A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I had a DNA surprise about eight months ago.  I'd done the test, my second, only because I wanted to have my DNA results on the same platform as all my family research, and wasn't expecting any surprises.  But there was a big surprise. My dad wasn't my biological father.  Since then, I've had many, many conversations with friends and acquaintances about that discombobulating discovery.  People have different reactions to my news, maybe because it's being filtered through their own memories of this thing we call Dad, and how they feel about the dad they got. Some have asked how I felt about discovering that my mother had not been "faithful."  Neither of those things mattered to me personally.  My dad was my Dad, no thoughts otherwise. He was a dad of his times, and yes, I had a period of being angry with him in my reflective 50s for never showing up to any of my piano recitals. But he was unwaveringly on my side through each one of my painful life cycles, f...

My new hobby of diving into ancestry information brings me many treasurers, including these four 1924 Chinese Immigration Act documents of my uncles and aunt back when they were little kids. They all just showed up recently in my Ancestry.com "hints," so I'm guessing it was a release triggered by 100 years having passed. My Romanian grandmother had married a Chinese man in 1910 Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, which must have been some kind of crazy act at the time. Their children were thus half-Chinese, and presumably had to be documented via these forms once the Act took effect in 1923. Canada had ended the Head Tax that year and replaced it with the Chinese Immigration Act, which would block virtually all immigrants from China from coming to Canada for the next 24 years. From  the Canadian Museum of Immigration  website: The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 virtually restricted all Chinese immigration to Canada by narrowly defining the acceptable categories of Chinese immigrant...

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency. Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money. Young women in Canada in my grandmothers’ era had little choice but to attach themselves to a man for economic survival. I see that truth in my 17-year-old Romanian grandmother’s sad eyes in her wedding-day photo, married off rather scandalously to a Chinese man in Moose Jaw, Sask. while the rest of her family hived off to Alberta with one less mouth to feed. I feel it in my heart for my 27-year-old grandmother, leaving children and home country behind to travel to Canada for a better future with a man married to her sister just months before, only to be abruptly paired with her after sister and babe died in childbirth.  I’m overwhelmed by it as I learn the tragic story of my third grandmother, whose intellectual disability left her like a lamb to the wolves. It’s still tough to be a woman, bu...

On this night 50 years ago, I was preparing for my wedding the next day. I was barely two weeks past my 17th birthday. What was on my mind that evening? No recollection. I know I wasn’t scared or sad – then and now, I’ve always been up for an adventure, and I’d been eager to get out of my parents’ house for at least a couple of years by that point. (They were good people, but I so desperately wanted independence.) My memories of the weeks around the wedding are like snapshots more than anything. I remember a glimpse of this, a few seconds of that. It’s never big stuff I recall, just these quirky little bits that linger. Me enjoying the fuss of all the big community bridal showers that a girl got when she married a Cumberland boy in those years. Cakes shaped and iced like a Barbie doll's ball gown. Me in the mirror for the first time in my wedding dress, appreciating its low cut. The purple everything in the honeymoon suite of the Port Augusta Motel. Us splurging for two nights in t...

When I was a kid and got too whiny about some little difficulty in my life, I'd get shaken back to reality by a parent or grandparent with a version of one of those Walked Five Miles to School in a Blizzard stories from their own childhoods.  The examples varied, perhaps invoking a time when there was nothing but shrivelled potatoes to eat, or comparing my comfy bedroom to the mattress on the floor that they remembered sharing with some ridiculous amount of siblings.  But the moral was always the same: this parent/grandparent had known deprivation, and I should be so glad and eternally grateful for living in different times. It struck me the other day that the Boomer generation that I'm part of just might be the first generation in Canada whose own stories will instead be of how good they had it compared to their grandkids.  Let me tell ya, kid, back in my day we had houses for people. We didn't even have a word for homelessness, and you camped for fun, not because it was...

