| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Patricia E. Roy, The Oriental Question: Consolidating a White Man's Province, 1914–1941 (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2003)

SEPARATING THE HISTORIAN's own analytic voice from those of the historical actors to whom he or she is trying to give voice is one of the critical issues in writing a history of racism. Failure to maintain this separation can result in unwittingly reproducing the very categories and exclusions that need to be explained in the first place. When one relies exclusively on primary sources without critically engaging wider literatures and theories of racism, this result is all the more likely.

Patricia E. Roy's The Oriental Question: Consolidating a White Man's Province, 1914–41 illustrates both the advantages and dangers of an approach relying almost exclusively on primary sources. This is the second of three volumes in which Roy traces the history of anti-Asian racism in British Columbia. The first volume, published a number of years ago, A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858–1914, examined anti-Asian discourse and public policy in British Columbia until the beginning of World War I. This volume picks up where the former left off, bringing the story up to the eve of the forced relocation of Japanese Canadians on the west coast during World War II. The third volume covers the period from 1941 to the introduction of the points system and the supposed dismantling of racist immigration policies in 1967.

The Oriental Question has many of the same strengths and weaknesses of the earlier work. Like A White Man's Province, it is deeply rooted in the primary English-language sources and in newspapers in particular. This rootedness in the primary sources has always been one of the strengths of Roy's research and has allowed her to make finely shaded distinctions that escape less careful historians. Indeed, I was a bit shocked to learn (13) that Roy admits to not having read all of the newspapers published in British Columbia during the period under consideration. She has certainly read more of them than anyone else and this shows here in the way in which she treats the development of anti-Asian discourse as specific to time and place. For example, she is able to document how at various moments anti-Asian feelings died down in one part of the province, only to pick up in another, and how such feelings were often specific to particular issues. She supplements her newspaper accounts with other available public records such as House of Commons and Senate debates, as well as archival sources and the diaries of leading protagonists. The result is a finely textured account that convincingly shows that while anti-Asian racism was never a monolith, it became consolidated in the image of British Columbia as "a White Man's province" during this era.

One of the virtues of the resulting account is the way Roy spins these very divergent sources about a series of isolated, even obscure, episodes into a credible narrative. In effect, she argues that after a period of quiescence during World War I, immigrants from China and Japan and their Canadian-born children were seen as "unassimilable," meaning incapable of ever being incorporated into the dominant British Canadian community. Even as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 ended immigration from China, resulting in greater tolerance of the members of this community, fear mounted over Japanese imperialism, and ultimately over the presence of Japanese Canadians. In many ways this thesis is an elaboration of her "Fear of Asians" argument first put forward over 25 years ago, i.e., that as the century progressed anti-Asian sentiment shifted from a focus on the Chinese to the Japanese and that at heart these sentiments were based on a fear of Asian superiority and competition. Certainly subsequent scholarship on this issue will need to contend with Roy's findings and interpretations, e.g., that there was no significant gender component in the anti-Asian racisms of British Columbia's "white" population.

