Chinese Canadian Research Articles

Rooting Intergeneration Conflict in Racism: An Examination of Disappearing Moon Cafe and The Jade Peony

A recurring theme in Canadian diaspora literature is the problematization of cultural identity in the children of immigrants as they navigate between Western influences and their cultural heritage. My paper examines the different portrayals of second generation Chineseness in SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995) through close reading. Although both these texts depict diaspora-matured Chinese Canadians as incorporating Western values into Chinese tradition, the elder generation’s response to this hybridity is configured differently. Through opposing representations of second generation characters’ use of the English language, Lee depicts early Chinese-Canadian Vancouver as more accommodating to amalgamated culture, while Choy’s Chinatown is hostile to Western influence. Linguistic proficiency is central to the plot of Disappearing Moon Cafe, where “Westernized” Chinese youth are depicted as masters of the English language and Western politics. This enables them to fight against repressive laws and ultimately gains them the approval of the elders, whereas the same bilingualism and biculturalism is condemned as dangerous in The Jade Peony. My paper analyzes white xenophobia in each text as the root cause of this difference in treatment; in an era where anti-Chinese sentiment is again rising, it is valuable to be aware of the far-ranging impacts of this hostility.

A Smartphone App (mDASHNa-CC) to Support Healthy Diet and Hypertension Control for Chinese Canadian Seniors: Protocol for Design, Usability and Feasibility Testing.

BackgroundThis proposed study aims to translate the Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension with Sodium (Na) Reduction for Chinese Canadians (DASHNa-CC), a classroom-based, antihypertensive, dietary educational intervention, to an innovative smartphone app (mDASHNa-CC). This study will enable Chinese Canadian seniors to access antihypertensive dietary interventions anytime, regardless of where they are. It is hypothesized that senior Chinese Canadians will be satisfied with their experiences using the mDASHNa-CC app and that the use of this app could lead to a decrease in their blood pressure and improvement in their health-related quality of life.ObjectiveThe goal of this study is to design and test the usability and feasibility of a smartphone-based dietary educational app to support a healthy diet and hypertension control for Chinese Canadian seniors.MethodsA mixed-method two-phase design will be used. The study will be conducted in a Chinese immigrant community in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Chinese Canadian seniors, who are at least 65 years old, self-identified as Chinese, living in Canada, and with elevated blood pressure, will be recruited. In Phase I, we will design and test the usability of the app using a user-centered approach. In Phase II, we will test the feasibility of the app, including implementation (primary outcomes of accrual and attrition rates, technical issues, acceptability of the app, and adherence to the intervention) and preliminary effectiveness (secondary outcomes of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, weight, waist circumference, health-related quality of life, and health service utilization), using a pilot, two-group, randomized controlled trial with a sample size of 60 participants in a Chinese Canadian community.ResultsThe study is supported by the Startup Research Grant from Nipissing University, Canada. The research ethics application is under review by a university research ethics review board.ConclusionsThe study results will make several contributions to the existing literature, including illustrating the rigorous design and testing of smartphone app technology for hypertension self-management in the community, exploring an approach to incorporating traditional medicine into chronic illness management in minority communities and promoting equal access to current technology among minority immigrant senior groups.Trial RegistrationClinicaltrials.gov NCT03988894; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03988894International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)PRR1-10.2196/15545

“Want to be a superior man?”: The Production Chinese Canadian Masculinities in Paul Yee’s Writing

This paper examines the re-imagining of Chinese Canadian masculinity in Paul Yee’s novel, A Superior Man (2015). Unlike Yee’s previous writing, this novel does not describe Chinese Canadian men as Western Frontier heroes. Rather, it illustrates how Chinese immigration intersects with the oppression of Indigenous peoples, and how notions of masculinity are produced within settler colonialism. The novel thus provides an important entry point into discussions about how to make Indigenous presence and colonization foundational to anti-racist efforts. Yet, since it represents Indigenous peoples as largely peripheral, the novel also points to how much anti-colonial work remains to be done

Diasporic still life: Midnight at the Dragon Café and the cultural politics of stasis

