The federal government has yet to pay for the financial and emotional costs incurred by the Chinese-Canadians who helped build B.C. and Canada. For generations, Chinese-Canadians were unfairly taxed and denied citizenship. The laws may have changed, but the discrimination that formed them haunts the descendants of those who paid the price, and the few remaining people directly affected. They are looking for redress.

It is appropriate that they tell their stories this month, on the eve of the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rooster. Those born during this year are said to be hard-working, definite about their decisions, and unafraid of speaking their minds.

Charlie Quan wants his $500 back. And he wants an apology from the federal government for taking his money in the first place. And he wants them to make it snappy. He is 97, after all, although he doesn’t look a day over 75. With his alert eyes, neatly groomed white hair and moustache, and sprightly walk, Quan brings a certain dignity to his quest to get a refund of the head tax he paid to enter Canada in 1923. “Why do the Chinese have to pay?” he asks.

Quan brought his own youthful interpreter, the 83-year-old Gim Wong, to our recent meeting in the mah-jong parlour of the Quan Family Association building near Hastings and Main, where he hangs out on Sunday afternoons. But he didn’t really need an interpreter—he is able to make himself perfectly understood on the subject of the head tax. “The other people don’t have to pay anything. If immigrants from other countries pay, I don’t care. I’ll pay. But only the Chinese pay and that’s not fair to me.”

July 1 is Canada Day to most of us. It means fireworks, barbecues, and “O Canada” sung off-key. To many Chinese-Canadians, however, it is Humiliation Day. On July 1, 1923, the head tax that Chinese immigrants had to pay for entry to Canada was repealed and replaced with an outright ban on Chinese immigration. Quan considers himself lucky to have been in quarantine that day in an immigration holding shed—known to its Chinese inmates as the overcrowded, stifling hot pigpen—on the Vancouver waterfront. Quan, then 15, paid the $500 tax with a loan from his uncle, who owned a restaurant in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. And, instead of spending the usual four to six weeks in the pig pen, he spent two, thanks to another $100 bribe for the guards.

Quan worked off his $600 debt, starting at 14 cents an hour, by washing dishes in his uncle’s eatery in Swift Current. He worked there for nearly four years, 14 hours a day, 365 days a year. When he left in 1942 to move to Vancouver, he was second cook.

Quan was one of the last of the 81,000 Chinese immigrants who paid a total of $25 million in head taxes from 1885 to 1923—a staggering amount of money at that time.

He’s also one of the handful of head-tax payers who are still alive. Quan is an icon in the growing movement in the Chinese community to have the head taxes refunded, restitution made for the separation of Chinese families during the 24 years of Chinese exclusion (1923-1947), and an apology offered for a total of 62 years (1885-1947) of racist legislation that governed the Chinese in Canada.

The Chinese were not consigned to second-class citizenship for 66 years. They were denied any form of citizenship at all.

GIM WONG’S NEATLY pressed RCAF uniform and glossy shoes are a not-so-subtle reminder that he was ready to put his life on the line for a country that denied him, a native son, the rights and privileges of citizenship until 1947. He trained as an air gunner for the war in Europe and as a flight engineer for the Japanese campaign, both of which ended before he could be posted overseas. In 1941, when he was 19, he was riding his motorcycle with a friend in South Vancouver. The police confiscated his motorcycle, and that of his Japanese friend. “I had to prove I wasn’t Japanese,” he says.

By that time, China had been an ally for 10 years, but Chinese-Canadians were treated like enemy aliens.

Wong worked in a Prince Rupert cannery that same year for 17 and a half cents an hour. His younger brother’s pay was 12 and a half cents an hour. “Why?” he asks. “Because Chinamen were paid half the white man’s pay. And you know what? We got nothing. We got no bunk. We got no mattress. We got no toilet. No toilet, even.”

It took four tries for Wong to get an application to volunteer for the RCAF. “All my friends said ‘Don’t bother. They won’t give you an application. Try. Go ahead. See if they give you an application.’ Sure enough, they wouldn’t give me an application. Hell no. Every time you turned around you had to prove you weren’t Japanese. See?”

Finally, an RCAF recruiter invited Wong to talk his way into the air force. Talking is Wong’s forte. For 20 minutes he expounded on the three aircraft pictured on the recruitment officer’s walls—detailing their engines, performance figures, and useful loads. The recruiter didn’t say a word. He smoked his pipe, and when Wong was finished, handed him an application, breaking his silence to say he’d support Wong’s candidacy for flight training.

“IN MANY WAYS, the Chinese in Canada, our struggle could be the most epic and heroic,” says Sid Tan, 55, a redress-movement activist, social worker by training, and communications consultant by trade. “[All immigrant struggles] are epic and heroic, but we had something to overcome, which we did. We did overcome it.” Tan says Chinese-Canadians can be proud of their history, and, more importantly, so can non-hyphenated Canadians.

