The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Until the end of the 1970s, when Toronto surpassed it, Vancouver was
home to Canada’s largest concentration of ethnic Chinese. Served by as
many as three Chinese-language dailies and various journals and
magazines, Vancouver’s Chinatown never lacked for public opinions
regarding the issues, personalities, or events of the day that affected
the community. These media outlets, together with numerous voluntary
associations, served as arenas for the ongoing debates over Chinese
identity and interests in Vancouver. Ng has assiduously mined the
records of these groups to reconstruct the lively and often contentious
dialogue between Canadian-born Chinese and the immigrant Chinese who
came to the city beginning in the early 1950s. The result is a
perceptive study of the formation of Canadian-Chinese ethnic identity
and cultural consciousness.

What structures Ng’s discussion is concern with the complex process
of identity construction and how it was affected by migration and
settlement in postwar Vancouver. Ng carefully reconstructs the world of
the old-timers, whose need for protection and assurance produced the
commercial and social foundations of the city’s Chinatown. As
Vancouver’s Chinese community from the 1940s on abandoned the
China-focused sojourning outlook of the early settlers in favor of
sinking local roots, the influence of the pioneers—whose Old World
ties and native place fixations defined them as Chinese—faded.
Canadian-born Chinese, together with post–World War II immigrants,
subsequently dealt with the new challenges posed by accommodation and
multiculturalism, which prompted yet another formulation of ethnic
identity.

Theoretically informed, concise, and solidly documented, Ng’s work is
not just about the turbulent and fascinating history of Vancouver’s
Chinese community. It also shows just how much the Chinese had to say
and to debate among themselves about who and what defined them and their
community as Chinese.