My Father

Chou Man Look

My father taught me lessons I never knew would find resonance in so many corners of my life, and all without saying a word.

He was the product of a brutal "school of hard knocks" childhood and youth that would have crushed lesser men.

At 12, he was sent from his tiny farming village in Guangdong province in China into indenture to his uncle in Montréal so that he could send money home to his impoverished parents. The promise of Gim San, "Gold Mountain," stole his childhood.

He landed in Vancouver in 1922, a child lost in a crowd of lost children streaming off the Empress of Canada steamship. He stepped into a foreign land whose language he did not speak, whose food he had never tasted.


Official government documents describe him like a steer at auction, as mere Oriental inventory. My sister and I both sat in stunned silence in the Vancouver public library a few years ago as we peered at the microfiche capsule of a human life:

Jew Mun Look

Male, 12 Bor Law Schoolboy

Empress of Canada 1922 December 4

Mole, centre right cheek

4’ 6.5 inches

mole back left neck

small mole above right eyebrow

small pit under left eye

He had a note written in English pinned to his tattered jacket, "Take this boy off the train in Montreal."

  My father was subject to the racist head tax imposed only on Chinese by the Canadian government (my sister has the certificate framed in her home to remind her, to remind us, to remind them ...).

 He worked in essential slavery for that uncle as a child, paying off first the costs of his passage to Gold Mountain, then his exhorbitant head tax of $500.

He endured the pervasive, systemic discrimination of a Canada that enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923-1947), a Canada that extended to Chinese Canadians the right to vote in federal elections only in 1947.

But he survived. In a time and place where it was mandated by law that Chinese could not become doctors, lawyers, or accountants, he survived. In a country where a poor Chinese child with no nuclear familial support could not expect even a rudimentary education, he survived.

He learned how to cook Western food, because cook was one of the few jobs Chinese could hold. His greatest memory that became his signature story was of the time he worked in the Prince of Wales Club, long since defunct, in Niagara Falls. He had prepared a batch of cream of celery soup when the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII was visiting. According to my father's account, the Prince walked into the kitchen and began sampling food, among the dishes was my father's potage à l'imperial.


Dad became a salesman for Chinese import/export firms specializing in bolts of silk, he opened his own fish and chip restaurant on Pape Avenue in Toronto, he owned a hand laundry on Vaughan Road where I was born.

 He married outside his race, a dangerous act in those times, for both my father and my mother. He raised a family of four children, all of whom attended university.
He lived a hard, difficult life and endured. When, as a farmer, his produce rotted and was dumped at the consignment wholesaler's, he gritted his teeth and went back into the fields. When, one winter as we especially felt our poverty and he had to accept the Christmas charity basket sent by the local church for us, he swallowed his pride and said thank you. When, as a lawn maintenance man, he was repeatedly humiliated and ridiculed by his rich clients and their demands that he perform the tasks they would not ("My dog died -- you're the gardener --bury it!"), he ate the bitterness and came back the next week.
He told us tales of the blatant discrimination he had endured and warned us to be prepared, for our slightly almond eyes would betray us in this society.

And they did.

He hoped his stories would toughen our skins, harden our psyches so that razor-sharp prejudice would not pierce our souls as it had his.
Education was our passport, he told us repeatedly. No one can take it away from you. And he made sure we attended to our education, insisting, cajoling, demanding until we understood our own responsibility in the undertaking and began to drive ourselves.
My father was right.
Perhaps this is the reason that indifference to education, feigned or real, on the part of my students is like a red flag to me. I fought so hard, with so few resources, so that I could attend university (OSAP was finally established just as I was entering first year at Victoria College, University of Toronto).

When I hear my students tell me they don't care, or when they say that they don't put much effort into a project "because it's only first year, dude!" I feel the affront deeply.

I feel it as an affront to me, as an affront to my father who understood the value of an education he would never have, and as an affront to those potential students who cannot be in that seat because they cannot afford tuition.
I cannot help but feel the responsibility to teach my students the most important lesson my father taught me without his ever saying a word.

Let me be as good a teacher as he was. Thanks, Dad.