Eight Ounces Half a Pound by Chelsey Doyle

Eight Ounces Half a Pound

Eight Ounces Half a Pound Guadalupe Martinez Katherine Soucie Tommy Ting

June 28â&#x20AC;&#x201C;August 8, 2014 Access Gallery

Table of Contents

The Weight of Things,

Kimberly Phillips

“Whatever your lot was, that was your lot”:

Chinese-Canadian Women at Work in the

Vancouver Area: 1880–1945,

Eric Wright

Images

Biographies

The Weight of Things Kimberly Phillips

The shell of the former Ho Sun Hing Printing Company, Canada’s oldest Chinese print shop, stands on the same block of East Georgia Street as Access Gallery and permanently closed its doors on March 28, 2014 after 106 years of business. First established as a rubber stamp store by Lam Lat Tong, a cook on the rail line, Ho Sun Hing grew to become an institution in Chinatown, producing all manner of books, pamphlets, announcements, business cards and restaurant menus for several generations of Chinese-Canadian communities. The shop famously housed several antique presses, including a 1912 Lanston monotype, modified to handle both English and Chinese type, along with a complete set of 8,000 lead Chinese characters. Having witnessed the print industry change markedly with the expansion of digital technologies and online print businesses in recent decades, Ho Sun Hing’s current owner, 81 year-old family matriarch Hilda Lam, made the decision to retire. In the months leading up to its closure, Lam methodically emptied the shop of its contents. The slow ebbing away—or more correctly, the selling off—of machinery and related ephemera from that site was lamented by local historians, print

enthusiasts and the press, not only because of the immediate loss to the community of a significant, century-old family-run business, and with it years of embodied knowledge and experience. The closure seemed also to strike at the heart of the pronounced changes Chinatown is currently undergoing, driven by shifting economies, technologies and social practices, a dwindling population of long-time Chinese inhabitants and the sudden influx of young professionals, as well as the swift transformation of the urban fabric through real estate development. It is clear that (as throughout its history) the neighborhood remains a complex terrain upon which a matrix of racialized and exoticized histories and desires are projected.

Access is entangled with these changes; since 2011 our organization has operated out of 222 East Georgia Streetâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a building owned by the Yee Fung Toy Societyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in a space originally housing a modestlyscaled denim factory and retail facility whose workers lived in the apartments above. There are few traces of the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original occupants and operations, but the weight of their absence has taken on a certain palpability for me that is difficult to explain. In a neighbourhood whose history is now frequently referenced by its new inhabitants through salvaged

signage, Asian-inflected provisions and many other nostalgic nods, how is it possible to address (rather than redress) the opacities that we exist alongside? 2

Eight Ounces Half a Pound is a partial attempt to consider local histories of racialized labour that have been silenced or overwritten through time, and the distance between forgotten workers’ embodied experience and our own. The three artists whose works comprise this exhibition consider these issues in nuanced ways. Each creates sculptural forms arrived at through different processes and interactions with materials: Guadalupe Martinez’s Across the street, far away through the performative actions of hauling and assembling; Katherine Soucie’s Skid Row through the gathering of found objects and repetitive act of binding; and Tommy Ting’s Machine (Iron Chink, invented in 1903, found at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, British Columbia, refabricated by Ionic Model in Beijing, China) through research and meticulous re-fabrication. All sculpture seems to reference the body, not only because of the dominance—historically at least—of figural representation in this medium, but because of sculpture’s tendency to occupy the same physical space as that of the viewer, thus communicating with—or challenging—the body in its corporeality.

In Martinez’s, Soucie’s and Ting’s work, however, the body that is implied is an absent one. It is registered through the materials themselves and through the artists’ engagements with them, in an echo of some lost archive of movement, relations and work. Tommy Ting’s practice is centrally concerned with narratives that have become marginalized through the process of history. Working in a number of different media—including sculpture, video, photography and performance—he explores how memories can be fabricated and performed. Machine is a recreation of the “Iron Chink” invented in 1903 by a Canadian to mechanize the process of fish gutting and cleaning for the Pacific Northwest’s canning industry. The human butchers that the machine replaced were predominantly Chinese, hence the racist name, “Iron Chink.” The Chinese contract labourers were thought of by cannery owners as efficient, and most importantly, economical, but it was widely claimed that one “Iron Chink” machine could replace fifty human butchers. The “Iron Chink” represents the transference of an insidious racial stereotype onto the physical object. In a wry turn, Ting had the “recontextualized readymade” manufactured in China by a modeling factory, produced in PVC and uniformly spray painted

