NOTES ON WORD USENOTES ON WORD USE

I. In this book, the term “coolie” refers to workers who did heavy labour for low wages, such as the Chinese who helped build railways in North America.

In the nineteenth century, “coolie” also referred to indentured workers brought from India to Caribbean and Central American countries to replace slaves who had done work such as cutting sugar cane. Unfortunately, in some of those countries today, the term “coolie” is used to insult and demean people of South Asian descent.

The use of “coolie” in this book does reflect the racial and class-based disdain directed at Chinese and South Asian workers in the nineteenth century. But here, no offense is directed at people of South Asian descent. Instead, this story tries to educate readers about that class of labour and give those workers an honourable place in history and literature.

Word meanings change over time. In India today, “coolie” is a labour category for workers who are registered, licensed, and given uniforms to do the work of moving heavy luggage at railway stations.

II. As this book purports to be a translation of a memoir written in Chinese about Canada in the 1880s, many colloquial Chinese terms and phrases appear in English. The narrator came from the Pearl River region of south China and spoke Toisanese, a rural dialect. Therefore, for some Chinese words, especially in spoken dialogue, I have tried to provide a Toisanese transliteration.

However, this principle could not be consistently applied. For example, the city of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) is already well-known in English by its pinyin spelling for Mandarin pronunciation. As well, other Chinese terms (e.g., fan-tan, feng shui, mah-jongg) are now found in English dictionaries. We follow those standard spellings, even though they reflect different Chinese dialects. Fan-tan, for example, is based on Cantonese, while feng shui is based on Mandarin.

III. To refer to First Nations or Aboriginal persons, my fictional memoirist likely wrote Chinese words that sounded like the term “Indian,” common in the English language at that time. Those Chinese words would have sounded like “Yin Chin,” a term that doesn’t appear in the Chinese language today. For this book, I used “Native” to avoid offending modern-day readers. However, because I wanted to make the book sound authentic to its nineteenth-century setting, I did not draw on contemporary terms such as First Nations or Aboriginal.