by Paul Yee
Chinese gather at one point of the railway, Red Beards at the other. A whistle shrills and the handcar hurtles off. All you hear is the squeal of wheels against steel track. As the car nears the finish line, men chant, “Faster! Faster! Faster!” louder and louder. Then the crowd swamps the timekeepers to get the times. Quickly, the next team boards and the whistle sounds again.
After two races, the Chinese had won both. Then everyone melted away before a third race could be run, in case a high-up boss showed up.
We celebrated at camp. Cook roasted peanuts and jugs of wine were passed about. Then Bookman arrived and announced the Red Beards were issuing a challenge for tomorrow. They dismissed the two-out-of-three win, and wanted a three-out-of-five series. They wanted new men on the handcar. Right away we accepted the challenge. We turned to our biggest, strongest workers, Half Lump and Gold Coin, but they shook their heads.
“We’re too big,” they said. “Our weight will slow down the cart.”
Not everyone wanted to race. Some feared getting caught and fired. Others feared the Red Beards would beat them up. The most eager volunteers were not always suitable: too short, too old or too weak. Our final choice surprised me: Ba and a fellow called Old Wide.
May 7
Ba and Old Wide were defeated by the Red Beards. Now both sides have won the same number of races. Ba has been replaced by someone else for the final race tomorrow.
May 8
At the work site this morning, Crew Boss and Bookman both looked uneasy. The Company had fired one of the Red Beard racers from yesterday. Now Old Wide was dismissed.
Right away, our men called for a strike. Bookman shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he warned us. “The Company will fire you all. It is determined to stop handcar racing.”
Ba strode away with Old Wide and I ran after them in a panic. When I asked Ba what he intended to do, he said he planned to go to town and ask Contractor to give Old Wide back his job.
“What if he fires you too?” I demanded.
Ba shrugged and said we were planning to quit anyway.
“Not me,” I said quietly.
Ba stared at me. Then he said, “Son, now you know how I felt during my first year on the railway. But this year, things are different.”
And off he went.
May 9
A runner brought horrible news this afternoon. We knew something strange had happened, because in the middle of the morning, our crew bosses started carrying long guns and wearing guns on their belts. They grunted rudely at us, and when Bookman asked what was wrong, they refused to answer. Short Boss was seen shooting at bottles placed on a tree stump.
The runner blurted his news to our bookmen and then ran on to the next camp. Bookman summoned us. Be on guard against a Red Beard attack, he said. A fight had resulted in a Chinese worker being killed by Red Beards.
It happened at Camp 37, a few miles south of the big Chinatown at Lytton, early yesterday morning. At the work site, a crew boss fired two Chinese workers. Their bookman asked for a quarter day’s pay for them. The crew boss refused and tried to leave. The bookman reached out to stop him but fell. The Chinese crew saw this and hurled rocks at the crew boss. Red Beard workers pulled him to safety but the angry Chinese attacked with picks and shovels and crowbars. The Red Beards managed to escape, and then work resumed for the rest of the day.
That night, twenty to thirty Red Beards crept to the Chinese camp and set four cabins on fire. When the Chinese ran out, they were beaten severely with poles and sticks. Yee Fook died and six others were badly wounded.
Right away, we wanted to stop work and make our anger known to the Company. A strike would force the Company to punish the murderers. The crew bosses saw us milling about and pulled aside Bookman. They told him the Company could not punish the killers; that was the duty of the law courts. We went back to work, but everyone was grumbling.
I pray Ba and Old Wide are safe, travelling by themselves on the railway line.
May 10
This morning, Ba shook me awake and told me to pack. We would be leaving right away. He was on his knees, rolling his clothes into a blanket.
I jumped to my feet. “We can’t run off like cowards, as if we’re afraid!”
Ba reminded me that he had an important promise to keep. He knotted his blanket firmly and stood up. “I accept the will of Heaven in accidents, but not the evil that men commit. This burning and killing is unforgiveable. The Red Beards hate us more than I ever imagined. When Poy Uncle’s wife hears about this, she will worry even more.”
