by May Q. Wong
But the completion of the railroad meant that Chinese workers were no longer needed in Canada. Thousands returned to China, but many stayed, even though they could not easily find jobs. The country was undergoing a time of economic slowdown, and with increasing unemployment, white workers were afraid the Chinese would, by accepting lower wages, take scarce jobs away.
As economic conditions worsened, so did overt discrimination and racism against the Chinese. They were taunted and harassed by individual citizens, assaulted by mobs, and publicly denounced by community leaders. At every level of government, legal steps were taken to “regulate the Chinese population.”
In 1885, the Dominion Government passed the Chinese Immigration Act, imposing a fifty-dollar head tax for every Chinese immigrant entering Canada. The weight of the tax was enormous. By 1900, the Chinese had entered new occupations such as operating laundries, market gardens, and inexpensive restaurants.
Although they prospered, many immigrants could still not afford to bring their families from China. As was tradition, they sent remittances to support their relatives and home communities, in addition to making sporadic visits; thus they were called “sojourners.” Their habits of living alone with no families—“They must be morally depraved!”—and their sending money out of the country—“They don’t support our local economy!”—were used as justifications by the white establishment to continue discriminatory practices. Labour unions and politicians in BC were particularly strident in lobbying for federal laws to further limit Oriental immigration.
The Dominion Government passed a new Chinese Immigration Act, enacted on June 1, 1902, doubling the existing head tax to one hundred dollars. To appease BC, which had lobbied for a five-hundred-dollar tax, the federal government allowed the province to retain half the proceeds of the hundred-dollar fee. Ships carrying Chinese immigrants were limited to one person per fifty tonnes of cargo, or risked a fine. Still, the province continued to agitate for more restrictions. One outcome was the establishment of a royal commission, which concluded that the continuing policy of limiting immigration from China would not adversely affect trade between that country and Canada. However, the increased tax did not deter immigration either, and the number of new arrivals remained similar to previous years, averaging two thousand people per year.
In 1903, the head tax was once again increased. Set at five hundred dollars, it was equivalent to two years of work at white man’s wages. As before, only the Chinese were required to pay. On July 1, 1923, another Chinese Immigration Act came into effect. A response to growing anti-Oriental sentiment arising out of the post-war economic collapse, the act virtually shut down further Chinese immigration, with the exception of university students, merchants (except anyone involved in laundries, restaurants, or retail produce), Canadian-born Chinese, and diplomatic personnel. On the positive side, the head tax was finally abolished.
The Chinese community living in Canada was stunned by the far-reaching implications. The people felt betrayed by the country that they had helped to build, through the sacrifice of their devalued labour and lives. On subsequent Dominion Days, when the rest of Canada celebrated, the Chinese mourned it as “Humiliation Day” until the act was finally abolished in 1947.
Between 1885 and 1923, an estimated twenty-three million dollars was collected from the head tax. During this period, young men, and the families and villages who supported their bid for a better life, still found it worthwhile to try their luck in Canada. At home in their villages, they might have found enough work to earn two dollars a month; in Canada, they could earn ten times that amount, money they could remit back to their families.
In BC, laws were passed that denied the Chinese the right to vote, to own land, and to work on Crown land or on provincial projects. Since they were not on the voters list, Chinese could not work in the professions. Even with proper and otherwise accepted credentials, they could not practise law or be accountants or pharmacists.
Following the railway, the Chinese moved east, hoping to find less discrimination and more work. They settled in communities like Calgary, Moose Jaw, and Regina, eventually reaching Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal.
As Ah Dang later discovered, Chinatowns might have been created out of preference but they were maintained out of necessity. The Chinese congregated to form a community, but governments and white residents also preferred them to be segregated. The largest Chinatowns in BC were in Vancouver, Victoria, New Westminster, and Nanaimo, and in the rest of Canada in Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal.
By 1911, there were almost twenty-eight thousand Chinese in Canada, of whom 71 per cent lived in BC, 10 per cent in Ontario, and about 6 per cent each in Alberta and Quebec. By 1921, there were almost forty thousand Chinese, 60 per cent of whom lived in BC.
