Chapter 4

I thought I would be happier in Canada. I really did. Some stability had finally come to my life as my mom promised me I would never have to leave her again. But I didn’t feel happy. Mom was still busy and to be honest, the days of wanting to be with mom had come and gone. I didn’t value time with mom that much anymore. Also, as it turns out, mom was not a fun parent to be around. She would yell at me a lot and force me to study a lot. Trying to discipline me to make up for the fact that she had never taken care of me for an extended period of my life. I wasn’t disobedient though. I had just got my mom back and was too afraid to lose her. 

My daily schedule was much more consistent in Canada. I would go to a school called Walter Perry Junior High on Midland and Eglington. Afterschool I would hang out with the only friend I had. His name was “E” and he was the only one I could talk to since everyone else spoke English. The funny thing? E was the only friend I had who I could talk to and he didn’t speak the same language as me. E spoke Cantonese and I spoke mandarin. I still find it kind of hilarious. Between the random ramblings of things we talked about we may have understood around 10% of things discussed.

We got bullied a bit. Most people did in Canada. Bullying wasn’t such a huge deal in China for me because I never really attended school that much. Here in Canada, I was attending it more and I was right at the time when bullying was rampant in the country. I wouldn’t say I had it the worst though. A random kid threatened to punch me a few times during recess? A few bruises from getting beat a few times? What’s that compared to the emotional damage I felt from being abandoned by my parents? This was a cake walk. Then, it got even easier. 

Our ESL teacher found out about me and E being bullied after just a few recesses. E had been punched once in the shoulder and knocked down to the sandpit. I was bruised from being kicked in the leg a few times. Since our ESL class was isolated from the rest of the school and had a class size of 2 people, our ESL teacher caught on pretty quick. She called in the bully and made him apologize to us. At least that’s what I think happened. I didn’t speak English and all I saw were people pointing and talking. Our bully eventually sat in front of us, said a few things, and then left. Me and E didn’t think much of it. I turned to E and said “I think he just apologized to us.” E then turned around to be and said “(something in Cantonese)”. We didn’t speak each other’s languages but at that moment, we nodded and understood that the bully will likely never make a pass for us again. No one really bullied us much after that. Partially because our ESL teacher was pretty cool and also because the school started a program against bullying and more hall monitors and other adults showed up. I think this event made me and E grow a bit closer.

When I wasn’t hanging out with E at school, I would go over to my mom’s workplace. She was the head of an afterschool program for Chinese kids where they would learn about reading, writing and speaking Chinese. It was located at a High school down the street from my elementary school. To get there, it was about a 20 minute walk. While there is something to be said about letting a 7 year old walk from school to another school by himself in a country he doesn’t speak the language in, my mom was my mom and this was how she dealt with working during my school hours to support me. We had no help from dad and she had bills to pay. People always idolize single mom’s for doing things like this. They sometimes even call these single moms, “supermoms”. You get this impression that they sometimes do the job of 2 parents as one adult. While that sounds nice, you never hear the story about how the kids manage the situation. We never got called superkids for putting up with an absentee mom. Whenever we complain about this and our being cheated out of our childhood, the critics turn on us and call us spoiled. Most media will portray the mom as a superb figure for simply providing for the children while no one ever speaks about how the children sacrifice their own childhood to help meet the responsibilities supermoms fail at. 

Here’s a hot take, supermoms can’t do it all and when they fail, the children pick up the pieces for them. Those who make it out okay from a single parent childhood aren’t champions, they’re survivors. Now, while that may seem incredibly selfish of me to say, I don’t want you to think I am 100% spoiled. I’m more like a-few-days-past-expiration spoiled. So I will say that I know it was tough for my mom too. All I am saying is that you shouldn’t idolize single mom’s because the situation is never as solid as it may appear. The household of the single mom has tons of maintenance problems and crooked screws. It is not often a safe work environment nor a good place to raise your kids. 

What I will say for the record is this, my mom did have to suffer through sucking up her pride a lot. It seemed quite normal for the time but thinking back, my mom literally went from a well respected PhD position in China to an afterschool program director for a high school. To some, they call this the price of immigration. You can’t simply be a doctor in China then hop over to the US and continue your career. There are bridging programs in place to establish standardization of merit and skills. Maybe it is as it should be also. Now that I have a career going, I have become quite familiar with different practices around the world for different professions. The truth is, I wouldn’t want to be treated by a doctor who got their degree from a third world country where their textbooks were all outdated by 20 years. Having to abide by Canadian customs in order to gain credibility is something that is unfortunate but part of the process. That being said, it doesn’t make it any easier. I’m sure my mom must have questioned her decision once or twice when she considered this path for her life. 