This article revisits and reevaluates the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s debut novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2005) as an important and intimate map of the social geography of a small Canadian town that illuminates how diasporic Chinese life is both constructed and constricted by the institution of the Chinese restaurant. I propose that having a narrative of restaurant life that centres around Chinese Canadian waiters and cooks exposes how socioeconomic institutions reproduce dominant social relations by limiting movement and representational possibilities for immigrant populations. In the book, sedentariness is presented alongside the social and political institutions that generate these diasporic subjects, which, I argue, creates a scene of stasis — where diasporic subjects work to achieve an equilibrium between competing cultural regimes. Bates’s book is remarkable insofar as it maps the unevenness brought on by diasporic globality but in a very "fastened" way — showing how the characters’ global outlooks are shrunk and slowly withered away by the small-town space. This article considers, then, what writing about diasporic stasis achieves in an age that is often characterized by global mobility.

Activism and Assimilation: The Political Memoirs of Olivia Chow and Adrienne Clarkson

While the history of Chinese settlement in Canada is touted as an example of perseverance despite racist opposition and of socio-economic success under Canada’s immigration and multiculturalism policies, it is important to remember the very active role that Chinese Canadians played in their own trajectory. Throughout its history, the Chinese Canadian community has engaged in civic and political activism, on the one hand, and the promotion of positive stereotypes associated with assimilation into Euro-Canadian society on the other. Both of these approaches can be seen in the political memoirs of two prominent Chinese Canadian women: My Journey by Olivia Chow, a Member of Parliament who focused her career on a plethora of social justice initiatives; and Heart Matters by Adrienne Clarkson, a former Governor General who deemphasizes her Chinese heritage in order to mould herself into the ideal Canadian citizen. Despite these clear differences in political ideology and personal identity, both Chow and Clarkson’s memoirs reveal the ways in which Chinese Canadians can not only claim full belonging as Canadian citizens, but also interrogate systemic forms of racism and inequality.

Narrativizing trauma, activating awareness: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking and its afterlives

ABSTRACTWhen Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, exactly sixty years after the Nanjing Massacre, the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, called attention to one of the greatest human tragedies in the twentieth century. As a powerful historic reminder, The Rape of Nanking aims “to understand the event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded.” This paper focuses on Chang’s role as a writer/fighter who uses words to fight forgetfulness with a forceful narrative concerning one of the most dreadful traumas in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. It produces quite a number of “afterlives,” including different Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China, a nanking winter (2008), a play by the second-generation Chinese Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan, Nanjing Requiem (2011), a novel by the first-generation Chinese American novelist Ha Jin, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2013), a collection of poems by the third-generation Chinese Hawaiian poet Wing Tek Lum. Furthermore, the docudrama Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking (2007), directed by Bill Spahic and Anne Pick, presents a filmic representation of the short fascinating life of this passionate writer. This paper discusses how Chang, role as a writer and activist, fights against amnesia with remembrance as well as her rich legacy to the world across linguistic, generic, and semiotic boundaries. Chang’s text and its afterlives strive to give voice to those nameless war victims as a step towards truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace.

Media, Symbolic Violence and Racialized Habitus: Voices from Chinese Canadian Youth

This study examines how Chinese Canadian youth perceive media representation of Chinese people and how that perception affects their identity construction. Drawing on Bourdieu and interview data with thirty-six first- and second-generation Chinese Canadian youth in Alberta, we discuss three themes of symbolic violence that Chinese youth experience in the media field. We argue that media-initiated symbolic violence not only reproduces and reinforces racism institutionally and systemically but also contributes to the evolvement of a racialized habitus among Chinese Canadian youth. It affects Chinese Canadian youth’s construction of a positive Chinese identity, and at the same time their perceptions as “real” Canadians in the country that they view as home.

Model Minority Stereotype and Racialized Habitus: Chinese Canadian Youth Struggling with Racial Discrimination at School

This paper examines how Chinese Canadian youth struggle with the model minority stereotype and experience racial discriminationat school. Three negative connotations associated with model minority stereotype are identified, which respectively treat Chinse students as academic achievers and thus social nerds, undesirable immigrants (descendants) from the non-Western world, and targets of bullying.Drawing on Bourdieu, I elaborate on a concept of racialized habitus, particularly in relation to the model minority stereotype. I argue that in addition to the existing theorization of racism as institutional and systemic, racism has also been maintained and reproduced at the individual level as a racialized habitus.

