The history of Canada's policies in the matter of Chinese immigration from 1870 to the present time may be divided into four distinct periods: The period of unrestricted immigration ending 1885; the period of the head-tax system from 1885 to 1923; the period of the exclusion of Chinese immigrants ending in 1947 and the period of limited admission of Chinese immigrants under the rules applicable to Asians in general. [...]

While the first entry of Chinese immigrants to Canada dates back to more than a century, in 1967 when the Canadian immigration policy changed, Chinese immigrants from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan became the top source of migration. Over the past few decades, the process of acculturation and mental health of Chinese immigrants has received attention in cross-cultural research. Researchers are particularly interested in investigating the stress experienced by immigrants during the process of acculturation and the ways of dealing with such stress. The thesis reports on a study that explores acculturative stress, length of residence, and cohesion of Chinese immigrants in Canada. The results from this study showed that enmeshment (a high level of family cohesion or family togetherness) and flexibility (a high level of adaptability to change family rules and roles) are related to a lower level of acculturative stress in Chinese immigrant mothers in Vancouver, British Columbia. Of particular interest was the effect of cohesion and adaptability on the social dimension of acculturative stress. Additionally, the results showed that length of residence did not predict acculturative stress in Chinese immigrant families. Limitations, contributions, and implications of the present study for future acculturation research are discussed.

From feeling neither entirely "Chinese" nor "Canadian," Vancouver's Chinese weathered the hard times of racism and economic depression and found themselves embracing a new identity that was both "Chinese" and "Canadian" during the deeply intense period of Japan's invasion of China and later the Second World War. This paper argues that Vancouver's Chinatown was a transnational community whose existence and vitality were not only predicated upon the strength of its internal organizations but also upon its trans-Pacific linkages and movements. It also argues that wartime social and cultural changes led to the first creation of "Chinese Canadians," a double identity that had been born long before the official introduction of Canada's multicultural policy. The two generations of immigrants and Canadian-borns also became welded together during the war, actively supporting China's and Canada's war effort. Finally, this essay closes by highlighting the "double-edged" blessing of a double identity under the effects of local and global historical processes, which were mirrored in the wartime stigmatization of Japanese Canadians, the destruction of the Sing Kew Theatre and the postwar dwindling of trans-Pacific ties with the onset of the Cold War and Maoist socialism in China. '

No description available.

From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the experiences of predominantly male Chinese migrants in Canada, their relationship with each other, and their interactions with Chinese and Canadian society were influenced by each society's patriarchal nature. Each society had a culturally-specific patriarchal system that perpetuated the interests of a few elite men over other groups and cultures, and each portrayed this group as the masculine ideal. Since each viewed events through this lens, racism frequently took on a gendered language. The construction of culturally-specific notions of gender helped maintain each community's culturally-specific patriarchal system. Furthermore, racialized gender constructs and gendered constructs of race legitimized existing patterns of domination both within each group and in these groups' interactions with each other. This thesis shows that the categories of race and gender were linked and that a feminist approach is useful for the study of immigration history.

