Canada history research paper 2000
39
Beyond Chinatown:
Chinese Men and Indigenous Women
in Early British Columbia
Jean Barman *
T
he Chinese presence in early British Columbia is still largely
equated with Chinatowns, where men, who made up almost all
arrivals, led their personal lives separate from the larger society,
and family life was limited mostly to a small handful of merchants
with Chinese wives. 1 Attention to men beyond Chinatown allows for a
* This essay responds to the Chinese-Canadian graduate students who have, over the past several years, sought to persuade me to publish on the topic. I thank you for doing so. I also thank Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck and Lily Chow for their encouragement and BC Studies co-editor Richard Mackie and three readers for judicious comments and suggestions. 1 See Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada , 1875 -1980 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Universit y Press, 1991 ); Wing Chung Ng, The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945 -80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1999 ); Lisa Rose Ma r, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885 -1945 (Toronto: Universit y of Toronto Press, 2010 ); and Timothy J. Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2011 ). Less exclu - sively focused are Patricia E. Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858 -1914 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1989 ); Patricia E. Roy, The Oriental Question: Consolidating a White Man’s Province, 1914 -41 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2003 ); and Patricia E. Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941 -67 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2007 ). Earlier in time, see James Morton, In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia (Vancouver: J.J. Douglas, 1974 ); Edgar Wickberg, ed., From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982 ); Anthony B. Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (Vancouver: New Star, 1983 ); Peter S. Li, The Chinese in Canada (Toronto: Oxford Universit y Press, 1988 ); and Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Universit y Press, 2002 ). Chinatowns have also been a principal literar y device, notably in Wayson Choy, Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (Toronto: Viking, 1999 ); and Denise Chong, The Concubine’s Children (Toronto: Penguin, 1995 ). Chinatowns are also the stuff of memoir, notably Sing Lim, West Coast Chinese Boy (Montreal: Tundra Books, 1991 ); Joanna Claire Wong, Wong Family Feast: Our Recipes and Memories (Vancouver: Privately printed, 2007 ); and Larr y Wong, Dim Sum Stories: A Chinatown Childhood (Vancouver: Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies, Universit y of British Columbia, and Chinese Canadian Historical Societ y of British Columbia, 2011 ). Chinatowns have been interrogated directly, as with David Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns within Cities in Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1988 ); Ying-ying Chen, “In the Colonies of Tang: Historical Archaeolog y of Chinese Communities in the North Cariboo District, British Columbia, 1860 s-1940 s” (PhD diss., Simon Fraser Un iv er sit y, 2001 ); and Paul Yee, Chinatown: An Illustrated History of the Chinese Communities
bc studies , no. Spring 40
more nuanced approach, one in which some men were less constrained
by tradition and more likely to make their own way in their personal as
well as in their work lives .
A close examination of multiple sources reveals a very different pattern
of intimacy among some Chinese living in the BC hinterland than their
countrymen in Chinatowns. Taking such persons into account, one
in six Chinese men who, through the end of the nineteenth century,
engaged in intimacy leading to family formation did so not with a
Chinese woman but with a local indigenous woman. While some such
encounters have been noted, they have not been gathered together or
interrogated. 2 The thirty relationships introduced here speak to Chinese
men’s initiative and resourcefulness in early British Columbia and
Canada, alongside that of the indigenous women in their lives.
of Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2005 ). On specific Chinatowns, see Paul Yee, Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Vancouver: Douglas and McInt yre, 1988 , rev. 2006 ); David Chuenyan Lai, The Forbidden City within Victoria (Victoria: Orca, 1991 ); Patrick A. Dunae, John S. Lutz, Donald J. Lafreniere, and Jason A. Gilliland, “Making the Inscrutable, Scrutable: Race and Space in Victoria’s Chinatown, 1891 ,” BC Studies 169 (2011 ): 51-80, reprinted as “Race and Space in Victoria’s Chinatown, 1891 ,” in Richard Mackie and Graeme Wynn, eds., Home Truths: Highlights from BC History (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2012 ), 206 -39; Jim Wolf and Patricia Owen, Yi Fao, Speaking through Memory: A History of New Westminster’s Chinese Community, 1858 -1980 (Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2008 ); Philip C.P. Low, Memories of Cumberland Chinatown (Victoria: Privately published, 1993 ); Colleen Leung, Letters from Home (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 2001 ); and Chad Reimer, Chilliwack’s Chinatowns: A History (Vancouver: Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies, Universit y of British Columbia, and Chinese Canadian Historical Societ y of BC, 2011 ). Exemplar y of the earlier, almost exclusive, focus on Chinatown are Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa: The Commission, 1885 ), whose testimony came almost wholly from white residents of Victoria with lesser numbers from New Westminster and Nanaimo, all of whom were influenced by their cities’ Chinatowns (see list on li-lii); Hilda Glynn-Ward ’s polemic The Writing on the Wall (Vancouver: Sun Publishing Co., 1921 ); and the materials prepared for a 1923 sur vey of the Chinese and Japanese presence along the American and Canadian Pacific coasts, for which the BC portion was limited to Vancouver’s Chinatown. See Sur vey of Race Relations Records, 1924 -1927 , 38 manuscript boxes, Hoover Institution Archives, available online at http://collections.stanford.edu/srr/bin/page?for ward=home. 2 In order of publication, Naomi Miller, “The Lum and Ban Quan Families,” BC Historical News 21, 2 (1988 ): 19-20; Lily Chow, Sojourners in the North (Prince George: Caitlin, 1996 ), 108-11; Hilar y Kathleen Blair, “Settling Seabird Island: Land, Resources, and Ownership on a British Columbia Indian Reser ve” (MA thesis, Simon Fraser Universit y, 1999 ), 39-43, 68, 72, 74, 93-94, 105, 120-23, 126; Lily Chow, Chasing Their Dreams: Chinese Settlement in the Northwest Region of British Columbia (Prince George: Caitlin, 2000 ), 4-5; Dexter Friesen, “Canada’s Other Newcomers: Aboriginal Interractions with People from the Pacific” (MA thesis, Universit y of Saskatchewan, 2006 ), 82-84; Eleanor Yuen, “Are You W ho You Think You Are? A Study of Chinese Canadian Name Forms,” available at https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/ 2429 /12575 /Chinese_Canadian_name_forms.pdf ?sequence= 1; and John Belshaw, Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009 ), 152, 246 n30, drawing, with permission, on my research notes.
bc studies 41
Not without reason Chinese men have most often been thought of
in the context of Chinatowns modelled on familiar ways. Unwanted by
a dominant society cheered to have them out of sight, they considered
themselves away from home only for the short or medium term, with little
need to break away from tradition. Most arrivals came from the Pearl River
delta, a densely populated rice-growing area of Guangdong Province in
south China not far from the British colony of Hong Kong. A shortage
of land gave priority to increased productivity. Irrigation and fertilization
required capital, provided by young men who went abroad to work and
send money home. The social structure was based on the extended family,
which meant that men could leave China secure in the knowledge that
their families, including their wives if they were married, would be cared
for until their return, in anticipation of death, if not earlier. 3 Initially, most
went to southeast Asia, but increasingly the west coast of North America
beckoned, initially California with its gold rush beginning in 1848 , and
then British Columbia with its counterpart a decade later. 4
The first wave of four thousand or more Chinese arrived in British
Columbia in search of gold from 1858 onwards, a second wave originated
with upwards to fifteen thousand men hired in the early 1880 s to construct
the BC portion of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway, and
a third wave came for various reasons. A census taken on the eve of the
British colony of British Columbia’s joining Canada in 1871 enumerated
fifteen hundred Chinese, comprising one in seven of the non-indigenous
population. 5 The nine thousand British Columbians born in China in
1891 accounted for one in eight, the fifteen thousand in 1901 for one in
ten. 6 Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did some Chinese
cross the Rockies. In 1891 , 98 percent of the Canadian total of persons
born in China lived in British Columbia, down to 86 percent by 1901 .7
3 Testimony in Report (1885 ), 161; and Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1902 ), 8, 33-34, 37, 236. 4 Among other sources, Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882 -1943 (Stanford: Stanford Universit y Press, 2000 ). 5 There were 8,500 “whites” and 450 blacks. “Report of the Population of British Columbia … 187o ,” in British Columbia Chronicle , ed. G.P.C. Akrigg and Helen B. Akrigg (Vancouver: Discovery Press, 1977 ), 2:404 . 6 According to the Canadian census there were 8,910 Chinese among 70,870 non-indigenous British Columbians in 1891 , and 14,576 among 149,708 in 1901 . W hile the number of British Columbians born in China would expand by over a third to 21,500 in 1921 , the proportion of non-indigenous British Columbians fell to one in t went y-five due to the mass immigration that characterized Canada as a whole in the early t wentieth centur y. 7 The Canadian totals of persons born in China were 9,129 in 1891 and 17,043 in 1901 . The proportion living in British Columbia would fall to just under 60 percent by 1921 . On the topic generally,
Beyond Chinatown 42
Source : Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration: Report and Evidence
(Ottawa: The Commission, 1885 ), 363 -65.
