Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In addition the fear for personal security in light of racist hostility and
the employment-driven need for labour mobility made settled family life
difficult. By 1911, there were 28 times more men than women of Chinese
origin in Canada, and in 1931 the differential remained twelve-fold
(Li 1998). The common migrant experience was that of a lonely bachelor
life in a confined Chinatown, separated by a vast ocean from a female-
headed village family in Guangdong province dependent on trans-Pacific
remittances. Family members were often not re-united for years, even dec-
ades, for wives could not immigrate in any numbers until the more liberal
era after the repeal of Chinese exclusion in 1947.
The Spectre of Chinatown
Geographical containment was part of the colonial strategy of management
and control. Segregated 'Chinatowns' emerged not only in larger centres
like Vancouver and Victoria but also in smaller mining and resource settle-
ments. In part segregation facilitated, as it does for all immigrants, the pur-
suit of shared cultural practices and rudimentary mutual aid. In Vancouver
aid was formalized in networks of some 80 clan, home town and other
benevolent societies (Willmott 1970; Wickberg et al. 1982; Ng 1999). In
part too segregation was motivated through the desire for security through
co-ethnic proximity, for in a frontier society random violence was always
possible; anti-Chinese rioters swept through Vancouver's Chinatown in
1887 and 1907, smashing property and beating up racialized victims.
But segregation was also enforced by the disciplinary power of the state.
Anderson (1991) chronicles the intricate and merciless network of sur-
veillance and incursions into Vancouver's Chinatown by the functionaries
of local government: the police, the medical officer, housing and sanitary
inspectors, and later, land use planners. All were concerned with a strat-
egy of containment: to establish boundaries and to reproduce both spatial
and social order according to the authority delegated to them. If spatial
boundaries would not hold and Chinese migrants spilled out of their
Chinatown ghetto, there would be no other alternative Alderman Hoskins
told the
Province
newspaper in 1919 than 'to take up arms to drive
them into the sea' (Anderson 1991: 123). The re-territorialization in
Chinatown of de-territorialized migrants was driven by an uncompromis-
ing Orientalism that shaped the Chinese through a defiling set of absences:
neither white, nor civilized, nor Christian. Anderson has expertly docu-
mented how Chinatown 'was a concept that belonged to Vancouver's
white European community' (1991: 104). Stereotyped and essentialized
by the media, by popular discourse, and by public rhetoric, the idea
of Chinatown was a solid edifice of the colonial mind at the margins of
empire, with portentous effects in the everyday lives of its residents and
