Korean/한국어: 마지의 사무실, 다시 찾다
Foreword
“Marge’s Office” is a previously unpublished piece about Marge Humchitt, a former sex worker and activist based in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).
I met Marge at an anti-police protest in the fall of 2010, when I was a first-year student at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism covering the DTES as my local beat.
Marge later testified at a public hearing in 2018 for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls about her life in the DTES and her late sister Cheryl. You can read her full testimony here.
There were many reasons I didn’t publish this piece when I completed it in December 2010.
Questions of ethical representation, my wide-eyed inexperience, and the ever-present disparity between what I wanted to transmute and the actual outcome were among many of them. In the 15 years since, I still struggle with all in equal measure.
The difference is that now I have the courage to talk more openly about these struggles. We’re all just human beings trying to coexist on this chaotic rock spinning in space, somehow.
Above all, I want to thank Marge for her time, sincerity, and honesty. The following version is published with her full consent.
Marge watches a girl getting ready for work in a park bathroom in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
The girl applies drugstore mascara and pulls up her ripped stockings. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
“I’ve done that before,” Marge says, afterwards. “Getting ready for work in a park bathroom.”
Marge instinctively reaches for her small backpack and takes out a plastic takeout container filled with turkey and mashed potatoes. She got it earlier at a free Thanksgiving lunch. She offers it to the young woman.
“Thanks a lot,” she says, gripping the container. Like most of the working girls in the area, it’s hard to tell whether she is 15 or 30. She walks away, toward East Hastings Street. Marge shrugs. She’ll find out more about the girl if their paths cross again.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be on a team down here. But I don’t mind walking alone.”
Marge Humchitt lived on and off the streets of the Downtown Eastside for 22 years as a “a big time, heavy drug user, 24/7.”
She decided to change her habits in 2005.
Now, she calls the streets her downtown office, and her clients are women who need her help. Usually she finds them during her weekly walks around the neighbourhood.
She works alone, equipped with her cell phone and a leather wallet filled with business cards from social service organizations in the Downtown Eastside.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be on a team down here,” she says. “But I don’t mind walking alone.”
Marge still struggles with addiction.
“I use, every once in awhile,” she says, not specifying the substance. She doesn’t like the scrutiny paid to being “clean” in the Downtown Eastside. She thinks a lot of aid workers struggle quietly with their own addictions here, in the dark.
She says she prefers to walk alone and hide nothing, rather than work on a team and hide her ongoing issues. “Let it be that I have a drink. And let it be that I use,” she says. “But I don’t bring that down here. I don’t.”
A friend recently bought Marge new shoes, sturdy workmen’s boots from an outlet warehouse.
Her friend might also be taking her on a cruise to Alaska. Marge has never been on a cruise, but she’s done a lot of other things in her life. Some times were rough, and some were fun.
At 19, Marge had black hair and an hourglass figure. She got a lot of dates for looking Asian.
She remembers a time when she was skinny, and had dates every night.
Dates with men driving cars, slowing down at the bus stop on Clark and East Hastings Street where she sat with her legs crossed.
Wearing a miniskirt and stiletto heels, she smiled coyly and asked, “How’re you doin’ tonight?”
Marge isn’t into men now, and she wasn’t back then either. But she did it because it was the easiest way to make money for having fun. Fun was nightclubs, drugs and booze.
She came from Bella Bella, a small island village more than 1000 kilometres away from Vancouver. She was 19 when she started hooking with her older sister Cheryl.
At 19, Marge had black hair and an hourglass figure. She got a lot of dates for looking Asian. She always wore heels and makeup. At 46, she has short gray hair and a rounded body. She is five feet tall, and wears no makeup.
“You’d hardly recognize me back then,” she says with a laugh. Her dark grey eyes twinkle in the late afternoon sun, softening the scarlet acne scars on her cheeks.
Speaking about her experiences at these meetings helps her heal from the last 10 years of her street life, when she lost herself completely in an abusive relationship with a woman named E.
Marge keeps telling more stories from the office.
There was Grace, a young woman coming down from a bad trip. “When I first met her she was crawling out of an alley. She was just skinny, so skinny,” Marge says.
She helped Grace get into a rehab house, but Grace soon relapsed. Marge saw her again, a few months after. She gave Grace a long hug.
“It’s saying, guess what, I’m still here for you. That’s what I did for her,” Marge says, her soft voice shaking. She wipes away tears.
“I don’t down anybody if they slip. It’s just hurting them more. You might as well rip my guts out and hurt me too.”
