Retired architect recalls minute details
Longtime community leader Frank Ling tells his story in Pray Standing
Frank Ling has been alive 76 years, and he seems to remember every waking second.
That’s a tremendous help to a person in writing a memoir, as Ling, a retired Ottawa architect and longtime community leader, has done.
The book, Pray Standing, recounts his eventful life, from a childhood in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong through his travels to England and the United States in pursuit of education, and his eventual, unplanned arrival in Ottawa, his home for the past 46 years.
But Ling’s uncanny memory — he can recall not only what he ordered in the restaurant where he ate his first meal in London at age 19, but exactly what it cost him — helps beyond filling in the details of the story. More than that, the names, conversations, and smells encountered over a lifetime collectively communicate something larger about Ling: it’s not just that he can remember these things, it’s that he noticed them all. Ling is not among those content to float along through life semi-conscious of all but the sharpest bumps. He’s been paying attention.
The most formative episode, and the one that provided the book’s title, is a moment he shared with his mother during an Allied bombing raid on the Japanese in 1944. He was walking to church with his mother when the sirens began. They quickly ran beneath a tree, the only thing nearby that offered even a semblance of shelter.
The six-year-old boy asked his mother a question with the complete seriousness that belongs to young children.
“Mother,” he asked, “can you pray standing?”
She didn’t answer in words, but took his hand and nodded.
“The calm certainty of that unvoiced response,” writes Ling, “was to become the guiding focus of my life: with trust, all is indeed well, no matter what.”
Wartime provides Ling, as a writer, with some stories that even people with lesser memories would not likely forget, such as the Japanese soldier who made a “game” of chasing him, again as a six-year-old, around a dining-room table with a drawn sword. The soldier laughed uproariously; the child was terrified.
Ling spends time, in the book, on his upbringing, grounded in stiffly structured traditional family relationships; the Chinese words for “eldest paternal aunt” and “second paternal aunt” give a sense of the duties and obligations involved. While he rebelled at times against these traditions, he writes about them with appreciation. His childless aunt and uncle, in particular, took a special interest in him. He explains that this came from a sense of family duty, but he is no less grateful to them for that.
When he left Hong Kong to pursue his education — through such places as the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Harvard University — in characteristic Ling fashion, he worked hard to gain everything he could from both his studies and the culture around him. In his words, he gained “British self-discipline and sense of duty, European adaptability, American vigour and optimism, and Canadian give-and-take, equanimity and perseverance.”
One imagines Ling might have found his way to these characteristics, or at least a similar list, wherever he’d gone, but his ability to understand East and West placed him well to take on a leadership position within the Ottawa Chinese community — and beyond it.
Ling originally intended to settle in Montreal but made a last-minute decision to try Ottawa instead, barely even knowing where the city was. He had success as an architect, doing work on the Chinese Embassy and a significant renovation of the Langevin Block, which houses the Prime Minister’s Office. His favourite work is the Dow’s Lake Pavilion, which he designed.
After doing well in business and becoming financially secure, Ling retired from full-time architectural work in 1989, while only in his early 50s. He made that decision, he says, in order to take on community responsibilities. Among those, he has chaired the Ottawa Police Services Board and the board of the Canadian Museum of Nature, was founding chair of the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival and has served on numerous other boards.
He has also played the role of “business matchmaker” in his work with the Hong Kong-Canada Business Association.
He says he took on the volunteer work, which has earned him the Order of Canada, partly because he was so honoured to be asked to do so in his adopted country.
“I feel lucky,” he writes. “I feel blessed, and I feel grateful. In other words, I feel truly Canadian.”