ECW Press granted the Toronto Spark permission to publish Chapter 10 from Reconciling: A Lifelong Struggle to Belong, by Larry Grant in conversation with Scott Steedman. Grant, a Musqueam Elder with mixed Chinese and Musqueam ancestry, was born and raised in Musqueam traditional territory by a traditional hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam family.
Chapter Ten
Seeing Ghosts / Home to China
In 2009, the Grant family began planning a family trip to Sei Moon to see the village where their father was born. At the last minute, they were joined by a two-person film crew who would document the journey in the award-winning documentary All Our Father’s Relations.
The idea for the trip came from Edmond Leong, a Chinese cousin and friend who had grown up on the reserve with the family. He heard that a lot of Sei Moon was going to be bulldozed as part of a huge construction project and talked to Gordie, Larry’s older brother, about it. “He said, you’ve got to come to China if you want to see your dad’s village,” Larry says, “because the government wants to punch a bullet train through there, they’re going to destroy a whole bunch of houses. Gordie and I said ‘We’ll go’ immediately.”
“The thought of something we were connected to being demolished was the decider,” Larry adds. “We knew our grandfather, knew that Dad went back and forth. We wanted to see it all before it disappeared.”
The whole family had been reluctant to visit China for close to a century, a legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Even after the 1960 amnesty, many Chinese immigrants and their families were afraid go home because they didn’t trust the Canadian authorities to let them back in. Larry’s great-uncles and uncles had almost never dared, having risked and paid so much to come to Canada only to find themselves excluded from society, treated like second-class citizens, the “yellow peril.”
The fear ran deep. “For many years, I never imagined going to my father’s homeland,” Larry’s brother Howard says in the film. “I never spoke about it, never thought about it, never asked about it. . . . The fears from our uncles and great-uncles were ingrained. I was afraid to go, afraid I wouldn’t be accepted. How would we communicate, would it be a hollow experience?”
On board from the start with Larry and Gordon were their wives, Gina and Jean, who did a lot of the organizing, with Jean doubling as the fourth translator because she had spent several years in a village near Sei Moon and spoke the local dialect. Larry’s grand-daughter Desirae and grandson Casey came too.
Up until the day of departure, people kept changing their minds. “Howard never gave an answer, he danced right around it,” says Larry. “Decided to go last minute, with his eldest son, Wade.”
Sarah Ling, the film’s lead producer, will never forget being at the airport with this great, excited clan, three generations of the Grant family about to set out on their adventure into the unknown. It was November 1, 2013, and as they waited for China Southern Airlines flight 330 for Guangzhou to depart, someone started singing “Happy Birthday” for Howard. It was also the fifty-seventh anniversary of their father Hong Tim Hing’s passing, ninety-three years after he had left China on a steamer bound for Vancouver.
As they approached the village, Edmond said, “Don’t drive in, let’s walk.” So the whole hesitant clan got out of the car and started to amble onwards on foot. The entrance was marked by a striking, yellow-tiled gate, a workaday version of ornate ones like Vancouver’s Millennium Gate, that sat in the middle of a traffic roundabout on the edge of town, with the village’s name carved in green letters on a high stone plaque. Its construction had been funded by donations from all the great-uncles who had left for Canada.
“They raised money, pooled it and sent it back to the family in the village, to help them to erect a gate,” Larry says. “Edmond was saying, your family put up that gate, we should walk through it.” So they did, their backs to a concrete overpass, moving slowly down a narrow road past school kids in uniforms on their bikes and workers transporting firewood, the family house visible in the distance. High-pitched beeps made them step aside, and there was Larry’s grandson Casey, sitting on the back of a motor scooter with a huge grin on his face; one of the villagers had recognized him and offered him a lift.
“That moment, my whole being said, ‘I’m home,’” Larry says. “It really hit me that way. This is the other half of my life I had no idea about. My spiritual being became grounded at that moment, in that village.” At age seventy-seven, he had come home to China, a mythical land ten thousand kilometres east of Musqueam he had only ever imagined.
Fifty-seven years after his father’s death, Larry walked into a tiny village in southern China and saw a ghost. A crowd of strangers surrounded them, greeting them in Cantonese and smiling happily. Many, they would soon learn, were close relatives—their father’s family, brand-new faces that looked awfully like familiar faces they remembered from the farm.
“They were feeding us and introducing us to cousins, nephews and nieces that we had never met,” says Larry, “when along comes an uncle I didn’t know that I had! I was taken aback. Holy smokes. He was the spitting image of an uncle that had come to Canada and lived for twenty-plus years here before his death, Uncle Tommy. Here was this guy who looked like he stepped out of the grave. It was unbelievable.”
The actual reunion only lasted a few hours, which went by in a blur. When they first saw their uncle, their father’s youngest brother who looked like the long-lost twin of Uncle Tommy, Larry and his two brothers found it hard to speak. They just hugged him and drank tea and ate lunch together, while the framed photos of their common ancestors looked down proudly from the walls.
These relatives they’d never met knew who Larry and his siblings were; they produced photo albums with faded snaps of the Canadian family, including one of Uncle Tommy, and others of Gordon and Howard, back when he sported a handlebar moustache.