in China Red. Machine is installed in the gallery sitting upon its own crate, making its travels self-evident. The histories of objects and their usage also inform the work of Katherine Soucie, who salvages obsolescent machinery and other found objects, then binds them with cast-off, pre-consumer waste textiles. In the fall of 2013, Soucie temporarily relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, settling at the border of two distinct working-class neighbourhoods, Reynoldstown and Cabbagetown, both with long histories and racial divides. Bisecting the area is a decommissioned rail line, which formerly supplied the Cabbagetown Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. In the months after her arrival, Soucie began collecting iron fragments, rusted tools and other mill detritus that still litter the decaying railway corridor, observing the materials carefully and recording notes (considering their possible origins and histories) in pseudo-archaeological fashion. The objects were then subjected to a profound transformation, as Soucie wrapped them in layers of pre-consumer hosiery waste material acquired from the Doris Hosiery Mills in Quebec. The artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s laborious, repetitive acts of binding the broken, discarded metal forms calls up the monotonous movements of workersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; bodies, and the ways in which they would have interacted

with such objects. In their infancy, the bound forms are white. But over time, rust from the metals and tannins from the wood bleed out into the textile, staining it. In this time-based process, Soucie “tends” to the objects for weeks, exposing them to weather and photo-documenting their slow change in colour. Soucie engages with pre-consumer nylon waste hosiery in a way that attempts to interrupt its life cycle. A petroleum by-product, knitted nylon does not decay unless it is exposed to an catalyst such as rust. For the artist, the acts of binding and wrapping—themselves akin to rituals of bandaging and mummification— enact a kind of reciprocity, and an honouring of the histories and usage of these outmoded, discarded implements. “Mending has always been a part of my vocabulary and way of thinking,” Soucie states. “It is both physically and metaphorically embedded into 3

every aspect of my research and practice as an artist.” Like Soucie in her temporary home of Atlanta, Guadalupe Martinez’s sensitivity to the spatial, social and political matter of her surroundings is acute. Since her relocation to Vancouver from Argentina in 2008, she has become increasingly interested in exploring the role of the body in mediating space and

materials. “I don’t see materials existing without the 4

body, at least not in my work,” she has explained. Her research combines performance and considerations of three-dimensionality to create site-specific work that mnemonically activates found materials, “reanimating their meaning,” in her words, “into new structures of 5

signification and resistance.” Her actions are motivated by a deep respect for place, despite (or perhaps because of) her own experience of geographical displacement. For Across the street, far away, Martinez’s discovery of a particular circumstance—the immanent closure of Ho Sun Hing Printers—became the project’s focus and propelling force. On Friday, June 13, 2014, following negotiations with the new owners’ demolition crew, Martinez and several volunteers (Pablo Dompé, Jessica Gnyp, Nicolas Gonzalez, Meaghan Kennedy and Emilio Rojas) carried the remaining structural materials from the interior space of the emptied print shop down the block, to reassemble them in Access Gallery. The simple act of transporting materials from one place to another echoed the unspectacular movement of countless other inhabitants, pets and things—crates of produce, laundry bags, bales of newspaper, windowwashing buckets—traveling up and down East Georgia Street on any given day over the past century. In lifting

and carrying the heavy materials together, negotiating sidewalk traffic and other people and things, Martinez and her participants performed a kind of improvised choreography, bringing a quiet observance to the provisional and fleeting relations between bodies, materials and space. The poetics—and ethics—of this activation serve to remind us of the intricate nexus of entanglements between consciousness, the body, and the objects amongst which we dwell and move.

Elsewhere I have written about the anxiety that the object’s silence produces. Inert, indifferent, but charged with the weight of our accumulated histories, even the careful excavation, retrieval and preservation of things leads us nowhere but back to 7

ourselves. “The thing holds itself aloof from us and remains self-sufficient,” Merleau-Ponty reminds us, 8

“…a resolutely silent Other.” It is, to quote another 9

important thinker of phenomenology, “solid (massif).” In this case however, the muteness of these things, their opacity and weight, seems to me a relief. The worth of these artistic works, and the practices that underpin them, lie precisely in their respect for that weight, an acknowledgement of the futility in presuming we might recuperate or embody anything other than our own utterances and affective maps.

For this same reason, I invited the emergent historian Eric Wright to contribute a text to this publication that would sit in parallel to the exhibited works of Martinez, Soucie and Ting. Drawing on his research of marginalized peoples and labour in the Pacific Northwest and in sensitive acknowledgement of his own distance from that about which he writes, Wright addresses a particular set of experiences that have been all but omitted from the written historical record—those of Chinese-Canadian women living and working in the early years of Vancouver. The pages of this publication are folded into cover stock that was purchased from the Ho Sun Hing Printing Company on its second to last day of operation. Block printed in red ink from a single lead plate, the characters that form the basis of the decorative pattern, I was informed, symbolize “Double Happiness,” and would have found use as the backdrop on wedding and birth announcements. For some reason it seemed appropriate, for the reasons I describe above, to materially and corporeally connect with the former presence of this century-old printing operation. As a commemorative gesture? An homage? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps this decision (as well the act of producing the physical book itself)

