B., Ms, Ann Chan, Puiche Wong, and Ying Lam
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, Ann Chan, Puiche Wong and Ying Lau discuss their respective migrations to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, and their lives in Canada.
The women talk at length about changing marriage customs among Chinese Canadians, including discussions of picture brides (“across-the-port” brides), their own experience with matchmakers, and their varying degrees of desire to marry.
The women also discuss their social lives in Canada, noting that language barriers and cultural differences between Canadian-raised Chinese and those, like the interviewees, who were raised in China, made it difficult to make friends. They discuss their community involvement and their husbands’ attitudes toward this involvement.
The women also discuss their work lives in restaurants, their work raising their children, and other experiences in Canada.
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