Person

Mar, Mary

• 馬彩雲

• Bornet, Toinan
• Bornet, Toivan
• Mah, Mary
• Wong, Mary

1922-2020

Mary Mar was born in 1922 in Nanaimo, B.C. in a tiny Chinatown community that no longer exists.

In explaining Mary's Chinese name, her daughter, Janice Mar Wong, writes “Toi… has multiple meanings, multiple attributes. 'Toi' can mean lucky, choice, colourful, beautiful. 'Won' means cloud. My mom’s name, 'Toi Won', translates to Lucky Cloud, Choice Cloud or Beautiful Cloud. We called her ‘Mary Lucky Cloud.’”

Mary grew up in a tiny Chinatown community that was the third settlement of Nanaimo’s Chinese community. Uprooted due to rising land values and pushed beyond the city limits due to cultural tensions, the community shifted locations twice before finally settling at the north end of Pine Street, alongside a ravine, on the edge of the city’s dumping ground.

Mary's mother passed away when she was just one-and-a-half years old, but she was fortunate to have a warm, gregarious and loving grandmother, named Lung Kee Moo or Lung Kee Missus. Her grandfather, Mah Nyet Doon, also died before she was born, but “she remembers him through the people he left behind, his legacy in the community and the businesses he fostered,” as her daughter, Janice, recalls. She had a sister named Beatrice Mar (Mah Toi Mai / Toily Bornet) and a brother Mar Shall Toy (Cecil Mar) (C.I.45 #12631).

Mary’s grandmother kept a large family garden. On summer evenings, Mary and her sister shucked corn and hauled steaming pots of it down the boardwalks and around the vibrant mahjong houses, selling the fresh corn for ten cents a cob.

On New Year’s Day, her grandmother visited families in the community while Mary, dressed in her best clothes, helped distribute dim sum goodies.

By the age of nine, she was living on the edge of Vancouver’s bustling Chinatown.

By thirteen, she was removed from school and sent to China on a one-way ticket, which was all her family could afford at the time. She was given the responsibility of escorting her ailing grandmother back to the homeland. She found village life to be quite challenging – she missed her friends in Canada as well as the many freedoms of her childhood.

In 1938, after almost three years of village life, her father, sister, and brother finally saved enough money to pay for her return passage back to Canada. Not long after her return, she met her future husband, Dennis Edward Wong, at the Leap Year Dance in Victoria's Chinatown on New Year’s Eve in 1940. They relocated to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan in 1944 where they raised their four children.

In a book about her parents called "CHOW: From China to Canada," Janice, once wrote, “My mom is always hungry. To this day, at 96, she still believes she will sleep more soundly with a warm, full tummy. Her stories, the memories of Nanaimo Chinatown and her village in China, slip back through time and link my siblings and I to our culture, our race, and our food traditions. Traditions fade, language falls away, but the kinship through food endures.”

Mary Lucky Cloud passed away in Vancouver on February 7, 2020.

Mar, Shu (1890-[1952])

Mar, Beatrice (1919-2001)

Wong, Dennis Edward (1917-1999)

Description supplied by collector/curator