The Hidden Seduction – Part III-3 – The Cunning Cottage

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Part III-3 – The Cunning Cottage

 

One year after Ou Yang started working, they bought a little cottage in Lasalle.

It was a cottage row house, two stories with a basement. “Row” means that there are other houses directly connected on both or one side of the house. The front of the cottage was very narrow, only 4 meters wide and 10 meters deep. The first floor was one meter higher than ground level to give height to the basement, while the rest was 1.2 meters dug into the ground, to make 2.2 meters of livable space.

The front door opened into the combined dining-sitting room. Further ahead was their medium sized kitchen with a small island in the middle.  There was a truly minuscule “bathroom,” with just enough space for a toilet bowl and a sink. It is actually called a “powder-room,” a euphemism for a lady’s place that is still in use as culture develops, and it is mainly for the convenience of the guests. Of course, gentlemen are allowed to go as well. A nice spiral wood staircase led up to the second floor where there were two small bedrooms adjacent to a space in the middle that served as their son’s playroom. The strange thing was that the windows were not on the long sides of the cottage, but on the front and back, due to the fact that the cottage was sandwiched between two other cottages. It felt like a long train compartment with misplaced windows! And then there was the basement. It held a garage and a guest-room or other playroom for their son, where they could put the piano.

Ou Yang had always loved things to be nice and beautiful. The decoration of the house then became a significant way for us to know her. The fact that such a cottage was chosen already said a lot about her. The whole development was quite new, and their cottage was only 6 years old, since the Chinese from Mainland China only liked new houses. Why? Maybe it is because all of China is new, with skyscrapers, shiny new stores, and trendy apartments appearing in every major Chinese city. They liked new things. 25 years old apartments were already very shabby and dirty, looking like slums. Ten year old apartments began to look bleak, because the Chinese did not have “Co-ownership Committees” to help clarify rights and obligations, or, in a word, govern their apartments and carry out the proper maintenance.

“Aiya, you have many residential buildings and houses in Montreal that were built in 1900 and even older? How do they look? They must be terrible!”

Her sisters in China were amazed. How incredible it was! In China, buildings erected after 1988, only 21 years old in 2009, already looked so old, dirty, and out of date.

In China, in one area after another, “old” buildings had been torn down to make way for new, more modern ones, with bigger bathrooms, huge sitting rooms and gardens, bridges and fountains everywhere. It seemed that dismantling “old” buildings was as easy as just blowing out a sneeze! There seemed to be no mortgage issues to worry about, nor land acquisition to argue about. Right, for sure, China was a socialist or communist country, where buildings belonged to a ghost-like collective. The country once belonged to everyone in name, yet no one really knew what ownership was, what rights this ownership granted, and who was responsible for what. Although property privatization had been going on for many years, obligations were still not necessarily and automatically forthcoming with ownership.  Under the vagueness and ambiguity of no trivial concepts of ownership, even masonry will rot! When human hearts become like poorly mixed cement: either too much cement, resulting in complete rigidity, or too much sand, and not being able to hold even air; water does not help consolidate and “Ethics and Trust” have no place.

Both Ou Yang and Ge Wen were delighted to live in the house. Though not as big as she wanted and neither as new, Ou Yang was satisfied for the moment. As having a family “Cheng Jia 成家 ” had been the first crucial symbol of success for Chinese, “house” became the fundamentally indispensable element for a home or family. In Chinese culture, no matter how successful a person can be in other aspects, if he or she is not married and does not have a home (together with a house), he or she will barely be regarded as successful. A house has become such a preeminent thing in people’s life. After almost 40 years of being deprived of property ownership,  without limitations of times and era, we have become  fundamentally and thoroughly so poor inside, that we have been paranoid of the impact of being poor and unconscious on the effect of spiritual status. We know that without a home, no souls could survive for long. So with privatization of properties and maybe land in the future of China, can we expect the flourish of happy souls?

Not like many Chinese families overseas who acquired huge houses yet no money for furniture nor heating expense, Ou Yang and Ge Wen preferred to have a smaller house. Ou Yang had taste and a good sense about the balance of living. She wanted to have a nice home with trendy furniture and decorative things. She hung many lovely pictures of her little family along the wall going upstairs; she painted some walls in different colors; she bought exaggeratedly huge flowers from “Pot Pourri” and put them together with some green leaves, dry sticks that were plastic, but made to seem genuine.  She would never wanted the idea of buying a huge house with no furniture and barren “white” walls, only to shiver in winter with 15 degrees in the house wearing sweaters and outdoor coats!

The three of them, Ou Yang’s little family, were very comfortable in the cottage. They kept the heat at 24 degrees. In the summer they ate outside and received friends on their small wooden deck under a charming red umbrella. Ou Yang had planted tulips the previous November, and now she was planting more perennials and annuals. She invited her boss and his wife. Ou Yang showed her beautiful white teeth as she smiled from ear to ear when she finally heard the compliments about her new house and her good taste. The few lines between her eyebrows were gradually disappearing now that she was under her own roof and was eliminating the factors that were carving them. She helped her husband cook a delicious and exotic banquet, both western and Chinese, and her son was playing the piano downstairs. Every thing went extremely well. Ou Yang was soaked in happiness, feeling proud of being a person full of savvy.

Time passed without them noticing, and their son Sonny turned six years old in 2010. Ou Yang was promoted twice because of her good performance and was earning forty-eight thousand Canadian dollars a year. Ge Wen made a little bit more. Because he did not speak French, he always felt that there was some discrimination against him.

