Between Two Worlds

Carol F. Lee

My mother’s name was Mary Quan. She was born in Canada in 1921. I grew up hearing about my mother’s transpacific experiences in the 1930s and her sense of dual Canadian and Chinese identity in the 1940s, which was shaped in large part by openings and closings of opportunities and the structural realities of exclusion in Canada.  

I was reminded of my mother’s stories recently while reading Letian Wang’s master’s thesis about the Vancouver Chinese community’s active support for wartime aid to China, 1937-1945. Wang contends that the Chinese Canadians who worked so hard and gave so much money to the Chinese war effort were motivated in large part by a strategy to improve their own situation in Canada by strengthening China, so that China could intervene effectively with Canada to grant them equal rights.  He questions a commonly held view that Chinese Canadians were principally motivated by patriotic attachment to China in reaction to Canada’s unwillingness to grant them equal citizenship.  Wang’s thesis adds a new dimension to the scholarly literature. However, based on the experience of my mother’s family in BC, I would like to draw attention to another consideration.  Until the late 1940s, China offered career opportunities for Canadian-born Chinese with university educations.  Canada did not.  This reality affected the ways in which they identified with China and Canada.  

The 1923 Chinese Immigration Act distorted the composition of the Chinese population in Canada.  Chinese men in Canada were unable to bring wives and children to join them.  Canada’s Chinese population declined 25% from 1931 to 1941.  In 1941, only 18.7% of Canada’s Chinese population had been born in Canada.  And despite their birth in Canada, they were disenfranchised in British Columbia, where the majority of Chinese Canadians resided.  As a result, they were barred from professions such as law, pharmacy, and engineering that required voting eligibility.  Even without legal barriers, white employers did not want Chinese employees for non-menial jobs. 

In Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver, Paul Yee describes the situation faced by Canadian-born Chinese in the 1940’s.  As he explains, “This was a generation caught between two worlds.  On one side there was Chinese school, China, and the second-class status of the Chinese in Canada.  On the other, there was Canada with its promises of British justice and fair play.”^[1]  This generation had been educated in BC, many of them at university, but “few could find work outside Chinatown because of racial discrimination.”^[2]  Yee added that those with professional degrees looked to China for work. Jobs available to young men included work in cafés, laundries, grocery stores, lumberyards, steamships, taxi or truck driving.  Women could work in fruit and vegetable stores, canneries, or garment factories.  

The experiences of my mother and her brothers Ben and Dick – born in Canada in the 1920s — corroborate Yee’s account.  As my mother told me, “there were no good professional jobs to be had in Canada at that time.”  She and her brothers did not wish to spend their lives working at their father’s produce store.  Therefore, they and many other university-educated Chinese Canadian students expected to build their careers in China.  The three Quan children were enrolled by their father in boarding school in Canton in 1936 to gain proficiency in Chinese language and culture. The escalation of the Second Sino-Japanese War caused their parents to bring them back to Canada in early 1938.  All three won full tuition scholarships to UBC in competitive examinations and graduated with first class degrees.  My mother graduated from UBC in English in 1945 and then earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.  Ben graduated from UBC in engineering in 1947, Dick in 1949.  When they began their engineering studies, they were barred by law from becoming engineers in BC because they were ineligible to vote.  My mother and both uncles contemplated returning to China to help with the postwar reconstruction of China.  

According to historian Shelly Chan, Vancouver’s Canadian-born Chinese developed a new identity during the Second World War. She notes that “from feeling neither entirely ‘Chinese’ nor ‘Canadian,’” Vancouver’s Chinese “found themselves embracing a double identity that was both ‘Chinese’ and ‘Canadian.'” China’s status as a wartime ally, and more favorable Canadian attitudes toward the Chinese, encouraged many Vancouver Chinese to feel that they belonged in Canada and to support Canada’s war effort with enthusiasm.  At the same time, they were still Chinese culturally and emotionally, “the result of family lore, childhood upbringing, and personal experiences.”  Thus, according to Chan, “Trans-Pacific connections, memories, and obligations required many Vancouver Chinese to move continuously between the two worlds of China and Canada.” 

