Immigrants to B.C. tell their stories
B.C.’s immigrants — redefining what it is to be a newcomer — are sharing their stories
Lino Coria is a Vancouver engineer who develops computer vision algorithms. But to tens of thousands of YouTube users in his native Mexico and across Latin America, he’s better known for talking about the life of his young family in Port Moody.
Coria has fans. His wife, Marcela de la Pena, was shopping for Halloween costumes at Value Village in Coquitlam last year when a stranger came up to their daughters, Julia and Emilia, now nine and four.
“‘Are these Lino Coria’s kids?!’ She had seen them in his videos before she moved here (from Mexico) to study,” said de la Pena.
Chatting in Spanish to his followers — about everything from bear-proof garbage cans to grad school programs to choosing public transit over buying another car — helps Coria think about what it means to be an immigrant building a life in B.C.
There is growing awareness of the value of hearing and recording stories like Coria’s. They are the kinds of observations that can easily get lost when immigration is examined only through an academic lens, which tends to focus on the historical or economic impact of each major wave of newcomers.
Immigrants’ stories told in their own words “are important because it doesn’t always work to see ourselves in the version of history that is jammed from above,” said Henry Yu, a UBC professor of history.
Yu said that starting in 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial, there was a pervasive sense “that we are a bilingual nation, English and French, and everyone else is an immigrant. Prior to this, (our identity) was about being part of the British Empire.”
Now, in this moment of celebrating Canada’s 150th year, said Yu, we should reflect on how our national fabric is much more complex than it is often described. And immigrants’ recollections convey nuances that timelines and chronologies can’t.
Individual “stories allow for the reality of more complicated migration from other parts of the world, that include third and fourth moves, such as South Asians who were in Africa before arriving here or Chinese that were thirdgeneration in Trinidad. We should take stock of who we are and all the complex stories.”
‘TAKING THE TRAIN’
For Coria, thinking about what viewers in his homeland want to know about living in B.C. lets him stay close to places that are familiar to him, like Guadalajara, Mexico, where he grew up before arriving in Vancouver in 2003 to do his PhD at the University of B.C.
“I talk about taking the train to go to work. It’s not that I don’t have money to get a car. But public transit is terrible in Mexico, so people there don’t understand that (here) I get to work faster and can relax and use one less car. So I talk about that.”
Making the videos also reminds him how he can be perceived differently. “When I speak English, I’m an immigrant. When I speak in Spanish, I’m a privileged Mexican.”
A big part of the appeal of making his popular videos is the opportunity to show that there is a variety of immigrant stories, something that often isn’t acknowledged.
“People think of immigrants, sometimes, in a very cartoony way,” said Coria. “That they come and do jobs that no one wants to do. Sometimes, that is true. Or that everybody is happy and successful because they came to make life better. But (immigrants) are also just living their life.”
The Pacific Canada Heritage Centre Museum is an example of efforts to increase awareness about the diversity of immigrant experiences.
“We need to give space to (these) voices, make these stories accessible,” said Winnie Cheung, who heads the museum.
The PCHCM is an organized effort to find and present immigrant viewpoints by reaching back beyond the 20th century to times in B.C.’s history when there were outright racist government actions and exclusion policies against some newcomers and their descendants.
Another “very important piece (of the story) is the aboriginal one,” said Cheung. “When migrants first came across the Pacific, how did they relate to their (First Nations) hosts? Who are the real hosts? What are the missing stories? Our approach is very different.”
Last year, the museum helped organize a Fraser Valley river rafting tour to explore the remains of early Chinese Canadian settlements in the Nlaka’parmux territory of the Lytton First Nation dating back to the 1880s.
“We know there were longstanding, respectful relationships here,” said Cheung.
Cheung, who moved from Hong Kong to Vancouver in 1986, is also working on a project to showcase Cantonese opera in B.C. Travelling troupes regularly visited Chinese theatres that existed in Vancouver and Victoria going back to the 1850s.
She also has an eye out for stories that are still in the making and too raw to tell yet, including those of a small group of immigrants from Afghanistan who have come to Vancouver in recent years.
“Most of them are women, and they are struggling with language and survival and caring for children, and so on,” said Cheung. “I don’t want to give them pressure. But I keep them on my list, keep them involved.
