Prof wins Dorothy Killam Fellowship to research cultural importance of Chinese Canadian artists

Whether it’s through art or food, or something else entirely, immigrant communities have changed the fabric of this country’s culture, becoming part of the story Canadians tell about themselves. But too often the intertwining of these stories goes unnoticed.

Take food. It can serve as an unassuming gateway to learning about and understanding different cultures and practices, while becoming a part of people’s lives, their routines and celebrations.

Most small towns across Canada had a Chinese food restaurant. “It was where people gathered, where they went, and it was often their first experience of Chineseness,” says York University English Professor Lily Cho, author of Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada.

“One of the things that struck me when I started university was how interesting it was that I saw Chinese immigrants contributing to the country, not just economically, but also culturally, really changing what we think of when we think Canada, and contributing to that conversation in ways that were really not visible,” says Cho, whose research often explores the cultural richness that immigrants bring to Canada.

She is one of this year’s Dorothy Killam Fellowship winners, part of the National Killam Program administered and delivered by the National Research Council. Since 1968, several mid-career scholars are awarded the annual Fellowship. It is a gift, says Cho, that she is immensely grateful for as it will allow her to focus solely on her newest research project for the next couple of years exploring the work and contributions of Chinese Canadian artists.

Cho joins an exclusive club of about 30 fellowships that have been awarded to English scholars over the years with York’s Department of English in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies claiming three of them, including previous winners Professors Christopher Innes and Deanne Williams. York can also boast several past winners of the Killam Prize – Professors Christina Sharpe, Carl James, Janine Marchessault, Stephen Gill, Ellen Bialystok and Harry Arthurs.

Cho’s first book, Eating Chinese, looked at the conundrum of how people would talk about the small-town Chinese restaurants as a disappearing space. Although, as a Chinese Canadian, that was not her experience. “They remained vibrant and important parts of the community, real engines of cultural production and conversation in these communities.” Everyone she spoke to had positive memories of their local Chinese restaurant.

Almost every small town tucked into the furthest nooks and crannies of this country had one and it often gave restaurant goers their first brush with Chinese culture. In exchange, they also defined Canadian food. Through menus, one side listing Chinese dishes, the other Canadian, Canada’s culture was reflected back through its dishes, defined largely through the eyes of immigrants.

Despite racism directed at Chinese immigrants, Chinese restaurants not only thrived and endured, they became places of refuge for others.

“Chinese restaurants historically were also one of the first places where immigrant populations that were not valued by WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] Canada could go and not be treated badly,” she says. “For example, the Italian working-class communities would report going to Chinese restaurants because they were not treated like immigrants in these restaurants.”

These experiences raised questions for Cho that she still thinks about and that continue to run through her research. Questions about how the contributions of Chinese migrants and other diasporic communities are counted, especially for those who perhaps, like her parents, didn’t speak or write in English and weren’t recording their own histories or the contributions they were making in their communities and the world around them.

“With my research on Chinese restaurants, one of the things I did was to think about the menus as a way to understand how Chinese migrants were writing themselves literally into Canadian culture. They were scripting an idea of Chineseness and Canadianness in a very enduring format that millions of people read,” says Cho.

Cho has a unique perspective. Her parents settled in Alberta after leaving Hong Kong and mainland China in the 1970s. A couple of years after Cho was born, they moved to Whitehorse to run a Chinese food restaurant – the Shangri-La. “There were very few Chinese families in that part of Canada in the 1970s when I grew up,” she says.

Life among her parents and relatives in Whitehorse, Red Deer – where her relatives also owned a Chinese restaurant – and Edmonton, where the family returned following their two-year adventure in the Yukon, was somewhat insular until she started school. “I didn't know that people spoke English until I started school.” It gave her distinct vantage points for both cultures. Her experience of Canada and its food introduced through Chinese food restaurants and the friends she made at school, who came from families who looked nothing like hers.

Once in university for her undergraduate studies, she realized that Chinese immigrants were invisible in the scholarly conversation and the understanding of how Chinese immigrants shaped Canadian culture was absent from the general psyche. Although there were Asian Canadian novels, stories and poems at that time, none of them were on any of her English degree syllabi.

