Banning Chinese immigrants came with 'fanatical documentation,' says curator of exhibit on Exclusion Act

In the summer of 1923, Tai Hing Gom was committed to Essondale Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Coquitlam, B.C., that later became Riverview Hospital.

Tai was 42 years old and five feet two inches tall. He had arrived in Canada from Canton (Guangzhou), China about 13 years prior. Little else was known about him, according to government records at the time. There was no information about where he had settled, what he did for a living, or what mental health condition he had.

Even his C.1.44 — a government form that Chinese immigrants were required to have at the time — had a line that said, "Nothing more known."

But the date of Tai's hospitalization offers historians some clues.

On July 1, 1923, the government of Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act, now known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned nearly all immigration from China.

Two weeks later, Tai landed in Essondale Hospital, where a photo of him was taken. He was wearing an oversized coat. His eyes were cast down, his shoulders were slumped.

"This man is someone who's broken," said Catherine Clement, the curator of the exhibit, Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, at the new Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver. 

Tai's story was one of hundreds that Clement discovered for the exhibit, which opens on July 1 — 100 years after the Exclusion Act was passed.  

Tai was like many other Chinese migrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In seeking a brighter future in Canada, they found themselves uniquely targeted by a colonial government determined to contain the Chinese people who had stayed after helping to construct the Canadian Pacific Railway, and keep new immigrants out. 

Once the immigration ban was implemented, "it's like they lost hope," said Clement. 

"They were here and working so hard and maybe barely eking out a living, and then this Act comes in."

'Fanatical documentation'

While other communities also faced systemic discrimination at the time, the Chinese community was the only one subjected to the unprecedented mass registration that came with the immigration ban, Clement said.

As she discovered, institutional racism required "fanatical documentation," including use of photo identification and "C.I." — certificates to monitor the community. 

Even Canada-born Chinese people were issued certificates by the Department of Immigration and Colonization's Chinese Immigration Service.

"In order to do exclusion, you needed lots and lots of paperwork, lots of ink, lots of bureaucrats, lots of paper," Clement said.

Clement has dedicated the past four years to tracking down as many C.I. certificates from across the country as possible, and to find out the stories behind them.

Since so many Chinese people felt humiliated by the pieces of papers meant to keep tabs on them, many never spoke of the documents even after the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947, she said. 

Others were afraid of what the surveillance meant.

"It was actually the registration that put the fear of God into the community … because of what the consequences could be," said Clement. 

Some people even destroyed the discriminatory paperwork after they became citizens. Still, a voluminous paper trail remained.

"And today it's actually these pieces of paper that help take us back into this story."

A way to honour those without descendants

While unprecedented, the 1923 Exclusion Act was merely the latest in a series of government policies meant to keep Chinese people out. 

In 1872, Chinese Canadians were denied the right to vote or run for public office. In 1885, the government brought in the head tax, which rose from $50 to $500 by 1903.  

When the head tax failed to deter immigration, the government introduced the Exclusion Act. Between 1923 and 1947, fewer than 50 Chinese people were allowed into Canada. 

Some Chinese merchants were able to bring their wives over to Canada during this time, but poorer labourers were forced to be apart from loved ones for decades. Most men never had any hope of forming a family.

University of British Columbia history professor Henry Yu's maternal grandparents were forced apart for nearly three decades, following the Chinese Exclusion Act, he said.

Yu's mother was 28 years old when she met her father for the first time in Vancouver in 1965. 

"You could say Paper Trail, the exhibit that is opening on July 1 is both, in my mind, a kind of way to recognize and honour men like [my grandfather]," said Yu, who also co-leads the Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement at UBC.

"But it is also, perhaps more importantly, a way to mark and acknowledge and remember those who don't have descendants to remember them by."

Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act opens at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver on July 1.