Blood and Iron
Page 15
The Canadian Pacific Railway made the idea of a Canada stretching “from sea to shining sea” a reality. Chinese workers were a major part of that accomplishment. In September 1989 a “Memorial to Commemorate the Chinese Railway Workers in Canada” was unveiled in downtown Toronto. The memorial takes the shape of a life-size railway trestle. Part of the memorial’s text reads:
… Far from their families, amid hostile sentiments, these men laboured long hours and made the completion of the railway physically and economically possible…. With no means of going back to China when their labour was no longer needed, thousands drifted in near destitution along the completed track. All of them remained nameless in the history of Canada…. We erect this monument to remember them.
Images and Documents
Image 1: Mealtime for Chinese workers aboard a Canadian Pacific Railway Company ship. The date and location of the image are not known, but we can tell that the workers are Chinese because of the Chinese-style jacket worn by the man on the left and by the coiling of queues atop men’s heads.
Image 2: Two Chinese railway workers at a camp near Kamloops, British Columbia. The crews moved from site to site, to be close to construction.
Image 3: Possibly a rest day for Chinese railway workers. Note the wash basin, belongings being dried, and men gathered in a group.
Image 4: Workers remove rubble from the path of the railway using wheelbarrows and wooden ramps.
Image 5: Tunnel #8, about 27 km above Yale, showing the narrow mouth, the river below, and the mountains from which rocks rolled onto the workers. For a sense of scale, note the man standing near the entrance.
Image 6: C.P.R. locomotive #365 moves across a bridge in the Fraser Canyon.
Image 7: White workers made twice the wage of the Chinese crews.
Image 8: The section of railway through the Fraser Canyon, with its high cliffs, was one of the most difficult to complete.
Glossary
Almanac, Chinese: A guidebook to the days of the year. Among many items, an almanac notes the changes of the seasons, predicts weather and advises if certain days are good for events such as weddings or funerals.
Chek-Hom: A busy market town in Guangdong province in south China.
Ching Ming: This day of observance is held by Chinese families each spring to pay respects to their ancestors at gravesites.
Fan-tan, fan-tan cloth: Fan-tan is a gambling game where money is bet on how many beads are under a cover. The fan-tan cloth is marked with squares where a player may place money to make bets.
Ginger: A plant that is eaten as food, medicine or spice.
Gold Mountain: In the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants called North America “Gold Mountain” because the gold rushes in California and in British Columbia had drawn them here.
Heavenly Nines: A game played with dominoes.
Horse position: A stance in Chinese martial arts.
Ik-Hoi: A busy market town in Guangdong province in south China.
Incense: Incense is made from aromatic woods, oils and other materials such as spices. When incense is burnt, smoke and fragrant smells are released.
Insects Awaken: A spring day in the Chinese almanac.
Jung-San: A county in Guangdong province, south China.
Lunar calendar: A lunar calendar is based on the cycles of the moon (from new moon to full moon). A lunar cycle repeats every 29.5 days. A solar calendar is based on the earth’s revolution around the sun, so one month is one-twelfth of a year, at 30.4 days.
Ming dynasty: A period of imperial rule in China that lasted from 1368 to 1644 CE.
New Year (lunar) customs: Just before the lunar New Year, families in China clean the house thoroughly. People also distribute red packets of gift money to children, feast on special foods and wear new clothes.
Opera, Chinese: Chinese opera tells stories on stage through song, dance and acting. In the nineteenth century, female roles in Chinese opera were played by male actors.
Paddlewheeler: A ship or boat that is propelled by a large wheel containing many paddle blades.
Red Beard Ghosts: In the nineteenth century, Chinese people often called Westerners by this name, which referred to a hair colour that had been rarely seen in Asia. The word “ghost” was used negatively.
Say-Yup: Say-Yup means “Four Counties” and was a region where many Chinese immigrants came from.
Second City: The name Chinese immigrants used for New Westminster, British Columbia.
Toi-San: One of the four counties in Say-Yup, in south China.
Yuan dynasty: A period of imperial rule in China that lasted from 1271 to 1368 CE.
Zhou: A common Chinese surname.