“It was discrimination against Chinese!” He would think.

He started talking about moving to Vancouver, where he would not have as much of a problem with the language. There is a huge population of Chinese in Vancouver, and Ge Wen thought they would feel better there. But the issue naturally went away, as he was the only one who said so, and the fragile one among all others. Their son started primary school.

With their son going to school, Ou Yang and Ge Wen’s life became more stable, and they began to relax. Sonny was older now, and gaining more independence each month, which also gave Ou Yang and Ge Wen more time for both of them. They were not bound from minute to minute any more. They could literarily enjoy some time without having to watch their son playing in the yard or outside. They could even send their son to the home of his school friends, or rather to that of her close friend who happened to be the mother of their son’s friend. They could go see a movie now and enjoy a bit of free time- time when they could have rekindled something that had begun to be extinguished by the daily routine.

Over the issue of taking turns to watch over the kids among the school parents, Ge Wen and Ou Yang had a huge and definite disagreement at the beginning. He only agreed with reluctance to try once.  He would rather stay home to be with their son when Ou Yang wanted to go out, and he would frown when his son’s friend wanted to sleep over Friday night.

“Don’t bother other people!” was his usual righteous thing to say when it came to matters like these.

If he had not been willing to also provide his service, it surely would have become a “bother!” But a father is a father. He accepted it, after seeing his son jump up and down upon hearing the news that his good friend was coming, and seeing that many other people were doing it. His son needed friends!

What about them? Did they need friends?

For Chinese men or women to have a friend of the opposite sex is not a possibility. It is not common to even find true friends amongst the same gender. Women could have girlfriends for going shopping or gossip, but men do not go out after work to grab a drink to keep up with the world. We Chinese just do not talk nonsense. For overseas Chinese men, it seems that their world is literarily getting “smaller and smaller,” narrowing it down to their homes. In China, they go out drink and sing karaoke for “business” and social networking, but in Canada they don’t. Maybe it is too cold too long in winter and their nuts have to hide inside their bellies. Their busy struggle for survival has made it almost impossible to have any extra time for friends, anyway. If we say that friendship in China is as shallow and hypocritical as the relationship between wolves and lambs, here it becomes a luxury.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand why our Chinese culture centers on Family values. Having no time could be a good excuse. The need for making friends comes from a hunger, just like the need for a wife or husband. We have been trying to combine friendship with couple-ship, maybe in order to save time and be efficient, or maybe because we have wished it so, but it randomly works out that way. We wish for friendship to serve as the base for couple-ship, yet that is probably a “Fleur Blue” (a hopeless romantic), which seldom blossoms. The chances of turning our spouses into friends with whom we can talk about anything and everything, is as scarce as the writer of this story falling from a capsule in space and breaking the speed of sound like Felix Baumgartner.

Yet Ou Yang ended up uniting with western or non-Chinese families for such services, because Ge Wen was not the only one; there were many others just as distrustful and uncomfortable as he. They didn’t see the necessity of keeping their social life going or having some private time for themselves, thinking that it was their full responsibility to watch over their kids, and they also genuinely did not want to “trouble” other people! They didn’t trust others; at the very least they didn’t feel comfortable with language and cultural issues. In their minds, they would feel guilty for their kids and their friends, and always worried if that ever happened from time to time.

We Chinese are basically incapable of trusting people other than our family members, or people who are connected to our family members. How much this distrust comes from self-distrust or lack of self-confidence, it is hard to say. In China, we would always have family to help with our kids, either the in-laws or brothers and sisters, or in the worst case, we could afford nannies from the far-away countryside to be live-in baby-sitters, sometimes until kids were up to 15 years old. In Canada, we are stuck with kids. No cheap help is available and we refuse to work with other people. But luckily and out of blue, Ou Yang had a couple of friends she seemed to trust.  Obviously, she did have certain self-assurance, self-trust and pragmatic entrepreneurial spirit.

As a great nation, we Chinese are polite, quiet, and always agreeable when among other people. But under such great merits, there seems to exist a deadly rotting element of distrust and untrustworthiness.  It seems that we Chinese, both as individuals and as a nation, really lack the need to connect with other individuals or other nations, and the ability to truly connect. “For what?” we would ask, and then wonder about the question ourselves. We do connect within ourselves, but even that seems reluctant and passive!  It could only happen when desperately necessary or for the sake of “business.” This pathetic connection is so often of the materialist nature that it doesn’t really hold, like the poorly mixed concrete combination, with the fault always falling on others.

“For a cunning cottage we could share…” Oh, yes, a home to have, a cunning cottage we could share…

* The title is an excerpt of a George Gershwin’s song: I’ve Got A Crush On You

 

To Be Continued…

The Hidden Seduction – Part III-2 – Thorn Birds and Prejudice!

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Part III-2 – Thorn Birds and Prejudice

 

Ou Yang and Ge Wen only felt financially relieved once she had found a job as a clerk at a small importing & exporting company, where she was paid $32,000 a year. Not bad at all for someone who had only two years of post-secondary education in the form of training as a travel guide after high school.

Many immigrants from Mainland China who had master’s degrees in technology, sciences, or the arts, or had already worked for up to 15 years as medical doctors in China, were paid minimum wage as cooks or grocery store owners. Grocery store owners can make money, but it is mostly illegal, done by not declaring all of their revenue, while sacrificing their precious time, and that of their kids, for what amounts to peanuts when factoring in 17 hours a day of work for 7 days a week. Most astonishing is the fact that some had left their jobs as engineers to be grocery owners for the promise of “more money” and freedom. But who have these menial jobs, and who are the owners of small grocery stores in China?