Chinese British Columbians long continued to be almost wholly
men, not unexpectedly so given the circumstances of their migration.
The fifty-three Chinese women present in 1871 made up 3 percent of the
total number. An 1885 count located 59 “married ladies,” t wo-thirds of
them living in the provincial capital of Victoria, and 72 “prostitutes,”
together accounting for just over 1 percent of the total (Table 1).8 As
of 1902 , Victoria housed 92 wives, the rapidly growing rail terminus of
Vancouver 27 wives, being 3 and 1 percent, respectively, of the totals. 9 Even
though fewer than 10 percent of the 3,000 men living in Victoria at the
turn of the century were merchants, two-thirds of the city’s 92 Chinese
wives were so partnered, as were two-thirds of the 27 in Vancouver. 10
Inferring from these figures, the total number of Chinese wives in British
Columbia by the turn of the century was likely somewhere around 150 .
see, among other sources, Wickberg, From China to Canada ; Chan, Gold Mountain ; R oy, White Man’s Province ; Roy, Oriental Question ; and Roy, Triumph of Citizenship . 8 Report (1885 ), 363-65. 9 Report (1902 ), 12-13, 22. The precise numbers of men were 3,187 and 2,053. Chinese women would be enumerated separately in the federal census in 1911 , when the 415 women comprised 2 percent of the almost 20,000 British Columbians born in China, approaching 4 percent a decade later. 10 Report (1902 ), 12-13. On merchants, see Timothy J. Stanley, “‘Chinamen, W herever We Go’: Chinese Nationalism and Guangdong Merchants in British Columbia, 1871 -1911 ,” Canadian Historical Review 77, 4 (1996 ): 475-504 ; Paul Yee, “Business Devices from Two Worlds: The Chinese in Early Vancouver,” BC Studies 62 (1984 ): 44-67; Paul Yee, “A Chinese Business in Early Vancouver,” BC Studies 69/70 (1986 ): 70-96; and Frances Hern, Yip Sang and the First Chinese Canadians (Victoria: Heritage House, 2011 ).
ta bl e 1
Chinese in British Columbia, 1885
Men “Married ladies” “Prostitutes” 17 and under To t a l % Chinese by region
Victoria 1,559 41 34 133 1,767 16.9
Other Vancouver Island 925 8 4 32 969 9.2
New Westminster 1,577 4 7 92 1,680 16.0
Railway
construction 3,510 0 0 0 3,510 33.5
Other Mainland 2,528 6 27 5 2,556 24.4
To t a l s 10,099 59 72 262 10,482
bc studies 43
Source : Census Canada, 1901 .
The more the Chinese population increased, the more attitudes
towards it hardened. 11 The basis for doing so lay in the broad acceptance,
in Britain and beyond, of fundamental differences between persons based
on physical features. A perversion of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species, published in 1859 , argued that human beings, as distinguished by
skin tones and other outward characteristics, were biologically arranged
in a hierarchy. Persons perceiving themselves as “white” not unexpectedly
put themselves at the top, their superiority seemingly confirmed by the
Industrial Revolution and colonizing exploits. The consequence was that
Chinese men were disparaged even as they were wanted. The economic
conditions whence they came made them willing to submit, at least
outwardly, to their circumstances so long as employment was to be had
– this being, in good part, jobs their white counterparts considered to
be beneath their dignity to perform. Gold mining and rail construction
were complemented by coal mining, market gardening or farming,
resource-sector jobs, and the seasonal industry of salmon canning. Others
worked as laundrymen, tailors, cooks, and household servants known as
houseboys, or ran small stores and restaurants.
11 For a contrar y, sympathetic white child ’s perspective, see John Norris, Wo Lee Stories (New Denver, BC: Twa Corbies, 1997 ), 5-17, 111-21, esp. 118 on the sole time the family’s Chinese neighbour was allowed into their living room.
ta bl e 2
British Columbians born in China, 1901
Census region To t a l n o n -indigenous popul ation
China born % of Total popul ation % Chinese by region
Greater Victoria 23,355 2 ,915 12.5 20.o
Other Vancouver
Island 21,429 2,558 11.9 17.5
Vancouver and North Coast 33,109 2,803 8.5 19.2
New Westminster and Fraser Valley 20,592 2,556 12.4 17.5
Fraser Canyon, Cariboo, Kootenays 51,223 3,74 4 7.3 25 .7
To t a l s 149,708 14,576 9.7 \
Beyond Chinatown 44
This ethos encouraged and legitimized legal as well as informal
discrimination. In 1874 and 1885 , the right to vote in British Columbia
and Canada, respectively, was removed from persons who were Chinese
by origin or descent, which meant that they could not enter the pro -
fessions of law, medicine, pharmacy, or accountancy; seek government
employment; take up government land; or enjoy other privileges linked
to the franchise. Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald defended
these actions on the grounds that the Chinese had “no British instincts or
British feelings or aspirations, and therefore ought not to have a vote.” 12
Also in 1885 , a fifty-dollar head tax was imposed on new arrivals from
China, being doubled in 1900 and raised three years later to five hundred
dollars. In 1923 , the federal government prohibited Chinese immigration
altogether. The franchise would be returned only in 1947 , the same year
the immigration ban was repealed, although it would take another two
decades for Canadian immigration policy to become non-discriminatory.
For all these reasons Chinatowns exercised enormous appeal. There
men formed family, clan, and home district associations and political
societies, which provided both social services and venues for such familiar
leisure activities as gambling and opium smoking. The largest were in
Victoria on Vancouver Island and New Westminster on the Mainland,
being entry ways to the goldfields, and, from the mid- 1880 s, in Vancouver. 13
A number of smaller counterparts were similarly self-sustaining, although
it was also the case that any conglomeration of Chinese men, however
informal, was liable to be so labelled. 14 As well as giving protection,
Chinatowns served to isolate men from other ways of life, even when, as
with some of them, their jobs took them further afield. 15
Chinatowns did not, however, represent the entirety of Chinese mi -
grants’ experiences in early British Columbia. Some had to rely much
more on their own resources. Principal among these were the many men
who mined for gold long years after most whites had departed. The 1870
census indicated that, whereas the majority of the eighty-five hundred
whites lived on Vancouver Island, over three-quarters of the fifteen
hundred Chinese were on the Mainland. Excluding railway workers, a
quarter or more continued to reside on the Mainland wherever the search
12 John A. Macdonald, House of Commons, 1885 , quoted in Ward, White Canada Forever , 41. 13 As of 1885 , Victoria housed 1,767 Chinese and New Westminster 1,680 , in 1902 Victoria housed 3,263 and Vancouver 2,080 . See Report (1885 ), 363-65; Report (1902 ), 12-13. 14 Particularly useful in this respect is Lai, Chinatowns , 34-51. 15 This point is well made in Dunae et al., “Making the Inscrutable.”
bc studies 45
for gold extended itself (Table 1 and Table 2).16 Early on, a fellow miner
praised Chinese tenacity:
This much-enduring and industrious race are generally to be found in
little clusters, at work upon diggings deserted by the whites ... and will,
doubtless, at the end of the year, by means of their frugality, save more
than their white brother is likely to, in spite of his higher gains ... It is
the fashion on the Pacific Coast to abuse and ill-treat the Chinaman in
every possible way; and I really must tell my friends ... they are hard-
working, sober, and law-abiding – three scarce qualities among people
in their station. 17
No aspect of everyday life better illustrates the distinctiveness of
Chinese men in early British Columbia than do pathways to intimacy.
