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doris ray |
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Sunday, May 10 2009 @ 08:30 AM EDT |
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PROLOGUE FOR “COMMON THREADS” (A Fictionalised Biography)
When I was about twelve and my brother ten we asked our mother whether she’d ever learned anything at all about her father; what country he was from and how and when he died. Mom had been regaling us with tales about her childhood in a Victoria, BC, orphanage where she and her sister were taken in 1918, when she was five-and-a-half and our Auntie Rose* (not her real name) was almost three.
As an adolescent living in a small rural community in the Cariboo District of British Columbia, I was often curious about which of our grandfather’s ancestral traits now revealed themselves as physical attributes in our mother and in ourselves. Our grandmother had been a blue-eyed redhead, but both her and Auntie Rose’s eyes were a rich, warm shade of brown. Our mother’s complexion was dark. And before it had turned grey, she’d sported a lovely mane of black naturally curly hair.
Dad had sprung from a long line of fair-haired, blue-eyed Hollanders. When I was younger I had apparently resembled his side of the family. I was proud of that fact and only wished that one morning I’d wake up as blond as they were. But as time passed it became obvious that both my brother and I were more affected by Mom’s darker pigmented genes.
Our mother remained coy about revealing anything she knew of my grandfather and his ancestry. She answered my inquiry with a complacent smile and surmised that he had probably been “French.” That was all I needed to know. In school we had studied the impact of Louie Riel’s efforts on Canada’s history and learned that he was half-French and half-Native Indian. That made him what was referred to in the textbook as a Metis. Mom’s father had probably been a Metis, I decided. That would account for her dark hair and skin. Perhaps he’d been a voyageur and had drowned while on a canoeing expedition along one of Canada’s fast-flowing rivers.
Mom had passed a prominent nose on to me, as well as ears that were too large to be feminine. I assumed they were legacies from a distant Native Indian relative. But my brother recalls a rumour circulating through our old neighbourhood that Mom’s dad was Chinese. He had asked our mother about it and she’d insisted it wasn’t true. I cannot remember hearing that story at all. Perhaps that was why I was more inclined to be surprised than he was when, forty-seven years later, I learned that I was one-quarter Chinese. My racial ancestry included an ethnic group with which I was totally unfamiliar.
One other rumour I vaguely recall making the rounds in my childhood was that my mother had another sister named “Carrie”( not her real name) who’d been adopted out to a family in Vancouver. My mother neither confirmed nor denied the rumour. It wasn’t until long after Aunt Carrie had passed away that I learned she had actually existed.
My mother died in 1983. Fifteen years later a copy of her birth certificate, which I’d ordered from the BC Archives, arrived in the mail. I opened the envelope with a sense of embarrassment; a feeling that I was about to invade her privacy. Rather than the anglicised maiden name that my mother had used throughout her lifetime, the document revealed that her registered birth name, as well as that of her father’s, was indeed Chinese. I experienced an intense rush of excitement-an emotional high. At that moment I felt closer to my mother than I ever had while she was alive! I also felt that she wanted me to dig into her ancestry and chronicle what I could of her own mother’s experiences.
During the long, slow process of gathering information about my mother’s family, a throng of brand new relatives popped up. They were all living on the BC Lower Mainland. An uncle from my grandmother’s third marriage helped unravel much of the mystery of where my grandmother came from and who she had been. From there, I was able to obtain copies of birth certificates and other vital information. My uncle’s anecdotal tidbits, as well as those of an elderly family acquaintance who recalled some key circumstances, revealed a world of intriguing material for me to build upon.
The story I have created is a composite of chronologically arranged data, dates and personal reminiscences, strung together with a whole lot of conjecture. When filling in the huge gaps with improvisation, I tried hard to be as genealogically, historically and geographically correct as possible. The names of my mother’s ancestors have been changed to protect the privacy of their descendants. Their personality traits and experiences have been greatly exaggerated or invented. Most other characters that appear in the book are the products of my imagination. A few have the characteristics of people who may have actually existed, but about whom I knew very little.
All narrative material relating to my grandfather “Won Gar”, other than that obtained from archival references, is fictional.
COMMON THREADS
My grandfather was
Chinese
I learned
of these
common threads
when I was
fifty-nine
That the tapestry
of my ancestry
was intertwined
with silk robed
silhouettes of
concubines
sipping green tea and
rice wine
That their
history
was
also mine- Doris Ray 1998
CHAPTER ONE: NELL O’BRIEN –Vancouver 1948
The middle-aged woman with the snow white curls like rolls of soft cotton batting stepped cautiously along the wooden sidewalk that snaked uphill and down through the quiet Vancouver suburb. It was bitterly cold this morning and she suspected there might be frost patches on the uneven planked surface that could cause the unwary to slip and fall. Thank goodness she wore slip-resistant overshoes over her new orthopaedics, and the long woollen coat that she’d purchased twenty-four years earlier on her last trip home to England. You just could not beat British-made garments for wear, she thought. The grey-mixed tweed fabric looked almost as good as new. It was wonderfully warm.
The woman’s name was Nell O’Brien. It was January 1948, a brand new year. She hoped it would be a good one. This past one hadn’t been so pleasant. It had rained all summer long. So far this winter, the weather had been awful. Almost as bad as those long, cold winters she’d experienced in the Kootenays. Dear old Mrs. Lebecoff had written in her Christmas card that it was even worse than usual up there.