serves as a marker of something more massif and inaccessible: a suggestion of embodied histories we exist in proximity to, but that are not ours to know. In her haunting bookwork Nox, the poet and scholar Anne Carson writes of her inability to grapple with the loss of a brother she did not know. Attempting to describe the “muteness” that is her memory of him, she resorts to an obscure German term—das Unumgängliche (“overtakelessness”)—which she defines as “that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects 10

facts—it remains beyond them.” Of course we might read this as a definition of melancholia (as Freud theorized, a pathological response to loss, which cannot 11

be overcome ) but what the German term registers for me is a certain physical presence, an assumed objecthood, the form of which obscures and blots out but can only be glimpsed sidelong. It seems to me that Tommy Ting, Katherine Soucie and Guadalupe Martinez each offer their own Unumgängliche of sorts, as a response to an unknowable archive of knowledge, movement and experience, the rapid dispersion or outright loss of which we may only ever be partially aware. The objects present in this exhibition—an ungainly red machine, hauled sheetrock,

plywood and ceiling panels, and the bandaged forms of weeping, abandoned toolsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;might be examined, circumnavigated, and appreciated of course, but the histories they point towards cannot be got round.

Ho Sun Hing Printers 259 East Georgia Street, Vancouver 1908â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2014

Notes

The renowned urban geographer Kay Anderson has written extensively on Vancouver’s Chinatown as a social construct and a racialized place. See Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995).

The phrase “half a pound, eight ounces” is an ancient Chinese idiom, and was sung by ‘70s Canto-Pop star Samuel Hui, who gained notoriety for incorporating working class colloquialisms into his lyrics. It suggests that no matter what our efforts may be, we perpetually work to the same ends. My sincere thanks to Tommy Ting, who suggested I investigate this phrase as a possible title for the exhibition.

See www.katherinesoucie.com/statement/

Guadalupe Martinez, quoted in Polina Bachlakova, “The Work of Guadalupe Martinez,” Beatroute (October 3, 2013), http://beatroute.ca/2013/10/03/the-work-of-guadalupe-martinez/

See http://www.guadalupemartinez.com

See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962); new trans. by Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012) 6

Kimberly Phillips, “On Indexing Melancholy or, Why We Long For Things,” Unknown Objects (Vancouver: 221A Artist Run Centre, 2013), 3-11.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), 322

Jean Paul Satre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (NY: Washington Square Press, 1993), xiii.

See Anne Carson, Nox (Canada: New Directions, 2010), entry 8.5. I extend my thanks to Areum Kim, Curatorial Assistant at Access Gallery, for placing Nox (for another reason entirely) on my desk at the right moment in the writing of this essay.

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 237-258.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Whatever your lot was, that was your lotâ&#x20AC;?: Chinese-Canadian Women at Work in the Vancouver Area: 1880-1945 Eric Wright

Introduction: The Chinatown Memorial Monument At the intersection of Keefer and Columbia Streets, in a small public plaza across from the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, stands the Chinatown Memorial Monument. Installed in 2003, it is the work of the well-known sculptor and muralist Arthur Shu Ren Cheng. Cheng was commissioned to create the monument by the Chinatown Memorial Square Committee, a group of Chinese-Canadian World War II veterans. The monument consists of two larger than life ChineseCanadian male figures cast in bronze and placed on either side of a Chinese centre character and a gilded maple leaf. One man, a shovel slung over his shoulder, depicts a worker on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s. The other depicts one of the few hundred Chinese-Canadian men who served in the Canadian Military during World War II. The monument has an epic sensibility about it: the railway worker marches forward resolutely, his eyes gazing off into the distance, perhaps envisioning the completion of the national railway. The men’s overcoats ruffle behind them in the wind. This epic stylization recalls many monuments created in the “socialist realist” style that still dot the landscape of the former USSR and China.

The Chinatown Memorial Monument at Keefer and Columbia Streets in Vancouver World War II soldier at left and CPR Railway worker at right. Sculpted by Arthur Shu Ren Cheng, installed 2003. Photo credit Anyse Ducharme.

Detail: The Chinatown Memorial Monument at Keefer and Columbia Streets in Vancouver Photo credit Anyse Ducharme.

One way to account for the monument’s epic style and nationalistic subject matter is to think of it as a response on behalf of Chinese-Canadians to some of the most persistent Chinese stereotypes held by whites throughout much of Vancouver’s history. These were that Chinese people did not desire to ‘assimilate’ into mainstream Canadian culture, and that they were not capable of doing so anyways due to their “unique” racial and cultural features. 2

By demonstrating in a very literal and epically

exaggerated fashion how Chinese-Canadian men were in fact central participants in the construction and defense of the nation at its most seminal moments, the monument definitively refutes these longstanding racist stereotypes, that Chinese people could not, and did not desire to be a part of, the Canadian ideal. The monument is in fact just one very visual and stark example of a persistent historical dialectic in Vancouver, where whites suggest (subtly or not so subtly) that Chinese people do not belong here, or do not desire to belong, which is countered by fervent and often exaggerated displays of national loyalty on behalf of Chinese-Canadians in the aim of dispelling this oppressive belief.

