Paul Yee's Blog

          The railroad has a powerful grip on the Canadian imagination.
          Late one night during the mid-1970s, in Vancouver's Chinatown, a bunch of us got the idea that we needed our own railroad photograph.
          This may have been during the first Chinese-Canadian Conference on Immigration, around 1975. The conference poster used an image of Chinese railroad workers.
          Early next morning, we headed to the waterfront, where the railroads converged. Chinatown guru Jim Wong-Chu took the photo, and I wrote a poem. Among the "young people" who gathered that morning were today's filmmaker Karin Lee, two-term Vancouver City Councillor George Chow, jazz singer Shannon Gunn and her bass-player brother Sean, and Gordon Mark, a stalwart of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C.
          Here's my poem.

5:30
saturday morning

the light is
just right
(he said)

it was 5:30
but
the idea clicked
everything fit
          railyard, grey morning, third generation
          pickaxe, history, gloves, remembrance

it was 5:30
but
the boxcar is a monument
to all our heroes.

Below is the historic photo (Vancouver Public Library 1773) , Jim with the photo at Centre A, 2014 (photo by M Takasaki), and Jim's photo.

          In A Superior Man, I wanted a sense of the dialects of south China. I grew up speaking Cantonese and had long enjoyed its pithy, lively nature.
          I used Robert Morrison's Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect: Chinese Words and Phrases, 廣東省土話字彙 printed at the East Indian Company in Macao in 1828.  Morrison wasa Protestant missionary in China who translated the Bible into Chinese.
          His guide featured very colorful language, for example, a phrase for a useless action was "a rat grabs a steel nail." Many of the terms are still in use today.
          I first learned to read Chinese at Vancouver's Mon Keong School. At first I liked it because my worst subject (arithmetic) wasn't on the timetable, but later I resented it because the time seemed wasted.
          Three of my teachers are below. Seated from right, WONG Chun Sang黃春生 ; on his right WONG Kong Fow 黃孔埠 ; standing, facing camera, first from left, WONG Da Sing 黃大成 , in 1951. I didn't meet them until the 1960s. I'm sure this party scene is FAR from how the students remembered them!
          We children wore the school badge on our shirts during the annual picnic.

          For Canada to stretch from sea-to-sea meant building a transcontinental railway, promised to British Columbia when it joined the federation in 1871.
         The romance arose from an earlier period.  Pre-modern settlers fought a wilderness of trees and rock, swamp and insects. On isolated farms, they dreamed of independence but were left to their own resources.
          Then came the Industrial Revolution and steam power. By 1860, America had 50,000 km of railway. In North America, the railway was not only technology, but also an alluring symbol.
          Its tracks, bridges, and tunnels altered the landscape. Tracks that cut through mountains and over muskeg showed humans trouncing Mother Nature.  Trains traveled fast and ran on schedule, bringing order to people spread across a vast land who often felt they were at the mercy of an unpredictable weather.
          The speed and power of railways led people and corporations to view technology as the engine of progress that would benefit everyone.

          From Andy den Otter, The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea in British North America, 1997.

          FSALA15 took place this weekend at the University of Toronto, and featured authors from around the world meeting to read and discuss literary issues.
          I was intrigued by the "East Asian Panel" which discussed "Is 'Asian-Canadian' a helpful label in terms of the Canadian canon?" 
          Many of my favorite writers addressed the topic, including Denise Chong (The Concubine's Children, Egg on Mao), C Fong Hsiung (The Picture Bride), Madeleine Thien (Uncertainty, Dogs at the Perimeter), Diana Tso (Red Snow), and Terry Watada (The Game of 100 Ghosts, Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes).  They all spoke frankly and with great feeling, as this was a topic close to the heart.
          Session moderator was Sang Kim, fiction writer, playwright, chef, and restaurateur at Windup Bird Cafe.
          Kudos to Mawenzi House Publishers, one of the driving forces behind this festival.

          When I think of Chinese rail hands and Canadian poetry, three works come to mind. E.J. Pratt's TOWARDS THE LAST SPIKE, F.R. Scott's "All the Spikes but the Last," and Jim Wong-Chu's "equal opportunity."
          Pratt's poem was published in 1952 and won the Governor General's Award for poetry. His epic poem of 1620 lines, written in free verse, told with vivid imagery how the Canadian Pacific Railway was constructed as a nation-building project., led by Prime Minister John A Macdonald, the visionary politician, and William Van Horne, the engineer.
          Three years later, Scott's much shorter poem blunty asked, "Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?" to question Pratt's omission of Chinese workers.  Scott, a constitutional law expert, won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1981, and for non-fiction in 1977. He helped found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor of the National Democratic Party (NDP).
          JIm Wong-Chu is a longtime actrivist in Vancouver's Chinatown. His poem appeared in his CHINATOWN GHOSTS (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1986).  There are the last five lines to his poem:

after much debate
common sense prevailed

the chinese are now allowed
to sit anywhere
on any train

         Ever since last Thursday, I've been doing sessions with elementary and secondary school students in the Greater Vancouver region. Vancouver is my home town, so I always like coming here. I  "tell" my stories to the younger children, but for the high school kids, I talk more formally about my writing habits.
        This morning, I was at Howard De Beck Elementary School in Richmond, along with my Tradewind Books publisher Mike Katz.  We were hosted by librarian Janice Cramer.  We had Grades 4, 5 and 6, the kids were very attentive, and, at the end of the session, had lots of questions to ask.

