The laughter tells you they’re friends, but the jabs may have you believe otherwise.
A group of a dozen Caribbean-born men sitting around a table at Richmond Centre’s food court tease each other about all things personal – their looks, their lifestyles – in what’s called “fatiguing” or “mamaguying” in the Caribbean.
And if these men don’t fatigue or mamaguy each other, something is definitely wrong.
“For us, putdown is a sign of love among ourselves. In the Canadian culture, you don’t put someone down,” said Trinidad-born Ken Wong-Moon. “See, the more I put him down, the more I like him and the more he feels loved in our culture.”
It’s something polite Canadians might not understand, especially in today’s “politically correct” atmosphere, the Caribbeans explained to the Richmond News.
The Caribbean men, meeting weekly in Richmond, find common ground in music, sports, stories and “lots of B.S.”
While Richmond – and Canada – are known worldwide for drawing people from around the world, it seems it might have a rival in Caribbean countries.
The informal gathering is a microcosm of the world – the forefathers of these largely retired professionals came to the Caribbean from Africa, the Middle East, India, China – even Scotland.
While Canada draws immigrants from around the world to find a better life, the Caribbean has a less auspicious immigration history.
In the 1800s, Indians were enticed to the Caribbean as indentured servants, “to fill in where slavery had failed,” explained Bob Hosein, whose family originated from West Bengal.
Hosein’s grandparents and parents worked in sugar plantations, but by the time he was born, indentured servitude had become “an embarrassment” to the British Empire, Hosein explained, and was being transitioned out.
For this group, by the time they were reaching adulthood, their parents were pushing them to go abroad to get educated, with the hope they’d come back and have better jobs.
Like several of his Caribbean compatriots, Hosein left to go abroad to study and work in his early 20s, looking for opportunities not available in his native Trinidad.
After working and studying in England for half a dozen years, he came to the Lower Mainland in 1974 and “looked around and stayed.”
Hosein worked as a nurse for 42 years, first as a psychiatric nurse at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital at Colony Farms in Coquitlam and later as a community nurse.
For those who have lived in different countries, identity and nationality can be a complicated and evolving thing.
“When I was there, I was Trinidadian first, and anything else after; here I am a Canadian first, and anything else after,” Hosein said.
Canada escape from tensions in U.S.
In full mamaguy style, Lefroy Virgil said he likes to come meet with his fellow ex-pat Caribbeans because “I sort of enjoy hearing people telling lies.”
Virgil arrived in Vancouver via Philadelphia, having grown up in Bermuda.
He left his native country to study medicine in the United States, attending Lincoln University and graduating third in his class in 1968.
Despite his high academic standing, however, he couldn’t get a residency anywhere in the U.S.
But when he applied to Vancouver General Hospital, he was snapped up immediately.
Just days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he set out from Philadelphia driving towards Vancouver.
Racial tensions were high across the United States, and he had to sleep in his car along the way, except one night when he was able to secure a motel room.
“Things were pretty tough then,” Virgil said.
But that didn’t mean those of African and other non-Caucasian descent didn’t experience racism here in Canada.
“All of us have felt some discrimination, but we didn’t let that terminate our plans,” said David Lloyd Edwards, who hails from Trinidad.
While the food – a fusion of cuisines from many continents - and music in the Caribbean is “the best,” and Carneval is spontaneous and non-commercial, Edwards still doesn’t regret his move to Canada.
“I think most of us, when we left Trinidad, we left with the intention of coming back,” said Edwards, who also joins the Friday group regularly in Richmond.
But that wasn’t how it always worked out.
After studying biology and math at UBC, Edwards ended up working as a school teacher in Surrey for 25 years while living in Port Moody.
The Wong-Moon brothers, Ken and Wilkie, were both sent abroad from Trinidad to study, following in the footsteps of their older brother.
Their mother had come from China to the Caribbean through an arranged marriage – she was an only child, who was highly educated and spoke seven Chinese dialects.
In the mid-1930s, her parents were worried as the Communists were taking over China, so they sent her to Trinidad to be married.
She worked as an interpreter for the Chinese consulate, but when it came time for her adult children to get educated, they were “shipped off.”
“She insisted we all come abroad to get educated,” said Ken, whose brother Wilkie also takes part in the Richmond Centre group.
There is a deep-seated childhood Canadian connection for some of the men meeting at Richmond Centre.
Ian MacLeod, conceived in Trinidad but whose ancestors were Scottish, is considered an honorary Caribbean in the Friday group.
His Canadian father and mother were missionaries and teachers at Naparima College in San Fernando, Trinidad, where they met. They married in Trinidad but left a month before MacLeod was born.
Three of the men who meet at Richmond Centre remember attending Naparima College and being taught by MacLeod’s father, including Aga Khan whose family originated from Afghanistan.
After graduating from Naparima College, considered one of the most prestigious high schools in Trinidad, Khan came to Vancouver to study biochemistry at UBC in 1957, graduating in 1965.
After marrying a girl from Richmond, that’s where he finally settled and lived for about 20 years, later moving to Ladner.
He worked as a medical technologist at what’s now the BC Cancer Agency as well as other labs.
Steel bands – the Caribbean sound
When he arrived at UBC, Ken Wong-Moon wanted to study guitar and become a musician, but he also studied sciences. This led to a teaching job at Cambie secondary where he taught science and guitar for 34 years.
In the meantime, his older brother, Wilson, who had come to the Lower Mainland about a decade earlier, had started a steel band called The Moonlighters.
Ken joined his brother’s band but he felt the music was out-dated, reflecting more the 1950s than the 1970s.
He started arranging the music and bringing it up to date.
The Moonlighters played at different festivals, and one of their regular hangout was the Cosmos Club in North Vancouver where the cricket club practiced and played.
Rivalling the Moonlighters was another Caribbean steel band, the Sunset Cavaliers, which Virgil joined in 1968 and which played at the PNE, the Calgary Stampede and various music festivals.
Playing the festival circuit, members of the two ex-pat Caribbean bands got to know each other.
But there was no competition between the two bands, according to Virgil.
“We were bigger, more sexy and stronger,” he said.
Cricket plays part in Canadian-Caribbean experience
The Anglo influence on the Caribbean countries resulted in cricket being one of the most popular sports – something many of the ex-pats played when then came to Canada.
Stevenson Deare was part of this cricket scene, having learned to play as a boy in Barbados.
Deare remembers a game in 1964 when the Australian team came to Barbados to play and the game went on for two days and ended in a draw with hundreds of runs by both teams. He points out the “greatest player to play the game,” Sir Garfield Sobers, was from Barbados.
Two years after he arrived in Canada, Deare was chosen for the Canadian national cricket team.
As a youth in Barbados, Deare always wanted to come to Canada, having met many Canadians while working as a bellboy at the Caribbean Hotel in Bridgetown.
While he has good memories of growing up in Barbados, he said it was hard to make a living there and came to Canada looking for a better standard of living and finding what he calls “the best place to live in the world.”
The weekly informal gathering allows the friends to socialize in the context of a “common life experience from when we were young,” explained Khan.
The Caribbean ex-pats live partly in the past – in those shared memories from their childhood – but they’ve got their eye on current events and what’s happening in their community.
But eventually, it all steers back to the Caribbean experience, be it as friends back home or friends in their new-found home.
