The Excluded Wife

Bill Waiser is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
He is the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History of Prince
Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of Western
Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.  Hi

In 1923, after nearly four decades of trying to limit Chinese
immigration by means of a steadily rising “head tax,” the Canadian
government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and formally banned Chinese
immigration. Those Chinese already in Canada, known colloquially as
“Gold Mountain guests,” were allowed to continue to live and work in
the country, but could not be joined by their wives, children, or
extended families.

The Excluded Wife is the story of Sau-Ping, a peasant woman from
Toi-Shaan County, China, who married a Vancouver restaurant worker
during his only visit home in 1933. Although a fictional account,
Sau-Ping’s 22-year separation from her husband is neither exceptional
nor exaggerated; indeed, her character and circumstance were inspired by
a series of interviews with elderly Chinese men and women in British
Columbia and South China in the 1970s and 1980s. These experiences have
shaped and informed Sau-Ping’s life—from her lonely days as a grass
widow with a daughter in her mother-in-law’s home, to her desperate
flight to Hong Kong during the Communist purges, to her awkward reunion
with her husband in Vancouver in 1955.

Creative nonfiction, when done properly, can be an effective device,
and the approach is perfectly suited for The Excluded Wife—thanks, in
no small part, to author Yuen-Fong Woon’s painstaking research and
sensitivity for the subject. The book also provides the reader with some
insight into the other side of the equation. Whereas most studies focus
on the lives of Chinese immigrant laborers in Canada, The Excluded Wife
provides some much-needed perspective on how Canada’s restrictive
immigration laws affected those who were left behind.