They brought money to Canada, of course, and no unimportant amount. But as Chinese, who always adhere to the old Chinese teachings of “being a smart rabbit having three caves in case of danger (狡兔三窟),” they also saved money and refrained from spending more than the minimum necessary for their first home.

We should remember that Ou Yang had been making good money back in China as a tour guide, and she surely knew how to spoil herself with luxurious stuff. She was the youngest child and the wife of the only son of a very sensible family; naturally, she was exempt from all responsibilities for both families, and she had enjoyed all the money for herself. For Ge Wen, a Chinese “intellectual” type, a shirt or a pair of shoes would last him forever without feeling the need to change. He had always told Ou Yang in China, and now in Canada, when she wanted to buy some new clothes for him:

“No, it’s not necessary. What I have is good enough!”

Isn’t it? Ge Wen was a person who sought nothing beyond the few things that he already had.

Yet Ou Yang was a person with taste and a sense of social behavior. She knew that they could no longer dress the way they had in China. They had to change shirts every day to go to work, and even the men needed to put on a bit of “cologne.” Ou Yang was already used to it from her time as a tour guide who mingled with people of “perfume and cologne,” yet Ge Wen was used to his colleagues at a Chinese state-owned company, where he had never known anyone who smelled like that.

“Lao Gong! “(老公-”lao” means old, “gong” means male) is a popular nickname for husbands, resulting from the rising influence of Hong Kong vocabulary since the early 1990’s, when China first opened her doors to Hong Kong.

“You should wear some cologne when you go to work!”

It was not a suggestion, so much as an order. While it often seems that passive people don’t think much, Ge Wen did have his ideas!

“No! No! What are you talking about? I will never be like them!”

His colleagues here in Canada, he said, smelled badly, some even smelled like stinky foxes!

“I don’t stink, why should I put on that kind of thing?”

Ge Wen was offended. No matter what Ou Yang said or threatened, he refused to accept that kind of thing for the declared reason of not being smelly himself, yet deep down in his heart this sort of thing was more a symbol of a spiritual connection with capitalist taste than an odor remover. For a Chinese “intellectual” – an independent and different man, a man with a deeper insight – the acceptance of “such a thing” could have an impact so deep as to make him feel that he was losing his personality or identity.

There is a limit on the things we can control, even when we know that one way is better than the other.  Ou Yang could do nothing on the matter of “cologne,” yet Ge Wen did have a point on this matter, didn’t he? Chinese people don’t stink and “foreigners” do, so they invented “perfume” and “cologne” to disguise their natural but unwashed bodies into “seduction,” which to Ge Wen was a revolting idea.

The Quebecois were strange in Ou Yang’s eyes as well. For one, they took their time serving you in restaurants. It was very slow, and Ou Yang would waste no time to comment:

“Not like in China! In ten minutes, 5-8 dishes would be on the table, all delicious and hot!”

Here, the waiters and waitresses came to the table, smiled, chatted, made jokes, maybe even flirted with the customer, regardless of whether they were to their liking. In an hour of waiting, they did everything else with you besides bring your food! This was unbearable for most Chinese, revealing another hidden reason why they don’t talk while eating. They have been taught by old rituals not to talk over meals or when sleeping (吃不言,睡不语-chi bu yan, shui bu yu). They cared little for jokes and smiling while waiting for food. They were ok in China where food was served without the waiters even looking at the customers, and everyone ate quietly like ants!  Why were they being flirted with when going for food? They just wanted to eat!

Here, the Government services to the public were even slower.

“Oh, Good Heavens!” Ou Yang would say when talking like a religious zealot about her medical experience in Montreal with his family in China.

“It was a pain in the butt to go see those doctors!” Sometimes she would wait an entire day, seven to eight hours, just for a little checkup. She clearly did not know the function of “triage,” which classifies patient urgency according to the seriousness of their illness. The wait for small problems could seem to go on forever because all of the more serious cases pass to the front of the line. In China, the patients themselves performed “triage.” When the Chinese were busy running around crowded hospital like lunatics trying to find out what to do, or finding family friends who had relations with the doctors, of course they were not bored like here by waiting for hours in the waiting rooms, instead they were working hard for hours to make the hospitals look very efficient!

Ou Yang tried many times to be nice with the clerk in order to get some favors, but it never worked. She got a cold answer every time:

“you have to wait your turn.”

In that respect she felt that China was faster and better. China works with connections, and who did not have connections in China? That is why China gave birth to 1.6 billion people so that they could link-in for convenience, speedy treatment, and the exchange of favors!

So “efficiency” comes from connections and favors, rather than “inefficiency” serving no connections. Which one is better? Are there any other choices?

Ou Yang perceived the Quebecois as lazy people in general. In her mind, they were not only lazy, with many relying on social benefits, but they seemed not to encourage efficiency or strive for improvements, and they also failed to encourage people and children to have dreams. The Quebecois, they actually liked to bathe in the sun in summer time, some even enjoyed being tanned by a machine!  They enjoyed sitting for a long time with a cup of coffee without doing anything; they were addicted to having fun with meaningless things, and enjoyed talking for hours about nothing. They put their young children to bed early so that they could go out and enjoy themselves! Both Ou Yang and Ge Wen were both very much against this. They thought they were not responsible for their kids and family.