But the 1920s also saw the start of growing interaction with whites and changing attitudes, some for the better. A few years after Ah Dang arrived, the Vancouver Chinese Students Athletic Club, featuring star player Quene Yip, joined the city soccer league and held its own against white teams. In 1933, when the Chinese team won the BC Soccer Championship, all of Chinatown celebrated the victory.
• • •
A number of significant events that took place in China between 1916 and 1928, although they did not directly involve Ah Thloo or Ah Dang, did eventually have an effect on their social, economic, and political environment.
The sudden death of President Yuan Shikai in 1916 plunged the country into what was called the Warlord Period until 1928. Autonomous warlords, many of whom were regional governors with private armies, ruled their kingdoms more through coercion than statecraft. Warlords maintained individual power and authority through the creation of alliances, and as loyalties shifted, wars broke out. Opposing armies relied on the local peasantry for new recruits, as well as to feed, house, and care for them, thus terrorizing the countryside. The shout of “Bandits are coming!” was a warning cry for Ah Thloo and her family to get home behind barred doors.
As an enticement for China to assist Britain against Germany in the First World War, a promise was made that German-occupied Chinese lands, especially on the strategically important coast of Shandong Province, would be returned after the war. However, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles gave the territories to Japan, an old enemy. This decision was seen by the Chinese people as a betrayal and a humiliation of China at the hands of foreign imperialist powers, and galvanized thousands of patriotic students, union workers, and even merchants to protest at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on May 4, 1919. The May Fourth Movement showed that all levels of citizenry, including peasant farmers who protested against landlords, could be mobilized for a nationalist cause.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was officially founded in 1921, in Shanghai, but did not gain popularity until 1925. In 1923, Dr. Sun Yat-sen again came into the limelight, at the head of a reorganized Kuomintang (KMT) Party, and established the Nationalist Government in Guangzhou in 1924. His intention was to defeat the warlords and take up the call for nationalism by ridding the country of foreign concessions and privileges. Dr. Sun created a strategic alliance with the CCP and invited Soviet advisers to build an army to fight the warlords and to train the Chinese in how to mobilize the masses. Two key figures emerged at this time: Jiang Jieshi, representing the KMT, and Zhou Enlai, representing the CPP, and both took on important roles at the newly created Whampoa Military Academy.
Dr. Sun died of cancer in March 1925. On May 30 of that year, a student demonstration in the Shanghai International Settlement, which culminated in a British police commander and his mainly Sikh officers shooting and killing Chinese protesters, triggered another nationwide outcry against foreigners. In Guangzhou, merchants recruited their own armies to enforce a fifteen-month strike and boycott of British goods. These events boosted membership in the CCP to twenty thousand and led to the creation of units responsible for peasants, women, labour, and military affairs.
In 1926, General Jiang Jieshi led the Northern Exp
edition from Guangzhou to fight the warlords and unify China and met with success in southern China. The fragile alliance between the KMT and CPP broke apart in 1927, when Jiang used his Shanghai underworld gang connections to seek out and destroy Chinese Communists. General Jiang took over the leadership of the KMT and set up a politically right-wing Nationalist government in Nanjing in 1928.
In Canada, the Chinese-Canadian community was very politically involved, divided along the same lines as in China, but there was hope that the KMT Nationalist government would bring stability. Chinese Canadians in leadership positions in the KMT Party in Canada were recognized as being linked to the new government in China. When a KMT convention was held at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, the party reached out to local leaders, inviting the premier and his cabinet, the mayor and aldermen, the American consul, and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, as well as service club and business leaders to a banquet.
A Canadian Trade Commission office was established in Shanghai, and by 1926, Canada had started sending trade missions. Canada exported wheat, flour, timber, clothing, electrical appliances, machinery, and foods to China. Canadian insurance and shipping companies were established in China. Almost seventy years after the first Chinese immigrants landed in Canada, improvements could finally be seen at some key levels of Chinese-Canadian relations.
