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Go to original source: Edmonton
Journal / SouthamNews
Edmonton
Journal (Page B3)
THEY
JUST WANT AN APOLOGY AND THE $500 BACK
Three generations of Chinese-Canadians bare the scars of cruel discrimination
BILL MAH,
Journal Staff Writer
The
Edmonton Journal
Sunday,
May 21, 2000
Photos
Captions:
Ed
Kaiser, The Journal / Vince Mah holding a head tax certificate with
a picture of his father.
Candace
Elliott, The Journal / Kenda Gee plays mah-jong with regulars at the
Gee Association.
Head
tax payer Wally Mah
Clattering
mah-jong tiles swirled by excited Chinese men and women on a nearby tabletop
nearly overwhelm the soft voice of Wally Mah.
It's
a noise he's heard for most of his 97 years.
But
for about two decades, female voices were missing from the sounds of Chinatown.
Wally
arrived in Canada as a teenager in 1921 and returned to China to marry and
have children. For 22 years, he lived in Canada, an ocean apart from his
family, playing mah-jong with other Chinese men.
"Oh,
it was lonely, sure it was lonely," says Wally.
The
former grocer is one of the dwindling number of aging Edmontonians who paid
the head tax. It's unknown how many remain.
"The government should pay us back." His face hardens as he wonders
why only Chinese paid to enter Canada.
"Why
did we have to pay? That was hard times for $500."
Today,
it's the equivalent of $4,341.09.
It
was July 15, 1921 when the "Controller of Chinese Immigration"
clerk scrawled his signature on the head-tax receipt for Mah Ming Sun, who
would take the Canadian name Wally. He and his uncle had just disembarked
a steamer from Canton, China.
Wally's
father had scraped together enough as a labourer building the railroad near
Revelstoke, B.C., to pay their passage and the tax.
The
white children taunted him at school in Kelowna, B.C. "Chink-Chong
Chinaman," they would jeer.
He
never finished school, working instead 14-hour days cleaning house for $5
a month. His father bought a cafe in Rock Haven, Sask., and Wally worked
there for 15 years before buying his own place in Dawson Creek, B.C.
Wally's
mother in China had found a bride for him and he travelled to meet his fiancee
Shirley for the first time. When it was time to return to Canada, Shirley
couldn't accompany him.
"They
let the man over but not let the woman. I had the money but the government
would not allow you."
Wally
sailed back to China three or four times to visit Shirley.
"Every
time I go back, she was like a stranger."
The
couple had four children all born in China, all left behind.
Four
years after the exclusion act ended, Wally brought his family to Canada.
His two sons helped him run his empire of three grocery stores in Edmonton
in the 1950s.
Mah's
wife Shirley died five years ago. One son is a successful accountant. The
other children are retired.
Wally
still keeps the head tax certificate in a box at home, waiting for an apology
from the government.
"It's
not the money. The thing is doing right."
Canadian
law robbed families left behind in China of husbands and fathers.
"I
never had a son-and-father relationship, because I had never seen my father
until I came here," says Vince Mah, 67, (no direct relation to Wally
Mah). Vince came to Canada in 1950 at 17.
His
mother saw her husband for the first time in 25 years when she came to Edmonton
in 1957. He had suffered a stroke four years earlier. She looked after him
until he died in 1962.
"It's
not right to have something apply to Chinese people only. It's inhumane
to separate a wife and husband and the family. It's the people like me that
were affected."
Wiping
tears from his eyes, he says it's hard for others to understand the suffering
he and his mother Jock Sim endured. They ate leaves and roots to survive
drought, disease and Japanese occupation during the Second World War.
His
father Jock Mah came to Canada on April 8, 1921 and returned to China four
years later for an arranged marriage with Jock Sim but couldn't bring her
back to Canada. When Jock returned to China in 1932 for a second visit,
they had their only child Vince.
Vince
longed to see the father he had only heard about.
"Whenever
I was coming home from school and I saw a man in front of our house, I was
hoping it was my father. Getting closer, I was always disappointed."
Vince
came to Edmonton in 1950. But now it was a Chinese Communist ban on emigration
that prevented Vince's mother from joining her family in Edmonton. In the
mid-50s, Vince, who had found jobs in restaurants, paid men in Hong Kong
to smuggle his mother out of China.
Vince
never lived with his father because of work: "He was in one place.
I was always in another place."
Neither he nor his mother had ever heard about the head tax or the
exclusion act until a public meeting in Chinatown. When he came home, he
told his mother and she burst into tears. "She said all her life married to my father,
they did not even spend 10 years together. When I heard that, I could not
say anything else because I feel so badly."
Jock
Sim died in 1996 at the age of 86.
While
Vince says "everything is better today," he wants Ottawa to apologize
for splitting their family. "It will clear up my head and also for
my mother. Even though she's not here, she'd feel better too."
Activism
came late for Kenda Gee, a city man pushing Ottawa to redress the head tax
and exclusion act.
"I'm
kind of embarrassed to say this, but I really didn't develop a Chinese or
Asian consciousness until undergraduate or maybe even law school,"
says Gee, a legal scholar, filmmaker and author in his 30s. "Everyone
tried very hard not to be Chinese growing up."
Gee's
Canadian roots reach back to 1910 when his great-grandfather Gut Gee travelled
from Toi Shan to toil on the railroad in B.C. In 1922, Gut Gee ran the Wah
Sing Laundry on 112th Street and Jasper Avenue. "My great-grandfather
never even got to see his wife again."
Gee's
grandfather Cheung Gee was born in China and emigrated to Canada at 15.
He too went back to marry. In the 1930s, he ran a market garden on 107th
Street and 99th Avenue.
Took
Ning, Gee's father came to Canada in 1950 and opened Ning's Grocery on 34th
Street.
"In
fact, I am fourth-generation, but in law I would only be considered second-generation."
Kenda
Gee says he never realized the discrimination his family faced until he
wrote a law school paper about the head tax and exclusion act.
"My biggest regret is perhaps that as a younger generation Chinese-Canadian,
or Canadian for that matter, I did not get involved much earlier. We have
to make sure that this never happens again."
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