Being Chinese in Canada

The Struggle for Identity, Redress and Belonging

William Ging Wee Dere

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771622196
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

After the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in1885—construction of the western stretch was largely built by Chinese workers—the Canadian government imposed a punitive head tax to deter Chinese citizens from coming to Canada. The exorbitant tax strongly discouraged those who had already emigrated from sending for wives and children left in China—effectively splintering families. After raising the tax twice, the Canadian government eventually brought in legislation to stop Chinese immigration altogether. The ban was not repealed until1947.

It was not until June22, 2006, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to the Chinese Canadian community for the Government of Canada's racist legacy. Until now, little had been written about the events leading up to the apology. William Dere's Being Chinese in Canada is the first book to explore the work of the head tax redress movement and to give voice to the generations of Chinese Canadians involved. Dere explores the many obstacles in the Chinese Canadian community's fight for justice, the lasting effects of state-legislated racism and the unique struggle of being Chinese inQuebec.

But Being Chinese in Canada is also a personal story. Dere dedicated himself to the head tax redress campaign for over two decades. His grandfather and father each paid the five-hundred-dollar head tax, and the1923Chinese Immigration Act separated his family for thirty years. Dere tells of his family members' experiences; his own political awakenings; the federal government's offer of partial redress and what it means to move forward—for himself, his children and the community asawhole.

Many in multicultural Canada feel the issues of cultural identity and the struggle for belonging. Although Being Chinese in Canada is a personal recollection and an exploration of the history and culture of Chinese Canadians, the themes of inclusion and kinship are timely and will resonate with Canadians of all backgrounds.

Part Three
Redress

Chapter 10
Being Chinese in Canada

“If you don’t have Chinese culture, baby, all you’ve got is the color of your skin.”

—Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman¹⁴¹

When my daughter was little, I read her bedtime stories—tales from China and Chinese Canada that I was discovering. There were books by Paul Yee (Teach Me to Fly, Skyfighter) and Laurence Yep (Dragonwings). They were about the Chinese experience in Gold Mountain and meant for pre-teens and teens, but nevertheless, Jessica got an early start on Chinese Canadian literature. As I read to her, we both learned about Chinese cultural values and morality. Due to the weightiness of the subject matter, after a couple of pages she quickly fell asleep. She never said “Again!” as she did with more traditional books like Goodnight Moon.

When a relationship or a marriage is freed from the political and ideological framework of the Movement, it has to stand on its own. The unresolved issues of culture and ethnicity have to be worked through. That was the hard lesson I learned. By 1985, the many differences and contradictions that affected us personally and as a couple came to the fore for Gillian and me. We decided to part ways. Once we’d agreed to the amiable terms, the divorce was simple and cost me the $80 filing fee after I prepared the legal document with the help of my lawyer friend Ian Wong. As Gillian and I stood before Judge John Gomery, he only had one question—whether our three-year-old daughter would be well taken care of. We told the judge that both of us loved Jessica so much that we would not let anything harm her. He granted us joint custody of our daughter, and the divorce.

During the process of the separation and divorce, I experienced a period of anguish. Gillian and I had been together for seven years. I went through the classical five steps of grieving the end of a relationship—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. It took me a year and a half to two years to come out of my daze, and to come to terms with my new situation. Amazingly, at the end of this period, I felt free and energized.

For the first time in my life I had to dig deep into myself to understand who I was without the external influences of society, politics and ideology or the traditional Chinese values of the institution of marriage. I began to develop an awareness of being Chinese Canadian—I needed to find myself. But I was in for a rude awakening. In 1985, there was little in the way of Chinese Canadian culture—the culture that expressed our experiences in Canada.

I continued to search for that elusive identity and sense of belonging. At first I explored the influences from within the Chinese North American culture that I could connect with emotionally. But I also needed to bond with the cultural roots of my forebears. Since childhood, I’d heard stories of historical events from the time of the various Chinese empires, but I’d never read the four main Chinese classical novels, despite the fact that one of them was Water Margin, the book my father had so often quoted from.¹⁴² The Chinese classics are to the East as the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are to the West, and they have influenced the cultural and literary thinking of the Chinese through the millennia. I wanted to dig into how those stories have crept into the psyche and influenced the cultural works of Chinese people around the world. In the end, I read the English versions of the four Chinese classics.

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I read everything about Chinese North America and the Chinese diaspora that I could get my hands on. I attended Chinese film festivals wherever I could. In the 1980s there wasn’t much overseas Chinese culture to be had, but there was enough to drive my interest and imagination. Lacking Chinese Canadian materials, I took to the surrogate of Chinese American works. One of the first Asian American films was the 1982 film noir Chan is Missing by Wayne Wang, which left a lasting impression on me because it had a storyline situated entirely in the Chinese working-class community of San Francisco. This was ten years after I had been influenced by the Asian American civil rights movement, which came on in the wake of the African American movement: students went on strike in California universities for Asian American studies. Due to its greater numbers, the Chinese American cultural scene in general was much more developed and vibrant than what was happening in the Chinatowns of Canada. I felt a strong need to be aware of my identity and the need to feel proud of what I am.

I became a proponent of developing and promoting Chinese Canadian culture. I travelled to the Chinatowns of Vancouver and Toronto and met some of the pioneers of Chinese Canadian cultural expression. There was Barry Wong, one of the originators of Pender Guy, an English-language community radio program that offered local writers an outlet for their stories, satire and community action. Pender Guy is a play on words in English and Chinese. Guy is Toishanese for street. Barry was a community cultural activist and one of the few people I knew who could speak in grammatically correct paragraphs and in a mellifluous radio voice. There was the late Jim Wong-Chu, the author of a book of poetry, Chinatown Ghosts.¹⁴³ His poems had a strong influence on me. (Later, I would use his poetry in my 1993 documentary Moving the Mountain.) Jim came to Canada as a “paper son” and he lived through the experience of all that entails. He was a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop through which many Asian Canadian writers emerged. The prolific author Paul Yee is one of those writers that came through the workshop. I read his Tales of Gold Mountain to Jessica as a bedtime story.

I looked south of the border and was influenced by the writings of Frank Chin, a fellow railroader (he worked as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad). His writing was impatient and uncompromising—that was his appeal for me. This is one of his works:

The Year of the Dragon¹⁴⁴

We’come a Chinatowng, Folks! Ha. Ha. Ha. … Happy New Year!

Fred Eng. “Freddie” of Eng’s Chinatown tour’n’travoo.

“We tell Chinatown where to go.” Ha ha ha. I’m top guide here.

Allaw week Chinee New Year. Sssssshhh Boom! Muchee muchie

fiery crake! Ha. Ha. Ha…

But you’re my last tour of the day, folks. And on my last tour of the

day, no hooey. I like to let my hair down. Drop the phony accent.

And be me. Just me.

I figure once a day, I have got to be me.

I was particularly provoked by Chin’s searing criticisms of literary stars Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Tan’s Joy Luck Club made it big on the New York Times best sellers list and in Hollywood with a white feminist portrayal of Chinese immigrant families, in which the emasculated Chinese males were painted as insensitive misogynist louts. Chin regarded Tan’s work as “fake,” denigrating Chinese men and playing to the stereotypical racist assumptions of Chinese Americans depicted by popular white culture.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s books, China Men and The Woman Warrior, charmed me with the stories describing the early lo wah kiu (old overseas Chinese) experience in Gim Shan (Gold Mountain) through which I tried to situate the narrative of my father and grandfather. However, Frank Chin in his brash style shattered my impressions with his scathing critiques.

In his influential essay “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,”¹⁴⁵ Chin lambasted Kingston, along with Tan and David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), for perpetuating racist stereotypes in their works so they would gain easy acceptance by white America. He wrote:

These works are held up before us as icons of a Chinese culture….

