All Our Father's Relations

The story of the Grant siblings - Howard E. Grant, Helen Callbreath, Larry Grant and Gordon J. Grant - now in the twilight of their lives, and their connection to their mother's First Nations (Musqueam) heritage and reconnecting to their father's southern Chinese heritage is told. Their parents, Agnes Grant and Tim Hing Tong, met when he emigrated to Vancouver from China in 1920 and worked on the leased farmland on the Musqueam Reserve in the southwestern corner of the city with his family. Because of the racist policies of the Canadian government of the time (as demonstrated through the Indian Act and the head tax), Agnes and Tim were separated when they began to have children, who lived mainly with her on the reserve, with Tim having lived most of his married life in Chinatown. Despite being denied Indian status, the four offspring got to know their Musqueam heritage well living with their mother, who was one of the community historians and storytellers, while they, out of circumstances even beyond not seeing their father much, even when they did live with him in Chinatown, did not know much about his side of the family, especially as their Chinese Vancouver area relations were hesitant to visit the homeland and the ancestral village for fear of not being allowed back in Canada, that fear, again, due largely to the historically racist policies against the Chinese. Ultimately with the encouragement of their extended family on their father's side in Vancouver, the three brothers, with some of those extended family members, head back to China and their father's ancestral village of Sei Moon in Guangdong province to reconnect with that side of their heritage, not knowing if they would be welcomed seeing as to their First Nations blood on their mother's side.