The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities 9780773558069

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Preface
Notes about Chinese Romanization
Introduction: Interdiciplinary Approaches to Transcultural Negotiations of Chinese Canadian Identities
Part one – Migrant Transcultural Negotiations
1 The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1950
2 Transcultural Poetics: Hong Kong Canadian Identities in Yasi’s Works
3 Psychogeography and Cultural Negotiation in the Poetic Imagination of Hong Kong Canadian Identity
Part two – Negotiating Success and Failure
4 Identities in Public: Cultural Translation in Jan Wong’s Out of the Blue
5 Migration, Gender Relations, and the Negotiation of Identity among Chinese Professional Immigrant Women in Canada
6 Group Boundaries and Immigrant Income
Part three – Negotiating Adaptation, Belonging, and Co-construction
7 Ethnic Identity and the Cultural Translation of the Marketplace: The Supermarket Exemplar
8 Denaturalizing Canadian Literature: Fred Wah and Recapitulation
9 The Dynamics of Cultural Identity of Chinese in Toronto, 1960s–2010s
Conclusion: Future Directions for the Study of Chinese Canadian Identities
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

T h e T r a n s c u lt u r al Streams o f C h in e s e C a n a d ian I denti ti es

The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities

Edited by Jessica Tsui-yan Li

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-7735-5684-3 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5685-0 (paper) 978-0-7735-5806-9 (eP DF ) 978-0-7735-5807-6 (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of grants from the York Centre for Asian Research and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies of York University and the Asian Institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The transcultural streams of Chinese Canadian identities / edited by Jessica Tsui-yan Li. Names: Li, Jessica Tsui-yan, 1975– editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190115033 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190115106 | ISBN 9780773556850 (softcover) | IS BN 9780773556843 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780773558069 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780773558076 (eP U B ) Subjects: L CSH: Chinese—Cultural assimilation—Canada. | C SH : Chinese Canadians—Ethnic identity. Classification: L CC F C106.C 5 T 73 2019 | DDC 305.8951/071—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

Contents

Tables and Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Jessica Tsui-yan Li Preface xi Vivienne Poy Notes about Chinese Romanization  xvii Introduction: Interdiciplinary Approaches to Transcultural Negotiations of Chinese Canadian Identities  3 Jessica Tsui-yan Li Pa rt one   M i gr a nt T r a nsc ult u ral N e g o t i at i o n s   1 The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1950  31 Henry Yu   2 Transcultural Poetics: Hong Kong Canadian Identities in Yasi’s Works 50 Jessica Tsui-yan Li   3 Psychogeography and Cultural Negotiation in the Poetic Imagination of Hong Kong Canadian Identity  66 Kwok-kan Tam Pa rt two   N e got i at i ng Suc ce ss an d F ai l u re   4 Identities in Public: Cultural Translation in Jan Wong’s Out of the Blue 83 Eleanor Ty

vi Contents

  5 Migration, Gender Relations, and the Negotiation of Identity among Chinese Professional Immigrant Women in Canada  94 Guida Man and Elena Chou   6 Group Boundaries and Immigrant Income  117 Eric Fong and Loretta Ho Pa rt th r e e  Ne go t i at i ng A da p tat i o n , Be l o n g i n g , a n d C o - c on st ruc t i o n   7 Ethnic Identity and the Cultural Translation of the Marketplace: The Supermarket Exemplar  139 Lucia Lo   8 Denaturalizing Canadian Literature: Fred Wah and Recapitulation 157 Lily Cho   9 The Dynamics of Cultural Identity of Chinese in Toronto, 1960s–2010s 174 Jack Hang-tat Leong Conclusion: Future Directions for the Study of Chinese Canadian Identities 185 Jessica Tsui-yan Li Contributors 191 Index 195

Tables and Figures

Tables 1.1 County origins of Chinese registrants, 1885–1949  35 6.1 Levels of perceived group difference by income level and ­professional occupation  127 6.2 Interval regression estimates of perceived group differences and other variables of income  128 6.3 Interval regression estimates of perceived group differences and other variables of income among professionals  130 6.4 Interval regression estimates of perceived group differences and other variables of income among non-professionals  131 9.1 Attachment to Canada: Integration of Chinese in Canadian society 179 9.2 Integration of Chinese by generation  180 9.3 Representation of the Chinese in each attachment class by immigrant status  180 9.4 Definition of the attachment classes  180

F ig u r es 1.1 Sample page from General Register of Chinese Immigration. General Registers of Chinese Immigration, 1885–1949, L AC, R G 76 D 2a, image e006069721.  40 1.2 Destinations of Cantonese migrants to Canada between 1910 and 1923. Created by Edith Tam and Sally Hermansen in 2010, using data from the Chinese Head Tax Database ­produced between 2008 and 2010 at UB C from the General Registers of Chinese Immigration, 1885–1949, L AC, RG 76 D 2a. 41

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Tables and Figures

2.1 The Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe by Bill Reid (Haida, 1994). Photo taken at Vancouver International Airport Terminal, Departures Level 3 (photograph by Jessica Tsui-yan Li).  58 7.1 Conceptual framework. Adapted from Lo (2009).  143 7.2 Study areas and supermarket locations, Lo (2009).  148 7.3 Shopping venues for specific groceries, Wang and Lo (2007). 150 8.1 Lithograph by J. G. Bach of Leipzig after drawings by Haeckel, from Anthropogenie, published by Engelmann.  168

Acknowledgments Jessica Tsui-yan Li

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the collaboration, contributions, help, and advice of many people, institutions, and organizations. Most of the chapters in this volume derived from the two-day symposium entitled “Cultural Translation and Chinese Canadian Studies,” which I organized at York University on 13 and 14 March 2014. I am indebted to the following sponsors of the symposium: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the York Centre for Asian Research, the Asian Business Network Association, the Minor in Asian Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and York University’s Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics; Department of Humanities; East Asian Studies Program; Department of History; and Department of Geography. I am grateful for the great support of Vivienne Poy, who gave an insightful keynote address at the symposium and offered valuable comments and suggestions for improving the quality of this volume. I would also like to express my gratitude and appreciation to all of the presenters at the symposium and other contributors to this book. They include distinguished scholars, both established and emerging academics, from Canada and Hong Kong. I am grateful to all the discussants and colleagues who commented on individual chapters and offered advice on this volume: Wing-Cheuk Chan, Eric Fong, Pietro Giordan, Donald Goellnicht, Susan Ingram, Philip Kelly, David Chuenyan Lai, Christopher Lee, Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Bernard Luk, Lisa Mar, and Shuguang Wang.

x Acknowledgments

I am particularly grateful to Philip Kelly, former director of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) (2012–17) at York University, for his great support in organizing the grant application, the workshop, and the publication of this volume. I thank Alicia Filipowich, the Y C A R coordinator, for her help with workshop organization and in the preparation of this manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the support of the following from York University: Martin Singer, Kim Michasiw, Naomi Adelson, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. My special thanks to Mark Abley, acquisitions editor of McGillQueen’s University Press (M Q U P ); to the anonymous reviewers for their critical and productive comments; and to the M Q U P staff members who were involved in this project. I would also like to thank Cindy Chopoidalo and K. Joanne Richardson for copyediting this manuscript. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the York Centre for Asian Research and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies of York University, and the Asian Institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto for the financial support they provided for the publication of this book.

Preface Vivienne Poy

Ethnic Chinese have been arriving on Canadian shores since the eighteenth century. During this time, Canadian society’s attitudes towards Chinese migrants and immigrants alike have evolved and, in turn, so have the identities of Chinese Canadians. Chinese came from many areas of the world, bringing with them different cultures and backgrounds. This book covers only those who originated from Greater China because they are by far the majority, particularly those who came from South China’s Guangdong province through Hong Kong. Up until now, few academic studies with as wide a scope as this one have focused on this group of Canadians. The idea for this book came from a symposium that was organized by Jessica Tsui-yan Li and that took place during two bitterly cold days in March 2014 at York University. All of the chapters that comprise The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities originated in this symposium. They deal with the history of Chinese migration to Canada, the discrimination these immigrants faced, their survival, their gradual acceptance by and adaptation to Canadian society, and the evolution of Chinese Canadian identity. Readers will note that some of the authors have English names and that some have English as well as Chinese names or initials. The names indicate the cultural backgrounds of the scholars. Many Chinese from Hong Kong use both English and Chinese names, while those who have lived in the West for a long time may choose to use only English names when their works are published in English. Until the end of the twentieth century, the Chinese who entered Canada came predominantly from Guangdong province via Hong Kong. The imperial Qing government allowed only Guangzhou

xii Preface

(Canton) to be a port of entry for European trade with China, and this enabled the Cantonese population to be exposed to Western peoples and cultures, despite restrictions imposed upon the latter. When Hong Kong Island (1842) and Kowloon (1860) were ceded to Britain as a result of the Opium Wars, and the New Territories were leased to Britain for ninety-nine years in 1898, Hong Kong became the port of entry and exit for both goods and labour overseas, mainly to the English-speaking world. With the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, cheap labour was needed to replace the slaves to work in the British colonies. The California gold rush (1848) and the subsequent Fraser River gold rush (1858) in British Columbia tempted many Chinese from Guangdong to go to North America, which became known as Gum San, or Gold Mountain. This temptation was understandable as the amount of money they could make in Gum San dwarfed what they could make in their home villages. The Gold Mountain dream became part of Cantonese culture for young men from the villages in southern Guangdong province to the extent that, for the following century, this part of South China was devoid of young men and adolescent boys. This book covers the issues of contract labourers, the discrimination migrants faced, the immigration and settlement of different waves of Chinese to Canada, and their eventual inclusion in Canadian society. The dominance of Chinese migration from Guangdong province and Hong Kong until the end of the twentieth century is of cultural importance. This particular geographic origin and the groups’ identities are strongly reflected in most of the chapters. Cultural identities are greatly influenced by how a minority group of citizens is accepted by the host country. Canadian immigration laws and regulations evolved from the head tax imposed after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act). But it was not until after the Second World War that Canada and Canadians were ready for change, and this happened very gradually. Chinese immigration to Canada increased at the beginning of the 1960s. The year 1967 marked a distinct shift in immigration policy with the introduction of the points system. The new regulation was presented as non-discriminating; however, in reality, discrimination based on race and country of origin was simply changed to discrimination based on class – on education and skills. Class bias was blurred

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only when it came to “family class” immigration. The immigration discussed in this collection mostly reflects that of the middle and the educated class. In the Chinese Canadian communities from the late 1960s onwards, the influx of those seeking higher education, as well as the highly educated, changed the dynamics and the identities of communities across Canada. The airing of CTV W 5’s “Campus Giveaway” in 1979 brought out the exclusionary elements in Canadian society: those university students who looked Chinese, irrespective of whether they were Canadian citizens or not, were considered outsiders who took university spaces from “Canadians.” The earlier Canadian perception of Chinese immigrants as comprising a “dirty, poor, labouring class” who lived in Chinatowns was changed to that of students who competed fiercely for spaces in Canadian institutions of higher education. This marked a distinct change in the identities of Chinese Canadians. From the 1980s onwards, due to Britain’s immanent return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China, the evolution of Chinese Canadian identities continued with the influx of business immigration from Hong Kong. Hong Kong was, by then, a major world financial centre, known for its high educational standards. The Canadian government moved its immigration resources to Hong Kong in order to attract entrepreneurs and wealthy immigrants. By 1990, the investor category from Hong Kong alone was responsible for approximately 12.5 percent of direct foreign investment in Canada, or approximately $1 billion per year. Despite the welcome from Canada’s federal, provincial, and municipal governments, Hong Kong immigrants, who, for a number of years after 1985, were responsible for 40 percent of Canada’s business immigration, were blamed by Canadian media for social ills and were seen by many Canadian citizens as a threat to the Canadian way of life. The identity thrust upon them may be summarized as: “You are from Hong Kong, you must be rich!” Large Chinese malls, grocery chains, seniors residences, Hong Kong-style cafes, and up-market Chinese restaurants came into existence, and so did television stations and radio programs that catered to Hong Kong immigrants. The negative reaction to Chinese Canadians was particularly heightened in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. In 1988, in an attempt to deal with this, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed David See-Chai Lam, a Hong Kong immigrant, as the twenty-fifth lieutenant-governor of British Columbia.