Acknowledgments
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover cameo: Document with photograph certifying that a certificate of identity was issued, 11/15/1910; Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, compiled ca. 1882 – ca. 1960, National Archives and Records Administration, ARC identifier 278696.
Cover scene: Work Crew Laying Track in the Lower Fraser Valley, 1881, Royal BC Museum, A-07021.
Cover details: Aged journal © Shutterstock/velora, aged paper © Shutterstock/Filipchuck Oleg Vasilovich, belly band © ranplett/istockphoto, (back cover) label © Shutterstock/Thomas Bethge
Image 1: Oriental men aboard a Canadian Pacific Railway Company ship. Date, location and photographer unknown, Vancouver Public Library 12866.
Image 2: Chinese Camp, Kamloops, British Columbia, 1886, Library and Archives Canada, C-021987.
Image 3: Construction of a Chinese Camp, Library and Archives Canada C-016715.
Image 4: Chinese at work on C.P.R. in mountains, Ernest Brown/ Library and Archives Canada, C-6686.
Image 5: Tunnel No. 8, 16 ½ Miles Above Yale, Vancouver Public Library 416.
Image 6: C.P.R. locomotive #365 on a bridge in the Fraser Canyon, Vancouver Public Library Accession Number 9556.
Image 7: Schedule of Wages for White Labour on the Canadian Pacific Railway Line, Inland Sentinel.
Image 8: Map by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 1999 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada.
The publisher wishes to thank W. Peter Ward and Robert Turner for sharing their historical expertise; and Barbara Hehner for her careful checking of the factual details.
About the Author
Paul Yee tells an intriguing story about growing up Chinese in Canada, but not learning much about the history of Chinese people here. He says, “When I was a child in the 1960s, there were no books about my world — the world of immigrants, racial minorities and different histories. I had to learn about these things much later in life.” He heard some stories from his Aunt Lillian, who raised him. She told him a tale about railway-building: “One cold winter day, a worker wandered by mistake into a warehouse. He passed a high shelf. Looking up, he saw round shapes lining the edge. Then he saw that each round shape had a pigtail coiled around it. Those were heads of Chinese workers. The shelf held frozen bodies. The worker ran out as fast as he could.”
Paul didn’t learn about the Chinese working on the Canadian Pacific Railway until he went to university. “The story wasn’t taught anywhere, not even at my Chinese language school,” Paul says. “This event had involved thousands of Chinese working at great personal cost to help build one of Canada’s defining symbols. Yet their personal stories were not passed down from generation to generation within families. That puzzled me.
“One explanation is this. In the nineteenth century, south China saw huge numbers of its men go abroad to work, to several countries in southeast Asia, to Australia and to North America. They worked abroad in many fields and sent money home to their families. To them, the Canadian Pacific Railway was just another job. It was tough work, b
ut that was the nature of overseas work.
“Another explanation? Railway construction followed the gold rushes in California and British Columbia. There would have been stories about lucky adventurers who picked up gold in the rivers to take home. Those tales would have dazzled eager listeners. People didn’t want to hear about the dirty, back-breaking labour of moving earth and rocks that was part of railway-building.
“I didn’t grow up with my parents, so I heard very little family history. In my early twenties, I toured China and my father’s village. Word of my visit reached my father’s older sister, whom I never knew existed. She wrote to me after I returned to Canada. I wrote back asking her about my grandfather. She said he had worked on the railway. To this day, I wonder if I can believe her 100 per cent.”
Paul Yee has written almost twenty picture books and novels, contemporary and historical, about the Chinese experience in Canada. Among his many other honours, he won the Governor General’s Award for Ghost Train, the B.C. Book Prize for Tales from Gold Mountain, a Canada Council Honourable Mention for The Curses of Third Uncle, a placement on the IODE Violet Downey Recommend List for Blood and Iron, and was nominated for the CLA Book of the Year Award for Dead Man’s Gold and Other Stories.
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For more information please see the I AM CANADA
website: www.scholastic.ca/iamcanada
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Lee Heen-gwong is a fictional character created by the author, and his journal is a work of fiction.
Copyright © 2010 by Paul Yee. All rights reserved.
A Dear Canada Book. Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd. SCHOLASTIC and I AM CANADA and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
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ISBN: 978-1-4431-1926-9
First eBook edition: January, 2012