Chan, Lizzie
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, Lizzie Chan describes her family’s immigration history, and her family’s life in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Lizzie was born in 1924 in Vancouver. Her father first immigrated to Canada in about 1910 to escape poverty in China. His surname was Wang, and he relied on the assistance of people in his surname association to survive in Canada. Lizzie’s mother came to Canada some time later, at the age of 14 or 15. They had five children, living in a small room in Vancouver. Her parents decided to send Lizzie and her siblings back to China in 1927.
Lizzie describes her father’s work in a laundry and her mother’s work in a restaurant, making cakes. She explains that women were expected to remain in Chinatown.
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