xiv Preface

Identities of Chinese Canadians continued to evolve as the number of Chinese immigrants increased. In 1994, almost 20 percent of all immigrants to Canada were from Hong Kong, and, by 2001, Chinese had become the third most spoken language in Canada. From the mid-1990s onwards, immigration from Hong Kong gradually decreased and immigration from mainland China increased. By 1998, the number of immigrants from mainland China had overtaken that from Hong Kong, while many immigrant heads of households returned to Hong Kong because of its political stability and improved economic opportunities while their families stayed in Canada. A few years later, this same pattern of return migration also occurred with regard to the immigrants from mainland China. The number of ethnic Chinese youth in Canadian schools and institutions of higher education dramatically increased, and these students came to be identified as high achievers. In 2006, in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to all Chinese Canadians for the head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act. A symbolic payment was offered to surviving head tax payers and / or to the surviving spouses of deceased head tax payers. The sense of relief among Chinese Canadians was short-lived because, within a very few years, the Harper government cancelled almost 300,000 immigration applications that had been submitted prior to 27 February 2008. These applicants had waited for years to be processed by immigration authorities, and a large number of them were from mainland China. The Harper government also announced its intention to end the existing investor program, and it introduced difficult language tests for new immigrants. These were all seen as discriminatory policies that targeted immigrants from non-European countries. So, despite Canada’s image as a multicultural country with a policy of inclusion, racial discrimination remained alive and well. The federal government’s policies were reflected in the media. A perfect example was the “Too Asian” article published by Maclean’s magazine on 10 November 2010, in which Canadian universities were criticized for accepting too many Asian (i.e., Chinese) students. Around the same time, there was a sharp drop in immigration applications from mainland China. The federal election at the end of 2015 brought an astounding victory to the Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau. The Liberal government is proceeding to undo some of the policies of the Harper Conservative government – for example, it is relaxing the age bracket

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pertaining to language tests required of new immigrants. It is also attempting to change the ambiance in Canadian society so that it will be more welcoming to newcomers. As time goes on, and governments come and go, Chinese Canadian identities are continuously evolving, particularly among those who were born in Canada and those who immigrated to Canada at an early age (when acculturation can happen much faster than in later years). How do the social and cultural mores, languages/dialects, incomes, food preferences, and shopping habits of Chinese Canadians fit into the Canadian context? How do Chinese Canadians view themselves? Angst, fears, hopes, and dreams are clearly expressed through literature, and Chinese Canadian literature shows the coming of age of this group’s identities. Since 1998, when immigration from mainland China overtook that from Hong Kong, Putonghua, together with Cantonese, became the dominant Chinese languages spoken in Canada. As Chinese Canadians from Greater China become well established financially and professionally in Canada, this book helps the reader to understand and define what it means to be Chinese Canadian. Further research will be needed to find out why, after hundreds of years in Canada, Chinese Canadians are still not taking leadership roles in this country’s corporations, judicial system, political realm, or higher educational institutions.

Notes about Chinese Romanization

In general, this book adopts the Hanyu Pinyin Romanization system. Some Chinese names of places and people as well as other proper nouns that are well established in other systems are also used. For better understanding and consistency, some old spellings of Chinese words are followed by the Pinyin version. For Pinyin spellings, apostrophes or hyphens are usually not used; however, when syllables are connected, an apostrophe is used. For Chinese given names and words that are connected to make new meanings, the Pinyin Romanization is joined together without a space. The transliteration of Chinese words may be italicized.

T h e T r a n s c u lt u r al Streams o f C h in e s e C a n a d ian I denti ti es

In t ro du cti on

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Transcultural Negotiations of Chinese Canadian Identities Jessica Tsui-yan Li

Chinese Canadians are becoming increasingly transcultural. They hold values and ideas, and perform acts, that cross cultural and national boundaries. Transcultural identities are produced when different groups of people interact with each other and eventually incorporate new discourses and knowledge systems into new forms of cultures situated within specific temporal and spatial spectrums. Symbolized on the cover of this book, Chinese and Canadian cultural identities, like various streams flowing and joining together, are blending concurrently. Chinese Canadian identities, as exemplars of transcultural identities, are characterized by diversity and fluidity, transcending many cultural and national boundaries. The resulting cultural heritages are intermingled, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict. The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities adopts an interdisciplinary approach to study how Chinese Canadians negotiate their perceptions of themselves and the power dynamics in Canada, resulting in continuous multidimensional cultural exchanges, from institutional racism to the gradual adaptation and co-construction of a culturally diverse Canadian society. Alongside the growing recognition of the pan-ethnic category of Asian Canadians, Chinese Canadians are gaining more prominence in Canada. This transformation has been influenced by several factors, including demographic changes in the Canadian population, with a steady increase in the number and power of Canadians of Chinese descent; the substantial growth of China’s economic and political

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power; more interaction between China and Canada; sociohistorical and literary academic discourses such as studies of ethnicity, migration, diasporas, gender, and race; and the changing reception of Chinese Canadians and their creative works by Canadians and others. With the increases in political, social, and cultural power of their newly developed contemporary demographic, Chinese Canadians have had a greater influence on Canadian society in the early twenty-first century than at any other time, giving rise to the multifaceted social and cultural factors that constitute Chinese Canadian identities and their ongoing transformations. Contextualized within larger debates on multicultural Canadian society and the specific Chinese Canadian cultural experience, Transcultural Streams examines the ongoing negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities as a simultaneously diasporic, transnational, transcultural, and domestic social and cultural formation. This book focuses on the negotiated identities of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese Canadians who occupy majority positions in the Chinese Canadian demographic landscapes and who, in recent decades, have made significant cultural imprints on Canadian society. While colonization and imperialism have led to imbalances in the power and influence of certain cultures and concepts, contemporary identity studies challenge assumptions of cultural superiority by investigating the continuing debates of various cultural practices as performative acts in different temporal and spatial contexts (Bhabha 1994, 46). Identity provides a crucial perspective for scholars of Chinese Canadian studies interested in examining cross-boundary interactions, migration, and cultural exchanges (Ty and Goellnicht 2004, 3). For Chinese Canadian subjects, identity has become a critical factor in the remaking of shared history and experience in modern and postmodern times, as demonstrated by the constant renegotiations and modification of Chinese Canadian identities. This social-­ constructivist perspective frames Chinese Canadian identities in terms of their productive and subversive power and the possibilities for recreating self-understanding. The major question this book asks in relation to contemporary Chinese Canadian identities is: How do Chinese Canadians negotiate their transcultural identities historically, socially, and culturally? This question can further be broken down as follows: How do Chinese Canadians construct their identities in the process of transcontinental migration, negotiate their “visible minority status” in interpreting

Introduction

5

the process of immigrant success and failure, and re-evaluate the transcultural values and established social hierarchies that foster the different senses of separation, marginalization, integration, belonging, and even co-construction involved in the shaping of their identities? Unlike traditional approaches, which employ only one disciplinary methodology, Transcultural Streams takes an innovative interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transnational approach to studying the ways in which Chinese Canadians adapt to Canadian society and co-­ construct the Canadian multicultural mosaic. Although most of the chapters in this book do approach the subject from particular disciplines, their interdisciplinary arrangement presents the reader with a holistic view of the influence of history and culture on the transcultural streams of Chinese Canadian identities from both collective and personal perspectives. Historical and social studies of Chinese Canadian identities offer a broader range of discourses on these social identities, while cultural and literary analyses of Chinese Canadian creative works highlight personal voices and individual cases. In this collection, we argue that Chinese Canadians create and constantly redefine their identities in a transcultural Canadian environment, as manifested in the social science, literary, and historical spheres. These constant negotiations not only reflect the sociocultural ideologies and practices that shape Chinese Canadian identities but also demonstrate the possibilities inherent in Chinese Canadians’ recreations of their self-perception, self-expression, and self-projection in relation to others and to their positions in Canada and in the world. The examination of trans-Pacific migration in Chapter 1 sets the stage for the transcultural negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities. Highlighting the historical and cultural significance of the Hong Kong diaspora in Canada, this chapter discusses the geopolitical and economic circumstances that have prompted Hong Kong migration to Canada as well as the corresponding migration of mainland Chinese, which has gradually supplanted it. The diverse cultural presentations of literary expression in both English and Chinese, as illustrated in Chapters 2 and 3, demonstrate negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities on a personal scale within a multicultural setting. Chapter 4 examines the influence of gender and profession on success and failure in terms of being a “model minority,” while Chapter 5 studies the gendered dynamics of migration and the growth of transnational “astronaut” families in the 1980s, and Chapter 6 investigates social

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inter-ethnic boundary crossing and its relationship to Chinese Canadian income. Various patterns of Chinese cultural interchanges in Canada – ranging from trends of consumption in Chinese supermarkets (Chapter 7) to multi-ethnic identities portrayed in literature (Chapter 8) to statistical analysis of the identity negotiations of second-generation Chinese Canadians (Chapter 9) – intertwine not only with disengagement and belonging but also with the significance of co-construction in Canadian society. Conventional postcolonial methodology has tended to portray immigrants in the host country merely as the so-called Other, who is  engaged in an exilic experience of displacement. By contrast, Transcultural Streams also discusses Chinese Canadians as a socially privileged group in their country of origin despite their sometimes marginalized position in Canada. By transcending the self/other binary favoured by “the West,” this collection takes an interdisciplinary approach that enables it to enrich postcolonial studies by giving voices to Chinese Canadian migrants’ former selves and experiences – selves and experiences that form vital components of their constantly evolving identities. Similarly, the discussion of astronaut families in this book provokes critical debate regarding not only why Chinese Canadians choose to live in a new country when they were already enjoying good lives at home but also why people with their talents and expertise would be marginalized in their new country.

C h in e s e C a n a d ia n I denti ti es The study of identity provides an important way for individuals to conceptualize their sense of self and their relationships with history, social communities, and cultures. It reflects cultural ideologies that affect individuals’ and communities’ self-projection and self-­perception. Traditionally, identity-based political movements, such as the women’s and civil rights movements, both of which focused on social justice issues have been perceived as confirming liberal ideals of democratic institutions. Recent liberal or progressive critics have challenged this positive view of minority social struggles (Piven 1995; Rorty 1999; Nancy 2000), instead viewing identity-based groups as special interest groups with politically limited and misguided agendas. However, failing to recognize identities will lead to distrust, miscommunication, and cultural hegemony (Mackey 1999; Alcoff 2006; Miki 2011; Bannerji 2011). Identity, as a construction dependent upon various

Introduction

7

historical circumstances, ideologies, and social practices, is strategically important for minority groups. Identities are neither positive nor negative; rather, they are significant markers for the sociohistorical and cultural structures that hierarchically organize and shape individuals. Transcultural Streams particularly examines social or personal identities that, in many ways, are imaginative responses to social structures. Identity is contingently constructed in specific times and spaces, and it is characterized by flexibility and indeterminacy (Alcoff 2005, 2006; Agnew 2005; Wiegman 2012; Lee 2012). Identity is not static but, rather, is subject to changes with the passage of time and space. Individual and community identities are not limited to ethnic heritage; they undergo constant modification through continuous experience and historical transformation. In terms of culture, identity involves many factors, such as class, sex, gender, sexual orientation, education level, and religion, all of which affect Chinese Canadians’ self-positioning and self-expression both individually and collectively. The fluidity of identity opens up new opportunities and spaces for subjects to refashion their self-images and their worldviews. Investigating the transcultural stream of Chinese Canadian identities requires a discussion of Chineseness. Tang Junyi (1974, 110) uses the imagery of drifting flowers and fruits to characterize Chinese expatriates replanting their roots in new soil and cultivating their languages and cultures, some aspects of which include Zhongyong (the Middle Way, or Way of Centrality) as well as filial piety and respect. While Tang regards Chineseness as both an ethnic and a cultural heritage, Lisa See (1995, xx) challenges this definition, arguing that Chineseness is a cultural practice rather than a biological inheritance and using personal anecdotes relating to her family and herself to exemplify this. David Palumbo-Liu (1999, 344–5) contends that diasporic identity is a collective cultural imagination relocated to a different time and space, and inexorably affected by transnational political and economic dynamics. Kuehn, Louie, and Pomfret (2013, 7) suggest that Chineseness has been “re-embedded in the process of diasporic relocation,” while Serena Fusco (2016, 6) defines Chineseness as a “transnational cultural category.” Transcultural Streams argues that, in reaction to late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century Western imperialism, Chineseness has often been constructed as an essentialized ethnicity with a standardized language and a unified literature. However, the claim that

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Chineseness is a homogeneous entity bound to mainland China overlooks the plurality of Chinese culture, which embraces ethnic minorities, diasporas, and locations. As Rey Chow (1998, 37) claims, “Chineseness can no longer be held as a monolithic given tied to the mythic homeland but must rather be understood as a provisional, ‘open signifier.’” By the same token, is the signifier “Chinese Canadian” entirely open? Chinese Canadians are politically, socially, and culturally situated but enjoy an ever-increasing heterogeneity. The term “Chinese Canadian” refers to a person of Chinese descent who lives or works in Canada and who is a transcultural and transnational entity. Chinese Canadians might be born in Canada or they may have arrived here from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or other locations (e.g., the United States, South America, Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia, and / or Africa). Some of the transnational familial and social migration patterns of Chinese Canadians are examined in detail in Chapter 1. On the political or institutional level, Chinese Canadians hold Canadian permanent residency or citizenship, whether they live in Canada or elsewhere. On the affective level, they reside in Canada and have a sense of belonging to this country regardless of their citizenship status. Between the mid-eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, many Chinese in Canada did not have Canadian permanent residency or citizenship due to institutional discrimination and / or social circumstances. However, these early Chinese migrants can also be considered Chinese Canadians because of their experiences related to immigrating to and living in Canada – experiences from which many may well have developed a sense of belonging. In recent decades, some Chinese who are citizens of other countries yet who, for various reasons, reside or work in Canada may also perceive themselves, affectively, as Chinese Canadians. Though the sociohistorical and literary imaginations of Chinese Canadians produce coherent Chinese Canadian identities, the reality is more complex, there being tensions between the heterogeneity of Chinese Canadian individuals and the assertions of political and cultural coherency pertaining to Chinese Canadians as a group. The term “Chinese Canadian” is a generalization, and it does not account for everyone who may be placed within it; therefore, although as scholars we use “Chinese Canadian” as a marker of ethnic identity, we acknowledge the existence of differences and diversities that are more individual than collective. Nevertheless, this volume’s broad