With regards to education, Ou Yang thought the Quebecois parents were lazy and had no plans for their children’s future. Parents left their children outside after school in spring, summer and fall, and didn’t give them drills to practice what they learned at school: even worse was that there were no home-work from teachers! How could children abide by “Review the old and they will know new better (温故而知新 – wen gu er zhi xin )”?

Ou Yang had a girlfriend with two daughters, one twelve and the other fifteen. Ou Yang could not stand the way her friend and her husband spoiled their girls. They were complete princesses: in Ou Yang’s opinion, they didn’t learn much at school and did nothing at home, either with their studies or helping with family chores. They even had a nanny to clean their rooms for them. They ate and then stood up from the table and left without helping, enjoying the habit of having their mother or father do everything for them.  Worse was that the parents had no desire or intention to train the teenagers in any other skills besides the minimum required in school. Another thing that was hard for Ou Yang to accept was that the kids here could and would not stand any criticism of any kind, as if the necessary training and discipline were regarded as torture for children, making parents feel guilty for attempting it!  If they could ever get the children to agree to do anything, they were far too slow, and the job would never be complete. Western parents would have a day when they would have to bargain for their child’s love.  But what about Chinese parents? Haven’t they been constantly bargaining, begging or manipulating for their children’s love the entire time?

One thing Ou Yang and Ge Wen agreed upon was their son’s education. There was not even a question about whether their son would go to piano lessons, or another activity that would help him to develop his abilities. And so their Sonny began taking piano lessons at age three and half; then at five, the Go. Ou Yang was as busy as a bee, running between school, work, the piano, and Go practice. Ge Wen would usually cook, so that they could start their dinner at 7pm when wife and son finally returned home.

Quebec had undergone their social revolution from the 1960’s to 1980’s with little blood shed. It seems that they had realized what the Americans and Chinese have been struggling towards for so long. Quebec enjoys its social benefits: free medical care, nine years of free mandatory education, nearly-free colleges and universities, and a “no-fault” automobile insurance policy installed by Lise Payette! Because of all these fundamental social improvements, Quebecois society’s mentality has made great strides with its people’s freedom from the conservative days of Catholic Church rule. One might wonder how the great French writer Victor Hugo’s social political idea of “he who opens a school door, closes a prison” has influenced the present free education system in Quebec!

Chinese and many other immigrants came to Quebec because of the results of the famed thirty years of social revolution, “The Quiet Revolution,” the French cultural heritage.  What greater dreams could Quebecois even have? Was it really necessary to train children to be capable of doing small things at home, in order to make them alert of the possibility of one day needing some basic skills, such as cleaning up after oneself? What else could Quebec do to please Ou Yang?

One evening, Ge Wen heard a dispute on TV over whether an Indian boy could keep his tradition of his culture and bring a knife to school. Both of them had no opinion about it.

“Mind your own business!” was what Ge Wen,or even Ou Yang would say to themselves. “It is not our business!”

Was it really? One day maybe their own son might have an Indian boy sitting beside him wearing a “cultural symbol!”

Ou Yang had also heard her colleagues talking about a Sikh who had been granted the right to wear his turban instead of the hat as an important part of his mounted police costume. Ou Yang felt it strange that such thing would even happen in Canada. To her, this was just like a Tibetan solder in the Chinese army who would want to wear his mountain boots as part of his military costume!

“How ridiculous!” Ou Yang said!

Did she have a point? Can we challenge our traditions and rituals?  Can we raise questions?

Surely the western people who lived in China had much to complain about Chinese habits and customs. Even Ou Yang hated those uneducated Chinese who spit, hawked, or smelled badly after wearing their shirts for days. She detested people, especially Chinese, who ate with their mouths open. She was furious when talking about the disrespect and distrust of Chinese to each other, and she could often judge fast and clear what kind of person someone was.

“She is a bad person,” Ou Yang would conclude when someone did not return her favor.

Since Ou Yang was fast in just about everything, her judgments were no different. Ge Wen also judged, but only as fast as his metabolism allowed him to. Often, once judgment was done, although differently from hers, his conclusions would rarely change and could seldom vary.

Thorn birds are not Kun Pengs(鲲鹏)and prejudice is hard to avoid. We can hardly say that integration has nothing to do with money and stability, but it has everything to do with the perceptions that integration requires us to alter, in the very least.

 

To Be Continued …

 

The Hidden Seduction (Part II – 3)- Threshold,A Portal To The New World

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Part II – 3- Threshold,A Portal To The New World

 

It would be rare to find a traditional high wooden threshold in Chinese big cities now, but some can still be found in the countryside. The bigger a city grows, the lower the thresholds get. Isn’t it wonderful that now we do not have to lift our feet one after the other to cross over the high wooden thresholds of the past?. Kids were held back either from misbehaving or running around playing because of its height. Yet as one kind of threshold is becoming lower for convenience and comfort, and at the same time to let peasants into the city world, other thresholds are becoming higher and harder to surmount, such as that of the “Hu Kou” Registration Bureau, and schools for the children of migrant workers. As millions of countryside Chinese are let into big cities as cheap laborers, many city Chinese like Ou Yang and Ge Wen are passing through an invisible threshold into another world!

When the plane began to descend, Ou Yang knew that she was arriving in a city about which she had no feelings and no knowledge! She had finally arrived in whatever city it was, putting an end to five hours of waiting at Beijing Airport, eleven hours across the Pacific Ocean, two hours of nervous hustle in the Vancouver airport before another five hours across Canada. Ou Yang had been desperately bored, not knowing what to do besides endlessly scrolling the list of movies, getting up to stretch and sitting back down while letting her neighbors past to the toilets.

