Saturday, July 31

Jan Wong

Friday, July 30, 1999

In China, being detained can lead to unpleasantness, like execution. So what must the 123 Chinese who washed up on our shores last week think of Canada?

We put them up in a beautiful gymnasium, beautiful at least, compared with the hovels they left behind in Fujian province. We provide linens, towels, toothbrushes, toothpaste and soap. Doctors take their blood pressure.

We get them take-out chow mein from a famous Victoria restaurant named Ming's. We provide lawyers to protest that the chow mein is cold. To keep them amused, we also provide local newspapers.

Those Chinese-language newspapers will help them figure out the Canadian Way of Life. If they're going to stay -- as did previous boatloads of Tamils (in 1986) and South Asians (in 1987) -- we want to indoctrinate them as soon as possible.

Civics Lesson 1. DON'T WORK TOO HARD. Poor Leticia Cables made that mistake. Now the Filipina nanny is huddled in an undisclosed church basement in Edmonton, trying to avoid deportation. Ms. Cables claims to have worked only one extra job besides the one permitted by her visa. But a Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesman said darkly: "We allege she had worked with three employers. We've had information about some more. We only need one (to deport her.)"

Civics Lesson 2. DON'T EVEN WORK AT ALL. Winston Rhule, who missed 203 of 244 works days in one year, was awarded $117,000 for wrongful dismissal. Arbitrators also gave him back his janitor's job in the Toronto subway system. No appeal is planned.

Civics Lesson 3. GET PAID TO STOP BEGGING. Squeegee kids in Toronto will earn $10 an hour for 10 weeks if they get off the streets and take a bicycle repair course. They also get a free bike.

The Chinese who debarked last week reminded me of my own grandfather. Chong Hooie arrived 120 years ago on a coolie ship, not much different from their filthy, leaky trawler. He also ended up at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt.

But my grandfather was stupid. He came here legally. For that, he got to wash laundry for 15 years.

After Grandfather Chong helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway, he paid a $10 "unemployment tax." That enabled him to stay. He found work, at $1 a month as a houseboy for Colonel Josiah Greenwood Holmes, the deputy adjutant-general of the Canadian West Coast military base in Esquimalt. Back then, CFB Esquimalt was called the Pacific Station, and was under British command.

My grandfather quickly violated Civics Lesson 1. With Colonel Holmes's blessing, Grandfather Chong augmented his houseboy salary by providing a laundry service to the fort's soldiers and, eventually, to citizens in nearby Victoria.

As The Globe's China correspondent, I once went to Changle county on the coast of Fujian, the favourite jumping-off point for Chinese illegals. On a sparkling winter day there in 1992, I cornered a lone fisherman repairing his nets on a white sand beach. He told me the son of a local Communist Party Secretary had recently resurfaced in Japan. "He was smuggled there," the fisherman added, with a grin.

Snakeheads, as the local gangsters are known, charge $50,000 to transport a person to Canada. That's a lifetime's wages for the average Chinese worker, much more for a peasant.

No wonder the latest arrivals have been saving safety pins, tinfoil plates and pens, and hiding them in their bedding. The police called them makeshift weapons. Maybe the Chinese just haven't acclimatized to our culture of wastefulness.

On Wednesday, after just one week here, most of them refused to eat Ming's catered lunch. An RCMP constable reported that the newcomers were "frustrated" with the backed-up hearings.

Welcome to Canada. What better indoctrination into the Canadian Way of Life than months and months and months of government hearings?