But if the monument works as an antidote to historically prevalent racist white stereotypes about Chinese people, it also problematically reinforces gendered power relations. Just as Vancouverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s broader â&#x20AC;&#x153;commemorative landscapeâ&#x20AC;? is male-centric, (from street names to statues) so the Chinatown Memorial Monument reproduces this pattern of male-centricity 4

found in broader society. In working against racial stereotypes (and the very real economic exclusion they produced) through a depiction of the heroic contributions of Chinese men to the building of Canada, the monument paradoxically erases the working histories of Chinese women through an act of omission. This monument is just one highly visible instance where Chinese-Canadian women have been omitted from the historical record, silenced by the dual constrictions of racialization and patriarchy.

In this essay, I explore the working lives of immigrant first-generation and second-generation ChineseCanadian women in and around Vancouver during the same time period as that of the men depicted in the Chinatown Memorial Monument. From the 1880s through to the 1940s, the working lives of ChineseCanadian women in the Vancouver area followed

diverse paths. However, common themes of great loneliness and isolation, long hours working multiple jobs, the necessity for female family members to sacrifice educational opportunities to aid in family caregiving and women’s “double burden” of maternal/ domestic labour and labour outside the home are common themes. Unlike the Chinatown Memorial Monument, which attaches nation-building significance to Chinese men’s work in Canada, few women ever understood their work in this light. Rather, faced with a severe lack of choices, women often expressed a sense of fatalism about their working lives, which helped them survive hardship. Arriving in Vancouver When the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885, thousands of Chinese men who had come to labour in Gum Sam (Gold Mountain) suddenly found themselves out of work. Some of these men returned to China, but many found their way to Vancouver, which was by then a burgeoning metropolis thanks in large part to the railway the men had helped construct. A group of Chinese men established themselves in a few square blocks around East Pender Street, in what would 6

become Vancouver’s “Chinatown.” In the decades to come, the population of Chinatown would swell into

Winter comes in November, New Year after December. Daddy sent money from Gold Mountain, Everybody has new clothes to wear, And we have a nice fat duck for the New Year The magpie is happy as we celebrate The New Year, Daddy has gone to work on Gold Mountain. He has gold and silver in his hand, So we can build a house and buy Farmland. Daddy’s gone to Gold Mountain. Life’s good, send more cash, Send cash right away, We need it here today. —Taishan children’s rhymes

the thousands, as men sought work in the city’s lumber, cannery and service industries. Although Chinese men had always greatly outnumbered Chinese women in Vancouver, the newly established head tax of 1885 ensured that this demographic trend would remain a 7

salient feature of Chinatown society till the 1950s.

The few Chinese women who arrived in Vancouver in the 1880s at the completion of the railway entered this male-dominated “bachelor society.” Many who arrived were mui tsai, which translates literally as “little sisters.” Mui tsai was a euphemism for a girl born into a poor family who was sold to a better off family at a young age to work as a domestic servant. Girls of this status worked for a number of years in their adopted family before they were married off at the discretion of their adopted household. By the late nineteenth century, many of the more well to do families in Vancouver’s Chinatown had imported girls from southern China to 8

work as mui tsai in their households. In spite of their presence in many families, mui tsai stories have been practically invisible in the official histories of Chinese immigration to Canada. First hand accounts of mui tsai experiences in Vancouver are exceedingly rare, yet it is generally

Chinese family at 1870 Frances Street Vancouver Adult woman standing directly in front of the man was a mui tsai in this family. 1922, photographer C.B. Ward. Image courtesy of Dr. Imogene L. Lim. Further information about this photograph can be found at Dr. Limâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website: http://wordpress.viu.ca/limi/about-me/research-interests/ chinese-women/.

accepted that they faced a wide range of experiences. Some girls were treated as near equals in their adopted families, who provided them with decent clothing and living space and allowed them to dine together with the 9

rest of the family. Mabel Yee remembered that unlike in other families, her parents insisted that they address their servants as “big sisters” instead of “little sisters,” which was a sign of respect. Others were less fortunate, and faced abuse, isolation, re-selling to other families, abandonment or selling into prostitution. The presence of mui tsai in Vancouver households attracted the attention of reformist white women, who frequently likened the institution to slavery. In Victoria, the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church established a home for runaway mui tsai. Although it is unclear how many girls from Vancouver’s Chinatown made their way to the Victoria Mission Home, the society’s record book demonstrates that mui tsai experiences in British Columbia were frequently far from ideal. One entry read as follows: Age: 23. 1901. Ran away from her master, came to the Home asking for protection, as the “old man” was cruel. This man bought her for $900.00 and her former mistress had returned to China wealthy. Slave and prostitute to Chue Cheung.

