Rare Books & Special Collections, UBC Library
They welcomed us,
needed us, celebrated us,
worked us to death.
We pounded every spike,
heaved every log, mined every stone,
built them from ground up without complaint.
When the last spike strikes rail,
its quiet resonance trembles and hardens their hearts.
They see our strength, our sweat, the world we have carved out,
they despise it,
they despise us.
A hateful frost creeps through our windows,
slithers through our families,
cuts through the papers of our children,
and the heart of our very being,
Their once soft autumn breeze,
freezes without mercy.
Ice written into law chills the soul of a people,
lives crack,
families shatter,
communities still,
we are frozen in 24 years of humiliation.
Our flame smolders,
but the frost does not go easy,
its bite drips and scars generations.
Even today,
shards of ice haunt our veins,
a slow painful thaw,
a numbing shame,
it lingers like a bruise on our people,
it aches of everything that was lost.
Spikes of exclusion built the heart of this land,
we must not forget the ice,
we must burn more than they every feared.
Writing this pushed Lulu Wang to research more about the history of Chinese Canadians and how attitudes shifted as time went on. She learned a lot about the discrimination Chinese Canadians had faced and the long-lasting impact of the act on individuals.