Chapter 6
Getting Organized
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
A CBC reporter, doing a piece on racism in Quebec, recently asked me, “Have you ever been affected by systemic racism?” I answered, “Yeah, my whole life.” When I was younger, I would not have been able to offer such a categorical response. Yet, as the immigrant son of a Chinese laundryman, I felt the race and class oppression of Canadian society from an early age. All the hardworking Chinese of my father’s generation were aware of this mistreatment. They may not have been able to articulate this consciousness as well as Marx did in the quotation above, but they fought against the way they were treated and matched wits with their oppressors through their everyday practice of resistance against authority—a form of resistance that was a natural reaction to state racism.
Ever since I’d arrived in Canada as a child, people had been more conscious that I was Chinese than I was myself. Common culture, developed over decades of discriminatory legislation, painted the Chinese as different and apart. My father felt and lived this difference, but it would be years before I could come to intellectually understand how my father felt. I am still trying to articulate the profundity of my father’s consciousness and his experience, over six decades, of negotiating the contradictions of life in Canada. My own consciousness of these contradictions began in my teens as I began to open my mind and question my place in society, and to gain some maturity in my political and intellectual interpretation of life. This questioning led me to explore radical revolutionary explanations for the class and racial inequalities that I felt around me.
I entered high school during the 1960s. It was a decade of international upheaval. In Canada, the idea of the Quebec nation was emerging in people’s consciousness. But despite these political developments, which turned out to have a crucial effect on me, my world view had not yet taken shape. I was mainly focused on my studies and playing sports when I first started attending Loyola High School in the fall of 1963.
It wasn’t a big school, only five hundred students—all boys. It was located in the leafy west end of Montreal—on the campus of Loyola College, before the college merged into Concordia University. The high school was housed in a three-storey gothic building at the northeastern corner of the bucolic campus. The school has since moved into a new, bigger complex across Sherbrooke Street at the corner of West Broadway. (Coincidentally, today, the old building is the home of Concordia’s Psychology Department, where my daughter, Jessica, studied for her PhD in Clinical Psychology.)
Loyola catered to the English Catholic elite of Montreal. Many of the students became successful and well-known businessmen, academics and politicians. The school had high-calibre sports teams, too; the hockey and football teams were consistent winners. However, it was the high-calibre teachers that had an impact on me. Most of them were Jesuits with PhDs. They lived up to the reputation of Jesuits, who promoted independent liberal thought, putting them in frequent conflict with the established order.
Perhaps it was the times that brought together some liberal-minded members of the Society of Jesus to teach at Loyola. They reflected the attitude of the ’60s. There was Norm Lawson, my English and Latin teacher. He challenged me not to be so cynical when I was thinking critically. Richard Haughian was my coach on the senior basketball team and my history teacher. As time went by, he also encouraged me in discussions on the Cuban revolution. Open my mind and question authority; think critically but not cynically; accept other cultures as they are; learn from the world. These were some of the concepts that I was nurturing and they have stayed with me throughout my life.
At the time, most of my fellow students parroted the position of the US on world events, especially after the assassination of J.F. Kennedy in November 1963, which seemed to have had a spiritual effect on the school.
In 1967, I wrote my final year history paper on the Cuban revolution, entitled “Castro’s Cuba.” In it, I quoted liberally from Fidel Castro, who in 1961 had said: “Revolutions, real revolutions, do not arise through the will of one man or one group. Revolutions are remedies—bitter remedies, yes. But at times revolution is the only remedy that can be applied to evils more bitter.” Those words moved this seventeen-year-old student to explore more about social revolution and its meaning.
The theory and practice of revolution and social activism had not yet fallen into place for me. I was still questioning why and how events happen in the world. I was not fully aware of the social and economic differences due to class. I was just dipping my toes in the vast ocean of social protest, national liberation and revolution. Nevertheless, my political ideas and understanding were taking shape as I began to read “revolutionary” literature.
Then, in the fall of 1967, I entered McGill University, where I had chosen to study mechanical engineering out of practicality. My father had steered me into seeking an education that would get me a decent job, a professional job. He had once pointed out the fenced, spacious McGill campus behind the Roddick Gates as we rode the Sherbrooke Street bus.
As I walked through these gates, the proverbial freedom in thought and action of those heady days overwhelmed me.
Within days of starting the engineering program, I began running into one protest after another; it was the heyday of the New Left and there were protests throughout my university days. One evening in 1968, I was in bed when I heard a CBC report on protests in Chicago against the Vietnam War. I knew that I needed to be involved. I identified with the young people protesting against both the war and the political system that fed the war. I stayed up most of the evening pondering what I had to do to help stop the war. McGill too was the venue for protests calling for an end to the war in Vietnam, as well as for nuclear disarmament. There were sit-ins and occupations for a democratic university, and a massive demonstration for the nationalist McGill français movement that wanted to transform McGill into a French university.
But while others were turning to the European Marxist philosophers like Louis Althusser or Jean-Paul Sartre, I was reading books like Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Martinique Marxist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, and Revolution in the Revolution? (1967) by the French journalist and philosopher Régis Debray, who had fought at the side of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
Fanon introduced me to colonial oppression and exploitation in the Third World.82 What an introduction! Through reading Fanon, I began to understand that colonial oppression relied on violent repression of the native culture and way of life. The only way to overthrow the oppressors, liberating the nation and the people’s cultural thought, was also by force. He taught me to stretch Marxist thinking. Fanon, the psychiatrist, exposed the psychological violence of the settlers. But the native population never stood still. In Fanon’s words: “He is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him.”83
Fanon talked about nationalism as well as colonialism, and so gave me a new way of looking at the political movement developing in Quebec at the time. He warned against bowing to “bourgeois nationalism.” It could mislead poor workers and peasants to get behind the nationalist cause, only to be betrayed by the ruling class, which wants to gain power for its own class interests. It was through reading Fanon’s work that I came to understand that nationalism in fighting against colonialism and foreign occupation is progressive, whereas nationalism to exclude others is regressive.
Fanon also issued an inspiring call to arms which I could not resist at the time, and which still rings with great appeal today:
Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, and in all corners of the globe. … It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man.84
It was an indictment of those who went to the European schools and came away with a colonial mentality. I saw some of that at McGill—students who were there because of the parents’ money and connections, and who wanted to use their degree to reinforce the neocolonial ruling class to lord it over the ordinary people of their countries. Neocolonialism, the continuation of dominance by the ex-colonizers, took the place of open colonialism to keep the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America within the economic and cultural sphere of European and North American imperialism. I began to understand the concept of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the title of Walter Rodney’s 1972 book,85 which summed up colonialism and neocolonialism and how the exploitation of the Third World enriched the economically advanced countries.
Debray tried to put the Cuban revolution within the context of orthodox Marxist-Leninist concepts, and explained why each struggle must be waged within the historical concrete conditions of the country. He opened my eyes to the pitfalls of intellectualism. Writing in Revolution in the Revolution? Debray suggested that intellectuals will try to understand through preconceived ideas from books and live life through these books. Such intellectuals think they have all the knowledge they need through their reading and become less flexible and practical.86
Debray addressed the paradox of the Cuban revolution, where the worker-peasant alliance overthrew the US-backed government to achieve state power, without seemingly being led by a Marxist-Leninist party. Unlike the Chinese or Vietnamese revolutions, where the Marxist-Leninist party formed the liberation armies, the Cuban Rebel Army “learned revolution by waging revolution” under the political leadership of Castro and his comrades. Debray claimed that the core of the political leadership was within the Rebel Army, hardened by armed struggle. This leading core, or vanguard, later coalesced into the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965.
At the time, I did not fully grasp the concept of a vanguard Marxist-Leninist party. This understanding would come later when I began to study the Chinese Revolution.
It was Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China—the first edition of which came out in 1938—that gave me the visceral appreciation for social revolution. The book gave me an idealized, quixotic view of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Snow wrote about the lives of the heroic Chinese communists who set up bases in northwestern China under Mao’s leadership in the 1930s after their legendary Long March. Nearly wiped out by Chiang Kai-shek’s Encirclement and Annihilation Campaign, the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army under the command of the Chinese Communist Party retreated and marched over 6,000 miles (more than double the distance between Toronto and Vancouver) in 370 days, with many deaths along the way. The US Army at the time doubted that such a march took place or was even possible, Snow wrote.
As with any pivotal historic event, there are disputes over facts and alternative facts, depending on which side of the fence you are on. But taking into account all the claimed numbers, 85,000 to 130,000 Red Army soldiers started the march and 8,000 to 20,000 survived to set up their bases in Shaanxi. It was a turning point in the revolution. It was in these bases that Mao and Zhou Enlai consolidated their leadership of the Communist Party of China. I came to see that Mao understood the nature of China’s revolution to be agrarian, with the peasantry as the driving force, both in the resistance to the Japanese and in the eventual victory over Chiang Kai-shek. All the while he avoided erroneous directives from Stalin and the Communist International (Comintern).
Snow offered a romantic view of the Chinese in the liberated areas where new selfless men and women were being shaped. He wrote the stories of how and why these men and women took part in “the long struggle to carry out the most thorough-going social revolution in China’s three millennium of history.”87
In 1936, Snow visited the Chinese soviets in the liberated areas to write about the ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary feats. He met and interviewed Zhou Enlai and Mao. I learned from Snow that Mao’s favourite book was Water Margin, the Chinese classic that was my father’s favourite book and whose stories he had ingrained in me as a boy.
From the time I came to Montreal at age seven, my father had told me stories from Water Margin, which is about 108 outlaws who used their martial skills to fight against feudal tyranny, only to be betrayed in the end by the same feudal ideology that they fought against. Father applied his nineteenth century Chinese view of the world to twentieth century Canada—even his spoken Toishanese was from an earlier period. Most of the time he succeeded; it allowed him to make sense of the new world. This was the early education I received from my father; he was educating me to take extra care in dealing with power because the system was against us, and to this day, I remain disdainful of authority.
Snow perceived a gentler side of Mao during the time he spent with the Chairman, calling him “a humanist in a fundamental sense; he believed in man’s ability to solve man’s problems. … [H]e had probably on the whole been a moderating influence in the Communist movement where life and death were concerned.”88
What most provoked me, though, were the stories of the ordinary men and women who gave up everything—including, many, their lives—for the revolution. Snow described the role of women in the liberated areas and how they played a vital role in the revolution, long before the Western feminist concepts of women’s liberation saw the light of day. “Equal pay for equal labour” was the slogan of the Chinese soviets, to eliminate wage discrimination against women. Policies were instituted for maternity leave and childcare. These stories stirred me to action!
Snow’s enthusiasm for the Chinese Revolution was unmistakable and infectious, at least for this young incipient “revolutionary.” I gladly loaned the book to a Singaporean student at McGill named Pang. He told me that these books were banned in Singapore. When he returned home he kept the book; he must have smuggled it into the country. In a small way, I contributed to Communist thought in Singapore. My reading of the book also coincided with momentous events in China at the time: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The name Cultural Revolution itself invoked extraordinary, earth-shaking transformations taking place. China gave me pride to be Chinese. Red China became my model.
The struggle for decolonization was taking place throughout the Third World at the time, and as an impressionable young student, these battles of the underdog against the powerful foreign colonial occupiers were inspirational.
The peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America were throwing off the yoke of rapacious colonialism. Many nationalist leaders—such as Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral—were assassinated in last-ditch attempts by the European powers, including Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands, to retain the colonies. If countries did not acquire independence after years of pacifist struggle, as India did, armed national liberation struggles in countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor and Eritrea were the only methods that the colonial authorities understood. Then there was the struggle of the Vietnamese people against the military might of the US.
I wasn’t the only one inspired by all of this.
In 1960s Quebec, decolonization was de rigueur ideology.89 The idea of the Quebec nation emerged in people’s consciousness through the politics of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense political, social-cultural and economic change that took place between 1960 and 1966. Quebec nationalism had evolved since colonial times when French settlers occupied the Indigenous people’s territories and dubbed it New France in the sixteenth century. Contemporary nationalism gave rise to the Quiet Revolution’s motto of Maîtres chez nous (Masters of our own house), to reflect the desire for self-determination of the Quebec nation and control over its own destiny. Among other things, the class nature of Quebec society began to develop in people’s thinking. The Quebec national bourgeoisie as a class began to exert itself to take control of economic power with the help of the state, through nationalizing private power companies to create Hydro-Québec, for example. The Quebec left struggled to keep up, and the rudimentary class-consciousness was expressed through nationalism.
Quebec nationalists claimed Quebec had Third World status and sought the decolonization of their own nation. In doing so, they appropriated the term and affronted those in the Third World fighting for genuine decolonization. The real decolonization struggle of the Indigenous peoples in Canada was ignored and trampled on by the original colonizers of Quebec—the Québécois de souche or pure laine, the “White Niggers of America.”90 This title of Pierre Vallières’ book muddled the concepts of race and social and economic status in society. It was as if they did not see the class nature of their own oppression so they needed to borrow the reality of racial and colonial oppression from others. The decolonization theory of Quebec was discredited and began to wane when people realized the true nature of the fight against colonialism was to be seen in the Cree people’s struggle for self-determination in Northern Quebec.
At this time, I was having many new experiences and meeting many new people, including a good number of the foreign students who came to McGill and introduced me to their world. Even the foreign students’ views of McGill were an eye-opener for me: for many of them, the further from Canada they had come from, the better McGill’s reputation.
Devinder Garewal was a Sikh from India. He was an imposing figure, well over six feet tall, fully bearded and turbaned. But he was soft-spoken and patient in his explanations, even in the finer points of dialectical materialism. He was a couple of years ahead of me in engineering. I got to know him as he was passing out leaflets at an antiwar protest, and he invited me to attend a Marxist-Leninist study group. By then, I had abandoned the casual and loose politics of the New Left and begun the study of the theory of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, also known as scientific socialism. Marxism-Leninism is the synthesis of Marx and Lenin’s theories as applied to revolutionary practice. It is the guiding ideology of Communist parties throughout the world. Mao further integrated these theories to apply them to the Chinese Revolution and thus developed Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
The pieces started coming together for me, as the theory explained so much about why and how capitalist society maintained itself through exploitation of workers and the Third World.
Devinder and I took over the Plumber’s Pot, the engineering newspaper. We dubbed it the “best red paper on campus,” as we mocked the New Leftism of the McGill Daily. (One of the editors of the Daily, Mark Starowicz, Loyola alumnus, went on to become an executive at the CBC.)
Then, one icy December evening in 1968, I walked briskly along La Gauchetière and slipped through a small wooden door next to the Sun Kuo Min Café. I walked down the dimly lit corridor with the sound of mah jong tiles click-clacking in small rooms on either side, and through the pungent redolence of Chinese herbal soup simmering on some stove. At the end of the corridor, I went into a small meeting hall, the gathering place of the East Wind Club, organized by the Hong Men (Chinese Freemasons). The club had monthly showings of films from the People’s Republic of China. People went to these events surreptitiously, looking over their shoulder before entering from the street. The Kuomintang was still strong in Montreal’s Chinatown and who knows, maybe the RCMP was watching the place.
This evening, the club was showing Dr. Norman Bethune, a black and white Chinese production starring American Gerald Tannebaum, who overacted his role as Norman Bethune, the selfless Canadian communist doctor who gave up his life for the Chinese Revolution. Preceding the feature film was a newsreel of Red Guards at Tiananmen Square waving the “Little Red Book” and shouting “Mao zhuxi wansui” (“long live Chairman Mao”). The feature film was my introduction to Bethune. The visual dramatization of his life and death made a deep impact on me and explained why people, even from the West, made revolution. I went home that evening and read Mao’s In Memory of Norman Bethune.
