Yearly Archives: 2006

Edmonton Journal June 24: Head-tax is incomplete / Descendents should get payments too

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Head-tax redress is incomplete

 

The Edmonton Journal

Published: Saturday, June 24, 2006

Re: “Full apology for head tax: Chinese-Canadians win redress
for racist policies,” The Journal, June 23.

This headline is wrong. The government has not made a full
apology for the head tax.

By making payment only to the surviving payers or their
surviving spouses, the government is only recognizing its wrong to a small
percentage of those discriminated against by the head tax. The article says
82,000 people paid the exorbitant fee; only 20 surviving payers and some 200
spouses will be compensated. That is less than 0.3 per cent.

The government, in effect, is saying we do not recognize the
wrong done to the immigrants who are now dead. Every head-tax certificate that
is outstanding should be redressed by the government. That is, it should buy
back each head-tax certificate as if it were a forced-investment certificate,
with a reasonable return.

As it stands, I feel that both my father and uncle, who paid the
head tax, have been forgotten and that the discrimination continues. Why?
Because I have their certificates to remind me of the hardship imposed and the
wrongful action taken by the Canadian government.

By compensating only the survivors and spouses, the government
is saying it did no wrong to those who have since died.

The headline should read, “Fractional apology for head tax.”

Ken P. Mah, Edmonton

© The Edmonton Journal 2006
———————————————————————

Descendants should get
payments too, local group says



 

Dorothy Tai holds her father George Mun Yee's head-tax certificate in Edmonton on Thursday while watching the government's apology on TV.
 
Dorothy Tai holds her
father George Mun Yee's head-tax certificate in Edmonton on Thursday while
watching the government's apology on TV.
Photograph by : John
Lucas, The Journal
 
Keith Gerein, The Edmonton Journal; with
files from CanWest News Service
Published: Friday, June 23, 2006

EDMONTON – Dan Park grew up without his father because of a punitive “head
tax” imposed on Chinese people who immigrated to Canada.

Park's father paid the $500 fee when he moved here in 1919, then spent years
toiling at odd jobs in his new country to pay back friends and relatives who
loaned him the money.

With little income left over, he couldn't send much to his young,
poverty-stricken family in China. The effect was tragic, as Park watched his
sister die from malnutrition and general poor health. His mother soon
followed.

Due to a 1923 Canadian policy that banned further Chinese immigration, Park
wasn't allowed to join his father in Canada until 1950.

Now 70, Park was among a dozen local Chinese-Canadians who gathered Thursday
in a Chinatown community centre to watch on TV as Prime Minister Stephen Harper
apologized for the head tax and announced compensation payments for its
victims.

As the politicians stood and cheered the announcement in the House of
Commons, the Edmonton group sat in silence. They were disappointed that the
government will provide payments only to those who paid the tax and their
spouses, but not to descendants.

Park said his story shows it wasn't just those who paid the tax who suffered.
Children were victims, too, and deserve equal compensation, he said.

“What the prime minister did was a step in the right direction, but it
doesn't go far enough,” he said. “Although the (immigrants) agreed to pay the
tax, you can't say it was a fair deal. How come the government did not ask
immigrants from other parts of the world to pay the same thing? It was
discrimination.”

Grant Toy also spent much of his life without a father due to the head tax
and the immigration ban.

“I didn't see him until was 14. It was very devastating for me to grow up
without a father,” he said. “The compensation should be for everyone. We've
already been punished once, we don't want to be punished a second time.”

Lorna Yee, 82, watched Harper's speech from her wheelchair. Unlike the others
who attended on Thursday, she can expect money from the government because her
late husband George paid the head tax when he came to Canada in 1923.

Yee's son John said his mother has no idea what she will do with the money.
The payment, he said, is far less important than getting the issue out in the
open.

“This (apology) brings us a little closure,” he said. “My sister and I didn't
know anything about the head tax growing up, and I'm not sure my mother did
either. My father never talked about it. This was a part of history that nobody
wanted brought up.”

Kenda Gee, the head of the Edmonton Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act
Redress Committee, said his group may try to further push the federal government
to extend compensation to descendants of those who paid the tax.

