My challenge was to make the transfer so that the image in my head was reflected perfectly in the hardening clay.

  As a young artist, I did a series of drawings, sculptures of children dying of famine, a large oil painting of a mother desperately trying to breastfeed her child when no milk was forthcoming, a big relief of a hungry child staring at the viewer and seeking a response. I didn’t just create realistic pieces, though. Some were abstract—beings bursting into the open. One remains in the basement because Jack found it too disturbing to look at.

  In a way, I am always sculpting, as both artist and politician. I work with clay, of course, when I create a piece of art. But as an elected official, I work as part of a team—reaching out to the biggest possible art mob and taking the clay we find around us before trying to make something better with it. Each act of shaping—the one a solo activity, the other inherently collective—complements the other. It seems I need both.

  Trying to live the motto of Love Thy Neighbour, while I was still at university I was also volunteering at Toronto East General Hospital’s crisis centre and participating fully at the Toronto Chinese Baptist Church. Sleep? Who needed sleep?

  I was nineteen when I worked as a volunteer counsellor in the crisis intervention unit at the hospital, in 1976. I had a desk in a room right beside the intake desk in the emergency department. As patients came in, I would be notified if attempted suicide was suspected. Overdosing on pills or wrist slashing were the methods of choice.

  These attempted suicides would occur mostly after office hours, when the psychiatrists had gone home. My job was to assess what kind of support the patients needed. Why did they want to end their lives? What was the trigger? Did they have any support network? Were they emotionally balanced? Was this a call for help and, if so, what kind? If they went home, would they make another suicide attempt? Should they be asked to stay in the hospital to be monitored even though they were medically cleared to leave?

  The best time to connect with these patients is the moment when they regain consciousness and discover that they are still living. This is when they are at their most vulnerable, most open, most eager to connect with a live human being, and this is when I would do my assessment.

  My shift at the hospital was usually in the evening, sometimes starting at midnight and continuing almost to morning. I often did the holiday shifts. People feel their loneliness most acutely when others are celebrating—Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Saturday nights.

  When I wasn’t seeing patients, I was answering the unit’s crisis hotline. In one such call, a man who had already overdosed just wanted to talk to someone. He was middle-aged, lonely, with no one to love, and he had made a decision to end his life. I tried to persuade him to give me an address so an ambulance could be dispatched, but he was starting to slur his words and I could tell he would soon become unconscious. No matter how hard I tried to persuade him otherwise, he said there was nothing in this life worth living for and that no one would care whether he lived or died. We were trying to trace the call, but back in the mid-seventies this took a long time, and I desperately needed to keep him on the line.

  Someone had committed suicide while on the line with one of my fellow volunteers. The emotional trauma was too severe and she was no longer able to work in the unit. I couldn’t bear the prospect of the same thing happening to me.

  As I frantically tried to engage this man, I heard a dog barking in the background. I asked the man to tell me the name of the dog, her breed and age. I asked him if he loved his dog.

  “Oh yes,” he replied. “My dog is my companion. She’s the only friend I’ve got.”

  “After you die,” I said, “who will take care of her? Will she be taken to the humane society and destroyed?” I then told him about the dog I grew up with, Ah Woo, and how important he had been in my life. And how, when I came to Canada, I had to leave my dog behind and was heartbroken.

  “Why don’t you tell me where you live,” I said, “so I or someone can come over to pick up your dog? I will care for her.”

  After a long silence, he gave me his address. I then gave it to a colleague and an ambulance was dispatched. We continued our chat about what his dog meant to him, and how and when he got her, until, finally, I heard a knock on his door. I have never felt such relief.

  During the two years I volunteered at the hospital, I encountered men who had lost their purpose in life when they retired and teenagers whose lovers had left them or who were conflicted about their sexual identity. I came across lonely souls who felt abandoned by the world. Some drank too much or took too many painkillers to dull their emotional pain and were not yet ready to take their own lives. For others, their suicide attempts were actually desperate cries for help or attention.

  And then there were those who failed in their attempts because they were discovered earlier than they had expected and who would attempt again the minute they left the hospital. I came across one such young man, who was so tired of his life he refused to speak. His silence was a manifestation of his determined will to die.

  But in my experience at the hospital, I was mostly successful in connecting even with hardcore cases. If they can get help, even in their darkest moments, there’s a good chance they will choose to live.
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  Through my experience in the crisis unit, I discovered not just the deep satisfaction that comes with helping others but also my ability to connect and empathize—and, above all, to instill a sense of hope.

  While I was able to empathize with others and dispense advice, I could have been a candidate for the help line myself. At that time in my life, I was drawn to the wrong kind of men.

  For a time when I was seventeen, I lived, as I mentioned, with a man whose only sin was to lack ambition—a sin that led me to end the relationship. After that, I began courting disaster.

  The next man was a bruiser—literally. He was much bigger than me, a former marine with a black belt in karate, and twice he came close to killing me. I was choked and punched in the face, and yet, the first time he beat me, I made excuses for him. And the second time … he was drunk and he did apologize, after all. It took me more than a year of black eyes and bruises to leave that relationship. And I never sought help or called the police.

  The next man seemed gentle enough, but when we ended the relationship he was enraged, and he lashed out physically. He hit me, but this time I was the stronger one: I hit him back and I called the police, but I never did lay charges.

  The pattern is so familiar, regardless of background, ethnic origin or education level. Male-against-female violence is rooted in a desire to possess, dominate and control. Women in every culture are so often encouraged—or encourage themselves—to believe “just love him a bit more and all will be fine. Just don’t provoke. Be more obedient, or do a better job of taking care of him, and all will be well.” This imbalance of power causes untold suffering and even death.

