Chang, Billie
Over 130 interviews with Chinese Canadian women were conducted for the book Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women. Produced in 1992 by the Women’s Book Committee of the Chinese Canadian National Council, Jin Guo was intended to fill the gap in historical accounts of Chinese Canadian women’s history. Researchers traveled across Canada to interview Chinese Canadian women of various ages and backgrounds. The book’s authors, Amy Go, Winnie Ng, Dora Nipp, Julia Tao, Terry Woo and May Yee, organized the book around themes and patterns that emerged across multiple interviews – feelings of isolation and culture shock upon arrival in Canada, memories of parent-child relationships, the importance of education, the working lives of women, discrimination, cultural identity, marriage and dating, family life, perspectives on aging and retirement, and examples community activism. The interviews conducted for this project are stored at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario’s archives. This collections database includes a large cross-section of interviews conducted for Jin Guo – in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
In this interview, Billie Chang describes her life growing up in Hong Kong, moving to England for school and finally settling in Canada in 1970 where she completed her studies, worked and raised a family.
Billie was born in 1949 in Hong Kong to parents from Shanghai. She remembers her strict schooling in Hong Kong, noting that she did not feel pressure from her parents to excel academically. She recalls how she and her two sisters were expected to do household chores, but her two brothers were not.
After her brother went abroad for schooling, Billie decided to do the same, going first to England and then to Canada, joining her sister in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was introduced to her husband through mutual friends, and they corresponded for one year before Billie joined him in Edmonton and they married. Though she recalls some instances of employment discrimination, Billie found work as a secretary and stenographer. When her husband moved to Labrador to work as a mining engineer, she joined him, and that is where they had their children. She describes their life in Labrador, including learning to skate, ski and speak French.
Billie remarks on how she behaves differently with Canadians than she does with Chinese people, censoring herself more with her non-Chinese friends. She reflects on feelings of “Canadian-ness” among different generations of immigrants.
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