While this is noble, the truth of the matter is that this is only true through the lens of thinking this was all for me. If it was definitive that this entire scenario that my mom consciously chose to do was for my sake of living in a better country then, yes, this would’ve been a very big sacrifice. However, I’m not certain I can say this was all for me. So where does that leave us? Well, let’s keep the story rolling.

I wasn’t getting that much out of having a mom. I think I’ve passed that stage at this time of my life. What didn’t help was the fact that my mom never walked with me to or from school and told me to go there by myself. I was never really worried about being kidnapped though, luckily the neighborhood wasn’t that bad. That being said, when I have kids, I would probably never let them roam around by themselves at age 6, English fluency or not. It’s not just about the safety aspect of things. The moments spent with parents are meaningful. Regardless, no point in crying over spilt milk. 

My time with my friend E was so much better than my time with mom. We got along. Made jokes about things even though only every other word was somewhat understood by each other. It’s still fascinating to me how kids can become friends even with large language barriers. Everyday, for an hour or two, the ESL teacher would come and get me and Edison and bring us to the library where she would give us special lessons on basic English. They were simple and we caught on quite easily. The English taught was not enough to make conversation but it was a nice start. I would say the English was just enough for me to understand some of the Cartoons I was starting to get addicted to on TV but not really enough to allow me to follow along with the adult jokes thrown in there.

TV Cartoons were my jam when I was a kid. After I was done with school and done helping at my mom’s afterschool program, I would come home and sit at the TV for as long as possible, stopping only when sleep was too hard to fend off. I must have watched every episode of the old poorly animated spiderman cartoon and understood nothing from it. When I got older, I would credit Cartoons for teaching me English. While my mom didn’t like the idea of my eyes being glued to the television, it was the easiest and cheapest equivalent to a nanny she could find. I wished I could’ve talked to E about cartoons but not only did we still have the language barrier that was there, E also didn’t have a TV. This would all be fine though, I still enjoyed E’s company. It was just nice to finally have a friend who I saw regularly. 

Sometime around the second year of my time with mom, we moved one apartment over. My mom was blatant about things like this. There was no sugarcoating of anything really. She simply walked up to me one day and told me to pack my shit. She then told me straight away that we needed to stretch our money further, which meant that living had to be cheaper. What had happened was, one of my mom’s friends, who was also one of the roommates, wanted to move out on her own. With only one other friend left to help meet the rent, we had to move. 

I started to get anxious about money. If my mom doesn’t make money, how am I going to eat? What am I going to do when I can’t even speak English that well? I got more nervous and started to question what I could even do as a Chinese kid in a Canadian city. My mom did little to comfort me from all these thoughts I had. She told me that I should spend less time watching TV and more time studying English. Studying would be my responsibility and how I could pull my weight in the family. If my mom worked hard to feed me, I would work hard to do well in my class. But here’s the thing, there wasn’t that much to do in class. What kind of homework really was expected of a 3rd grader? 

I felt kind of useless and like a burden on mom. Money was tight and all I was contributing was more stress to the situation. I felt bad. My mom didn’t seem to care much about how I was feeling. Then, amidst all the frustrations and concerns regarding money, one day I came home to find a new small cello on my bed…let me explain…

I remember first seeing the cello. It was shiny and wooden. It sparkled a nice reflection on the ceiling. I stared at it for a few minutes and then picked it up, imagining all sorts of music that I could make with it. I first started picking at it like a guitar then tried to use the bow next to it. I sounded horrible and had no idea what I was doing. My accordion skills clearly did not transfer over. As I was picking at it over and over again, my mom came in and told me I would be learning cello from now on. She was starting to expand the things she did at the afterschool program and first on the list was a music department. She would also sign me up for swimming and Wu Shu but to be honest those hobbies came and gone without much of an impact… Well actually, the swimming thing did help but more on that later. The cello stayed with me the most though. Despite the fact that I never asked for this, I would find that my soul and the cello would be bound from that day onwards.

The cello teacher who taught me at mom’s after school programming was nice enough. He taught me the basics of how to hold and how to bow the instrument. He also taught me some simple pieces. Things were moving very quickly though because after just a few sessions, mom had arranged for a talent show for all the kids in the afterschool program. I was co-MC for the entire show and also performed the cello in a trio with 2 other girls who played violin and piano. Their parents also had ties to the main manager/boss of the afterschool program. Thinking back, I now know that my mom made me learn the cello to be in this trio so that she could showcase the idea of the music program to other parents. Afterall, if we were short on money, why waste it on a cello? Nonetheless, the two girls and myself quickly became really good friends. 