  How could I have been drawn to these men, and why did I stay with them? Why did I put myself at risk? I had been a crisis counsellor, I had seen the patterns, and I had seen how children who had witnessed violence (and I was certainly one of them) had themselves become involved in abusive relationships. Yet I, like so many others, believed, “Love him enough and he will change.” I may have subconsciously thought that physical violence is normal, or perhaps I lacked the self-confidence to leave these abusers sooner. Perhaps I felt my mother had suffered abuse because she herself was somehow to blame; perhaps I felt that if she had been more submissive, my father would not have abused her, and we would have enjoyed harmony in our home.

  Years later, and after much reading and research, I taught several courses part-time in George Brown College’s Assaulted Women’s and Children’s Counsellor/Advocate Program, aimed in part at survivors of abuse who had committed their lives to helping others. I worked with students to help them understand the underlying causes of male violence, and I taught them how to build confidence, develop power and find solutions for themselves and for the people they might get involved with in the future. As well, I worked with them to explore why women who endure racial bias are also the most poverty-stricken in our city, in our country and around the globe. I assigned books that developed intellectual understanding along with films (such as Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It) to explore rape, dominance and the ingrained double standard that governs the sexual behaviour of young men and women.

  At the same time, I taught a course in feminist political action and community development. I would ask students to identify one area that they wanted to change in their lives. Often they said they wanted to establish or provide more funding for a women’s shelter; sometimes the goal was to create more childcare spaces, or provide more counselling for children to help them overcome their cycle of violence and poverty. And as I taught, I also learned to appreciate the vital importance of achieving true equality for women in the political sphere. Understanding weakness becomes a source of strength.

  The key is to empower, to turn helplessness and despair into a quest for political action. I was beginning to wake up.

  CHAPTER 3

  Political Awakening

  There is a Cantonese word, guo, meaning “the hand that stirs.” Starting in 1979, I started stirring the pot. Many, many pots. But the first pot stirred had to do with the boat people.

  In the spring of 2013, as I was writing this book, I indulged in a Sunday tradition—one that had become almost sacred to the Chow family from the moment we arrived in Canada forty-three years earlier. I dropped my father off at the Toronto Chinese Baptist Church so he could take in the morning service, to be followed by a family brunch at our favourite dim sum restaurant, around the corner on Dundas Street.

  Located in the heart of Toronto’s Chinatown, that church played an important role in my life when I was a teenager. “Our home and sanctuary,” the church’s website reads, and for many years that was true for me. A red brick edifice with white pointing, this handsome but understated church dates from 1880. There are now many Chinese Baptist churches in Toronto, but this one is the mother of them all.

  In my earlier life, I was questing for community. When I was still feeling like a newcomer to both the city of Toronto and the country of Canada, this church on Beverley Street was my community centre. It was the place where I came to know about the power of unconditional love. It was the place where I was baptized and where I worshipped. Through the youth fellowship—the Gideons—that church created in me a sense of belonging.

  Here I learned hymns and Bible stories and felt the connectedness that comes with being in a choir and hitting the right note. My friends Betty Chee, Wendy Chan and Ann Ling and I were the Four Altos in the choir. (Truth be told, I don’t sing well.) Here I learned the joys of working co-operatively. I learned at that church to speak in public, to teach a Sunday school class and chair a meeting, to head up a group at a summer camp. At the church, I was the de facto publisher and editor of an in-house magazine called Image, and I decided which articles and poems would be printed and how much editing was required.

  I learned teamwork and skills that would serve me well later on when I waded into political waters, first as a school trustee, then as city councillor and then as a member of Parliament.

  Reverend Andrew Wong and his wife, Linda Wong, presided over the church. They were good and honest, loving and caring people who led by example. And I was a totally dedicated member of the congregation. On weekends, my life revolved around the church. Friday night was choir practice, Saturday afternoon was dedicated to “fellowship,” Sunday meant teaching Sunday school, attending the service and partaking in the lunch that followed. The church helped me understand the power of the collective. I felt the pull of the congregation and the yearning to proselytize. To bring others into the fold, I would invite all my classmates and friends to join me at church.

  When I stand on the steps of Toronto Chinese Baptist Church, I can look across to Grange Park. For me, church and park are connected—yet disconnected. The first political rally I ever attended took place in that park, in 1979. The plight of the Vietnamese boat people had brought several hundred citizens to that park, including me—a still-shy young woman who, if she read a newspaper at all, went straight to the arts section and ignored the rest. But my friends had alerted me and others in my community to the travesty that was then taking place on the seas off Southeast Asia.

  That rally on that rain-soaked day sparked in me a slow politicizing process that led me to ask hard questions of my church: Why the focus on a distant heaven when there was so much to do here and now on earth? The Lord’s Prayer said, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” To me that meant that God’s dominion has arrived and that we are called to “give new life to the broken-hearted. Share our bread with the hungry. Bring the poor, the outcasts, to our house. When we see them naked, clothe them …” (my take on Isaiah 57–58). Isn’t the true call of Christians to “love our neighbours as ourselves”?

  If so, why spend so much time saving souls when saving lives—by rescuing them, feeding them, clothing them, sheltering them—was at least as important? What place does social justice occupy in the long list of my Christian church priorities if Jesus’s mission was to “to bring good news to the poor,” according to his first teaching as recorded in the Gospel of Luke? If the oppressed are drifting and starving in broken boats, should we not do everything we can to free them?