The Remembrance Day holiday has brought me a welcome break from the increasing pressure of the end of a semester. But I’ve always had mixed feelings about the act of commemoration it involves. As a child, I can remember standing during a minute of silence in school each year at the exact time of the Armistice that ended the First World War, and also my mother encouraging us to buy poppies. I can recall the way the poppies were made quite distinctly: they had a green plastic stalk, and a single crimped piece of red paper, shaped like two lobes or intersecting circles, for petals, fastened in place by a black plastic knob that also did duty as the stigma. I remember that poppies were awkward to wear if your clothing didn’t have a convenient buttonhole near the lapel: you had to poke the stalk between the threads of a sweater, and push it down, all the way to where it bent in a right angle, so that it did not fall out.

As soon as I left home for university I stopped wearing poppies. It was important to remember the past and the dead, but I also came to know of the senselessness of the First World War, and how the remembrance of the deaths of so many young men was used to instil patriotism and, at times, militarism in the present. I volunteered for a time at the Peace Pledge Union in Endsleigh Street in London, and I adopted their practice of wearing white poppies for a couple of years, to signify respect for the dead, but also opposition to war. And later, as I travelled further, I realised how many of the dead were excluded from these remembrances: the Chinese labourers brought to work on the battlefields, or the troops from all over what was then the British Empire, from Africa in particular, many of whom would be buried in unmarked mass graves, without a memorial. In Canada, the First World War and Vimy Ridge are also part of a national mythology. I see people wearing poppies, selling poppies even, and feel a sense of disquiet. I would like to remember, but to remember otherwise. Last year, approaching my first Remembrance Day in Canada for thirty years, at a farmer’s market, we did find someone selling white poppies, with tiny lettering spelling out “PEACE” written across the stigma. We bought two, but I could find no buttonhole in which to place mine. A week later, I found it, forgotten, in my coat pocket.

This year I had a different opportunity to remember. A BC Labour Heritage Centre email asked for volunteers to go to Mountain View Cemetery to put flowers on the graves of Canadian volunteers who fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. This was, at the very least, a much more necessary conflict, and attempt – which at the time did not succeed – to stop the rise of Fascism in Europe. I sent off an email, received a list in return, and chose one volunteer, Esko Kumpulainen. He was born in Finland in 1906, and arrived in Canada in 1930. He left for Spain in 1937, and returned to Canada in 1939. He worked, the biography told me, as a seaman, labourer, and relief camp worker, and was active in union work. What made me curious about him was the final sentence of the brief biography. He died in 1971, of heart failure, and his body was not found until two days later. He had no relatives in Vancouver, and he was buried in an unmarked grave. Like so many in this city, then, his new life in Canada was also marked by struggle, some success, surely, but also isolation and loss.

I did a quick internet search before I visited Esko Kumpulainen’s grave, and found out two more things. The first was the address where he died, on East Georgia Street in Chinatown, in a building that still exists. The second was more puzzling, and difficult to knit into the fabric of a life. In 1964, Kumpulainen suddenly surfaces in the public historical record. He was working as a stockman on a ranch near Chase, in the British Columbia interior, when he shot a man called Martin Harby in the back with a small-calibre rifle. After a trial, he was convicted of manslaughter. The case was prominent enough to be written up in newspapers in Vancouver and Victoria. And then, after the verdict,  he vanishes from history again.

I cycled to Chinatown first, to the address where Kumpulainen lived. It’s a shop, as it was in an earlier photograph I have from the 1980s, now selling meats and other ingredients for hotpot cooking and barbecues. This was a public holiday, and so the street was deserted. The shop had opened, and the older people who were its customers were calling out in Cantonese, that language that is slowly vanishing from these streets. Then I cycled around the end of False Creek and up Ontario Street, past the Victorian and craftsman houses. After King Edward Avenue the landscape is more open, the trees smaller, the house more modest: stucco bungalows, with the occasional Vancouver Special. There’s something strange about the area of Vancouver where the cemetery is located between Main and Fraser, south of King Edward. The cemetery is called Mountain View for a reason. If you’ve cycled south, it isn’t until you turn that you realise that you are at the top of a rise, and that you can see the mountains of the North Shore, beyond downtown, but strangely close, so that you feel for a moment that you are in a small town in the interior, not a huge metropolis.

The grave was unmarked, and so I found it as best I could using GPS, and placed a single white rose on the grass. The cemetery was packed with people, and I thought of Qing Ming at Brighthill in Singapore, going every year, at first to the urns of family members I had never known and then, later, to pay respects to someone I had known. And my parents’ grave, too, in an English churchyard, its stone just like the ones in this cemetery, flat, pressed lightly into the turf. 

I rode back, towards the mountains, descending Ontario into the heart of the city: the inlet with its tiny boats, lit up by a moment of sunshine, the glass towers of Yaletown. Guests who come here marvel in this beauty. Nobody, a friend from Singapore said to me, ever asks me where I am from. Scratch the surface, though, and see the world he lived in, barely buried: the legacies of resource extraction, colonial violence, racism, labour activism, isolation, organization, the hotels and hostels on Hastings Street that still persist. It’s still there, in the way this city breathes.