“Head Tax Apology is Only First Step”

Prof. Henry Yu, Department of History, University of British Columbia

The announcement this week by Prime Minister Stephen Harper of a formal apology to Chinese Canadians for the injust Head Tax imposed between 1885 and 1923 was an important symbolic act. As a historian who teaches and researches the history of Chinese migrants to Canada at UBC, and as a descendent myself of Head Tax payers, I welcome this important gesture as a step towards the healing and reconciliation with a racist past that Canada still sorely needs. However, in extending compensation only to the handful of those still alive who paid the onerous Head Tax, Parliament missed an opportunity to reconcile the long troubled past of Canada’s treatment of Chinese Canadians.

I was born and raised in Canada, and was fortunate to know as a child my grandfather, Yeung Sing Yew, who paid $500 (over a year’s salary at the time) in Head Tax as a 13-year old migrant in 1923, months before Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which forbade any further Chinese immigration. His father before him had come to Canada to help build the railroads, and his older brothers were pioneers in B.C. who worked in mines, grew produce, owned grocery stores, and built lumber mills. He followed them in their pioneering activities, and then for over thirty years, my grandfather worked as a butcher on CPR ships that cruised between Vancouver and Alaska. My grandfather lived almost his entire life in Canada, only returning to China to marry, and was forced to leave his pregnant wife behind in China because of Canadian Exclusion laws. These generations of split families were the direct legacy of Canadian legal racism. His own father had left him and his brothers in China as children because he could not afford to bring them over until they were old enough to work and help pay off their own Head Tax payments. When my grandmother and mother were finally able to join my grandfather in Canada, just before I was born, it was an emotional reunion. She had never known a father growing up, and he had been deprived of knowing his own child--my mother was 26 years old the first time she met her father. Perhaps he took a special interest in his grandchildren because of what he had missed: I remember walking as a 4 year old with him to Chinatown and his pride in showing off a grandchild to his friends. Most of them had lived a similar life, and the look of joy in their faces as they gathered in the café to play with me spoke volumes about their own missing children and grandchildren. Some of them were able to bring their wives and children to Canada after the Immigration Act of 1967 made it easier to reunite families (the large wave of Chinese who came to Canada in the 1970s contained large numbers of these family unifications), but many of them lived out their days in Chinatown flophouses as lonely old men, bereft of wives because immigration policy had kept Chinese women out and blocked them from having relationships with white women because of racism.

I think it is entirely right that Canada as a nation formally apologizes for its treatment of men like my grandfather and his friends. It is long overdue, since the movement for such an apology is almost half a century old, and if it had been made in a timely fashion, many more of those who paid would be alive to hear it. I wish my grandfather had lived to hear Canada say “We are sorry.” As a child, I remember him showing my mother his Head Tax certificate and explaining the years of hard work it took him to pay it off. He knew it had been injust, recognized that nobody except the Chinese had been required to pay, and an apology while he was alive would have had immeasurable meaning. He knew the racism that had singled out the Chinese--he lived it every day of his life as a second class citizen in Canada--but materially he knew it as he struggled to repay his debt. The governments of Canada and of British Columbia split the $23 million proceeds from the Head Tax (well over $1 billion in today’s money), and it represented a significant proportion of BC’s provincial revenue in its early history. Canadians enjoyed the benefits of Chinese labor not only because of their work on the railroads and in lumber mills, farms, mines, grocery stores, restaurants, and other industries--everyone else benefitted directly from the infrastructure that was built using Head Tax revenue: the roads and sewers, but also the schools and hospitals, most of which Chinese Canadians were not even allowed to use because of “whites only” policies.