Larry was shown a journal written in Cantonese that recorded several centuries of his father’s genealogy in China. “I was told, ‘You are the seventeenth generation of this house,’” he recalls. “Oh my god. That was my reaction. Going there and being hugged and fed, it’s not just something in a book at that point. To be embraced and hear someone say, ‘This is where you belong, this is where you come from’ was very emotional.” The words echoed the way Larry and his siblings had been welcomed into the home villages of their extended Musqueam family when they visited as kids, a big part of every summer.
“You could feel the emotion, see the emotion,” says Larry. “You didn’t need a translator, just being there made it so meaningful. It was much more emotional than I’d expected. Maybe because of our age. It was amazing to see the acceptance pouring out from our relatives.” This was no “hollow experience”—they were being welcomed into the bosom of their long-lost family, their long-lost homeland.
“I was really happy then, while doing it, and after,” says Larry. “Just being in China, the homeland of our baba and all our other ancestors. I had a hard time keeping my thoughts together.”
It took Larry a long time to unpack all the emotions the trip sparked. Supporting Sarah and Alejandro while they spent the best part of three years making All Our Father’s Relations helped.
The film premiered at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival to a sold-out crowd in November 2016. It moved a lot of people and was awarded Best Canadian Feature. It has been screened many times since, across Canada and internationally, including several times on CBC and BC’s Knowledge Network.
Like most children of immigrants, Larry grew up with all kinds of preconceived notions about his father’s homeland. In his mind’s eye it was rural and not very sophisticated. He knew it was a small village surrounded by lush farmland and had seen the old photos of creaky windmills and barefoot children farming with water buffalo, but he was surprised to find that it was just like Musqueam: “the streets were paved, there was electricity, telephones,” he says. “It was not third world.”
Turns out that the Pearl River Delta is not just one of the lushest, most fertile areas on the planet; it’s now also one of the most urbanized, a megalopolis of never-ending cities. Sure, they saw bright-green rice fields, but among a forest of cranes and tower blocks criss-crossed by highways and, these days, bullet trains. His father, who left rural China for opportunity in the West, would never have recognized the dynamic, industrial powerhouse the country has become. “Being there was a weird feeling!” Larry says.
Even weirder and more surprising was the intense emotional bond he felt, to a land he had never visited and a people he had pretty much turned his back on as a child. “The reality of our connection really became apparent after watching the documentary multiple times,” he says. “The emotions popped out, emotions that were always there, that I didn’t recognize at first. It takes time for the walls to break down, walls that you’ve erected over all those years.”
Why was the bond to his father’s culture weaker than that to Musqueam? “Because it’s your mother, your aunties who nurture you!” Larry says without hesitation. “That’s true everywhere, in any culture. I’ve always been my mother’s son.” He has seen his Chinese uncles on and off all his life, but the bond didn’t compare to the intense, cherishing embrace of his mother, the person who raised him and was always there. “She was the person who would pick me up from falling down and say, ‘Is anything broken? No? Then go do it again!’” he says with a smile. Now, at age seventy-seven, he was having to recalibrate all this and open his heart to the Chinese side of his being.
“People cry when they watch it, people who have no connection to us or to China,” Larry says. At first he was confused and wondered why. Now he thinks he understands; for a country like Canada, a nation of immigrants and nomads, people uprooted and replanted in a thousand myriad ways, “going home” is a universal longing, a fantasy we all dream but can never truly satisfy.
Larry is a vocal Chinese Elder today, a bridge between two communities, Asian and Indigenous, that have always shared many features. When he talks to Chinese Canadians or Indigenous students at UBC, or most anyone these days, he encourages them all to “Go home! Go visit the village your parents or grandparents came from, find out who they are, what it means, where your emotions lie. It will really assist you, make you more proud of who you are.”
He has come to see that recognizing where your family comes from is so important. “Unless you’re First Nations, you’re here in a different land, far from the place of origin of your ancestors. You’ll be surprised at the emotional connection that’s there. It’s completing the circle of your whole life, of who you are, what your origins are, the different communities you belong to. It’s so, so important.”
“Whether it’s good or bad is not the issue, it’s where your beginnings are. I’ve said that ever since, from watching the movie.” So many Chinese Canadians have never been to China; so many Indigenous Canadians have never visited the place where their parents or grandparents grew up. “Because of my connection to China, my roots in Musqueam, I carry that history with me.”
He acknowledges that not everyone will follow his advice, and tells the ones who do that they mustn’t feel like they have to visit every relative or spend months or years learning the history or the language. Though some will.
“You will have your preconceived notions shattered. You don’t need to stay, just go once and see home.”
For his whole life, Larry never denied being part Chinese. All the people he and his siblings dealt with over the years thought of them that way. “But inside I was Musqueam, still am,” he says. And not knowing the homeland, the lands his ancestors walked upon and came from, survived and flourished in, stopped him from truly embracing that part of his heritage. Until he went home.
“It’s part of you, as every person who comes from a place knows,” Larry says. “Going there opens up your mind. Completely. About how much of me is part of that land, whether I live there or not. Part of my soul is forever there, walking where my father walked, where his father raised him, where all those generations walked.
“It’s very much how we were taught in Musqueam,” he adds. “This is where you come from, this is where you belong. That same revelation happened over there, opened our minds: 100 percent acceptance of being Chinese.
“I can make myself cry thinking about it,” he says, smiling all the while.
ECW Press published Reconciling: A Lifelong Struggle to Belong, by Larry Grant in conversation with Scott Steedman. It’s nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes. The awards will be announced on September 19 at the University Golf Club in Vancouver. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