Introduction

9

definition of “Chinese Canadians” and its focus on Hong Kong and mainland Chinese suggests multiple collective identities. In discussions of ethnicity and area studies, the notions of origins, authenticity, and collectivity often become entangled and complicated, having little regard for postmodern discourses on anti-essentialism. Focusing on the theme of identity, we argue that Chinese Canadian identities are characterized by fluidity and plurality rather than by essentiality, homogeneity, and stability. The transcultural negotiations involved in the process of forming Chinese Canadian identities go beyond the hierarchical binary opposition of West/non-West, in which the so-called “non-West” is perceived as an undifferentiated, negative category in opposition to the status quo. Indeed, Chinese Canadians are not limited to their Chinese traditions but, rather, are influenced by, and themselves influence, their daily interactions with other groups within a hybridized multicultural Canadian society. In other words, Chinese cultural heritage and the multicultural Canadian environment work together to shape Chinese Canadians’ thinking and behaviours, which is what produces their identities. Meanwhile, Chinese Canadians continuously negotiate their identities in their everyday personal and cultural experiences, which, in turn, influences multicultural Canadian society. The performativity of Chinese Canadian identities is demonstrated by Chinese Canadians’ speech, behaviour, and gestures, which are not only the result of, but also the factors that construct, those identities that are constantly redefined by daily interactions with the rest of Canadian society. The concept of hybridity is important for understanding the construction and negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities. Though the term initially referred to the biological realm of racial intermixing, Homi K. Bhabha extended its usage into cultural studies in the late 1990s. Since then, critics have debated the meaning of hybridity, especially its significance as it relates to universality and particularity. Ania Loomba (1998, 178) argues that Bhabha’s theory of hybridity disregards the diversity among hybrid subjects and thus universalizes colonial modernity. Rey Chow (1993, 35) also questions whether the imperialist can speak for the interests of the subaltern. Building on this debate, we argue that Chinese Canadian identities are constructed within dynamic and diversified sociohistorical and cultural contexts rather than within a universal context. Therefore, we need to use interdisciplinary approaches to examine both social phenomena and individual cases so as to overcome generalizations and stereotypes

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and to obtain a clearer picture. The literary analysis of cultural hybridity offered in this collection demonstrates that the mixing of cultural divisions enables Chinese Canadians to negotiate their identities between and among psychological, linguistic, and cultural alienation; gradual adaptation and integration; and, in various individual cases, even the co-construction of Canadian multiculturalism. Chinese Canadian identities do not conform to a single mode; rather, they are deeply affected by the intersections of various types of inequality, such as race, ethnicity, class, sex, gender, or sexual orientations, to name but a few. In 1989, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a black feminist legal scholar, introduced the theory of intersectionality to criticize the inclination, when regarding the marginalized, to generalize the experiences of relatively privileged women to all women. However, in order to produce political and social theories/practices that oppose all forms of oppression, it is important to recognize the diversity in identity politics (Carastathis 2016, 7). In applying the notion of intersectionality to Chinese Canadian identities, one should recognize the necessary heterogeneity of this group given that the individuals who comprise it intersect with different social hierarchies in Canadian society. This “intersectional” discourse further points out the diversity and fluidity of Chinese Canadian identities in the face of various forms of subjugation and power imbalance.

Mig r a n t T r a n s c u lt u r al Negoti ati ons During the process of transnational migration to and within Canada, historical events, social structures, and cultural practices all contribute to the ways in which Chinese Canadians negotiate transcultural identities. Most of the early Chinese immigrants in Canada were poor labourers from Guangdong province between the mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, escaping natural disasters, foreign invasions, and internal uprisings. In 1788, about fifty carpenters and craftsmen from Macau and Guangzhou (Canton) arrived in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island to build a fortress and a schooner, followed by seventy workers the following year (Lai 2011). Because of the harsh working and living environments in Canada, this group of Chinese workers was unlikely to have brought along female companions; therefore, their progeny was quickly absorbed into the local Aboriginal society. The recruitment of Chinese workers increased significantly for subsequent labour-intensive projects in Canada. In 1858, thousands

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of labourers from the Pearl River Delta in South China came to work in the gold mines and, later, to build the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Under severe living and working conditions, Chinese workers risked their lives, particularly in the construction of the transcontinental railway, and were exploited financially, physically, and socially. Clearly, the identity negotiation processes of early Chinese settlers in Canada took place in an unfavourable sociohistorical environment. From 1872 to 1947, the negotiating power of the Chinese in Canada was undermined by Canadian legislation that legally institutionalized discrimination based on the idea of the cultural and racial supremacy of white people of English and French origins. As Peter Li (1998, 38) argues: “The legislation enacted against the Chinese suggests that discrimination against them was based on race and its stereotypical connotations. The laws curtailing their civil and political rights were aimed at the Chinese as a racial group.” During this period, British Columbia and Saskatchewan both denied the Chinese the right to vote,1 and more bills were subsequently passed to prohibit the Chinese from holding many occupations.2 Depriving Chinese Canadians of citizenship rights officially abolished their political power, which, in turn, affected all aspects of their welfare and livelihood (see Backhouse 1999). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of this anti-Chinese legislation, which was aimed at curbing the negotiating power of Chinese migrants in Canada, reduced the majority of the Chinese to inferior positions politically, socially, and culturally. Some of these restrictions on Chinese immigration imposed by the Canadian government included the head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act (in force from 1923 to 1947). The already unbalanced sex ratio in a Chinese Canadian community composed predominantly of married men whose wives and children stayed in China became even more severe, and this led to a bachelor society that existed until the mid-twentieth century. The Chinese Canadian population dropped drastically from 1931 to 1951 (Li 1998, 7). A new wave of Chinese immigration to Canada occurred after the Canadian government implemented the universal point system in 1967 and the business immigration program in 1984. As a result, the Chinese Canadian population in the 1980s and 1990s was largely composed of new Chinese immigrants from overseas (ibid.). These changes in Canadian immigration regulations, we argue, prompted Chinese Canadians to actively negotiate social identities between exclusion and inclusion.

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Located on China’s south coast, Hong Kong served as an important transit station for early Chinese migrants travelling to Canada between the mid-eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Hong Kong has dramatically changed from being a British colony (1842–1997) to having its current postcolonial status. Its dynamic relationship with mainland China and Canada led to the large-scale migration of Hong Kongers to Canada between the 1970s and the mid-1990s. Hong Kong immigrants to Canada in the 1970s included university graduates who settled in Canada, professionals, entrepreneurs, and relatives of those who were already here. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong immigration to Canada formed a significant part of “a period of great exodus” (Fong 2012, 31). The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration pronounced the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997, with the result that many Hong Kongers became worried about the colony’s future. Due to the traumatic experiences of some earlier generations of Chinese refugees who had escaped to Hong Kong, and the great disparity between the social and cultural practices of some people in Hong Kong and some in mainland China, the approach of the 1997 handover ignited a strong sense of uncertainty and anxiety. As a result, large-scale emigration from Hong Kong to foreign countries, including Canada, took place in the 1980s. The Chinese government’s crackdown during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 intensified this fright and flight. These social and political disturbances had the effect of prompting more Hong Kongers, despite their privileged socioeconomic positions at home, to migrate to Canada and other countries that were considered politically stable. Between 1989 and 2007, over 320,000 Hong Kong immigrants came to Canada (Fong 2012, 26). Some of the Hong Kong immigrants to Canada in the 1980s and 1990s returned to settle in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s and 2000s (Li 2005; Fong 2012). Based on the 2001–06 Canadian census, of the immigrants who arrived between 1981 and 1990, about 7,596 returned to Hong Kong. Of those who arrived between 1991 and 1995, about 14,500 returned. These numbers together represent approximately 30 percent of the total population of Hong Kong immigrants in these five years (Fong 2012). The return of Hong Kong immigrants can be attributed to several political and economic factors. There were more employment opportunities for them in Hong Kong than in Canada. One reason for this was that many Hong Kong immigrants who had professional and technical qualifications had

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not been trained in Canada, and their qualifications could not be easily transferred. Some Hong Kong immigrants in Canada’s business sector found the Canadian investment environment unfavourable and could not cope with new business situations. Also, the taxation rate was lower in Hong Kong than in Canada (Li 2005, 22). Some were unable to adapt to Canadian culture and found it more comfortable to return home (Fong 2012). After becoming Canadian citizens, some families decided to return to live and work in Hong Kong in the 1990s when the political situation there seemed to have stabilized. Moreover, this was a period of economic depression in Canada, while the economy in Hong Kong continued to flourish. Some Hong Kong immigrants became “astronaut” families, with one parent continually shuffling between Canada and Hong Kong (Ong 1999, 127). In such cases, usually the father would return to Hong Kong for job opportunities, while the mother and the children would stay in Canada for the sake of a better education and living environment. This led to the phenomenon of there being more female than male adult immigrants from Hong Kong staying in Canada in recent decades. On the one hand, they enjoy precarious legal rights to citizenship; on the other, they manage to secure both economic stability and a Western education for the younger generation, despite the risk of marital and parental estrangement due to the prolonged separation of family members. These Hong Kong Canadian families shift citizenship, workplaces, and places of residence in order to deal with dynamic political and economic situations. Literary depictions of Hong Kong Canadian migrants’ transnational and transcultural experiences since the 1970s show how their bilingual and bicultural environments strongly affect their perceptions of themselves and their relationships with other people and the world. In Chapters 2 and 3, Jessica Tsui-yan Li and Kwok-kan Tam, respectively, seek to elucidate how Hong Kong Canadians negotiate their identities between and among different geographical, psychological, linguistic, and cultural orientations. Their literary analysis of Hong Kong Canadian poetics moves beyond the stereotypes produced in broader sociohistorical narratives to reach a greater understanding of personal identities within diversified contexts. In so doing, they argue that Hong Kong Canadians’ frequent travels between Canada and their homeland facilitate social and cultural exchanges across national boundaries, destabilize the linear model of immigration, and promote multidimensional migration experiences.

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Beginning in the late 1970s, Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping advocated for modernization and an open-door policy in mainland China. His successors adopted similar strategies, which have generated rapid economic development and transformed the nation and its position in the world. In the face of setbacks during the processes of modernization and globalization in mainland China, many middle- and upper-class Chinese have migrated to Canada from the mid-1990s to the present. The class differences between early and recent Chinese migration patterns are striking. Economic and political developments in mainland China in recent decades have had a significant effect on Chinese migration to Canada and have affected the demographic composition of the Chinese Canadian population. According to Statistics Canada, in 2011, 585,555 mainland Chinese were living in Canada (Statistics Canada 2011b). China has experienced a growing market economy and prosperous foreign investments, especially in large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Tianjin. The expansion of the well-educated and wealthy middle and upper classes in mainland China, and the focus of Canadian immigration policy on admitting skilled immigrants with high education and capital, have led to an increasing number of professional and business-class immigrants from mainland China (Li 2005, 34). This collection focuses on the significant roles played by Chinese migrants to Canada from Hong Kong and mainland China in the transcultural negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities. Regarding the mainland Chinese migrants, more emphasis is on the negotiations of the identities of educated and wealthy migrants from mainland China since the mid-1990s than on those of the poor labourers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given the ongoing changes in mainland China, its transformative relationships with Canada and the rest of the world, and the influx of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese migrants to Canada, an updated assessment of Chinese Canadian cultures is timely and important. Chinese Canadians continuously and actively negotiate their identities around various axes of difference, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, history, literature, migration, occupation, and the marketplace as mediated at both global and local levels.