An alternative to arriving with a wife in tow, as did some merchants who
came north from California, was to get one from home. The process was
difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Not only did most men first
have to repay the cost of their transportation even as they were fulfilling
their obligation to remit money back home, their wages were often less
than half those paid to whites in the same job, all of which delayed their
ability to send, or have sent, a wife from China. While men who had left
wives behind might return from time to time for conjugal visits, most
such women never made it to Canada for lack of resources, obligations
in China, or immigration restrictions. 18 Other men turned to Chinese
16 Eventually the search extended virtually ever y where, given, as a technical report put it sometime later, “gold is ver y generally distributed over the entire area of the Province of British Columbia.” See John B. Galloway, Placer-Mining in British Columbia (Victoria: British Columbia Department of Mines, 1931 ), 10. On early gold finds in respect to the presence of Chinese miners, see Chow, Sojourners in the North ; and Chen, “In the Colonies of Tang,” 143-55. 17 R. Byron Johnson, Very Far West Indeed (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, & Searle, 1872 ), 76-78. 18 Most general accounts ignore Chinese women altogether, with the possible exception of merchants’ wives, or treat them summarily in passing. Among exceptions are Tamara Adilman, “A Preliminar y Sketch of Chinese Women and Work in British Columbia, 1858 -1950 ,” in Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro, eds., Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women’s Work in British Columbia (Victoria: Camosun College, 1984 ), 53-78; and Yuen-Fong Woon, “Bet ween South China and British Columbia: Life Trajectories of Chinese Women ,” BC Studies 156/57 (2007 -08): 83-107; also Chan, Gold Mountain , passim; Li, Chinese in Canada , 58-70; and the earlier autobiographies in Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1992 ), 17-45. For more recent vignettes of family life, see Brandy Liên Worrall, ed., Finding Memories, Tracing Routes: Chinese Canadian Family Stories (Vancouver: Chinese Canadian Historical Societ y of British Columbia, 2006 ); and Brandy Liên Worrall, ed., Eating Stories: A Chinese Canadian and Aboriginal Potluck (Vancouver: Chinese Canadian Historical Societ y of British Columbia, 2007 ). For examples of Chinese men’s unions with Chinese women outside of the major Chinatowns, see Marie Elliott, Gold and Grand Dreams: Cariboo East in the Early Years (Victoria: Horsdal and Schubert, 2000 ), 113-15, also 84-85, 110;
Beyond Chinatown 46
prostitutes, whose presence in early British Columbia (Table 1) reflected
the larger society, which, as a consequence of the gold rush and earlier the
fur trade, also contained more non-indigenous adult men than women. 19
Whereas the overwhelming majority of Chinese men equated intimacy
with Chinese women, a minority were less inhibited, sometimes part -
nering with an indigenous woman in what might become a long-term
stable relationship. For indigenous women, who, going back to the
earliest years of contact, came from a long tradition of being flexible and
adapting to changing circumstances, such activity was not unusual. 20
For Chinese men, such relationships might appear unexpected, given
the general assumption of the day that “Indians and Chinese” did not,
as asserted in 1885 , mix “a great deal.” 21 In line with this perspective, it
is still the case that almost all scholarly and popular publications and
graduate theses on early Chinese migration to British Columbia, and
also to the United States and Australia (both of which were driven by
similar economic circumstances), take for granted that Chinese men
only engaged in intimacy with Chinese women. 22 Such an approach
Chow, Sojourners in the North , 46; W.M. Hong, And So That’s How It Happened: Recollections of Stanley-Barkerville, 1900 -1975 (Barker ville, BC: Privately printed, 1978 ), 11-13; and Lily Hoy Price, I Am Full Moon : Stories of a Ninth Daughter (Victoria: Brindle and Glass, 2009 ). 19 On Chinese prostitution, see Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871 -1921 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009 ), 105-20; Chan, Gold Mountain , 80-84; Chen, “In the Colonies of Tang,” 329-33; Woon, “Bet ween South China and British Columbia,” 89-92; ongoing accounts in the Victoria Colonist newspaper, online at http://w w w.britishcolonist.ca /. For comparisons, see A lbert Dudley Gardner, “Two Paths One Destiny: A Comparison of Chinese Households and Communities in A lberta, British Columbia, Montana, and Wyoming, 1848 -1910, ” (PhD diss., Universit y of New Mexico, 2000 ), 187-95, 218, and passim; and Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman: Universit y of Ok lahoma Press, 1994 ). On British Columbia generally, during these years and subsequently, see Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia , 3rd ed. (Toronto: Universit y of Toronto Press, 2007 ). 20 On British Columbia, see Jean Barman, “Indigenous Women and Feminism on the Cusp of Contact,” in Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture , ed. Cher yl Suzack, Jeanne Perreault, Shari Huhndorf, and Jean Barman (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010 ), 92-108; Jean Barman, “Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria: Engendering Transgressive Sexualit y during the Gold Rush,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past , ed. Myra Rutherdale and Katie Pick les (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2005 ), 205-27; and Jean Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexualit y: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850 - 1900 ,” BC Studies 115/16 (1997 -98): 237-66, reprinted in Mar y Ann Ir win and James F. Brooks, ed., Women and Gender in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004 ), 210-35. 21 T.R. McInnis [ sic, McInnes], Report (1885 ), x x vi. See also Adele Perr y, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849 -1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001 ), 48-78; and Mawani, Colonial Proximities . 22 Undertaken in December 2012 , the search encompassed all potentially relevant books held in the Universit y of British Columbia Librar y, articles accessible through the America Histor y and Life and comparable databases, and graduate theses and dissertations available through Proquest and similar sites. Among the partial non-BC materials located were Sue
bc studies 47
is short-sighted, if for no other reason than that, in numerous areas of
emigration during these same years (including Malaysia, the Philippines,
the Hawaiian Islands, the West Indies, and Cuba), Chinese men, as
also explained in 1885 , “intermarried with the native races.” 23 One of the
very few contemporaries to acknowledge Chinese-indigenous unions
in early British Columbia was an Englishman resident since 1859 whose
construction of pack trails and surveying took him into the hinterland.
In 1879 , Edgar Dewdney explained to a federal committee on Chinese
labour and immigration how “a good many [Chinese men] live with
Indian women,” relationships of which, in the absence of Christian
marriage, he disapproved. 24
Thirty relationships between Chinese men and indigenous women
can be glimpsed in early British Columbia in censuses, vital statistics,
school and church records, contemporary accounts, family stories, and in
the research of such scholars as Lily Chow and Naomi Miller ( Ta b l e 3).
While the number is not large in itself, it is considerable when compared
with the likely five times as many Chinese men, or about 150 , who, up
to the turn of the century, partnered with a Chinese woman. In other
words, one in six Chinese men who, in early British Columbia, engaged
in intimacy leading to family formation did so with an indigenous
woman. The proportion is almost certainly higher, given the ambiguity
and disregard surrounding newcomer-indigenous relationships more
generally, the dismissive attitudes towards both Chinese and indigenous
British Columbians, most unions’ location in the hinterland, low English
literacy levels among Chinese men and indigenous women making for few
first-hand accounts, and the common use of shortened names for Chinese
men making it difficult to track single individuals through time. 25
Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Urbana: Universit y of Illinois Press, 2011 ), 140 ; Daniel Liestman, “Horizontal Inter-Ethnic Relations: Chinese and American Indians in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30, 3 (1999 ): 347-48, which cites other items; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: Universit y of California Press, 1995 ), 316n52; and notably, Gardner, “Two Paths One Destiny,” 281-83, for an intriguing A lberta instance; and Ruth Kretzler Billhimer, “Pawns of Fate: Chinese/Paiute Intercultural Marriages, 1860 -1920 , Walker River Reser vation, Schurz, Nevada” (MA thesis, Universit y of Nevada, 1998 ). 23 Report (1902 ), 235. See also Report (1885 ), cxiii, cx xix. According to the Chinese consul in British Columbia in 1885 , “ in Cuba, fully sevent y-five per cent have married native women” (Report [1885 ], 41). 24 Edgar Dewdney in “First Report of Select Committee on Chinese Labour and Immigration,” in Journals of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada 13, app. 4 (1879 ), 48. On Dewdney’s basis of understanding, see E. Brian Titley, “Edgar Dewdney,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online . 25 Renisa Mawani notes several early court cases concerning Chinese men selling liquor to indigenous peoples, who were legally prohibited from having such access, but she does not