Finally, she had arrived! When the wheels touched the threshold of the Pierre.E. Trudeau Airport of Montreal, she did not notice that she had been crying. She did not know if she was crying because she had left China and her family behind, because she would not know when she would be able to muster up her courage to go through the ordeal again to go back and visit China, or because her husband Ge Wen was waiting for her at the airport after being alone in Montreal for six consecutive months.

“Oh, there he is!”

All the anxiety of wanting to be in a place that was not moving left Ou Yang when she spotted her husband. Ge Wen was there, waving to her among the scattered people; it was midnight, and Ou Yang’s plane had been the last to arrive, but they were finally reunited after half a year apart. It had always been Ou Yang who would leave home and come back to Ge Wen time and time again in the past, but this time, it was Ge Wen who had left and gone to Montreal to prepare things on the other side, while Ou Yang stayed for a last few profitable jobs.

They did not smile to each other. They had been married for eight years now, and it seemed that they knew each other well enough to understand without expressing their feelings verbally, even after all this time of separation. Isn’t it true that, with time, we become the victims of routine and habit?  We stop sensing the world as a moving object and people as changing beings, while we imperceptibly evolve everyday. If we stopped to think, we would be appalled by how completely the monotony of daily procedure consumes the passion of love and replaces it with numbness, turning a couple into drudges for life.

Ge Wen removed the heavy bag from her shoulder and took her place behind the luggage cart. Ou Yang then threw her arms around Ge Wen and wanted to kiss him on his cheek, but Ge Wen ducked away, saying:

“You must be tired!”

Ou Yang knew that he was shy to show affection in public and gave up, casting him a begrudging look.

Ge Wen was still fighting with the signs at the airport intersections as they made their way to the highway. Pierre E. Trudeau airport was not far from where they were heading, just 20 minutes from the airport. Home was also 20-minute drive from Downtown Montreal. It was very dark out at 1 am and there were no cars on the roads except for theirs. They had been driving for 15 minutes, but she still saw no tall buildings.

“Where are we going? Do you know where we live? You said it was very close to downtown, but it doesn’t seem like we are driving in the right direction!”

“Yes, of course. Sit tight, don’t move!”

Ou Yang would, of course,  have been doubtful about a close-to-downtown place that showed no signs of the “big” city as Montreal was supposed to be in her mind. In China, even a district  on the outskirts of an urban centre would have been full of glamorous lights, people walking and eating along the streets, and the honking of cars and trucks to startle and remind us of where we are. But here, just a bit past midnight, there was nothing to remind her of anything close to what she knew of a major city. This feeling removed her from her familiar mindset, which was evidently some 18 hours behind, as if she were still in China, and it left her with a bizarre sensation of not really knowing where she was. Ge Wen was driving, and that was the only fact that fastened her mind to her familiar world.

Their home was a rented one-bedroom apartment in a triplex buildingIn Canada it is called a three and a half: bedroom, sitting-room, dining area with kitchen and half is the bathroom because of its small size. In the province of Quebec, especially in Quebec City and Montreal, there are many buildings that contain between two and eight apartments of different sizes, such as the one Ge Wen rented, or four and a half or five and a half. These properties, with each apartment bearing a different civic number, usually have only one owner who takes care of the mortgage payment, then the city and school taxes, insurance premiums, and maintenance and repairs. The owner collects the rent and in return takes care of the tenants. The rights of both sides are regulated by a government rental board that, in the owners’ eyes favors the tenants, while the tenants feel it is quite useless in keeping the rent from skyrocketing with inflation in recent years and the real estate market rapidly gaining value.

All of this was brand new to both of them. The architecture of the properties , the gardens and the arrondissement of the whole city threw them into an imaginative world. In China, there were no such properties except those rural areas of the big cities with “cages à poules” (chicken cages), with no kitchens nor bathrooms, clustered together to serve as temporary dwellings for the people who had migrated from countryside for short term jobs. But these chicken cages are not really temporary; they end up being the permanent homes of millions of Chinese workers who have been constructing the LOOK of the “new” China with their minimal needs and compressed desires. But for Ou Yang and Ge Wen, their cozy little apartment, situated in a nice two story building with gardens lit with solar lights at night, made her feel more like she was living in an expensive “villa” in China.

Montreal is a special and important city for Canada. It is not the capital of Quebec, but it is perfectly bi-lingual: English and French. It used to be the biggest city, but after the 1960’s, when the car industry replaced that of the train and tramway, it gradually lost its economic importance. Ironically, the Chinese were the ones who actually built the Canadian railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the construction of the railways was as surprisingly corrupt as that of the high-speed trains now being built in China. Montreal’s old port used to be as busy as Huangpu Port in Shanghai, until the St-Lawrence Seaway was built to provide access to Toronto and The Great Lakes areas. Mr.Duplessis, the dictator-like Prime Minister of Quebec during the 1940s and 1950s, instead of welcoming changes and liberation, supported the traditional power of the Catholic Church and gave opportunities away to Ontario, which helped Toronto surpass Montreal to become the largest city in Canada. The French population of Quebec had been experiencing great humiliation in education, jobs, and social status. They were treated as inferior to the English population as a whole, and the elite wanted to change their destiny by launching the very important “Revolution Tranquille” (Quiet Revolution).

