Tan, Wilany
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, Wilany Tan, who was born in Jakarta in 1957, discusses her immigration history, her marriage and her family life in Sasktoon, Saskatchewan.
Wilany’s great-grandparents came to Jakarta from China in the late 1800s. Wilany notes there was a large population of Chinese immigrants living in Jakarta, yet because Indonesia was a Dutch colony there was a significant Dutch cultural influence amongst the population. Within her family, Wilany said her parents mainly followed the cultural traditions of China.
When she was 17, Wilany went to Singapore and trained to be a secretary, then went on to study interior design in Germany and London, England. In 1978, Wilany moved to Washington, United States of America, and worked as a secretary in a hotel, and upon returning to Indonesia several years later, worked as an administrative assistant for the American Embassy. Reflecting on the places she had lived, Wilany preferred living in Germany because of the openness and freedoms the citizens there enjoyed.
In 1981, Wilany married her husband Boen, who is also of Indonesian with Chinese heritage, and they have one daughter. At the time of their marriage, Boen had obtained his Canadian citizenship. They eventually settled in Saskatoon.
Comparing children born in Western society to those born in Indonesia, Wilany positively reflected upon Western children exhibiting a greater sense of openness and a more sophisticated way of expressing themselves.
On issues of discrimination, Wilany said she had experienced incidents of discrimination while living in London, and went on to note some examples of discrimination against Chinese people living in Indonesia, usually on religious rather than racial grounds. She did not recall any discrimination in Canada.
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