When I was about twelve and my brother ten we asked our mother whether she’d ever learned anything at all about her father; what country he was from and how and when he died. Mom had been regaling us with tales about her childhood in a Victoria, BC orphanage where she and her sister were taken in 1918 when she was five and a half and our Auntie Ruth was almost three. Ruth was an appealing toddler and very intelligent. Everyone including my mother adored her. Mom was chubby, awkward and prone to embarrassing moments. She’d found herself in trouble a few times with the matrons who ruled the facility with an iron hand.

Mom described the tearful occasions when her mother used to visit at her and little Ruth’s bedsides in their orphanage dormitories. Her farewell hugs and kisses were hardly enough to sustain them. Head Matron and staff were usually very busy maintaining the residence and preparing the meals. They were harsh at times in their quest to ensure that the children followed the facility’s extremely stringent rules. But the sisters had each other to love and comfort and were to remain close throughout their lifetimes. In 1926, the year my mother turned thirteen, there had been one final unification between the siblings and their maternal parent. Following that my grandmother had apparently returned to her ancestral home in London, England. Neither my mother nor her sister ever saw or heard from her again.

Mom and Dad were married in 1936, when Mom was 23. My brother and I had been born at the Coast but in the fall of 1945 we moved to an isolated farm in the BC Interior about 20 kilometers from the present day town of 100 Mile House. In those days moose meat and potatoes were an integral part of the family larder. But our dad was extremely hearing impaired. He did manage to bag one moose in about 1947 but that was only because the animal was an extremely stupid one. Most years we depended on Native Indian hunters from the Canim Lake Reserve who would bring us moose meat and venison in exchange for vegetables from Dad’s garden. We got to know a few of the more affable ones who would linger on our chesterfield sipping cups of tea or sampling a batch of Mom’s homemade raisin wine.

One such fellow was a middle aged gentleman named Modest Boyce. Modest enjoyed telling us stories—some of them obvious exaggerations—about experiences he’d had as a soldier during the Second World War. The rivers had run red with human blood he would tell us kids, not really expecting us to believe him. Modest had a penchant for using the word “blood.” Sometimes after having a sip or two of her wine, he would commence to stare intently at our mother and exclaim, “You are of my blood!” Mom didn’t seem to mind. She would just smile coyly, never verifying his assessment concerning her racial background but not denying it either.

As an adolescent I was often curious about which of our grandfather’s ancestral traits now revealed themselves as physical attributes in our mother and in ourselves. Our grandmother had been a blue-eyed redhead but both Mom’s and Auntie Ruth’s eyes were a rich, warm shade of brown. Our mother’s complexion was dark and before it turned gray she’d sported a lovely mane of black naturally-curly hair.

Dad had sprung from a long line of fair-haired, blue-eyed Hollanders. When I was younger I had apparently resembled his side of the family. I was proud of that fact and only wished that one morning I’d wake up as blonde as they were. But as time passed it became obvious that both my brother and myself were more affected by Mom’s darker pigmented genes.

Our mother remained coy about revealing anything she may have known of my grandfather and his ancestry. She answered my inquiry with a complacent smile and surmised that he had probably been “French.” That was all I needed to know. In school we had studied the impact of Louie Riel’s efforts on Canada’s history and learned that he was half French and half Native Indian. That made him what was referred to in the texbook as a Metis. Mom’s father had probably been a Metis, I decided. That would account for her dark hair and skin. Perhaps he’d been a voyageour and had drowned while on an canoeing expedition along one of Canada’s fast-flowing rivers

In about 1950 Mom’s friend Mildred whom she’d known since childhood moved up from Vancouver Island to our tiny community. Mildred was part Native Indian. During our treks to the general store and post office my mother and I would often stop in for a visit with Mildred and her daughter Norma. The older ladies would chit chat over tea while Norma and I listened to recorded music in her bedroom.

Every summer a lady named Joy and her husband would drive up from Victoria for a visit with Mildred. Mom had known Joy since childhood but as far as I could learn, not from the orphanage. The three women would converse quietly for hours. Joy was slim and pretty with an almost ethereal quality about her that stemmed from her soft, restrained tone of voice and the graceful way she walked. Mildred had divulged to Norma and me that her best friend was half Chinese. Her oriental heritage was apparent in facial composition and coloring.