How C h i n e s e C a n a d ia n s Negoti ate Succes s a n d   F a il ure The different structural and power issues involved in the terms “visible minority” and “race,” and the changing position of Chinese

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Canadians vis-à-vis mainstream Canada and Canada-China relations, have exerted a great influence on Chinese Canadian transcultural identity negotiations. The classification “Chinese Canadian” was officially categorized as referring to a visible minority under the federal policy of multiculturalism introduced under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau in 1971, established in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, and further legislated as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (also known as Bill C-93) in 1988. The Employment Equity Act designates “persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are nonCaucasian in race or non-white in colour” (Statistics Canada 2006) as visible minorities. We argue that, although this policy aims to promote equity and diversity in the areas of immigration, employment, labour, and social practices in Canada, it inevitably privileges white Canadians by locating them at the centre of mainstream Canadian society, while those who are “non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” are collectively marginalized as negative counterparts. Scholars such as Smaro Kamboureli (2000, 82) have criticized Canadian multiculturalism as a policy of “sedative politics” – that is, “a politics that attempts to recognize ethnic differences, but only in a contained fashion, in order to manage them.” Katharyne Mitchell (1993) also argues that the policy of Canadian multiculturalism aims to hegemonically manipulate the meanings of race and nation in order to facilitate the integration of Canadian cities, such as Vancouver, into global capitalism. Defined as legally, socially, and culturally visible, Chinese Canadians have been gazed upon but, paradoxically, have remained largely invisible in mainstream Canadian history. From the 1870s to the mid1990s, Chinese Canadians were all but invisible in mainstream Canadian public and cultural domains – for example, in public news and prime-time television shows (Ty 2004, 4). One prominent example of this paradox of visibility and invisibility is the racial discrimination the Chinese endured in Canada during the early immigration period. For example, Chinese workers were not depicted in the famous photograph “The Last Spike,” which was taken on 7 November 1885 in Craigellachie, British Columbia, and captured the driving in of the ceremonial final spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Chinese workers were thus essentially excluded from this symbolic event.3 The classification of Chinese Canadians and other racial groups as “visible minorities” is a convenient way of incorporating various political, institutional, and conceptual forms of inequality and oppression into the dominant society. However, “minority” is a relative and

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dynamic term, creating, as it does, an opposition to a given majority in local, national, and global contexts. The concept of minority relies on the power relations between different racial groups rather than merely on any given number of people. Though ethnic Chinese are classified as minorities in Canada, they are no longer minorities in parts of Greater Vancouver and Greater Toronto. As a result of mainland China’s open-door policy and its rise to power since the late twentieth century, more interaction between China and Canada has occurred in the business, education, social, and cultural sectors. Moreover, the increase in Chinese Canadian populations, particularly in cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, along with their rise in political, economic, and social power both within Canada and in the world, challenges the meaning of “visible minority.” A further challenge to the term “visible minority” comes from the diverse backgrounds of contemporary Chinese Canadians, who arrived after the amendments to Canadian immigration policies and legislations, in comparison to those of the early Chinese migrants to Canada. For instance, as Guida Man and Elena Chou discuss in Chapter 5, since 2000, women migrants from mainland China have become more assertive and independent in the areas of education, family, and career. Canadian immigration policies privilege highly educated and investor classes, while reinforcing restrictions on the working class, poor migrants, and refugees. For example, between July and September 1999, the Canadian government detained and then deported more than four hundred Chinese who were smuggled into Canada on ships (“Canada”1999). This provoked a debate over Canada’s immigration policies that focused on their privileging of trade over human rights. Though many Chinese Canadians are still confronted with poverty and inequality, others are associated with the “model minority” group and have achieved a high degree of socioeconomic success. The term “model minority” was coined to describe Japanese Americans, and then it evolved to refer to American Jews and Asian Americans who had made significant achievements (although, of course, it is also associated with discrimination and negative stereotypes). In Chapter 4, Eleanor Ty investigates the case of Jan Wong, who struggles to harmonize interpersonal relationships with professional status. This exemplifies the struggle of some educated Chinese Canadians and their ongoing negotiations of transcultural identities. Although stereotypes and racial discrimination persist, by commanding public attention and visibility, Chinese Canadians have striven to challenge the association between “visible minority” and

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subordinate status. Numerous Chinese Canadians, such as Vivienne Poy, Adrienne Clarkson, Lillian Dyck, Olivia Chow, G. Raymond Chang, and Patrick Chan, to name just a few, have gained recognition for their successes. In Chapter 6, Eric Fong and Loretta Ho argue that Chinese Canadians will become more successful if they are able to embrace other cultures. Since the late nineteenth century, Chinese Canadians have established a variety of community associations, such as the Chinese Canadian National Council, the Chinese Professionals Association of Canada, the Canada-China Cultural Development Association, and the Asian Business Network Association, to ensure that their members are treated fairly. And these associations are becoming more influential in the new millennium. These individuals and associations command visibility in Canada’s public history, social communities, and cultural domains, and this helps to empower Chinese Canadians in both public and private spheres. Thanks to the immense efforts of individuals and community organizations, Chinese Canadians gradually gained prominence and were acknowledged for their achievements. One example of this is the Toronto Star’s 6 April 2016 article on the “missing” last Canadian Pacific Railway spike. In June 2006, Ralph Lee, who, at 106 years old, was the oldest living Chinese head tax payer in Canada, was photographed with the spike before he travelled to Ottawa for then prime minister Stephen Harper’s official apology to Chinese Canadians for the Chinese Head Tax and the Chinese Immigration Act (Sachgau 2016). After a century, individuals and organizations finally succeeded in lobbying Ottawa for this historic apology to the Chinese Canadian community, thus showcasing the gradual elevation of the negotiating power of Chinese Canadians. Identifying people as visible minorities is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it serves as a means of isolating certain groups of people; on the other, it enables those so isolated to form an alliance and hence to generate political power. In recognizing this inherent incongruity, this collection examines the genealogy of Chinese Canadian identities by investigating the construction of Chinese Canadian subjectivities in terms of their various historical circumstances, ideological suppositions, methodological strategies, institutional forces, linguistic backgrounds, gender relations, class distinctions, ethnic experiences, and the multiple effects of intersectional discourses. Our approach is interdisciplinary, and we use history, sociology, geography, anthropology, and literature to deal with different issues and to form dialogues.

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Ne g o t iat in g A da p tat i on, Belongi ng, a n d   C o - c o n s t ructi on Chinese Canadians constantly negotiate between inclusion and exclusion, marginalization and belonging, and adaptation and co-­ construction, even in contemporary Canadian society. Although Chinese Canadians have gained access to higher education and achieved professional status and business success, cultural conflicts and racist and anti-immigrant sentiments still endure. For example, in 1984, many residents in Scarborough, a Toronto suburb, expressed resentment towards the Chinese patrons of Dragon Mall, which accommodates Chinese restaurants, shops, and grocery stores, for causing traffic and parking problems. After an investigation, the Ontario government admitted that the traffic problems were actually caused by “poor planning by city staff” (Li 1998, 146). Similar conflicts occur on the west coast, where many mainland Chinese have immigrated in recent decades. Controversy about Chinese-only business signs in Richmond, British Columbia, has provoked debate for years. However, “[a] city audit of signs found out that less than three percent are actually in Chinese only” (CBC 2015). The examples of Scarborough in the 1980s and Richmond in the twenty-first century demonstrate how Chinese Canadians have continuously negotiated their languages, businesses, lifestyles, and meanings – and all the racial tension that this implies – with local residents. In recent decades, Vancouver’s local residents have also blamed the Chinese for the city’s rapidly increasing real estate prices, and this blame exemplifies underlying racist sentiments. The house price index in Greater Vancouver was $521,200 in May 2007 and rose to $967,500 in May 2017, which continues to be above Canada’s average (MLS Home Price Index 2017). For decades, wealthy communities on Vancouver’s west side, such as Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy, were built around white supremacy and were resistant to diverse new immigrants, especially those from Hong Kong in the 1990s and from mainland China in the 2000s (Yu 2015). Instead of blaming mainland Chinese for the rise in real estate prices, one should point to the fact that the real culprits in the creation of Vancouver’s unaffordable housing market are hyper-capitalism and neoliberalism and their relation to class and wealth (ibid.). The scapegoating of mainland Chinese is an example of how Chinese Canadian identities must be negotiated on a social battlefield rife with discrepancies between financial superiority and social prejudice.

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Besides the negotiations in city planning and the real estate market, new horizons of social differentiation are emerging in Chinese Canadian communities as a result of the constant arrival of mainland Chinese whose culture is different from those of migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Putonghua and simplified Chinese characters have become more prominent in Chinese Canadian newspapers, radio, television, and social communities. Chinese restaurants, fast food stalls, markets, and even some mainstream Canadian grocery stores provide more diverse food and drink products from various regions of China. As Lucia Lo argues in Chapter 7, Chinese Canadian grocery stores became social platforms both for Chinese Canadians to connect with their heritage and for other Canadian ethnic groups to experience Chinese food. In addition, Chinese Canadian benevolent and business associations have embraced immigrants from different parts of China, and Chinese Canadian literature has increasingly represented the cultures of these newly arrived immigrants. The expanding new generations of Chinese Canadians born in Canada and those who immigrated to Canada as children have contributed to the ongoing transcultural negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities. The ratio of Canadian-born to Chinese immigrants was low in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as compared to the large numbers of second-generation Chinese Canadians in the 1990s. The development of “astronaut” families has helped to create gender balance. Since the 2000s, as the Canadian population became more diversified, there has been an increase in mixed unions (Statistics Canada 2011a) and children of multiple heritage. Contemporary scholarship on negotiated identities of mixed families and children laudably announces “mixed-race icons as the best of both worlds, who can bridge racial and cultural divides, [and who] represent not simply a disavowal of a racist past in which miscegenation was taboo, but also in some respects, whether consciously or unconsciously, earlier discourses of hybrid vigor and exceptionalism” (Teng 2013, 21). In Chapter 8, Lily Cho examines how children of multiple heritages negotiate their identities between racist marginalization in the past and self-assertion in the present to demonstrate that identity construction is influenced by culture more than by biology. As paradigm cases, she uses the works of Fred Wah. According to 2011 Statistics Canada data, most of the second generation of Chinese Canadians born in Canada are under the age of fifteen. Although the members of this new generation have performed well in schools, they, too, must negotiate transcultural

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identities in the educational sector as they fluctuate between belonging and alienation. In his study of the history of anti-racism, Timothy Stanley (2011) argues that Chinese migrants and their Canadian-born children actively resisted white supremacy in the education system in 1920s British Columbia. They rejected being identified as either “Chinese” or “Canadian” and invented a new term – “Chinese Canadian.” In November 2010, Maclean’s magazine published the article “Too Asian?,” which blamed Asian students for taking away white students’ opportunities to study at the University of Toronto. In addition to claiming there were too many Asian students, the article also criticized the latter for being too academically oriented, making it difficult for white students to compete with them. This article defined Asians as both Asian Canadian students and international students from Asia. In this way, it implicitly questioned whether Canadians of Asian descent were really Canadian, and it denied their right to higher education in Canada. Can Chinese Canadians translate high academic achievement into good jobs? According to Monica Boyd (2011, 226), in the last decade, a new generation of Chinese Canadians seemed to be performing well: “Examining the proportions with managerial and high-skill occupations and the annual earning of full-time full-year workers confirms that the second generation is very similar to the third-plus non-visible minority group or more likely to be employed in high-skill occupations with higher earnings.” Audrey Kobayashi (2008) contends that second-generation Canadians are heterogeneous, and she urges that their various circumstances and issues of integration be addressed in order to constitute effective public policies. In Chapter 9, Jack Hang-tat Leong examines the educational and occupational success of second-generation Chinese Canadians as well as their sense of belonging and level of life satisfaction. These, of course, are affected by various sociocultural circumstances, and he suggests that there be more appropriate institutional support for the integration of Chinese Canadians into the larger society. Some contemporary affluent Chinese young people lead assertive and extravagant lifestyles. Glimpses of this phenomenon can be seen in Ultra Rich Asian Girls, a Canadian reality television web series broadcast in both English and Putonghua that features contemporary young wealthy Chinese Canadian women in Vancouver who are the daughters of wealthy Chinese, or fuerdai. The series presents the extraordinarily extravagant lifestyles of these young women, including

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their daily consumption of expensive alcohol and food, frequent shopping for deluxe clothes and accessories, and purchases of milliondollar real estate (Washington Post 2016). Ultra Rich Asian Girls generates a paradox for contemporary young wealthy Chinese women. Traditionally, young Chinese or Asian women have been stereotyped as powerless, submissive, and voiceless. However, the web series depicts these women as financially powerful, assertive, and vocal – albeit at the cost of being re-stereotyped as superficial, extravagant, and non-productive.