Most Chinese chose Vancouver, for its shorter distance to China, or Toronto because of the language issues encountered in Quebec. One of the results of the “Revolution Tranquille” was Bill 101, which mandated primary and secondary education in French to protect the French culture from assimilation into an otherwise English continent. For the Chinese, immigrating to another country where Chinese is not spoken was already a big deal, and so moving to a province where they had to learn another language as difficult as French appeared like another threshold. Nevertheless, the government of Quebec recognized the difficulties and thereafter created an integration French Program focused primarily on learning the language. Unfortunately, there were no efficient cultural courses set to help further the immigrants, despite its great effort in promoting French.

Language is an up-front issue of integration and a nation’s cultural upbringing is another threshold hidden behind colors of the skin, with the height of the threshold varying from person to person.  If the choice of leaving China and immigrating to Canada had determined the destiny of those Chinese immigrants as such that they have to put down their pride and pick up whatever it takes for them to integrate into a new society, then half the battle would have already been won. Yet how many of them are aware of the difficulties? How many of them realize the cultural and cross-cultural issues and how language, social customs, rituals and habit, and different values and references separate people into groups, circles, and races more than actual skin colors, look, or profession?
Knowing the history of a place, a province, or a country lowers the threshold and opens the gate to a new world, as well as opening the door to the hearts of the people with whom the immigrants are trying to blend in. A threshold in physical reality is nevertheless a minor and unimportant issue that we do not even talk about, but when the world is merging, it is then hard to avoid the importance of those metaphorical barriers that lie high in front of us. Canada is not the United States, and Quebec is not quite exactly like the other English speaking provinces. Ou Yang and Ge Wen, who came from China’s old city; we couldn’t  know how many thresholds they were conscious of and how many they were ready to cross over.

 

The Hidden Seduction – (Part III-1) – The Early Years in Montreal

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Part III-1 – The Early Years in Montreal

 

What determines who we are and how we behave? Is a new country with marvellous and favourable benefits of any help to us as we adapt and become better and happier people? What prevents the pendulum from swinging too high on both sides and being pulled back towards the centre? –

Before too long, in the early spring of the second year, Ou Yang was pregnant.

The first spring in Montreal after the first dreadful winter! It was so good to stop breathing in the biting dry air, soothing like aloe on a burn. So delightful to see the buds of willow trees on the banks of the St-Lawrence River growing into leaves within just a few days. The brisk feeling of the long rough winter finally surrendering to the tendency of extremities swinging back to the centre! Though the spring in Montreal is as short as a dog’s tail, it’s enough to rekindle the hope of a wonderful summer. Still chilly, the temperature is just right to urge life into its wonderful ways.

Ou Yang attended French courses in a government program during her pregnancy, and as always, she was a fighter. Even though nausea often drove her to the bathroom before 12 weeks of pregnancy, she was tough enough to hold on to her classes and only missed out on a few lessons. To her, it was really no big deal, because she had a talent for language and had already taken five months of classes in China.

There were few Chinese in her class, because the first Chinese emigrant tide only started around 1998, with the first group arriving in Canada after 2000. Of that group, most stayed in Vancouver or Toronto.

There were many other immigrants from Eastern Europe, such as Romanians, Croatians and Russians. There were Africans from Egypt and Kenya, and South Americans from Mexico and Chile.  She seldom met North Africans in the French classes, because many of them were from French colonies like Morocco and Algeria, and they already spoke French in their home countries. Sometimes, she would see English Canadians who came back to take French courses to refresh their knowledge of their forgotten national treasure. All of them learned to speak French, but it came out with the wonderful various accents marked by their different countries and cultures.

French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are all Latin languages. Almost all south American countries speak Spanish, except for the Brazilians, who speak Portuguese; Guiana, a French territory, speaks French, as for the rest, Guyana, the Bahamas, Montserrat, Jamaica, and many other small Caribbean countries and islands speak English.

Most South Americans and Romanians were excellent in French mainly because their languages belonged to the Latin language family, so learning French is much easier for them. For the Romanians, there is a second reason that makes them even better learners: most of them are well educated, usually having earned at least one University degree before coming to Canada. The majority of Chinese immigrants from Mainland China share this characteristics, but because of the fundamental difference of Chinese from Latin languages, both in its writing ,pronunciation and intonation, the Chinese were advancing with enormous difficulties. When Quebecers don’t understand something, they often say: “C’est du Chinois?” (This is Chinese?),” an informal social commentary on the level of strangeness and impossibility of comprehension of the Chinese language to them. Therefore, if the Chinese think that French is impossible for them to learn, it is not hard to understand.

Ge Wen chose not to learn French from the very first day of his arrival. He had never learned a day of French, even though it was free and he was eligible for a government subsidy of about $500-800 per month. He felt that English was more than enough for him to improve, and he would surely be confused by learning a second language that was even more difficult. He enrolled for six months in English classes and one year of his accounting courses taught in English. After all that education, he stumbled along quite fine with his English, which was enough for finding a job.

But they were living in Quebec where French, while not desperately necessary for survival, is indispensable for further integration. Only the fact that Ge Wen would not have a clue about what his future child would speak or write about was enough to see the point. Nevertheless, the will of implementing life’s strategies depends on the intelligence of seeing the importance of certain values, such as crossing the threshold into a new world, and further, into the heart of his next generations. The idea of leaving the place where our children have grown up is not likely feasible for most people and their children, even though it happens all the time, and so learning the local language becomes a must. At the very least, it does not hurt.