Beyond Chinatown 48
M a n ’s na me Born BC location Occupation Beg. yr Wom a n ’s na me Origin Born Principal sources
Ah Chin 1848 Lytton Fa r mer 1878 Mary Indigenous 1861 1881 census
Ah Ching 1830 Ya l e Fa r mer 1881 K itt y Indigenous 1820 1864 land record/ 1881 census/stories
Ah Ching Ya l e Railway worker 1880s Unnamed Hope Recollection
Ah Choong 1833 Victoria Not given 1865 Mary Seminoo Cowichan 1848 1865 marriage
Ah Chu 1850 Princeton Miner 1901 Lupel Similkameen 1850 1901 census
Ah Chung/
Ah Chin Yun 1842 Lytton Fa r mer 1879 Lucy Indigenous 1862 1881 /1891 censuses
Ah Lean 1841 Osoyoos Miner 1881 Ah On Indigenous 1862 1881 census
Ah Lem 1834 Osoyoos Miner 1877 Mary Indigenous 1861 1881 census
Ah Louis Ya l e Cook 1879 Annie Quyanak Boston Bar 1879 marriage
Ah Lum 1843 Omineca Miner 1880s Esther Joseph/Nos Oep Git xsan 1901 Indian census/Lily Chow
Ah Lum/
Chin Lum Kee
1835 Rock Creek Storekeeper 1870 Lucy/Squeetle-wood Stó:lo 1854 1891 census/stories/Naomi Miller
Ah Sing 1856 Ya l e Labourer 1877 Annie Indigenous 1851 1891 census
Ah Wee Kong On 1840 Lytton Storekeeper 1872 Unnamed Indigenous 1880 school record/ 1881 census
A h Yu e n Seabird Island Fa r mer 1874 Lucy Aleck Popk um 1890s school records/Hilary Blair
Bow Dung 1829 New Westminster Baker 1870 Sarah Anne Indigenous 1858 1881 census
Charley Chung 1844 Hope Rancher 1879 Susan Qo - swqusclet Hope 1865 1880 marriage
Chi Chum 1830 Cache Creek Teamster 1866 Mary Indigenous 1845 1881 /1891 censuses
Chong Sing 1868 Clinton Cook 1898 Gusta Qualt Chilcotin 1878 1898 marriage
Chow Ah Lock 1850 Omineca Miner 1899 Josephine Alexander Carrier Lily Chow
Chu Jaw 1839 Osoyoos Miner 1876 Susanne Indigenous 1859 1881 census
Chung Moon Rock Creek Miner/farmer 1871 Emily Rock Creek Written recollection
K u To n g 1842 Hope Baker 1889 Susan Indigenous 1865 1891 census
Lee Lee 1863 Princeton Laundryman 1901 Julie Similkameen 1885 1901 census
Louis Sing 1864 Nicola Valley Houseboy 1896 Alice Shî shîatko Lytton 1872 1896 marriage
Nu y Wa h 1841 New Westminster Restaurant keeper 1875 Mary Indigenous 1851 1881 census
Yaow/ Yow 1850 Port Essington Contractor 1888 Alice Indigenous 1869 1891 school record/ 1901 census
Unnamed Chilliwack Not given 1892 Unnamed Skowkale 1895 missionary account
Unnamed Chehalis Restaurant keeper 1883 Unnamed Indigenous 1885 recollection
Unnamed Ta s h m e Rancher 1880s Unnamed Indigenous Oral recollection
Unnamed Ya l e Houseboy 1895 Unnamed Indigenous 1896 missionary account
ta bl e 3
Summary of relationships between Chinese men and indigenous women in
nineteenth-century British Columbia
bc studies 49
M a n ’s na me Born BC location Occupation Beg. yr Wom a n ’s na me Origin Born Principal sources
Ah Chin 1848 Lytton Fa r mer 1878 Mary Indigenous 1861 1881 census
Ah Ching 1830 Ya l e Fa r mer 1881 K itt y Indigenous 1820 1864 land record/ 1881 census/stories
Ah Ching Ya l e Railway worker 1880s Unnamed Hope Recollection
Ah Choong 1833 Victoria Not given 1865 Mary Seminoo Cowichan 1848 1865 marriage
Ah Chu 1850 Princeton Miner 1901 Lupel Similkameen 1850 1901 census
Ah Chung/
Ah Chin Yun 1842 Lytton Fa r mer 1879 Lucy Indigenous 1862 1881 /1891 censuses
Ah Lean 1841 Osoyoos Miner 1881 Ah On Indigenous 1862 1881 census
Ah Lem 1834 Osoyoos Miner 1877 Mary Indigenous 1861 1881 census
Ah Louis Ya l e Cook 1879 Annie Quyanak Boston Bar 1879 marriage
Ah Lum 1843 Omineca Miner 1880s Esther Joseph/Nos Oep Git xsan 1901 Indian census/Lily Chow
Ah Lum/
Chin Lum Kee
1835 Rock Creek Storekeeper 1870 Lucy/Squeetle-wood Stó:lo 1854 1891 census/stories/Naomi Miller
Ah Sing 1856 Ya l e Labourer 1877 Annie Indigenous 1851 1891 census
Ah Wee Kong On 1840 Lytton Storekeeper 1872 Unnamed Indigenous 1880 school record/ 1881 census
A h Yu e n Seabird Island Fa r mer 1874 Lucy Aleck Popk um 1890s school records/Hilary Blair
Bow Dung 1829 New Westminster Baker 1870 Sarah Anne Indigenous 1858 1881 census
Charley Chung 1844 Hope Rancher 1879 Susan Qo - swqusclet Hope 1865 1880 marriage
Chi Chum 1830 Cache Creek Teamster 1866 Mary Indigenous 1845 1881 /1891 censuses
Chong Sing 1868 Clinton Cook 1898 Gusta Qualt Chilcotin 1878 1898 marriage
Chow Ah Lock 1850 Omineca Miner 1899 Josephine Alexander Carrier Lily Chow
Chu Jaw 1839 Osoyoos Miner 1876 Susanne Indigenous 1859 1881 census
Chung Moon Rock Creek Miner/farmer 1871 Emily Rock Creek Written recollection
K u To n g 1842 Hope Baker 1889 Susan Indigenous 1865 1891 census
Lee Lee 1863 Princeton Laundryman 1901 Julie Similkameen 1885 1901 census
Louis Sing 1864 Nicola Valley Houseboy 1896 Alice Shî shîatko Lytton 1872 1896 marriage
Nu y Wa h 1841 New Westminster Restaurant keeper 1875 Mary Indigenous 1851 1881 census
Yaow/ Yow 1850 Port Essington Contractor 1888 Alice Indigenous 1869 1891 school record/ 1901 census
Unnamed Chilliwack Not given 1892 Unnamed Skowkale 1895 missionary account
Unnamed Chehalis Restaurant keeper 1883 Unnamed Indigenous 1885 recollection
Unnamed Ta s h m e Rancher 1880s Unnamed Indigenous Oral recollection
Unnamed Ya l e Houseboy 1895 Unnamed Indigenous 1896 missionary account
Beyond Chinatown 50
Snippets here and there speak to physical attraction, which, if it did
not in most instances result in intimacy, might in other circumstances
have done so. The family tells a story about leading Vancouver entre -
preneur Wing Sang. Employed in the early 1880 s as a bookkeeper on rail
construction, he made regular stops “in Yale for apple pie served by a
young Native girl.” On one such occasion he was informed that he was
just in time for the announcement of an engagement. “Afraid that his
love of apple pie served by a pretty young woman had given the wrong
impression, he made a hasty departure. It wasn’t that he didn’t want a
wife – he did – but he wanted a Chinese wife with Chinese values.” 26
A local history recalls Hong Hing, who, like so many others, was born
in Canton, the English name for today’s Guangzhou, the capital city
of Guangdong Province. 27 From about 1916 a merchant in Chemainus
on Vancouver Island, Hong Hing was “known to make a ‘Nelson’s Eye’
[a wink] at pretty Indian maidens who frequented his premises. His
attention to the Indian ladies filled his store with sweaters, toques and
sox, of which he made a specialty, with elaborate displays.” 28
While cause and effect in Chinese men’s unions cannot be demon -
strated, it is highly suggestive that, whereas virtually all of the men living
proximate to or in an organized Chinatown appear to have restricted
themselves to Chinese women, not all those at a distance did so. The
thirty glimpses examined here contain three possible exceptions. In 1865 ,
in a Methodist ceremony in Victoria, thirty-two-year-old Ah Choong,
born in Hong Kong, wed a seventeen-year-old Cowichan woman named
Mary Seminoo, both then living in the city. 29 The other two unions
extend the contact into the personal relationships that might have ensued. See Mawani, Colonial Proximities , 121-25, 152-62. A lthough individually enumerated in the early Canadian censuses, difficulties in communication and also disinterest meant Chinese names were routinely simplified, occupations identical for pages on end, and ages rounded off to a convenient 0 or 5. Many of the men brought in to work on the railway were simply called Ah, which was not a surname, but rather an informal prefi x, much like the English-language suffi x that turns “John” into “Johnny.” More generally, “Ah ” was routinely put before some small part of the actual name. See Census Canada information for 1881 , 1891 , and 1901 , available online at various sites. On aspects of naming, see Yuen, “Are You W ho You Think You Are?” Two important initiatives intended to counter these limitations are the Vancouver Public Librar y’s Chinese-Canadian Genealog y website at http://w w w.vpl.ca /ccg/Basics.html and head ta x and other records and information available online through Archives Canada.26 Hern, Yip Sang, 16-17. 27 Of the six of thirt y unions described here where men’s origins were noted, principally in marriage records, five were Canton. 28 Ning Chang, “The Life St yle of Hong Hing,” in Memories of the Chemainus Valley , comp. Lillian Gustafson (Victoria: Chemainus Valley Historical Societ y, 1978 ), 293. For a rare vignette of ever yday Chinese-indigenous sociabilit y, see Lim, West Coast Chinese Boy , 5-8. 29 Pre-Confederation Marriage Records, 1858 -1872 , British Columbia Archives (hereafter bca ), GR- 3044 .
bc studies 51
survive in the form of 1881 census entries from the New Westminster
area. Fifty-two-year-old baker Bow Dung lived with twenty-five-year-
old Sarah Anne, their son Fat Ah, aged nine, who was attending school,
and two-year-old daughter Mun Gaw; forty-year-old restaurant keeper
Nuy Wah lived with thirty-year-old Mary and their daughters Iow Sun
aged five and Ah Win aged one. The 1881 census does not include origins,
but, given the women’s ages and births in British Columbia, it is almost
certain they were indigenous.
