THE DOG’S AGE BEGINS
It’s a whole new year
Local group explores ties between Vancouver and historic city in southern China
A dozen or so people are gathered in the dining room of a cosy Vancouver home to look back on a special trip they made to Kaiping in southern China.
Plates are laden with food and treats of all sorts brought to share. There’s baked salmon, stir-fried broccoli, takeout boxes of barbecued pork and duck, a selection of gourmet cheeses with thin apple slices, and Ziploc bags of black sesame and peanut brittle.
Later, bottles of Scotch come out, and there is both laughter and reverence as the people chat about what they experienced and who they met.
It’s a weekend gathering just ahead of Lunar New Year, one grounded in many of the holiday ’s traditional and universal themes: travel and reunion, abundant food, drink and revelry. Underpinning it all is a deep respect for one’s family and forebears.
As Vancouver aims for UNESCO World Heritage Site designation for its Chinatown, reflecting on this trip to Kaiping reveals the fascinating, long-standing connections that exist between the two cities.
Kaiping is a city in southern China’s Guangdong province known for its hundreds of crumbling “diao lou” fortress towers and villas that were built in the early 20th century by Chinese families who returned to the area after making good on a whole new life overseas in cities such as Vancouver. They returned to Kaiping with money to invest and a love of Western styles.
The diao lou buildings, made of imported cement, feature ornate balconies and turrets like those on a medieval castle in Europe, but they are also infused with details that hark back to local village life during the Ming dynasty.
In 2007, Kaiping applied for and received UNESCO World Heritage Site status for the architectural uniqueness of its diao lou buildings and the history attached to them. Not long after, the New York Times described the dotting of diao lous in this area as being “in a tableau that is more Tuscan countryside than Chinese landscape.”
The travellers gathered in Vancouver to reminisce about their trip to Kaiping recall biking through fields, traipsing through open-air markets and the sampling of local delicacies such as clay pot rice and snake soup simmered for hours.
But, for many at the dinner, the highlight was “visiting the ancestral villages,” says Geoff Wing, who was born in Kamloops, grew up in Vancouver and lived and worked overseas in Tokyo before becoming interested in his family’s ties to Kaiping.
His uncle Peter served as mayor of Kamloops in 1966, the first mayor of Chinese descent in North America. With bits of family lore, old letters and “biographies from three uncles,” Wing has been tracing the story of his family’s past back to his grandfather’s arrival in B.C. in 1901.
Wing says he joined the trip to Kaiping last fall so he could learn more about the history of the Chinese from Vancouver’s Chinatown before they arrived in Canada.
Much of the current push to appreciate Vancouver’s Chinatown is focused on its history as a place of refuge for Chinese railway workers and bachelor societies, and the site of protests for recognition.
But there is growing awareness that Kaiping shows how Vancouver Chinatown is part of a much bigger international thread that extends
from southern China to cities in the U.S., Southeast Asia, Australia and Canada, says University of B.C. history professor Henry Yu.
“It’s an extension. Vancouver Chinatown is part of the same story,” says Yu.
If there is one place in Vancouver Chinatown to look for a direct tie to Kaiping, it might be at the second floor premises of the Hoy Ping Benevolent Association on Main Street. The connection is not immediately obvious, but Kaiping and Hoy Ping are different ways of romanizing the same Chinese characters. Simply put, Kaiping is the Mandarin spelling and Hoy Ping the Cantonese spelling for the same city. The association goes back to the 1920s as a place to support immigrants from the Kaiping area.
A few elders, who came to Vancouver during different decades, still make regular visits to the association to meet friends, read newspapers or play a game of chess. They are now in their seventies and eighties and have varying childhood memories of running around Kaiping’s diao lous and hearing stories of men that left for Canada and the U.S. in search of opportunities.
They say it’s not easy now to find the Vancouver families who went back to Kaiping to build the diao lous. There are probably records, but time has passed and “they would be the descendants and even the descendants are getting older” says Tony Jew, president of the Hoy Ping Benevolent Association, rattling off a few names of acquaintances.
He says families returning to Kaiping not only built diao lous, but also helped to establish hospitals and schools such as the Kaiping No. 1 School and the Kaiping Kaiqiao School. These institutions are still running and there are hundreds of former students and teachers in their Vancouver-based alumni groups.
“The diao lous in Kaiping are unique and have a great story, but it’s the process of migration internationally and the global network of Chinatowns that may be the more impressive legacy and infrastructure built, especially when considered as intangible heritage,” says Doris Chow, who is serving a third term as a director of the Hoy Ping Association.
She and her sister June represent younger, local-born, female members of the association who are keen to highlight that heritage.
“In Vancouver Chinatown, there are elders who still speak the Kaiping village dialect and there are village delicacies found in the bakeries (here)," says Chow, who was on the trip to Kaiping organized by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C., St. John’s College at the University of B.C. and the Guangdong Qiaoxing Research Centre of Wuyi University.
It was billed as being “unlike commercial tours or those organized by travel agencies” as it drew on scholarly research by these groups.
Chow and the others on the trip were led by researcher Selia Tan, who specializes in overseas Chinese history and heritage conservation at Wuyi University. Tan was a key player in collecting information when Kaiping was applying for its UNESCO designation.
For years since then, she has continued her work, knocking on doors in Kaiping to familiarize herself with the inhabitants of diao lous and tease out their family tales. She says she has interviewed “around a hundred people or more ... most of them from Vancouver” who have shared their stories.
One that she describes as typical is that of Yao Hua Fang, a village with diao lous built starting in 1923 by an immigrant family who returned to Kaiping from Vancouver. When Kaiping was applying for UNESCO designation, local journalists nicknamed these diao lous “Canada Village” because of that connection.
The village’s transformation started with Guan Guonuan, who went from Kaiping to Victoria in the early 20th century, says Tan. “He had his business (there) and helped his relatives from the village one by one. Eventually, more than 10 families benefited from his help. Their young men worked for Guan Guonan first. Then, with his help, they had their own businesses and spread out into Vancouver and Calgary.”
Tan’s list of Kaiping addresses and phone numbers and her notes compiled over a decade — who lives where, how they made their money, who they married and who might be around on a certain day of the week to unlock a village door — are invaluable leads for visitors from Vancouver and other places who arrive in Kaiping with incomplete or partial pieces of family history.
“Selia’s students have lots of updated information, including the (cell) phone numbers of the key holders,” says Nancy Wong, who joins the dinner party in Vancouver via Skype from Boston.
She and her husband went on the trip in the hope of visiting five Kaiping area villages where they have family ties. She’s been on previous trips that were less fruitful, but this time she was able to identify the house in which her mother was born.
“You need to be able to find the person with the keys,” says Wong.