“The federal government still hasn't got it right,” Gee said. “They are
essentially redressing 20 surviving tax payers and maybe 200 spouses. That
leaves almost 4,000 families who were directly affected as victims but won't be
acknowledged by today's settlement.”

kgerein@thejournal.canwest.com

© The Edmonton Journal
2006.

Head Tax redress: What is the bigger picture?” Todd Wong commentary

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1) Todd Wong 2) with friends at Global News telecast from Dr. Sun Yat Sen Gardens (ethnic issues during the election) 3) with head tax redress supporters after the Redress Express Train departure ceremony in Vancouver 4) BC Coalition after the Head tax ceremony in Vancouver.

Head Tax redress: 
What is the bigger picture?” 
Todd Wong commentary

So what is the big picture?

I say that the BIGGER picture is this:  hundreds of thousands of Chinese Canadian head tax descendants will wake up out of their sleep, and say… “waitaminute… this isn't fair…”  If granny and grandpa or mommy and daddy died the day before the apology… then they get nothing!  They are dead, and redress is only for the living.

But the memory still lives.  As long as the descendents keep the memories of our mothers and our fathers, our grandmothers and our grandfathers… then they still live.  And if they still live, then redress compensation is for “those living head tax payers and spouses.”

The JC redress committee and the Mulroney Conservatives could not predict the impact, outcome, acceptance or continuing process on the Japanese Canadian community when Redress was made in 1988.

18 years later… the Japanese Canadian community is still broken.  Redress did not undo the despersal of the JC community across Canada, nor did it mend broken families, bring dead loved ones back to life, nor did it give back confiscated property.

There are Japanese Canadians who will never open up a copy of Obasan or Naomi's Road, because the memories of internment and property confiscation is too painful.  Even if Joy Kogawa and David Suzuki are two of Canada's most celebrated writers, examples of triumph despite adversity, members of the Order of Canada, the Order of BC, etc etc etc…    The personal experience is too buried, too integrated, too damaged to ever be completely healed.

Asians who have come to Canada after the 1950's and never understood or experienced the racism that those who lived here from 1880 to 1960 did, may never ever realize the extent of the negative self-identity and learned helplessness that crippled the Asian communities.  Yes… individuals succeeded despite the challenges… That is the triumph of the human spirit.  That is the will of the individual to succeed against adversity.

Talk to the UBC graduates who could not be hired as engineers, who took up jobs as clerks, in the same companies while whites who performed poorer in the same university classes got hired.

Talk to the people who applied for apartments or houses to rent, but were told “it's taken” – but when they phoned back with a “white name” that the place was available.

Talk to the people who were told that they would never be good enough as a white person, so don't even try.

When I hear our celebrated writers such as Joy Kogawa and Paul Yee, and many other friends say that while growing up – they wished they weren't Chinese, or Japanese, or Asian… if they could change their skin, their skin colour – because they were ashamed of being who they were… This is a tragedy.

It is a Canadian tragedy because it was the Canadian govt that is responsible for the Internment, and dispersal of the Japanese Canadians.  It is the Canadian govt that is responsible for the Chinese head tax and Exclusion Act.  It is the Canadian govt that is responsible for the Indian act  It is the BC government that is responsible for the Potlatch Law.

Who is responsible for the Canadian government?
It is the Canadian people.
It is the responsibility of the Canadian people to make redress happen.

Redress worked for the JC community… maybe not completely, but it was a start.  It was an acceptance.  It was an apology.  It was an acknowledgement.  It was a way to address the wrongs, and offer something symbolic to help make things right.

Redress did make people feel part of Canada.  It did offer healing, and the process for continued healing.  My friend Ellen Crowe-Swords told the audience at a Joy Kogawa reading at Vancouver Public Library, that nothing would ever take away all the hurt and anguish caused by internement. But by recieving the $21,000 – “I sure felt better.”

CC redress will not bring back loved ones, it cannot make up for the extra years of hard work paid in blood, sweat and tears.  It cannot erase the memories of Gim Wong being beaten and urinated on as a child.  It cannot take away the shame that Chinese Canadian soldiers felt unwanted.

