THE CHANS

March 16, 2011 Wednesday

Tonight our appointment cancelled on us, so after dinner we made a few calls and found that the Chans would be home and would be happy to have us visit. (We’ve decided that we are going to take advantage of times like that to visit some of the older active members in the ward.) These guys are our age and Gina’s 97 year old mother lives with them. She was busy in the kitchen while we were there. I commented she must be healthy and Brother Chan said, “And grumpy too.”
The Chans are from Christmas Island. Christmas Island is an island northeast of here that was discovered on Christmas Day, hence, the name. It has a huge phosphate mine on it, and when phosphate was discovered there, Asians were recruited to come there to work. Sister Chan’s parents went there from Singapore when she was 4. Brother Chan’s mother was Malaysian and married a Japanese man in Singapore. Brother Chan was orphaned at 2. His grandmother raised him until she died when he was four. He had an uncle who already had a bunch of kids, but he allowed him to sleep at his house. Brother Chan was mostly supporting himself by the time he was 7 by running errands on his bike for people. He went to Christmas Island to work when he was 17. They said Christmas Island was a beautiful, remote place to live and work. Now, however, the Australian government has made it a refugee detention center. We hear about it all the time in the news because of the unrest of all the people from the Middle East who are being held there. It’s a sad mess.
Anyway, the Chans eventually moved to Australia. Elders tracted them out. They were very busy at the time and would ignore the elders when they returned to visit. Finally they kept coming back in the cold, rainy evenings of winter, and Sister Chan felt sorry for them and let them in. The rest is history. They moved to Port Hedland so he could work in the mines up there. He served as branch president there for 5 years. They were so interesting to visit. Their daughter, Belinda Oates, is a counselor in the stake RS presidency and lives in our ward.