Kelly Egan
Photograph by: The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa Citizen
By Kelly Egan
The Ottawa Citizen
This month, in the heart of Chinatown, the Mekong Grocery was reduced to piles of brick and clouds of dust, leaving an audible sigh of relief among the ruins.
The building at 816 Somerset St., a burned-out shell since April 2005, is now gone and buried, the lot returning from whence it came -- to dirt and sky.
"Finally," said Jack McCarthy, executive director of the Somerset West Community Health Centre, located around the corner.
"It was this reminder of a really painful, painful thing that happened. It was time to turn a new page."
Four years ago, on April 5, an early morning fire killed five members of the Thach family who lived above the grocery, an informal hub for the city's Cambodian community.
The ages of the victims only magnified the misery: Gary, 14, Danny, 13, Sunny, 12, and the older sister, Linny, 23, a new mother herself. The children's mother, Coli Yan, also perished.
Three members of the family survived, including Makara, his grandson, Sipheng, and his son-in-law, Bunny Svay.
Just as the building was crushed, so did the survivors rebound.
Makara, the shy patriarch, spent about six months in Cambodia in 2006. Unexpectedly, he came home with a new wife, Vesa, a member of a family that had long been friends with the Thachs.
They now live in an apartment near the St. Laurent shopping centre, with Bunny and the boy, now aged five.
It is a tiny place, a second-floor walkup. There are big bags of rice stacked in a corner, toys scattered about, a couple of visible laptops, fat Linux textbooks, a small Buddhist prayer area.
There is, too, an abundance of smiles.
The boy, nicknamed CoCo, seems to be thriving. He likes to play with cars and trucks and is scheduled to begin kindergarten in September.
His father, Bunny, told him his mother, Linny, "went up to the sky." When it rains, said Bunny, the boy sometimes asks if his mother is sending some kind of message.
Bunny has a hectic life. He is studying computers at Algonquin College, cares for his son and works three shifts a week in a bowling alley.
About three weeks ago, he became a Canadian citizen. He is here to stay.
Thach, meanwhile, has started his own cleaning business, with a mix of commercial and residential clients, and has a handful of employees.
He works long hours, evenings and weekends.
"He's never forgotten," said friend Vuthy Lay, acting as a translator. "They are always on his mind, 24 hours a day, unless he is sleeping."
Thach keeps the ashes of his lost loved ones in a temple in Montreal. Every year, at a date in April close to the anniversary, he travels to the temple for "a special ceremony."
Thach has avoided the Somerset Street area since the fire and had no strong reaction to the news of the demolition.
His dream is to help create a community centre and cultural hub for area Cambodians. But he has neither the means nor the plan to make it happen.
"We were trying to get a community centre built where the store was," said Lay, secretary of the Cambodian Association of the Ottawa Valley.
A meeting was held with then-mayor Bob Chiarelli, he said. "We came this close."
In the weeks following the fire, two Citizen reporters, Andrew Duffy and Hayley Mick, put together a remarkable history of 816 Somerset, tracking every owner to 1897, when a lumberman first erected a house.
One house, one patch of ground, told of much.
It burned in The Great Fire of 1900, which swept across the Ottawa River from Hull and laid waste to much of the neighbourhood.
In 1901, a new brick structure was erected and a dozen years later, 816 begins its long history as a storefront, with residences upstairs.
It was a grocery store, a tobacco outlet, a pool room and Italian coffee shop. Its owners were butchers, fruit and vegetable vendors, grocers, tab-keepers and almost always immigrants.
The common thread among the shopkeepers was a story of survival in the face of war or poverty or persecution in their homelands. So it was for the Thachs, who fled Cambodia via Thailand, arriving in Canada in 1990.
The owner of the lot at 816 said he's yet to decide what to do with the property, one of seven or eight vacant along the strip.
Grace Xin is the executive director of the Somerset Street Chinatown Business Improvement Area, which has 120 members. She, too, was glad to see the building come down.
She said the structure had become an eyesore, not just because of its derelict condition, but because of the work of vandals and graffiti-makers who attacked the boarded windows.
"Not just for the BIA, but the whole neighbourhood. It's a sad memory."
Contact Kelly Egan at 613-726-5896 or by e-mail, kegan@thecitizen.canwest.com
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