Abstract

The History of Chinese Canadian Literature: Diversity and Integration is the first of its kind. It explores the history of the multilingual development of Chinese Canadian literature. The author conducted and completed the project with the support from the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of China Ministry of Education. Based on first-handed materials and historical facts, the book keeps Gold Mountain, a geographical and psychological concept familiar to countless Chinese, as a background. It describes the long hard over-100-year history of Chinese Canadian literature, which proves to be prosperous and diverse for being multilingual, multi-media and transnational, especially in west and middle Canada（centered around Vancouver, British Columbia）, east Canada（centered around Toronto, Ontario）and francophone Canada （centered around Montreal, Quebec）. These three areas have the largest Chinese population in Canada.

Since the mid-19th century when Chinese laborers cherishing the Gold Mountain dream went to Canada, Chinese immigration to Canada has undergone five stages: Free Entry（1858-1885）, Taxation and Limit（1885-1923）, Exclusion（1923-1947）, Ban-lifting（1947-1967）and Equalization （1967-now）. These five stages describe the progress of Chinese Canadians from marginalization to acquisition of full equal rights through their struggle. Meanwhile, Chinese Canadian literature has gone through the periods of emergence, growth, and prosperity.

At present, out of the total population over 37 million in Canada, nearly 1.8 million is Chinese. The Chinese has become the largest minor ethnic group after two founding nations, the English and the French, and Chinese is Canada’s third most widely spoken language after English and French. For more than a century Chinese Canadians have claimed rich literary productions in Chinese, English and French, which results in a unique diverse and multilingual body of literature.

Therefore, an integrated and comparative approach to the multilingual Chinese Canadian literature is applied to the following five subjects: early Chinese immigrants’ poems carved on the wall of Canada’s custom house, Canada’s longest-running Chinese newspaper The Chinese Times（1907-1992）, identity construction of Chinese women in North America, ethnic bildungsroman, and Chinese Canadian writers’ self-translation. Such an approach can not only reveal the historical cause for the diversity of Chinese Canadian literature, but can also deepen the research on some major Chinese Canadian writers and their works, highlighting the internal links within Chinese Canadian literature and its difference from or similarity to Chinese American literature.

The appendix“Chronology of Chinese Canadian Literature”is the first of its kind either home or abroad. The aim is to provide the readers a convenient glimpse of the history of Chinese Canadian literature.

So far, there are few monographs on the complete history of Chinese Canadian literature in China, Canada, or in other countries. This book, totaling about 400, 000 Chinese characters, thus attempts to serve as a pioneer, supplying a wealth of relevant pictures and photos. It seeks for the reason as well as for the historical course of multilingual development of Chinese Canadian literature to demonstrate its achievement in Chinese, English and French writing. This permits cross-lingual, transnational studies marked by integration and comparison. Chinese Canadian literature can be proved of high value to the understanding of Chinese Canadians, the history of Chinese immigration, the world Chinese literature, Canadian literature, Sino-Canadian exchanges, etc. All these efforts can perhaps contribute to strengthening the construction of overseas Chinese literature as an emerging discipline.

Key words: history of Chinese Canadian literature, Chinese immigration, diversity, integration, cross-lingual research