Timing in Bruce Lee’s Writings as Inspiration for Listening Musically to Hand Combat and Martial Arts Performance

Timing is how we know when to do something in order to achieve an aim, and it is essential to all manner of human endeavour. In his posthumous international bestseller Tao of Jeet Kune Do [1975], Bruce Lee discussed timing as a quality of martial arts. His most influential timing concept is broken-rhythm, which is an idea that has resonated with martial artists around the world. Notwithstanding Tao of Jeet Kune Do’s impact, the strategies, tactics, and methods of timing remain poorly expressed in hand combat discourse. That is not to say that martial artists have poor timing, but rather that most martial artists are not very good at explaining how exactly they time their actions. Lee’s own choice of vocabulary was eclectic, drawing from music, fencing, chess, and military drill, which allowed him to discuss diverse approaches to combat time but also led to inconsistencies that muddy the waters for those wishing to engage with his ideas. This article takes up the question of timing in two ways. First, I re-interpret Bruce Lee’s ideas about the rhythm of combat using music theory, which provides precise, self-consistent vocabulary for the task. Second, I explore the meanings that a musical hearing of hand combat reveals at the intersection of sound and movement. Based on extensive fieldwork at a Chinese Canadian kung fu club, I identify some of the ways that percussion-driven performances of choreographed fighting skills have overlooked value as combat training.

MDASHNa-CC APP to Support a Healthy Diet and Hypertension Control for Chinese Canadian Seniors

mDASHNa-CC APP to Support a Healthy Diet and Hypertension Control for Chinese Canadian Seniors

The Role of Cultural Values in the Folk Psychiatry Explanatory Framework: A Comparison of Chinese- and Euro-Canadians

The Folk Psychiatry (FP) model proposes a process through which people understand mental illness, comprising four dimensions: pathologizing, moralizing, psychologizing, and medicalizing. Cultural group differences have been observed in previous research using part of this model, with one prior study suggesting that adherence to cultural values may partly explain these differences. The current study, therefore, evaluated whether horizontal–vertical and individualism–collectivism values contribute to explaining Chinese-Canadian (CC) versus Euro-Canadian (EC) cultural group differences among the FP dimensions. Undergraduate CC ( n = 252) and EC ( n = 296) students participated in an online survey, in which they read vignettes about a person exhibiting symptomatic behaviors of major depression. They were then asked about their impressions of the person’s behavior, based on FP scales. Our results show that CCs were more likely to pathologize and moralize the behaviors described in our study vignette, whereas ECs were more likely to employ psychologizing explanations. When compared with ECs, CCs were significantly more likely to endorse vertical individualism and vertical collectivism and less likely to endorse horizontal collectivism. There was an indirect effect of cultural group on moralizing through the endorsement of vertical (i.e., hierarchical) values. Our findings suggest that valuing social order and adherence to social norms may partly explain why some people view mental health problems as a personal fault.

Creating Hybrid Identity: the Function of Epigraphs in The Wondrous Woo

Multiculturalism in Canada has created many hybrid identities among the children of immigrants. The novels of second-generation writers often reflect this reality. This presentation examines the function of epigraphs and its allusions to traditional customs, classics, and oral legends in The Wondrous Woo by Carrianne Leung. Miramar Woo, the protagonist and daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, imagines a world of magical realism in the suburbs of Scarborough to encapsulate the space that lies between Canadian and Chinese culture. The novel is divided into chapters with each chapter introduced by an epigraph associated with Chinese-cultural references which is suggestive—although separate from the main narrative. An epigraph ironically references Tomb-sweeping to show the importance of ancestry and juxtaposes it to make sense of death. Classical allusions to the Monkey King act as a tool to express views toward love interests. Oral legends of the Snake Sisters exemplifies sibling interactions. Furthermore, the omission of an epigraph in the novel’s final chapter performs the same function—to not only create tension, but also give perspective to Miramar’s fluid experience. The epigraphs perform as a structural framework that capture the essence of Chinese traditions and channels them towards Miramar’s experience as a “hybrid” Chinese Canadian. The significance of the epigraphs is not to emphasize dissonance in the reference, but rather the epigraphs act as a tool to show how Miramar understands the world as a Chinese Canadian in response to her alienation from dominant society.

