The Elders from Sto:lo, Stat'myx, Salish, and Nisga'a nations needed to be housed out of the elements during the Chinese New Year's Day Parade in Vancouver, B.C., as it happened to be a cold one on Jan. 27, 2009, "A very cold and wet event this year," said Bill Chu, who organized an assembly of First Nations in the parade on Main Street.
Bill Chu's guests, the wait for the march of the dragons and that doesn't normally happen. Bill has organized similar multi-cultural events over the past few years in Vancouver.
"It always seems to be raining on the New Year's Parade," said Bill, "but this year it was bitterly cold." Bill Chu is a driving force behind Canadians for Reconciliation, "a peaceful non-partisan grassroots movement committed to developing a new relationship with aboriginal people, one that signifies a deep apology for past injustice, a willingness to honor truth now, and a resolve to embrace each other in the new millennium."
There is some missing pieces too, that they would like to embrace. "A professor at UBC informed Bill that the 1881 census in B.C. revealed 20 percent of the non-Aboriginal population in the province was Chinese. "There were more Chinese than any other single immigrant group. There is no history books that explain this, and it paints the Chinese of British Columbia in the completely different light."
Chinese were indeed a populous group, but not exactly a uniform one because the in-migration was practically entirely men. Furthermore because of the misinformation in the history books, "Today we are seen as recent immigrants. Our history has been suppressed to benefit of the white guys. Aboriginal people and our people were treated similar ways. We suffered similar discrimination and all of it was written right out of the history books.
"In the 1800s when the government of B.C. would give away free tracts of land only two groups of people were excluded from this privilege: Chinese and Aboriginal. We were useful to work on building the railroad and working in the mines, but we were never welcome and they used us out of necessity. It was a cheap way to finish the railroad." As a result the years 1881 to 1885 compose a memorable chapter of labour exploitation of Chinese men.
"It's not just about wages," said Bill, "and we didn't get those every day of the year either. We were only paid nine months of the year. During winter there was no work and they stopped paying us. It trapped the people in place with no health care, inadequate constructions to survive to winter, and no way to save any money." Everything they saved was spent on surviving three wintery months with no income.
The Chinese began turning to the only alliances open due to the draconian systemic racism that was blossoming in the North American continent, with B.C. distinguished by particular complications related to the location on the Pacific Rim, namely, Pacific-based people.
Bill said, "The Aboriginal story I like to tell is from a Chinese restaurant owner who was passing away, and he gathered his children around him, and he told them, 'You have to treat the Aboriginal people well.'
"'Why must we do this?' asked the restaurateur's children, 'Way back when I was a railroad worker who got injured I was left by the tracks to die because that is what they did for us. Nothing. A few agonizing days a group of Aboriginal people walked by and picked me up and took me home where they nursed me back to health. And I became a restaurant owner.'"
Bill noted, "That's just one insight. The fact is that in 1885 the white guys decided, 'We don't want the Chinese here anymore.' They started the head tax in 1885, slapped on the infamous head tax $50 to enter the country. Only the Chinese, nobody else, had to pay the head tax. At that time for $50 you could buy a house. It was a lot of money"
The Chinese already in the country for many years may have once intended to return to China but their chances of that had always been slim and now they were none. He said the era of the head tax put the Canadian Chinese in a big dilemma. Here they were, many of them since 1858, and suddenly it is was stick around in Vancouver enduring this horrendous discrimination and scraping for a living. That was the moment when some of them intermarried with Aboriginal population."
Bill Chu is hopeful that a wider body of research begins to develop in the history of Chinese in British Columbia because it precedes Canada and the Chinese should be acknowledged for their place in the foundations of an important nation in the world.