Like her earlier account, this one is also largely immune to issues of theory. As Roy explains, her argument "relies more on empirical evidence than on theories." (11) This is unfortunate since between the publication of her first volume and this one a significant literature on racisms and their histories has appeared in Canada, a literature that has often benefited from being theoretically informed. Consider for example, the work of Constance Backhouse on the history of legal racism in Canada or Roy Mikki's account of the Japanese Canadian redress movement. One advantage of theory is that, when used properly, it leads to asking better questions. Roy largely takes racist categories at face value, treating them much the same way her sources do, and while her sympathies are not with the racists, she occasionally falls into the kinds of binaries that underlay so much anti-Asian racism, a tendency that does a disservice to her strong claim to the empirical. For example, she provides an account of the picketing of "Chinese" potato farmers by "white" growers on the Fraser Street bridge in March 1937. The picketing resulted in an assault on a truck driver, Chung Chuck. Roy is careful to describe Chung's injuries and notes that he also inflicted a minor knife wound on a Vegetable Board inspector. The police laid charges against Chung who also charged the inspector with assault. Both sets of charges were dismissed by the courts. Roy then notes that the Chinese consul condemned the picketers and that the CCF condemned the marketing board that was trying to fix prices and whose actions had led to the confrontation in the first place. She then points out, "The Vancouver Province denied that it was 'a racial issue' but sympathized with the board's efforts to keep the market for Canadians against an 'increasing tide of ruthless Chinese competition'." (141) She seems unaware of the problematic juxtaposition between "Canadian" and "Chinese" here. It is possible that her description reproduces the terms of the Vancouver Province editorial, but if so it is curious that these categorizations warrant no discussion. By contrast, Paul Yee's Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre 1988) presents a rather different account of this incident, one more sensitive to the racist nature of the conflict. We learn, for example, that Chung Chuck was not merely a truck driver, but one of the main growers who had successfully challenged the marketing broad's restrictions in the courts. (80) Yee's reproduction of the Province editorial itself shows that it represented those behind the Chinese-controlled farms as "smart young Orientals, born in Vancouver and claiming all the rights and privileges of Canadian citizenship." (Yee, 83) While the editorial makes clear that these people were in the process of taking over, to the detriment of racialized whites, it appears that this Canadian/Chinese juxtaposition comes from Roy rather than the editorial itself. This in turn suggests that she rather misses the point that "the Chinese" were also "Canadian" and that an important historical question is how and why so many of their racialized "white" contemporaries did not see them as such or would not accept them even when they technically shared the same citizenship. In effect, she sees her sources as relatively straightforward descriptions of real differences rather than as artifacts of a discourse that continually created and recreated notions of racialized difference.

Roy's closeness to the English-language newspaper accounts meant that I often found myself hearing the racist voices, and relatively little in the way of antiracist voices. Indeed, I found myself wondering whether the English-language sources Roy relies upon do not also contain more of the voices of the members of the excluded groups themselves. Certainly by the 1920s and 1930s, British Columbia's population of racialized Asians included many who were literate in English and who did not hesitate to speak out against racist practices in letters to the editors and in various organized protests. The dominance of racist voices is compounded by Roy's necessary reliance on English-language sources and hence her failure to adequately consider the experiences of racism as lived by members of British Columbia's Asian communities. In the early chapters, she makes an effort to include some references drawn from the Vancouver-based Chinese Times, the Chinese-language newspaper published by the Zhigongdang or "Chinese Freemasons," but these disappear in the later chapters even though this paper continued to be published. I suspect that this has less to do with a careful review of this paper than with her reading of the notes on its local news section compiled as part of the background research for Edgar Wickberg, et al., From China to Canada, and preserved in the Chinese Canadian Research Collection at UBC. These notes become rather more spotty after the mid-1920s. Here some might also argue that had she conducted interviews with some of the survivors of the racist practices of this era, she might have had quite a different result. In the end, her book is more about the attitudes of racialized whites towards racialized Asians than it is about the social construction of racism.

Finally, I also wondered at her decision to end this volume on the eve of the exclusion of racialized Japanese from the west coast during World War II. While this may be the result of editorial decisions to preserve an extended discussion of this event for the third volume, something that might have been too large to include here, I cannot help but feel that an adequate understanding of racism requires appreciation for the consequences of racist and racializing representations, something that this volume cannot achieve if it does not also discuss the effects of a quarter-century of racist discourse in the destruction of Japanese Canadian communities.

Thus, in the end, the significance of this work is that, like the earlier volume, it catalogues English-language anti-Asian discourse in British Columbia. As such it is an invaluable reference for students of racism and of British Columbia's history. Its failure to problematize racist categories or to adequately consider the experience of racism from the points of view of those who were the objects of this discourse means that it fails to provide a convincing account of anti-Asian racisms. Racisms are not merely sets of linguistic practices on the part of members of racially privileged groups; they are dynamic relations of categorization, of inclusion and of exclusion, and of resistance. An adequate account of racism needs to be more alive to these dynamics.


Timothy J. Stanley University of Ottawa

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