Many of the Chinese men partnering with indigenous women in early
British Columbia were gold miners. Typical was Chin Lum Kee, known
as Ah Lum, of whom a variety of sources, ranging from census records
to interviews with daughter Lillian Martha Ban Quan and daughter-in-
law Beryl Lum to extensive research by historian Naomi Miller, make
it possible to know quite a lot. 30 According to Lillian, Ah Lum was
born in Canton, “got off the boat at San Francisco,” and walked north
to the original heart of the gold rush in the Fraser Valley, where he ran
a store servicing miners and carried the mail. In about 1870 the t went y-
five-year-old partnered with sixteen-year-old Squeetlewood, known as
Lucy, recalled as belonging “to a tribe of Indians at Chilliwack ” in the
eastern Fraser Valley, thus being Stó:lo. Sometime after gold strikes at
Rock Creek in the southern interior, the couple started packing in goods
and then opened a store to supply settlers and miners with “groceries,
hardware saddles whatnot, anything for horses.” Back to Lillian: “There
was about a hundred Chinese placer miners on the sluice boxes at Rock
Creek, and white people … It was very nice and quiet.” That was not all
Ah Lum did to support his seven children, who were born at two-year
intervals. “In 1886 my father was the first guy to cook for the Mounties
at Fort McLeod [in southern Alberta]. I don’t know how he got that job.
He was home in Rock Creek and they must have called him to cook.”
A placer miner visiting Rock Creek in 1892 recalled: “Quite a number
of Chinamen were strung out along the creek washing gold. Dick Ah
Lum also had a store nearby, and kept numerous chickens, ducks and
geese. He was married to an Indian woman, and their eldest children
were about grown up.” 31
30 Inter view with Lillian Martha Ban Quan by Imbert Orchard, 5 November 1964 , bca , T0822 ; inter view with daughter-in-law Ber yl Lum by Imbert Orchard, 1 November 1964 , bca , T0898 ; Miller, “The Lum and Ban Quan Families,” 19-20; and letter from Naomi Miller, 17 November 1991 , in author’s possession. 31 Harr y D. Barnes, “Reminiscences of the Okanagan and Boundar y Districts, 1891 -1900 ,” Okanagan History 13 (1949 ): 97.
Beyond Chinatown 52
Sometime after daughter Lillian settled in the Kootenays with her
miner husband Chu Ban Quan, who had travelled from Canton to San
Francisco in 1868 and mined his way north, her parents followed her there.
The couple moved to booming Cranbrook, where they opened a grocery
store, then on to Fort Steele, where they ran a butcher shop. Then, as
Lillian put it, Ah Lum’s Chineseness caught up with him: “He got old
and he quit. Father left for China in 1911 , went home to die.” According
to Naomi Miller, before he did so Ah Lum burned his shop records to
signify he forgave his debtors in anticipation of his death. His versatile
widow, who lived another four decades, raised sheep and chickens and
took in washing.
Even such a long-lived union as that of Ah Lum and Lucy was not
without its tensions and contradictions. His partnering decision was
pragmatic, being expeditious and inexpensive compared to the acquisition
of a woman from China, but all of these factors did not necessarily make
it right from his perspective. Indicative of Ah Lum’s ambivalence the
family did not associate with Lucy’s family: “We just go by Chilliwack.
We don’t know who mother’s relatives are. We don’t see no Indians
around. We don’t mix with them.” Another descendent explained, in
old age, how they were never to admit to either their Chinese or their
indigenous descent. 32 It was also the case that, in everyday life, the family
accommodated to their circumstances: “Mother was a very nice lady, she
talked to us in her language and father talked to us in Chinese.” 33
Very importantly, Ah Lum’s and Lucy’s offspring were sufficiently
comfortable with their upbringing to make their lives across a spectrum
of possibilities. Lillian slid into a traditional union: “You know how the
Chinese are, they marry young … They picked a husband for you. I was
in grade 8 … My marriage was arranged. He was 45 and I was 16.” W h i le
one sister married a Chinese man who had a market garden near Fort
Steele, another opted for the American who was the local blacksmith.
Learning packing skills from their parents, all three sons became expert
with horses and worked as guides. One felt comfortable partnering
with an indigenous woman, a second apparently did not marry, and a
third opted for a white woman. Having taken his father home to die,
son George was meant to return with a wife from China. He did not
do so, instead marrying a young Englishwoman he met while he and
his brother were in charge of pony and trail rides at a major hotel at
32 Naomi Miller named “Lucy” in print as Lucy Williams, “daughter of the packer at Hope,” which, she later explained privately, was because the family did not like to admit to its indigenous background (letter, 17 November 1991 ). 33 Inter view with Lillian Martha Ban Quan by Imbert Orchard, 5 November 1964 , bca .
bc studies 53
Lake Louise in the Rockies, where she worked. From her perspective,
interviewed in old age, it was a match made in heaven, for “I loved the
western life.” As for their seven children, “they are nurses and teachers
and everything.” 34
The gold mining enclave of Rock Creek nurtured at least one other
Chinese-indigenous union. Chung Moon and “Emily an Indian woman”
from Rock Creek had a daughter named Ah Lan who was born in 1872 .
In attempting, at age forty, to get a copy of her birth certificate from the
provincial government, Ah Lan provided considerable information about
her family and herself. 35 Chung Moon had, according to his daughter,
been a “gold miner and farmer.” When Ah Lan was ten, her mother
had died. Five years later, in about 1887 , she and her father moved to
New Westminster for a year and then to Victoria. Two years later Ah
Lan married “according to Chinese custom” Leng Tung Hai, who had
arrived in British Columbia in about 1873 , worked in a sawmill, and then
had a market garden. His daughter settled, Chung Moon returned to
China, where he died a year later.
Fifty kilometres west of Rock Creek lies Osoyoos. There, as of
1881 , three Chinese miners were living with indigenous women in a
Chinese-run hotel or boarding house that also contained some thirty
unattached Chinese miners. Forty-year-old Ah Lean was partnered
with nineteen-year-old Ah On, who, despite her name, was described
as indigenous. Ah Lem, aged forty-seven, and Mary, aged twenty, were
the parents of three-year-old Pauline; forty-two-year-old Chu Jaw and
twenty-two-year-old Susanne were the parents of Agatha aged four and
Julia aged two. As were most Chinese men, all three were enumerated as
Buddhists. The women were not unexpectedly, given that missionaries
were early arrivals into the region, put down as Catholics. The unions
gave such men, along with their children, access to indigenous worlds
as well as to the Chinese milieu in which, as of 1881 , they lived in the
everyday. Very possibly in order to visit them, in the last decade of the
nineteenth century an indigenous child from across the border in the
United States recalled “one trip that my parents seldom failed to make
each year was … to S’oo-yoos Lake, British Columbia, in the country
34 Inter views with Lillian Martha Ban Quan and Ber yl Lum by Imbert Orchard, 1 and 5 November 1964 , bca . 35 File attached to British Columbia, Division of Vital Statistics, Birth registrations, bca , GR 2965 , 72-09-038396 .
Beyond Chinatown 54
of the Upper Okanagan.” As to the reason: “Some Chinese men had
settled ” there “to placer mine for gold and had taken native wives.” 36
While women’s indigenous identities are often not given in the census
or elsewhere, the majority were almost certainly local, which would have
encouraged sociability. Among them were two literate Chinese men who
arrived in Canada in 1881 , which suggests they came as railway labourers.
By 1901 , they were both living about a hundred kilometres west of
Osoyoos at Princeton, where they had each partnered with local Simil -
kameen women. Thirty-eight-year-old Lee Lee, a Buddhist, was running
a laundry with sixteen-year-old Catholic Julie, while placer miner Ah
Chu, also a Buddhist, was living with a Catholic woman named Lupel.
Indicative of the broad brush strokes sometimes accorded such persons
in the census, Ah Chu and Lupel were both recorded as born in 1850 .
Not only did such men acquire a new entry way to sociability along
with intimacy leading to family life, but they also got a helpmate who
was useful in everyday life, particularly to men like Lee Lee who were
providing services. Two hundred kilometres northwest of Princeton at
Cache Creek, Chi Chum lived with an “Indian” woman named Mary
and their children: Nancy Fa, born 1867 ; Soot Fa, born 1871 ; and Chon
Win, born 1877 . In both 1881 and 1891 , Chi Chum was a teamster who
drove oxen, and Mary, fifteen years his junior, undoubtedly assisted
him in managing the numerous boarders the couple took in. Storyteller
Annie York , a Yale woman of mixed indigenous and non-indigenous
descent born in 1904 , related a similar account passed down from her
mother : “Somewhere around Tashme [near Hope] that Chinaman had
a ranch and all the Indians stopped there and stayed overnight. And the
same on the way back. And the Chinaman had a half-Indian daughter.
