Chan, Amy
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, Amy Chan discusses growing up in China and Hong Kong, moving to Australia and then to Canada, her marriage and divorce, her career, and her identity as a single mother.
Amy Chan was born to a wealthy family in China in the 1940s. She received an education away from home at a boarding school. She went to Hong Kong after high school to visit a relative. Amy did not enjoy life in Hong Kong and wanted to return the China for university. However due to the political instability in China at the time, she was urged to remain in Hong Kong. She saw that many of their friends and former classmates were heading off to university abroad and decided to follow suit. She was accepted into Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
In 1965, she came to Canada and married shortly after. Unfortunately, they were divorced within a couple years just before her first daughter was born. The legal battle drained her financially and emotionally. She went through a period of severe depression. A friend suggested that she go back to school and to see a counselor. Amy became an accountant after two years and regained her confidence and happiness when she got her first job.
Amy switched jobs several times throughout her career. She did not experience much discrimination.
Amy is grateful to be in Canada because her divorce would have been judged very harshly had she been in China. She is also grateful for the opportunity to return to university as a mature student, which would have been impossible in Hong Kong. To Amy, Canada had been a wonderful place for her to build a life for her and her daughter as a single parent.
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