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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT/RESUME
This paper broadens ethnic studies of the Chinese in Canada from the context of large cities to that of towns and small cities like Peterborough, Ontario. It also expands the analytical focus from the anti-Chinese prejudices, policies, and other forms of institutional racism to the everyday racism that fused such racist ideologies and institutional forces into routine and recurrent practices against the Chinese in the daily life of Peterborough before 1951. In this small urban community, Chinese immigrants coped with everyday discrimination not simply through the passive or militant responses discussed in previous studies, but also by defending their rights and counterattacking racism using Canadian institutions (courts, churches, and local media). The paper describes how these experiences led to significant changes in their ethnicity.
Cet article augmente les etudes ethniques des Chinois au Canada du contexte des grandes villes jusqu'a celle des villages et des petites villes comme Peterborough, Ontario. Il augmente egalement le foyer analytique de l'etude des prejudices and des politiques anti-Chinois, et d'autres formes de racisme institutionnel, a l'etude du racisme ordinaire, qui a fusionne de telles ideologies racistes et forces institutionnelles avec des pratiques courantes et recurrentes contre les Chinois dans la vie quotidienne des residants de Peterborough avant 1951. Dans cette petite communaute urbaine, les immigres chinois ont fait face a la discrimination ordinaire pas simplement en utilisant les reponses passives ou militantes discutees dans les literatures precedents. Ils ont egalement defendu leurs droits et ont attaque le racisme en employant les etablissements canadiens, y compris des cours, des eglises et des medias locaux. Certaines de leurs batailles legales ont reussies. En particulier, leurs contacts journalieres avec les personnes blanches ont mene a leurs relations amicales avec eux, et aussi aux changements cruciaux a leur appartenance ethnique.
INTRODUCTION
In an immigrant country such as Canada, ethnic minorities and their relations with the majority group are central themes in its national history. Nevertheless, ethnic studies of the Chinese in Canada have usually centered on British Columbia and a few large cities in other provinces. The Chinese as a racial minority and their ethnic relations with the white majority in small urban communities outside British Columbia have not received much academic scrutiny. (1) The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to extend ethnic studies of the Chinese experience in Canada from the context of large cities to that of towns and small cities like Peterborough, Ontario. An additional objective is to compare the experience of the Chinese in this eastern Canadian community with that of their more thoroughly researched counterparts on the Pacific Coast.
Previous writings revealed popular attitudes and political policies against the Chinese in Canada, especially institutional racism imposed and sustained by the state and other institutional forces before the mid-twentieth century (Ward 1978: Roy 1989; Li 1998). Such studies have focused on the passive responses of the Chinese in their aversive efforts to build Chinatowns as residential ghettos and develop ethnic businesses as occupational enclaves (Anderson 1991; Chan 1983, 49, 68-73, 137-144; Chan and Lam 1986, 579; Lai 1988, 34-35). Some have also highlighted their largely ineffective legal battles, their organized strikes, and other forms of militant resistance to racism (Backhouse 1999, 132-172; Creese 1987, 38-43; Tan 1987, 80-85; Walker 1997, 87-121; Wickberg et al. 1982, 50, 121-131).
This paper expands the analytical focus of racism to examine the everyday racism that fused the aforementioned racist ideologies and institutional forces into routine and recurrent practices before 1951, and actualized the unequal relations between the Chinese and the white majority in the daily life of Peterborough residents. Such everyday racism has long been overlooked because it has been regarded as individual behaviour based on personal prejudices. It was thus considered trivial phenomena, distinct from institutional racism (Henry et al. 1995, 44-47; Li 1998, 37). Everyday racism, however, involves daily, familiar, and repetitive practices against ethnic minorities by the majority from the individual to the institutional level. It is an active and cumulative process that implements and reproduces racial domination of the majority over minorities through their interpersonal and institutional encounters in everyday situations. (2) The tragic impact of everyday racism on the Chinese in Canadian society was thus more direct, ubiquitous, and unbearable than institutional racism alone, which has gradually subsided since the late 1940s. Nevertheless, everyday racism has not been stamped out entirely, thus this examination of its historical expression in Peterborough is still significant.
Everyday racism against the Chinese in Peterborough happened in a different environment from that of the anti-Chinese movements in British Columbia and in the large cities of other provinces. The Chinese in this small urban community also responded differently. They not only coped with everyday discrimination through the passive or militant responses discussed in previous research, but also defended their rights and counterattacked racist practices by using Canadian institutions including courts, churches, and the local media. Unlike the failed Chinese legal battles mentioned in previous studies, those in Peterborough were somewhat successful, though the legal rights of the Chinese within Canada's judicial and political systems were limited. A detailed documentation and systematic analysis of this group's reactions to racism in Peterborough before the mid-twentieth century provides new insights into the diversified and dynamic roles they played in relationships with the white majority.