S t ru c t u r e o f the Book The nine chapters in this book are grouped into three parts, each of which highlights particular aspects of the transcultural streams of Chinese Canadian identities relating to the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese Canadians. Part 1 focuses on migrant transcultural negotiations of Hong Kong and Pacific migrant cultures. It does this not only by investigating the unique historical dynamics of Hong Kong migration to Canada but also by analyzing how Hong Kong cultural producers convey both a sense of productive cultural hybridity and psychological dislocation that result from these geopolitical shifts. In Chapter 1, “The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1950,” Henry Yu investigates the transcultural negotiations of the social identities of Cantonese migrants in the Pacific Rim. Contextualized within the larger trans-Pacific migrations of Cantonese people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Yu provides the historical context of Chinese-North American migrant identities at the familial and village levels. In a creative conversation with Yu’s chapter, Jessica Tsui-yan Li argues in Chapter 2, “Transcultural Poetics: Hong Kong Canadian Identities in Yasi’s Works,” that Yasi (Leung Ping-kwan, 1949–2013) approaches Chinese Canadian identity negotiations in Canada’s pluralistic cultural landscapes from three major literary and linguistic perspectives: (1) the translation and adaptation of Chinese language, literature, and culture into their Canadian equivalents and vice versa; (2) the juxtaposition of Cantonese and modern literary Chinese; and (3) an appreciation of the mundane in contemporary Chinese Canadian societies. In Chapter 3, “Psychogeography and Cultural Negotiation in the Poetic Imagination of Hong Kong Canadian Identity,” Kwok-kan Tam points out that, in their cultural imaginary, Hong Kong Canadian migrants negotiate between Chinese

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and English (representations of their split identities). Part 1 provides a more complex understanding of Aihwa Ong’s conception of flexible citizenship, with references to Canada’s immigration policy, global capitalism, and the exploitation of poor migrant labour as well as literary imagination, visual culture, linguistic juxtaposition, and psychological sophistication. Part 2 presents how Chinese Canadians negotiate success and failure in the social, economic, gender, literary, and cultural spheres. It articulates how gender negotiates concepts of success and independence, and the extent to which the burgeoning model minority myth, and by implication straightforward assimilation, may fail to account for the often aggravated relations between the social and economic horizons of Chinese Canadian life. In Chapter 4, “Identities in Public: Cultural Translations in Jan Wong’s Out of the Blue,” Eleanor Ty discusses former journalist Jan Wong’s self-published book about her experience with work-related stress and depression. By informing the general public about depression and mental illness, narrating an autoethnographic story of her sense of belonging to a Chinese diasporic community, and explicating her failure as an Asian Canadian woman, Wong’s memoir negotiates her identity as a woman, a Chinese Canadian, and a journalist. In Chapter 5, “Migration, Gender Relations, and the Negotiation of Identity among Chinese Professional Immigrant Women in Canada,” Guida Man and Elena Chou examine the transnational migration experiences of highly educated Chinese immigrant women who were professionals in their home country. They discuss these women’s identity negotiation strategies in terms of gender relations, household work, and paid work in Canada, and their local and transnational strategies in accommodating their productive and reproductive activities. Moving to the success and failure of Chinese Canadians in the multicultural production force, in Chapter 6, “Group Boundaries and Immigrant Income,” Eric Fong and Loretta Ho investigate the negotiations of Chinese Canadian social identities. They argue that immigrants who interact more with other ethnic groups are associated with a higher income than those who do not, with the education level and sociodemographic background of immigrants being the controlling factors. However, the factor of cultural and ethnic integration does not affect the income of immigrants in professional occupations because institutional regulations ensure similar economic returns for all employees.

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Part 3 features the transcultural streams of Chinese Canadian identities in terms of adaptation, belonging, and co-construction in the marketplace, literature, and the new generation, ranging from the era of scientific racism to the age of multiculturalism. Focusing on Chinese grocery stores in the multicultural marketplace, in Chapter 7, “Ethnic Identity and the Cultural Translation of the Marketplace: The Supermarket Exemplar,” Lucia Lo examines the consumer behaviour of Chinese and non-Chinese in multicultural Toronto. According to Lo, Chinese-owned businesses are growing and mainstream ventures are actively pursuing Chinese clients. She uses grocery shopping as an example of the translation of Chinese culture across the marketplace in everyday life. Besides their basic commercial function, Chinese supermarkets also serve as sites of Chinese ethnic identity formation, though they seem to be impermeable for most non-Chinese people. As race continues to mediate projections of Chinese identity, in Chapter 8, “Denaturalizing Canadian Literature: Fred Wah and Recapitulation,” Lily Cho uses theories of evolutionary biology to examine Fred Wah’s poetry. She examines the metaphors of evolution and development in Canadian literature and contends that Chinese Canadians negotiate their transcultural identities in the intersectional dimensions of genealogy, languages, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexual orientations, among others. Furthering the discussion on Chinese Canadian immigrants’ fraught sense of belonging in an age of multiculturalism, in Chapter 9, “The Dynamics of Cultural Identity of Chinese in Toronto, 1960s to 2010s,” Jack Hang-tat Leong explores the cultural transitions and identity negotiations of Chinese immigrants and their children in Toronto. He argues that, although, according to a 2002 Statistics Canada report, second-generation Chinese Canadians generally score low in life satisfaction, in-depth interviews of individual Chinese Canadians reveal that these individuals are successful role models. Leong further urges that they receive institutional support to enable them to generate a strong sense of belonging to Canada.

C o da Transcultural Streams contributes to the study of the Chinese Canadian community by covering not only historical information but also more recent data on the diasporic, transnational, and domestic and transcultural negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities, particularly those

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of the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese Canadians. Like other Canadian identities, minority or otherwise, Chinese Canadian identities are characterized by both fluidity and plurality, by their endless possibility of refashioning their self-perception, self-expression, and self-projection in Canada and in the rest of the world. Transcultural Streams is interdisciplinary in that it investigates the conditions that shape Chinese Canadian identities from various historical, social, and literary perspectives, and it forms a dialogue with interlocking themes. We argue that Chinese Canadians persistently and actively negotiate their identities within a transcultural Canadian environment. On the sociohistorical level, Chinese migrants in Canada have negotiated their transcultural identities between institutional inclusion and exclusion in various historical and contemporary periods. With familial and village resources and connections, Chinese Canadians manage to navigate their lives in Canadian society amidst racial discrimination. On personal levels, Hong Kong cultural producers depict in their creative works both a sense of cultural hybridity and a psychological split due to geopolitical relocation, which demonstrates the multilinear process of migration. Chinese Canadians have instilled new meaning into the descriptor “visible minority” by commanding visibility. Prominent Chinese Canadian individuals have achieved success in various sectors of life. Many Chinese Canadian associations facilitate communication and provide benefits for their members. Chinese Canadians face ongoing racial discrimination and marginalization, but they are also able to adapt and to integrate, and they have reached a state of co-construction that contributes to a multicultural Canada. While most of the chapters in this collection present studies of Chinese Canadians in different parts of Canada, some are oriented around Chinese communities and cultures in Toronto, thus introducing some diversity to the emerging field of Chinese Canadian studies, which tends to emphasize the west coast. Although there are large Chinese Canadian communities in both Vancouver and Toronto, the East Asian Canadian literary community, especially the Chinese and the Japanese, has dominated the Asian Canadian cultural platform in Vancouver, while the South Asian Canadian literary community has occupied much of the Asian Canadian cultural arena in Toronto since the mid-1970s, due to the history of publishing in Canada (Goellnicht 2000, 25–7). Prominent academic journals on Asian Canadian studies, such as west coast line, Canadian Literature, and

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Amerasia Journal, tend to focus on the west coast in general and on Vancouver and Victoria in particular, as do studies of the history of Chinese immigrants to Canada (Yu 2007, xviii-xix). With its interdisciplinary analysis of the transcultural negotiations of Chinese Canadian identities in history, literature, culture, and different communities in Canada, including Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal, Transcultural Streams offers a comprehensive picture of current Chinese Canadian scholarship.

n otes   1 For example, the provincial legislature of British Columbia passed an Act to amend the Qualification and Registration of Voters Act that ­disenfranchised both the Chinese and East Indians in 1872. A loophole in this act, which allowed previously registered Chinese to vote, was closed in 1875 (Stanley 2011, 63). The Parliament of British Columbia frequently passed legislation to bar the Chinese from voting in provincial (Statutes of B C 1895, c. 20) and municipal elections (Statutes of B C 1896, c. 38).   2 For instance, in British Columbia, the Coal Mines Regulation Amendment Act, 1890, prohibited them from working underground (Statues of B C 1890, c.33). In Saskatchewan, the Chinese were forbidden to employ white females in restaurants and other business (Statutes of Saskatchewan 1912, c.17). The governments of Ontario and British Columbia followed suit in 1914 and 1923, respectively. Some Chinese were self-employed, engaging in less competitive businesses (including restaurants and laundries).   3 Chinese railway workers were not at Craigellachie. Nevertheless, this photo symbolizes the accomplishments of the C PR without the acknowledgement of Chinese workers.

R efer en c e s Agnew, Vijay. 2005. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity – A Search For Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Alcoff, Linda Martin, ed. 2006. Identity Politics Reconsidered. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. – 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bannerji, Himani. 2011. Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Inc. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

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Backhouse, Constance. 1999. Color Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1990–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Boyd, Monica. 2011. “Immigrants in Canada: Trends and Issues.” In The Changing Canadian Population, ed. Barry Edmonton and Eric Fong, 207–31. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. “Canada: Chinese Immigrants.” 1999. Migration News, October, vol. 6, no. 10. https://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=1923. Carastathis, Anna. 2016. Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. C B C . 2015. “Chinese-Only Signs in Richmond: Subject of New City Campaign.” 17 February. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/02/17/­ chinese-only-signs-in-ric_n_6699124.html. Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. – 1998. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” Boundary 25, 3: 1–24. Fong, Eric. 2012. “Return Migration from Canada to Hong Kong.” China Review 12, 1: 25–43. Fusco, Serena. Incorporations of Chineseness : Hybridity, Bodies, and Chinese American literature. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK : Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Goellnicht, Donald. 2000. “A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature.” Essay on Canadian Writing 71 (Winter): 1–41. Kamboureli, Smaro. 2000. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Kobayashi, Audrey. 2008. “Introduction: A Research and Policy Agenda for Second Generation Canadians.” Canadian Diversity/Diversité Canadienne. 6, 2: 3–6. Kuehn, Julia, Kam Louie, and David M. Pomfret, ed. 2013. Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China: Communities and Cultural Production. Vancouver: U BC Press.  Lai, David Chuenyan. 2011. “A Brief Chronology of Chinese Canadian History: From Segregation to Integration.” Chinese Canadian History Public Education Project, David See-Chai Lam Centre for International Communication. Vancouver: Simon Fraser University. http://www.sfu. ca/chinese-canadian-history/chart_en.html. Li, Peter S. 1998. The Chinese in Canada. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

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– 2005. “The Rise and Fall of Chinese Immigration to Canada: Newcomers from Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China and Mainland China, 1980–2000.” International Migration 43, 3: 9–34. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Mackey, Eva. 1999. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London: Routledge. Miki, Roy. 2011. In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing. Edmonton: NeWest Press. Mitchell, Katharyne. 1993. “Multiculturalism, or The United Colors of Capitalism?” Antipode 25, 3: 263–94. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.1993. tb00220. ML S Home Price Index. 2017. Real Estate Board in Greater Vancouver. http://www.rebgv.org/home-price-index. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, N C: Duke University Press. Palumbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. Sachgau, Oliver. 2016. “The Lost Spike Has Been Found – in Gatineau.” Toronto Star, 6 April. http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/ 2016/04/05/the-lost-spike-has-been-found-in-gatineau.html. See, Lisa. 1995. On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. New York: St Martin’s Press. Stanley, Timothy J. 2011. Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians. Vancouver: U BC Press. Statistics Canada. 2006. “Visible Minority Population and Population Group Reference Guide, 2006 Census.” http://www12.statcan.ca/­ census-recensement/2006/ref/rp-guides/visible_minority-minorites_­ visibles-eng.cfm. – 2011a. “Mixed Unions in Canada.” http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhsenm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/99-010-x2011003_3-eng.cfm. – 2011b. “2011 National Household Survey: Data Tables.” https:// www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/Index-eng.cfm.

