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. '
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14996 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Chan, Shelly |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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