Grant, Gretta
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, Gretta Grant reflects on her family’s history, growing up in London, Ontario, and aspects of her personal and professional life as the first Chinese Canadian woman to practise law.
Gretta’s father rented a stall in a marketplace in London, Ontario in order to qualify as a merchant and avoid the head tax when bringing his wife to Canada. He opened a restaurant in London in 1914 and started his family. Gretta was born in London in 1921; she was the seventh of eight children.
Gretta remembers her childhood as a happy one, with loving and supportive parents who placed a great deal of importance on education. Though the family business struggled during the Depression, Gretta’s father managed to send all of his children to university. Gretta attributes her social acceptance in the London community to the relatively small Chinese population in London. She moved to Toronto, Ontario to attend law school where she felt more discrimination. She remembers facing intolerance from both the white population and from Chinese-born immigrants in Toronto because she did not speak Chinese.
In law school she met her husband, a Scottish-Canadian man from rural Ontario. Gretta explains that both sets of parents were supportive of the marriage and that their interracial status was of little importance. She recalls raising her four children, encouraging them to be proud of their interracial heritage and to dispel prejudice with confidence and humour.
Gretta became involved in Chinese cultural organizations later in life and she recalls butting heads with other organizers because of her assertive personality. She also remembers feeling ostracized at various social events because she did not speak Chinese. She stresses that Chinese Canadians need to integrate rather than assimilate into the Canadian community at large, and that they should become productive Canadian citizens without forgetting their Chinese heritage.
2 / 2 
