Lum, Raymond
Raymond Lum is a photographer who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father, Ming Lum (also known as ‘Tommy’), immigrated to Canada in 1922 from China. When Ming returned to China to visit in 1929, his family arranged for him to marry Irene Lum (née Tseng Yook Lahn) who came from a neighbouring village. The couple were separated for a decade during the Exclusion Period (1923-1947), while Irene lived with her in-laws in China. Raymond describes this period of separation as ‘awful’ because Irene was treated poorly by her mother-in-law and was not permitted to see her own family. In 1940, Irene came to Canada as a ‘paper daughter’, taking on the identity of a deceased woman in order to join her husband. She departed on one of the last boats leaving Hong Kong harbour before the Japanese captured the city. Ming and Irene worked side-by-side at Canada Produce, a busy grocery store on Granville Street in Vancouver. The Lums raised Raymond in an apartment above the store, and Irene had little time for socializing because she was, in Raymond’s words, ‘bound to the store.’ Raymond describes growing up in Vancouver, caught between the traditional expectations of his parents’ generation and his own aspirations as a Canadian-born youth.
Irene Lum’s smile in this photo belies the difficult period of adjustment that she faced when she first arrived in Canada. Taken shortly after her arrival in Canada, Irene stands beside her husband and their grocery store’s delivery truck. Irene’s son Raymond says his mother found the cold weather and unheated apartment difficult to bear. She also had to take on a heavy workload in the store: ‘lifting heavy boxes, putting up stock, preparing fruits and vegetables. It was a physically demanding job,’ says Raymond.
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