Chapter 3
The Turbulent Exclusion Years (1923–47)
“I fancy we do not want them here. … make it absolutely clear that Chinese women cannot come in under any circumstances.”
The two and a half decades after the Canadian government banned Chinese immigration were extremely difficult for thousands of Chinese people, including my family, both because of Canada’s treatment of the Chinese and because of international events.
In Canada, the government achieved its desired sinister effect with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923. Although the Chinese community protested against the law before it was passed and gathered every July 1 to mark Humiliation Day for the twenty-four years the law was in effect, the population of Chinese in Canada during those years tells the real story. According to the Canadian census, the Chinese population dropped by 30 per cent between 1931 and 1951, from 46,519 to 32,528. The majority of the Chinese who left Canada went back to China. During that time, only forty-seven Chinese33 were allowed into Canada under special categories, such as diplomats.
During this period the Chinese in Montreal and across Canada were extremely anxious about political developments in Asia. It was a time of tremendous turbulence, upheaval and division. By 1931 the threat of a Japanese invasion of China had turned into the reality of the Japanese occupying Manchuria in northeast China and preparing to invade the entire country.
There was a great political divide in China, which two organizations in Canada reflected: the Kuomintang, or KMT (Nationalists), and the Zhigongtang, or ZGT (Chinese Freemasons). In Montreal, while my father and grandfather most often sought out the company of other Chinese men in Chinatown at the Young Men’s Christian Institution and the Montreal headquarters of the Hum Association, there were other mutual support organizations at hand, some with strong political associations, most notably the Chinese Nationalist League (KMT), which had opened its doors in 1918 at 139 Clark, and the Chinese Freemasons (Hong Men) at 78 La Gauchetière. Other organizations in Montreal at the time included various other family associations and the Chinese Benevolent Society, which had started in 1915 at 6 La Gauchetière.
The KMT and its newspaper, the Shing Wah Daily News, had a strong influence on the Chinese community in Canada. My father and grandfather were lifelong supporters of the KMT due to their respect for Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who had founded the party in 1912 to unite the nationalist forces and establish a republican government in China. That support was reciprocated: before Canada introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese in Canada appealed to the Chinese government to make representation to Canada, which led Sun Yat-sen and his flamboyant Canadian bodyguard, Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, to cable the Canadian government asking for a halt to the proceedings.34 (To no avail, of course.)
In the 1920s, the KMT had sought the political and material support of the Soviet Union and the Comintern, or Communist International, an organization that united the world’s communist and workers parties. The Comintern ordered the Chinese Communists to join the KMT and form a united front to tackle the reconstruction of China. After the death of Dr. Sun in 1925, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek took control of the KMT and began a purge of Communists in China, which led to a mass slaughter in Shanghai in April 1927. Ten thousand communists were killed throughout China within twenty days. This brought an end to the first united front and sparked the Chinese Civil War, which would last the next twenty years.
The history of the Zhigongtang (Hong Men) is more convoluted. It was founded as a secret society in Guangdong province in 1674 to overthrow the Manchu Qing Dynasty. In Canada, a branch was formed in 1862, during the Gold Rush, in Barkerville, BC. Its Canadian members were workers, gold miners and small merchants.
As historian Kin-ping Kam said proudly at the Twenty-third Assembly of the Chinese Freemasons in Canada, held in Toronto in September 1985: “It was neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist party that had overthrown the Qing Dynasty [in 1911–12] and built the Republic of China.” Instead, “opposition against the Qing Dynasty … fell on the shoulders of brothers of Hong Men overseas. This spectacular achievement shines as brightly as the sun and moon, and deserves the admiration and respect of thousands of generations to come.”35
During the time of Sun Yat-sen, the Hong Men in Canada had a social and political agenda: to raise funds across Canada for the nationalist cause in China. They became bitter rivals with the Kuomintang after Dr. Sun’s death in 1925 and Chiang Kai-shek’s ascendance to the KMT leadership.
That rivalry endured throughout the 1930s and ’40s. The Hong Men were sympathetic to the Chinese Communists, whereas the KMT members in Canada represented Chiang Kai-shek.
In the Montreal community, the Zhigongtang was well respected as a social welfare organization; its activities included organizing busloads of people to go to Mount Royal Cemetery to honour the ancestors for the Qing Ming festival, and it was active in establishing the original Montreal Chinese Hospital founded in 1920 in a former synagogue at 112 La Gauchetière in Chinatown.
The Hong Men, though, had an image problem in North America. Due to their origins as a secret society, authorities in the US and Canada associated them with Triad criminal gangs. The Montreal media sensationalized disputes between the ZGT and the KMT—including one physical altercation in 1933—calling them the “Tong Wars.”
During the Depression, there wasn’t much help from the provincial government for the Chinese in Montreal. It was the clan associations, the YMCI, the Benevolent Society, the Hong Men, the Chinese Catholic and Presbyterian missions and other organizations that came together to provide some form of relief to those who needed it.