I don’t remember her name. My mother said she was a pretty girl. The
Chinaman lived with an Indian woman. He raised pigs for the miners,
smok ed t hem.” 37
Such families’ everyday comfort with each other is attested to by a
young English adventurer who trekked across southern British Columbia
in the mid- 1880 s. Morley Roberts, in his The Western Avernus , published
shortly thereafter, recounts his travels along the Fraser River to Chehalis:
Then to Harrison River, bright and clear and blue, a Fraser tributary,
and dinner at a Chinaman’s restaurant, where we had a plentiful
36 Jay Miller, ed., Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (Lincoln: Universit y of Nebraska Press, 1990 ), 20. 37 Annie York, in Andrea Laforet, “Folk Histor y in a Small Canadian Communit y” (PhD diss., Universit y of British Columbia, 1974 ), 297.
bc studies 55
and well-cooked meal served by the owner himself, who spoke good
English to us, Chinese to his pig-tailed compatriots, and fluent
Chinook [Pacific Northwest trading jargon] to his Indian wife, who
held in her arms a curious child with the characteristics of both Indian
and Chinaman stamped unmistakenly upon it. The father admired it
immensely, and was, it seemed, very fond of his wife, who, for her part,
was stolid and undemonstrative, as most pure-bred Indians are.” 38
This modestly flattering description stands out, given that, in the view
of critics, Roberts’s “discussions of native people and the Chinese are
blinkered by racism. 39
Chinese men partnered with indigenous women who lived near the
gold rush’s origins were the most likely to find themselves subject to
outsider scrutiny. 40 In 1876 , the school board at Hope in the eastern Fraser
Valley was livid over “Chinaman houses” occupied by Chinese men and
“their squaws” on land sought for a new building. 41 At Lytton, a hundred
miles to the north, the public school and a nearby Chinese-indigenous
family comfortably coexisted. Its new teacher was so valued that, in
the fall of 1880 , parents sent her a letter of appreciation together with a
seventy-five-dollar collection, including five dollars from Ah Wee Kong
On. 42 The 1881 census described him as a storekeeper born in China in
about 1840 , the father of eight-year-old Ah Kow. The boy’s mother may
be the woman named in the Indian reserve census of the Lytton area
four years earlier as In-than-ta-oss’s daughter “married to a Chinaman.” 43
Two other couples were also in the Hope-Lytton area in 1881 . Thirt y-
five-year-old Lytton farmer Ah Chin and his twenty-year-old “Indian”
wife Mary were the parents of two-year-old Ten Fee. Ah Chin was
Buddhist, Mary and their son were Anglican. A twenty-year-old
Anglican “Indian” woman named Lucy and a year-old girl named Hydah
were living in the same household as was Lytton farmer Ah Chung,
a forty-year-old Buddhist, and two Chinese labourers possibly in his
38 Morley Roberts, The Western Avernus (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1896 , orig. 1887 ), 156. 39 Jeremy Mouat, “Morley Roberts in the Western Avernus,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 93 (2001 -02): 31, 36n44. 40 See Jiw u Wang, “His Dominion” and the “ Yellow Peril ”: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants to Canada , 1859 -1967 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Universit y Press, 2006 ). 41 J.A. Bowes to John Jessop, 10 September 1876 , in BC Superintendent of Education, Inward Correspondence, bca , GR 1445 . 42 Commendation to A[delaide] Bailey, teacher at Lytton, 27 December 1881 [sic , 1880 ], in BC Superintendent of Education, Inward Correspondence, bca , GR 1445 . 43 Indian Reser ve census, 1877 , as compiled on Royal BC Museum and Okanagan Universit y College Living Landscapes website at http://royal.okanagan.bc.ca /census/ind 1877 .
Beyond Chinatown 56
employ. A decade later, Lucy, now described as twenty-eight, was living
with forty-eight-year-old farmer Ah Chin Yun, almost certainly the
Ah Chung of a decade earlier and now also an Anglican. Unlike Lucy,
he was literate. Testifying to the solidity of some Chinese-indigenous
unions, their children, as of 1891 , were Susan aged ten, son Ko Kee aged
seven, and Jenny and son Coke An, both aged five.
Schools were not the only outside entity impinging on Chinese-
indigenous unions. While aimed principally at indigenous peoples, the
long-lived missionary presence, going back in time to the earliest years
of the gold rush, caught some Chinese men in its wake. One goal was
their conversion from Buddhism to Christianity, as with Lytton farmer
Ah Chung, who, by 1891 , had become Anglican like his wife Lucy.
The other goal was Christian marriage, encouraged by the presence
of St. John’s Anglican Church at Yale in the Fraser Canyon, where,
in 1879 , Yale cook Ah Louis wed Annie Quyanak from nearby Boston
Bar. Describing himself as a farmer’s son born in Canton, he signed
the marriage document in Chinese with a sure, literate hand. A year
later, thirty-six-year-old Hope rancher Charley Chung, a labourer’s son
born in Canton who similarly signed the church register in Chinese,
wed fourteen-year-old Susan Qoswqusclet, daughter of a local chief. 44
Whoever was meant, at about this time the Anglican bishop proudly
described in his memoir how he “married an Indian girl to a Chinaman”
a t Ya l e . 45 In similar fashion, in 1895 , the Anglican order whose sisters
ran All Hallows School at Yale rejoiced over the “marriage of one of
the newly-made Christians [being indigenous people baptized as adults]
to a Christian Chinaman, who was in domestic service at the Mission
House.” 46 The 1891 census recorded thirty-six-year-old Buddhist labourer
Ah Sing living at Yale with forty-year-old indigenous Annie along
with thirteen-year-old Jimmy and nine-year-old Emma, who, like their
mother, were described as Anglican.
Visiting periodically from his base in New Westminster, the Anglican
bishop not only encouraged conversions and married one or more
Chinese-indigenous couples but also made use of their services. Annie
York told of how, when the bishop first arrived at Yale in 1879 , he was
44 “St. Johns, Yale, Register of baptisms, marriages, and burials, August 28, 1859 -Apr i l 24, 1895 ,” Anglican Archives, Vancouver School of Theolog y, Universit y of British Columbia.45 Herbert H. Gowen, Church Work in British Columbia (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899 ), 17. 46 East and West , Winter 1896 , 428. On the school, see Jean Barman, “Separate and Unequal: Indian and W hite Girls at A ll Hallows School, 1884 -1920 ,” in Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia, 2nd ed., ed. Jean Barman and Mona Gleason (Calgar y: Detselig, 2003 ), 283-302 .
bc studies 57
looked after by a Chinese man who lived nearby with his indigenous wife.
Ah Ching “housed and fed him.” 47 Her cousin, born in 1911 , described
being taken care of as a child by an elderly Chinese railway labourer,
also named Ah Ching, who hailed from north of Hope. 48 When he fell
seriously ill, Ah Ching cooked a “ blue jay” for him, which he recalled as
the toughest thing he ever ate. 49 Indicative of the caution necessary in
dealing with multiple sources, another or possibly the same Chinese man
named Ah Ching appears as a farmer along with his wife, indigenous
Kitty, in the 1881 census. Ah Ching and Kitty were already aged fifty
and sixty, respectively. Going back even further, in 1861 a Chinese
man named Ah Ching pre-empted from the government 160 acres
(65 hectares) near Yale; by the time he acquired the land outright in 1871 ,
he had constructed a house with a cellar, put in a 1.4 hectare garden, and
planted two hundred and fifty apple trees. 50 This Ah Ching was not alone
in taking up land. More than half a dozen similarly enterprising Chinese
men, who had arrived with the gold rush, did so prior to Chinese people’s
being legally precluded from acquiring land through pre-emption. 51
The Methodists were not far behind the Catholics and Anglicans in
chasing souls. Enumerated at Hope in 1891 were fort y-nine-year-old
Methodist baker Ku Tong; twenty-six-year-old Methodist Susan, who
was indigenous; and their year-old son Ah Tong. Five years later, in a
Methodist ceremony, Louis Sing from Canton, a thirty-two-year-old
Methodist houseboy employed in the Nicola Valley a hundred and
forty kilometres to the northeast, wed Anglican Alice Sh î sh îatko, aged
twenty-four and probably a Lytton woman. 52 It is unclear under whose
religious auspices, if any, two years later thirty-year-old Chong Sing,
a cook at 150 Mile House near the long-established mining town of
47 Annie York, in Andrea Laforet and Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808 -1939 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1998 ), 126. 48 Annie York, Richard Daly, and Chris Arnett, They Write Their Dream on the Rock Forever: Rock Writings of the Stein River Valley of British Columbia (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1993 ), 30. 49 Arthur Urquhart, in Laforet and York, Spuzzum, 126. 50 F.W. Laing, Colonial Farm Settlers on the Mainland of British Columbia 1858 -1871 (Victoria: Privately printed, 1939 ), 227. 51 According to Laing, Colonial Farm Settlers , Kim Sing and Ah Wah pre-empted from the government 50 and 37 acres ( 20 and 15 hectares), respectively, near Lytton in 1867 (239); Ah Ky 160 acres ( 65 hectares) near Lillooet in 1867 (242); Ah Gin 160 acres ( 65 hectares) near A lkali Lake in 1867 (282); Ah Chee and Ah Kye 10 and 160 acres ( 4 and 65 hectares), respectively, near Lillooet in 1868 (242); Long Tie 320 acres ( 130 hectares) near Lillooet in 1872 (266 ); and Nam Sing 160 acres ( 65 hectares) near Lillooet in 1876 (281). 52 British Columbia, Division of Vital Statistics, Marriage registrations, bca , GR 2962 , no. 96-09-169150 .