The audience was mainly restaurant workers who had just gotten off work. I respected and had sympathy for these workers who were so easygoing and down to earth in their view of the world. I was the only student there, but since I was still working as a waiter, I spoke their language—which included some colourful swear words focusing on your mother’s genitals. They had an avuncular sentiment towards me and jokingly called me “Mao doy” (Mao boy).
Politics was only part of my life. Economic survival was also important, as I needed money to continue in university.
In 1969, I was walking along University Street with my friend and fellow Verdunite Richard Orawiec, and looking at companies that might be hiring summer students. We saw a sign for “Saguenay Shipping.” As a lark, we said to each other, let’s get a job on a ship. Sure enough, Saguenay, a subsidiary of Alcan, had a student employment program but no students had applied because the pay was so pitifully low—$185 a month. We took the job for the adventure. The company flew us to Kitimat, BC, my first plane trip, to board the SS Sunek, a fifteen-thousand-ton ocean freighter. The Sunek made the run between Kitimat and Port Esquivel, Jamaica, to pick up alumina for the Alcan smelter in Northern BC. Kitimat was a company town designed and built by Alcan in the 1950s to take advantage of the hydroelectric power.
The Sunek plied the route between Kitimat and Jamaica along the Pacific coast of North America, through the Panama Canal, and occasionally across the Atlantic to an aluminum plant in Norway. The hierarchy of class and race on board ship was unambiguous. All ten officers were white and the thirty-member crew was Jamaican. It was a lesson in class and racial division. The officers were mainly British, with the exception of the Greek assistant engineer and two Canadians—they had well-maintained cabins to themselves on the upper deck. The Jamaicans, on the other hand, lived four to a cabin on the dingy lower deck. Richard and I shared a guest cabin with bunk beds on the officers’ deck.
Naturally, I hung out with the Jamaican crew and worked alongside them chipping away at rust and repainting various spots of the ship. They passed the days doing their marine duties at sea with an easygoing attitude as they chewed ganja to preserve their mellow mood. The Jamaicans did all the heavy lifting when the ship was docking or undocking and when it took on or offloaded the cargo; these operations could take all day or all night. Most of the crew were young; there was a burly, bearded one named Chung, whose father was a Jamaican-born Chinese. I learned from Chung that Chinese labourers settled in Jamaica at about the same time that they settled in Canada. Posters of Che and Fidel hung in many of their cabins alongside reggae musicians Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.
Richard and I ate in the officers’ dining room complete with white tablecloths and crisp white napkins as the two dignified Jamaican stewards served the meals. The Jamaican cook prepared the delicious food. The crew ate below deck in their segregated mess hall; once I asked if I could eat with them and they all laughed. Their meals were simple fare but the main reason was that there was barely enough food at each meal for the ravenous crew. If open class struggle were to happen, this was the epic setting for it.
Nevertheless, Richard and I enjoyed our time on the ship. When not chipping and painting I did engine watch as well as night duty on the bridge. I particularly savoured the sultry sea breeze and viewing the abundance of stars in the clear night sky. During the day, we watched the flying fish sailing across the bow or the dolphins jumping alongside the ship through the azure blue water. On our last trip down to Port Esquivel, Richard and I fantasized about being sailors and we debated whether to stay on the ship and sail to Norway from Port Esquivel. Richard was the first to come to his senses, as he reminded me that we were the first in our families to go to university and it would be a great disappointment for our immigrant parents if we became sailors. I agreed. Richard later became a dentist.
Back at McGill, I was about to meet my political mentor.
Devinder took me to the lab of Daya Varma, an MD with a PhD in pharmacology who was a professor at McGill, and introduced me. The lab was a hangout for progressive students. Daya was the leading force on campus of the Third World Marxist-Leninists; he had joined the Communist Party of India during his student days in the 1950s. Apart from becoming my political mentor, he would become a lifelong friend.