At this time I also found out I liked girls. Since everything in the world has revolved around sexuality these days I feel like I should state for the record that I was privileged to be straight and not confused about anything. This is because I started crushing on those two girls really really hard almost immediately. I would always want to spend time with them any chance I got. I even started practicing the cello a bit more to impress them. Now, childhood crushes are adorable but never lead to anything but despite that, I chose to mention it here because here’s the other reason those 2 girls were so important to me. They spoke mandarin. 

I was going to an English speaking school to learn English with an ESL teacher. The entire time I would only understand every other word or so and have almost no interaction with any of the other kids in my school except for E who, though we worked out a means of communicating, still couldn’t speak properly to one another. Then comes these 2 girls my age and who can actually understand what I’m speaking. Wow. These were my first friends who I could communicate fully with. This means, besides some childhood crush, they were the first people I could talk to outside of my mom. As you may have guessed, my mom didn’t have much time to converse with me between her job and all that. I guess it was just nice to not be as alone as before.

Now that being said, trying hard at the cello to impress the girls wasn’t easy. I wasn’t getting much better at the cello despite my efforts. My mom knew this also. The only method she knew to get me to get better? Yelling and verbal abuse. Her choice of love language. She belittled me and kept comparing me to others around my age and how much better they were at their instruments than me. Typical Asian mom starter-pack things. Memes aside, this would be the inception of a branching factor between me and mom. I was already on shaky terms with mom. I went from needy to disappointed to neglected all before my 7 year birthday. Now I’m not only all those things, I was being called a failure and a disappointment by mom. What would you do? Stay put and take the verbal abuse and get back to work? Would you yell back? Would you curse the heavens for being cursed with a bad mom? I did the first thing. I felt like I was not improving because it was my fault and not just because I was a 7 year old trying his best. I was practicing every day but clearly it wasn’t enough. When I couldn’t meet the expectations of my mom, I felt bad, then my mom would come and salt the wound. After a few weeks of trying to learn the cello until I cried, I realized that mom wasn’t concerned about my mental state at all. She would tell me to keep going. This was the cold and unsympathetic side of mom I would come later on to know. The one that valued results and progress before anything else. I think she was actually disappointed when my cello teacher at the time didn’t yell at me. He told me I was progressing at a normal rate for kids my age. As I kept dancing this dance with my mom regarding her constant pestering of practicing cello, I soon started to get a suspicion on her intentions. While this may not be entirely true, it is not good when I think it’s unclear if the parent’s actions of scolding me was to simply get me to do better at cello or if my mom just needed any outlet for her emotions and shortcomings. Now that I am older and looking back, I would say it’s probably both. 

My evidence for this? One day my mom told me that she once took some time off from work to go to a library to cry. She used this story to guilt trip me into learning the cello more. In truth, I think this speaks to what she was going through. She was sad that despite being a PhD, she was now barely getting by with managing a Chinese after school program. She had no one and apart from using this story to get me to work, I think she also told me this because she had no one else to talk to. Maybe she needed to let some emotions out some way or another, or maybe she was trying to feel sorry for herself. I used to think I was somehow contributing to all this, I grew up ego-centric and selfish, remember? But now I think about this differently. If there was a ranking of why my mom was feeling so bad about the situation, I think it would be like this:

1. Mom. She brought this on herself. It wasn’t a bad decision to come to Canada but she made her bed and now she had to sleep in it. It’s just part of the process.
2. Dad. Once again, I think the single mom household idolization is a scam. Clearly mom needed help and had no one there to help us. 
3. Mom’s roommate/friend. She was close to us. She was an adult. She knew what was going on. If she was a good friend, why not help a sister out? 

Since my mom was a single mom, I don’t think she got enough shit for doing things like this. My dad fully abandoned me and fucked off somewhere and my mom was here venting it out on me. As a parent, that is one of those taboo things no? Don’t think so? Still think my mom was a supermom? Let me ask you this question, would you think things would be different if it were my dad that was there in a similar situation? Society tends to not forgive fathers who can’t control their emotions or depression because who gives a shit what the mental health of men go through? 

It was tough during those first years. Money was tight and we ate whatever was cheap. Luckily, my mom was at least employed somewhere and had a job. I eventually just accepted all the verbal abuse from the cello thing and kept going about my day blocking that portion of my day out. I was starting to come to terms with how our lives were going and enjoying the fact that at least there was a consistency with everything. I was happy at least that I now had 2 friends and hey, that was something at least. Growing up with them was something I looked forward to. They were only hanging out with me after school on some days but that was honestly enough for me. Having people outside of my household was a breath of fresh air. No talks about money or cello, this was my escape. 