He stopped at the door of the tent. “I’ve thought it over. It’s up to you, Heen. I won’t force you to leave with me. You’re old enough to think for yourself. If you want to stay, I won’t get angry. I’ll give you respect.”
Later
Men are talking about having sentries guard the camp at night. They are also raising money to hire a lawyer to pursue the case.
I decided to stay. By working through the rest of the season, I will bring home more money. In the meantime, Ba will take my journals home with him. He says they will be safer in China. He worries about me, but tries not to show it. I look forward to re-reading my journals when I get home.
I want to send my accounts back to China with my journals, so I went to Bookman. He gave me the latest numbers, and I took every penny that was mine and sent it home with Ba.
Here is the final tally for my year in Canada:
Epilogue
In September of 1883, Jon M. Hayes, David H. Perry and John Gray went on trial for Yee Fook’s murder at Camp 37. They were charged with murder, manslaughter and common assault. Perry was acquitted due to lack of evidence. The eleven-person jury, after five minutes of debate, found Hayes and Gray not guilty. Chief Justice Matthew Begbie, who presided at the trial, later suggested that some of the witnesses may have lied.
Thunder God passed through Heen’s camp at the end of May. He was sad to have missed seeing Ba. Chinese doctors in Yale had healed his knee, making it possible for him to work again. But in December 1883 Heen was fired, along with Old Fire, Blind Eye, Saltwater Crisp and three thousand other Chinese workers. Most of them had not saved enough money to buy a ticket to China. But Heen had been extra careful all year, saving money for Grandfather, so he had enough to pay his ship’s passage. Unfortunately, it is not known what happened to Heen’s other journals, if he kept any.
For over thirty years, Wong Brother worked as a miner in northern British Columbia. He trekked long distances in the Omineca, Cassiar and Atlin gold fields and found bits of the precious metal here and there. He managed to send money home so that his father did see a good doctor. He eventually retired in Victoria, B.C.
In China, Heen found he could not resume life as a sixteen-year-old in his hometown. He rejected more schooling because he and Ba had failed to bring home enough money to regain Grandfather’s store. Heen wanted to work, but no suitable jobs were nearby. He thought to go overseas but the family said no to North America. Grandfather read Heen’s journal and exclaimed, “Thank the Heavens and the Earth that you two returned safely.”
Ba found a job doing bookkeeping for the Lee clan. Through this work, he met Ngoon Lee, who had an import-export business in Singapore. In 1884, Ba persuaded his new friend to take Heen to Singapore to work there. Ba and Ma had another child, a girl named Pui-gwong, born in 1885. This time, Ba made sure he stayed close to home, to enjoy her childhood.
Two years later, Ma found a bride for Heen, and he returned to China at age nineteen to marry. He and his wife, Hong-ping, had a first child, a son, in 1888. They named him Hok-yun. After Hok-yun’s birth, Heen went back to work in Singapore. Hong-ping and son Hok-yun joined him in 1892, and the family became established there. Over the years, Heen rose through the company ranks to become the firm’s general manager and a leader in the community.
When Heen’s wife and child joined him in Singapore, Grandfather and Ba also moved. They went to Thailand to work with Grandfather�
�s friend in the rice industry. A year later, Ma brought eight-year-old Pui-gwong to Thailand too.
During his first year back from Canada, Heen told many stories about railway work to Little Brother Gee-gwong, who was nine years old then. He never tired of hearing them. In 1893, when Ma and Little Sister moved to Thailand, Gee-gwong turned nineteen and sailed to Vancouver, the city at the western end of the national railway. He worked in nearby shingle mills and salmon canneries and on ferry boats. But he was a gambler, and was unable to save much money.
Poy Uncle’s son Ah-Wing came to Canada at the same time as Gee-gwong. He pooled his savings with other Chinese to open a general store in Vancouver’s Chinatown. A dozen years later, Ah-Wing bought out his partners and became the sole owner. His wife joined him in Canada, and they raised six children. But he was unable to find his father’s grave along the Fraser River, even though Heen and Ba had given him directions and a hand-drawn map.
