Mary Sui Yee Wong
Well Wishers, 1992

Mary Sui Yee Wong
Well Wishers, 1992

Alice Ming Wai Jim

In 1995, the Montreal McCord Museum of Canadian History presented Mary Sui Yee Wong's contemporary art installation, Well Wishers II, in conjunction with the exhibition A Rare Flower: A Century of Cantonese Opera in Canada.² Exploring different activities which took place outside of the regular work day in the lives of early Chinese Canadians, the former highlighted the involvement of Chinese immigrants in the politics of their homeland while the latter offered a window into the staging of Cantonese opera in Canada.

These two projects were linked by their contextualization within the development of Chinese Canadian history. Many Chinese at the turn of the century had migrated from politically unstable and famine-stricken China to places in Canada such as gum san (or "gold mountain," in reference to the West coast of North America) in search of opportunity and ways to supplement meagre incomes back home. Although the first Chinese settlers had arrived in Canada in the 1850s in search of gold, the major North American influx of immigrants from China took place between 1880 and 1884 when over 17,000 Chinese entered Canada to work on the final section of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).

When the railway was completed in 1885, Chinese workers were subjected to a series of racist immigration acts such as the imposition of a $50 head tax on every incoming Chinese, which increased to $500 by 1904 (equivalent to about $20,000 today), and the Exclusion Act, which decreed an outright ban on Chinese immigration between 1923 and 1947. These federal policies prevented Chinese workers, who were mostly men and expected to return to their homeland upon completion of the CPR, from bringing their wives and children over to join them in Canada. Denied the right to vote and hence to gain membership required for professional occupations, the early Chinese who remained in Canada had little choice but to find work in restaurants, laundries, grocery stores, coal mines, or on farms.

Although the prohibitive immigration laws made the decision not to leave a difficult one for many Chinese, evidence of community building provided by A Rare Flower and Well Wishers attest to the fact that the early Chinese-contrary to the popular stereotype of them as "eternal immigrants" or "sojourners"-once arrived in Canada, intended to stay. Offering different faces and narratives of the Chinese Canadian community, these two projects blurred distinctions between public and private, disguise and display, complexifying notions of Chinese cultural identity and representation as a consequence.

Encountered unexpectedly at the end of A Rare Flower, which featured an elaborate and brilliant display of operatic costumes and accessories, Wong's Well Wishers with its domestic setting inside a washer room seemed comparably monochromatic and bare, even deceptively simple. Separated by a wall and deprived of the informative labels attached to the museum's other exhibits, the contemporary art installation seemed dislocated and out of place in contrast to the cultural spectacle before it.

Yet Well Wishers did share a number of qualities with the exhibition on Cantonese opera in its common historical frame of reference, theatrical presentation, use of archival sources to reconstruct the past, and transmission of a sense of the pride and inner strength of the Chinese workers who participated in these activities even in the face of great hardship. According to the artist,

Chinese people have a tremendous sense of pride [which] includes not showing in public what affects us. Well Wishers looks at how people lived their daily lives and were still happy in the face of all this adversity. All the objects in this work relate to the Chinese notion of face which teaches the importance of maintaining integrity when confronting one's enemies. One must keep face, have face and save face.³

Reinforcing this notion of giving face were the title of Well Wishers and the three towels on which was printed, in English and Chinese, the standard greeting "Good Morning."

The setting of Well Wishers-with towels hanging on the wall and eleven large porcelain wash basins forming a two-tiered circular structure centre-stage-immediately brought to mind the scene of an early laundromat, one of the few places in which Chinese were hired to work. The simple white basins, filled with clear water, also suggested a place of self-cleansing and of healing, a space of recognition, commemoration, and understanding of the Chinese experience in early and contemporary Canada. Through their de-centred placement and their serene presentation, these containers invited viewers into the space of the art work and in confrontation with the governing image of the installation: the wallpaper series of a composite photograph of members of the Chinese Empire Reform Association dated 1900.⁴

Of the same blue hue as the designs found on Chinoiserie porcelain, the small repeated faces of these men covering one wall of the exhibition space from floor to ceiling acted as multiple triggers of memory that traced their bodily presence within the space of the installation as well as the annals of Canadian history. This invoked presence not only reflected upon the predominance of men but the invisibility of Chinese women in early Chinese Canadian communities.⁵

Active between 1899 and 1911, the Empire Reform Association, made up of mostly the older, more prosperous Chinese merchants in Canada, supported the modernization of China through progressive reforms within the framework of a constitutional monarchy rather than by armed revolution.⁶ According to historian Anthony Chan,

The politics of China relieved the boredom of dead-end jobs in canneries, laundries and restaurants. It filled the leisure time of bachelor workers, provided valuable trade connections to China for the merchant class, and tapped the hidden reserves of patriotism for the old country... the politics of China [also] kept the people of Gold Mountain in touch with their families and ancestral home.⁷

This organized level of involvement in Old World politics was also a defensive reaction to the anti-Chinese sentiments fostered in Canadian politics at the time.⁸ While "not everyone sought refuge in Chinese events," it was often "a choice between participation or isolation," of belonging or detachment.⁹ In effect, Well Wishers explored the political nature of the Chinese social body in Canada against a backdrop that recorded some of the male faces attached to this body-faces which until only recently signified simply cheap and dispensable labour.

Four passages from Paul Yee's historical account SaltWater City, nestled in the middle of the basins provided viewers with information in English on the Chinese notion of face, the stereotype of Chinese people as sojourners, the racist immigration laws, and the political alliances of the Chinese to their homeland. Perhaps Well Wishers' most direct statement of meaning, the inclusion of these textual fragments emphatically brought forward the issue of communal responsibility on the part of both art work and site in the production of knowledge in today's display culture. […]

Alice Ming Wai Jim is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at McGill University. She is currently researching media art in Hong Kong.

Notes

1. This text is an excerpt from a paper delivered at the UAAC Annual Conference in 1996.
2. Well Wishers I was exhibited in 1992 at A Space Gallery, Toronto. A Rare Flower was organized by the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia. It featured an impressive selection of pieces drawn from the MOA's collection of Cantonese opera costumes and accessories, one of the oldest and largest in the world.
3. Wallie Seto, "The Conflict of Two Cultures," The Montreal Gazette (2 January 1996) B5.
4. From the Vancouver Public Library Archives #26691.
5. For an informative account on this subject, see Chinese Canadian National Council's Women's Book Committee, Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women (Toronto: Women's Press, 1992).
6. Edgar Wickberg, ed., From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982) 74-75, 104. The Empire Reform Association, more accurately translated as the Emperor-Protection Association (Bo Wong Wui) was founded in 1899 by Kang Youwie.
7. Anthony B. Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983) 137.
8. Paul Yee, SaltWater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988) 47.
9. Ibid., 10, 19, 47.