As the months went by, I eventually started picking up English quite quickly. Thank you spiderman. Soon, the conversations with my 2 mandarin speaking friends would switch to English and not long after that, I was conversing in English pretty fluently. I started to talk more and more with E and we sometimes even hung out after school, on the days when I didn’t have to go to mom’s afterschool program. We didn’t understand each other thoroughly but we did know each other enough to play through the entirety of “Little Fighter”. That was a fun time. While E didn’t have a TV, he did have access to his dad’s computer. Of the few times we hung out at his place, we would rush from our school to his house and play. We only had a few hours before his dad came home so we needed to hustle our time. That was a fun time. I have no idea how E came to find “Little Fighter” on his computer but this was definitely a core memory for me. Well, this and that one time later on when E’s cousin told us how to unlock Julian and Firzen. That blew our little heads.

As my English got better, and I got more quality time from E and the 2 girls I knew, I was starting to feel happy about my life. Keep in mind, I was very aware that I was only happy when mom was not around. Her expectations and yelling made her insufferable to me quite early on in life. Luckily, that would calm down too because around this time, my maternal uncle and aunty would decide to go to Canada. They initially thought about Toronto but eventually settled down in Vancouver. They did pay us a visit before heading over though. When they came to visit us, my uncle gave mom some money to help her buy a property. I think the money was given to Uncle by my maternal grandma for him to settle down in Canada. He thought it was appropriate to share with mom despite mom never asking for money. He knew that mom would sooner let her son starve before she asked for something. She was adamant about “losing face” but luckily my uncle saw through this. Regardless, within the course of just a few weeks, my mom and I wouldn’t be renting anymore. Property owner status, here we come. 

If you’re wondering if this is the part of the story where I would talk about the house we would inevitably lose, this isn’t it. We’re not there yet. Also, a house in Toronto? Did you think we had that kind of money at this stage? Nope. My uncle was not that well off. The mortgage we bought was for a condo in Scarborough. Looking back on it now, the condo was a 3 bedroom and 1 large living room condo covering a total of 955 sqft. The cost of the condo around this time, approximately 2003-2004, was $125,000 CAD. The important thing here is still that my uncle had now set my mom on a path of property management.

My uncle was probably the mastermind behind this financial decision as I can’t really imagine my mom doing this kind of math. Moreso, when we first got the property, we renovated immediately, a decision my mom would have never thought of. What did we renovate? The living room in our condominium was converted into a separate room and Mom and I would reside there. It was just big enough to hold two beds, some book shelves, a cabinet and a TV. The three other rooms would be rented out. Looking back, having 4 rooms in a 3 bedroom condo all occupied was probably illegal or a fire hazard of some sort. That didn’t really matter to us though. The reason? my mom was making a profit on the rent alone. The rent from 3 separate rooms covered the mortgage and utilities and that meant all the money my mom was making from her job could be pocketed. 

This was all amazing, things were looking up and up for us. There’s just one problem. It was with my wellbeing but let’s be honest, my mom didn’t give two shits about that. The problem I had was that this property was in Scarborough. This meant moving. I was going to have to say goodbye to my 3 friends. 

I was devastated. I had just started to get close to those friends. I finally got some roots in the ground and once again, I was uprooted and moved. When my mom first told me about moving to a different place, I started to cry. My mom told me we were never going to see E or anyone from the afterschool program again also since she was also going to quit her job. I got offered no further explanation. She was used to me crying at this stage and simply told me to get over it quickly because she couldn’t handle my crying when she had to job hunt. I realized I wasn’t even considered at all when mom made the decision to move. Oh well, what else is new? In truth, I wasn’t angry. I hadn’t fully explored or really discovered that emotion yet. I was mainly just sad. Anger was not an emotion I came to normally. I wasn’t an angry person by nature but this would be the first time I got pushed towards it. I couldn’t blame my past self for feeling this way though, I had just been pushed away from people I cared about. 

Remember my saying of being selfish? I recall only how sad I was and never questioning why my mom did any of this. I still have the impression that it was all about me. Why did the actions of my parents never have any regard for my values? Why were my friends never seeing me ever again not a point of contention for my mom? Why was my childhood disregarded? I knew the answer. Financial stability was more important. In hindsight, moving was the correct choice. But the way that my mom handled the aftermath of a calculated decision wasn’t very elegant. As an adult, I moved on from it. I call it a necessary move towards prosperity. As messed up as my childhood was, it was better that it was messed up and unhappy with at least a roof over my head.