In addition to being incredibly vulnerable to their sometimes-abusive heads of household, life as a mui tsai could be isolating and lonely. Shirley Chan, a third generation Chinese-Canadian woman remembered that her grandmother experienced great loneliness while completing her period of domestic servitude for a family in Vancouver’s Chinatown: At that time there were very few women in Chinatown. She wasn’t allowed to go out, she wasn’t allowed even to go downstairs to the store, because girls, as soon as you became mature, were not supposed to be in the company of men.

Loneliness & Alienation Great loneliness and alienation was also a common experience for many adult Chinese-Canadian women who came to join their husbands in Gum Sam in the years after the completion of the railway. Mabel Yee, who grew up in Chinatown in the early twentieth century recalled that she “never saw her [mother] go next door to visit…she would chat a little with the 12

neighbour, and that was it.” Sharon Lee, a secondgeneration Chinese-Canadian woman also recalled that, “life in Canada was very isolating and alienating for [her] mother,” who immigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century.

In some instances, women were isolated to the extent that they quite literally became housebound. These cases stemmed in large degree from patriarchal social relations within the Chinese community. Lee Ng, a working class second-generation Chinese woman who grew up in early 20th century Chinatown, recalled that women were at times ostracized by men for merely looking out the window of their homes: “If you stare out the window people who saw you would say, ‘So and so’s wife isn’t ashamed of herself.’ They still talk even if you 14

were behind the windows just looking out the streets.” The loneliness and alienation felt by many firstgeneration Chinese-Canadian women was of course in great measure simply due to the fact that there were very few Chinese women in Vancouver before the 1940s, because of the head tax, the 1923 exclusion act and pressure from within Chinese families for women to stay at home in the village while men went abroad to earn money. Homesick, linguistically isolated, lacking a like-minded peer group and in a context where being seen outside of the home invited rumours of “indecency,” many first-generation Chinese-Canadian women immigrants experienced intense isolation and loneliness in Canada.

Domestic & Maternal Labour Although many Chinese-Canadian women experienced isolation in their new country, they were certainly never idle. Consider the story of Bak Bak, who was brought to Canada from China around the turn of the twentieth century by an aunt, who left her with a family in Powell River. In Powell River, Bak Bak worked as a mui tsai in the Sam family, where she looked after the children and performed household labour instead of attending school. In 1919, she was married off (in an arranged marriage) and moved to Richmond, where she farmed and raised ten children with her husband.

Peggy Soon, Bak Bak’s second daughter of two, recalled the astonishing number of tasks her mother performed on their family farm. On a daily basis, Bak Bak would: look after the pigs, plant the gardens, weed, and feed us kids, look after us kids, sew our clothes, no patterns, just you know, she would do all our clothes and knit. She would feed the farm hands, cook three meals. We had cows then too, she’d look after the cows, pigs, sheep, whatever animals we had, our pets, rabbits…the dogs, the cats, oh and the chickens, you know, it’s a farm. So, she had a big job. And she had to load the truck up. She would load grandfather’s truck up before he goes at 4-5 in the morning. Because he would sleep just about before he was ready to go. She woke up at 3 or 4

in the morning, she hardly slept I think, grandfather would leave by 5… I don’t know when she slept, to tell the truth, because she would sit and knit, I don’t know when she has time to sit and knit and sew whatever.

Bak Bak’s experience typified that of many firstgeneration Chinese-Canadian immigrant women in the Vancouver area, who balanced an astonishing number of domestic tasks with the demands of raising large families. Women often gave birth to families of eight to ten children, an impressive feat of labour in itself. Many second-generation Chinese-Canadian women, when queried about the type of work their mothers did when they arrived in Canada, bluntly recalled that women set to work rearing babies. Victoria King, whose mother came to Canada in 1912 responded to the interview question, “What type of work did your mother take up when she got here?” by quipping that her “mom took up 17

having babies, nine of us.”

Mothers frequently expressed a strong sense of pride in their ability to juggle the conflicting demands of maternal and domestic labour. Hazel Chong, a secondgeneration Chinese-Canadian woman who grew up in Vancouver, recalled that her mother frequently claimed to have timed the birth of her children to the early hours of the morning so as to still be able to prepare

Family in traditional clothing in front of Wah Chong Washing and Ironing Circa 1895, photographer unknown. Vancouver City Archives, Accession # AM1376-: CVA 178-2.8.

breakfast for the other children when they awoke.