The first goal of the current study was to comprehensively assess depressive and anxiety symptomatology, and examine the resultant symptom structures among 206 Caucasian Canadian and 251 Chinese Canadian university student samples in relation to the tri¬partite conceptual model put forth by Clark and Watson (1991). The current study used 14 symptom measures assessing the affective (e.g., low positive affect), the cognitive (e.g., worry), and the somatic aspects (e.g., autonomic hyperarousal) of depressive and anxiety symptomatology. Items that were found to function differently across the current two samples via the techniques of item response theory were considered to be culturally biased and were subsequently removed from these 14 measures so that the true structural relations among measures of depressive and anxiety symptomatology could be illustrated. The current study identified differences in symptom structures between Chinese and Caucasian samples (e.g., worry and autonomic hyperarousal), as well as differences between these two samples' symptom structures and the structures of the original tripartite model (e.g.. lack of depression specific element). After the cross sample differences and similarities in symptom structures of anxiety and depressive symtomatology were identified, the second primary goal of the current study was to further investigate cultural influences on between-group similarities and differences in the resultant symptom structures of anxiety and depression. Symptom factor scores were found to relate only to specific but not generic indicators of an individual's cultural experiences (e.g., Negative Acculturating Experiences). Furthermore. among 201 items of the 14 symptom measures included in the current study, 52 items (about 26%) were found to be culturally biased, with about one half of them being more likely endorsed by the Chinese sample and about the other half more likely endorsed by the Caucasian sample. The phenomenon of cultural bias at an item level was common, because all scales used in the current study contained culturally biased items, and because bias responding tendency was found within both Chinese and Caucasian samples. Cultural contrast response tendency, a composite variable of all cultural biased items. was found to relate to some but not all aspects of cultural orientations (e.g.. Canadian External Orientation). It also showed a greater relation than symptom factors with cultural orientation measures. The third goal of the current study was to explore individuals' cultural and depressive experiences with a qualitative approach using a semi-structured interview, in order to discover new culturally relevant themes that may link individuals' cultural background with psychopathology. Three themes were identified among the interviews of Chinese Canadian university students. portraying the role of Chinese culture in understanding an individual's depression, illustrating the mechanism linking culture with psychopathology, and highlighting the significance of a qualitative research approach in understanding a Chinese individual's experiences. Clinical implications for assessing depression and anxiety symptomatology, especially for individuals with Chinese origin, were discussed.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 158-165). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This research implements a mixed method design to examine complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use among Chinese Canadians. Using logistic regression to analyze data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, this study explores the relationship between Chinese ethnicity and CAM use. This study also uses narrative accounts from case study interviews with Chinese Canadian CAM users to understand why they use CAM. The quantitative results indicate that Chinese ethnicity and other cultural variables significantly affect respondents' likelihood of using CAM. The qualitative results reveal four main reasons for CAM use: (1) adherence to traditional understandings of health and illness, (2) views about the effectiveness of Chinese medicine, (3) acceptance of use by family and friends, and (4) access to Chinese medicine practitioners. The findings are integrated and discussed in the context of the study's theoretical and methodological contributions for the sociological study of CAM use among visible minority groups.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racism, in the form of white supremacy, shaped relations between whites and Chinese British Columbians. In resisting and accommodating to white supremacy, the Chinese were active participants, along with the members of the dominant society, in shaping these relations. White supremacy was consequently a dynamic system, one whose many parts were continually in flux, and whose central constructs—notions of "race" and British Columbia as "a White Man's province"—were largely political in nature. The thesis argues that white supremacy, as both ideology and organization, was deeply imbedded in British Columbia society. Exclusion based on "race" was incorporated into government institutions as they were remade at Confederation in an effort to enhance the power of white male property-owners. By the early twentieth century, ideological constructs of "the Chinaman" and "the Oriental" were used as foils in the creation of identities as "whites" and as "Canadians." The official public school curriculum transmitted these notions, while schools themselves organized supremacy in practice by imposing racial segregation on many Chinese students. In reaction, the Chinese created their own institutions and ideologies. While these institutions often had continuities with the culture of South China, the place of origin of most B.C. Chinese, they were primarily adaptations to the conditions of British Columbia, including the realities of racism. Chinese language schools played an especially important role in helping to create a Chinese merchant public separate from the dominant society. This public was at once the consequence of exclusion and the greatest community resource in resisting white supremacy. The study concludes by questioning the workability of contemporary anti-racist strategies which treat racism as a marginal phenomenon, or as merely a set of mistaken ideas. Instead, it suggests that such strategies must recognize that racism is one of the major structures of Canadian society. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Assessing English-as-a-second-language (ESL) children in their native and second languages (L1 & L2) is likely to result in a better estimate of their academic potential than in the L2 alone. In the present study, the Hong Kong-Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (HK-WISC), the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition (SB: FE), and the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery (WLPB) were administered to 32 Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong. The mean age of these children was 11.01 years. Their mean age on arrival (A0A) was 9.27 years, while their mean length of residence (L0R) was 1.74 years. Results of the multiple regression analyses and analysis of variance indicated that AOA and LOR are significant predictive variables for ESL immigrant's verbal performance. In addition, variables such as family socioeconomic status, frequency of speaking Cantonese at home, gender, and having studied English before are also useful to make predictions of these children's performance. The present sample had a high nonverbal and low verbal profile of performance on the English IQ measure. However, this profile of performance was not present on the Chinese IQ measure. These findings add to the cumulative data that Orientals have a characteristic intellectual profile. Finally, this study suggests that, if feasible, immigrant children should be assessed in both LI and L2. Standardized tests can be used to assess ESL immigrant children, even in their first few years of arrival to a new country. The results of the assessment should be kept as a record so that comparisons can be made with future assessment results. However, all these results need to be interpreted with extreme caution because inappropriate labelling and misplacement of these children are unacceptable. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate