Lam Chi Phat: The Chronicle of an Overseas Chinese Family

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Montreal author Tri Lam lovingly recounts the history of his extended
family in this concise homage to courage and perseverance. Those
qualities served the Lam family well during their lives amid the turmoil
and change that swept South China and Southeast Asia during much of the
20th century

Like many of his generation, Lam Chi, Tri Lam’s grandfather, had seen
many friends and relatives sojourn beyond the crowded coastal counties
of Guangdong province. Many went to North America, though by the early
1900s French-controlled Vietnam, especially the fertile Mekong Delta,
was the destination of choice for Chinese farmers attuned to the rhythms
of intensive rice cultivation. It was here the elder Lam slowly built a
small empire based on rice trading and milling that absorbed his sons
and their families and provided a comfortable living in one of Asia’s
most productive regions.

Despite considerable material success, the Lam family was still unable
to escape larger political changes or acts of petty jealousy.
Kidnappings and large ransoms paid to the Communist Vietminh in the late
1940s and expulsion from Cambodia in the 1960s with other Chinese were
examples of how vulnerable ethnic Chinese were in much of Southeast
Asia. The family’s greatest losses, both financial and emotional,
occurred during the mid-1970s when South Vietnam fell after years of war
with Communist forces. Although the resulting diaspora of ethnic Chinese
from Vietnam was painful, Tri Lam credits his grandparents’ and
great-uncles’ strength and the living memory of their steadfastness as
crucial to his generation’s determination to succeed in their adoptive
countries.