Chow, Kam
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 with Kam Chow, Mai Lai and others, they discuss growing up in Hong Kong, immigrating to Canada, and work life and family life in Canada. The primary narrator came to Canada as an agricultural worker, and then spent many years working as a dishwasher in a restaurant, stopping working when she had children. She explains that she would like to return to work, but that childcare costs make this unfeasible. She expresses worries for her children’s futures. She speaks about wages she earned, and the price of her house and other costs. She also discusses her lack of work opportunity, due to lack of skills and poor English. She believes that there was more opportunity in Hong Kong for piece-work as a seamstress, and wishes she had the same opportunities in Canada.
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