Ou Yang gave birth to a son on November 20th, 2004. Ge Wen stayed home with the baby for the first six months, and then he received a few calls for job interviews. He happily got the job that he had wished for at just the right time. They were both very happy that Ge Wen had started working, allowing Ou Yang to spend more time at home with their son. She had not planned to look for a job before their son was two, although she could have sent him to daycare from the age of six months. They could not believe that so many other parents sent their babies to daycare so young.

“That’s cruel,” they thought.

Is it?

When we are young, we, in general, have a faster metabolism. We make and consume energy much faster than when we are older. That is why younger people act and react faster than older people do. But among people of the same age, metabolism varies greatly. We cannot conclude that intelligence has anything absolutely and directly to do with metabolism, but it has a certain relation, as energy does play an important role in fueling activities that might generate sense, sensibility, knowledge, and thereafter consciousness. It is consciousness that marks knowledge as intelligence; otherwise, knowledge is as dumb as facts in history books that Chinese kids recite without knowing the meaning. Ge Wen was not stupid at all, but his metabolism ranked under that of Ou Yang’s.

It was Ou Yang who ran the family, since she had higher metabolism, clear vision for their life, and a stronger will. Shopping for the baby, buying groceries, seeing doctors, choosing the daycare and putting their son’s name for queuing up the line, among other things. Most of the time, Ge Wen was the cook and chauffeur. Ou Yang’s family played an important part, because she was the youngest daughter and sister with ten years’ difference. There was much advice and suggestions given by her family and it seemed that the husband’s opinions were unnecessary. Ge Wen had only the right to carry out their decisions, no right to give more ideas, except for when they were needed. Ok, then, he had a chance to relax after work!

“Aren’t you lucky?”,  Ou Yang would often say to her husband, as if she and her family were doing the husband a big favor.

This way of going about things continued all the time. As a Chinese proverb says: ” The capable work more”(能者多劳)。

Apart from metabolism, curiosity also drives us further. It puts interest in things we do not know and it puts necessary doubts in our mind that are meant to be eliminated in order to find an answer that makes sense to us.

Ou Yang was a very energetic woman, and at the same time very curious, while her husband was more traditional in following set rituals and rules even in his way of thinking. Ou Yang was up for any activity, and ready for trials of all sorts in their new country.

But it was more difficult to see who Ge Wen was, and why he was that way. Maybe he acted so conservatively because of his metabolism, or maybe it was the other way around and his conservative way of thinking prevented him from being curious, or perhaps Ou Yang and her family’s full occupation and invasion of his space had fostered him into inertia. As the only son of his family, he had been under the wings of his mother, and now was being moulded into a husband under the strong grip of his wife and the manipulation of his in-laws.

The quality of being intellectually curious is cultivated at an early age, and in Ge Wen’s case it is hard to understand why he lacked intellectual curiosity, since he had been raised by a family of teachers. It was not easy for anyone to lend any help, and even harder or impossible for Ge Wen to utter anything about his awkward, hopeless situation.

 

To Be Continued…

The Hidden Seduction (Part II – 2)-A Sky Far, Far Away

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Part II – 2-A Sky Far, Far Away

Ou Yang and Ge Wen arrived in Beijing, this time not for Ou Yang’s travel business, but for their own affaires: an interview for their visa at the Immigration Office of the Canadian Embassy: 19 Dongzhimenwai Dajie, Chao Yang District, 100600, Beijing.

Beijing and Xi’an, two very different cities, yet some parts of Beijing reminded Ou Yang of her own city and there was a certain “regard” in people’s eyes that Ou Yang was not unfamiliar with. She saw the “tossing-head taxis”* in Xi’an as well as here in Beijing, and her feet were swept by the huge bamboo brooms in the middle of the days by the city cleaners dressed in yellow vests or shirts. Yellow was the royal colour of the Chinese kingdoms and now it had trickled down to the people on the bottom and was used on the city cleaners’ uniforms. But above all, Ou Yang felt close and cozy as if she were at home in Xi’an when the old lady in the shabby and barren basement “hotel” handed her a clean set of sheets and pillows after she tipped her 10 yuan.

Ou Yang had always stayed in three- or four-star hotels with her travel groups, but this time they had to pay from their own pocket, so they chose the cheapest hotel they could find to save money, and this was the closest one to the Canadian Embassy. It only cost 45 Yuan a night for a room with two single beds, even though there was barely anything else besides the “boiling water”* TV set of “Rainbow”* serving only to give the look of a “hotel.” The Turkish toilette was just behind a sink where the guests could wash anything they wanted: dishes, chopsticks, under-wears, anything. The concrete floor was so worn out with time that it had become shiny. There was no decoration of any kind, not even a piece of curtain to hide the people inside from the sight of passers-by on the streets. But it was in the basement, after all. Who would break their backs to bend down that low to look under?

The next morning, Ou Yang and Ge Wen got up very early so that they could be the first in line at the embassy. The days in mid- autumn still did not break too late and it was already 7 o’clock.

“Ge Wen, get up!” Ou Yang did not see any movement, so she called again and dragged out his name: ” Geee Weeeeen, hurry up! We are late! ”

His hair looked like spikes in the air and Ou Yang had to push him into the public shower. What “public shower” meant for men in those days, we would have to ask someone to know! She herself used her old tricks and dropped a little perfume on her neck. After she had prepared all the necessary documents and placed them carefully into her business suitcase, she sat down again to put on her jade earrings while she waited for her husband. She took out her hand-mirror and looked seriously into herself. She was stern about everything and everything had to be perfect. He face was perfect, her skirt was by a famous brand, her lipstick was by a foreign brand, and her eye lashes were vividly and beautifully tilted towards the right direction. She was a young woman who knew what she wanted and it seemed that she had a certain ability to obtain it.