The overseas family or clan associations were organized for mutual support following the principles of Confucian social formations. In Montreal, the major family associations were for the Hum, Lee, Wong and Chin clans. The Dere clan was not numerous enough to form its own organization, so it associated with the Hum Family Association and used its premises on La Gauchetière Street. The family associations were led by the merchants, who had the financial resources to back their activities, making loans for business ventures, and transferring funds to China. They also performed other functions, such as organizing the Qing Ming festival—and even sending bodies from Montreal for shipment back to the village for burial.36 The merchants, although they only made up 5 per cent of the Chinese population across Canada,37 were economic leaders of the community. But even they had little or no political clout when fighting unvarnished racism and human rights violations. This is the outcome of state-sanctioned repression.
During the Depression, the unemployment rate in the general population of Canada was 30 per cent. In Vancouver, 40 per cent of the Chinese were unemployed.38 But it was not clear what percentage of the unemployed across Canada were Chinese, since they did not normally count in the general statistics. What was clear was that Chinese Canadians did not receive the same relief that was given to the white population.39
In Vancouver, the provincial government gave the Chinese Anglican Mission 16¢ a day, per person, to set up a soup kitchen in Chinatown. Many Chinese got sick from the poor quality food, which the Communist paper BC Workers News claimed was only worth 3¢ per meal.40 In areas catering to whites, those who needed relief received meal tickets worth 15¢ to 25¢. Similarly, in Alberta, relief payments of $1.12 per week were given to the Chinese, less than half of what was given to others.41
On May Day, 1935, the Chinese Workers’ Protective Association and the Unemployed Chinese Association, with the support of the Provincial Workers Council, demonstrated in Vancouver, demanding that Chinese Canadians receive relief equal to that of jobless whites.42 The Chinese Workers’ Protective Association was founded in 1923 to fight for jobs and the rights of Chinese workers, and existed until the mid-1950s. It had some fraternal affiliation with the Communist Party of Canada.43
During the decade of the Depression, the Chinese population in Canada, without any fresh inflow of immigration, decreased by 26 per cent. Some decided to go back to China believing things couldn’t be worse back in the village. In Vancouver, the local government urged destitute Chinese to leave. Paying for their passage was cheaper than giving relief to people who were becoming increasingly militant. For a promise to never come back to Canada, four hundred Vancouver Chinese decided to return to China with a government subsidy in 1935.44
The laundrymen in Montreal, despite their self-reliant form of economic livelihood, were also seriously affected by the global capitalist crisis. With the slump in business, my father and grandfather decided to take turns going to China, thinking it would be easier to maintain a one-man laundry operation with one less mouth to feed. Grandfather went back in 1931 and when he returned, Father left in 1933. When he came back to Canada in May 1935, he saw things were not that much better.
In the late 1930s, international events took centre stage. Japan waged an all-out military invasion of China in 1937. Canada entered World War II in September 1939 when it declared war on Germany; two years later, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Canada declared war on Japan.
During the war years, the Montreal Chinese formed their own united front against Japan—the Chinese Patriotic League45—which included the KMT, ZGT, the YMCI and other organizations. Altogether, the league in Montreal raised over $400,000.46 Across Canada, the Chinese bought $10 million in Canadian Victory Bonds to support Canada’s war effort.47
My father and grandfather got involved in fundraising as the Japanese were advancing towards our home county in China. Their concern led them to become active in the patriotic campaign to raise funds for the anti-Japanese war effort. My father had brought news to Montreal of the impending Japanese onslaught when he got back from his visit to China in 1935. He knew that if the Japanese were not stopped in Manchuria, they would eventually reach our home province of Guangdong.
In 1937, Japan began its wholesale invasion of China in an undeclared war, after consolidating its occupation of Manchuria. People were eager for news from home. In Montreal, a large bulletin board was erected at the corner of La Gauchetière and Clark where Chinese articles about the war were posted daily. The Montreal Gazette reported that, during the same year, $10,000 was raised in the Chinese community for Red Cross work in the war-torn areas of China.48 This is one of the few times that an article from the mainstream press did not deal with Tong wars, gambling, prostitution or other illicit activities in Chinatown.
(The more frequent type of sensationalized news included the press reporting that on a cold Saturday night in January 193449 the Montreal police, in an early incarnation of racial profiling, raided every single Chinese laundry, restaurant, club and some private homes in the city. Out of the hundreds of locations searched, only seven Chinese were arrested for possession of weapons and four for possession of opium. This was typical of the dramatic French and English press coverage, which often labelled Chinese as “inscrutable celestials.”50)
In the laundry, Father eventually hung a two-foot-wide group photo taken in 1942 after a fundraising procession through downtown Montreal. In the photo, he proudly stood behind the seated dignitaries—the leaders of the Chinese community as well as some white civic officials.
Newsreel footage of that procession showed a group of a dozen young Chinese women holding a large, spread-out KMT flag to collect donations. Father felt it was his patriotic duty to support the KMT and the Republic of China to fight against the Japanese invaders. Without the hindsight of history, he did not understand that the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek was far different from the KMT under Sun Yat-sen—the new leader devoted most of his energy to fighting the Chinese Communists instead of the Japanese.
