The Ava Lee Series Bundle 2 by Ian Hamilton

Author:Ian Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc

( 9 )

The drive up the Don Valley Parkway was laborious, as usual, and the traffic didn’t lessen when she exited at Highway 7 and entered Chinatown North. About 500,000 people of Chinese descent now lived in the city and the Greater Toronto Area. The first big wave had come from Hong Kong, just prior to repatriation, and was quickly followed by an influx from the mainland. The city had Chinese daily newspapers, Chinese radio and television stations, huge shopping centres built Hong Kong style, and restaurants — hundreds of restaurants — offering every known East Asian cuisine, served up by chefs recruited from the best restaurants in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing and paid huge salaries to relocate in Canada. Jennie Lee maintained that the Chinese restaurants in Toronto were now the best in the world, and Ava couldn’t argue with her.

When they had first moved to Toronto, the only Chinatown was located downtown. Every Saturday morning Jennie had bundled Ava and Marian into the car and driven them there for abacus and Mandarin lessons while she shopped for Chinese vegetables and the ten-kilo bags of fragrant Thai rice that she loved. The downtown Chinatown was densely populated, so Jennie had settled herself and the kids in the northern suburb of Richmond Hill, where a wealthy, sophisticated Chinese population was beginning to expand.

Mimi had asked Ava once why so many Chinese people chose to live in Richmond Hill. The answer was simple. For years Vancouver had been the most desired landing spot for Chinese immigrants, and the town of Richmond was where they settled. When Toronto began to supplant Vancouver as the economic hub of Chinese activity in Canada, there was a migration of western Chinese Canadians. And because they — and just about everyone in Hong Kong — knew the name Richmond, Richmond Hill was where they ended up. There hadn’t been many Chinese people there when Jennie brought her two daughters east, to get away from what was for her the dreary, rainy climate of Vancouver, which reminded her too much of Hong Kong. But within a few years Richmond Hill, Ontario, was as Chinese as Richmond, British Columbia.

The Lucky Season was in a strip mall named Times Square, which was modelled after a Hong Kong mall of the same name. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant, but it served great and cheap dim sum. Jennie had found it years ago and had been going several times a week ever since. Each dim sum serving cost $2.20, about half of what you’d pay at most other places on Highway 7, and maybe a quarter of the tab at trendy downtown restaurants such as Lai Wah Heen. The place sat about four hundred people and was always jammed.

Ava knew the hostess — another of Jennie Lee’s innumerable friends — and was immediately led past a knot of waiting customers to a table. No one complained about the preferential treatment; having connections was an accepted part of daily life in Richmond Hill, something to be admired, not envied.

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