Spatial Transcript: SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe

Abstract

barbarian of the northwest tribes took me to wife by force,He led me on a journey to the lands at the horizon,Ten thousand strata of cloudy peaks, so stretched the returning road,A thousand miles of piercing winds, driving dust and sand.The people extravagantly savage, violent - like reptiles and snakes,They draw their bows, they wear armour, their bearing arrogant and fierce.My second song stretches the strings, stretches them to breaking point,My will shattered, my heart broken, I lament and sigh.(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)- Cai Yan(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) (177-250 D , Han Dynasty (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.))11Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The Crescent at Dusk: Chinese Canadian Women's Writing OnstageAs documented in Chinese history, Cai Yan, the daughter of an eminent poet and statesman in the Han dynasty, was kidnapped by the barbarian mercenaries and forced to become a concubine of the chieftain of the Southern Xiongnu tribe and to raise her children in an alien(ated) land. In the last section A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe of The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston alludes to the legend of Cai Yan (Ts'ai Yen), which, in Kingston's narrative, echoes the struggle of her own character, Brave Orchid, to bring up her children on foreign soil. Cai Yan's story could be suggestive of the modern version of how early Chinese women emigrants survived in North America, an outlandish space conceived of by the Chinese as fanyu ((ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)), the territory of barbarians. It is difficult for contemporary readers to imagine these early women's hardships, because the official documentation of their lives in North America from the turn of the twentieth century to the postwar era remains scanty.To know why the emergence of Chinese Canadian writing took until after 1960s or even later to occur, it is necessary to provide a sketch of Chinese Canadian history with its attendant collective sense of powerlessness and muteness in the face of internalized negative definition. This silenced history, in turn, helps explain the absence of literary production for almost a century since the first Chinese landed on Canadian soil at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the time, Chinese women in both Canada and the USA were a rarity; at the time, they were such an exotic curiosity that money could be made by simply putting them on display.2 The first Chinese woman to emigrate to the USA was Marie Seise, who arrived in San Francisco as a slave in February 1848. The second was Ah Choi, who disembarked at the same port in 1848, working first as a prostitute and later running a brothel in the Bay Area.3Chinese women landed in Canada much later than this, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and their history is a chronicle of institutionalized racism. head tax of $50 for entry was levied in 1885, and Canadian legislation had increased the fee to $500 by 1904. With the passage of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 under the Liberal government of William Mackenzie King, there was no further need for a head tax - Chinese immigration was effectively prevented completely, not least by the Exclusion Act in force from 1923 to 1943, which even made it impossible for already resident Chinese workers to bring their families over.4 The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in 1947, and Chinese Canadians were finally granted the right to vote in federal elections. Naturalized citizenship for Asians was permitted in 1954. Only in 2006, more than a century since the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven in 1885, did Stephen Harper's government offer an official apology and compensation for the head tax once paid by indentured Chinese labourers shipped to Canada.The first Chinese woman to arrive in Victoria was Mrs Kwong Lee, the wife of a wealthy merchant from San Francisco, and many of the early Chinese women came to Canada from 1885 onward. …