Dad & Grandad
Toishan, China → Oxbow, Saskatchewan
• Photos from
The Oxbow Cafe
We got lost finding our way back to my grandfather’s cafe.
The maps on my phone did not know the way there, insistently leading us in circles along highway roads under construction.
Oxbow was a quiet town, a few trucks rolling down its main street with a handful of shops. We drove around its perimeter in less than 10 minutes, my dad pointing out where he went to school.
When we finally arrived at the café, it had just closed for a 3 week summer holiday. There was so much hope & expectation built into this trip, and I was deflated.
And yet by fate or luck, we arrived at the same moment as a group of my dad’s old childhood friends, and I watched them catch up across the past 50 years. These friends met at the café twice a day for coffee and conversation. I watched my dad laughing and chatting among a sea of cowboy hats and baseball caps, a sight I’ve never seen before.
It was a journey of unexpected encounters, one closed café leading us on an adventure to another café.
“All the things they could find, an opportunity to make a living”
“All the things they could find, an opportunity to make a living”
On this trip, I was surprised to learn that my grandfather found a way to enter Canada during a time when Chinese immigration was almost entirely banned due to anti-Chinese sentiment.
From 1923-1947, the Chinese Exclusion Act stopped Chinese immigration after their pivotal work building the railway was complete. He worked in a series of Chinese-Canadian cafés, and then pooled funds with family when they discovered the Oxbow Café in the 1950s, buying out their shares a few years later. He stayed on as the cook, while my teenage father worked as a waiter after school each day. My grandmother later joined for a few years.
"In those days, the social and economic condition in China was very very poor and the reason why people moved to Canada was because they were hoping for a better life because its really utter poverty in China in those days. So basically they came over here to improve their livelihood."
"Every day. Come back from school 4:00, work here until about 10:00, and go to sleep. The next day’s routine is the same, 7 days a week, 364 days a year, and we close one day for Christmas every year."
We didn’t have a chance to enter my grandfather’s café that first visit - but I loved watching my chaotic daughter run riot on the streets of Oxbow as my dad followed behind her.