From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Chinese/Peter S. Li
Several books can be recommended for a general study of the history of China and of Chinese emigration in the nineteenth century. Chinese history in the imperial era is covered in Imperial China, edited by Franz Shurmann and Orville Schell (New York, 1967), and in Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Fall of Imperial China (New York, 1975). Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York, 1991), provides a comprehensive account of Chinese history from the late sixteenth century to the present and is useful for an understanding of home conditions in nineteenth-century China and the era of immigration. Wang Gungwu’s China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore, 1991) has many insightful articles which explain how and why Chinese emigrated to southeast Asia and other parts of the world.
From China to Canada, edited by Edgar Wickberg and written by Edgar Wickberg, Harry Con, Graham Johnson, and William Willmott (Toronto, 1982), is an important book for understanding the general history of Chinese in Canada. One of the most comprehensive histories of this type, A History of Chinese in Canada(Taiwan, 1967), was originally written in Chinese by Lee Tunhhai, also known as David T.H. Lee. Additionally, James Morton, In the Sea of Sterile Mountains (Vancouver, 1974), is one of the first studies to present a detailed account of the treatment of Chinese Canadians in British Columbia.
Several books have taken the vantage-point of Canadian society to understand the Chinese in Canada and how they have been treated; these include W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever (Montreal, 1978), and Patricia E. Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858–1914 (Vancouver, 1989), which uses newspapers as principal sources in documenting racism against Chinese and Japanese in Canada. Peter S. Li, The Chinese in Canada (Toronto, 1988), focuses on pre–World War II institutional racism and its effect on Chinese community development in Canada, and its post-war changes.
Chinese settlement in Canada and the development of Chinatowns is documented in David Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns within Cities in Canada (Vancouver, 1988), while Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal, 1991), is a study of how Vancouver’s Chinatown has provided a social and geographic boundary for constructing the Chinese as a racial group in British Columbia. Evelyn Huang and Lawrence Jeffery, Chinese Canadians: Voices from a Community (Vancouver, 1992), is a collection of edited transcripts of interviews with prominent Chinese Canadians and includes a comprehensive history of the Chinese in Canada. On Chinese-Canadian culture, readers should consult Artists of Chinese Origin in North America Directory/Pei Mei Hua i i shu chia ming jen lu (Westmount, Ill., 1993); Ban Seng Hoe, Beyond the Golden Mountain: Chinese Cultural Traditions in Canada (Ottawa, 1989), written to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; Lien Chao, “Anthologizing the Collective: The Epic Struggles to Establish Chinese Canadian Literature in English,” Essays in Canadian Writing, no.57 (winter 1995), 145–70; and Chinese Culture Centre, Vancouver, Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity & Chinese-Canadian Artists in Vancouver, November 2–30, 1991 (Vancouver, 1991).
