A paper son
Sid Chow Tan came to Canada under a false identity
Sid Chow Tan, 68, remembers being told that if anyone asked, he was a baby when he came to Canada and did not remember a thing.
That was true, but it was meant to conceal things that were not.
Later on, he realized there was a reason he referred to the couple who raised him as Mom and Dad when he was speaking English, but as Ah Yeh and Ah Nging — paternal grandfather and grandmother — when speaking Chinese at their home in Battleford, Sask.
There were thousands of socalled paper sons and daughters who came to Canada under false identities, as Tan did as a baby fleeing the Communist Revolution with his grandmother in 1950, as a way to get around strict and racist immigration rules.
Tan says he and the boy he knew as his older brother — really a cousin who came as a second paper son — grew up unaware of this secret until their family applied for amnesty. Afterwards, his own birth parents and younger siblings were able to immigrate to Canada, too.
Like many Chinese-Canadian men, his grandfather had already been in Canada for about three decades, having paid a head tax and prevented from bringing his family over. He had been brought to Canada by an uncle who had worked on the railroad after coming to North American for the gold rush of 1849.
Tan, who played a role in the fight for Chinese Head Tax redress, says that while his family has been on the continent for more than 150 years, his own children were the first to be born here.
“That tells you what racism and immigration policies and all that stuff do to families,” says Tan.
Still, Tan stresses he is grateful to be Canadian.
“I believe our family has won life’s lottery by being able to grow up and live and participate and be part of this free country we call Canada — stolen as it is, from First Nations,” he says from his home in Vancouver, B.C.