Beyond Chinatown 58
Williams Lake, wed twenty-year-old Gusta Qualt, a Chilcotin woman. 53
Other services were sometimes sought. A Methodist minister described
an 1895 visit to Chilliwack to a “Chinaman’s whose little boy died this a.m.
as result of scalding … I spoke as well as I could to the mother (Indian)
& all & prayed with them. On the wall there was a Buddhist shrine.
There were 3 Chinese present. Got back after dark.” Even though in his
next day’s entry he grumbled over the failure of his efforts at conversion,
he clearly had not given up: “Buried half-breed (Chinese-Indian) boy at
Skowkale. Heathen Indian & Chinese & Xtian sermon.” 54
If courted by missionaries, Chinese men were also reminded from
time to time that they and the indigenous women in their lives were
not wanted. As narrated by Hilary Blair, in about 1874 a man known as
Ah Yuen built a house on Seabird Island, located in the Fraser River
between Chilliwack and Hope, established a garden, partnered with
a local Popkum woman named Lucy Aleck, and began a family that
would number five. 55 Ah Yuen’s troubles began when, in 1879 , apparently
oblivious to his presence, the federal Department of Indian Affairs
reserved the fertile island for seven named indigenous groups, including
Popkums. Six years later the chief of one of the other groups persuaded
government officials to evict Yuen, who was soon back supported by his
Popkum father-in-law to claim the landholding by virtue of having an -
nually paid taxes on it. 56 In 1891 , by which time the property comprised
nine cleared hectares, three houses, and 220 mature fruit trees, Ah
Yuen was killed while blasting stumps. Two years later, the Department
of Indian Affairs ruled, in line with federal policy, that, by virtue of
marrying a non-indigenous man, Lucy Aleck had lost her Indian status
and, thereby, her right to remain on what was now a reserve. However,
as a special consideration, she was allowed to do so as long as she did
not remarry.
For all of the whims of federal policy, the widowed Lucy raised Ah
Yuen’s and her children as indigenous. In 1894 she enrolled ten-year-old
Frederick at the newly opened Coqualeetza Industrial School for Indian
Boys in nearby Chilliwack, whose records described his father as a
53 British Columbia Division of Vital Statistics, Marriage registrations, bca , GR 2962 , no. 98-09-175273 . 54 6 and 27 June 1895 entries in Ebenezer Robson, Diar y, bca , H/D/R 57. 55 The family’s stor y is recounted in Blair, “Settling Seabird Island,” 1, 27, 39-41, 104, 120-26. The seven indigenous groups to which Seabird was allocated were the “Popkum, Skawits, Ohamil, Ska-wāh-look, Hope, Union Bar, and Yale” ( 1). 56 This point is made in Friesen, “Canada’s Other Newcomers,” 83, based on Department of Indian A ffairs files.
bc studies 59
“Chinaman” now dead. 57 Frederick remained there seven years, playing
in the school band and being taught farming, which he thereafter pursued
back on Seabird Island. In a list of Seabird ’s dozen family heads, compiled
during the hearings of the 1914 Royal Commission on Indian Affairs,
Fred Yuen was described as a Popkum having a wife and two children, a
house, and six hectares under cultivation with another two cleared, being
the second largest holding on the island. 58 In neither its meetings with
Seabird residents nor in its meetings with the local Indian agent did the
commission make any reference to Fred Yuen’s being of Chinese descent.
Yet a list compiled four years later, which included among Seabird ’s then
twenty-five family heads Fred and his brother Henry, both described
as Popkums, indicates that they had settled there in 1879 , clearly on the
property their Chinese father had claimed. 59
Relationships in the far corners of British Columbia may have more
proceeded on their own terms with less outside interference than those
in areas longer settled by newcomers. In April 1891 , provincial edu -
cation authorities requested a “list of the white and half-caste children
living within the bounds of the Port Essington School District with a
statement of their ages.” Included among those still too young to go to
school but expected to do so in due course were Sam Yow aged two and
Baby Yow aged three months, both given as “Mother Indian, Father
Chinaman.” 60 The 1901 census of this north coast community described
fifty-one-year-old Yaow as coming to Canada in 1873 , naturalizing as a
British subject in 1890 , and living with a thirty-two-year-old “Indian”
named Alice and their four children – Sam (twelve), Joe (nine), Mary
(eight), and George (four). Yaow was Buddhist, the others Methodist.
The three oldest children were attending school, the two oldest speaking
Chinese, “Indian,” and English as their first languages.
Yaow described himself in the census as a “contractor” earning eighty
dollars by working just three months in the past year. In other words, he
had charge of recruiting other Chinese to work in one of Port Essington’s
three seasonal salmon canneries making cans, butchering fish, and
soldering, cooking, and packing the filled cans. As explained at about
57 Coqualeetza school register, United Church Archives, Vancouver School of Theolog y, Universit y of British Columbia.58 Meeting with the Seabird Indian Band, 23 November 1914 , in Evidence Submitted to the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs in the Province of British Columbia: Lytton Agency (Victoria: The Commission, 1913 -16), 16-18. 59 “Residents of Seabird Island – 12 December 1918 ,” compiled by the Indian agent, in Blair, “Settling Seabird Island,” 122. 60 D. Jennings to S.D. Pope, 13 April 1891 , in BC Superintendent of Education, Inward Correspondence, bca , GR 1445 .
Beyond Chinatown 60
this point in time: “The contracts are made with boss Chinamen who hire
their own help in their own way … The contractor makes an advance of
$30 to $40 to each Chinaman at the opening of the season to induce him
to come. The contractor furnishes the provisions, where chiefly his profits
are made. At the end of each month what he has supplied is made up and
charged pro rata to the men in his employ. At the end of the season, if
the run is short, the contractor may lose money on his contract.” 61 Even
though Yaow’s income fluctuated over the years, he had sufficient status
for both his children to be pre-enrolled and to attend the local public
school.
The 1901 census also included an Anglican household headed by Nos
Oep Ah Lum, who described herself as a Gitxsan woman and the mother
of Peter, Tony, and Thomas Ah Lum, who were Gitxsan and Chinese
with Gitxsan as their first language. Because the family was enumerated
in the Indian component of the federal census, no ages were given. This
information is consistent with historian Lily Chow’s story of Ah Lum, an
Omineca gold miner born in 1843 who came to Canada in 1858 , partnered
with a Gitxsan woman whose English name was Esther Joseph, and very
profitably interspersed winter trapping with summer mining. 62
Shortly after their mother Esther’s death in about 1910 , when the
youngest child Gwen was nine, Ah Lum determined to return home to
China. He wanted to take Thomas and Gwen along, but the two children
did not want to go and so stayed behind to be raised by Esther’s sister.
The circumstance created its own tensions. Gwen’s daughter Charlotte
Sullivan, a Gitxsan hereditary chief, explained how the children perforce
learned to value their double inheritance: “My mother did not have a
very pleasant life in the native community. She was often looked down
[upon] because she had mixed blood in her veins. Regardless, she was a
very strong woman and held her head up high.” For his part, Ah Lum
did not want his children to forget him. As well as leaving behind a
small faded photograph of a round-faced man with a bald head, he
wrote regularly from China: “Whenever my mother and uncles received
a letter from their dad, they were excited and eager to know what he
wrote. But they could not read Chinese characters, so they usually took
the letter to grandpa’s Chinese friends in Hazelton or in Smithers who
would translate the letter for them.”
Lily Chow has also written about Chow Ah Lock, who arrived in
British Columbia in the 1860 s aged seventeen and mined for a dozen
61 Report , 1902 : 135. 62 Chow, Chasing Their Dreams , 4-5; also, conversations with Chow.
bc studies 61
years before heading to the Omineca in the province’s far northwest
corner, where he both ran a pack train transporting goods and continued
to mine so successfully that he would eventually have a lake, creek, and
mining site named after him. 63 Chow Ah Lock settled down with a local
indigenous woman named Josephine Alexander. They had a son named
David who was born in 1900 and to whom his father gave the Chinese
name of Chow Sai Yoke, Chow being his own proper surname.
