Painstaking research work by Catherine Clement found a treasure trove of records buried deep in federal archives
The situation caused some business owners to return to China. Many others, who lived in poverty, asked clan societies or local merchants for charity to sponsor a passage back to China so they wouldn’t be separated from family. Some fared worse, giving into despair. Others lived in fear they would be so alone when they died that there would be no one to bury them, said Clement.
She first started noticing these beige paper identity cards, known as C.I. or “Chinese immigration” certificates, years ago when she was interviewing Chinese Canadian war veterans. She was intrigued to see how they were colour-coded and numbered in an extensive system of cataloguing with many classifications for different professions and for those born abroad and in Canada. Newfoundland, which wasn’t then part of Canada, issued its own version of these cards.
“I kept on finding all these photos from 1924,” said Clement, explaining how Chow ran the go-to studio in Vancouver for getting the head shots that Chinese people were required to submit to government officials during that one-year registration period. More recently, she gave UBC history professor Henry Yu the C.I.44 registration form for his grandfather. Until now, his mother had never seen a photo of her father as a young man, said Yu, recounting how his grandfather and mother and grandmother were separated because of the Exclusion Act.
There is the merchant class and the men who industriously ran small businesses. After the repeal of the Exclusion Act in 1947, they could apply to be reunited with family members, even though the process took some years and was sometimes awkward and painful.Article content
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