Anti-Racism Learning Toolkit

Commissioned as part of Winnipeg Chinatown's centennial, photographs and words document the Chinese community in Winnipeg.

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination?

Essays in this volume argue that Chinese Canadians, a population that has produced significant cultural imprints on Canadian society, must create and constantly redefine their identities as manifested in social science, literary, and historical spheres. These perpetual negotiations reflect social and cultural ideologies and practices and demonstrate Chinese Canadians' recreations of their self-perception, self-expression, and self-projection in relation to others. Contextualized within larger debates on multicultural society and specific Chinese Canadian cultural experiences, this book considers diverse cultural presentations of literary expression, the "model minority" and the influence of gender and profession on success and failure.--Description (abridged)

Calling Power to Account suggests that our legal systems can hope to play a part in responding to their own legacy of past injustice only when they recognize the full array of issues posed by the Head Tax Case.

The history of Chinese immigration to Canada and the US over the past 100-plus years has been fraught with sadness and indignity; newcomers to North America encountered discrimination, subjugation, and separation from loved ones. As well, in Canada the Chinese head tax was introduced after the Canadian Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 to discourage Chinese immigrants, while in the US, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act outright banned Chinese immigration to America. Despite such obstacles, these Chinese newcomers persevered in order to create a better life for the generations to come. Escape to Gold Mountain is the first graphic novel to tell their story: based on historical documents and interviews with elders, this is a vivid history of the Chinese in their search for "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese colloquialism for North America) as seen through the eyes of the Wong family. Ages 12 and up.

Vivienne Poy captures the social, political, and ethnic tensions of the period. Although the narratives included here represent women of all ages and educational backgrounds, they share a common sense of determination and spirited resilience in the face of hardship. Through their stories we learn about Chinese settlement experience, how the Chinese community developed alongside changes in immigration regulations, and why the immigration of Chinese families to Canada became commonplace in the 1970s. The women address experiences of patriarchy and discrimination in both China and Canada, revive memories of the turbulent years in China at the end of the Pacific War, and speak of their uncertainties about the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China in 1997.