Another time, she helped a woman named Deb fight an eviction notice from her landlord.
They were not successful, but kept in touch as friends. Marge calls her “the Real Deal.” They met at a housing rally for women in the Downtown Eastside, one of many rallies that Marge attends.
She also goes to discussion groups and meetings related to women, health, and social justice in the Downtown Eastside. Speaking about her experiences at these meetings helps her heal from the last 10 years of her street life, when she lost herself completely in an abusive relationship with a woman named E.
“She taught me not to look at people, not to talk to people for more than 20 seconds. It took me a long time to recover from that.”
Near the park, Marge points out a building where she and E used to live.
They moved in together in the mid-1990s, when Marge’s life was falling apart. Her sister Cheryl was murdered over a drug debt, and her girlfriend of 13 years had left her.
Marge found out too late that E was both controlling and out of control.
They smoked crack and drank continuously, stopping only to make money to buy more crack and booze.
“She had the day tricks, I had the night tricks. But that led to 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock in the morning,” Marge said. “It was pretty much—I’m not even going to say pretty much—it was an abusive relationship between me and her.”
In 2005, Marge worked the longest shift of her life. It was 7 o’clock in the morning, and she stood on a street corner shivering in the frigid air. She watched the traffic lights changing color over an empty street. She was tired, but couldn’t go home.
There was no coke in her pocket, and she was scared of what E would do to her.
Holy shit, she thought. I can’t live like this.
After a few attempts, Marge left for good. She checked herself into a rehab program for women, and re-established some contact with her siblings. She had always been fiercely independent, but her time with E had left deep psychological wounds. Marge remembers getting panic attacks on the bus, and being paranoid around strangers. “She taught me not to look at people, not to talk to people for more than 20 seconds,” she says. “It took me a long time to recover from that.”
Many people helped Marge in her recovery. They were people from inside and outside her family. Marge is vague about some of the details; 2005 was a year of countless ups and downs. She relapsed several times. Her brothers and sisters invited her into their homes and lives. She re-connected with her daughter, whom she gave up at birth over 20 years ago. She found out that she was a grandmother.
She cannot forget what it took for her and others to keep her alive and sane during her recovery.
In 2007, Marge began waking up at 7 o’clock every morning to attend the multiple murder trial of Robert William Pickton in New Westminster.
Pickton was charged with the murder of six women from the Downtown Eastside. She didn’t know any of the women, but that didn’t matter. She knew their stories, and empathized with them. She went because she had to, because she could’ve ended up like one of the murdered women but didn’t.
A Globe and Mail reporter noticed her at the trial, sitting directly behind Pickton every day. He published an article about her called, ‘Day by day, ex-prostitute finds meaning at the trial.’ Marge wants to contact the reporter.
“He can write about how much I’ve changed in the last three years,” she says. The article also mentioned her two granddaughters, whom she later regretted mentioning to the reporter.
“My daughter wasn’t so happy about that. She’s a pretty private person,” Marge explains. She doesn’t talk much about her relationship with her daughter, and talks more about her granddaughters instead.
She takes care not to mention their names, but eagerly shows their photographs on her cell phone. She giggles and coos over them, lost in temporary ecstasy.
“I am just glad that they involve me in that role that I’m in right now, where they call me grandma,” she says. She sees them once or twice a week, which is more than enough in her busy schedule.
Her brother Randy is in town from Bella Bella, and she is spending a lot of time showing him around. There are rallies and meetings to attend, friends and girls to check up on. Although Marge is devoted to her granddaughters, she cannot live for them alone.
She cannot forget what it took for her and others to keep her alive and sane during her recovery. She cannot forget her friends, and the women she has helped in her walks around the Downtown Eastside.
“This is my office, right down here,” Marge says. “I’m 46, and here I am, trying to make my mark in life, and it is going to be this.”
postscript 1
The following is a running list of local non-profits that provide safe housing, recovery, and advocacy services for women facing violence, exploitation, or addiction. They are always looking for volunteers and/or donations.
Battered Women’s Support Services
Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre
postscript 2
I’ll never forget the day my teacher showed us Through a Blue Lens in high school. Along with Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, these works fundamentally shaped my view of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I saw how there were real lives, real grief, and real histories playing out block by block.
This documentary remains complicated, imperfect, and deeply human. What it opened for me wasn’t just awareness, but a lifelong reckoning with what it means to witness someone else’s story without turning them into a convenient narrative symbol.