Portraits

MIKE MEHTA

Mike Mehta, 67, left Uganda because he had to; but he says he chose Canada as the place to begin his new life. “It scared the hell out of me the first time I saw that much snow here, but that didn’t stop me,” Mehta says from his home in Kitchener. He had lived through more frightening things than snow. On Aug. 4, 1972, Idi Amin, who was then president of Uganda, ordered 80,000 people of Asian origin out of the country. Mehta says he knew nothing about Canada except that its prime minister was accepting refugees and treating them well. There were 6,000 Ugandan Asians brought to Canada — the first time the country took part in a large-scale resettlement effort involving non-European refugees. Mehta, with $50 in his pocket, was one of them. “I said: ‘Where is the warmest place in Canada?’” Mehta says when asked how he ended up in Windsor, Ont. He started off working a minimum-wage job at a jewelry store, but had to spend too much of his earnings on transportation. He was keen to own a car and a house like the Canadians around him, so he answered an ad for a part-time job as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesperson. He began climbing his way up in that industry before eventually moving into the dry-cleaning business. “It was challenging. It was a lot of fun.” “I could see what the opportunities are there in the world, in Canada, if you are willing to work.”

DEBORAH KIGJUGALIK WEBSTER

Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, 49, has a memory for each season she headed out on the land with her father, either by boat or by snowmobile and qamutiik, a traditional Inuit wooden sled. “There’s nothing like the social aspect of ice fishing in the spring, breathing in the scent of the tundra in the summer, blueberry picking with my aunt in the fall and Ski-Doo rides and sliding in the winter,” says Kigjugalik Webster, a children’s author. “The outdoors was our classroom and playground!” She grew up in Baker Lake, or Qamani’tuaq, a hamlet in Nunavut, where she remembers being surrounded by family in the close-knit community. She and her family — including her mother, an Inuk woman, and her father, who originally immigrated from England and moved up north for a teaching job — moved to Ottawa so that she could go to high school, as her home community did not have one. She moved to Yellowknife after university. She has been back in Ottawa for six years and loves how strong the Inuit community is there. She says her mother, Sally Webster, is often invited to say a prayer and light the qulliq — a traditional Inuit oil lamp — at community events. She also makes tapestries featuring pictures of the people and places she knew back home. She says the community has complicated feelings about celebrating Canada 150, given the history of how Inuit were treated by the Canadian government. “I know Inuit were used as human flags in the north and relocated to the high Arctic when it wasn’t their traditional land,” she says. Still, she says she is proud to be part of this country and plans to celebrate the event on Parliament Hill. “I think now is a special time of healing and it’s good when we come together for events like this.”

SID CHOW TAN

Sid Chow Tan, 68, remembers being told that if anyone asked, he was a baby when he came to Canada and did not remember a thing. That was true, but it was meant to conceal things that were not. Later on, he realized there was a reason he referred to the couple who raised him as Mom and Dad when he was speaking English, but as Ah Yeh and Ah Nging — paternal grandfather and grandmother — when speaking Chinese at their home in Battleford, Sask. There were thousands of so-called paper sons and daughters who came to Canada under false identities, as Tan did as a baby fleeing the Communist Revolution with his grandmother in 1950, as a way to get around strict and racist immigration rules. Tan says he and the boy he knew as his older brother — really a cousin who came as a second paper son — grew up unaware of this secret until their family applied for amnesty. Afterwards, his own birth parents and younger siblings were able to immigrate to Canada, too. Like many Chinese-Canadian men, his grandfather had already been in Canada for about three decades, having paid a head tax and prevented from bringing his family over. He had been brought to Canada by an uncle who had worked on the railroad after coming to North American for the gold rush of 1849. Tan, who played a role in the fight for Chinese Head Tax redress, says that while his family has been on the continent for more than 150 years, his own children were the first to be born here. “That tells you what racism and immigration policies and all that stuff do to families,” says Tan. Still, Tan stresses he is grateful to be Canadian. “I believe our family has won life’s lottery by being able to grow up and live and participate and be part of this free country we call Canada — stolen as it is, from First Nations,” he says from his home in Vancouver, B.C.

TERESA SECONDO ZUCCARO

Teresa Secondo Zuccaro, 62, remembers her father throwing the plates away after a farewell dinner with family. “We don’t need these anymore!” she says, laughing at the memory. The decision to leave the dinnerware in Italy was followed by another decision to pack a small suitcase with nothing but sugar taralli — a biscuit shaped into a circle — in case they disliked the food they encountered on the journey to Canada in 1960. That was not the case on the transatlantic ocean liner, at least not for five-year-old Secondo Zuccaro, who remembers a waiter insisting she finish her supper before being able to enjoy a bowl of orange sherbet — a dessert she had never tasted back home and one she loves to this day. On the train from Halifax to Montreal, however, is where they dug into the suitcase, having turned up their noses as the strange and mysterious bread — sliced, if you can imagine — that greeted them ashore. Life in Montreal is where things became easier for Secondo Zuccaro and her siblings, who soaked up a second language alongside other newly arrived immigrant children in the classroom. “We were proud to be able to speak English and try to fit in,” she says. Secondo Zuccaro is proud of the traditions her family has kept up from their Italian heritage — especially the culinary ones — and glad that all three of her children learned to speak Italian. But this is where she feels she belongs. “Italy is beautiful, but no — Canada is home,” she says.

MARIE CLARKE WALKER

Marie Clarke Walker, 52, says there is nothing she can get back home in Jamaica that she cannot find in the local supermarket in Toronto. “Now, I can go to the store just across the street and get otaheiti apples, get all different kinds of mangoes, get tambrin, get guava, get naseberries — that’s my mother’s favourite fruit — everything,” she says. “When you come into Canada, there is no sign that says leave your language, your culture, your ethnicity at the door,” she says. She did not want to come here, though, when she arrived in 1972 at the age of eight, leaving her house and the warm weather of Jamaica behind for an apartment crowded with relatives she barely knew. Her mother, Beverley Johnson, decided it would be best to bring Clarke Walker and her six-year-old brother, Robert Clarke Johnson, to live with family in Toronto while she returned to Jamaica for her job, with a plan to eventually bring her children back home. “I considered what was in their best interests and the education system, the opportunities that were presenting themselves for them, made the decision,” says Johnson, 77, who had come to Canada as a student years earlier but decided not to stay. “For me, it was a difficult decision to take.” Clarke Walker does have sweet memories of making ice cream and jackass corn — a thin and crisp traditional Jamaican biscuit — with her grandmother, but there were also negative memories much deeper than the snow. “There were some kids that wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t play with us,” says Clarke Walker. “The first time I heard the N-word was three weeks after I landed in this country,” she says, noting this experience helped shape her life as a human-rights activist and labour leader. “The first time didn’t come from another child. The underlying current — at times it’s a whisper, at times it’s a loud voice — of racism still exists.”