• • •
AH DANG: CHINA, 1929
For reasons now lost in time, Ah Dang couldn’t get back to China as quickly as he would have liked. He worked hard to obey his father’s dying request and booked the passage as soon as he was able to save enough funds to return home to marry, but it took him almost eight years.
While Ah Dang was too late to see his father alive, he made sure the man was not forgotten. His first act upon arriving in the hamlet of Longe Gonge Lay was to amass joss sticks and offerings of food and wine in front of his father’s photograph at the household shrine. He burned long strips of red paper on which were written Ah Gay Sieng’s name, so his father’s spirit could join the ancestors. Ah Dang then visited his father’s gravesite, where a bright-coloured marker identified the occupant, and repeated the offerings of a dutiful son to a revered and loved father.
Grave markers, 1986.
ROBERT WONG, CHINA
The cruellest aspect of footbinding was that . . . peasant[s] . . . imitated the upper class. [A]mong Chinese farm women who had to lead lives of work, footbinding . . . was a widespread practice in the nineteenth century, and its effects were still visible in the 1930s.
—John King Fairbank, China: A New History
FOUR
Grandmother’s Golden Lilies
AH THLOO AND AH NGANGE: CHINA, 1923–1928
Of all the adult family members, Ah Thloo felt closest to her grandmother, whom she called Ah Ngange. As the oldest person in the household, Ah Ngange was recognized as the Elder. A wise and giving person, she held this position graciously. She declined to be served first at mealtimes, choosing to eat with the rest of the family. She could have lived a life of leisure, bossing around her daughter-in-law, the servant girls, and the rest of the family, as most women in her position did. She had earned the right, having lived in a subservient position to her own mother-in-law in this very house, before that venerable lady had passed on.
Her life had been especially difficult because she had jat giek, bound feet, which made standing painful and walking excruciating. Before she was married, she had rarely left her house, but as a young newlywed, she had had to work in the vegetable gardens that her new family leased. Those had been terrible, agonizing years.
Fortunately, when her son was born, her mother-in-law had allowed her to stay in the house, even though he remained an only child. She was good at managing the household servants and maintaining a harmonious home. In addition, she was good with her hands and an excellent cook.
Her dim sum, dumplings, were works of art. Every variety—whether it was sweet or savoury, steamed, boiled, or deep-fried—had a different wrapping or finish. Many of the wrappings required the creation of pouches to hold different fillings. No matter what the design, Ah Nange’s finished pouches were uniform in size and shape, and their simple beauty made them even more appetizing.
She was also an expert seamstress; her handmade stitches were even and almost invisible. Her embroidery featured realistic-looking flowers, butterflies, and birds, all decorative without being gaudy.
When Ah Poy Lim, her son, brought his bride to the house, she had nurtured a warm relationship with the young woman, sharing the household duties. She maintained control of the house, while her daughter-in-law, whose feet were not bound, worked in the family’s fields and gardens. Ah Ngange had specifically chosen for her son a bride whose feet had not been deformed.
Ah Ngange helped raise all the grandchildren once they were weaned from their mother’s breast. Staying at home, she supervised their care, which was undertaken by servants (daughters of poor relatives). Everyone naturally doted on the first grandson.
When the granddaughters were born, Ah Ngange did not allow their feet to be tampered with. Although the practice was going out of favour, some families in the village reverted back to the tenth-century custom when they started to gather some wealth. Ah Ngange taught the girls the domestic arts. Ah Thloo learned the appropriate use of herbs, roots, and precious animal by-products for illness prevention, health, and healing. For example, mushrooms, because of their dark colour, nourish the kidneys. Similarly, green foods like vegetables benefit the liver, yellow soybeans help the spleen and stomach, red dates are good for the heart, and so on.
