Lives of the Family by Denise Chong

to suit me,” said Mabel. When he proposed, Mabel was pleased for Doris. She had only one reservation: Howard liked to gamble. “Gamblers only think of themselves,” she warned.

    Christmas at the Way-nees. Sarah Way-nee (centre); Hin Lew (jacket and tie); Sarah’s four children (from left to right), Helen, June, Alan and Douglas; Irene Joe (second from right); unknown
.
Courtesy Hin Lew

FIVE
    BETWEEN
    WHEN HELEN ENROLLED AT her new high school, Lisgar Collegiate Institute, a grey stone, turreted building in downtown Ottawa, she decided to choose her own surname. All through school, her family name had been recorded at the whim of her teachers as Ling or Way or Nee.
    Helen’s father gave his name variously as Ling Way and as Ling Nee. He had no concern for how it was anglicized or spelled. When he’d first arrived in Ottawa two decades earlier, in 1921, and taken a room above a shoe store on Bank Street, the canvasser for the city directory listed him as Ling Way. It would have been lost on the canvasser to explain the Chinese convention of placing surnames first: that Ling was the surname; Way was the given name shared with his brothers. In fact, the directory listing omitted the other half of his given name, Nee, which was his alone.
    Neighbours were equally confused about how to greet Helen’s mother, born Sarah Randall, and addressed her as Mrs. Way or Mrs. Nee. The Lings lived in the Jewish quarter of the city, centred around Chapel Street, and straddling the neighbourhoods of Sandy Hill and Lowertown, east of Parliament Hill. That was where Sarah Ling had finallyfound a landlord willing to rent to her. Apart from the occasional French-speaking family, the neighbourhood remained a Jewish enclave.
    Helen’s older sister, June, and her younger brothers, Alan and Douglas, faced the same problem with their teachers, which led to the awkwardness of family members’ having mismatched surnames. Only one recorded surname in the family did not change: that of baby David, on whose tombstone was carved
David Ling
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    When it came time to register at Lisgar, Helen wrote her surname as Way-nee. Knowingly or not, her use of a hyphen conveyed her feeling of living between the side of her that was “Canadian”—white—and the side that was Chinese.
    AUNT EVA WAS THE ONLY member of the Randall family who remained on speaking terms with her sister, Sarah, after her marriage to Nee Ling. She’d insist to the teenaged Helen: “Your mother was a friendly, outgoing girl.” To Helen, Aunt Eva seemed to be talking about a different person. She didn’t know her mother to socialize with anybody. Not even coffee or tea with a neighbour. She wasn’t sure if that was because her mother was a loner or because she was snubbed.
    Her father was hardly home, except on Sundays. Nee served as head chef and baker on the household staff of a family prominent in the wholesale lumber business, the Bremners. Six days a week, he rose at dawn to take the streetcar to the Byward Market, hoping he was early enough to beat other cooks and café owners to the pick of produce, fish at Lapointe’s and meat at Aubrey’s. His day ended at ten at night, later on evenings when the Bremners entertained. Regardless of thehour, once off work, Nee made a beeline for the social clubs on Albert Street.
    Alone with the household chores, Sarah had her hands full. By night, she slept with one ear to June, ready to race to her side if she heard the telltale thrashing or gurgling of the seizures to which her daughter was prone. Even if the night passed without incident, Sarah slept fitfully. When the weather turned cold, she had to get up an hour earlier to get the wood stove burning in the kitchen and stoke the coal furnace in the basement. Until Nee finally had the money to put down on a house, the trying task of finding a new apartment always fell to her. She’d moved the family three times, the first after they’d lost everything when embers in the wood stove