OTTAWA — She grew up to be a gifted political organizer and beloved step-mom, but Olivia Chow’s teenage years as a new immigrant in Toronto were marked by abuse and family dysfunction.
In her new memoir dubbed My Journey, details of which trickled out Friday ahead of next Tuesday’s national release, the NDP MP, former Toronto city councillor and widow of late NDP leader Jack Layton recounted her early days in Toronto after immigrating from Hong Kong at the age of 13.
She calls it a period of “great loneliness and great shame,” largely because her father Wilson Wai Sun Chow had a problem — he viciously beat her mother.
He’d always been abusive, she wrote, but after arriving in Canada both her father, a former school superintendent, and her mother Ho Sze, a former teacher, “suffered a perilous decline in both income and status.”
Her mother eventually found work in a hotel laundry, while her father took odd jobs delivering Chinese food or driving taxis.
“My father had been beating my mother even before I was born, but these beatings now escalated as new strains and pressures rocked them both,” she wrote, later recounting a time he struck her on the head leaving a bloody gash.
Chow, who was too embarrassed to bring friends home during this period, would sometimes get between her “warring parents” and once nearly killed her father to put an end to the abuse but “something stayed (her) hand.”
“I was in my late thirties or early forties when I was finally able to forgive him,” she wrote of her father who also shared her passion for art and often doted on his daughter. “It took me that long to discover what state of grace is — it’s achieving the peace and freedom of living in the moment and not allowing past wrongs to colour the present.”
From the challenges new immigrants face, to domestic violence, to the importance of taking care of seniors — she notes her mother’s pension was a “lump sum of just over three thousand dollars” when she retired — Chow explains that in many ways, her own experiences are what fuelled her entry into politics.
The 315-page memoir focuses a great deal on Chow’s accomplishments in municipal politics — getting the topic of homosexuality into the high school sex-ed program, ensuring the city’s poorest children had access to free dental care and convincing city hall to overturn a knee-jerk plan to ban raves after a university student died at one after taking ecstasy.
In many ways, the book could be her election platform if indeed, she decides to contest Rob Ford for mayor of Toronto.
She said this week she’s “seriously considering” stepping down from federal politics to throw her hat in the ring but has “yet to make that decision.”
At the very least, it presents an alternate vision for the city that stands in stark contrast to that of its current crack-smoking, tax-cutting, anti-union boss.
Of course the book wouldn’t be complete without tales of her decades-long romance with Layton. Chow dedicates an entire chapter to the “four nanoseconds” it took for him to fall in love with her at a charity auction.
Although a number of the stories have been shared previously by the ever-open couple and also in a recent CBC biopic following Layton’s death, others are fresh, funny, inspiring and even heart-wrenching.
For instance, she blames herself to some extent for Layton’s “ghastly pallor” the day he told Canadians he was stepping aside as leader of the official Opposition to battle a new, aggressive cancer, as she was the one who kept asking for “more makeup.”
Major revelations, however, are few.
Chow, for instance, promises she will “always honour” her husband’s wish to keep secret the details of the cancer that finally claimed his life.
