15 February 2010

Chung Collection Illuminates the Chinese Experience in B.C.

Wallace Chung looks over the model of the Empress of Asia he spent six years rebuilding. The replica is part of the Chung Collection at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC.

Vancouver British Columbia - There has been Lunar New Year feting and feasting all over town on the weekend. But on one night last week, on the lower floor of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC, there was a different, very poignant, event in honour of the annual holiday.
 
Wallace Chung, a retired vascular surgeon who was born in Victoria and grew up in his father's Chinatown tailor shop, is gently flinging open drawers, moving between display cases, and regaling an intimate crowd with anecdotes, some amusing, others appalling, about what it was like to be of Chinese descent in B.C., going back to the 1880s.
 

 
It's a rare walk through the Chung Collection. And tonight, his guests include many recent immigrants from mainland China. Several continue to commute regularly, doing business in Beijing, Shanghai, and beyond.
 
The collection tells the story of the Chinese vanguard in B.C. who came seeking gold in the mid-1800s. Thousands later built dangerous stretches of the Canadian Pacific Railway as it reached westward through the Interior and the Fraser Canyon.
 
"Some recent immigrants don't know too much about the past here," Chung said at the end of the evening, organized by York House School.
 
B.C. may promote its Asia Pacific Gateway as a newfangled concept, but many of Chung's keepsakes, especially the ones collected from Canadian Pacific Railway and Steamships, are reminders that people and trade to and from Asia have been flowing for much more than 100 years.
 
On the flip side, "Some [attendees] said to me that they were surprised at what they learned," Chung said.
 
"Canada was once a deeply bigoted country. Today, it is welcoming and full of opportunities for minorities."
 
Two years ago (Editor's Note:  The collection has been on display at UBC since 2002 at least.), Chung and his wife, Madeline, a retired obstetrician, moved their collection of 25,000 items, including documents, rare books, maps, posters, and other artifacts recording early Chinese immigration to B.C., to this permanent location at UBC.
 
It's open to the public and on most days, visitors get a peek at a temperature-controlled, no bags, no coats, no felt, or ballpoint pens, speak softly, rare-books-and-archives kind of place.
 
The collection has been partly captured online, but UBC archivist Sarah Romkey hopes to one day make recordings of Chung's stories available to visitors. With their meanderings, ironies, and "something new each time I hear him tell them," his commentaries bring the collection to life, she says.
 
It's definitely one thing to just read a tag that says:  "Report on funds raised and expenses for the defence of Wong Foon Sing in the Janet Smith murder case, 19 May 1925."
 
It is quite another to hear Chung recount the story behind a tattered booklet. When Smith, a Scottish nursemaid, was found murdered in the Shaughnessy mansion of a prominent Vancouver family, "the Chinese houseboy [Wong] was, considering many other circumstances, absurdly suspected, tortured, and arrested".
 
The Chinese community in B.C. rallied together. In tiny, little contributions of 25 to 50 cents each, thousands of them raised some $3,000 for him," Chung said.
 
Other items that evoke the past and give pause to the present include copies of phrase books for Chinese labourers in B.C. mines and on the railway.
 
In alternating lines of Chinese characters and English translations, these workers had a pocket reference for navigating their foreign workplaces: "Where is the dynamite and fuses? Where is the sledgehammer? ...Who is the tallest one? He is the president of the company."
 
Finally, at the heart of the collection is a tribute to Canadian Pacific's once grand fleet of luxury liners that carried goods and people across the Pacific, linking Vancouver to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Yokohama, and Nagasaki until the start of the Second World War.
 
Chung's mother arrived in Canada in 1919 aboard the company's Empress of Asia steamship and, for many years, there was a poster of it hanging in his father's shop.
 
This inspired him to obsessively and painstakingly spend some 4,000 hours over six years restoring a model of the ship.
 
In another corner, there is a nod to Canadian Pacific's first ocean-going ship.
 
In 1886, just weeks after the first trans-Canada train made it from Montreal to Port Moody, the W.B. Flint arrived from Yokohama "with more than one million pounds of tea aboard.
 
"This was immediately transferred from ship to train for destinations in Eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe.
 
"So began a large and profitable ocean trade for the Canadian Pacific Railway Company."
 
Joanne Lee-Young