What I Saw In My Early Years
By Nina Zhou, 2021
This interview is set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Era in Toronto, Canada. Many Chinese families were separated due to discriminatory immigration laws. Restrictions on family reunification were not lifted until late 1960s. During the Exclusion Era, Chinatown was called the “bachelors society” because most wives and children were not allowed to accompany. The narrator, Bernice Hune, whose family was intact at that time, was one of the very few Chinese families to have this luck. She is a third-generation Chinese Canadian. In this audio clip, you will hear Bernice talking about her feelings about and perception of Asia when she was a child, when positive depictions of Chinese were absent in textbooks around 1950s-60s. She also talks about her family’s Cantonese linguistic influence in shaping her understanding of things that she saw in Chinatown at that time.
TRANSCRIPT:
Bernice: Asia was not discussed at school. You learned about Marco Polo, and he called it Cathay. Okay, that’s the first time you learn something, it’s just like not important, insignificant, not discussed.
And then the bit of information coming through is this element of fear, which is communism, red. So then the general tone is these booming voices that put this kind of —
But in my general daily life, there’s the odd comic book or something about a Jap. and there’s this “pow, pow, pow” kind of thing. And you just get the feeling that that’s not good. And you get the feeling about, shoot ’em up, you know, all the cowboy things. You get the feeling all those Indians, you know, somehow — you just get a general sense that, that these people, they’re not fully formed in the information you are receiving from the outside world.
Okay. And I wasn’t able to put these things together in my younger mind. Because I didn’t like the tone that was coming on about Asia, I think, at a certain age or point or something. I just kind of couldn’t read, in English, what people writing about Asia.
Because it — I had always had a tone that wasn’t the world I knew, from a family community sense of way. And so I couldn’t put them together. So I found it better just not to read about it. I waited a long, long, long, long time before I could read about it. And then the general sense from my, my elders, in the Cantonese language, you got the sense that they didn’t want to talk about things. They were rather protective. If they had hardships, they weren’t gonna—
And you don’t go up to ask why is that old man so old? And why is he all alone? I mean, you can’t, as a child, but certainly I saw enough men like that. There were theses elderly men in Chinatown. It’s just not explained to me.
At school, they don’t talk about the Exclusion Act. You can’t find it in any of the books, okay. I don’t even know to this date what the Chinese word for Exclusion Act is. All I know is “Um Jun Um Jun” (唔准唔准), “It was not allowed”. You know, I say to my aunt, well, you know. And they’d say things like, “Well, you had to come back within two years — You have to come back within two years.” I mean, now I know that the Canadian government – in order for you to sustain whatever status you have in Canada, the men had to come back at one point within one year, or at the other point, within two years. Or they would lose their status. Okay, those are immigration rules. But as a young person, it wasn’t explained to me in that way. Just was “Um Jun Um Jun”, “it wasn’t allowed”, it wasn’t permitted.