Family and Early Life
Clarkson's ancestry lies with the Hakka in Taishan, Guangdong, China, from where her paternal grandfather (伍培 Pinyin: Wǔ Péi) emigrated in the late 19th century to Chiltern, Australia. There, he operated a general store called Willie Ah Poy Fruitier and Confectioner, Ah Poy being his name in the vocative, based on the Taishanese pronunciation, and what Australian immigration officials heard Poy enunciate in response to their request for his name. Poy's first son, William (伍英才 Pinyin: Wǔ Yīngcái), was born in Victoria but was later sent back to Taishan, from where he made his way to Hong Kong. There, he worked with his father for the Canadian government and met and married Ethel Poy, with whom he had two children: Neville, born October 29, 1935, and Adrienne, born February 10, 1939. The elder went on to become a plastic surgeon in Toronto and married Vivienne Poy, who herself became a Senator.
Clarkson describes one of her earliest memories as that of hiding in several Hong Kong basements during the Japanese invasion of the territory in 1941. It was only through his Canadian government connections that her father gained his family the opportunity in 1942 to flee the occupation to Canada, as part of the repatriating of Canadian government staff from the fallen city. Even so, the Chinese Immigration Act, 1923, prevented the Poys' immediate entry into the country until the Department of External Affairs intervened and cited an unfilled quota in the prisoner of war exchange programme with the Japanese Imperial Forces that would permit the Poy family free passage into Canada. The family settled in Ottawa, though William had lost almost all of his substantial fortune, and the Poys lived in a cramped duplex. Clarkson attended public school in the city and, in October 1951, was lined up with her class to see Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh (later Queen Elizabeth II), as the royal motorcade passed through the city.
Read more about this topic: Adrienne Clarkson
Famous quotes containing the words family, early and/or life:
“Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;Mthe heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
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“One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)