The Marxist-Leninist study groups of Third World people were an alternative to the New Left, nationalist and decolonization movements in Montreal in the late ’60s. Through the network of Third World students and study groups, I began to organically understand the fight for national liberation and the need to make a break from colonial mentality through socialist thought.
In the Marxist-Leninist study groups, we examined classical works such as Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and The State and Revolution; Mao’s New Democracy, and On Contradiction; and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The texts furthered my understanding of the world, especially the Third World. It was a new language and I quickly became proficient in it.
Having knowledge of Marxism-Leninism was like having a passport into understanding the oppressed peoples and countries of the world—it was a different world outlook. When you think you have the solutions to change the world for the better, you tend to have an air of arrogance. I’ve been accused of this more than once.
I am not an orator. I don’t move and inspire people through speech. My skill is in organizing. This ability to mobilize people put me behind the scenes and allowed those more talented, who can articulate the cause, a platform to inspire people through oration. I resisted attempts by Daya to get me to address meetings. After I refused his many invitations to be a speaker, he became frustrated and accused me of “false modesty.”
With the core of people from the Marxist-Leninist study groups, Daya formed the Afro-Asian Latin America Peoples’ Solidarity Committee (AALAPSC) as a mass organization to broaden the support for Third World struggles—struggles we deemed to be at the vanguard of world revolution. The AALAPSC, also known as the “Afro-Asians,” created different support groups for the struggles in areas such as Palestine, South Africa (Azania), the Portuguese colonies in Africa, and the Caribbean and Latin American struggles in places like Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guatemala and Venezuela.
Two of the more renowned members of the Afro-Asians were Hidipo Hamutenya of Namibia and Mtshana Ncube of Zimbabwe. Hidipo would become a minister in the SWAPO91 (South West Africa People’s Organization) government and he was almost elected president of Namibia. Mtshana was a member of the Patriotic Front–ZAPU92 (Zimbabwe African People’s Union).
The Afro-Asians published Third World Solidarity and later the semi-monthly journal Third World Forum, both of which Daya funded. We distributed the literature and set up book tables at community functions, trade union conferences and Third World solidarity rallies. Literature tables were a good way to communicate with people who dropped by out of curiosity and allowed us to do our agitation and propaganda. I sat behind many of these tables and enjoyed my conversations with those who stopped—especially the ones that did not agree with our points of view—and lively debates ensued. On these tables we had pamphlets from the national liberation movements, Marxist-Leninist texts, and of course, literature from China. We met fellow travellers and recruited many to our cause.
The insular movement of Quebec nationalist renewal was beginning to turn international, as members of the Afro-Asians—especially the French-speaking Haitian and North African members—started to link up with the Québécois community groups and the solidarity committee of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux union. World events and local Third World activists helped to turn the homegrown nationalism into a global internationalism.
Today, there is much discussion on whether we have ethnic, linguistic-cultural or territorial nationalism in Quebec. However, in the 1970s many on the left saw Quebec nationalism as a progressive force challenging the status quo, but this nationalism became internationalism with the influence of Marxist-Leninist thought.
On Daya’s suggestion, I was assigned to create the Canada-China Friendship Association. The international network of China friendship groups was essentially a united front of trade unions, community organizations, political groupings, academics and common people from all walks of life who had an interest in China. Many of these friendship groups were mass organizations and seen as fertile grounds for Marxist-Leninists to recruit people who were sympathetic to China—and by extension to socialism. Friendship work was productive in promoting a friendly awareness of People’s China, and it spurred on a broad spectrum of people to get a first-hand look at the “miraculous” changes taking place in the new workers’ paradise.
I took on the task with Alan Silverman, whom I befriended in a study group, and we’ve remained friends ever since. Alan and I were roommates in the mid ’70s, sharing a flat on Drolet, half a block up from Carré St. Louis. He introduced me to gefilte fish, the bland Jewish delicacy. He kept a cupboard full of cans of this stuff, which he often ate as a quick meal.
