This book is a voice from Chinese Canada. It is a voice from the margins and firmly plants itself in the soil of Canada and Quebec. It explores my selective memories as a Chinese Canadian activist; my motivations and my conscious and subconscious desires to seek my true identity, culture and place of belonging. I don’t consider myself a witness to history. I was too involved to be able to step back and give an objective testimony of pivotal events involving Chinese Canadians from the 1960s to today. This is a personal account of how events affected me and perhaps how I might have had an influence, however small, on them.
As the chapters that follow will make clear, the infamous and hefty head tax that Canada chose to levy only on Chinese immigrants has been a particular focus of many of my years in this country, including my participation in the head tax redress movement. The long-lasting effects on families caused by the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act (HTEA) are incalculable. For sixty-two years, an entire community was prevented, by law, from integrating into Canadian society. The Chinese community did not develop in a normal fashion since the law prevented families from reuniting or starting in Canada. A total of 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid a total of $23 million into the coffers of the Canadian federal and provincial governments. Those governments indeed showed that they could profit from racism.
I was born in China. I spent the first five years of my life there with my mother and siblings, and the next two in Hong Kong. My father and grandfather sent money from Canada, where they had both immigrated before Canada brought in the legislation that made it impossible for them to bring their wives to join them. My father’s last trip back to China was in 1947. I discovered that detail only after his death, through his head tax certificate. He had held on to it, along with other papers he kept safe for fear of being deported if any of them were lost.
On a personal level, Being Chinese in Canada explores why my father and grandfather decided to immigrate to Canada and how they survived in an unwelcoming society. But the personal is only a small part of a broader picture that became clear to me, during my research for this book, as I looked through the General Register of Chinese Immigration—a thousand volumes that Canada used to record and control Chinese immigrants. It’s a little known Canadian artifact that lists information about each Chinese person who was made to pay the head tax to come into the country.
I originally set out to write about my involvement in the redress movement for the HTEA. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 levied the head tax—which started at $50, rose to $100, and eventually settled at $500 per person—on those Chinese immigrants allowed into the country. The tax was replaced in 1923 by another Chinese Immigration Act, this one banning all Chinese immigration until 1947. It would be another twenty years before Chinese people were treated like others wanting to immigrate to Canada. Obtaining government redress was a further long battle. It was a defining period in the history of Chinese Canadian reality in this country and I was engaged for twenty years of my life in this struggle.
As I tossed the idea of my book to my daughter, Jessica, she lobbed back another suggestion: “I love it when you and mommy tell me about what you did in the Party. Why don’t you write about that?” As she was growing up, I dragged her to countless head tax meetings. She helped me organize workshops, study groups and concerts. She even appeared in Moving the Mountain, the 1993 documentary about the HTEA that I co-directed with Malcolm Guy. To her, the redress campaign was old hat. But she thought it was so romantic that her mother, Gillian Taylor, and I had met and fallen in love as comrades. I thought about all this and the redress book I was planning to write gradually grew.
Knowing my culture—Chinese Canadian culture—is the key to understanding and defining my identity in Canada and Quebec. It is a lifelong quest. I am talking about a stereotype-breaking, in-your-face kind of culture, the kind of social understanding and feeling that reflect the everyday struggles and experiences of living in Chinese Canada. The kind of social understanding and feeling that establish our place and identity in this country.
During periods in my youth, I grappled with my sense of identity and belonging in Canada, and as a founding member and full-time organizer of the Workers Communist Party, I felt a powerful sense of identity and belonging. Only years later did I come to the painful realization that political and ideological kinship was not the same as personal and emotional connection.
The decade of the 1970s was a turbulent time in Quebec and around the world. The revolutionary and popular movements of the ’70s honed the Québécois tradition of militant activism, and the province became a North American hotbed for resistance against the authority and repression of the state following the War Measures Act of 1970. Quebec activists learned how to organize within this atmosphere.
I was inspired by the national liberation struggles throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially the worldwide movement to oppose American aggression in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.
Throughout this period there was a beacon, a model: the People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong. Many progressive youth of the West were inspired by the slogans of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.” The Chairman exhorted the youth, “It is right to rebel” and “Bombard the headquarters.” Mao’s dictum, “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” had a quixotic air for the youth searching for solutions. In the early 1960s, the Communist Party of China criticized the policies of the Soviet Communist Party and by doing so launched the New Communist (Marxist-Leninist) Movement, which became a global phenomenon and caught the imagination and enthusiasm of the disaffected young intellectuals, students and workers of the West.
I was one of them—questioning things and not just accepting “truths” for granted. Throughout my university years in Montreal, and for a decade and a half following them, I was caught up in the New Communist Movement.
Two years after the breakup of the Workers Communist Party in Canada, my marriage with Jessica’s mother also ended. Without the ideological and political discipline of the Party guiding my way, I defaulted to the traditional Chinese cultural values learned from my parents. The year 1985 was a time of awakening as I began the search for my identity and my cultural terrain.
At that time, I knew nothing about Chinese Canadian history. Imagine: I knew about the history of the workers’ movement in Quebec and Canada and the struggles that took place in Canadian history, but I knew virtually nothing about the struggles of my own people and nothing about the history of my own family here in Canada.
In the course of searching for identity and belonging I became involved in the Montreal Chinese community. Through this involvement, I finally discovered some aspects of my father’s life here in Canada.1
When the Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act campaign started, I threw myself into it. Here was a unifying struggle against injustice and for equality, and it was personal. The struggle was not just for society in general as during the Marxist-Leninist years, but this time it was for myself and my family, and it was for the families of all the lo wah kiu, the pioneers of our community. There were small meetings, awareness-raising sessions, petitions, mass education meetings and concerts. During this period I made two documentary films to bring the message to a wider audience.
As an “insider,” I went through the ups and downs as in any political campaign. However, the HTEA issue was fundamental to the development of our community. The discriminatory laws resulted in the unequal way the early pioneering families and the community interacted with the larger society and we needed to expose this history. The twenty-two-year redress struggle transcended any factions within the community. The HTEA was a historical wrong that had to be recognized and redressed. In 2002, I formulated with the Chinese Canadian Redress Alliance a two-stage redress proposal that some in the community feel gave the government too easy a way out.
When the government of Canada finally apologized to Chinese people in the country in 2006, it was far from the end of my cultural odyssey—an odyssey that in 1990 had led me back to China, where I met the love of my life, Dong Qing Chen, who agreed to come to Canada with me, and who became so significant in my continuing personal quest for identity and belonging.
Being Chinese in Quebec is not like being Chinese in Canada. My participation in a 2012 documentary film, Être chinois au Québec—Being Chinese in Quebec, which explored the legacy of the HTEA in Quebec, exposed the fault lines between our community and the larger society. It is still an arduous uphill struggle for the Chinese minority to stand up for our own identity in Quebec.
Trying to sum up my ongoing quest for identity and belonging in this book has led me to realizations that I never anticipated—realizations that are now part of Being Chinese in Canada.
Note: To help readers, in the chapters that follow I refer to Chinese immigrants by the names they were given by Canadian immigration, occasionally making it clear as well what their original names were. I use the Western nomenclature of placing the family name last where appropriate.