A Reflection on Wondrous Woo

As a second-generation Chinese Canadian immigrant, I reflect on and respond to my first encounter with Chinese Canadian literature: Carrianne Leung’s The Wondrous Woo. The Wondrous Woo is a YA novel following a Chinese girl, Miramar, who resides in the suburbs of Toronto as she navigates through university, relationships, and family hardships. My lack of exposure to Chinese Canadian literature combined with my desire to see Asian Canadians represented in popular media creates certain expectations for the novel. When The Wondrous Woo fails to represent my own experience of cultural hybridity, I find myself grappling with feelings of anger and frustration. The narrative forces me to ask whether novels like The Wondrous Woo can sustain novel quality while encouraging readers to explore complex dimensions of a diverse society, or if they address racism using stories with hidden objectives to commodify Chinese culture. By reading The Wondrous Woo through Nai-Hua Kuo's article "Depictions of Chinese Americans in Young Adult Literature," to problematize what it means for a novel to be a quality multicultural text, I begin to gain a new understanding of what Carrianne Leung is trying to illustrate in The Wondrous Woo.

A Doctor’s Foreign Accent Affects Perceptions of Competence

ABSTRACTMany doctors work or train in foreign countries and speak with a foreign accent. People sometimes assume that a person who speaks with a foreign accent possesses negative traits and personality characteristics. The purpose of this study is to test if doctors who speak with a foreign accent are perceived as less competent than doctors who speak with a standard accent. Both Caucasian Canadian and Chinese Canadian undergraduates rated the competence of a doctor speaking English with either a standard Canadian accent or a Chinese accent. The doctor was delivering either good or bad news about the patient’s cholesterol levels or cancer. Previous research has shown that when reminded of death, participants favor in-group members. We found that the Chinese-accented doctor’s competence was judged more negatively than the standard Canadian accented doctor by all participants. Both doctors were deemed less competent when delivering bad news than good news. These results suggest that foreign-accented doctors face biases about their competence from their patients.

Facilitators and Barriers to Healthy Eating in Aged Chinese Canadians with Hypertension: A Qualitative Exploration.

Objectives: To determine the facilitators and barriers influencing healthy eating behaviours among aged Chinese-Canadians with hypertension. Methods: After attending five weeks of dietary educational training (Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension with Sodium (Na) Reduction for Chinese Canadians; DASHNa-CC), 30 aged Chinese-Canadian participants partook in a telephone interview. Participants were asked to name three facilitators and three barriers that influenced their ability to follow the DASHNa-CC intervention. Telephone transcripts were then analyzed and coded using computer software and categorized into personal, familial, community, and societal facilitators or barriers. Results: Personal factors included health problems, motivation, effects of healthy diet, health-related careers, and dietary habits. Family factors included family structure, support from family members, and critical health events involving family members or relatives. Community factors consisted of educational materials, friends, primary care physicians, and online social networks. Societal factors included accessibility to grocery stores and restaurants. Conclusions: Aged Chinese-Canadian immigrants experience unique facilitators of and barriers to healthy eating, which may warrant further attention from healthcare professionals when educating patients in a culturally-sensitive manner.