As we move forward from this historic step in addressing anti-Chinese racism, I would urge my fellow Canadians to reconsider and reconcile with our past. Our national history still excludes the Chinese just as our national policies did, recognizing them only for being here during the Gold Rush and helping build the trans-Canada railroad. What were they doing the rest of the time? My grandfather, like his father and brothers, lived and worked in Canada during the rest of that time, helping build it under incredible duress. Most European settlers came to the west coast of North America to find the Chinese already there. Before the railroad, it was easier for the Chinese to cross the Pacific in a ship than for Europeans to cross North America. The irony of the Chinese helping build the transcontinental railroad is that it made it easier for trans-Atlantic migrants to come to the Pacific coast. Our history is wrong. The story we usually hear is that anti-Chinese agitation centered around the claim that the Chinese came late and “took” the jobs of whites. In fact, the complete opposite was true. Anti-Chinese movements began as European settlers arrived to find Chinese, First Nations and others (such as Japanese and South Asians) well settled in a Pacific British Columbia. The rhetoric was that the Chinese “took” jobs away from “whites”; the reality was that “whites” wanted to take jobs away from the Chinese who were already there, just as they wanted to take the land from the First Nations people who were already there.

Redress for the Head Tax that is limited to those handful of survivors and their wives who actually paid the Head Tax is like settling Native land claims by giving back stolen land only to those First Nations people who are still alive from when the land was first taken. We all live with the historical legacies of white supremacy in the form of legal policies such as land appropriation, immigration exclusion, and the revenue generated from the Head Tax. We have all either benefitted or suffered from this history in the forms of privilege that it granted or denied our ancestors, and the legacies of the inequity did not go away with the death of my grandfather, his brothers, nor his friends.

My mother loves Canada—for the last four decades it has given her a home, given her the education of her children, and given her hope that there is a place that strives for a better world. She does not want the money paid so onerously and unjustly by my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and his brothers. But symbolically, should she not decide how to redress the wrong that was committed? Rather than a government committee, or even a panel of historians and “experts” such as myself, should not she and others who felt directly the legacies of that wrong, decide how to materially address the financial redistribution of that tainted money (even if Canada were to only put aside the actual amount of $23 million collected, it’s present value would be a pittance in comparison to it’s original worth)? There are many proposals for how to redress the wrong—a fund for Heritage Canada to distribute for education and community development, scholarships for students and scholars to study Chinese Canadian history, money to collect for our national archives materials on the Chinese and other groups that have been neglected and excluded from a collective sense of our past. We should have a collective fund, but would there not be greater meaning and moral purpose to have an array of people like my mother deciding how best to make amends? There can not be a single definition about how to right a wrong. The conflicts within Chinese Canadian communities over the past year reflect disagreements about what is best. Should we not then agree to disagree, and to see how individual families and individuals make meaning out of reconciliation? I want to hear the stories of how one family gave money to charity, or how another decided to create a scholarship, or how someone else decided that their father or grandfather would be at rest if he knew that the money had gone to an education fund for a grandchild robbed of an inheritance for which he could not save. When Canada gave financial redress to Japanese Canadians interned during the war, one of the wonderful results was that the families each had a chance to make peace with the past in their own way, and the overall effect of each of these individual decisions was so much greater than a small set of decisions that could be made by a government committee or Heritage Commission.

We need, then, to acknowledge our troubled past by giving individual families the choice on how they want to reconcile with the wrongs committed, and also to create a collective fund to remake our national history. As a scholar, I believe we need a redefinition of Canadian history to finally address the central role played by those who were heretofore erased from our official history. One of the reasons I became a scholar was because the history I learned in school was so at odds with the reality I knew from family stories passed down from my grandfather and great-grandfather. Their Canada was not just a story about railroad workers and victims of racism. They told stories of Chinese men who had children with First Nations women, who lived and traded among aboriginal and European migrant communities in rural areas throughout B.C., who operated cafés  and grocery stores in small towns throughout the Prairies, who lived and worked together with their neighbors to create Canada. For four decades on a CPR cruise ship, my grandfather served those who recently arrived from Britain and Europe who had the privilege to instantly call themselves Canadian and to imply that he and not they had just arrived.  But he knew that the life he had made here, as hard as it was, was a life made in Canada.

Henry Yu is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research on Chinese Canadians (INSTRCC) at the University of British Columbia.