Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980

Ann Turner is Financial and Budget Manager, University of British
Columbia Library.

As the subtitle suggests, this is not another tourist guide to
Vancouver’s world-famous Chinatown, nor is it another cultural history
and description of the area. It is a penetrating and thought-provoking
study of racism, using the history of Vancouver’s Chinatown as an
illustrative case study. Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation,
it postulates that the concept of race has little basis in genetic fact
or cultural ancestry. Instead, “race” is a construct devised by the
dominant element of a society (which in this case is of British and
European origin) to define other elements of the society and continually
reinforce their subordinate status. “Chinese” and “Chinatown”
have held different connotations at different times for the dominant
white majority, but inevitably they placed the Chinese community at an
inferior level. Tracing the history of these perceptions and their
effects on interactions between the two groups through 100 years of
Chinatown’s history, the author builds a compelling argument in
support of her thesis.