oral histories

Let’s start with where you were born.

I was born in Vancouver General Hospital and I’m the first born in my family. I have two siblings: a brother and a sister. Mom and dad lived in Langley when I was first born. I think I lived there when I was about a year old and then we moved to Richmond. I’ve lived here, what I consider to be my whole life. We used to always laugh and say “There weren’t very many people now who were born and raised in Richmond.” So, I’m one of those. I’m a baby boomer. All the new schools that were built way back when . . . we went to so many schools.

Why is Richmond so special to your family, especially to your father?

Richmond was a very small farming community. Everybody knew everybody. My dad and mom came to Richmond because of the horses. My dad fell in love with horses. We always laughed and said, you know, “Dad’s first love was horses and then maybe his kids” [laughs]. Our family album is the winners of my dad’s race horses because most people didn’t take a lot of pictures back then, but every time a horse won dad took everybody to Chinatown for dinner and we always had a picture taken. At the race track that’s part of winning. You’d go to the winner’s circle and you’d have a picture taken. You can see us grow up in those pictures, until the last winner in 1994, just before my dad died. So, a lot of history through the horses.

What was it like growing up in Richmond?

Lansdowne Road is where my memories of growing up and going to school are really more formed. I just remember feeling never worried as a kid. You know, you played, you did things, we wandered, but Lansdowne Road ran between Garden City and Number Three Road and there were only two street lights along that stretch. You never worried about it because all the neighbours knew who you were, you knew who they were, everybody kept an eye out for everybody. On Lansdowne Road we had people from all kinds of backgrounds. We called ourselves the League of Nations because there were Germans, Dutch, Japanese, Scottish, everybody, and nobody was a “whatever.” They were just neighbours and the same with us. We weren’t the East Indians that lived down the road. We were the Gills that lived down the road.

How has Richmond changed over the years?

I was a high school counselor for most of my teaching career and so I had a great time. I retired from Palmer officially in 2004 and the world had changed a lot by then. Richmond was different. It wasn’t a little town anymore. It wasn’t farmland and horses and all that. It was high-rises. When I grew up they couldn’t build anything over three-storeys in Richmond. I saw poverty when I started teaching and counselling at Palmer. I saw inner city, which surprised me. People that lived in an apartment by the Lansdowne Mall, which would’ve been the Lansdowne Racetrack — living in apartments with virtually no furniture. You know, just a TV and mattresses on the floor. So Richmond has become a very different place to live. It’s not the community that I grew up in. It’s the community that I still live in but I don’t feel as connected to it as I once did. It could be anywhere in the world now. In my mind we’ve lost some of that neighbour-ness.

What was your father’s journey from India to Canada like?

When Dad came to Canada it was through, again, a series of “You can stay here or you can go there” because India was part of the British Empire or Commonwealth Empire back then. Men travelled, women didn’t. People had come to Canada. A lot of Sikhs had come during the Boer War in the 1900s, so they saw the country and they went back and talked about the country. When Dad came he knew nobody here but he came, like most people did then, because his papers said he was the son of so and so. He wasn’t the son of so and so. He was an uncle but he had come to Canada. When he came here he didn’t speak English. I’d never seen a picture of my dad with a turban. My dad was always clean shaven. My dad was Canadian, not Indian.

What was it like for your father to start a life in Canada?

When he came here, he ended up in Ocean Falls which is way up north, right? Because there was a lumber mill there. They went wherever there was work. My dad said that he walked from Vancouver to Kamloops and picked vegetables along the way because they were broke and they needed money, and they travelled where the money was.

You mentioned that in a lot of ways your family was Canadian and you didn’t feel like you were East Indian. Have there been other instances where you felt you were living between cultures?

When we were kids Dad used to drag us to the temple every Sunday. We’d all have to get in his car and go to the church. He’d be out there a half an hour before the rest of us and tapping his foot because that’s just who he was. So we went to the temple but didn’t really understand what was going on because everything was in Punjabi and my mom and dad did not really speak Punjabi to us. Apparently I was bilingual before I went to school. I don’t remember that. So I can hear the words in my head but if I try and say them it comes out unrecognizable, you know? So I don’t speak Punjabi and that’s a regret that I have. Mom and Dad, the only time they ever spoke to us in Punjabi is if there was somebody around and they didn’t want them to know what we were doing or if we had gotten in trouble or something.

Yet, the religion, Dad, there’s some beliefs that he passed on to us. Supposedly, the day you’re born your life is laid out before you and there’s not a lot you can do to alter that. You live your life the best you can and when your journey reaches its end, it reaches its end. That’s what he always said to us. So don’t cry, and that was the big rule, don’t cry. When my dad died we had, in many ways, an Indian funeral. You know, people have to come to the house and offer their condolences. Because I was the oldest and because, you know, I lived in Richmond, everybody came to my house. So we had maybe hundreds and hundreds of people come through the house which for someone who doesn’t know the culture, that would be very hard.

Do you have anything else you would like to say?

I went back to university to do a post-degree thing and I had to interview an immigrant so I thought “Well, I’ll interview my dad.” So I interviewed my dad and I picked up a few things but I didn’t ask him nearly enough questions. I wish I could have . . . if I had a message coming out of this, it is to talk to each other, ask questions.

Years ago, I wrote something called The Lansdowne Road Story and that theme resonates all the time, like, we’re all here. We should be able to celebrate that we’re all here and we’re more alike than are different. I like that all I needed to know I learned in kindergarten; be nice to each other, if you borrow something put it back [laughs]. Life lessons don’t have to be huge and I’m really worried about Mr. Trump [laughs]. Let’s hope the world is still a better place.