Heen never forgot Canada’s landscape or the railway work. He also remembered the bitterly cold winters, and he much preferred the tropical climate of Singapore. He kept his journal all his life, often reading and re-reading his earlier words. Decades later, his great-grandson saved it from a stack of old business ledgers being tossed out.
In 1988, one of Heen’s great-great-grandsons, electrical engineer Colin Lee, emigrated with his children (Vincent, age ten, and Crystal, age eight) from Singapore. They settled in Calgary. Colin’s family took the train to Vancouver and saw much of the Fraser Canyon that Heen had seen. But they had no idea that their ancestors had worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Historical Note
In 1867, a trip from central Canada to British Columbia took several months of exhausting travel over land.
Eastern Canadians from Ontario, Quebec or the Maritimes who were hurrying to take part in the Cariboo gold rush in the 1860s started their journey by taking trains and steamers into Wisconsin, in the United States. They travelled through to St. Paul, Minnesota, before heading north to Fort Garry (later Winnipeg). From there they travelled in ox carts over 900 miles of prairie to Fort Edmonton. Then they fought their way through the Rocky Mountains.
There was no easier route through the south because the American transcontinental railway wasn’t finished yet. By sea, ships from Halifax sailed south and around the South American Horn and then up the west coast of two continents. It too was a long and often a dangerous voyage.
A transcontinental railway would solve this transportation problem. The railway would also stop the Americans from taking all the land of North America, provide Canada’s motherland Britain with safe passage to the prized markets of Asia, and cement Canada’s place in the British Empire. In 1871, a transcontinental railway was one of the terms by which British Columbia agreed to join the Canadian confederation.
But there were problems with raising money to build the railway, and finding enough labourers to do the work.
In 1881, British Columbia had a population of 49,500. It included 19,500 whites, 25,500 First Nations people, and 4,500 Chinese. Railway construction required a force of at least 10,000 workers.
The shortage of white workers and the high cost of building the Canadian Pacific Railway were two reasons that led to the use of Chinese labour. The first Chinese who worked on the job in British Columbia had experience building railways in the United States. As more labour was needed, Chinese workers began to sail directly from China to take up jobs on the railway.
In China, workers were hired by labour contractors working for Andrew Onderdonk, the American engineer who undertook to build the British Columbia section of the railway for the Canadian government. At this time, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company had not yet been formed.
The Chinese railway workers came from one small part of China, located in the southern province of Guangdong. Their home region had an agricultural base, but it lay close to the major seaports of Guang Zhou (Canton) and Hong Kong. For many decades, the men of south China had travelled overseas to work in southeast Asia, in places such as Singapore and Thailand. The tradition of men working abroad and sending money home to their wives and families was well established. News of the gold rushes in North America, first in California in 1848, and then in British Columbia in 1858, drew Chinese men over the Pacific Ocean by the thousands.
Between 1880 and 1885, about seventeen thousand Chinese workers arrived in B.C. They did not all stay for the entire railway job. They formed three-quarters of the total workforce.
Chinese workers received $1.00 to $1.25 a day, while their white counterparts got $2.00 to $2.50. The chief contractor on the railway told Canada’s prime minister that if Chinese workers were not used, then the railway would have taken an additional fifteen years to complete.
These workers were used only in British Columbia, where the mountainous terrain made the work extremely difficult and dangerous. The length of the railway in B.C. was approximately 615 kilometres. Andrew Onderdonk’s contracts covered the distance from Port Moody (on Burrard Inlet, close to Vancouver) to Craigellachie, where the “Last Spike” was pounded into the ground to join the tracks being built to meet each other from east and west.
