Chapter Eight
Life in the Land of Poutine
As far as happy endings went, 1994 came pretty damn close.
My parents had spent three years in Kingston building a new life from the ground up and dreaming of the day theyâd be able to bring me over from China so that we would finally be together as a family. Before that, they had defied all odds to graduate in Chinaâs legendary class of â77, which immediately followed a ten-year drought of all university admissions, and then built successful careers in Beijing before risking it all to come to Canada. My arrival in January was the culmination of all that they had strived for and marked the beginning of a bright new era in their lives. If this were a movie, I could imagine the picture fading to black as the three of us walked out of the airport together, hand in hand, as the music swelled and the credits rolledâa perfect Hollywood send-off.
But hang on a minute, Spielberg; seeing as weâre not even midway through this book, itâs pretty obvious that my parents donât get to ride off into the sunset just yet.
After all, anyone who has had a child would tell you that there is no challenge greater than parenthoodâeven more so when you are effectively adopting a four-year-old and bringing him halfway around the world to a country that he is completely unfamiliar with. Mom and Dad were about to experience the myriad of new responsibilities and burdens that came with raising a child, and would learn very quickly that âparenthoodâ was a lot more complicated than just living together.
I, in turn, would learn that life in Canada with my new family wasnât all that it was promised to be.
* * *
To be perfectly clear, my first impressions of Canada as a whole were overwhelmingly positive. The differences between Harbin and Kingston in 1994 were quite pronounced; I went from not having regular access to running water to being able to take as many showers and hot baths as I wanted in the house that now belonged to Maryâs niece. I stared in total awe as my parents drank water straight from the tap, without having to boil it first. All of the roads were paved, and all the cars driving on them were new and shiny. There were parks, trees, giant shopping centers and movie theaters, and a whole lot less dirt.
My first couple of weeks in Canada were jam-packed full of fun activities. We watched The Jungle Book in the theater together. We went to Pizza Hut, which at the time had an all-you-can-eat salad bar (almost three decades later, you still cannot convince my father of a better dining experience than a buffet). My parents even let me play with a computer for the first time, kicking off what was to be a very love-hate relationship with the internet.
There was a lot to love about Canada as a countryâTim Hortons, pond hockey, a universal health care systemâand both my parents and I have only grown to appreciate it more over time. However, fully adjusting to life in this new family unit proved to be a bit more difficult for all three of us.
When I arrived in Kingston in 1994 my parents were still on their holiday break. Soon, they had to go back to class, which left me without a caretaker during the day. So, barely two weeks after arriving in a totally foreign country, I found myself staring out the window of a day care, bawling my eyes out as I watched my parents back out of the driveway. I didnât know a single person, and couldnât understand anyone; English sounded like a gibberish language to me. But I didnât want to make friends or learn the languageâI just wanted my yĂ©ye and nÄinai. I cried all day until I was picked up, that day and every day for the next few weeks. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my parents had to pay for my day care entirely out of pocket, whereas Canadian citizens and permanent residents in the same income bracket would have had their childcare costs covered through government subsidies.
They were paying an arm and a leg for me to be sad.
I remember another time when, just mere days into our halting get-to-know you process, I woke up from a nap to find the house completely empty. While I was asleep, my mother had realized there wasnât any food in the fridge, and hoped to sneak out to grab some groceries and make it back before I woke up.
As per Murphyâs Law, I of course woke up almost immediately after she left.
Without any indication of where my mother was, I resolved to go out and look for her in the dead of winter. I dressed myself as best I could with my one operable arm, struggling into my snow pants, jacket, scarves and toque (and not really considering the fact that I had no idea how to get around town or to speak with the locals). By the time I got my gloves and snow boots on, though, I experienced a sudden loss of confidence. It was a rare display of common sense that no doubt saved my life; I sat at the top of the stairs and cried instead. When my mother finally came through the front door a short time later, she took one look at me, bundled up and puffy eyed, and all of the color drained from her face. She knew immediately that she had messed up.
Hold up, thoughâbefore you take out your pitchforks, time-travel to the mid â90s and call child protective services, consider that my parents were woefully ill-equipped for their new jobs as full-time care-givers. They had just spent the last three years only having to look after themselves; of course there was going to be an adjustment period. There was no learning curve, no gradual easing-into processâI simply showed up one day young, hungry and frustratingly dependent.
A few months after I had come over, Maryâs niece finally gave notice that she would be selling the house. We soon upgraded our living situation to a more spacious brick apartment in a broken-down part of town that was occupied by mostly low-income families, including eighteen other Chinese families like ours (most of whom were graduate students like my parents). As time went on, and my English became progressively better, I would befriend the other children in these families. Weâd all gather at each otherâs houses, playing games and speaking in English as our parents would sit and gossip in Mandarin. There was a familiar comfort in thisâit may not have been home, but at least it felt like community, the first time Iâd felt it since Iâd left Harbin.
Although it was a government-subsidized building, the rent for our new apartment was still far higher than Mary ever charged; with an extra mouth to feed, daycare costs that were through the roof and a much higher rent than they were used to, my parents found themselves once again pinching every single penny they could to survive.
