Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada by Alison R. Marshall (review)

Alison R. Marshall’s Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Chinese Canadian immigrant communities. While most studies of Chinese migration have centred on the Pacific coast, Marshall focuses on the growth and development of vibrant Chinese communities on the Canadian prairies. Specific attention is paid to Manitoba, where the most mature political and economic networks existed. Marshall demonstrates that these networks helped to facilitate the connection of newcomers to powerful elders, information, and associations that could help them on their way. Through close examination of Chinese communities in Manitoba and, to a lesser extent, Saskatchewan, Cultivating Connections illuminates how religion, racism, gender, and nationalist organisations shaped the creation of a successful Chinese society on the prairies.

Marshall begins at the turn of the twentieth century, when Chinese men began moving inland from coastal British Columbia and the United States. Ultimately, the prairies were more receptive to incoming Chinese and socioeconomic standing was more easily obtained. Though the society was small and predominantly male due to racist immigration policies such as the Head Tax of 1885 and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, networks created by global Chinese nationalist regimes such as the Kuomintang (KMT) emerged in the early twentieth century and provided strong networks of support. Marshall suggests that the small number of Chinese immigrants, combined with the relative absence of women, made nationalist ties stronger than familial ones and therefore membership of nationalist regimes was crucial to achieving and maintaining success in prairie communities.

While the discussion of male-dominated Chinese prairie networks is thorough, the most lively and engaging part of the book deals with ‘weaving women back into the historical fabric’ (p. 18). Women’s lower status within Chinese communities was compounded by isolation that resulted from racism, exclusionary Canadian immigration policies, and Chinese cultural norms that dictated certain gender roles. Women were limited both by the same racism faced by men, and by sexism from within the Chinese community as the powerful nationalist networks excluded them until the 1940s. The inclusion of detailed experiential accounts of first-generation Chinese women is possible only due to Marshall’s innovative interdisciplinary approach. Strongly grounded in feminist qualitative methods and oral history, Marshall’s analysis balances narratives of those in dominant positions with women’s narratives, which tend to be subordinate and difficult to access due to omission, invisibility, and self-censorship. While a man’s experience was dictated by his access to nationalist organisations and prominent community members, ‘a woman’s quality of life was determined by nationalism, her gender, and her outsider status’ (p. 137). Cultivating Connections provides a nuanced analysis of the gendered and racial experiences of Chinese Prairie Canadians and is an excellent contribution to the literature on the history of immigration and migration, social geography, and women’s history.