          Another book of mine that features Chinese food is ROSES SING ON NEW SNOW (1991), which tells of a fearless female cook during the pioneering days on North America's west coast. Her story was made into an animated short film by Canada's National Film Board, video 2002; dvd, 2006.
          I first wrote that story for another book, TALES FROM GOLD MOUNTAIN (1989), but the publisher decided to make it a stand-alone picture book.
          What happened earlier was more important. After I sent in four sample stories for TALES, the publisher pointed out to me that they featured all men.
          I explained that early Chinese immigration to North America was mostly "bachelors," where men came to work while their wives and children waited at home. Moreover, I had used the jobs of immigrants (railway workers, merchants, houseboys, tailors, farmers, cannery hands) as starting points for my stories. History was always a foundation for me.
          The publisher wanted to see some gender balance in TALES, but didn't push me to change my work. But I got the message loud and clear, and crafted stories about the daughters of New World workers.  The publisher's interest in gender had raised issues on an earlier book, CHIN CHIANG AND THE DRAGON'S DANCE, in which a boy in Chinatown learns the dragon dance from an elderly woman. 
          Critics pointed out that women were traditionally not allowed to to be in such a dance in China.
          The food items in other stories in TALES included fish, bread, ginger, and tomatoes.

          Up until 1956, my dad Gordon ran a cafe in Naicam, a hamlet in Saskatchewan (recent population: 690).  His cafe served western food.  My mom, who joined my father there in 1951, became expert at making jelly-roll cakes.
          My parents died when I was very young, which made me curious about them. In 1981, I wrote a short story about my dad, published as "Prairie Night, 1939."  I imagined one lonely night in his life when he fretted over returning to China or not, to get married. A later short story, "Prairie Widow," featured my mom as she fretted over her future in a strange land. When I learned later in my life that she could neither read nor write Chinese, it sent a chill up my spine.
          The notion of solitude runs through both stories and also surfaces in my ghost story "Alone No Longer," (in DEAD MAN'S GOLD, 2002), also set in a small-town cafe.  The tale spans decades and tells of a wife from China who joins her husband in Canada in the 1950s. Alas, she sickens and dies. Her last words to him are, "I should never have come here.  I loved you, but you changed more than I could."
          Two of Canada's literary legends wrote about Chinese cafe men in Saksatchewan. W.O. Mitchell's WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND, and Gabrielle Roy's novella, "Where Will You Go, Sam Lee Wong?" (in GARDEN IN THE WIND) are set around the time of the Great Depression.
          Solitude AND the Depression?
          Now, that's tough.

          Aunt Lillian belongs to mother's side of the family because Lillian was the common-law wife of my mom's brother WONG Kong Hee.  He had come to America in 1913 at age 18. He spent time in Fargo, North Dakota, and then worked at a sawmill in Vancouver, pulling planks off a chain. He married in China and had two sons there.  According to Aunt Lillian, Uncle taught her to read Chinese, from the local newspapers!
          Being from Taishan, Uncle spoke that dialect. Aunt Lillian spoken Cantonese, as her mother was from Guangzhou. Since she was our main care-giver, my brother and I learned Cantonese.
          Though Aunt Lillian was Canadian-born, she was determined that my brother and I learn Chinese. Her rule at home was this: No English to be spoken. My brother and I attended Chinese language school and watched countless black-and-white opera movies from Hong Kong of the 1960s.  Little did we suspect this would all contribute greatly  to my first play, "Jade in the Coal," which is about a Cantonese opera troupe touring through Cumberland, the coal mining town on Vancouver Island, in the 1900s.
        Today, my spoken Cantonese sounds okay, but suffers from a serious vocabulary deficit!

          My Aunt Lillian was close to her three sisters, Nellie, Winnie, and Ruth.
          But, oh, what lives they led!
          Lillian was one of the first Chinese women in the United States to get a divorce.
          In 1924, Nelie, a married woman, was having an affair with David Lew, a lawyer and prominent figure in Vancouver's Chinatown when he was gunned down on the street. The murderer was never found. Nellie later married a staff member of China's consulate in the United States.
          Winnie, trained as a mid-wife, married Raymond Ing, a restaurant man in Chicago in 1922, and took her two children to Shanghai to live. But they fled for their lives when the Japanese bombed that city in 1932.  Winnie later had a long career in sales at Chicago's renowned Marshall Field's Department Store.
          Ruth trained as a nurse in the United States, and went to work in China, but died there. Lillian's older brother Samuel, trained as an electrical engineer in Milwaukee, and also went to work in China. He later settled in Toronto.
          In the photos, you can follow the sisters from c1915, c1925, c1935 and 1962.