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Tang, Junyi. 1974. Lun zhonghua minzu zhi huaguo piaoling論中華民族 之花果飄零 [On the floating about of Chinese nation’s flowers and fruits]. Taipei: Sanmin shuju. Teng, Emma Jinhua. 2013. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943. Los Angelesa: University of California Press. Ty, Eleanor. 2004. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ty, Eleanor, and Donald C. Goellnicht. 2004. Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Washington Post. 2016. “Canada’s ‘Ultra Rich Asian Girls’ and the Biggest Outpouring of Wealth in History.” 18 February. https://www.washington post.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/what-canadas-ultra-rich-asian-girlshave-to-do-with-the-worlds-biggest-economic-threat/?utm_term=.48e7 b1d346b1. Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

part o n e Migrant Transcultural Negotiations

1 The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1950 Henry Yu

From the 1850s to the 1950s, Chinese migrations across the Pacific might be best understood as a singular historical process – the “Cantonese Pacific.” This is not to say that trans-Pacific Chinese migrants during that period all expressed some form of self-identity as Cantonese. However, regardless of the various local dialects they spoke, and the fractured local and regional networks they created out of their individual and family patterns of migration, these hundreds of thousands of trans-Pacific migrants created a single migration system with nodes centred in Hong Kong, San Francisco, Victoria, Vancouver, and Sydney as well as other ports such as Honolulu, Seattle, Yokohama, and Manzanillo. Over multiple generations, a unique, recurring, and persistent geographic imaginary developed around a mythic Gold Mountain (金山) that was extraordinarily powerful in directing these migrants’ aspirations for spatial and social mobility. Chinese Canadian identities can be, therefore, framed within this large scheme of Cantonese Pacific migration patterns. The single most important factor for the creation and endurance of this coherent process of trans-Pacific migration was the dominance of Hong Kong as the main “through-port” for almost all trans-Pacific migrants from southern China during that period. As Elizabeth Sinn (2010, 2013) has demonstrated, Hong Kong was the nodal port through which trans-Pacific Chinese migration processes connected. San Francisco, Victoria, Vancouver, Sydney, Honolulu, Seattle, and smaller ports in the British Caribbean and Latin America were the secondary nodes through which a vast geographic pattern of circular

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migrations extended across North America, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and the Caribbean. All of these nodes connected local rural sites in the hinterlands of British and US territories and colonies around the Pacific into a circulatory migration network that linked them with small villages in eight specific counties in Guangdong province. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, this group of coastal counties near the British port of Hong Kong became the nexus of trans-Pacific migrations to North America. Numbering several hundred rural villages altogether, people from these counties dominated the flows of migrants from China to the west coast of North America for over a century. It was not until the 1970s that the trans-Pacific migration of ethnic Chinese significantly expanded beyond the networks created by these early migrants and their descendants. Speaking various rural village and county dialects that were, in practice, mutually unintelligible, these migrants organized around family, village, and local dialect networks, creating long-distance routes that extended around the Pacific region. These routes were marked by multiple journeys in multiple directions, with young men leaving villages to pursue opportunities identified by earlier migrants, often paying for their initial journeys through loans and credit supplied by family and extended networks of relatives among earlier generations of successful migrants. Between the 1850s and the 1930s, a relatively stable system of life-cycle migration endured, with men migrating long distances and creating families both in their villages of origin and in various sites around North America.

T h e R is e o f t h e C a ntones e Paci fi c Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, migrants speaking various dialects of Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochiu, Hakka, Hainanese, and other localized forms of Chinese, originating mainly in the coastal regions of Guangdong and Fujian provinces, established sea-borne migration networks in the southwest Pacific (南洋 – Nanyang, or the South Seas). When significant numbers of migrants from China began to cross the Pacific in the 1850s, these migration patterns were extensions of the existing trade and migration networks that linked the southern Chinese coast with Southeast Asia, as well as links with other Chinese cities such as Shanghai. The ports of Amoy (廈門), Macao (澳門), Hong Kong (香港), and Singapore were the major



The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific

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nodes of migration from Guangdong and Fujian provinces into Nanyang; however, while Chinese trans-Pacific migration networks were extensions of the existing networks between southern China and Southeast Asia, they only extended the Cantonese-speaking network through Hong Kong. There were virtually no Hokkien-speaking migrants who crossed the Pacific, even though Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochiu-speaking migrants to Southeast Asia were proportionally split nearly evenly (along with smaller Hainanese-, Hakka-, and Hockchiu-speaking networks), forming clustered linguistic and familial networks. In contrast, between 1885 and 1949, there were only nine migrants out of nearly 100,000 to Canada who traced their origins to Fujian (table 1.1). By anchoring trans-Pacific routes in Hong Kong and linking Hong Kong with Canton/Whampoa (Guangzhou – 廣州) and the Portuguese port of Macao – the main ports for Cantonese out-migration – the British effectively cut the trans-Pacific migration routes off from coastal ports such as Amoy, which were the main out-migration ports for Hokkien- and Teochiu-speaking migrants from Fujian province. Elizabeth Sinn makes the compelling argument that the California gold rush in 1848 established the dominance of Hong Kong in this trans-Pacific process of migration and trade, at the same time creating the enduring importance of the myth of “Gold Mountain” (金山) as an organizing concept for the aspirations and dreams of social and geographic mobility that motivated migrants (Hsu 2000; Sinn 2013). The initial connection of trans-Pacific migration flows from Hong Kong to San Francisco and Victoria in the 1850s was made between a relatively small number of villages in the Four Counties (四邑 – Sze Yup in Cantonese, Siyi in Mandarin) and Three Counties (三邑 – Sam Yup or Sanyi) regions of Guangdong province. These seven counties, in addition to Heungsan (香山 – Xiangshan), later renamed Chungsan county (中山 – Zhongshan), near Macau, became sites for longdistance circular networks of migrants for the next century. A process of chain migration took place, in which an initial set of migrants created a series of social practices across space and time that facilitated the movement of other migrants along the same path. This pattern reflected the family- and village-based intelligence networks that passed along information about the opportunities available in North America and provided the practical means, such as loans and the arrangement of work and housing, that made trans-Pacific journeys possible.

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These networks were based upon kinship and shared origins in the clusters of villages from which the migrants came, and they stretched all around the Pacific and into the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of the Americas (Watson 1975; Woon 1984; Wickberg et al. 1982; Sinn 1989). These migration networks relied on good intelligence about wages, available jobs, local economies, and the value of goods that could be moved (Hsu 2000; Williams 2017). The persistence of migration flows decade after decade depended upon the long-term stability of these networks. Kinship and familial relations were crucial in the endurance of these networks, as was speaking shared local dialects. The organization of associations for mutual aid and support in North America was usually based upon kinship connections, either family linkages at the local level in the home village or an extension of kinship ties in North America by imagining common ancestral ties, and often by creating a clan association that brought together migrants from an assortment of villages who shared the same family name or the same local area of origin. Speaking a mutually intelligible dialect was important, and there was generally a separation of networks between migrants whose spoken language and county origins varied greatly, for instance, between those from Hoisan (台山) county and Heungsan (香山) county. Hoisanese and other Sze Yup dialects were so distinct from the urban Guangzhou dialect and the speech of other counties that they required linguistically dependent social practices and patterns. The dominance of Sze Yup (Four Counties) origins for the majority of the Cantonese in Canada and the United States should not be underestimated. In particular, migrants from Hoisan county (originally named Sunning county 新寧), which accounted for 45.5 percent of all migrants to Canada between 1885 and 1949, dominated clan associations and social and business institutions. A University of British Columbia study of the 97,123 registrations of Chinese migrants to Canada before 1949 showed that four of every five migrants before 1949 came from the Four Counties region.

I m ag in in g “ G o l d Mountai n” Before young male Cantonese migrants took their first steps away from their home village, they needed a “dream” to inspire them along the path they would take. The aspirations that drew individual migrants out of rural villages in Guangdong were created from the

Chinese Table 1.1 County origins The of Rise and registrants, Fall of the1885–1949 Cantonese Pacific

Table 1.1 County Chinese registrants, 1885–1949 Countyorigins origins,of 1858–1949 Number of (Total Registrants= 97,124)

County origins, 1858–1949 Kwangtung 廣東省 (Total registrants= 97,124) Chungsan 中山縣

Kwangtung 廣東省

(Heungsan 香山縣)

Chungsan 中山縣 “Four Counties” Sze Yup 四邑 (Heungsan 香山縣) Hoisan 台山縣 Sze Yup 四邑 “Four Counties”

migrants

Number of migrants 5,922

35

Percentage of total

Percentage of total 6.1

5,922 4,4217

6.1 45.5

(originally Sunning 新寧縣) Hoisan 台山縣 (originally Sunning 新寧縣) Sunwei 新會縣

44,217

13,857

14.3

Sunwei 新會縣 Hoiping 開平縣

13,857 13,352

13.7

Hoiping 開平縣

13,352

Onping恩平縣 恩平縣 Onping

3,753

3,753

3.9

Hoksan(town) (town)
山 Hoksan 山

2,579 2,579

2.7

2.7

Poon Yue Poon Yue番禺縣 番禺縣

6,413 6,413

6.6

6.6

Nam Hoi 南海縣

Nam Hoi 南海縣

479 479

0.5

0.5

Shun Tuck 順德縣

419

Shun Tuck 順德縣

419

45.5 14.3 13.7 3.9

“Three Counties” Sam三邑 Yup 三邑 “Three Counties” Sam Yup

Other places of origin in Guangdong Other places of origin

0.4

0.4

Chang Sing 增城縣 in Guangdong

623

Tong Kwan Chang Sing東莞縣 增城縣

623 202

0.6

0.2

Samsui 三水縣

Tong Kwan 東莞縣

54 202

0.2

>0.01

Fukien 福建省 Fujian Samsui 三水縣

54

>0.01

>0.01

Fukien 福建省 Fujian

9

>0.01

9

0.6

information that was passed on by the familial networks built along shipping and mail routes. News about the financial success of a the relative, the kinds of work that might be found, the amount of savings that could be amassed over a year in specific jobs, the relative merits of various destinations across the Pacific – all of this and more was passed along via word of mouth and in letters. Although the term “chain migration” (Price 1963) has been used to describe the phenomenon of individual migrants moving to the same places as previous migrants from the same family or local village, it does not capture the incredible amount of infrastructure that must exist in order for these links to be maintained. Mail service must provide communication across vast geographic distances, financial

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mechanisms must allow for the transfer of credit and remittances across oceans, and, perhaps most obviously, a means of transportation must exist at a cost that allows migrants to afford passage, often through loans from those who have already established themselves in the target destination. The decision to leave, however, occurs within the context of a set of aspirations that travel from the destination to the home villages, along the same path as remittances and loans. “Gold-Mountain” dreaming, as Madeline Hsu (2000) has argued, required the creation of a network of kinship patterns extended across both space and time as well as a set of recurring social practices organized into enduring trans-oceanic and translocal institutions. “Crossing the sea” (過海) became the metaphoric passage to Gold Mountain. Although the English term “dreaming” encompasses some of the aspirational quality of narratives about the desires and hopes for social and economic advancement created through mobility, the Cantonese phrase, which was used to mean “going overseas,” more accurately reflects both emotional resonance and geographic mobility. In a pattern that developed after the California gold rush in the 1850s, Hong Kong became the jumping-off point for trans-oceanic voyages, the long-distance stage of journeys that had begun days and even weeks earlier in rural villages. Young men left small villages, inspired by stories of opportunity and success narrated by wealthy returnees or contained in the voluminous letters that flowed back and forth across the Pacific. These stories generally focused on tales of success rather than failure, although cautionary tales also warned of the dangers of straying from the path to success by overindulging in gambling or prostitutes. Paul Siu’s 1930s study of Chinese laundry-men in Chicago perhaps best expresses the power of affective tales of success that fuelled long-distance voyages across the Pacific (Siu 1988). For the Cantonese men who imagined following others to Gold Mountain or the women who dreamed of marrying a Gum San Haak (金山客, literally “a Gold Mountain guest”) returning home wealthy, the term Gum San was not used for only Canada or the United States, as each had its own name in Cantonese, 加拿大 and 美國, but was synonymous with both places. Indeed, Gum San was also used to describe the Australian colonies. Gum San, in other words, referred to a set of aspirations for a better life, creating a geographic imaginary that determined the meaning of places and journeys. That overseas journeys were a primarily male-oriented aspiration is reflected in the male-to-female sex ratio of trans-Pacific migrants



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in the century between 1850 and 1950, beginning at over 25:1 and only falling slightly in the years immediately following the Second World War as more women were allowed as part of family reunifications and as war brides after official Chinese exclusion ended in the United States in 1943 and in Canada in 1947. But even if men primarily pursued these journeys across the oceans, there was an interlocked set of aspirations for women as well. Marrying an overseas Gum San Haak meant the possibility of a large house and continual remittances from abroad that could pay for luxury goods and children’s education. For many young women, marriage to a man who returned overseas also meant raising children in the absence of a husband and living with a mother-in-law in the husband’s village. For young men journeying to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aspirations were organized into an idealized life cycle: (1) leave the village as a young man, usually supported by the financial sponsorship of older generations who had already gone overseas; (2) work hard for five to ten years as a labourer in construction, farming, logging, mining, or canneries in order to pay off the loans needed to pay for passage; (3) once the initial loans are paid off, return to the home village, marry, start a family, and then go back overseas to begin sending remittances home to buy property and to create savings; (4) if possible, find labouring work in which one could observe and learn a small business trade, such as laundry washer, cook or waiter in a restaurant, grocery-store stocker, or produce deliverer; (5) work with enough diligence and potential to be recognized by an elder as responsible enough to be lent some money to have a partial stake in a business; and (6) work towards paying off this loan and acquiring a larger stake in one or more businesses, to the point of eventually becoming an elder with enough wealth to begin lending money and investing in young men of the next generation who show potential. Depending upon economic conditions and the aptitude, or lack thereof, of the individual, a young man might never get out of debt and instead spend a lifetime toiling as a labourer, growing ever older with an ever-decreasing capacity to sell his labour. But if a man was fortunate, intelligent, and diligent, by middle age he could amass enough wealth to become an investor himself, making loans to newer migrants and increasingly benefitting from the loan repayments of carefully chosen ambitious young men. Owning a half stake in a laundry or restaurant, for instance, might allow a man to make an