Amy Tan opens her Joy Luck Club with a fake Chinese fairy tale about a duck that wants to be a swan and a mother who dreams of her daughter being born in America, where she’ll grow up speaking perfect English and no one will laugh at her.¹⁴⁶

Chin accused writers like Tan of faking Chinese fairy tales to please Western appetites instead of using the real tales from China’s mythical past. As for Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang:

In The Women Warrior, Kingston takes a childhood chant, ‘The Ballad of Mulan’ … and re-writes the heroine, Fa Mulan, to the specs of the stereotype of the Chinese woman as a pathological white supremacist victimized and trapped in a hideous Chinese civilization. … David Henry Hwang repeats Kingston’s revision of Fa Mulan and Yue Fei, and goes on to impoverish and slaughter Fa Mulan’s family to further dramatize the cruelty of the Chinese.¹⁴⁷

Before you jump to your feet to accuse Chin of misogyny and professional jealousy, note that in his essay he touched on sexual politics and the emasculation of Chinese men in white popular culture. With a “stroke of white racist genius,” he said, Kingston had attacked “Chinese civilization, Confucianism itself, and where its life begins: the fairy tale.” Kingston, Chin wrote, “takes Fa Mulan, turns her into a champion of Chinese feminism and an inspiration to Chinese American girls to dump the Chinese race and make for white universality.” American publishers, he said, “went crazy for Chinese women dumping on Chinese men.” Chin cited the October 1978 issue of Cosmopolitan (after Kingston’s The Woman Warrior had appeared in 1976), in which Lily Chang wrote: “Once we have broken away from the restaurants of Chinatown, we prefer lovers distinguished by a freer, more emotionally flamboyant style. In short, Caucasians” (from the article “What It’s Like to Be a Chinese American Girl”).¹⁴⁸

All right, enough of going against the tide. Chin gets “real” with three other Chinese woman writers; he writes glowingly about them:

Unlike the pack of Chinese Americans, Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Diana Chang, and Dr. Han Suyin write knowledgeably and authentically of Chinese fairy tales, heroic tradition and history. … Chinese men who are not emasculated and sexually repellent in Chinese American writing are found in [their] books and essays. These three women are unique unto themselves, for they are Eurasians. Diana Chang and Dr. Han Suyin are the daughters of Chinese men. Sui Sin Far was the daughter of a Chinese mother and British father.¹⁴⁹

Sui Sin Far is better known in the US than in Canada despite her Canadian upbringing. Her family moved to Montreal when she was little. Her early writings as Edith Eaton appeared in the Montreal Star, where she wrote about the plight of the Chinese working man in the early 1900s and criticized the burden imposed by the racist head tax. She later went to the US to write under her pen name, Sui Sin Far. Her writings were the only ones found at the time to be sympathetic to the Chinese as she used her pen to denounce the US Chinese Exclusion Act. There are at least two biographies of Sui Sin Far written by American authors. She died at age forty-nine, in 1914, and was buried in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal.¹⁵⁰

In Chinese Canadian literary circles, the “Amy Tan effect” fortunately did not take hold. When I read Disappearing Moon Cafe¹⁵¹ by SKY Lee, I was prejudiced by Frank Chin’s critique of Chinese American women writers. However, SKY Lee, one of the first Chinese Canadian woman to be published, wrote with understanding and sympathy about the Gold Mountain men who were transposed from the Chinese villages to a hostile Canadian setting. Lee, who is also a feminist, wrote about the strong women who had to negotiate between Chinese and Canadian social mores while at the same time remaining true to their heritage, values and newfound sense of independence. She wrote real Chinese Canadian literature reflecting the racism encountered in Canada, and about both the early Chinese who fought to retain their feudal relations, and the younger generation that rebelled against these relations.

In a depiction of a more esoteric view of identity, the Chinese men and women of the era in SKY Lee’s novel were governed by the cultural and moral values of the times. They clung to their identity as overseas Chinese because, indeed, they were inassimilable as determined by the laws of this country and by the colour of their skin. They all took pride in their Chinese-ness; since childhood they’d been taught that their culture was superior to...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Family
• Political Consciousness
• Redress
• Identity, Love and Belonging
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index