But it sends a message to Canadians that this is the RIGHT THING to do.  Justice in OUR time.  The people who lived through the Head tax period and Exclusion Act are still alive.  It is THEIR time. It is still OUR time.  It is OUR time, as long as we choose to do something about it.

If we choose to walk away from it, then we are doing what non-Chinese Canadians did back then – by letting the Head Tax happen, by letting the Exclusion Act happen.  

If we choose to walk away from it, then we are doing what non-Japanese Canadians did back then – by letting the internment happen, by letting the confiscation of property happen.

If we choose to walk away from it, then we are doing what the non-Jews in Germany did back then – by letting the hooligans riot in the street on “Crystal Night”, by letting Jews be put on trains to be sent to concentration camps.

If we are to be the best Canadians we can… then we will be inclusive of ALL Canadians.  White, black, yellow, red, brown and pink, as well as every shade inbetween and every shade beyond.  Because this is what it means to be Canadian.  To be inclusive… to embrace cultural diversity as our strength… to find the THIRD WAY….   We do not fight for Win – Lose.  We fight for Win-Win-Win.  You, me and the community at large.  If somebody loses, then we all lose.

If we are to be the best Canadians we can… then we accept that the 1st generation Chinese Canadians were also “directly affected.”  They suffered as their parents suffered.  We know that in the JC community, whole generations tried to ignore and deny the internment process.  We know that whole generations succumbed to “Stockholm Syndrome” – to survive, they had to believe that they had done something wrong, and that the oppressors were their friends, and doing the right thing.

One certificate – one payment.  It is only fair.  If the government says… “sorry, the tax we charged you 120 to 80 years ago was wrong” but does not pay a dollar – is that right?

If the govt uses ill-gotten money because of racism for it's own purposes…  is it right for the govt to profit from racism?

What is the amount of $500 with accrued interest from 1903 to 2006?

If the Government were to charge the equivalent of the head tax amounts today… people would be outraged.  The Martin govt removed the $1000 immigrant landing fee, because it was seen as prohibitive for new immigrants.  What would the equivalant racist head tax be if it were charged today?

$100,000?   
$200,000?
$350,000?  That's what Charlie Quan said.

The equivalent of a house, or 2 years salary – maybe more.

Would a landing fee of $100,000 keep undesirable aliens from wanting to come to Canada?

But what if they keep coming… even if we raise it to $200,000 – then $300,000.

The federal govt is getting rich from these new immigrants – but the public opinion doesn't want them in the country – because they are dirty, smelly, have strange customs, will never adapt to Canadian ways.

What will we do?
Create an exclusion act.  Ban them completely.

But what about the ones who are already here, and want to bring over their wives and children.  The immigrants from America and Europe are bringing in their wives and children.

No… we don't want them breeding in Canada.  Keep the wives and children out.  They're not really human anyways.

No redress payments for 1st generation descendents.
This is what the Conservative government is saying.

Do you agree?

Gabriel Yiu writes:

If we take a closer look at the Japanese Canadian settlement, for a father whose house and factory were confiscated and himself put into concentration camp during WWII, when he passed away before the government redress was announced, if his offspring wasn't born prior to 1947, they would received [sic] no compensation.


My father was born before 1947.  Gim Wong was born before 1947.  Alex Louie, WW2 Veteran and subject of the NFB film “Unwanted Soldiers” was born before 1947.  Roy Mah OBC, founder of Chinatown News, was born before 1947.  But they will not recieve redress payment because they parents who paid the head tax are predeceased.  Were they still “directly affected” by the impact and legacy of the head tax and exclusion act?  Many will argue yes.

Under the JC redress paremeters, they would recieve redress payment, even though their parents are predeceased.

Too many head tax payers and spouses have died between 1984 and 2006, when the issue of redress was first announced.  The government needs to acknowledge and honour those that have died before redress was made.  Otherwise, the ghosts are not properly buried and will come back to haunt the government.

It is only fair, just and honourable.

It is merely the end of one head tax era, and the start of another era of exclusion.

Todd Wong
5th generation Canadian
head tax descendant for 4 generations.