Often overlooked in official histories, the extensive childrearing labour performed by Chinese-Canadian women in the 19th and early 20th centuries was tiring, relentless and dangerous work. Bak Bak’s experience of ceaseless domestic labour on the Richmond family farm and Hazel Chong’s mother’s birthing of eight children—these were typical work experiences of first-generation immigrant ChineseCanadian women. Reflecting on Chinese women’s working lives at this time, Emma Quon, a secondgeneration Chinese Canadian woman commented, “The role of the Chinese woman in those days was that you got married, you went into your future husband’s home, you were expected to bear his children, cook for him, to look after him, to look after his children, and this was expected whether you wanted to or not. You didn’t know whether you were going to marry a rich man or a poor man, but whatever your lot was, that 19

was your lot.” The experiences of Bak Bak and Hazel Chong’s mother certainly confirm Emma’s portrayal of Chinese women’s role at this time.

The Household Economy One effect of large family sizes in many ChineseCanadian households from the 1880s to the 1940s was a need for extra help in caring for siblings or earning additional wages to support the family. Wealthy families could sometimes afford to buy a mui tsai to assist in childcare, but in most cases, the oldest or most capable female child in the family would be pulled from school to become a secondary caregiver or wage earner. Nellie Chu, one of the first ethnic Chinese women born in Canada, recalled being pulled out of school to work in a Vancouver clothing store at age 12 to support her family: I had to work all the time to help my mother…and I started to work when I was twelve years. I had to quit school…well, who’s going to support the family? I don’t get any money out of it. Give it to my mother to pay the rent and feed the sisters… I go to Taylor’s Clothing Store and do ripping for $2.50 a week.

Peggy Soon, who recalled the astounding amount of work her mother Bak Bak completed on a daily basis on the family farm in Richmond, remembered that her older sister Sylvia was pulled from school “to do all the 21

babysitting.”

In a context of patriarchy, families in need of extra help in terms of caregiving or wages, looked to girls first to sacrifice their educational attainment. The boys of the family faced this burden less often—rather, female children were made to work in the aim of ensuring families could continue to support boy’s educations. This phenomenon of removing girls from school to care for large families or earn additional wages was common to working-class families of many different cultural backgrounds in early twentieth century Vancouver.

The Double Burden Chinese-Canadian mothers often faced a “double burden” of domestic and maternal labour and the necessity to undertake waged work inside or outside of the home to support their families. Because many firstgeneration women could not speak English and had limited education, they often worked at low paying and unskilled positions. As participant in the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre Oral History project Lee Ng put it, “the only way they could make a living is to 23

use their hands. Nothing else.” Pervasive racial and gender discrimination ensured that the few women who had attained an education were not granted access to well paying jobs.

Chinese cannery worker sorting fish while women workers pack cans n.d., photographer unknown. Black and White Photograph, 19 x 25 cm Canadian Fishing Company Fonds, Gulf of Georgia Cannery Archives Accession # CFC-3-21-9.

A common waged occupation for first-generation Chinese-Canadian women was “home-sewer.” Women contracted directly with local tailors to sew and mend garments from their homes. This form of labour permitted women to continue to care for children and run the household, which was considered their duty 24

at the time. Outside the home, Chinese-Canadian women often worked in garment factories, food processing plants and canneries. They sometimes took seasonal jobs in occupations like seed gathering, farm labour and grocery store stocking to make ends meet. Shirley Chan remembered that her firstgeneration immigrant mother worked in factories and canneries during the week, stapled boxes on the weekend, and raised her family with the help of her aunt the rest of the time. “Mom was tough, she 25

worked all the time,” Shirley remembered. Lee Ng recalled working in a fish cannery for eight years, and also “peeled shrimps and worked as a labourer.” She “held three jobs a day and worked very hard, a 26

whole day,” recalling “It was a very hard life then.”

Many second-generation women remembered their mothers’ inability to stop working even in old age. Oftentimes it was only serious health issues that finally prevented women from going to work.

Conclusion From 1880â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1945, first and second-generation ChineseCanadian women in the Vancouver area performed difficult, gruelling and sometimes dangerous work, similar to that of their male counterparts explicitly commemorated in the Chinatown Memorial Monument. Women undertook extensive household tasks, gave birth to large families, assisted in running family businesses and worked in low-paying wage labour positions. Unlike Chinese-Canadian men, their contributions have not been equally memorialized, despite their equal indispensability. Perhaps the most striking and consistent feature of the womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lives surveyed here is the extreme lack of choice Chinese-Canadian women faced concerning their working lives stemming from patriarchal social relations within the Chinese community and racial discrimination in employment practices in Canadian society. Faced with an inability to control their lives at the nexus of racial and gender oppression, Chinese-Canadian women sometimes found solace in a belief that it was their destiny to 27

suffer hardship. As Mary Woon Lee, who worked for many years in a cannery, expressed to those

asking about her working life, “I don’t involve myself in happiness and sadness. I take whatever, and do whatever is required to me… Being a housewife is to take care of children and do the household chores. There isn’t much to do with contentment… I don’t feel much about anything. I got married, worked 28

and brought up my daughters. That’s all.”

Notes

See Peter Ward, White Canada Forever (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002), 12-13.

2 It is important here to note that a belief in the social goal of assimilation presumes the superiority of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own culture or ethnic group over another. 3

One prominent historical example was a Welcoming Arch constructed by Vancouverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chinese residents in 1912 to welcome the Duke & Duchess of Connaught, a photo of which can be viewed in the Vancouver Public Library Archives. Today, more subtle remnants of this dialectic might be observed in immigrants style of dress, their support of what are framed as national pastimes such as hockey, or eager participation in nationalistic organizations like the Canadian military Cadets program.

4 The fact that Chinese men greatly outnumbered Chinese women in Vancouver until the 1940s in the Vancouver area is not a sufficient justification for this oversight. 5

In the introduction to her edited volume Indigenous Women & Work: From Labor to Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012) Carol Williams describes how Indigenous women in nineteenth century European colonies were subject to the dual oppressions of racism and patriarchy, which both marginalized them economically and ensured their invisibility in national histories in years to come. Chinese-Canadian women have historically experienced this same sort of dynamic in Canada.

Kay Anderson, in her broad work Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995) notes that Chinatown is as much a social construct of the west than it is an essential place where “Chinese” people (as if this was a unified category) inhabit. Nonetheless, she notes that Chinese people adopted and helped to construct the notion of Chinatown as a real space, which indeed it is.

7 Tamara Adilman, “A Preliminary Sketch of Chinese Women and Work in British Columbia 1858–1950,” in Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on The History of Women’s Work in British Columbia (Victoria: Camosun College, 1984), 55-56. 8

Adilman, 58.

Ibid., 58.

Shirley Chan in Opening Doors in Vancouver’s East End: Strathcona, editors and compilers Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2011), 117.

12 Mabel Yee, interviewed in Under the Willow Tree: Pioneer Chinese Women in Canada, directed by Dora Nipp (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1997), DVD.

Sharon Lee in Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women, Editor and Compiler, The Women’s Book Committee: Chinese Canadian National Council (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1992), 91.

14 Lee Ng interviewed in “An Ordinary Life: Life Histories of Women in the Urban Core,” compiled by N.J. McCallan and Katherine Roback (Vancouver: Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, 1979), 12. Vancouver City Archives, Ref. # AM 412.

“Chinese Women Project—Exhibits, Interview with Peggy Soon,” Multicultural History Society of Ontario: Chinese Canadian Women, 1923–1967, http://www.mhso.ca/chinesecanadianwomen/ en/database.php?c=182

Ibid.

“Chinese Women Project—Exhibits, Interview with Victoria King,” Multicultural History Society of Ontario: Chinese Canadian Women, 1923–1967, http://www.mhso.ca/chinesecanadianwomen/ en/database.php?c=62

Hazel Chong, interviewed in Under the Willow Tree: Pioneer Chinese Women in Canada, directed by Dora Nipp (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1997), DVD, 14:20.

Ibid., 14:05

Nellie Chu interviewed in “An Ordinary Life: Life Histories of Women in the Urban Core,” compiled by N.J. McCallan and Katherine Roback (Vancouver: Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, 1979), 16. Vancouver City Archives, Ref. # AM 412. 20

Agnes McLeod, a Canadian woman of Scottish descent who grew up in working-class southeast Vancouver in the 1920s remembered her father pulling her from Van Horne School in Grade nine to work as a live-in domestic servant for a wealthy household in Dunbar. Author’s family collection.

23 Lee Ng interviewed in “An Ordinary Life: Life Histories of Women in the Urban Core,” compiled by N.J. McCallan and Katherine Roback (Vancouver: Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, 1979), 13. Vancouver City Archives, Ref. # AM 412. 24

Adilman, 59.

“Chinese Women Project—Exhibits, Interview with Shirley Chan,” Multicultural History Society of Ontario: Chinese Canadian Women, 1923–1967, http://www.mhso.ca/chinesecanadianwomen/ en/database.php?c=1 25

26 Lee Ng interviewed in “An Ordinary Life: Life Histories of Women in the Urban Core,” compiled by N.J. McCallan and Katherine Roback (Vancouver: Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, 1979), 13. Vancouver City Archives, Ref. # AM 412.

Mabel Yee, interviewed in Under the Willow Tree: Pioneer Chinese Women in Canada, directed by Dora Nipp (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1997), DVD, 5:50.

Mary Woon Lee, interviewed in “An Ordinary Life: Life Histories of Women in the Urban Core,” compiled by N.J. McCallan and Katherine Roback (Vancouver: Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, 1979), 33. Vancouver City Archives, Ref. # AM 412.