A construction supervisor on the Canadian Pacific Railway praised the Chinese workers for being adaptable, obedient, self-reliant and clean-living. He found that the Chinese possessed a great advantage: an ability to look after themselves. This allowed large numbers of workers to be relocated from one work site to another. For example, two thousand Chinese workers could be moved 25 miles (40 km) and be at work on the job within 24 hours. By comparison, to move the same number of white men would have taken a week.
At the beginning of railway construction in British Columbia, Chinese and white workers used human muscle and body weight to push drills and swing hammers into rock. For Chinese crews, drilling and clearing tunnels was part of the task of opening a path for the railway. They pushed through thick forest and solid rock, removing trees and stumps, and clearing away undergrowth and boulders. Their tools were picks, drills, shovels and axes. A shift lasted ten hours, except for tunnelling, which was shorter at eight hours. The work of dynamiting and of erecting woodwork for bridges and tunnels was done by white workers.
Where the railway’s path did not tunnel through mountains, it was cut into the sides of mountains. There again, the Chinese removed tonnes of blown-up rock and rubble by manual labour.
The railway path had to be graded; that is, the slope of the road was shaped so that it did not slope too steeply. A gentle angle helped train engines push uphill and prevented them from racing downhill, out of control. Workers doing this work removed rock from mountainsides, dragged rock to fill gullies, and levelled the stone to create a smooth pathway sloping at the right angle.
After the railway’s path was cleared and graded, Chinese workers built up the roadbed. First they dug drainage ditches on both sides of the path. Then they covered it with gravel, which helped drainage, controlled weed growth and provided a flat base for the ties and rails. Horses then dragged a heavy scraper over the ballast to flatten it.
As different parts of the railway were finished along the route, Chinese workers were discharged. In December 1883, three thousand Chinese and five hundred white workers were laid off. It was reported that not many of the Chinese possessed enough savings to buy a ship ticket to return to China. Penniless, they suffered terribly, lacking food and shelter.
In the summer of 1884, the Chinese of Victoria, B.C., formed the Chinese Benevolent Association, partly in response to anti-Chinese racism and partly to help their fellow countrymen. The following year, many Chinese returned home, though a few moved east of the Rockies to settle in Alberta. Some settled in towns along the Fraser River.
With the completion of the railway, the winter of 1885–1886 took a heavy toll on the unemployed Chinese workers. At least two persons starved to death in the Fraser Valley. Many flooded the Chinatowns of New Westminster and Victoria. The provincial and federal governme
nts refused to help these needy Chinese, so Chinese merchants and organizations stepped in to do the job.
The estimates of how many Chinese workers died during this job range from 600 to 1500, with one estimate as high as 2200. In 1891, the Chinese Benevolent Association sent out teams of men who collected more than 300 unidentified bodies from the Fraser and Thompson River canyons and sent them back to China for burial.
There is a saying that one Chinese worker died for every mile of track laid. The length of railway that the Chinese worked on in British Columbia was 615 kilometres (382 miles). Even the lowest estimate of Chinese workers’ deaths backs up this wretched observation.
White British Columbians did not treat the Chinese equally or fairly. Anti-Chinese feelings existed even before railway construction began. White British Columbians knew that the Americans had employed over twelve thousand Chinese workers to build their transcontinental railway during 1863–1869. At the first sitting of British Columbia’s new provincial assembly in 1871, one member pressed for two laws. He wanted an annual tax of $50 to be levied on each Chinese in B.C. He wanted to ban any use of Chinese workers on government-funded public works.
White British Columbians disliked the Chinese for several reasons. They said the Chinese worked for lower wages, and took jobs away from white people. They said the Chinese were not settlers and thereby slowed the pace of economic growth. They accused the Chinese of carrying diseases and being a bad moral influence on young people. They said the Chinese could not assimilate into a “Canadian” way of life.
After the railway was finished, Canada made it clear that the Chinese were not wanted here. In the summer of 1885, a law was passed to reduce the number of them entering Canada. From January 1, 1886, onward, every Chinese person coming to Canada had to pay a head tax of $50. As well, the number of Chinese a ship could bring to Canada was limited.