Winning support for China prior to Canada establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic in 1970 was a “revolutionary” task. We saw China as the model, the beacon of world revolution; it was important to gain sympathy for China to counter the anti–Red China sentiments emanating from the US. The KMT was still strong in Canada and they were fighting a rearguard battle to discourage Canada from recognizing the People’s Republic of China.
Alan and I published newsletters and organized public meetings and film screenings of revolutionary classics, like The Red Detachment of Women. While I was still a student at McGill, I was able to book rooms and even take out audio-visual equipment without charge for these meetings and presentations on China. To get around any censorship from the administration, I presented the purpose of these meetings to be travelogues on China. In 1970, we invited notable speakers, such as Rev. James Endicott, an international peace activist, long-time friend of China and supporter of the Chinese Communist Party. Endicott founded the Canadian Peace Congress and received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. Another speaker was Ted Allen, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and was a friend of Norman Bethune. He was asked to speak about his book on the life of Bethune, The Scalpel. The Sword. Allen later wrote the screenplay for Lies My Father Told Me, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
William Hinton, another old China hand and author of Fanshan, also spoke in Montreal in 1971. I remember checking him into the old thousand-room Laurentian Hotel, a utilitarian lodging which has since been demolished for an office complex, at the corner of Dorchester and Peel. He spoke glowingly of the agrarian revolution in China’s countryside, but years later Hinton would become an outspoken critic of economic reforms in China. We also organized talks with the knowledge we gleaned from pro-China books and magazines like China Reconstructs and Beijing Review. Alan gave a talk on the true nature of Lin Piao,93 which shed some light on the internal intrigues of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution.
People in Quebec had great interest in People’s China. A few years later, when I knew and worked closely with Roger Rashi, he told me that while he was working in a furniture factory in 1972, the union called a general assembly at the shop to deliver a report on a Quebec labour delegation to China. Three hundred of the five hundred workers in the plant attended.94
Our friendship association lasted until 1974, when we merged with Prof. Paul Lin’s Canada-China Society, which had a more respectable clientele of academics, politicians and business people.
The 1970s—the decade in which I would graduate—were a tempestuous time in Quebec and around the world. But I can’t discuss that further without mentioning an event that took place in Montreal as the ’60s were coming to an end.
Racism in Canada has taken on many forms. We had the early naked state racism against the Indigenous peoples and the Chinese immigrants, but racism became more subtle and insidious as history progressed. I came to realize that the politics of racism required some intellectual understanding of how the economic system perpetuated racist ideas—both to exploit and divide people, and to maintain the system among oppressed and marginalized minorities.
The stark lessons of racism were clearly demonstrated in Montreal in 1969. The anti-racist struggles of the First Peoples, Blacks and other minorities had not yet entered the consciousness of the Quebec nationalist left. Vallières’ book used the concept of “white niggers” to paint a misleading picture of Quebec as an oppressed colony. In doing so, he clouded over Black Quebecers’ fight against racism. The anti-racist struggle in the province was crystallized by the occupation of the Sir George Williams University computer centre in support of Black Caribbean students’ claims of discrimination by a white biology teacher. Without any sensitivity to the grievances of the Black students, the university went into a public relations mode to absolve itself and, after a hearing, found the teacher to be not guilty of racism. In response to the original grievance, the students staged one of the largest student occupations in Canadian history with over four hundred taking part.
I remember standing on de Maisonneuve Boulevard, looking up as the occupying students threw out computer punch cards and printouts from the ninth floor, like confetti, covering the street below. The occupation was peaceful until the riot police were called. A fire broke out in the computer centre in the ensuing “riot.”
There was a substantial racist backlash to the burning of the computer centre. With black smoke spewing from the ninth floor windows, whites on the ground chanted, “Let the niggers burn.” The Quebec left was jolted by the reality of racism at home; it wasn’t a struggle of Blacks in the US South or in far-away South Africa, but in downtown Montreal. This open anti-racist rebellion was a fitting close to the turbulent ’60s.