Our mother had passed her prominent nose on to me as well as ears that were too large to be feminine. I assumed they were legacies from a distant Native Indian relative. But my brother recalls a rumour circulating through our old neighborhood and likely originating from Mildred that Mom’s dad was Chinese. He had asked our mother about it and she’d insisted that wasn’t true. I cannot remember hearing the story at all. Perhaps that was why I was more inclined to be surprised than he was, forty-seven years later, when my cousins and me became involved in researching our mothers’ family history.

While growing up in our tiny South Cariboo community during the late nineteen forties and early fifties the most visible minority around were the Native Indian people from the Canim Lake Reserve. We seldom saw any of the children who were usually ensconced during the school year at St. Joseph’s Residential School near Williams Lake, about one hundred and fifty kilometers from home. We did became acquainted with a few children of Japanese ethnic origin. The mothers and small siblings remained cloistered inside small wood-frame cabins while the fathers worked alongside our dad at a local sawmill. These children excelled at schoolwork and they were good at sports too. I used to envy them for that, especially a girl my age whose name was Osaka. Years later I learned that during the Second World War, hundreds of Japanese Canadian families were uprooted from homes and businesses at the Coast and been forced to endure humble, monitored lives in remote sections of the BC Interior. When the war ended some of these families decided to remain where they were and become successful and well-respected members of their adopted communities.

My generation which grew into adulthood during the nineteen fifties, may have been the first to attempt to break down age-old barriers of racial discrimination. I recall a group of us teenagers socializing with a young couple who were parents of a beautiful, endearing little boy. The family had been ostracized by several upstanding members of the community because she was a Caucasian and he was of Japanese descent. The word was out that their union was a really dirty trick to play on a poor innocent child. “That kid will grow up never knowing what culture he belongs to,” was the critical decree.

Our dad was always too busy to be a racist. The only people he despised were those who had accumulated enough wealth to brag about it. Besides he was almost stone deaf and not able to hear the gossip. I didn’t think Mom was racist either, until years later when she visited with me and my family at our home in Northern BC. One evening after I had introduced her to a few of the women in our neighborhood she commented, “Don’t you have any friends who aren’t Indian?”

My mother died nearly twenty years ago but I cringe inwardly whenever I think of her long-ago remark. Did Mom honestly believe- knowing she was half Chinese—that in the scale of things her heritage was further up the ladder of importance than that of Native Indians? But perhaps it had been me who had been racist? I did have friends who were Caucasian. Why hadn’t I introduced my mother to them?

In the fall of 1997 I received a phone call ‘out of the blue’ from Mildred’s son Harry which ultimately resulted in my achieving a sense of closeness toward my mother that I had not experienced while she was alive. Harry lived in Victoria now, he informed me. He had managed to maintain contact –off and on—with my brother ever since his family moved away in about 1960. During his latest visit to the Cariboo my brother had told him I was interested in learning more about my mother’s family history. Mildred who was now eighty-seven and living in a senior’s apartment in Victoria but still had all her marbles including an excellent memory, had filled her son in on the story. “Can you guess what nationality your grandfather was?” Harry teased. When I answered Native Indian or perhaps Japanese, he laughed heartily. “You’re close,” he replied. “He was Chinese. Your mother didn’t want you to know.”

My initial reaction–after recovering from the shock–was an acute sense of having been betrayed. Our mother had seemed almost childishly candid at times in her revelations concerning the orphanage and the places where she had later worked. But she had lied to my brother and me about her parentage! Why had she done that? For fifty-nine years I had blissfully ignored almost everything that was Chinese with the possible exception of the food. I had a lot of catching up to do.

Within the next several months, after having a few intriguing conversations on the phone with Mildred who sounded as bright and feisty as ever, and relaying bits of information back and forth between my cousin who was fervently searching the Internet from her home in the Kootenays and her brother who accessed the Vancouver City Archives almost daily, the intriguing story of our grandmother’s tragic and secretive existence began to unfold.