Denise Chong

What began as an article for Saturday Night magazine flourished into a enlightening and at times painful pilgrimage into the past for author Denise Chong. The result of that journey was the 1994 award winning, critically acclaimed national bestseller The Concubine's Children, which she presented January 27th at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre for the Women in View Festival.

The Concubine's Children recounts the life of Chong's maternal grandparents, Leong May-ying and Chan Sam. In 1924, seventeen year old May-ying was sold as a concubine to Chan Sam, a peasant twenty years her senior, who had left his first wife behind in China to seek wealth in Vancouver's Chinatown. May- ying spent most of her life working as a waitress in Chinatown's teahouses and her wages were regularly sent by Chan Sam to his wife living overseas in the village of Chang Gar Bin. To deal with her loneliness and the hardship of living in the slums of Vancouver, May-ying gambled and drank. Because many of the teahouses were equated with brothels, she eventually prostituted herself. She had three daughters, with Chan Sam, two of whom were taken back to Chang Gar Bin to be raised; the third child, Hing, (Chong's mother), would be raised by May-ying in Vancouver. May-ying was a strict parent, inflicting harsh punishments on her daughter for being disobedient and often abandoned Hing for long periods of time to follow a lover on his cross Canada business trips. Hing eventually married and had a family of her own. In 1987, she travelled to Chang Gar Bin to meet the two sisters from whom she'd been separated so long ago.

Chong accompanied her mother on the monumental sojourn to China and recalled that before the trip, her mother had been "leaning her back against the door of the past." When they were informed by Chinese authorities that Hing's siblings had at last been found, "the doorknob began rattling" and upon their arrival, they were flooded with stories and family relics. It was then that Chong realized her mother was the living link to her family's fragmented history.

The reunion itself was an event Chong had long yearned for, going back to the day when she first found an old photograph of her aunts in the bottom drawer of her parents' dresser in their Prince George home. The image of the sisters as little girls standing hand and hand stayed with Chong, sparking questions about their life in China: "I knew [in the photo] they stood on Chinese soil, " Chong remembered, " I used to fantasize that if I dug a hole in the garden, I'd come up under their feet."

Coming off an exhausting 10 day book tour in the United States, Chong spoke eloquently about the difficulty in getting her mother to speak about the past; at one point she resorted to sending her mother monthly questionnaires for information. Chong also emphasized her determination to relay the truth about her family, including all the contradictory accounts which surfaced upon researching her book. Contradictions, she felt, were the essence of family.

When asked by an audience member whether she felt she'd betrayed any family secrets or members because of the candid nature of her book, Chong replied that it was her own mother's words which convinced her that her journey into the past had been worthwhile: "I did it as an act of love to the family....When my mother picked up the book and said aloud, ' I forgive my mother,' I knew right then and there, it was worth it. "

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