When her husband came into the room, Ou Yang started firing words at him like a machine gun:

“Why are you so slow? Hurry up, Hurry up! We will be at the end of the line if we don’t leave now! You are just so slow! Ge Weeen, Hurry up!”

A short time later they were at the back of the Embassy where people had already queued up in a long line. Ou Yang had been right, they were late! Ge Wen offered to go get some food near by while Ou Yang waited impatiently for their turn.

Ge Wen came to a food stand that sold the Beijing golden”wuo wuo tou”* with millet porridge, to be eaten on the street in the morning. Two or three square tables with benches were scattered around on the wide sidewalk. The serving lady was too busy to wipe off the tables with empty bowls and carelessly left chopsticks. Ge Wen got their food into a container, grabbed two pairs of chopsticks and left with a “thank you” to the food stand lady. The lady was obviously not from Beijing and in her mid 30s. She was too busy to hear anything anyone said to her or to any one else. Ge Wen was thinking of Ou Yang and the lady was maybe thinking of her own kid being lectured for bad marks at school in her home town and seeing her own mother looking after her kid instead of her. The importance of the lives of two strangers meeting on a Beijing street one morning was so irrelevant that neither of them really looked into each other’s eyes. Why would they look at each other, some might ask? Well, why wouldn’t they, when they actually talked to each other?

Ou Yang and Ge Wen ate while standing in line. The whole morning went by, and there were still people in front of them. When it was almost their turn, around 12pm, a Chinese girl came out and announced:

“Sorry, everyone, we are not taking any one any more today. Please come back tomorrow!”

Everyone started complaining about the inhumanity of the Embassy making them wait the whole morning, but they left regretting not having woken up earlier.

“This is all because of you!”  Ou Yang threw a hard look at her husband and went away fast without him. Ge Wen followed quickly and begged her to wait.

“I am sorry, baby. I am so sorry! I will get up earlier tomorrow morning, I promise!” Ou Yang looked at him from the corners of her eyes with her lips begrudgingly protruding, as if an oily bottle could be hung there. She murmured:

“I don’t believe you!”

Ou Yang was a professional, successfully making much more money than anyone else in her family; only she had managed to become professional and important. In her eyes, no one else was trustworthy. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself! You might doubt that such a person was wise and right all the time, and she would definitely think that you knew nothing at all!

They did not have to set an alarm clock. Ou Yang was a sharp one, and that morning she was up at 5:30, and at 6:30, they were out of the “hotel” again. This time they were fifth in line. Soon it would be their turn! Ou Yang finally allowed a faint smile on her concerned face.  To Ge Wen, seeing Ou Yang happy, even just a little, really made his day.

After the thousands of exams and tests Ou Yang and her husband had gone through in school and for job promotions, they now had to go through another kind of exam. The interviewing official was a man of about 40. He had very short hair, an abnormally narrow pale face with thin lips like a cut, a pair of light grey eyes that would make you feel hallucinated and having nothing to look into. He looked at their papers and started asking questions without lifting his eyes. Ou Yang had expected a warmer welcome, but the interview had started with full banality, to her great disappointment!

“Why are you choosing Quebec?” was the first question.

Thanks to the training with the emigration company, they had learned something about Quebec and they were prepared to answer questions like that.

Quebec was for people who were about to have kids because it gives more financial support to families, or those who wanted to use its government study subvention system as a bridge to jump to other cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, or even the US after graduation. But of course, they would not answer like that.

“We like Quebec, because French is spoken there. French Quebec people are very friendly.”

It sounded so mechanical and false that, without a doubt, the official would surely understand that the answer had been taught by the emigration company. It would be very strange for people from Xi’an to know about Quebec and its history, when for the past 15 years they had almost only been exposed to American or British history and culture.

Both Ou Yang and her husband answered all the questions as if they knew all the answers. There was no doubt that Ou Yang’s work as a tour guide for eight years had greatly helped her to leave an excellent impression and convince the official that they were absolutely well prepared for their life-changing emigration to Quebec, Canada. Her fluent English and the “impressive” French that she had learned 5 months before had indeed shocked the official in a very pleasant way! Ou Yang’s attentive attitude and her charming smile had certainly helped them pass the interview!

It was such a special and unprecedented test that they had made themselves more nervous than they had ever been. It was a “Yang” (foreign) exam, given by a canadian official! If they passed, they would not go to any universities or be promoted to better jobs or higher pays, but they would get to fly across the big pacific ocean, to move ten thousand kilometers away, to look at a sky far, far away from home as it hovered over their spirit, expanded and full of wonderful wishes for their own future and their kid, or maybe children. It was not anything like getting a train or plane ticket to any place they could imagine, nor a ticket quite like one to Paradise, but it was strangely illuminating as something like that might be. Getting that visa was absolutely a big deal!

Foot notes:

* tossing-head taxi: those tricycles with manpower as convenient cheap transportation in cities of China. The slang comes from the movement of the tricycler when he peddles from side to side tossing his head from left to right.

*    boiling water: when the TV does not have a good connection, the screen is like boiling water with dots flushing.

*    Rainbow : a famous old Chinese TV brand.

*    wuo wuo tou:steamed bread with portions of wheat flour and corn flour mixed. It used to be the main food for Chinese northerners.

To Be Continued…