The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945–80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power by Wing Chung Ng (review)

humanities 547 discoveries? Documents B any documents from any country or period of history B are unlikely to speak for themselves, but a historian has to be careful about speaking for them. Boterbloem's text is riddled with conditional constructions : `possibly,' `conceivably,' `one could propose,' `one is tempted to deduce.' And what he is tempted to deduce tends to be what other historians, long before the era of glasnost, have already posited. In discussing Kalinin province's successive Communist leaders, for example, he surmises that each transfer or dismissal was the result of patron-client relations with senior Party bosses in Moscow B a reasonable supposition, but one that is nowhere reflected in the archival evidence he presents. The enormity and incompleteness of Soviet archival records present many challenges to a researcher, but the greatest is to pose new questions that can help to illuminate patterns in the data. Without such questions, we risk being overwhelmed by details, or else belabouring the obvious. There is a new history of the Soviet era to be written, but serious archival study demands a more systematic and innovative approach than the present work demonstrates. (R.E. JOHNSON) Wing Chung Ng. The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945B80: The Pursuit of Identity and Power University of British Columbia Press. xiv, 202. $75.00, $29.95 For much of this country's history, few scholars considered the story of Chinese Canadians to be a subject of much interest. The first significant studies of the topic were celebrations of the Chinese Canadians' contribution to Canadian society, intended in part to confirm the wisdom of official policies of multiculturalism. These were followed by studies of the effects of white racism on Chinese-Canadian history, which for all their value effectively reduced the Chinese Canadians themselves to the status of bystanders in their own history. Influenced by recent work on the permeability and instability of ethnic boundaries, Wing Chung Ng's remarkable new study restores Chinese-Canadian agency in their own history. Through careful study of the Vancouver Chinese press, institutional records, and interviews, Ng explores the history of the discourse of Chineseness, of Chinese identity and Canadian belonging, among the Chinese in Vancouver. In what is narrowly a history of instititution building in Vancouver's Chinatown, but broadly the best history to date of that community, Ng considers the ongoing struggles over defining the content of ethnic Chinese culture in the Canadian context. The key factors shaping the various positions are generational cohort and place of birth. Successive waves of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants approached these questions very differently, and pursued their respective 548 letters in canada 1999 visions of identity in the Chinese press and through the community's myriad voluntary associations. In the dark years of the 1923 Immigration Act which effectively excluded Chinese immigrants, ethnic Chinese in Vancouver shared a prevailing sense of community and Chineseness, shaped as much by rejection by mainstream society as by any underlying commonalities. Though immigration policy remained restrictive after the repeal of the act in 1947, some new immigrants did arrive. Seeking to redefine Chinatown's institutional life to better serve their interests, these groups criticized the older settlers for parochialism and isolationism. Meanwhile, a first generation of Canadian-born (tusheng) Chinese was coming of age. Refusing to be disparaged by the older generations for their use of English and their orientation to Canada, they proudly proclaimed a new definition of Chineseness. Struggles came to a head in the 1960s over control of the Chinese Benevolent Association, an umbrella group of Chinese associations, but the struggle was itself a symbol of conflicting and interacting positions, shaped by relations with the Old World and the New. The different positions were apparently reconciled in the 1970s with the formulation of 'Chinese Canadian' as an overarching identification for ethnic Chinese, one which advanced their claim to be Canadian at the same time as it celebrated their Chineseness. But debates over the meaning of Chinese Canadian persist. Ng's final chapter considers the comparative implications of his study of the complexities of identity construction. He suggests convincingly that attention to immigration patterns, demographic variables, ethnic institutions , and the influence of China...