  Clockwise from top left: My father David Paterson; my aunt Joan Hepburn, solo and with her mates; my grandmother's brother Jack Feica; my uncle George Chow and wife Fan from a newspaper clipping after George's dramatic escape from a Japanese internment camp; my uncle Bill Chow; my uncle Pete Chow; and my grandmother's brother Tom Feica. *** The benefit of being one of the people in your big extended family who hoards photos is that when struck by the thought of whether you could pull together a quick photo collage for Remembrance Day of relatives who served our country, there they all are. This little collection certainly doesn't represent all of my relatives who have served, just the ones I have photos for. But even this handful reminds me of their bravery and commitment to a better world, putting their lives on the line for democracy and freedom.  For my mom's brothers in particular, serving in the Second World War couldn't have been an easy choice, what wit...

Mom loved this 2015 photo from the Chow reunion, which miraculously captured all but one of her kids, their spouses and children in one place. My mother Helen Paterson was born in 1925 in Moose Jaw, the sixth of nine children in a hard-scrabble household of mixed-race kids back when nobody even knew that term.  Her father, Charles Chow, was Chinese and ran a grocery store catering to the Chinese community, many of them labourers who had come to Canada to work on the railway, and for a time he managed the Canadian Pacific Railway dining room in Moose Jaw. Her mother, Mary Feica, was Romanian, married off at 17 by her equally hard-scrabble Prairie family; when she wed her Chinese boss at the CPR restaurant where she worked, it was considered scandalous. Such family circumstance provided fertile ground for stories. My mother knew them all. She grew less and less reticent about sharing them as she aged, and we made good use of her as the historian of a larger-than-life...

  I can’t imagine what the dogs that run into Paul and I must think of us these days, trailing what must be bits of the scent of a dozen or more dogs on us at this point. Our itinerant way of life this past year has brought us many animal companions for periods of intimate living, and I’m sure it doesn’t all come out in the wash.     It’s been quite the animal-companion year since returning to the Island last May: standard poodle; Chinese crested hairless; Australian shepherd; Chihuahua; pug mix; poodle mix; shepherd mix; fluffy-dog mix; Schnauzer mix. Cats that live indoors. Cats that live outside. Alpacas, a llama and 28 chickens. We’ve gotten to know so many animals in the intimacy of their own homes.     You definitely end up sharing a lot of experiences with animals when you look after other people’s pets. I’ve slept with dogs I barely knew. All of us learn each other’s food quirks, poo quirks, good and bad habits and lines in the sand in very short or...

     Having never been one for goal-setting, the end of the year appeals to me more as a time for reflecting on where my life is at than as a start point for setting goals that may or may not be achievable in the next 12 months. As John Lennon so eloquently noted, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. (In the spirit of goal-setting, perhaps I should pick 2016 as the year that I finally get that truth tattooed on me. I've been talking about it for long enough.)      So I got to reflecting this morning. And I guess it’s not surprising that my thoughts turned to all the things I’m grateful for, given that I’m currently sitting here in my comfy home in the Managua heat, still in love after 19 years, practically giddy to have recovered from two herniated discs in my neck this past spring, and fresh off a terrific two weeks of travelling Nicaragua with a couple of our grandkids.      Herewith, a list of personal gra...

Wish I'd seized the moment to know my grandmother better My mother didn’t give me much choice about attending family reunions when I was younger, and there were times in years past when I wasn’t too happy about that. I love my family, but long summer treks to Saskatchewan weren’t necessarily my idea of a good time. But somewhere along the line, I got hooked. I can’t remember the exact reunion when it all clicked in, but I recall looking around at my many cousins as we made merry and thinking how incredible it was that we barely knew each other, had grown up thousands of miles away, and yet all had stories in common of our quirky grandmother. That connection is very much on my mind this week, because the aunts and the uncles and the cousins are all in town at this very moment for a family reunion in Victoria. Chances are I’m swapping Grandma Chow stories with some of them even as you’re reading this. Mary Feica was a Romanian teenager who married Chinese immigrant Charles Chow in 19...