Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (review)

In a book that responds to recent calls for more transnational and comparative treatments of the Pacific Rim, Mar locates a world, often reduced to a simple binary, within a transnational framework that incorporates not just Chinese immigrant and white communities in British Columbia but extends back to China and into the United States. In moving beyond the simpler dichotomies of Asian and “white,” Mar sheds light on the myriad interconnections between these seemingly disparate worlds, revealing that racial attitudes and encounters were far more complex than earlier histories have suggested. Mar’s transnational focus allows her, in turn, to foreground the activities of the Chinese “brokers” or “middlemen” who were able to leverage their ability to speak both English and Chinese, and to function effectively in all these spheres, negotiating the contours of white racism and the complexities of anti-Chinese exclusion laws. The inability of white politicians to read or speak Chinese and of newly arrived Chinese migrants to read or speak English created an opening that was occupied by Chinese brokers who could do both. The ability of these middlemen to bridge that language divide was a source of power that also rendered both groups dependent on them in critical ways. Mar herself is able to tell their story in part because of her own use of Chinese language sources that have not been previously utilized. (136, n.9)

Brokering Belonging comprises five separate chapters that examine the roles of Chinese brokers or middlemen in a series of specific contexts, including translating Chinese documents and interview responses for immigration officials and in both civil and criminal court cases; protesting against the segregation of Chinese students in the Victoria public schools in 1922; shaping public perception of Chinese immigrant communities by mediating responses to sociological studies; urging Chinese Canadians not to “boycott military service to protest their disenfranchisement” but to sign up for military service after they were permitted to join the armed services in 1944; and brokering remittances to China after the outbreak of hostilities with Japan in 1937. (12) Mar also examines the role of middlemen as labour contractors, describing their activities as “one of the founding bargains that structured Chinese migration in the Exclusion Era.” (56)

The range of contexts in which Mar considers the roles of Chinese middlemen means that this book will be of interest to scholars in a wide variety of fields, from immigration history and the history of identity and cultural representation, to labour history and education history. Mar argues persuasively that Chinese brokers were an integral part of the legal system that circumscribed the lives of Chinese labour migrants in British Columbia. Their role was a complex one, at once aiding other Chinese immigrants in negotiating an increasingly restrictive system of exclusionary laws when serving as interpreters for Canadian immigration officials, and using these negotiations to their own personal gain. In brokering agreements with white politicians who agreed to overlook legal irregularities, she argues, these middlemen played a critical role in producing new waves of “illegal immigrants.” (133) Although Mar notes that Chinese brokers served as practical enforcers of Canada’s Chinese head tax, she resists the impulse to simply dismiss them as “villains,” implying, in effect, that their efforts to aid Chinese labour migrants in evading the head tax can be understood as a form of resistance (even as they used the bind in which these migrants found themselves to line their own pockets). Ironically, although Mar rightly critiques race-based exclusionary laws as “illegitimate,” she appears to accept at face value their result, leaving unquestioned the status of the labour migrants who were able to avoid their full impact with the assistance of Chinese brokers simply as “illegal immigrants.” (14, 133) The dual layer of injustice faced by these labour migrants in the form both of race-based exclusion laws and graft cries out for a more complex analysis of their status.

Mar seeks to write history “from the middle” employing...