Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Age of Exclusion, 1885-1945 (review)

Brokered Belonging calls for 'an integrated history of Canada, the United States and the Pacific World during the Exclusion Era' (132). Nominally a study of the role of ethnic 'brokers,' that is of those who daily negotiated relations between the Chinese and the dominant society, it challenges accounts that have either seen the Chinese in Canada as a community apart from the mainstream or as solely of interest because of its exclusion.

For Lisa Mar, the Chinese were complex actors fully integrated into Canadian and transnational history. She demonstrates this through five superb case studies of immigration interpreters, legal advisors, the 1922-3 Victoria students strike, the 1924 Survey of Race Relations, and the workers movement during the Second World War. Each study is informed by a thorough canvassing of both Chinese- and English-language sources, including from relatively newly available Chinese archives, such as those of the Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia and the most careful rereading in thirty years of the major source on Chinese Canadian history, Dahan Gongbao or The Chinese Times. Mar's study is also firmly located in the literatures on Asian Americans and local elites in China.

The role of traditional brokers is brilliantly demonstrated in her groundbreaking account of immigration under the head tax regulations of the early twentieth century. She details how the entire immigration system depended on Chinese interpreters and how rival factions in both communities struggled for control of these positions. In 1909-11, the Vancouver interpreter Yip On actively sabotaged the regulations he was charged with enforcing. Yip was the chief organizer of the Chinese Empire Reform Association, a political activist who had organized the first successful boycott of foreign goods in China in 1908-9 in protest against foreign discrimination such as the head tax. Yet he got and maintained his interpreter's position through connections to the Liberal Party patronage machine in bc. The whole immigration system was corrupt with a network of kickbacks that reached the highest levels of the Liberal Party. Corruption was such that by the 1930s as much as a quarter of the Chinese population in Canada consisted of undocumented workers. Mar shows that factions of the Chinese political and commercial elite were inexorably tied to factions of the dominant society's elite. Thus, where others have seen two sets of politics at work, Mar forcefully argues there was a single set inexorably tied together.

By the 1920s, traditional brokerage was breaking down and, along with it, a long-standing politics of placating and accommodating white officialdom. This is the backdrop against which Mar reinterprets the 1922-3 students strike in Victoria, seeing it as directly connected to the mass movements of the May Fourth Movement in China. But traditional brokerage relations fully end only with the Second World War when British Columbia Chinese workers staged a series of illegal work stoppages, even establishing their own industrial union, as they struggled for equal pay, against discriminatory income tax regulations that starved families in China, and boycotted conscription in protest against disenfranchisement. Thus, for Mar it was on the shop floor and not the battlefield that the alliance was formed that won Chinese full voting and immigration rights. Indeed, Mar establishes that only 10 per cent of those eligible served in the Canadian armed forces.

But many readers will be most intrigued by Mar's chapter on the 1924 Survey of Race Relations, conducted under the leadership of Charles Park, the founder of the Chicago school of sociology. Mar argues that the findings of the survey, intended to document the situation of Asians on the Pacific Coast of North America, were controlled by Vancouver Chinese community leaders who ensured that the survey's researchers heard only a single narrative, that of acculturated Chinese blocked from full integration by racist exclusions. In so doing, they shaped one of the founding narratives of modern sociology and one that...