Lee, Linda
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, Linda Lee describes her family’s immigration history, growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, her educational and career pathway, and her marriage and adult family life.
Linda was born in Halifax in 1950, and had five siblings, three of whom were born in China. Her father ran a laundry in Halifax, and Linda remembers feeling separated from her childhood peers for financial rather than racial reasons, due to her family’s low economic status. Nevertheless, Linda recalls a happy childhood, with many family traditions and celebrations.
Linda and her siblings were highly educated. Linda became a lawyer, and was still practising as a lawyer at the time of the interview. Though two of her siblings chose to marry non-Chinese people, Linda married a Chinese Canadian in 1974. They have two children.
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