Political and community activism in Toronto: 2000-2016

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of political and community activism in Toronto’s Chinese Canadian community between 2000 and 2016.Design/methodology/approachAdopting a mixed approach (historical, political and personal), the paper draws from both primary and secondary sources to explore three different cases – SARS in 2003, the Head Tax Redress in 2006 and Maclean’s “Too Asian?” controversy in 2010 – to illustrate discrimination against the Chinese Canadian community in Toronto during the 2000–2016 period while illuminating the importance of safeguarding human rights and dignity in the community.FindingsThe outbreak of SARS in early 2003 traumatized the whole city of Toronto and sparked waves of racial discrimination and bigotry directed at the Chinese Canadian community. Meanwhile, the community’s ongoing struggle to fight for justice and redress for the Chinese Head Tax seized the opportunity in 2006 to successfully challenge the Canadian government and other political parties to recognize and apologize for the racist tax and its long-term negative impact on the community. However, despite constant efforts, discrimination against Asian Canadians rose again, fueling Maclean’s controversial “Too Asian” article in 2010. Notwithstanding Canada’s positive image abroad, racial discrimination still exists. This paper urges that Canadians of all backgrounds must come together in solidarity and work hard to advocate for social and racial justice and human rights.Originality/valueThis paper will be of interest to community activists, journalists and scholars who are interested in the history of political and community activism in Toronto since 2000. Policymakers may also learn that an unexpected public crisis like SARS can ignite racial intolerance and negative attitudes toward Chinese Canadian and other communities.

The Arches of Chinatown: Identity, Agency, and Belonging in Vancouver 1896–1936

The British Columbia Chinese community struggled against political and economic racism and discrimination in the first half of the twentieth century. This study focuses on four festive civic celebrations in the period 1896-1936 when Vancouver’s Chinese Canadians employed traditional Chinese culture to assert their place as a legitimate component of the city’s social fabric. They joined official Vancouver in greeting China’s most respected statesman in 1896; participated in civic celebrations for visiting members of Britain’s royal family in 1901 and 1912; and organized one of the most successful aspects of Vancouver’s 1936 fiftieth anniversary celebrations, a four-week “Chinese Carnival.” Voices in the “white” community during the same period steadily but slowly articulated increased levels of acceptance of the Chinese presence. Changes in the popular journalistic portrayal of Chinese people reveal a gradual lessening of racist tropes and stereotypes. Finally, an English-language pamphlet produced in the Chinese community for the carnival provides a glimpse of how Canadian-born Chinese Canadians themselves were forging an increasingly North American identity, undermining arguments about their “inability” to adapt to Canadian cultural values.

A Comparative Study on Agricultural Production Efficiency Between China and Canada

Agricultural production efficiency is vital to the development level and quality of agricultural production. China is at a crucial stage of agricultural transformation, and it is of great significance to measure and calculate agricultural production efficiency by scientific methods. This paper conducts a case study of Chinese agriculture and Canadian agriculture, and measures and calculates the average values of gross agricultural output and the variations of agricultural production efficiency based on data envelopment analysis. According to the research results, firstly, Canadian agricultural production efficiency is much higher than that of China, holding a leading position in the world. Secondly, from 2005 to 2015, the agricultural production efficiency of both China and Canada showed an overall rising trend, but there were obvious upward fluctuations in Chinese agricultural production efficiency. Thirdly, Chinese technical efficiency showed a rise and then a decline while the scale efficiency showed a decline at first and then a rise, and the overall efficiency showed a rise with fluctuations. At the same time, Canadian agriculture technical efficiency, scale efficiency and overall efficiency were all on the rise with fluctuations, and the efficiency values were significantly higher than those of China. Next, the Malmquist indices of both China and Canada appeared to change, but the rate of change of Canada was lower than that of China. Finally, based on Canadian agricultural production experience and combined with China's national conditions, this paper also puts forward the suggestions on improving Chinese agricultural production efficiency.

Intentional Solidarity as a Decolonizing Practice1

This article conceptualizes what a border literate reading looks like through a re-reading of Sky Lee’s 1990 novel Disappearing Moon Café. Using postcolonial feminist understanding of transnational literacy, with the help of queer scholarship on intimacy, I explore the difficulty of seeing the intersectionality of struggles of Chinese Canadian and Indigenous women. I argue that a border literacy alone may not be enough to propel us towards investing in these encounters. A deliberate intentionality that is based on a desire for a specific kind of future is necessary in how we retrace the past and in turn give shape to a different solidarity in the present that is not based only on the needs of the ally but a vulnerability and openness for new knowledges and different ways of being.

Evaluation of a Parkinson's Disease Educational YouTube Video for Chinese Canadians.

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