Chinese

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

This cursory survey of the Chinese in Maritime Canada presents a brief
history of China from antiquity to 1949; discusses Chinese language,
culture and religion; and traces the course of Chinese immigration to
Canada. What limits its utility, however, is the lack of footnotes, a
key omission in any introductory text. This problem is painfully evident
in Shyu’s survey of early Chinese immigration, which relies heavily on
Peter S. Li’s The Chinese in Canada (1988).

What passes for a history of Chinese settlement in the Maritimes is
limited to capsule biographies of 18 prominent individuals and families
in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick. Shyu might have avoided
this remarkably uninformative exercise by simply asking these
individuals about their lives in Canada. Oral histories might have
provided the author with the range of personal frustrations and
successes that make the immigrant experience across Canada worth
studying.