Many Chinese Canadians volunteered to go to war. At first, the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King did not conscript Chinese or Japanese for two reasons: first, racial intolerance was not amenable to camaraderie with the white soldiers; and second, as historian Patricia Roy has written, with Chinese and Japanese serving in the war effort, “Canada would concede them a claim for equality and for all privileges of citizenship including the franchise.”51
By 1943, however, when there was a need for additional manpower, Canada decided to conscript the Chinese, almost all of whom were born in this country. For one thing, many whites were complaining that the Chinese were not being conscripted.
Ken Lee, a Chinese Canadian war veteran I spoke to in 1992, explained events this way: “We were conscripted and we said, ‘Why should we fight for this country when we have no rights?’ So they said: if we would fight for this country, they would right all these wrongs.”52 Ken actually enlisted in the air force in 1941 because he wanted to fight Japan.
From 1923 onward, Chinese in Canada continued to agitate against unjust Canadian immigration policy, most notably by gathering across the country each year to commemorate July 1 as Humiliation Day. These were twenty-four years of struggle and resistance to systemic and institutional racism.
The struggle had also found support back in China.
“China feels that Canada has inflicted an injury on her prestige in the circumstance and spirit of the immigration act,” Louis K. Lee, former editor of the China Critic an English-language newspaper in Shanghai, wrote in August 1943 in a contribution to the Montreal Gazette.53 He called the official name, the Chinese Immigration Act, “a misnomer. It is really an act of exclusion rather than immigration.”
Lee pointed out that, in the time of war, China and Canada were allies in the fight against German fascism and Japanese militarism. “The exclusion discriminates in a manner that is offensive to the racial and national dignity of the group excluded,” especially so “when the exclusion is based on the principle of ‘ineligibility to citizenship,’ which conveys the obnoxious implication that the people are biologically inferior.”
Lee continued,
Since 1923 not a single Chinese laborer has been admitted to Canada. … as a nation of nearly five thousand years civilization (China) does resent the implication of inferiority! It is absolutely irreconcilable with her revolutionary principle of freedom and equality which was enunciated by Dr. Sun Yat-sen … and for which the present war against Japan is fought. Now Canada and China are among the United Nations fighting hand in hand for the common cause. It goes without saying that if such laws as exclusion of Chinese were allowed to continue that would constitute a constant source of friction between China and Canada and also reduce China’s confidence in Canadian sense of justice as well as her hope of a better world after the war.
The China Critic54 was published in Shanghai from 1928 to 1940, and also in 1945, with a weekly circulation of eight thousand. It supported the United Front of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang against Japanese aggression.55 (Mao Zedong, who would become the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, had originally developed the idea of the United Front back in the 1920s.56)
The end of World War II was the beginning of the end for Chinese exclusion in Canada. Chinese Canadians who served in the armed forces demanded equal rights upon their return.
George Mar, a Chinese Canadian war vet who saw service in Asia, told me, “We figured we’d paid our dues to be full citizens. It’s pretty hard to deny you full citizenship after the guys have gone to war for you. … We had offered our lives for our country and it’s pretty hard for the country to deny you full citizenship and the rights everybody else has.”57
Canadian opinion towards China, and by extension to the Chinese here, was becoming more favourable. China was an ally in the war and Chinese Canadians had enlisted in large number for the war effort. The government could no longer ignore the legitimate demands of these war veterans for citizenship and full rights including the right to vote. International pressure was brought to bear with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights forbidding discriminatory practices. Canada had joined with other countries to formulate the declaration.
After a lengthy debate in Parliament, the Canadian government finally repealed the Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Act of 1923 on May 14, 1947, thus ending sixty-two straight years of official state racism against the Chinese.
However, the parliamentary debates were not without enduring sentiments of racism, with Prime Minister Mackenzie King setting the tone. “Large scale immigration from the orient would change the fundamental composition of the Canadian population,” he said. “The government, therefore, has no thought of making any change in immigration regulations which would have consequences of the kind.”58
During the debate to repeal the exclusion legislation, MP James Sinclair (Vancouver North), grandfather of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said:
We have never separated the Chinese question from the Japanese problem for the same reason that we have found during our experience that they cannot be assimilated or blended into the national life as other groups—Caucasian groups—have been in the past…. The fact that in twenty-three years so few of them have intermarried shows the difficulty of ordinary biological assimilation. … but after long experience with them, we do not want more oriental immigration, apart from the families of these men.59
Few MPs spoke with magnanimity towards the Chinese. During the 1947 debate, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was the only party that stood unequivocally for the repeal of the act. CCF MP W. Ross Thatcher,60 (Moose Jaw) called the Chinese Immigration Act “an insulting and unwarranted slur against a fine race of people.” The act, he said, had been passed “in an era of prejudice. Having allowed thousands of Chinese men to come to Canada, it then deprived them of the society of their wives and their children. To this group such action seems contrary to the principles of morality, humanity and social welfare.”
When the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in May 1947, there were still more battles to fight. The Chinese would have to wait another twenty years before they were put on an equal basis with others who wanted to immigrate to Canada.