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arrangement with a younger relative who had shown an aptitude for running the business. The younger man would make regular payments over an agreed-upon schedule to slowly buy out this half stake, allowing the older man to make other investments or eventually retire home to the village or to Hong Kong. This life cycle of upward mobility and the creation of wealth, generation after generation, had grown out of existing social practices developed by migrants from the same areas to Southeast Asia. Intermarriage into local indigenous communities, whether the peranakan Chinese Malays of Southeast Asia, or Chinese Hawaiians in Hawaii, or Chinese Maori in Aotearoa (New Zealand), or ChineseAboriginal families in the Australian colonies, was a commonplace migration practice for young and aspiring Cantonese men. In British Columbia, Cantonese men frequently followed local marriage practices as they entered into relationships with First Nations up the Fraser River Canyon. Although we do not have accurate numbers, the numbers of such relationships that do show up in marriage records are suggestive (Barman 2013). A distinctive feature of the Cantonese Pacific, and one of the ways in which an exemplary life cycle shaped future aspirations, was the embracing of local marriage alliances and family formations, including multiple wives at home and overseas. Practices developed in the Nanyang (Southeast Asia), however, were modified in the trans-Pacific world due to the significant differential between wages made in North America and the cost of living in home villages. The route to wealth in Gold Mountain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was worth taking despite the high initial costs. The trans-Pacific passage was more expensive than passage to Southeast Asia, and, after the 1882 Exclusion Act in the United States and the institution in 1885 of the Chinese head tax in Canada, getting to Gold Mountain also included the cost created by anti-Chinese legislation, whether the direct cost of fees such as the head tax levied only against the Chinese or the cost of evading exclusionary measures by smuggling and purchasing false papers. The head tax imposed in Canada, for instance, added an additional cost equivalent to roughly two years of earnings as a labourer: $50 when the tax was first implemented in 1886, the amount was raised to $100 and then to $500 in 1904. Even so, the possibility of social mobility and economic opportunity in North America was so great that, despite the existence of the head tax, nearly 100,000 Chinese



The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific

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came to Canada and the United States, passing through Victoria and Vancouver between 1885 and 1923. The irony of the extensive anti-Chinese legislation and the resulting bureaucratic control of Chinese migrants is that there are extensive government records chronicling the surveillance that took place during border crossings. Unlike other, more desired, migrants who generated few records, anti-Chinese discrimination produced detailed and voluminous documentation both in the United States and in Canada. In Canada, the details included village origin, last place of residence, age, height, and even descriptions of scars, all meticulously kept in registers that recorded every single passenger who landed after “crossing the seas.” After 1910, Canada recorded the destinations of Chinese migrants, allowing an unprecedented view of how the “Cantonese Pacific” extended across the country. The records of destinations of the 38,410 migrants who came to Canada between 1910 and 1923, over one-third of the 97,123 total migrants who were registered between 1885 and 1949, demonstrates the wide spread of Cantonese migration throughout Canada. Nearly every small town across the Prairies had at least one or two Chinese residents, often running a café. The networks that connected men in disparate small towns were highly organized, and they maintained connections with each other as well as with their home villages and nationalist organizations across the globe (Marshall 2011, 2014). Cantonese migrants also managed to reach the Atlantic coast, crossing the continent from sea to sea in the opposite direction of European migrants. A rich understanding of the aspirations of these Cantonese men can be found in oral histories and in letters written in Chinese that were sent back and forth across the Pacific. At the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University, the Chinese Canadian Stories Project (http://chinesecanadian.ubc.ca) has collected and preserved stories of Chinese Canadians, building upon several decades of pioneering community history work done in Canada, gathering materials from community organizations across the nation, and using archival collections such as the Drs Wallace and Madeline Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia (http://chung.library. ubc.ca) and the Chinese Canadian Research Collection gathered by Professors Edgar Wickberg, Graham Johnson, and William Wilmott at U B C (Wickberg et al. 1982; Lai 1988; Ng 1999; Mar 2010).

Figure 1.1  Sample page from General Register of Chinese Immigration

Figure 1.2  Destinations of Cantonese migrants to Canada between 1910 and 1923

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Henry Yu

These data have produced a picture of early Cantonese trans-Pacific migration to the United States and Canada that connects Cantonese migrants all around the Pacific within a single set of migration processes. “Gold Mountain studies” may be a better term for this field than “Chinese Canadian studies” or “Chinese American studies” since the aspirations of the migrants themselves were organized around similar life-cycle aspirations of social and geographic mobility. As subjects of exclusion and discriminatory legislation, Chinese migrants keenly felt the imprint of Canadian and American nationalism, but they were also remarkably adept at evading such legislation in various ways as they continued to travel across the US-Canada border despite stringent laws. Indeed, for much of the period between the 1880s and the 1960s, the creation and persistence of astute social practices designed to fool and undermine the enforcement of anti-Chinese laws – such as false “paper” identities, the sale and reuse of legitimate government identity certificates, and fictional birth certificates that created legal slots for immigration – became a central characteristic of Cantonese migration to Gold Mountain. Exclusionary anti-Chinese legislation, the effects of the Great Depression, and the war in the Pacific halted the trans-Pacific migration of Chinese in both directions, with small flows picking up again only after the end of the Second World War. Because crossing by water or land from Canada had been one of the primary means of circumventing the Chinese exclusion acts in the United States, which began in 1882, the cutting off of Chinese migration to Canada in 1923 had the added effect of making extralegal entry from Canada to the United States more difficult. The Mexican revolution in 1917 also led to changes in the status of Chinese in Mexico, making that extralegal pathway into the United States less tenable. Paper sons, false identities, and other means of evading the exclusionary racial immigration policies of Canada and the United States could still facilitate movements across the Canadian-American and American-Mexican borders, but such mobility became clandestine and was hidden from authorities (Delgado 2012; Lee 2003; Mandujano-Lopez 2012; Romero 2010). It is possible to describe the first century of trans-Pacific Chinese migrations to Canada and the United States as a “Cantonese Pacific.” Although the English term “Cantonese” does not accurately describe these migrants, it does serve as a parallel to the historical declaration of self-identity common to southern regions of Guangdong, which



The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific

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continues to be reflected in the Cantonese name for the urban enclaves that they created in North American cities: Tong Yun Ga (唐人街, literally “Tang People’s Street”). The Cantonese who migrated overseas described themselves colloquially as Tong Yun (Hong Yun in Hoisan dialect), “People of the Tang dynasty,” in contrast to terms such as hanren (漢人) “People of the Han,” commonly used in northern provinces, or zhongguoren (中國人) “People of the Middle Kingdom” or zhonghua (中華) “Descendants of the Middle Kingdom,” which were popular at the end of the nineteenth century. When referring to the country from which they had come, they used the name Tong San (唐山) “Tang Mountain,” and they considered themselves “natives” (Punti – 本地人) of that land in the context of historical conflicts with the Hakka (客家) in Guangdong province. The word Hakka literally referred to the “guest people” who had migrated more recently to southern China from the north. Despite their strong identification with regional dialects and the ethnic divisions between overseas migrants from different counties, Cantonese migrants to Gold Mountain created an imaginary that managed to envelop them all, even the Hakka, in contrast to those known as foreigners or Westerners (鬼佬 or 西人), and in particular in contrast to the “Northern Chinese” (Buk Fong Yun – 北方人) who spoke the unintelligible Mandarin dialect.

T he R u p t u r e o f t h e C antonese Paci fi c Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Canada and the United States were forbidding and hostile places to Cantonese migrants and their families. Those who were descended from the early trans-Pacific migrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced racism and legislated discrimination in multiple forms, including disenfranchisement and legal segregation in housing and employment. White supremacy in Canada, like its counterparts in other British settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, was enshrined in law in areas as disparate as voting rights through housing segregation and labour relations. Nationalism, by singling out those who did not belong as “Orientals” or “Asiatics,” gave new names to migrants who were excluded. National imaginaries also gave a name for belonging to the Cantonese who struggled to belong, and becoming fully “American” or “Canadian” dominated new

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narratives of overcoming exclusion (Mar 2010; Stanley 2011). Not until the Canadian Citizenship Act, 1947, and a concurrent provincial legislative act of enfranchisement did Canadians of Chinese ancestry acquire voting rights in British Columbia, and immigration laws did not formally remove racial preferences until 1967. One of the effects of the white supremacist politics of nationalist exclusion and inclusion was the renaming of belonging, so that, rather than “crossing the sea” to Gum San, the metaphoric migration of Cantonese speakers ended with speaking English and “becoming American” or “becoming Canadian.” Mei Gok (美國) and Ga na dai (加拿大) became Cantonese descriptors for places where journeys ended. The geographic imaginary of Gum San, where local places acquired meaning as part of a single oceanic imaginary, was now nationalized, so that, in the 1970s, retrospective community histories of “Chinese American” or “Chinese Canadian” or “Chinese Australian” history consistently invoked the Chinese term for each of these nations as “Gold Mountain.” Rather than sites within a larger trans-oceanic mobility, driven by the aspirations of individual migrants following their kin generation after generation, Gum San often referred to a romanticized and mythic past of loss and longing, seasoned by decades of immigration exclusion with few new migrants joining the older communities. With reforms that ended racial preferences in immigration policy in the United States in 1965 and in Canada in 1967, the half-century interruption of trans-Pacific migration ended and migration flows from the coastal regions of Guangdong to Canada through the port of Hong Kong again flourished. After 1967, Canada as a whole echoed the incipient Cantonese Pacific that was developing in British Columbia before white supremacy took hold. For instance, the proportion of British Columbia’s total population that was Chinese in 1901 was roughly 10 percent (14,885 of 149,709). It took a full century before that proportion was reached again in 2001 (373,830 of 3,698,850). In 1881, before the imposition of the head tax, Cantonese made up almost 20 percent of British Columbia’s non-Aboriginal population and an even greater proportion of its workforce. Cantonese workers in lumber, mining, fishing, and agriculture dominated early industrial development, and, well into the latter part of the twentieth century, Cantonese farmers in Vancouver’s metropolitan region were still integral parts of the agricultural industry, growing, distributing, and selling produce in a vertically integrated network that connected farms



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along the Fraser River with grocery stores in every urban neighbourhood and small town throughout British Columbia. Import-export firms moved goods back and forth across the Pacific, fostering global connections that were often overlooked despite maintaining many of the trans-Pacific networks that led to the resurgence of migration from Hong Kong in the 1970s. Indeed, even though many of the new urban migrants from Hong Kong saw themselves as utterly distinct from their forebears in Canada, the new migrants of the 1970s often had familial links that established their initial connection to Canada. Indeed, the first period of the Cantonese Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left a legacy of familial and business linkages that created the networks for the movements of migrants and capital from Hong Kong and other parts of Southeast Asia to Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. Until nearly the end of the twentieth century, the mass migration of ethnic Chinese to Canada was still dominated by Cantonese, despite significant numbers of Taiwanese and ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America migrating to Canada in the 1970s. The flourishing of the new Gold Mountain had echoes of the earlier waves of migration, but the transformation of Hong Kong as a “through port,” or what Elizabeth Sinn (2013) calls an “in-between place,” into a cosmopolitan modern city in the 1960s and 1970s shifted the usually rural-rural migration patterns of the nineteenth century towards urban-urban migration flows in the 1970s through the 1990s. These were generally narrated and understood not as aspirations for wealth and economic gain through strategic mobility but, rather, as strategic decisions inspired by desires for political refuge and educational mobility (Ley 2010). The metaphoric language of “gold” lost traction as Hong Kong boomed economically in comparison to Canada, and trans-Pacific crossings were seen as sacrificing opportunities for wealth accumulation in Hong Kong rather than as searching for “mountains of gold” in Canada. As one of the “little dragons,” Hong Kong’s economy was much more vibrant than that of Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Toronto. The gender balance of migrants was reversed from the century before, with men staying in Hong Kong where money could be made, and women and children moving across the Pacific. The old Cantonese Pacific had been shaped by the relative economies of Pacific ports and their hinterlands, with home villages in Guangdong the best place to spend the money made across the seas. Women and children left

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behind could be housed better and schools could be built for their education. By the end of the twentieth century, money made in the fervent economy of Hong Kong was better spent on housing and the less competitive education system of Canada, and so women and children crossed the seas, not in search of “Gold Mountain dreams” but of larger houses and better schools. In other words, movements to Canada of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese were primarily motivated less by “gold” than by concerns about safety and security. Riots and demonstrations in Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s made parents fearful for the future of their children, and after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, anticipation of the 1997 reversion of Hong Kong to Communist China, coupled with solicitous business migrant and investor programs in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, moved hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese into circulatory networks around the Pacific that tied Hong Kong to many of the same ports to which it had been tied a century before. The Cantonese Pacific still spoke Cantonese in the late twentieth century, but now it was inflected with the urbane accents of Hong Kong Cantonese, sprinkled with English words pronounced in Cantonese accents, as well as neologisms tied to the booming popular media industry of Hong Kong. Hong Kong Chinese soap operas and movies spread across the Pacific, first via the distribution of videotapes in the 1980s and later via DVDs and cable networks. The dominance of this new urban dialect of Hong Kong Cantonese was the glue that held the new Cantonese Pacific together, and Hong Kong was indisputably the cultural and media capital and main node of a broad distribution network of both people and products. Since the year 2000, however, as ever-increasing numbers of new migrants coming from other parts of the People’s Republic of China began to reshape Chinese Canada, the long history of the Cantonese Pacific has been increasingly eclipsed by the “Mandarinization” of both Hong Kong and overseas Chinese migration. The 1997 “handover” of Hong Kong at first seemed to change little in terms of the Cantonese Pacific, but by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the centrality of Hong Kong as the “through port” and cultural capital of the Cantonese Pacific was steadily eroding. Even the Cantonese-language movie industry of Hong Kong, famous for kungfu films and genre-bending blends of romance, action, and comedy, began making Mandarin-language films for the larger mainland