The Quiet Revolution of the early ’60s had given the Quebec people the burgeoning confidence of being Maîtres chez nous. We lived through the results of the terrorist bombings perpetrated by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) and the state repression in response, imposed under the War Measures Act after the FLQ kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross and kidnapped and assassinated Pierre Laporte, a Quebec government minister. Our group at McGill opposed the terrorism of the FLQ. We viewed terrorism as a political tactic, devoid of any mass participation and support, to be counter-productive.
The declaration of the War Measures Act in October 1970 had a blanketing effect on us. The military was everywhere, even on the street in front of the McGill campus. Police repression was palpable. Many political activists were rounded up, and others were forced to work in a semi-clandestine manner.
One of Daya’s graduate students was picked up by the police and thrown into the Parthenais Detention Centre. Our collective was indignant but felt powerless for fear of being seized. Daya encouraged us to continue the agit-prop work. We had flying squads of people distributing leaflets denouncing the state repression.
I went to Daya’s office to pick up a bunch of stickers with the famous image of the old Québécois Patriote stepping in a forward lean with a musket in his hands, a corncob pipe in his mouth and a tuque on his head. The slogan “A Bas Le Fascisme!” (“Down with Fascism!”) was emblazoned on the sticker. People posted this sticker around town, including on campus.
I felt the nervous tension. We were in an atmosphere of “apprehended insurrection.” It cast a pall over our political work. Granted, it was nothing like the repression faced by the Third World revolutionaries and anti-colonial fighters in their life and death struggles, but it still came as a shock to most of us who had been taught to expect civil liberties, freedom and democracy in Canada. One day, running between floors in the McConnell Engineering Building, I sensed someone following me. I quickly dodged into a washroom and sat down in a stall. That person pursued me and entered the toilet but seeing I was there, doing my business, he left.
There was an acute economic crisis in the early ’70s. Unemployment was high, wages low, and inflation was rampant with soaring prices. In response, workers’ study groups, community organizations and social movements were sprouting at the grassroots. General strikes were called; union leaders were jailed. The dead-end nationalism of the Parti Québécois was driving people to seek a broader solution to the many problems facing Quebec society. During that time we participated in some of the major struggles in the Quebec anti-imperialist movement—rallying people against the Vietnam War, and in support of the Palestinian and South African struggles—and we also mobilized support for the labour battles that were rocking Quebec society.
After writing my final exam in May 1972, I went with a comrade to the east end Maurice Richard Arena where a union rally was being held. The assembly came on the heels of a province-wide general strike and legislation ordering the workers back to work. The arena was full of striking workers, union militants and community activists listening to speeches from their leaders. The strength of unity and solidarity was awe-inspiring. Music added to the festive and rebellious atmosphere. The Cuban song “Guantanamera” rang in my ears. I was truly inspired by José Marti’s words and felt I was casting my lot with the poor of the world.
The three union leaders of the Front commun95 were at the forefront of the popular struggles in Quebec and each was sentenced to one year in jail for defying the legislation to return to work. Each union issued a manifesto putting forward a fledgling class analysis, but they still saw Quebec society as a colony of Anglo capitalism and US imperialism. The manifestos revealed the class-consciousness growing among Quebec workers. This trend of thought could not help but have a powerful influence among the left in Quebec, which would lead to a more radical rupture from the decolonization politics of the ’60s.
Upon my graduation in 1972, I set out to find work. Many of my fellow engineering students were offered employment even before they graduated. A few months of pounding the streets and knocking on doors produced no results. Was it because I was Chinese, as my father said, or was it due to the economic recession? By this time, I knew that I wasn’t the main source of my own misfortune. The reason I was unemployed was due to the system that offered few opportunities for immigrants and minorities.
I decided to enter graduate studies, with the hope that a master’s degree would open some doors. I enrolled at Carleton University and moved to Ottawa. While there, I was restless, so along with a group of like-minded science students, I organized a Science for the People chapter. I left behind my Third World comrades in Montreal. I’ve always been a solitary man—a loner—but I missed the companionship and the camaraderie of the like-minded friends who came from all over the world to congregate in Montreal.