“The Lo Wah Kiu, the old overseas Chinese, are an extremely distinguished thread in the Canadian fabric. We’re just trying to get some measure of justice while there are still head-tax payers and spouses alive. What’s so hard about that?

“This is why I’m doing it: My grandfather and grandmother were separated by a racist law [the Exclusion Act] for 25 years. My grandfather was in Canada. My grandmother was in China. Trapped. Because she couldn’t come to Canada. And what that does to a family. My grandmother thought my grandfather was pretty useless; he couldn’t bring his family to Canada. And Grandfather was explaining ‘You don’t understand. I couldn’t. No one could.’ And she never understood that.

“This is a hell of a story. Like, in our family, we have it all. We have railway workers, we have miners, we have head-tax payers, we’ve got exclusion, we’ve got paper sons...”

Tan came to Canada as an illegal immigrant. His grandfather bought forged papers that said he had sons in China. Tan came over as one of those sons, and so did his cousin. In Canada, the cousins were brothers and the grandfather was their father.

“That’s what a paper son is. The paper sons are the result of all the racist legislation.”

SEAN GUNN, 56, is a musician, a fifth-generation Chinese-Canadian, and the son of a head-tax payer who immigrated to Canada in 1918. His mother’s sister married Alexander Cumyow, the first Chinese born in B.C. Gunn is a veteran of the early 1970s struggle for democratization of his community’s keynote institutions, such as the Chinese Benevolent Association. The founding of the Chinese Cultural Centre was an initiative of what was then considered the younger generation in Chinatown. Gunn’s song “Head Tax Blues” is featured in Karen Cho’s National Film Board documentary In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, which will be televised this month. Gunn estimates that he has been active in the redress movement since at least 1980. When does he think his efforts might bear fruit?

“Hopefully in my lifetime. I guess the government can play a waiting game, and I guess guys like Charlie aren’t getting any younger. They’re waiting until the last guy passes away or something? I don’t know.

“The Chinese-Canadian community is largely a [recent] immigrant community. Maybe it’s an issue that new immigrants don’t look at or perhaps haven’t heard much about. I guess it’s our job...to educate people more about it, even within our own community. Try to get more unity behind this.”

TAN CALLS LINDA JANG the dynamo of the redress movement. She got involved partly out of a search for her identity. In the 1960s she went to an Upper Shaughnessy school, Emily Carr Elementary, where speaking a Chinese dialect was forbidden—as was Yiddish, she notes. She married a Caucasian, but her encounters with racism are ongoing.

“I often get mistaken for being Native,” says Jang. “If anyone wanted to go off on a rant about being Native—I tell you, they are treated the worst. I see it all the time.”

Jang says she has been “accused” of belonging to every culture imaginable. This is not always a bad thing, she says—people who like Hawaii often treat her nicely.

“We’re supposed to be a multicultural society, but that’s a misnomer. Because if [the government] doesn’t go back to their roots and eradicate [the] racism [of] charging head tax on the Chinese community, we can’t go forward. They’ve always ignored us, or tried to pretend there’s not enough funds, or they felt there was only one or two [head-tax payers] living.”

The redress torch gets passed from generation to generation. Before Jang’s father died, he handed his papers, including his $500 head-tax receipt, over to Jang and said, “You take care of this.”

“What I hope the government would do is refund the money, in today’s current value, to the families, and let the families decide what they will do with it from there,” Jang says. “Because that’s how Chinese people work. The family is the most important concern. That’s probably where they got a lot of the money to begin with. So it should go back to them. Rightfully, it’s theirs.

“And an apology. That’s important.”

Which is more important?

“They go hand in hand.”

Actually, Jang thinks two apologies should be made. She thinks the government should apologize for having taken so long to apologize.

SID TAN ACKNOWLEDGES that the question of redress is in the government’s hands, but he’s encouraged by the appointment of Raymond Chan as multiculturalism minister. “Raymond’s presence in Canada is attributable directly to head-tax payer Charlie Quan,” Tan says. “One of Quan’s daughters-in-law is Raymond’s older sister, responsible for bringing Raymond to Canada. And Raymond understands what the issue means to the Lo Wah Kiu community.”

One member of that community, Gim Wong, notes that the amount paid in head taxes—”damn near $25 million”—was also the cost of building the Canadian Pacific Railway, not counting the lives of the 1,400 labourers who died doing the most hazardous work, such as blasting. The CPR was B.C.’s price for joining confederation.

“Compare what the Chinese as a minority have done for Canada,” Wong says, “and they should have paid us to come here.”

In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, written, directed, and narrated by Karen Cho, will be broadcast on CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts on Tuesday, Jan. 11 and Friday, Jan. 14 at 10 p.m. In this National Film Board production, Cho, a fifth-generation Canadian of mixed heritage, features stories of survivors of the head-tax and exclusion acts. See cbc.ca/roughcuts [1] or onf.ca/intheshadowofgoldmountain [2] for more information. For more details on the Chinese redress movement, see ccnc.ca/redress/ [3] or call 604-433-6169.