Adrienne Clarkson - Room for All of Us

ALSO BY ADRIENNE CLARKSON

Heart Matters

Norman Bethune

ALLEN LANE CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2011

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright Adrienne Clarkson, 2011

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

Excerpts from poetry by Pablo Neruda and Claudio Duran used with permission.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Clarkson, Adrienne, 1939

Room for all of us : surprising stories of loss and transformation / Adrienne Clarkson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-670-06547-9

1. Clarkson, Adrienne, 1939. 2. ImmigrantsCanadaBiography.

3. CanadaEmigration and immigration.

4. Cultural pluralismCanada. I. Title.

FC104.C53 2011 920.071 C2011-905471-X

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FOR
TALIA, MYLO, THEO, AND KAI,

who will inherit the Canada

that the people in this book are creating

CONTENTS

OUT OF CATACLYSM AND CATASTROPHE

This book is about people like me. When I published Heart Matters, in 2006, many people told me they thought it was a great story and that it showed how unusual my path had been in Canada. Even close friends went out of their way to say that they thought my story was different from anything anyone else had experienced in Canada. My immediate reaction was to disagree. All of my life, Ive met people who have lived trajectories not exactly like mine but in their own way, just as remarkable. Like me, the people in this book came out of cataclysm and catastrophe not of their own making and found themselves almost thrown into Canada. And what did Canada do? Canada took us in, and our real lives began. I told my story because I wanted people to identify with it and realize that they, too, had come a long way. I wanted to show that the goals they may never have thought possible, proved attainable because they were Canadian.

The people I write about were almost surprised by the way their lives turned out. They had worked hard to succeed and they are a very accomplished group, but what happened to them could only have happened because of their being uprooted and forcibly transplanted to another place. That this place was Canada was very fortuitous. People in every societywhether it is France, which I know well, or Britain, or the United Statescan succeed. But there is something particular about Canada, with its atmosphere of benevolent neglect, of letting people alone, that makes it possible for those who arrive with nothing to sense that they can belong and be part of something they can help to construct.

What follows is a simple account of immigrant experiences at the beginning of the twenty-first century, of people who would have died or suffered terribly, and certainly never would have come to the true fullness of their development, had they not been taken in by Canada. These people are immigrants like me. Some of them are refugees like me. All of them depended very much on the kindness of strangers to be taken in and allowed to make their way.

These are stories not just of survival, but of people who had very little choice and had to make the best of what was offered. Whether this meant being picked up in an airplane in Hong Kong and landing in Edmonton in the middle of winter, or being flown from Santiago to Vancouver after a military coup, or fetching up in Montreal as a deserter from the U.S. Armyall of them, like me, were driven here by forces that were out of their control.

Heart Matters was my storythe story of how our family came to Canada with one suitcase each, having been chosen almost at random to board a ship that was part of the Red Cross exchange of civilians on the two sides of the Pacific War. We came to Ottawa and made our way thanks to my father getting a job in the Canadian government. But we really made our way thanks to the people we met by chance and thanks to my parents enormous strength of charactermy fathers humour, resilience, and intelligence, and my mothers sensitivity, perfectionism, and struggle against depression. With that guidance and their terrific alertness to all of their surroundings, they sacrificed and saved so that my brother and I could go to universityin his case McGill, to become a doctor, and in mine, Trinity College at the University of Toronto, which led to a career that began in television. Canada did not set up any insurmountable barriers for me. I went to a very good high school, Lisgar Collegiate, in Ottawa, and at Trinity I was able to make friends and penetrate (I think that is the right word) the heart of Canadian life, which I have inhabited ever since. The close friends I made then, at the age of eighteen, have remained part of me through all of the changes in my life.

I dont believe I ever thought I wouldnt be able to do any of this. Canada was, after all, an easy country to live in and to do well in. At first, as a child, that meant excelling at exams and getting scholarships, and later it meant being good on television and the other things that came along to challenge me. I know I wouldnt have had the same kind of life had there been no war and had we remained in Hong Kong, but for many years I didnt think to ask my father what he thought would have become of us had we been able to stay. For us, our adaptation to Canada was so important and overpowering that I wasnt even able to frame the question until about twenty years ago. When I finally did ask him, after we had eaten a quiet dinner together, he answered, Well, if wed stayed in Hong Kong, you would have been very clever, and I would have continued to do well in business, and so we probably would have sent you to the States to universityRadcliffe or Vassar or Wellesley. I thought about that for a while. I knew that if I had gone to one of those schools, I would have still done very well academically, but I wouldnt have ended up as Governor-General of Canada! I might just have ended up marrying somebody rich, moving back to Hong Kong, and leading a comfortable life, perhaps immigrating to Canada in my thirties.