By John Hua
They call them parachute kids — children of immigrant families who are left in Canada, while their parents live overseas.
But Chinese parachute children in Ottawa are different than their wealthy counterparts in Vancouver and Toronto, says Jonas Ma, president of the Ottawa chapter of the Chinese Canadian National Council.
Ma says Chinese parachute children in Ottawa are a byproduct of the collapse of the high-tech industry.
“A lot of (these parents) came here to work,” Ma says. “Not to just buy a nice house and establish the family here, then return to do business.”
He says the common perception of parachute kids is that they are children from upper-class China and Hong Kong, who are dropped into thriving cities such as Vancouver and Toronto to settle, adjust and and continue with their education..
In such cases, he says, “you have people who have money” and parents who never intended to work in Canada.
Ma says Ottawa’s Chinese community is different from Toronto or Vancouver because, despite being educated, it does not have as many assets or as much wealth.
A wave of Chinese immigrants came to Ottawa in hopes of finding jobs during the high-tech boom of the 1990s.
But after the high-tech industry crashed in 2001, many of these immigrants had no choice but to return to their countries of origin to find work, leaving their families behind.
The children are left in Ottawa because there is better access to education and other opportunities, Ma says.
Esther Yeung, a front-line worker at the Ottawa Chinese Community Services Centre, says many Chinese immigrants who leave are experts in information technology and computers.
But without a high-tech industry to employ them, there’s little reason to stay.
“The job market in China right now is far better than here in Ottawa,” Yeung says.
As a result, she says the number of parachute cases in Ottawa has been rising over the past three or four years.
Parachute children aren’t being left alone, she says. Grandparents often assume legal guardianship.
But a more common scenario in Ottawa is children being left under the care of the mother, Yeung says.
It is a growing trend being addressed by the Ottawa Chinese Community Centre, which offers a wide variety of support workshops for young mothers whose husbands have left them behind to work in other countries.
Behnam Behnia, a social work professor at Carleton University, says the families who are left behind face both social and financial hardships.
Research shows parachute families cope with social challenges on top of dealing with an absent father, he says.
“On one hand they lose their father; on the other hand, (they feel that) society is a racist society.”
Ma sympathizes with theunfortunate situation of Chinese immigrants in Ottawa, and the financial motivations behind the difficult decision to leave their families.
“If they are well off,” he says, “they would probably just be happy in Vancouver and enjoy the nice weather.”