In an essay published in The Chinese Christian Student in 1945, my mother articulated her sense of a dual Chinese and Canadian identity as living “between two worlds” while seeking to create a bridge between them.^[3] Her writing shows that dual identity was not only an abstract scholarly concept but a lived reality forged by multiple cultural expectations — as well as unequal career opportunities. She quoted a passage from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which she had read in a German literature course at UBC: “Ich stehe zwischen zwei Welt, und bin in keiner daheim.”  She wrote:

Thomas Mann was speaking of the world of the artist and the normal world of everyday when he said, “I stand between two worlds, and am in neither one at home,” but these words of his may very aptly be applied to the lot of the overseas Chinese.  Many of us are first generation, that is to say, our parents came from China.  We not only have the usual gulf which separates parents from children, that of belonging to a different generation, but we also have the gulf of belonging to a different world.  Theirs is the old, ours, the new.  It is inevitable that the concepts and ideals which have been taught to us from childhood will be constantly clashing with western conceptions which we have gradually absorbed.

My mother added, “We stand midway between China and the west, serving as a link.  If it is at all possible, it is the duty of the overseas Chinese to merge the two worlds.”  

Contrasting the specialization of knowledge in Western scholarship with “humanized knowledge” in China, she wrote, “We must bring these compartments together to build a complete whole and attempt to integrate it with the humanized knowledge of China. . . . From our precarious position astride the two worlds, we must study and understand Chinese culture, attempting to determine the most advantageous way in which we can graft western culture on to our own.”  Overseas Chinese, she wrote, had “two things to bring to China:  specialized training and western efficiency.  As we look at China’s vast territory and the inevitable social and economic problems which must accompany it, we are faced with a sense of utter inadequacy.  However, bear this in mind – whatever our training be, whether in the field of rehabilitation, industrialization or education, there must be a niche for us.”  She exhorted her readers to “devotion in our service to China.”  Her conclusion:  “Above all, have faith in China and be loyal to her.”  Thus, my mother’s proposed resolution of her situation between two worlds was to bring western ideas and western efficiency to China’s task of modernization.   

Shortly after my mother wrote this essay, the world changed and she did not pursue a career in China,  She received an offer to teach literature at Lingnan University in Canton (Guangzhou).  However, in the late 1940s, the military successes of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War worsened the prospects in China for Canadians of Chinese ancestry.  On the other hand, important changes in Canada – enfranchisement, opening of the professions, and the gradual end of Chinese exclusion — improved the situation of the Chinese Canadian community.  

My mother’s quotation from Thomas Mann remains a vivid memory, both in the original German and in English translation. Years later, when I read essays by Professor Henry Yu about his concept of “Pacific Canada,” his advocacy for using the term “migration” rather than “immigration” resonated with me.  My mother’s early experiences did not reflect the traditional concept of one-way migration with three phases – leaving the old country, crossing the sea, and adjusting to the new home.  Discrimination in Canada created incentives for university educated Canadian-born Chinese in my mother’s generation to look to China – their parents’ place of birth, which was poorer and less developed than Canada — for career opportunities.  Yet they also identified as Canadians because of their upbringing and exposure to Canadian culture.  Yu’s complex and fluid concept of migration — “movements of people in multiple directions and with multiple journeys throughout a person’s life” – provides a valuable perspective on the experience of Canadian born Chinese before the turning points in the late 1940s. At that time, my mother held a dual Chinese and Canadian identity, one that was shaped by structural factors in both China and Canada and one that she understood as a potential bridge between cultures. 

Carol F. Lee is a retired lawyer in New York City who has spent decades researching her family history, including oral history, Chinese immigration records, historic newspaper databases, archives, books and articles.  In 1976, she published an article in BC Studies about the enfranchisement of Chinese and Japanese Canadians in British Columbia.  Mary Quan Lee died on October 11, 1991, in Granada Hills, California.  Her family has established the Mary Quan Lee Memorial Scholarship in English at UBC in her honor.

References

^[1] Paul Yee, Saltwater City:  An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Douglas & McIntyre, 1988), 103. 

^[2] Yee, Saltwater City, 103.

^[3] Mary Quan, “The Road Ahead:  A Chinese Girl Visualizes the Future Woman’s Role in China,” The Chinese Christian Student, December 1945.