The tree-lined street was sheltered from the rays of the morning sun. Nell could see remnants of the snowstorm that had paralysed the city a few days before Christmas. Crystallised lengths of snow bank still bordered the sidewalk. Childrens’ soil-encrusted snow sculpture littered lawns and a schoolyard. It looked as if Carrie and her husband had settled into a neighbourhood of mainly families with young children.
She paused beside a wire-fence gate. A walkway led toward a small white bungalow half-hidden by trees and winter-wilted shrubbery. Nell checked the street address with what was scribbled on the piece of paper she held in her hand. It was definitely the right place.
A large black dog lunged suddenly at the gate, growling and barking ferociously. A slender woman, clad only in a floral print housedress topped with a thin cardigan sweater, emerged from the house, shushing the dog as she approached.
“I’m so sorry about the dog,” she spoke softly. “You must be Mrs. O’Brien? Mother said you’d be stopping by.”
Nell observed the young matron as she exited through the gate, leaving it slightly open but not enough for the dog to escape. Agnes Lui’s small daughter had metamorphosed into a beautiful woman, she thought. Carrie had large almond-shaped green eyes, specked with brown, and her hair was a dark and shining auburn.
But Carrie remained unsure of herself and shy, Nell noted. Just as she’d been as a child. She was averting her eyes from the warm friendly gaze of the older woman. Her shoulders were hunched and she shivered from the cold.
“I won’t keep you,” Nell said. “I don’t want you to catch your death from the cold. Here is a packet of English tea biscuits for you.” She reached into the roomy paper shopping bag that she carried. “And a box of sugar lumps too. They’re from the grocery store I sold just after the war ended.”
“The birthday card is from your mother,” Nell added, handing Carrie an envelope. “You will be thirty-four on the fourteenth of this month.” It was a statement rather than a query.
Carrie looked up surprised. “Yes.”
“I baby-sat for your mother when you were quite small. I have a good memory for children’s birthdays.”
The young woman accepted the gifts and murmured an almost imperceptible “thank you.” She looked as if she was about to cry.
“Well, I’m off,” Nell said. “I’m invited for lunch at a friend’s place over in Point Grey. I have to catch a streetcar by eleven o’clock. The stop’s a fair distance from here to walk.”
She turned as if to leave. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, she inquired, “Your mother said you’d married ... and that he’s Chinese?”
Carrie’s reply expressed her innate feistiness of spirit: “Yes he is,” she retorted. Her green eyes flashed as they met Nell’s blue ones.
“And he is a good husband too.”
“Well, as long as you are happy.” Nell replied softly.
The six blocks to the streetcar stop on Wellington Avenue afforded Nell plenty of time to assess her motives for dropping in on her old friend’s daughter. It had been reassuring to see for herself that the dear little girl was now all grown up. She appeared to be happy. It was not that she was the least bit prejudiced, Nell told herself. It was just surprising that with all the blue-eyed Europeans who had flocked into the port of Vancouver after the Second World War, Carrie had chosen to marry a man who was Chinese.
Nell sat down on the bench seat behind the conductor’s box. She was pleased she’d caught one of the modern streetcars with their leather-upholstered seats and sturdy metal poles to hang onto. Her son Bobbie, who was interested in such things, had said there were now thirty-seven of the newer ones, on the BC Electric Streetcar tracks that criss-crossed the city. The new cars were much more comfortable to ride in than the old clunkers, with their wooden slat seats resembling park benches.
There was a sudden whirring sound from the overhead wires as the streetcar surged into motion and sped northward along the track. Except for the monotonous clink-clink of the wheels Nell noted very little noise. There was a slight screeching from outside, when it rounded the steeper corners. It took only ten minutes for the streetcar to cover the one-and-a-half miles to her stop. After that it was one more streetcar transfer, followed by a short bus ride, to her destination.
“How nice to see you again, Mrs. O’Brien! So glad you could join us for lunch.”
Mrs. Andrews was a friendly, outgoing lady who was an extremely good cook. Although the table was set for just the two women and her two small children, she had concocted a wonderful steak and kidney pie, with rice pudding for dessert.
“And how are your sons these days?” Mrs. Andrews inquired.
“They’re fine,” Nell replied. “Bobbie works for a telegraph company downtown. The older boy, George, has enlisted in the RCAF. He’s in Toronto.”
“Well, thank goodness it is peace-time now. You shouldn’t have to worry about him going to war. I’ll bet you miss having him around the house.”
“Yes, I do, even though my two boys never got along. Ever since they were little, all they did was fight.” Nell excused herself from the table and retrieved the shopping bag she had left at the door. “I’ve looked through my old trunk and discovered some doll’s clothing I made years ago.” She held up an assortment of miniature hand-sewn garments. “If Maryanne has a doll that would fit them, I’d like her to have them.”
Mrs. Andrews’s five-year-old daughter excitedly left the table without being excused. She ran into a bedroom, returning with a tiny unclad doll, which had a painted composition head, hands and feet and a stuffed cotton body. “Mommy, I think this dolly will fit those clothes!”
“Well, before you try them on you must say ‘thank you’ to Mrs. O’Brien and then wash your hands thoroughly.”
“These clothes are beautiful-such tiny little stitches!” Mrs. Andrews said as she examined a tiny gown. “I didn’t realise you were so talented with a needle, Mrs. O’Brien.”
“It was another thing that they taught in the boarding school I went to in England. What a place that was!” Nell shook her head at the recollection. “The emphasis there was on strict discipline. I used to warn my boys that they would soon learn to behave if I sent them away to a boarding school. Not that I would ever do that,” she laughed, “even if I’d had the money.
My boys were good sons,” Nell was contemplative. “Still, I’ve often wished I’d had a daughter.”
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