Covid-19 and spectres of quarantine for the Chinese Canadian community

Source: Fete Chinoise (4/20/20)
Covid-19 and the Spectres of Quarantine for the Chinese Canadian Community
Written by Angie Wong (Lecturer, Women Studies, English, and Indigenous Learning,
Lakehead University)

( The Asianadian, vol. 2, no. 4. Cover Image courtesy of The Asianadian Co-founder, Cheuk Kwan)

(The Asianadian, vol. 2, no. 4. Cover Image courtesy of The Asianadian Co-founder, Cheuk Kwan)

The crisis of COVID-19 has ushered in a new ‘normal’ for Canadians. Handshaking is now a dangerous proposition. Masks are being donned on the streets of Canadian cities, and it is not only Asian Canadians wearing them. Indeed, the entire world is now being forced to adopt some of the very symbols and practices that previously marked Asian Canadians as different (even suspect). But rather than creating a larger feeling of solidarity or common struggle between Chinese and other Canadians, the crisis of COVID-19 has once again made it scary to be Chinese in Canada, and North America more broadly. The coronavirus is a disease that has been racialized as the “Chinese virus,” loudly echoing the Orientalist notion of the Yellow Peril and the racist idea that ‘China is the sick man of Asia’. Of course, this is hardly the first time that Chinese people have been feared in Canada.

( The Asianadian, vol. 2, no. 4. “A ‘Prison for Chinese Immigrants” by Chuen-Yan David Lai. Image courtesy of The Asianadian Co-founder, Cheuk Kwan)

(The Asianadian, vol. 2, no. 4. “A ‘Prison for Chinese Immigrants” by Chuen-Yan David Lai. Image courtesy of The Asianadian Co-founder, Cheuk Kwan)

In 1908, the federal government erected an immigration building in Victoria, BC and designated it as a Detention Hospital for which mostly Chinese immigrants were detained when they first arrived in Canada (Lai 17). As Chuen-Yan David Lai discussed in a 1979 issue of The Asianadian: An Asian Canadian Magazine, the purposes of this immigration building, like others erected in Vancouver at the time was to process migrants, conduct head tax transactions, and question their route of arrival. Most of the Chinese men who came as labourers also underwent medical examinations, which resulted in them put into quarantine cells. As Lai recalls “the Immigration Building was notoriously known to the Chinese as Chu-tsai-uk (pigpen)” (17). This was among the first humiliations felt by the men who went through the ‘pigpen’. Many left their villages and were in Canada for the first time and without knowledge of the English language; most could not understand why they were incarcerated. Indeed, the Chinese immigration building was a carceral space used to determine which foreign bodies met the public health standards of a white, settler nation. Lai notes “although they may not have been physically abused, many must have been shaken psychologically by the incarceration experience” (Lai 19). We remain shaken.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL:

The two-storey immigration building was surrounded by walls and iron bars. The building was constructed like a dungeon, made with “five columns of red bricks and measured slightly over twenty inches thick…it is unnecessary for an immigration building to have such thick, exterior walls unless it is used for special purposes such as a prison” (Lai 16). Indeed, this was no ordinary immigration building. Thick, wrought iron bars encased every staircase, corridor, and fire exit and iron bars secured the windows. A windowless and uninviting reception area led to a large dining hall. The second floor contained the thick-walled prison cells for newly landed Chinese immigrants (16-7).

In their times of isolation and solitude, some Chinese men found solace by writing poetry on their cell walls. Though the immigration building of Victoria was demolished in 1977, these words of wisdom have survived and still offer us much. Lai provided photographs of the Chinese poems with his publication in The Asianadian’s 1979 Spring issue. Though they are haunting, they are also loving in their incredibly human sentiments of loneliness, a longing for home, and the pain of isolation.These writings on the wall reveal grit and resilience across time and space of the Chinese in Canada, yet they also capture the disappointments of Gold Mountain. To get a sense of what some of these men felt, Lai freely translated some of the following poems.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *