It is difficult to articulate a response to the irreparability of redress when the Canadian government’s attempt toat repair lands with insincerity or irreverence. I remember growing up, my mother and her siblings would occasionally talk about their grandfather being a “coolie” who paid the Head Tax, working on the Canadian Pacific Railway. How remarkable a feat it was that my great-grandfather didn’t die as many railway workers did – one for every mile of track laid, it is said. I think about how the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act, or more aptly referred to as the Chinese Exclusion Act, kept my great-grandfather from being reunited with his wife for four decades while she remained in Guangdong unable to join her husband, only seeing him for short periods when he was able to save enough money to travel back, a decade at a time. Approximately, a decade at a time a child was born, the youngest being my grandfather who remained in China until his marriage was already arranged. As young newlywed teenagers, my grandparents wouldn’t make their way to Canada until the 1950s, a half-century after their father first arrived. When recalling this story to people, I sometimes try toand explain that having such a long separation because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, results in them coming in their own “wave.” A long duration between one wave and an exhausted cresting of the next.
………Some waves arrive upon other shores, entirely. My great-uncle Tai, the oldest son of three, ended up in Guyana (then British Guinea), working as an indentured labourer. I remember the snide remarks of disdaindistain and silent disapproval my grandparents, aunts, and uncles would make in recalling stories of great-uncle Tai having a partner and two Afro-Canto Caribbean children while his first wife remained in Guangdong. I think about the sugar cane great-uncle Tai and his second partner cut. Did they meet on the plantation or in the neighbourhood? Who and where are these relatives now? If I went to Guyana, would I ever find them without knowing their names?
………I think about how my grandparents, aunts, and uncles passed this story down in our family and their disapproval of Tai abandoning his second partner and children when he left Guyana to reconnect with his father. How in leaving the Caribbean, his first wife joined him in Canada and the circumstances of long periods of separation from partners create the conditions with which waves of heartbreak crash on all shores, over and over, and over again.
………I’m listening to Sid Chow Tan’s 2006 speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Head Tax Families Society of Canada, and I’m struck by how he opens his address with a land acknowledgement of unceded Coast Salish territories, nearly a decade before the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to commence. How, successive Cantonese activists in BC would continue to align with Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh First Nations’ sovereignties while fighting for their own dignity in seeking acknowledgment and redress by the state. I refuse to call these activists aligned with First Nations, “Chinese-Canadians,” the name “Chinese-Canadian” a product of two colonial nation-states.
………As Timothy J. Stanley writes, “Macdonald introduced biological racism into Canadian state formation in 1885 when he effected the exclusion from the right to vote of anyone who was ‘a person of Mongolian or Chinese race’ (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons [Commons Debates], 1885, vol. xvii, p. 1582), on the grounds that they were biologically distinct from ‘Aryans’ and that their presence in the country threatened what he called ‘the Aryan character of the future of British America’ (p. 1589)” (2016).
………I think about the apology that Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally made to Cantonese migrants on Turtle Island and how half-heartedly that landed when he subsequently only applied compensation to the few surviving Head Tax survivors and not their descendants. I think about how my grandfather mailed his father’s Head Tax certificate to the government and was told he was ineligible for compensation because it was only for his father who was already deceased due to old age. I remember the insult to injury that this resulted in our family and to make it worse, his father’s Head Tax certificate was never returned. Perhaps it is now sealed in some archive somewhere or even dismissively recycled along with countless other weighty documental piles of evidence, inadequately accounting for successive waves of colonial violence and an enduring white supremacy that remains just as present today.
………I read about a cross wave, also referred to as a square sea or a square wave, which occurs when two simultaneous weather systems redirect sea waves colliding perpendicularly. These waves form grid patterns in the ocean. It is cautioned that such oceanic conditions are extremely dangerous for swimmers or vessels as waves crash upon them from all sides. I think about the square sea with its visceral and intergenerational impacts, as transnational colonial cross waves crash upon our bodies and homelands, creating the conditions of prolonged separation and isolation. I think about these seemingly separate wave systems – systems siloed by other systems that drown life between them – while overwhelming waters wash over the mouths of ancestors, capsizing all those trapped between them.
………I think about continual “waves” of forced migration, affecting peoples across the earth. I think about cross waves of bombs landing on Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians who endure while trapped by imperialism on all sides and how thea powerlessness to stop genocide by everyday people is felt from all directions. I think about those who survive and those who join waves of migration, arriving upon the shores of other colonized lands, forced into systems of alienation.
………I admit that this response provides no suggested means of rescue or resolution to the conditions outlined.
Reference:
Stanley, Timothy J. “John A. Macdonald, ‘the Chinese’ and Racist State Formation in Canada.” Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 1 (2016): 6–34, https://jcri.ca/index.php/CRI/issue/view/582.
Sebastian De Line (秋菊) is a queer, trans artist , curator, and scholar born in Burnaby, BC, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A head tax descendent, their mother’s family comes from Sam Yup District in Guangdong.