It wasnât long before I stopped feeling like my parentsâ happily ever after, and more like their burden.
* * *
At some point between my arrival in Canada and the day I started first grade, I was introduced to something that I initially thought was quite harmless, but which would ultimately fester and grow to become a constant malignant force in my life.
In the beginning, satisfying my parents was a pretty easy thing to do. Actually, Iâm not sure that I had to do anything at all; I could make my mother smile and laugh just by existing, could make my father applaud my artistic talents with the ugliest creations on Microsoft Paint. Iâm sure that they were still caught up in the honeymoon period of having a son as cute as I was. However, as time went on, Momâs smiles grew smaller, her laughs became mere chuckles, and Dad stopped reaching for the camera to document every little thing I made. I effectively became a Big Bang Theory rerunâsomething once fresh and shiny and new that became progressively less funny with each repeat viewing, until every punch line and the subsequent audience laughter that followed grated on you like nails on a chalkboard.
To be clear, I still did all of the kid stuffâmy parents signed me up for summer camps and swimming lessons, and let me play with my friends outdoors all the time. My mother would chase me up and down the block as I learned to ride a bike, ready to catch me if I lost my balance. I fondly recall the pure joy that I felt when they bought me my very own Thunder Megazord. After a season or so of the traditional Dinozords, Zordon upgraded the Rangersâ powers, resulting in new robotic Zords that combined into the giant and majestic Thunder Megazord. Refreshing the toys every couple of years to keep the children wanting more; it was pure marketing genius! My parents, fully aware of this consumerist gouging, dug deep into their wallets anyway and bought me the toy (which was really five toys) at full price.
Later, when another kid in our enclave became the first to get Super Nintendo, I came home jealous-crying that I didnât have one. It was just about the coolest thing I had ever seen, and it tore me up inside that I couldnât tear through Mushroom Kingdom on my own. My parents made the snap decision to buy a Sega Genesis the following weekâagain, at full price. Anybody who grew up in any immigrant household will understand how big a deal that is. Despite growing up âpoor,â I truly never felt like I was missing anything material in my life.
What I did miss, and greatly so, was curling up between YĂ©ye and NÄinai and feeling completely protected from all the bad in the world.
As time went on, I felt like I ceased to be an endless burst of joy and became something that had to be molded, or groomed, for success. Around the time I was set to begin first grade, I started to feel the weight of my parentsâ expectations on my shoulders, something that I had never encountered before in China, where being my adorable self was enough.
It began as an innocent question, not asked of me directly but posed implicitlyâdonât you want to make your parents happy? Well . . . of course I did; happy parents meant trips to McDonaldâs and garage sale shopping sprees! It meant that I could play with the friends that I had made in the building. Most important, it meant receiving the affection, validation and praise that my yĂ©ye and nÄinai had always been so generous with back home in Harbin.
Mom and Dad were unquestionably happiest when I was reading or accumulating knowledge. We would come home from the library with stacks of books that I would pore over, ranging from Dr. Seuss to the adult novelization of Return of the Jedi. I often had no idea what I was even reading but was still able to absorb the structure and the syntax of the English language. So what if I thought Jabba the Hutt was actually a person, and found the idea of Leia being chained to him weird and ineffective?
Meanwhile, my parents also began to fast-track my math skills. By the time I was five, I had my times tables memorized; by the time I was six and about to enter first grade, I could do long division. One day, my father pointed the camcorder at me and quizzed me like I was on some sort of prime-time game show:
âWe want to show YĂ©ye and NÄinai your progress,â he said, as if my value was tied to whether or not I knew what seven times eight was. I answered gleefully, seeing that I made him happier with every correct response I gave.
Tied to this new expectation, of course, was the consequence of falling short of it. I will absolutely never forget the first time my mother yelled at me. It had been a long day spent running and jumping off of things, as a child does, and Iâd felt too exhausted to do the âhomeworkâ that my parents had assigned me. After inspecting my work, which was sloppy and riddled with errors, she erupted at me:
âI asked you to memorize EIGHT WORDS. Youâve been sitting at your desk FOR AN HOUR. If youâre going to take ALL DAY to learn EIGHT EASY WORDS, how will you do anything else??â
My motherâs volume and intensity stunned me; it was a completely different side of her than the woman who had scooped me up in her arms at the airport, hugging and kissing me and refusing to let me go. Her words stung like hot lashes on my skin, punctuated by the speed and the ferocity of her voice. In shock and with absolutely no idea what to do, I closed my eyes and wept silently as she berated me.
âDo it AGAIN, and do it PROPERLY. You write these words TEN TIMES EACH, and donât even THINK about getting up. I donât care if weâre here all night, youâre going to SIT THERE for as LONG AS IT TAKES.â
Instead of stepping in to mediate the situation, my dad secretly recorded the incident on his camcorder, thinking that it would make an amusing addition to the tape that he was preparing to send overseas. Weeks later, on the other side of the world, my yĂ©ye and nÄinai sat helplessly as they watched the tears streaming down my face on their TV. It was not funny to them, and it certainly wasnât to me....
