Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada by Vivienne Poy (review)

An extension of her doctoral dissertation, Vivienne Poy’s Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada utilises her leftover research and provides us with personal narratives alongside historical analysis of Chinese immigrant women in Canada. Educated as an historian, Poy was the first woman of Chinese origin to be appointed a Senator in the Canadian Parliament. Her own immigration from Hong Kong exemplifies the success many Chinese immigrant women have achieved since arriving in Canada to start a new life.

While much research has been done on Canadian women’s history, the history of Chinese immigrant women has been all but ignored. Poy’s research into Chinese Canadian immigrant women therefore offers a much-needed glimpse into uncharted territory. Poy not only gives a voice to these women and their personal narratives as first-generation immigrants, she also calls into question the federal government’s strategic use of racist legislation, such as the Chinese Immigration Act (only repealed in 1947) to bar most women of Chinese origin from entering and staying in the country. By using a gendered and feminist lens throughout her book, Poy has pioneered a study into the lives and the social history of a significant portion of Canada’s immigrants throughout the twentieth century.

Poy structures her book by interviewing 28 women who came to Canada between 1950 and 1989. Many of them came as university students while others came to join male relatives already established in the country; others still came over as entrepreneurs and businesswomen. Poy’s diverse sample of interviewees demonstrates not only the distinct Chinese immigrant population in Canada throughout the twentieth century, but also the various ways in which they succeeded in their new land. She demonstrates the disparities among Chinese immigrants living in Canada. While some women and their families prospered through the Canadian educational system, becoming doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, many Chinese immigrant women were confined to the domestic sphere and/or forced to work as inexpensive labour in factories, farms, and restaurants. Poy highlights the personal narratives of these 28 women to reflect their journeys, sacrifices, hardships, and transformations as they left one homeland for another. Poy provides historical analysis alongside personal narratives and blends the two methods in a way that makes her book powerful and captivating. She sheds light on a part of Canada’s embarrassing and racially motivated past – something many Canadian public and social historians before her have been unwilling to engage with on such a large scale. Passage to Promise Land not only provides a voice for these 28 women and their experiences in Canada, it also lends itself to the larger historical narrative of immigration and grapples with the ever-elusive issue of Canadian identity.