Images

Guadalupe Martinez Across the street, far away, 2014 Katherine Soucie Skid Row, 2014 Tommy Ting Machine (Iron Chink, invented in 1903, found at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, British Columbia, refabricated by Ionic Model in Beijing, China), 2012

Guadalupe Martinez Across the street, far away, 2014 With help from Pablo DompĂŠ, Jessica Gnyp, Nicolas Gonzalez, Meaghan Kennedy and Emilio Rojas performative interventions, recuperated wood, found objects, prints, video variable dimensions photos courtesy of the artist

Katherine Soucie Skid Row, 2014 pre-consumer waste hosiery (pantyhose), salvaged textile industry, railway tools, metal fragments, salvaged wooden pallet, binding, rust dyeing approx. 106 x 127 cm photos courtesy of the artist

Tommy Ting Installation view of Machine (Iron Chink, invented in 1903, found at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, British Columbia, refabricated by Ionic Model in Beijing, China), 2012 PVC and wood 143 x 57 x 45 cm photos courtesy of the artist

Biographies

Guadalupe Martinez is an Argentine-Canadian artist who has been based in Vancouver since 2008. She obtained her BFA at the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte in Buenos Aires and graduates with an MFA from the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2014. Her research combines threedimensionality, performance and site-specificity creating work that mnemonically activates found materials, reanimating their meaning into new structures of signification and resistance. Martinez has attended residencies at The Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta; Hammock Residency, BC; The STAG, BC; Elsewhere Collective, North Carolina; The Vermont Studio Center; and Rebuild Foundarion in Chicago. Her work has been shown locally at The Commons, Satellite Gallery and grunt gallery among others; Palais de Glace, Museo del Grabado, Centro Cultural San Martin and Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires; and in Mexico, USA and Italy. Her graduate research has been acknowledged by numerous scholarships and awards.

Katherine Soucie is an artist and designer who specializes in transforming textile industry waste into new textiles and sculptural forms. She studied Fashion Design in London and Toronto, Ontario, Canada before furthering her studies in Textiles and Visual Art in Vancouver. Since 2003, her experimentation with textile industry waste has resulted in an extensive body of work for which she has received numerous scholarships, grants and awards. The intention of her work is to explore forms of visible mending where she reverse-engineers modes of production in order to honour and value the history of the discarded, cast-off materials and tools she salvages. The laborious and repetitive handcraft applications performed throughout their transformation leads to unexpected and emergent forms and constructions. Soucie was the recipient of the BC Creative Achievement Award (2006), was shortlisted for Niche Award (2007), USA; the International Design Green Award (2008), USA; and in the SustainART Competition in the UK (2014). She has spent the past year as Visiting Artist and Lecturer in Textiles at the Welch School of Art, Georgia State University.

Tommy Ting lives and works in London, UK. Working across photography, sculpture, video and performance, Ting investigates narratives that become marginalized through the processes of history. Central to his practice is an exploration of how memories can be fabricated and performed as a tool to interrogate contemporary issues. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: Peer, London (2014); Organhaus, Chongqing (2013) and Three Shadows Photography Centre, Beijing (2009). Ting also presents performances and interventions into site-specific public spaces including: Limehouse Blues, Sailorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Palace and Chilli Chilli Restaurant, London and Liverpool (2014) and Columbus Was Here, Piazza Italia, Vancouver (2013). Ting is currently an artist associate at Open School East in London, UK. He received his BA in Photography from the London College of Communications (2012) and a diploma in Fine Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (2009). Ting has been awarded project grants from the Arts Council, England and the British Columbia Arts Council (both 2014).

Eric Wright is an historian and author living in Vancouver. In 2013, he completed an MA in History at the University of British Columbia specializing in the Indigenous History of Canada & the United States. His thesis focused on an Indigenous spiritual movement that began near Shelton, Washington in the late nineteenth century. Apart from Indigenous History, Eric also specializes in Canadian and BC History and has recently published an article on the history of male fur-trader interactions with LGBTQ Indigenous people in the nineteenth century Pacific Northwest fur-trade. In his spare time, he authors the blog Actually History, which publishes short, critical and enlivening historical work of contemporary relevance.

Access Gallery is a platform for emergent and experimental art practices. We enable critical conversations and risk taking through new configurations of audience, artists and community.

Access gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of BC through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, The Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation, Audain Foundation, the Hamber Foundation, our donors, members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

Eight Ounces Half a Pound Guadalupe Martinez, Katherine Soucie, Tommy Ting June 28â&#x20AC;&#x201C;August 8, 2014

Published by Access Gallery Kimberly Phillips, Director/Curator Areum Kim, Curatorial Assistant ISBN 978-0-9866688-4-5 Edition of 75 Layout by Chelsey Doyle Printed in Canada by Bond Reproductions ÂŠ Access Gallery and the contributing authors and artists, 2014. This text cannot be reproduced without express written permission from the publisher.