In another indication of the ways in which relationships worked them -
selves out in the everyday, Chow Ah Lock ’s son grew up speaking both
his father’s southern Guangdong dialect of Taishanese and his mother’s
Gitxsan. According to Chow Ah Lock ’s and Josephine’s granddaughter
Julie Alexander, who, when she shared her family’s story with Lily Chow,
still yearned for the Chinese food he used to make for them: “Both my
grandparents worked very hard in the early days. My grandmother at -
tended to the horses and worked in her own garden. In the summer she
went to the bush to look for wild berries and cabbages. In winter, both
of my grandparents trapped animals for fur on their trap line.” One of
the stories told about Chow Ah Lock has him travelling to Vancouver
in 1913 loaded with gold dust and nuggets, with the intention of being
naturalized as a British subject. However, upon seeing streetcars, electric
lights, and motor cars for the first time, he hastened back to his wife and
son. In 1937 , several years after Josephine’s death, Chow Ah Lock, like
numerous of his contemporaries, returned to China so that he could be
buried in his homeland. It may have been Chow Ah Lock ’s and, earlier,
Ah Lum’s example that caused half a dozen or more Chinese men in the
Omineca to similarly partner with local indigenous women in the first
years of the twentieth century. 64
Not only did many more unions similar to those described here almost
certainly exist in early British Columbia, but they also continued to
do so throughout the twentieth century and into the present day, with
all of the stresses, as well as the satisfaction, that earlier accompanied
them. 65 A son born in 1943 to a well-established Chinese farmer in the
63 Chow, Chasing Their Dreams , 4; Chow, Sojourners , 108-10; conversations with Chow. 64 Chow, Sojourners , 110. 65 As examples, the marriages, in 1915 and 1916 in the Catholic church in Fort St. James, of, respectively, fift y-five-year-old Buddhist cook Ah Ye born in Hong Kong and t went y-year-old Catholic and Carrier Eugenie Sansgelau, and of t went y-seven-year-old Catholic cook Chen Tie known as Charles and t went y-one-year old Catholic and Carrier Celestine, recorded in British Columbia, Division of Vital Statistics, Marriage registrations, bca , GR 2962 , no. 15-09-158937 and 16-09-179358 . For more recent unions, see the documentar y produced by Karin Lee and others, Cedar and Bamboo (Vancouver: Chinese Canadian Historical Societ y of British Columbia, 2010 ); and Dorothy Christian, “Articulating the Silence: Filmmaker Dorothy Christian Breaks the Secrecy bet ween Native-Chinese Relations,” ricepaper 9, 3 (2004 ): 22–31.
Beyond Chinatown 62
southern interior – a man who had been unable to bring his wife over
from China – recalled that, when he was a child, his father repeatedly
admonished him to pay no attention to his indigenous mother who was
“ just around ” and who was, from the perspective of others, a household
ser vant. 66 A descendant of a Chinese restaurant owner from the gold
rush era reflected on how various people she knew, “if you [went] back a
couple of generations,” were of Chinese descent: “ but I also remember dad
saying that you could have a Chinese for a good friend but you don’t marry
t hem.” 67 Recollections are sometimes fragmentary, as with a self-termed
“British Columbia half breed logger” in the Fraser Valley who described
the woman he married in 1924 as “a Harrison River [Chehalis] Indian
except there is just a little Chinese in her some where back a piece.” 68
However many Chinese-indigenous unions there were by the end of
the nineteenth century, those about which we can know something testify
to Chinese men’s and indigenous women’s enterprise and determination.
Chung Moon, the two Ah Lums, the almost certainly two Ah Chings,
and the others did not cease to be Chinese by virtue of so partnering,
nor did the women in their lives become any less indigenous. But, at the
same time, men were not stultified by the single partnering option of a
Chinese woman, which, for most of them, would have been unobtainable.
The alternative of an indigenous woman was both expedient and practical.
It took most men some time to consider the possibility. They were in
their mid-thirties or forties by the time they did so, a decade and a
half to two decades older than the indigenous women with whom they
partnered, who were very much of a child-bearing age. Ah Lum and
Lucy at Rock Creek had seven children together, Ah Yuen and Lucy
Aleck on Seabird Island had five, Ah Lum and Esther Joseph in the
Omineca had at least four, and Yaow and Alice at Port Essington had
four. While most relationships survive only as snapshots in time, they
nonetheless speak to family stability. Morley Roberts’s vignette of his
Chehalis meal describes the satisfaction couples took in each other and
in their offspring.
Chinese men who partnered with indigenous women gained, alongside
intimacy and family life, an entry way into the place with which they had
cast their lot, more so than would have been the case had they restricted
their sociability to a Chinatown. Opportunities were used, as with Ah
Ching’s taking up land in those early years before the Chinese were
66 Personal communication.67 Personal communication. 68 Henr y Pennier, Chiefly Indian: The Warm and Witty Story of a British Columbia Half Breed Logger (West Vancouver: Graydonald, 1972 ), 12.
bc studies 63
legally prohibited from doing so. Ah Lum and Lucy took advantage of
the gold discoveries at Rock Creek to pack in goods and open a general
store that serviced whites alongside Chinese and indigenous people, as
almost certainly did Lee Lee’s and Julie’s Princeton laundry. The Port
Essington school board enumerated Chinese-indigenous offspring as
a matter of course, and a Lytton teacher welcomed a Chinese father’s
contribution to a collection in her honour. Chinese-indigenous couples
appear to have been accommodated by their white neighbours, including
missionaries. 69 They were not, as with Ah Yuen and Lucy Aleck on
Seabird Island, to be cowed.
It was at the same time not necessarily easy to live at the intersection of
two strong and self-contained ways of being. While the three Osoyoos
families enumerated in 1881 appear to have fraternized with indigenous
counterparts across the border, Ah Lum of Rock Creek did his best to
prevent his children from having contact with their mother’s family, even
as she taught them her language alongside the Chinese they learned from
their father. Neither forgot who they were and whence they came. For all
of the longevity of their unions, four of the Chinese men about whom
most is known turned inward with gathering age. Ah Lum and Lucy
had been together over four decades at the time that he, in his daughter’s
words, “went home to die.” The three widowers acted similarly at the
cost of leaving children behind: Ah Lum’s Omineca namesake after over
half a century away, Chow Ah Lock in the Omineca even longer, and
Chung Moon of Rock Creek two decades or more.
Offspring of Chinese-indigenous unions variously made their way as
adults. Chung Moon and Ah Lem at Rock Creek had no compunction
arranging their daughters Ah Lan’s and Lillian’s marriages to Chinese
men. Yet one of Lillian’s sisters opted for an American blacksmith, her
brother for an Englishwoman after conveniently not returning with a
Chinese wife after taking his father home to die. In the other direction,
despite the fact that her Chinese descent was held against her, Ah Lum’s
and Esther Joseph’s daughter at Omineca was a Gitxsan hereditary chief.
Comprising a likely one in six of the total number of unions in which
Chinese men are recorded as having been engaged in early British
Columbia, these relationships encourage us to rethink the Chinese
presence. None of the accounts is complete, yet together they tell a
new story. Some men living beyond Chinatown acted differently than
69 Of the fifteen women whose religious affiliations are in the records, five were Catholic, five were Anglican, one was an Anglican convert from Catholicism, and four were Methodist. Three of the men described themselves as Methodist, t wo as Anglican, and t welve as Buddhist, as likely were the other men.
Beyond Chinatown 64
their urban counterparts. They took a chance, as did the women in
their lives. From the perspective of the British Columbia mainstream,
such families did not exist – an attitude that served them well. It is,
in other words, precisely because the unions are so difficult to retrieve
historically that they may have endured as well as they did.
Whatever the topic that snares our interest, we need to be open to
possibilities, in this case to an alternative so obvious that it should not
have slipped from view. The two groups – Chinese men and indigenous
women – were both outsiders to the dominant society, meaning that
their lives went largely unrecorded so long as they were lived out of
view. Be they in Chinatowns or in the hinterland, Chinese men were,
for the most part, unseen outside of the workplace. It was assumed that
they were single, which most of them were, and, if otherwise, it did
not much matter. But it does matter as soon as we consider Chinese
men and indigenous women of the past on a par with ourselves, whose
lives are worthy of interrogation, rather than as objects beyond our
gaze and understanding. What is evident from these glimpses is that
some Chinese men were not nearly so uniform in their behaviour as
has generally been thought. Men were no less Chinese and indigenous
women no less indigenous by virtue of taking the future into their
own hands. Living beyond the constraints and the pressure towards
conformity that existed in Chinatowns, some Chinese men alongside
the indigenous women in their lives struck out on their own in this new
place called British Columbia.
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