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Chinese market rather than for viewers in Hong Kong and around the Cantonese Pacific. It is a slow leakage and bleeding out rather than a violent rupture, perhaps, but the rupture of the Cantonese Pacific continues apace, as Hong Kong, its central node and heart, is increasingly becoming just another city in China and just another port for Chinese migration outwards across the seas. Being Cantonese, a Tong Yun (唐人), had been an integral part of the rise of Chinese nationalism in the late Qing dynasty. Overseas Chinese such as Heungsan (香山) (later Chungsan [中山]) county native and the Republic’s founding president Sun Yat-sen (referred to in Cantonese as Sun Chungsan 孫中山), in whose honour Heungsan county was renamed as Chungsan county, had drawn upon both the financial resources and national imaginaries created among overseas Chinese networks. Sun had himself migrated to Hawaii along with tens of thousands of other Cantonese and Hakka from Heungsan, and the Cantonese Pacific was the backbone of the 1911 Revolution. When the modernization of mainland China began in the 1990s, Hong Kong served as the initial gateway for the return of overseas Chinese as investors and technicians for the “new China,” with Shenzhen across the border as a special economic zone for investment. But Chinese nationalism, a long-held dream of overseas Cantonese alongside their dreams of gold, has inexorably begun to subsume Cantonese identity both in Hong Kong and overseas. The Cantonese Pacific was the fount of many of the core traits of overseas trans-Pacific Chinese migration networks: (1) life-cycle migrations driven by affective desires; (2) recurring long-distance migration patterns that persisted across generations; (3) efficient flows of capital, goods, and migrants across vast and disparate locations; and (4) a relatively ecumenical and benign set of social practices of reciprocity and mutually beneficial engagement in relationships to non-Cantonese, as demonstrated by Cantonese intermarriage into local Indigenous communities in the Australian colonies, Hawaii, and British Columbia, and by business collaborations between Cantonese and Scots in Hong Kong. It would be a tragedy if these characteristics were lost to history as their endurance was a sign of their strength in creating bonds of trust and fidelity across long distances and within local communities. They also offer a usable past for current Chinese migrants searching for a sense of identity and an ethics of migration that served to create powerful affective ties across both space and time.

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n otes   * Part of this chapter has been based on the following previously published articles: Henry Yu, with Stephanie Chan, “The Cantonese Pacific: Migration Networks and Mobility Across Space and Time,” in TransPacific Mobilities: The Chinese in Canada , ed. Lloyd Wong, 25–48 (Vancouver: U B C Press, 2017); Henry Yu, “From Cantonese Pacific to Chinese North America,” in Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora, ed. ­Chee-Beng Tan  (London: Routledge, 2011); and Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in Connecting Seas and Connecting Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder, 393–414  (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

R efer enc e s Barman, Jean. 2013. “Beyond Chinatown: Chinese Men and Indigenous Women in Early British Columbia,” BC Studies 177 (Spring): 39–64. Delgado, Grace Pena. 2012. Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the US-Mexico Borderlands. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hsu, Madeline. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lai, David. 1988. Chinatowns: Towns within Cities in Canada. Vancouver: U BC Press. Lee, Erika. 2003. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration in the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ley, David. 2010. Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Mandujano-Lopez, Ruth. 2012. “Transpacific Mexico: Encounters with China and Japan in the Age of Steam, 1867–1914.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia. Mar, Lisa. 2010. Brokering Belonging: The Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Alison. 2011. The Way of the Bachelor: Early Chinese Settlement in Manitoba. Vancouver: U BC Press. – 2014. Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada. Vancouver: U BC Press. Ng, Wing Chung. 1999. The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945–1980: The Pursuit of Identity and Power. Vancouver: U B C Press.



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Price, Charles. 1963. Southern European Migrants in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University. Romero, Robert Chao. 2010. The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Sinn, Elizabeth. 1989. Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. – 2010. “Hong Kong as an In-Between Place in the Chinese Diaspora, 1839–1939.” In Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migration from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder, 225–47. Amsterdam: Brill. – 2013. Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Siu, Paul. 1988. The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation. Edited with an introduction by John Kuo Wei Tchen. New York: New York University Press. Stanley, Timothy. 2011. Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians. Vancouver: UB C Press. Watson, James L. 1975. Emigration and the Chinese Lineage: The Mans in Hong Kong and London. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. Wickberg, Edgar, ed., with Harry Con, Ronald Con, Graham Johnson, and William Wilmot. 1982. From China to Canada: A History of Chinese Communities in Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Williams, Michael. 2017. Returning Home with Glory. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press. Woon, Yuen-fong. 1984. Social Organization in South China, 1911–1949: The Case of the Kuan Lineage in K’ai-p’ing County. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

2 Transcultural Poetics: Hong Kong Canadian Identities in Yasi’s Works Jessica Tsui-yan Li

Contextualized within the larger scheme of the “Cantonese Pacific” migration patterns, as illustrated in the last chapter, the growth of transnational migration between Hong Kong and Canada since the 1980s has produced “astronaut families” who have contributed to the diversity and fluidity of Chinese Canadian identities. Due to the relative political stability in Canada, on the one hand, and the greater number of job opportunities in Hong Kong, on the other, many Hong Kong Canadian fathers shuffle between Hong Kong and Canada while their spouses and children stay in their adopted country. This group of Hong Kong Canadians is situated in a transcultural space thanks to their having been educated in a Chinese and English bilingual system, in a Cantonese-speaking and modern Chinese-writing environment, and in a British colony with a deep-rooted Chinese culture. From this transcultural background, these astronaut families negotiate transcultural and transnational identities as Hong Kong Canadians, challenging the traditional one-dimensional model of the immigration experience and contributing to the co-construction of multicultural Canadian society through multilinear cultural exchanges. This chapter takes as an example of the hybridized linguistic and cultural backgrounds of astronaut families depicted in the transcultural/transnational writings of Yasi也斯 (Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞, 1949-2013),1 a poet based in Hong Kong who travelled to various parts of the world during his lifetime. Inspired by his globalized



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perspective, his travels, and his life experience in Canada, some of his poems, prose, essays, and short stories depict Hong Kong Canadians who are characterized by the postmodern streams of hybridity and in-betweenness. These works have not been widely discussed, but they deserve critical attention, particularly in Chinese Canadian studies and, in a broader sense, in Canadian studies. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (1994) states that people’s characteristics are not merely restricted to their ethnic heritage but, rather, are performatively produced via their interactions and experiences with various cultures. Instead of being torn between different cultures, Yasi depicts Hong Kong Canadian identities through his philosophy of confluence and accommodation, albeit with contradictions and conflicts. His remapping of the interstitial space promotes convergence rather than divergence, inclusiveness rather than division. In his work, Yasi accommodated the depiction of pluralistic Hong Kong Canadian identities. His transnational movement, travel writing, and poetic criticism reflect his transcultural poetics. His works are marked by three elements of Hong Kong Canadian identity negotiations: (1) the translation and adaptation of Chinese ­language, literature, and culture into their Canadian equivalents and vice versa; (2)  the juxtaposition of Cantonese and modern literary Chinese;2 and (3) the appreciation of mundane life in contemporary Chinese Canadian societies. All these linguistic and cultural elements co-exist in a transcultural third space that firmly asserts Hong Kong Canadian identities as products of Canada’s ever-changing transcultural modernity.

Y as i’ s T r a n s c u lt u ral I denti ti es As both a person and a writer, Yasi complicates the understanding of cultural identity. After having earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Hong Kong Baptist University and his doctoral degree in comparative literature from the University of California, San Diego, Yasi served as a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong between 1985 and 1997, and then as chair professor of comparative literature in the Department of Chinese and director of the Centre for Humanities Research at Lingnan University in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2013. He travelled to many parts of the world for his research, teaching, and literary activities.3 His writings were not only cross-cultural

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but also cross-genre and cross-media, as he composed poetry, prose, fiction, and critical writings, and collaborated with painters, photographers, and cultural workers. His works were translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. He was also very active in introducing foreign literatures, including the French New Novel, American underground literature, and Latin American literature, into Hong Kong (Wong and Ng 2014, 232–41). His transnational educational background, academic career, and travel and writing experiences helped him participate in globalized cultural dialogues in the postcolonial era. In “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (1961; quoted in Fanon 2001), Frantz Fanon argues that the members of the African middle class are simply decaying imitators of their Western colonizers and therefore cannot lead Africa out of its colonial past. In contrast to Fanon’s contention that intrusive foreign elements should be eliminated in the assertion of national sovereignty, Arif Dirlik (2007) argues that the members of the transnational class, such as migrant traders and professional workers who share similar occupations, educations, and lifestyles, are willing to live in a global third space and take their societies in new directions. He sees the postcolonial bourgeoisie as positive assets in the progression of societies towards global modernity. To further complicate the cultural identities of transnational subjects in the postmodern and postcolonial eras, Aihwa Ong (1999) points out that subjects enjoy precarious legal rights to citizenship and that their frequent travel and communications facilitate the flow of capital and information across borders, encouraging the fluidity of national and personal identities. Instead of serving as representatives of either Chinese or Western institutions (Chow 1993a, 193), Yasi’s works accommodate post­ colonial identities and the quest for an alternative global modernity. Compromising neither with British colonial rule nor with pro-mainland Chinese authorities, Yasi created a transcultural third space in his works of the postcolonial period, during which, in 1997, Hong Kong was handed over from Britain to China. Yasi’s assertion of the transcultural space can be traced to Homi Bhabha’s (1994, 3) argument that “the social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiations that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.” However, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity has been contested since the 1990s. Some scholars have commented that



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Bhabha’s theory of hybridity assumes homogeneous subjects represented by a universal colonial discourse (Loomba 1998, 178), while others question the possibility of subaltern resistance (Chow 1993b, 35) or claim that the historical consciousness that Bhabha criticizes for its Western orientation is actually an anchor point from which minorities can start to make structural changes (McClintock 1995, 64). Yasi employs a deconstructionist approach to postcolonialism, which destabilizes the binary opposition of West/non-West and proposes postcolonial cultural pluralities. In his literary works that feature Hong Kong Canadian identities, the spaces of Hong Kong and of Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver merge, and it is at the confluence of their boundaries that the third space of Chinese Canadians exists.

Y as i’ s C h in e s e C a nadi an Nexus With his transcultural understanding and globalized perspectives, Yasi’s writing is an example of the in-betweenness of Hong Kong Canadian identities. For example, Yasi travelled to Toronto in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, where his visits inspired him to write a number of poems. He also served as a visiting professor and taught Hong Kong literature in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto in 1996. Collaborating with photographer Li Ka-sing 李家昇, Yasi held an exhibition, Foodscape, at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver between 14 February and 15 March 1997, featuring his poetry on the theme of food. He also launched his novel Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto on 30 April 2009. Most important, Yasi’s Chinese Canadian connection stemmed largely from that fact that his spouse and children immigrated to Canada in the 1980s. Yasi constantly shuffled between Canada and Hong Kong while his family members stayed in both Vancouver and Toronto. Thus, his and his family’s experiences demonstrate the pluralist and fluid transcultural and transnational identities of a Chinese Canadian family. Yasi’s travels between Hong Kong and Canada illustrated to him that immigrants and local residents must understand and incorporate each other’s cultures in order to live together peacefully.4 In his article 一葉輕舟，如何渡過萬重山? (“How Can a Canoe Pass Numerous Mountains?”), Yasi (Leung 2003) notes that, when he taught at York

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University as a visiting professor in 1996, he noticed a tremendous difference in the cultural landscape of Toronto since his previous visit in the 1980s. Some examples of Hong Kong popular culture in Toronto that he observed included Hong Kong magazines, such as Ming Pao Weekly, Next Magazine, and East Week; VCD s of movies featuring Hong Kong stars such as Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, and Faye Wong; and Hong Kong milk tea, a hybrid of Chinese and English tea. All of these elements of Hong Kong popular culture taking root in Toronto demonstrate the co-construction of Chinese Canadian identities and transcultural influences on Canadian multicultural society as a whole.

A J o u r n e y o f L in g e r ing and Di scovery Yasi developed his transcultural poetics of philosophy and styles in his travel writing. In his essay