In my research on Chinese restaurants, I learned that across the Canadian prairies, virtually every small town had a small cafe run by a Chinese family, as vividly illustrated by Tony Chan in his documentary. Even though they served mostly Western foods such as hamburgers, steak, pork chops, and apple pie, with the only dishes faintly related to Chinese food such as chop suey, chow mein, egg rolls, and egg foo young, they were considered “Chinese cafes” as the owners and operators were Chinese immigrants and their families.
One day it suddenly struck me that some of my relatives from China that immigrated to Canada years ago but I never met in person may have actually had a cafe in a small town in rural Canada. For quite some time, my mother received Christmas cards from a small Saskatchewan town from relatives that she had never met. I believe her niece had immigrated to Canada back around the 1970s, and raised her family there. However, I never heard any mention of what she or her husband did to earn a living. Could it possibly be that they were restaurant operators? If that was the case, I just had to find out because here I was writing a book on Chinese restaurants! I searched through old letters that my mother had received over the years, but never discarded. I succeeded, much to my joy, in finding a Christmas card from the mid-1980s from a Quong family that lived in Norquay, Saskatchewan. Now it was 2012, and I was unsuccessful in getting information from the town as to whether there had been Chinese living there in the 1980s and if so whether any of them ran a restaurant. If there had been Chinese there in the past, they were no longer there, so my search was in vain.
A few months later, I found a photograph on the Internet of a Chinese restaurant in a town near Norquay that I wanted to include in my book. I contacted Joan Champ, the person who took the photo, and she readily consented to let me use the photo. I asked her if she had been to Norquay in hopes that she might have known my mother’s niece and family, but she had little contact there. However, she did know someone there and gave me his contact information. With renewed hope, I called him and explained the nature of my search. However, he had only been in the area for a few years and could not confirm my hypothesis but fortunately his wife had lived in Norquay for many years. The good news was that she had known the family, which had in fact had run a cafe, but the bad news was that the parents were deceased and their children had all moved away. She did give me a telephone number of some Chinese restaurant in a neighboring town because she thought the owners knew my mother’s niece. I then made about three more calls, each leading me to another source. I was getting warmer, but still was unsuccessful in locating any of the descendants.
I was frustrated, and felt I was at the end of the search. Then a month or two later, the photographer mentioned earlier, Joan Champ, contacted me. She was a history museum archivist and had studied old hotels in Saskatchewan, some which had Chinese operated cafes in them, as she describes on her blog. Joan took an interest in my quest and did some searching of city directories and located several people named Quong living in Regina. I took a chance and called a likely telephone number but the woman who received my call was quite guarded and reticient to divulge any information to a stranger even though I explained my purpose and described the information I had from the old Christmas cards sent to my mother. She finally admitted that she was the daughter of the family I had been searching for but did not give me much other information. A few weeks later she visited her brother in living in Calgary and told him about my call. He was more receptive and we had a nice conversation about our kinship. I was invited to call on another brother if I was ever in Vancouver. And although that seemed an unlikely possibility, as I live about 1500 miles Vancouver, it so happened that about a year later I did visit Vancouver and was able to get together with his family for a delightful dinner.
Yin & Yang Press 