“My great goal when I went to university was to become a receptionist. That was the best job that my mom could imagine for me in the factory where she worked. The person who was the receptionist got to sit down all day, which for her was unthinkable. She was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that person earns a salary and doesn't have to stand all day and doesn't have to work in this really hot, dangerous factory full of dangerous equipment.’ I learned to type very early because of that.”

Although she is a self-described “terrible” receptionist, Cho found her academic calling. In addition, Eating Chinese, helped break through the dearth of Asian works in academia and is not only assigned on syllabi, but questions about it are on student exams.

Even though the question of how immigrants who are unable to speak or write the predominant language write themselves into history piqued Cho’s curiosity, she had no interest in discussing her own family history. “I feel like my job is to write about the world I'm in, not about myself.” However reluctantly, her research soon became about immigrants and their contributions. It is work, she acknowledges, that serves an important role giving voice to those without one.

Similar research projects have a way of finding her

Several years ago, after giving a talk on immigration, an archivist from the Library and Archives Canada approached Cho about CI-9s (Chinese Immigration 9), known as head tax certificates used to track Chinese immigrants who were forced to pay a head tax upon entry and now wanted to temporarily leave the country.

The C1-9s and head taxes ended in 1923, long before Cho’s parents arrived in Canada. Still, it fascinated her. Slipped a DVD-R by an archivist as if she now inhabited the world of spies, only added to the intrigue. And although she tried to interest other academics in the material, those she thought better positioned to do the research, eventually Cho took it on.

When she popped the disc into her computer, surprisingly 2,406 images popped up. It turned out to be a small percentage of the more than 80,000 taken of Chinese immigrants through the CI-9 program and the roughly 41,000 images still in existence.

“The images were so profoundly interesting. They're unlike anything else you will have seen,” says Cho. In addition to the photos, there is a wealth of information about each person – job, height, identifying marks, friends, etc. “For me, what was so moving, because my dad was an amateur photographer, was realizing that for this population, they never get photographed. Working class Chinese, Asian people in the early and late 19th century, and early 20th century, almost never get their picture taken. What a huge thing to have these portraits in our archives. I was just haunted, completely haunted and obsessed. So deeply reluctantly, I engaged in this project.”

It resulted in a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project and her second book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens, exploring how these photos capture and captivated at the same time.

“It was a way to understand how we honour people who have been photographed under duress because they were photographed not for something nice. They were photographed because they were being told that they don't belong to Canada. It wasn't a positive thing and yet we have these beautiful photographs. It ended up being a really moving and important experience,” says Cho, who adds it was also an opportunity to teach students research skills and how to work with archival and digital materials.

“For me, they weren't historical materials only, they had a kind of beauty to them, and I understood that beauty to be problematic.” Most of the subjects couldn’t read or write, were forced to have these photos taken, and yet dressed in their finest for them as if trying to influence their own stories of who they were.”

Her next research project, with the help of the Dorothy Killam Fellowship, will allow her to research the contributions of contemporary Chinese Canadian artists, some of whom have requested her to write about their work over the years. Like much of her research, this too will see Cho working in fields adjacent to English, which has always formed part of her reluctance to take these projects on despite their lure and fascination.

“The way in which they have navigated history and historical archives is so important and so interesting, because most of the Chinese Canadian artists working today are informed by archival work. The research they do before they make art is often archival and yet they don't treat the archive like a resource necessarily,” says Cho. “The archive is actually part of their work. It’s so profoundly interesting how these practitioners have taken historical materials and made them alive in really important ways.”

For the fellowship, Cho will focus on the work of artists such as Morris Lum, Karen Tam, and Shellie Zhang. Another of the artists Cho plans to write about for what will be the first book-length study of contemporary Chinese Canadian art is Kira Wu who developed a series of photographs on Chinese opera and its history in Canada. Cho previously wrote an essay about Wu’s last exhibit before Wu passed away. “These artists are creating work as the field of Asian Canadian studies emerges and grows. It’s a rare and profoundly interesting convergence, which I hope to highlight in this project.”

Despite her reluctance, Cho’s field of research found her, a convergence of her own family history with that of Chinese immigrants to Canada. It’s a privilege, she says, to show how Canadian culture derives its strength and vitality from cultural difference.