Land of welcome | The Press

Our first apartment in Montreal was in Westmount. We didn’t know we lived in a middle-class part of town, because our street was a cul-de-sac that led to a railroad. My parents had chosen it because it was opposite the convenience store where my father and his cousin worked mainly and, incidentally, my mother and me.

Officially, we were seven in this five and a half. Every day, we received friends of my little brothers who argued over whether to spend the night in their used double bed. In this small room there was also a single bed for my uncle Nghia and the rest of the space contained the washer and the three rows of hanging lines for drying our clothes. During the holidays, it was difficult to know how many there were. Family and friends, scattered all over the world, met at my parents’ house.

The twenties that we were never slept at the same time since there was a lack of beds and sofas. Also, our oven was too small to cook a turkey, which was a good thing because we much preferred Vietnamese marinated chicken wings. 40 years ago, failing to find takers, our butcher offered them to us for free. My uncle Nghia used to make macaroni and cheese for us in abundance, which only cost $1 for four boxes.

Since the chairs were missing, we pushed the table against the wall to clear the floor where one was mending a garment next to another who was recounting his bus journey from Schefferville to Montreal. My brothers left their beds to the elders to share their sleeping bags which they had received as gifts.

Since we had to pass over someone to use the bathroom, it was unimaginable to install a fir tree. Each cubic centimeter was occupied by a voice, a gesture, a laugh, a look, a sigh, a dream…

Later, my parents were able to buy a townhouse. The square footage has tripled, allowing us to decorate it with a tree branch my dad found on the sidewalk. My uncle, a former engineer, inserted it into a wheel covered with a white sheet. We hung there one by one the thousand strips of silver garlands that one of my aunts had bought on sale the previous year. Lots of photos were taken around this branch.

There were still many of us, but we no longer had to queue in front of the bathroom, since there was now a second one. My dad finally got a steady job with a big company that gave him a turkey for Christmas. We asked my dad to slice the turkey like in the movies when we had enough chairs and stools for everyone around the table. Unfortunately, it was a resounding failure since, cooked like a chicken, it had remained raw and barely thawed.

Over the years, we have become fewer and fewer. The family from Washington could pick up the one from New York, but no longer made the detour via Ottawa, since the new road safety standards no longer allowed us to be new in a car and also, because our respective sizes had doubled. . And then, there were the holidays in the sun of one, the ski trips of the other and the getaways of lovers in love. We have gradually integrated the habits of our adoptive countries according to the natural progression of our mastery of the language and our roots in our host lands.

A few years ago, at the visitor accommodation planning meeting, I was told that I could only accommodate six people in my three-story house with four large bedrooms. These numbers jumped into my head like intruders, because never before had I measured the number of visitors.

Having now become architects, dentists, computer scientists, managers, occupational therapists, business leaders, actaries, lawyers, biologists, nurses, statisticians or writers, our resources have increased while our capacity to accommodate, on the contrary, has decreased.

I had forgotten that the contiguity of our bodies nevertheless allowed my mother and my uncle, a doctoral student in mathematics at Princeton, to discuss together a problem of integral calculus of my brother. I owe to the same cup of tea, shared by three, the support of my CEGEP cousin and my aunt for the conjugation of the verb “to live” in the future perfect. Since this realization, I have knocked down some walls in my house and I do not replace the door handles in order to keep them ajar. I always invite more friends than the number of chairs available around my table. I no longer set a visitor threshold, because what my guests and I lose in comfort and intimacy, we gain in complicity and friendship.

My children thus learn, from this spontaneous reception, the sharing and multiplication of pleasure by the number, to live in the plural.