Ah Ngange treated the boys the same way as she treated the girls, but this was not customary. It was understandable that destitute families dreaded the birth of female children: girls were generally looked upon as belonging to another family—that of their future in-laws. As children, they had to be fed and clothed, and when they grew up, their parents had to provide dowries to marry them off. Granted, a bride price was paid, but when everyone was poor, how much could a family realistically get? Parents were never fully compensated for the care and attention a girl received at home, so it was little wonder that families sometimes took drastic measures. Occasionally, tiny, discarded corpses would be found, their small heads lying at odd angles to their perfect bodies, along the slopes of the rice paddy paths. Strangled and abandoned. All female. Dead male children were buried.
“Sons are important,” Ah Ngange once said to Ah Thloo. “Unfortunately, no one remembers that women actually produce the sons.”
When Ah Thloo was twelve years old, she was summoned to Ah Ngange’s room one evening before bedtime. “Ah Nui, you are now old enough. Come, help your Ah Ngange wash her feet.” By her tone, Ah Thloo knew that the term Ah Nui, meaning girl or daughter, was said with affection.
Ah Thloo did not hesitate, as she was honoured to help. “Ah Ngange,” responded the girl. “What do you need?” She had always admired her grandmother’s tiny feet; they were like a baby’s, only daintier. Her own were square and blunt, ungainly in comparison. Also, she was secretly eager to see a golden lily, the term she had heard whispered by the village children. There was something exotic but also shameful in the term that she did not understand.
On the floor by her grandmother’s wooden pallet bed, an enamel basin was filled with warm water and sweet-smelling herbs. In the corner of the room was a rough, three-legged stool that normally served as a chair. Ah Thloo was not invited to use it so she crouched on her haunches in front of Ah Ngange, who sat on the low bed. Her wide, bare feet were sturdy on the ground. This was a natural and comfortable resting position, and she could squat like this for long periods, with intermittent stretches.
With a grunt, her grandmother crossed one leg over the other and, hunching down, reached toward her foot to remove a tiny, embroidered, black cloth shoe. It was about three inches long, only slightly larger than a toddler’s shoe. The foot was still encased in cloth. Ah Ngange found the end of the soft bindin
g and started to unwind it carefully from around her foot. After a few turns, she stopped and handed the well-worn, yellowish bundle to Ah Thloo, indicating with a nod of her head that the girl should complete the task.
Pressing her lips together tightly in concentration, Ah Thloo took the roll from her grandmother and, as she had observed, held the unravelled end tautly in her small hands as she completed the task. When the last of the binding fell away to reveal the deformed limb, her body tensed and she felt tears of sorrow flowing like hot lava down her face, splashing down on what remained of her grandmother’s foot. Still, she said nothing—no words could express her horror. This . . . this thing was as white as a lily, but it was like no flower Ah Thloo had ever seen.
Dangling from a pale, bony, atrophied calf was something that resembled a large white shrimp. The foot was bent, doubled over on itself, so that the front—where the toes should have been—was facing down, all the digits except the big one turned under. The toe-encrusted ball of the foot faced the flat of the heel, with only a narrow space between them. The big toe itself was stunted.
Looking at the broken foot, Ah Thloo realized that her grandmother walked, if her hobbling could be called that, on the base of her heels. Sighing audibly, Ah Ngange dropped the naked foot into the warm footbath.
“No need to cry, my girl,” Ah Ngange said. “Grandmother’s feet don’t hurt now.”
For once, Ah Thloo was reluctant to ask how and why, but Ah Ngange told her story quietly, as her weeping granddaughter continued to gently release the other foot from its bindings.
“I was four years old when my feet were first bound. Before that, I was free to walk, run, and jump, just like you. First, my feet were cleaned, the toenails cut, and then warm, wet cloths were wound around my feet. They were still small, but even so, the bindings chafed and I couldn’t walk as before. My balance was all wrong. The first time my feet were released, I thought they were on fire. I was taught how to rub them and my legs to help the circulation. Just when I hoped the people had changed their minds, the bindings were put back on again. Each time, the wrappings were bound tighter. As my feet grew, they turned the four small toes under each foot. Whenever I walked, each step crushed the bones of my toes, but I never gave up trying.”