Previous studies also concluded that ethnic conflicts made the Chinese retain their own ethnicity and reject adaptation to the dominant Euro-Canadian culture, resulting in either minimal or hostile relations with Whites (Chan and Helly 1987b, 9-10; Li 1998, 24-26, 64; Yu 1987, 116-118). This case study, however, reveals that the Chinese in Peterborough made significant adjustments to the Euro-Canadian culture in their everyday lives by the late 1940s, though they did not forsake their Chinese culture and identity. Furthermore, rampant racism in Canadian society until the late 1940s did not really prevent the Chinese in Peterborough from developing sincere friendships with many white people through close daily contacts and cultural exchanges.
THE CHINESE MINORITY AMID EVERYDAY RACISM
Peterborough was founded in 1825 as an immigrant settlement following the arrival of a group of Irish people led by Peter Robinson, a commissioner of crown lands and member of the Upper Canadian Assembly. From the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century, this frontier settlement developed first as a lumber town and then as an industrial center by drawing in new immigrants from nearby areas and from overseas, especially from Europe (Jones and Dyer 1987, 11-13, 35). It was not until 1892 that the Chinese, largely Cantonese from Taishan, Kaiping, and Xinhui counties near Canton, began to arrive in this predominantly white community (Chen 2003, 3). Although Peterborough was incorporated as a city in 1905, it has remained a relatively small urban community in central Canada, and its Chinese population was much smaller than that of other European-derived ethnic groups.
Peterborough grew quickly after it joined the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century and turned from forestry to manufacturing industries. Its population more than doubled, from 9,717 in 1891 to 20,994 in 1921, and by 1951, rose to 38,272 (Seventh Census of Canada 1931, 2:158; Ninth Census of Canada 1951, 1:35/5). Analysis of the urban population in 1921 shows that nearly 50 percent of the urban residents were of English origin, followed by Irish at 30 percent, and Scots at 15 percent. The remaining 5 percent consisted of French, Italians, Dutch, Germans, Jews, native Indians, and Asians (Jones and Dyer 1987, 35). Although the Chinese were the earliest and largest ethnic group from Asia, immigrants of European origin far outnumbered them.
Actually, Chinese immigration to Peterborough was severely limited and their population was neither stable nor large during the nearly six decades between 1892 and 1951. The process began in 1892 and their number reached seven in 1901. According to succeeding censuses and newspaper reports, the Chinese population rose successively to twenty-five in 1911, to forty in 1912, and to fifty in 1913. But that number decreased to forty again in 1917 and fell sharply to fourteen by 1921. The Chinese demographic figure then rose again to forty in 1931, slowly increasing to forty-five in 1941 and to seventy-eight in 1951. As a result, the Chinese accounted for only 0.2 percent of Peterborough's urban population in 1951 (Chen 2003, 4). In contrast, the Chinese constituted 8.3 percent of the provincial population of British Columbia in 1901 and 2.28 percent in 1941. In 1941, the proportion of Chinese to Victoria's urban population was 6.89 percent, 2.61 percent in Vancouver, and 0.35 percent in Toronto (Wickberg et al. 1982, 300-302). Therefore, in terms of either their demographic number or their percentage in the local population, the Chinese in Peterborough formed a much smaller minority group than their counterparts in large cities from the West Coast to Central Canada.
The slow growth of the Chinese population in Peterborough was largely the result of Canada's discriminatory immigration policies restricting Chinese immigration from the mid-1880s. Under the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Chinese immigrants had to pay a head tax of $50 each. That tax was later raised to $100 in 1900 and, in 1903, to $500 (Li 1998, 34). This was a very heavy head tax, considering the fact that in 1910, a real estate agency in Peterborough listed a one-and-a-half-story brick building with a parlor, a dining room, two kitchens, three bedrooms, and a stable for only $900 (Peterborough Examiner 17 July, 1910). Still worse, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 expanded the legal limitation on Chinese immigration into total exclusion, with few exceptions. Institutional racism against the Chinese did not subside until 1947 when the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 was repealed (Li 1998, 34-35).
The impact of such institutional racism on the Chinese in Canada is well documented. It severely limited Chinese immigration, particularly that of female immigrants. Social hostility, economic hardship, and heavy head taxes...
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