http://www.shared-vision.com/2005/sv1801/headtax1801.html
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photo by Alex Waterhouse
Settling the Score
Hope for redress in the Year of the Rooster
by Sean Rossiter
The federal government has yet to pay for the financial and emotional costs incurred by the Chinese-Canadians who helped build B.C. and Canada. For generations, Chinese-Canadians were unfairly taxed and denied citizenship. The laws may have changed, but the discrimination that formed them haunts the descendants of those who paid the price, and the few remaining people directly affected. They are looking for redress.
Charlie Quan wants his $500 back. And he wants an apology from the federal government for taking his money in the first place. And he wants them to make it snappy. He is 97, after all, although he doesn’t look a day over 75. With his alert eyes, neatly groomed white hair and moustache, and sprightly walk, Quan brings a certain dignity to his quest to get a refund of the head tax he paid to enter Canada in 1923. “Why do the Chinese have to pay?” he asks. “The other people don’t have to pay anything. If immigrants from other countries pay, I don’t care. I’ll pay. But only the Chinese pay and that’s not fair to me.”
July 1 is Canada Day to most of us. It means fireworks, barbecues, and “O Canada” sung off-key. To many Chinese-Canadians, however, it is Humiliation Day. On July 1, 1923, the head tax that Chinese immigrants had to pay for entry to Canada was repealed and replaced with an outright ban on Chinese immigration. He’s also one of the handful of head-tax payers who are still alive. Quan is an icon in the growing movement in the Chinese community to have the head taxes refunded, restitution made for the separation of Chinese families during the 24 years of Chinese exclusion (1923-1947), and an apology offered for a total of 62 years (1885-1947) of racist legislation that governed the Chinese in Canada.
The Chinese were not consigned to second-class citizenship for 66 years. They were denied any form of citizenship at all.
GIM WONG’S NEATLY pressed RCAF uniform and glossy shoes are a not-so-subtle reminder that he was ready to put his life on the line for a country that denied him, a native son, the rights and privileges of citizenship until 1947. He trained as an air gunner for the war in Europe and as a flight engineer for the Japanese campaign, both of which ended before he could be posted overseas. In 1941, when he was 19, he was riding his motorcycle with a friend in South Vancouver. The police confiscated his motorcycle, and that of his Japanese friend. “I had to prove I wasn’t Japanese,” he says. By that time, China had been an ally for 10 years, but Chinese-Canadians were treated like enemy aliens.
It took four tries for Wong to get an application to volunteer for the RCAF. “All my friends said ‘Don’t bother. They won’t give you an application. Try. Go ahead. See if they give you an application.’ Sure enough, they wouldn’t give me an application. Hell no. Every time you turned around you had to prove you weren’t Japanese. See?”
“IN MANY WAYS, the Chinese in Canada, our struggle could be the most epic and heroic,” says Sid Tan, 55, a redress-movement activist, social worker by training, and communications consultant by trade. “[All immigrant struggles] are epic and heroic, but we had something to overcome, which we did. We did overcome it.” Tan says Chinese-Canadians can be proud of their history, and, more importantly, so can non-hyphenated Canadians.
“The Lo Wah Kiu, the old overseas Chinese, are an extremely distinguished thread in the Canadian fabric. We’re just trying to get some measure of justice while there are still head-tax payers and spouses alive. What’s so hard about that?
SEAN GUNN, 56, is a musician, a fifth-generation Chinese-Canadian, and the son of a head-tax payer who immigrated to Canada in 1918. His mother’s sister married Alexander Cumyow, the first Chinese born in B.C. Gunn is a veteran of the early 1970s struggle for democratization of his community’s keynote institutions, such as the Chinese Benevolent Association. The founding of the Chinese Cultural Centre was an initiative of what was then considered the younger generation in Chinatown. Gunn’s song “Head Tax Blues” is featured in Karen Cho’s National Film Board documentary In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, which will be televised this month. Gunn estimates that he has been active in the redress movement since at least 1980.
“The Chinese-Canadian community is largely a [recent] immigrant community. Maybe it’s an issue that new immigrants don’t look at or perhaps haven’t heard much about. I guess it’s our job...to educate people more about it, even within our own community. Try to get more unity behind this.”
TAN CALLS LINDA JANG the dynamo of the redress movement. She got involved partly out of a search for her identity. In the 1960s she went to an Upper Shaughnessy school, Emily Carr Elementary, where speaking a Chinese dialect was forbidden—as was Yiddish, she notes. She married a Caucasian, but her encounters with racism are ongoing.
“We’re supposed to be a multicultural society, but that’s a misnomer. Because if [the government] doesn’t go back to their roots and eradicate [the] racism [of] charging head tax on the Chinese community, we can’t go forward. They’ve always ignored us, or tried to pretend there’s not enough funds, or they felt there was only one or two [head-tax payers] living.”
The redress torch gets passed from generation to generation. Before Jang’s father died, he handed his papers, including his $500 head-tax receipt, over to Jang and said, “You take care of this.”
“What I hope the government would do is refund the money, in today’s current value, to the families, and let the families decide what they will do with it from there,” Jang says. “Because that’s how Chinese people work. The family is the most important concern. That’s probably where they got a lot of the money to begin with. So it should go back to them. Rightfully, it’s theirs.
SID TAN ACKNOWLEDGES that the question of redress is in the government’s hands, but he’s encouraged by the appointment of Raymond Chan as multiculturalism minister. “Raymond’s presence in Canada is attributable directly to head-tax payer Charlie Quan,” Tan says. “One of Quan’s daughters-in-law is Raymond’s older sister, responsible for bringing Raymond to Canada. And Raymond understands what the issue means to the Lo Wah Kiu community.”
One member of that community, Gim Wong, notes that the amount paid in head taxes—”damn near $25 million”—was also the cost of building the Canadian Pacific Railway, not counting the lives of the 1,400 labourers who died doing the most hazardous work, such as blasting. The CPR was B.C.’s price for joining confederation.
“Compare what the Chinese as a minority have done for Canada,” Wong says, “and they should have paid us to come here.”
For the full article see http://www.shared-vision.com/2005/sv1801/headtax1801.html
In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, written, directed, and narrated by Karen Cho, will be broadcast on CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts on Tuesday, Jan. 11 and Friday, Jan. 14 at 10 p.m. In this National Film Board production, Cho, a fifth-generation Canadian of mixed heritage, features stories of survivors of the head-tax and exclusion acts. See http://cbc.ca/roughcuts or http://onf.ca/intheshadowofgoldmountain for more information. For more details on the Chinese redress movement, see http://ccnc.ca/redress/ or call 604-433-6169.
