Reflections on family, migration, and the red threads that connect us
Every year, on the second Monday of October, Canadians gather to celebrate Thanksgiving. It is a time of harvest, family, shared meals, and gratitude for the abundance of the land.
Unlike the more commercialized American Thanksgiving, our Canadian celebration often feels quieter. There are no great expectations beyond gathering around a table, enjoying a meal, and giving thanks for the blessings of another year.
Yet, as I reflect on Thanksgiving, I find myself looking beyond the turkey, the autumn colours, and the familiar traditions.
I think about the generations who came before me, the journeys they undertook, the hardships they endured, and the lives they helped make possible.
And I wonder how often we sit at a table of abundance without remembering the sacrifices that brought us there.
A Harvest Rooted in History
Long before Canada became a nation, Indigenous peoples across this land observed seasonal ceremonies of gratitude, giving thanks for the harvest, the earth, and the gifts that sustained their communities.
European settlers brought their own traditions of harvest thanksgiving. In 1578, Martin Frobisher and his crew held a service of thanks following their perilous Arctic voyage. Later, French settlers and other communities continued their own customs of thanksgiving.
Over time, these different histories contributed to what would become the Canadian holiday.
In 1957, Parliament formally established the second Monday of October as a day of general thanksgiving to Almighty God for Canada’s bountiful harvest.
Yet Canada’s history is more complicated than the familiar image of a welcoming country blessed with abundant land.
The land was already home to Indigenous peoples, whose histories stretch back thousands of years. And for many who arrived seeking a better life, the promise of Canada was accompanied by hardship, exclusion, and sacrifice.
My own family’s story belongs to that history.
From the Gold Mountain to the Thanksgiving Table
In my memoir, Red Thread Reclaimed, I explored the journeys of my ancestors from Taishan, Guangdong, to Canada.
My great-grandfather came to what Chinese migrants called the Gold Mountain, a distant place associated with opportunity and the hope of a better future.
He arrived as a labourer in the early twentieth century, saving what little he earned so that his son, and eventually his grandson, might follow.
My father often spoke of his pioneering spirit.
My great-grandfather eventually established a fish stall in a Vancouver market. But life was not easy. My father remembered stories of white hooligans overturning his stall, scattering the fish, breaking crates, and destroying the livelihood he was struggling to build.
Yet he began again.
With perseverance and savings, he eventually opened a restaurant in Chinatown, where language, food, community, and familiarity offered a measure of belonging.
I sometimes think about that little fish stall.
How many times did he have to gather the scattered pieces and begin again? What sustained his determination when the very country in which he hoped to build a future made that future so difficult?
I cannot know his innermost thoughts.
I know only the stories passed down by my father.
My grandfather’s journey was different. He arrived during the years of the Chinese head tax, when Chinese migrants were required to pay an increasingly burdensome fee simply to enter Canada.
He worked alongside his father, but tuberculosis interrupted his life. He returned to China and died shortly afterward.
My father would sometimes speak of the tragedy of his early death, wondering whether his life might have been saved had circumstances been different.
These are not merely historical events to me.
They are fragments of lives that eventually became part of my own.
The Doors That Were Closed
Canada’s Chinese immigration history carries painful contradictions.
Chinese labourers helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway, contributing to the development of a nation that would later impose increasingly restrictive immigration laws upon them.
The Chinese head tax began in 1885. In 1923, the Chinese Immigration Act, commonly known as the Exclusion Act, virtually prohibited Chinese immigration.
For nearly twenty-four years, families were separated, opportunities were denied, and countless lives were shaped by restrictions imposed because of ancestry.
The Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947, although discriminatory immigration restrictions continued until later reforms, culminating in the removal of explicitly race-based selection criteria in 1967.
My father came to Canada as a young man in the 1940s, carrying his own experiences and the inherited stories of those who had come before him.
His generation lived through a changing Canada, one that was gradually beginning to confront some of its discriminatory policies.
I am among the generations who inherited the possibilities that earlier generations struggled to secure.
And this is where Thanksgiving becomes deeply personal.
The Red Thread of Gratitude
In Red Thread Reclaimed, I wrote about the stories that are told, retold, sometimes embellished, and sometimes lost.
Family history is rarely a neat collection of documents and dates.
Much of what I know came through my father’s recollections.
I have no photograph of my great-grandfather. The old documents are gone. My father discarded them years ago, not realizing how precious they would one day become.
What remains is a gravestone in Vancouver and the stories he left behind.
Yet those stories continue to live.
They connect a small village in Taishan to a fish stall in Vancouver, a restaurant in Chinatown, and eventually to the life I know today.
I call this connection the red thread.
It is not simply a thread of ancestry, but of memory, perseverance, identity, and the responsibility to carry forward what might otherwise be forgotten.
And perhaps gratitude is also part of that thread.
Not gratitude that ignores injustice or romanticizes hardship, but gratitude that recognizes how much of our present lives rests upon the efforts of those who came before us.
I can be thankful for Canada while acknowledging its painful history.
I can appreciate the opportunities my family eventually received without forgetting the doors that were once closed.
Gratitude does not require us to forget.
Sometimes, it asks us to remember more deeply.
More Than a Harvest of the Land
Today, Thanksgiving means something different to me than it did when I was younger.
Of course, I still appreciate the familiar traditions: the autumn colours, the food, the gathering of family, and the simple pleasure of sharing a meal.
But I also see another kind of harvest.
A harvest of generations.
The courage of a great-grandfather who began again after his livelihood was destroyed.
The hopes of a grandfather whose life was cut short.
The stories of a father who carried the memories of those who preceded him.
And the lives of children and grandchildren who may never fully understand the sacrifices that made their opportunities possible.
As a Christian, I also see gratitude as something more than an annual celebration.
It is a disposition of the heart, a recognition that much of what we receive has come through the lives, labour, generosity, and love of others.
And behind these ordinary human acts, I see the quiet presence of God’s grace.
Not a grace that erased suffering or prevented injustice, but one that I believe continued to work through imperfect lives and difficult circumstances.
Perhaps that is what I am most thankful for this year.
Not simply what I possess, but what I have inherited.
Not merely the abundance before me, but the lives that helped bring me here.
And not only the blessings I recognize, but the countless acts of perseverance and love that I may never fully know.
This Thanksgiving, as we gather around our tables, perhaps we might remember that every family carries its own history of journeys, sacrifices, losses, and hopes.
Some of those stories are spoken.
Others remain quiet.
But they are part of the harvest too.
For the harvest is not only what the land has yielded. It is also what generations of human lives have made possible.
And for all of this, I give thanks.
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving.
— Linda Lok
Author of Red Thread Reclaimed: Symbols, Stories, and Grace Across Oceans
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