For Chinese in Canada during the 1950s and 1960s, the gradual relaxation of immigration restrictions resulted in the reactivation of long-repressed filial ties. Contemporary Chinese Canadian writer Judy Fong Bates has fre-quently depicted recently reunited Chinese families living and working in
small Ontario towns during this period, a setting that stems from her own story as a young girl who arrived in Canada in 1955. For this chapter, I will focus on her 2010 memoir, The Year of Finding Memory, which contains some of her most extensive reflections on these experiences. The Year of Finding Memory revolves around two trips that Fong Bates made as an adult to her home village in Kaiping, China, after a lifetime of absence. From the start, she presents herself as a well-integrated, independent, and for the most part content Chinese Canadian woman, someone who benefited tremen-dously from the sacrifices of her parents. Her journeys prompt her to search for more information about her parents, a quest that unwittingly uncovers residual traces of a transnational migrant lifeworld.
In The Year of Finding Memory, everything goes back to 1947 but not because of historical milestones—rather, 1947 is the year when Fong Bates’s parents got married. For both her father, Fong Wah Yent, and her mother, Fong Yet Lan, it was their second marriage, and both had surviving children from previous unions. Her father first came to Canada in 1914 and worked for many years in small-town laundries. These years were spent separated from his first wife, who died suddenly around 1940 in the midst of the war with Japan. He would not see their four children again until 1947, when he moved back to China in the hope of enjoying a comfortable life. He had met Yet Lan years earlier when she was the village schoolteacher, but they had lost touch until she took the initiative to contact him to propose marriage.
As Fong Bates writes, “In 1947, when he believed he was returning to China to stay, his feelings of joy and hope must have been euphoric. The war was over and he would finally be reunited with his children. He would marry a woman whom he respected. Together, they would put the anguish of those war years behind and build a new life” (218). These expectations would be shattered as her father returned to Canada in August 1949 in order to escape the impending Communist victory. The author, his youngest daughter, was born four months later. His family fractured again as his oldest children, who were ineligible for sponsorship, remained in China never to see their father again, while his wife and younger children made it to Hong Kong and eventually to Canada.
Fong Bates recounts her life within the framework of the immigrant family narrative, with its emphasis on displacement, resettlement, and as-similation, and her stay in Hong Kong comes across merely as a brief transi-tion. She mentions that in 1953, she “fled” to Hong Kong with her mother, but she does not tell us how they got there (24). In a book about finding memories, the Hong Kong years are notably vague:
We languished in Hong Kong for only two years, but in my hazy remembrance the time feels longer, another lifetime belonging to someone else. I have no memory of [half-brother] Doon living with
us, and yet I know he did. He was in his late teens and spent his days exploring the city on his own and with other young relatives who were waiting to emigrate. That period of my life has left me with a vague but persistent impression of that city’s excitement, a memory of constantly turning my head and looking, my mother holding me by the wrist while we walked along contested sidewalks, and through outdoor markets swarming with people. (27)
These descriptions support the author’s claim that it was only in Canada that her sense of self became fully established, but seemingly minor details scat-tered throughout the text hint at what lies outside this framework. She men-tions that her mother had once sought refuge in Hong Kong during the war with Japan and originally did not want to go to Canada, preferring instead to stay in Hong Kong and live on remittances from her husband. Fong Bates also learns later on that her mother’s sponsorship application had been re-jected twice by Canadian authorities before finally being approved for rea-sons that remain unclear (234).
These details begin to acquire different meanings when we read them as belonging to a transnational lifeworld. The fact that Fong Bates’s mother had already spent time in Hong Kong places her in a mobile population of Guangdong residents who were familiar with border crossings before the early 1950s. Her knowledge of the city and her family ties there made her decision to leave her village much more manageable, while her reluctance to leave Hong Kong suggests that it was still possible to imagine (and indeed to prefer) being part of a transnational family supported by remittances, ar-rangements that would have been well known to overseas Chinese families.
We are reminded that the immigration process contains uncontrollable con-tingencies such as whims of bureaucrats, belying the common assumption that it is largely the result of choices and agency (I will return to this point shortly).
Moreover, these details indicate the text’s interest in alternative life tra-jectories, ways in which the author’s family history could have taken mark-edly different paths. Catherine Gallagher suggests that even though historical fiction contains invented elements, its defining constraint is that
“it cannot contradict the historical record” (320), which functions as the
“horizon of possibility” for judging whether events and other details are pos-sible or probable.14 Fiction and history constitute a “modal arc” (321; empha-sis in original) in which space is created for speculation and judgment without fundamentally questioning the facticity of history. Even though a memoir such as The Year of Finding Memory necessarily emphasizes historic-ity (that is, it retells what has already happened), a similar arc between hist-ory and fiction operates as Fong Bates seeks to render judgment on herself and her family. In this context, alternative trajectories acquire their peculiar
force through the awareness that they did not in fact take place. They are speculative, but, crucially, they function within the same discursive space that Gallagher identifies in the historical novel: they must be plausible with-in the historical world of the text. Put differently, the possibilities entertawith-ined by Fong Bates would have been applicable to many other would-be migrants who were converging in Hong Kong at the same time, facing similar condi-tions. In this sense, alternative trajectories provide a sense of the larger so-ciohistorical context in which Fong Bates’s family story emerged by conveying not only what happened but also what could have happened. By excavating these possibilities, the text raises deeper questions about how its temporal and spatial parameters narrow a transnational lifeworld into a na-tional narrative. It also asks: What kinds of relationships are possible if we look beyond restrictive itineraries of immigration and settlement? What psy-chic mechanisms are embedded in the very categories used to denote (im) migration? At stake in all this is nothing less than what makes The Year of Finding Memory legible as a Chinese Canadian narrative and the kinds of subjectivities that can be articulated through the exploration of intimate mi-grant family histories.