“Head Tax Apology is Only First Step” – Prof. Henry Yu

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“Head Tax Apology is Only First
Step”
Prof. Henry Yu,
Department of History, University of British Columbia
 
The announcement this week by Prime Minister
Stephen Harper of a formal apology to Chinese Canadians for the injust Head Tax
imposed between 1885 and 1923 was an important symbolic act. As a historian who
teaches and researches the history of Chinese migrants to Canada at UBC, and as
a descendent myself of Head Tax payers, I welcome this important gesture as a
step towards the healing and reconciliation with a racist past that Canada still
sorely needs. However, in extending compensation only to the handful of
those still alive who paid the onerous Head Tax, Parliament missed an
opportunity to reconcile the long troubled past of Canada’s treatment of Chinese
Canadians.
 
I was born and raised in Canada,
and was fortunate to know as a child my grandfather, Yeung Sing Yew, who paid
$500 (over a year’s salary at the time) in Head Tax as a 13-year old migrant in
1923, months before Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which forbade any
further Chinese immigration. His father before him had come to Canada to help
build the railroads, and his older brothers were pioneers in B.C. who worked in
mines, grew produce, owned grocery stores, and built lumber mills. He followed
them in their pioneering activities, and then for over thirty years, my
grandfather worked as a butcher on CPR ships that cruised between Vancouver and
Alaska. My grandfather lived almost his entire life in Canada, only returning to
China to marry, and was forced to leave his pregnant wife behind in China
because of Canadian Exclusion laws. These generations of split families were the
direct legacy of Canadian legal racism. His own father had left him and his
brothers in China as children because he could not afford to bring them over
until they were old enough to work and help pay off their own Head Tax payments.
When my grandmother and mother were finally able to join my grandfather in
Canada, just before I was born, it was an emotional reunion. She had never known
a father growing up, and he had been deprived of knowing his own child–my
mother was 26 years old the first time she met her father. Perhaps he took a
special interest in his grandchildren because of what he had missed: I remember
walking as a 4 year old with him to Chinatown and his pride in showing off a
grandchild to his friends. Most of them had lived a similar life, and the look
of joy in their faces as they gathered in the café to play with me spoke volumes
about their own missing children and grandchildren. Some of them were able to
bring their wives and children to Canada after the Immigration Act of 1967 made
it easier to reunite families (the large wave of Chinese who came to Canada in
the 1970s contained large numbers of these family unifications), but many of
them lived out their days in Chinatown flophouses as lonely old men, bereft of
wives because immigration policy had kept Chinese women out and blocked them
from having relationships with white women because of racism.
 
I think it is
entirely right that Canada as a nation formally apologizes for its treatment of
men like my grandfather and his friends. It is long overdue, since the
movement for such an apology is almost half a century old, and if it had been
made in a timely fashion, many more of those who paid would be alive to hear
it. I wish my grandfather had lived to hear Canada say “We are sorry.”
As a child, I remember him showing my mother his Head Tax certificate and
explaining the years of hard work it took him to pay it off. He knew it had been
injust, recognized that nobody except the Chinese had been required to pay, and
an apology while he was alive would have had immeasurable meaning. He knew the
racism that had singled out the Chinese–he lived it every day of his life as a
second class citizen in Canada–but materially he knew it as he struggled to
repay his debt. The governments of Canada and of British Columbia split the $23
million proceeds from the Head Tax (well over $1 billion in today’s money), and
it represented a significant proportion of BC’s provincial revenue in its early
history. Canadians enjoyed the benefits of Chinese labor not only because of
their work on the railroads and in lumber mills, farms, mines, grocery stores,
restaurants, and other industries–everyone else benefitted directly from the
infrastructure that was built using Head Tax revenue: the roads and sewers, but
also the schools and hospitals, most of which Chinese Canadians were not even
allowed to use because of “whites only” policies.
 
As we move forward from
this historic step in addressing anti-Chinese racism, I would urge my fellow
Canadians to reconsider and reconcile with our past. Our national
history still excludes the Chinese just as our national policies did,
recognizing them only for being here during the Gold Rush and helping build the
trans-Canada railroad. What were they doing the rest of the time? My
grandfather, like his father and brothers, lived and worked in Canada during the
rest of that time, helping build it under incredible duress. Most European
settlers came to the west coast of North America to find the Chinese already
there. Before the railroad, it was easier for the Chinese to cross the Pacific
in a ship than for Europeans to cross North America. The irony of the Chinese
helping build the transcontinental railroad is that it made it easier for
trans-Atlantic migrants to come to the Pacific coast. Our history is wrong. The
story we usually hear is that anti-Chinese agitation centered around the claim
that the Chinese came late and “took” the jobs of whites. In fact, the complete
opposite was true. Anti-Chinese movements began as European settlers arrived to
find Chinese, First Nations and others (such as Japanese and South Asians) well
settled in a Pacific British Columbia. The rhetoric was that the Chinese “took”
jobs away from “whites”; the reality was that “whites” wanted to take jobs away
from the Chinese who were already there, just as they wanted to take the land
from the First Nations people who were already there.
 
Redress for the Head Tax
that is limited to those handful of survivors and their wives who actually paid
the Head Tax is like settling Native land claims by giving back stolen land only
to those First Nations people who are still alive from when the land was first
taken. We all live with the historical legacies of white supremacy in
the form of legal policies such as land appropriation, immigration exclusion,
and the revenue generated from the Head Tax. We have all either benefitted or
suffered from this history in the forms of privilege that it granted or denied
our ancestors, and the legacies of the inequity did not go away with the death
of my grandfather, his brothers, nor his friends.
 
My mother loves Canada—for the
last four decades it has given her a home, given her the education of her
children, and given her hope that there is a place that strives for a better
world. She does not want the money paid so onerously and unjustly by my
great-grandfather, my grandfather, and his brothers. But symbolically, should
she not decide how to redress the wrong that was committed? Rather than
a government committee, or even a panel of historians and “experts” such as
myself, should not she and others who felt directly the legacies of that wrong,
decide how to materially address the financial redistribution of that tainted
money (even if Canada were to only put aside the actual amount of $23 million
collected, it’s present value would be a pittance in comparison to it’s original
worth)? There are many proposals for how to redress the wrong—a fund
for Heritage Canada to distribute for education and community development,
scholarships for students and scholars to study Chinese Canadian history, money
to collect for our national archives materials on the Chinese and other groups
that have been neglected and excluded from a collective sense of our past. We
should have a collective fund, but would there not be greater meaning and moral
purpose to have an array of people like my mother deciding how best to make
amends? There can not be a single definition about how to right a wrong. The
conflicts within Chinese Canadian communities over the past year reflect
disagreements about what is best. Should we not then agree to disagree, and to
see how individual families and individuals make meaning out of reconciliation?
I want to hear the stories of how one family gave money to charity, or how
another decided to create a scholarship, or how someone else decided that their
father or grandfather would be at rest if he knew that the money had gone to an
education fund for a grandchild robbed of an inheritance for which he could not
save. When Canada gave financial redress to Japanese Canadians interned during
the war, one of the wonderful results was that the families each had a chance to
make peace with the past in their own way, and the overall effect of each of
these individual decisions was so much greater than a small set of decisions
that could be made by a government committee or Heritage
Commission.
 
We need, then, to acknowledge our
troubled past by giving individual families the choice on how they want to
reconcile with the wrongs committed, and also to create a collective fund to
remake our national history. As a scholar, I believe we need a redefinition of
Canadian history to finally address the central role played by those who were
heretofore erased from our official history. One of the reasons I became a
scholar was because the history I learned in school was so at odds with the
reality I knew from family stories passed down from my grandfather and
great-grandfather. Their Canada was not just a story about railroad workers and
victims of racism. They told stories of Chinese men who had children with First
Nations women, who lived and traded among aboriginal and European migrant
communities in rural areas throughout B.C., who operated cafés  and grocery stores in small towns
throughout the Prairies, who lived and worked together with their neighbors to
create Canada. For four decades on a CPR cruise ship, my grandfather served
those who recently arrived from Britain and Europe who had the privilege to
instantly call themselves Canadian and to imply that he and not they had just
arrived.  But he knew that the life
he had made here, as hard as it was, was a life made in Canada.

 
Henry Yu is an Associate
Professor of History and Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and
Research on Chinese Canadians (INSTRCC) at the University of British Columbia.