By Joanne Stassen
Helping a client pick out a snowblower probably isn’t in the job description of most bank managers.
But that’s exactly the kind of thing Katie Ng, manager of the Bank of Nova Scotia on Somerset Street West, has done for clients who have recently immigrated to Canada.
“These were people who never faced a day of winter in their lives,” Ng says.
“I went out to Sears and I remember picking out a Toro with them. They trusted me because I showed them how to use their lawn mower in the summer.”
The bank is just one of many businesses to discover that meeting the needs of new immigrants sometimes means going beyond the ordinary.
Joan Sun McGarry, a funeral director at Hulse, Playfair and McGarry Funeral Homes says sometimes it’s as simple as loaning a grieving family a CD or giving them a little extra time to make decisions.
Ng, who immigrated from Hong Kong the 1970s, sees helping newcomers with the transition to life in Canada as an extension of the bank’s regular services.
“We explain how to read the bank statement,” Ng says.
“And when they are coming with school-aged children we also help them out with how to register the child in school.”
At Ng’s branch, in the heart of Ottawa’s Chinatown, staff offer regular banking services with a multicultural twist.
They serve clients in English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian and Vietnamese.
“We have about 50 per cent Chinese-speaking customers and about 30 per cent English and French-speaking. Of the 20 per cent remaining, there are Somali, East Indian and other ethnic groups,” she says.
Ng says many of her clients speak very good English, but because banking is a complex and personal matter, they appreciate being able to speak to their banker in their native language.
One 59-year-old customer, who immigrated to Canada five years ago and works at Kowloon Market a few blocks away from the bank, says he chose Ng’s branch because the staff speak Cantonese.
“If I have a problem, I can explain it to them because they can understand my language,” he says with the help of a translator. “It’s a good service.”
Many of the bank’s newer clients are Chinese immigrants who came to Canada in the 1990s as part of the Immigrant Investor Program, a government plan that allows people to immigrate if they invest large sums of money in the country.
“Investor immigrants are our bread and butter,” Ng says. “Most are bringing in a minimum of a million dollars. When they get here it’s not just opening an account and getting a mortgage.
“We spend three times the amount of time with a mortgage client who speaks Chinese because many are first-time home buyers.
“They don’t know that we have six different types of mortgage options. You have to explain everything in detail.”
The walls of the business office at Hulse, Playfair and McGarry Funeral Homes on McLeod Street are covered with hockey-themed artwork.
The firm is probably best known for providing state funerals, but Sun McGarry says they’re also the largest provider of funeral services to the Chinese community in Ottawa.
Sun McGarry, who immigrated to Canada from China in 1994, directs most of the funerals for Chinese clients.
She says Hulse, Playfair and McGarry have actually been offering funeral services to the Chinese community since the 1920s — long before she arrived.
“Since the mid-1990s the majority of Chinese people immigrated from mainland China,” says Sun McGarry.
Their needs are different from those of the Chinese clients the firm has been serving for decades.
Chinese families who have been living in Canada since the earlier waves of Chinese immigration tend to choose an earth burial and a traditional Buddhist funeral, complete with incense burners, an offering table and special good-luck envelopes filled with a coin and a candy.
After years of communist rule, Sun McGarry says more recent immigrants from mainland China are “more apt to choose cremation and they don’t tend to follow the same practices traditional families follow.”
Sun McGarry spends time with all her clients, whatever their background.
As a funeral director, it’s her job to walk them through all the things that need to be done to lay a loved one to rest.
But like Ng, Sun McGarry says she finds recent immigrants from China often need a little extra time and attention.
She says she thinks that’s because they’re simply not used to having so much choice.
“In China, all of the funeral homes are government owned,” says Sun McGarry.
“It’s a monopoly and you take whatever is offered to you. In Canada, all of a sudden it’s totally up to you what you want to do.”
Sun McGarry says sometimes the extra time is spent fielding questions she would never get from a family that has lived in Canada for a long time.
“They ask very blunt questions about what happens to the body of their loved one.
“In fact, they even use the Chinese word for corpse, a word we never use in the funeral business.”
The first time she got those kinds of questions she was puzzled — until she remembered that in many smaller cities and villages in China family members prepare the body for burial themselves.
“I have to assure them the bodies are in good care and treated with dignity. They want to know what happens to the body overnight and I have to assure them we have a good security system.”
Sun McGarry says being a recent immigrant herself helps her provide better service to her customers.
She’s never had to help a client buy a snowblower, but she has loaned CDs from her personal collection of traditional Chinese music to grieving families.
“It gives our business an edge to have someone from within the community,” she says.
Sun McGarry says Chinese clients — especially recent immigrants — appreciate being able to deal with someone who can speak their language, and understands where they are coming from.
It’s hard enough to communicate clearly in your native tongue when you’ve just lost someone you love, she says.
Imagine having to do it in a new language. Sometimes, because she understands the culture, certain things don’t need to be communicated verbally at all.
“It’s nice you understand, without us having to explain it to you,” one client told her.