Lives of the Family Read Online Free Page A

parents abandoning their children in public places in hopes that someone wealthy might chance by who would rescue them. And of people driven mad with hunger: a mother, thinking her baby to be a plucked chicken, had put it into a hot wok. People believed these stories, apocryphal or not, because they had witnessed unimaginable deprivation and loss.
    The villagers of Golden Creek grew anxious, expecting the Japanese eventually to target their village. Sure enough, the day came. Fay-oi, then seven or eight years old, heard a stampede of feet by the house and the tense voices of mothers hurrying their children. Alone in the house with her mother, who was ill and confined to bed, Fay-oi ran outside. Neighbours said the Japanese had struck at the houses clustered at the bend in the river. From the rooftop terrace, Fay-oi saw for herself: a large military boat moored there and smoke billowing from houses nearby.
    She rushed to rouse her mother. Yee-hing had not eaten for days and had been coughing up blood. “
Mama
, everyone is going to the mountain.”
    “I’m too weak.” Go, she said weakly. Go, quickly.
    “If you’re going to die,
Mama
, I want to die with you.” Fay-oi crawled under the covers of the bed that mother and daughter had shared ever since Harry left for Canada.
    In the stillness of the house, the two clung to each other. They awaited the inevitable: the sound of breaking glass as the enemy broke through the first door, the clang of the slatted metal of the second door sliding across, the smashing of the wooden lock and the creak of the massive timber doorswinging aside. Boot steps on the ground floor, then hastening up the stairs. Soldiers bursting into the bedroom. Instead, the silence gave way to the rustle of the leaves and the music of songbirds. A few hours later, Fay-oi heard the relieved chatter of returning villagers. She ran out: Why had they come down off the mountain? They said that from on high among the pine trees, they had seen Japanese soldiers board their boat and move on down the river. They snickered at the Japanese: maybe they were too lazy to make the ten-minute walk from the river’s edge to Golden Creek.
    Eight years after Japan had invaded China, the occupation ended; that same day, Japan announced its unconditional surrender in the Pacific War, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still, the people of China would have no respite from conflict. Hardly were the Japanese gone when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists renewed their civil war.
    AS BAD AS THINGS in China may have looked to Harry, he saw his prospects in Canada only improving. He and several partners had renovated a property on Vancouver’s Pender Street and renamed it W.K. Oriental Gardens (W.K. stood for
wah kew
, a term to describe “overseas Chinese”). Richly decorated with wood panelling and rows of tasselled silk lanterns hanging from the ceiling, the restaurant was located up a wide staircase on a second floor, evoking a tradition in Canton that sharing food and conversation is to be enjoyed away from prying eyes and the din at street level. By the mid-1940s, W.K. Gardens had become one of Chinatown’s busiest restaurants. Its four-page menu offered Canadianand Chinese dishes, from T-bone steak with a choice of seven styles of potatoes (French fries to potatoes
au gratin)
, to nine variations on chop suey. Sundays were given over to Chinese cuisine with a set banquet menu. Waiters rolled out rounds of plywood to enlarge the tables and seat as many as five hundred guests. Several nights a week, the restaurant offered a popular ticketed “Dine and Dance” evening, to the swing music of a big band.
    At the end of the Second World War, Harry Lim played a waiting game. If Canada reversed its immigration policy and began re-admitting Chinese, he could think about getting his family out of China. Chinese-Canadian soldiers had supported the British