Photo by Fiona Tinwei Lam
“1935-August… 1000 young cherry trees are donated to [the Parks] Board by Mr. and Mrs Uyeda. These are the first in the city and will be planted-out when more mature and funds available.” -R. Mike Steele, The First 100 Years: An Illustrated Celebration
“In April 1942, three months after the Uyeda family had been “removed” from Vancouver, seven hundred of their [1000] donated cherry trees were planted out ….” – Nina Shoroplova, A Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver’s Stanley Park
I search among the most venerable,
burly trunks, gnarled branches offering delicate
pink and white profusions to the sky.
Does even one remain
from your thousandfold gift?
No longer festooning Cambie boulevard.
No longer amid the frothy sonnet of trees petalling
Shakespeare’s Garden into spring.
Not among grafted cultivars ornamenting
park pathways toward the ‘Ojochin’s’
rivering arms, where the fluted pillar
of the Japanese Canadian war memorial rises high,
its lantern’s flame extinguished
in 1942: whole neighbourhoods gutted, erased–
schools, churches, factories, farms.
Uprooted to an Exclusion Zone ghost town,
your Dunbar home and downtown business seized,
bolts of silk unraveling in others’ hands,
you would never see Vancouver
blossom with your thousand trees.
Silken, pale pink petals flutter
over palimpsests. Mirage of shimmering
groves in a could have been city.
What survives?
Returns?
By the causeway, a quartet
of ‘Somei-yoshino,’ ancient companions, brocaded
with lichen and moss, scarred and scabbed,
anchored by their own deep roots,
can still remember to bloom.
And decades later,
a granddaughter—Sakura songs
from a once banished branch.
________________________
NOTE:
The ‘Ojochin’ is a rare type of cherry tree donated by the Japanese Government in 1925 for the Japanese Canadian War memorial in Stanley Park. Like the ‘Ojochin,’ the four ‘Somei-yoshino’ trees planted in Stanley Park also grow from their own roots. The memorial commemorates 54 Japanese Canadians who died fighting with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War I. 168 survived, only to fight again for the right to vote.
After being forcibly relocated to Kaslo, the Uyeda family moved to Montreal after the war. One of the Uyeda family’s granddaughters, acclaimed composer, Leslie Uyeda, moved from Montreal to Vancouver to live and work. In 2012, she accepted degrees on behalf of her two aunts, Mariko Uyeda and Lily Yuriko Uyeda, at a special ceremony at UBC in 2012 to recognize and honour Japanese Canadian students whose education was disrupted in 1942 when they were exiled from the BC Coast.
Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of three poetry books and a children’s book. Fiona Tinwei Lam’s work also appears in over 40 anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry and Best Canadian Essays. Her work has won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford prize and been shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer, and has co-edited two nonfiction anthologies. Her award-winning poetry videos made in collaboration with filmmakers have screened at festivals internationally. A former lawyer, Fiona presently teaches at SFU Continuing Studies. Fiona was Vancouver’s poet laureate 2022-2024.