Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Occasionally, smugglers' itineraries are routed through Canada. In summer
1999, four decrepit vessels landed 599 bemused migrants on the remote
British Columbia coast (Mountz 2004). Twenty years earlier, equally impov-
erished arrivals, Vietnamese boat people, many of them ethnic Chinese,
completed a publicly-funded journey from refugee camps by air to Canada
after their own desperate escapes on the South China Sea (Beiser 1999).
These distinctions among ethnic Chinese are complemented by a huge
range of past experiences and future life plans, so that any view of a uni-
tary Chinese diaspora as either an objective phenomenon (Wang 1999)
or an internalized source of identity (Ang 2001) is compromised by deep
ambivalence. Aihwa Ong (1999:111) adds, 'Sometimes we forget we are
talking about one-quarter of the world's population', while Wang Gungwu
(1999:123) writes that place and practice introduce so many variations
that 'being Chinese is not simple'. Among overseas Chinese, local condi-
tions will create many regional traditions of 'Chineseness', and great
uncertainty whether these could be trumped by an over-arching diasporic
identity. Instead, Ien Ang proposes a more hybrid position, an identity
shaped both by here and there, past and present, in effect 'an unsettling
of identities' (Ang 2001: 16). Ethnic essentialism - not merely specifying
authentic or unvarying cultural tropes, but also homogenizing (including
mapping) populations on the basis of language or place of birth - is
always contingent, a classificatory act that is both demonstrable fact and
convenient fiction.
Consequently the self-designated Chinese-Canadian population of
1.22 million enumerated in 2006,
14
some 3.9 percent of all Canadians, is
highly diverse in length of residence, in immigrant or Canadian-born status,
in country of origin, in socio-economic status, immigrant class, capacity to
speak English or French and homeland experience. The total is perhaps
modest in a global diaspora recently estimated at 33 million, but significant
as part of the seven million listed outside Asia (Ma 2003). The varied
national backgrounds of ethnic Chinese in Toronto in 2001, over 80 percent
of them foreign-born, include 43 percent born in Hong Kong, 34 percent
in China, 7.5 percent in Vietnam and 4 percent in Taiwan, with the remain-
der coming from all corners of the world (Lo 2006). Hong Kongers and
Taiwanese are more suburbanized, with modest spatial overlap, while
Vietnamese- and Mainland-born (some of the latter former residents of
Hong Kong) are more heavily located in Toronto's central city. Among the
immigrants who claim Chinese ethnicity and moved to Canada between
1980 and 2001, the distribution of schooling is bi-modal; 39 percent had
nine years of education or less, while 43 percent had post-secondary educa-
tion. Their citizenship was diverse. Over 70 percent originated in China,
Hong Kong or Taiwan, but in all they 'were citizens of 132 countries from
Afghanistan to Zimbabwe' (Guo and DeVoretz 2006: 283).
