Storytelling Project Speech My dad decided to travel to Canada in 1998, when he was 29 years old. He had just completed his PhD in China, and decided to travel to Canada in order to conduct some research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. He had known for a while that he wanted to leave China- not permanently-but just for a little while to gain some experience in a new place. My dad never meant to stay in Canada. His intention was to work in Canada for a few years to obtain some experience, and then travel back to China to become a university professor in Shanghai.
At the time, Canada was a global leader in power systems engineering, so my dad believed that he would learn much more working at a Canadian university than he would at a university in China. My dad needed a way to distinguish himself from others in the chaotic Chinese job market, and working at a Canadian university was his way of doing it. My dad took his first ever plane ride when he was travelling to Canada. It is an experience that he has never quite forgotten, even though he has been on hundreds of flights since then.
As the plane took ff, he stared through the window and watched as Shanghai disappeared from sight. He watched until all he could see was the endless blue ocean below him and the blue sky (a rare sight in Shanghai) above him. The inside of the plane was dark. All the windows were shut in an effort to help people sleep over the constant roaring of the airplane. The fourteen hour flight was not a pleasant one for my dad. Thoughts of the new place he was heading kept him awake all flight. When my dad arrived in Canada, he realized that English was a problem for him.
He ould understand English to some degree, because of the classes he had taken in China, but he had trouble speaking and writing. Though language was a large barrier for him, it was not too hard for him to integrate into Canadian society. People in Canada were so much kinder than people in China. They were quick to help foreigners like my dad. That is a generalization though, and my dad could not say the same thing about his boss at the University of Alberta. His boss -Wilson- was short tempered and pushed him extremely hard, putting immense amounts of work on his plate.
Wilson also worked incredibly hard himself working 6 days a week for twelve to sixteen hours a day. Two months after my dad arrived in Canada, my mom quit her job as an engineer in China in order to travel to Canada. She had not planned what she was going to do when she arrived in Canada, and just came here in order to be with my dad. When Wilson discovered this, he gave my dad a pay cut, telling him that my mom would be able to do some labour to earn money as well. That is exactly what she did for a while, working in factories and restaurants to earn money and help try to make nds meet.
Though my dad disliked Wilson for obvious reasons, he did hold some degree of respect for him. Wilson was very successful because of the tremendous amount of work he put into his research. My dad continued to work at the University of Alberta until he received a job offer from a company in Winnipeg. Soon after my dad got the job offer from Winnipeg, he quit his job working with Wilson in order to work here. He still did not intend to stay in Canada; he just wanted to have some actual experience working in the field of electrical engineering before he returned to China.
He was, however, now considering the possibility of permanently staying in Canada. My dad found that his job in Winnipeg was far less stressful than his job in Edmonton. It also paid a little better which let my mom to stop working minimum wage jobs and take some courses at the University of Manitoba. When my parents first got to Winnipeg, they lived in a dirty one bedroom basement with peeling wallpaper and a stench that could not be identified. The only source of natural light was one small window at the top right corner of the room.
The first winter in Winnipeg was a tough ne for my parents, mainly because their furnace rarely worked. It was also completely different from the winters they were used to. The weeks following the winter were just as bad. The basement my parents lived in flooded with two feet of water. The water was drained out quickly, but the room had carpet floors. Because of the lack of moving air, the soaked floors did not dry for weeks, and mould soon started to grow under them. My parents decided at that time that there was no chance that they would stay in Canada.
This all changed, however, when my mom found out that she was pregnant with me. At this time, China still had the one child policy, and my parents did not know what would happen if they decided to return to China. They had to wait at least nine months for me to be born before even considering going back to China. Although they had nine months to decide whether or not to return to China, my parents decided that they would remain in Canada in only a few weeks time. This was mainly due to the fact that it was much simpler to stay in Canada than it was to return to China. My parents had settled and made friends in Winnipeg.
My dad had a job that he enjoyed, while my mom was orking on a masters degree at the University of Manitoba, something that would take her two years to complete. Furthermore, I would be born a Canadian citizen, which would complicate matters if my parents decided to return to China. My parents also preferred the calm and relaxing lifestyle in Canada over the busy and sometimes overwhelming lifestyle in China. They believed that either choice would have a similar final destination (albeit a completely different location), so they chose the one that would be easier for them.
When my dad finally told his parents that he had decided to tay in Canada, they were surprisingly okay with it. They wanted my dad to work closer to home, but understood his reasons for why he had decided to stay in Canada. The decision to stay in Canada did not have much of an effect on how often he was able to see his parents. Even when he was in China, my dad worked several hundred kilometres from where his parents lived, and was only able to visit them two or three times a year. In the company he worked at in Winnipeg, he took business trips back to China, where he could visit his parents five or six times a year.
When I asked my dad if he would have done anything ifferently if he had the chance, he told me that he did not think it would have changed much if he had decided to return to China. His life would be more or less the same; it would just be in a different place. He had worked hard and become successful in Canada, but it also could have happened in China or anywhere else for that matter. He told me that the only actual important choice he had made was to work hard, because if he didn’t make that choice, he would probably be by himself driving a taxi under the skyscrapers in the streets of Shanghai not going anywhere in life.