“The important thing is to let them know that we value their stories and they should not let those things slip by. Keep it in the family, if you are not ready to share now.”
The important thing is to let (immigrants) know that we value their stories and they should not let those things slip by. Keep it in the family, if you are not ready to share now.
WINNIE CHEUNG, past-president, Pacific Canada Heritage Centre Museum
‘STRATHCONA SPIRIT’
Dominique Bautista is part of a team of oral historians working in Vancouver’s Strathcona, one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods. For generations, many immigrant families — Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, Croatian, Chinese and Japanese, to name a few — have settled there.
Bautista’s group has been homing in on 10 stories that reflect the area’s resiliency, or what Bautista calls “the Strathcona spirit.”
“It’s about people advocating for themselves in examples going back to the (anti-Asian) race riots (of 1907) to the fight against being labelled an ‘urban blight’ and the freeway (in the late 1960s),” said Bautista.
One of the stories is that of Randy Clark, a retired Vancouver school principal whose grandparents ran the popular Vie’s Chicken and Steaks restaurant on Union Street and who were descendants of the first black settlers to move from San Francisco to Salt Spring Island in the 1850s.
Bautista said Clark was 12 when he moved to Strathcona in 1965, at a time when the area’s once vibrant black community and its neighbourhood were in decline because talk of a freeway and the building of the viaducts led to neglect of the area’s buildings and sidewalks.
“They were in decay. Nothing was being repaired,” said Bautista.
For Nick Sandhu, keeping alive his story of being an immigrant teenager and finding friends through sport is his way of sharing a helpful perspective with today’s newcomers.
He was 15 in 1977 when his parents emigrated from a village in Punjab to Surrey.
That “wasn’t the easiest time,” he recalled. “I could read and write English, but not speak it and it was really hard to understand. I used to wear a turban at the time. It was a little different than now. Even at times kids would tease me. It was natural, especially if you stick out, then you will be a target.”
As a new immigrant facing discrimination in the ’70s, Sandhu found refuge on the field.
“I was leaning on (field hockey). My acceptance into that group was easier for me,” said Sandhu.
“It’s about finding a common thing between this place and that place.”
In 1984, he played for the Canadian men’s field hockey team at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles and also at the 1988 Games in Seoul.
He later was head coach of the national team at the 2008 Games in Beijing.
This weekend, Sandhu presides over one of the larger junior field hockey tournaments in B.C.
Off the field, a highlight is seeing players, referees, coaches and their families line up for free servings of butter chicken, rice and chai tea served by volunteers from the host team, the Surrey-based India Field Hockey Club.
The gesture “comes from the idea of a langar,” said Sandhu. “If you go to any Sikh temple, you will be served a free meal when you arrive. It’s part of the culture.”
His family’s wider immigration story goes back to the early 1900s. Sandhu’s great-grandfather moved from India to Vancouver in 1916 for a time before returning to Punjab. His migration was during the aftermath of the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, when a chartered ship carrying 375 mostly Sikh passengers was denied entry into Vancouver due to discriminatory immigration policies and forced to eventually return to Calcutta.
Unfortunately, said Sandhu, no details have survived about his great-grandfather’s experiences in B.C.
‘BUT WE WORKED’
Adriana Zylmans was born in Canada, but her father’s immigrant experience resonates in her life. She grew up listening to his stories about moving from Holland in 1948 to live with an uncle who had farmland in Steveston.
“He came from a family with five other boys who all wanted to farm,” said Zylmans, who recounts a poem her father wrote some 20 years ago when he was interviewed by a Dutch publication about his emigration: “We came to Canada, but we worked ... We were homesick, but we worked ... We experienced disappointment, but we worked ... We were successful, but we worked ...”
Zylmans heads a group called The Dutch Network, which was formed in the mid-1970s and organizes social gatherings — coffee mornings, pub nights, bike trips — for those who moved to Canada decades ago, as well as for newer arrivals.
“We have found that seniors need peers of the same age so they can talk about how they came here, their experiences, what they are currently missing not being back in Holland. And for the young ones who are joining, we are trying to introduce them to support systems, how to get settled and find services that are available,” said Zylmans.
Sometimes emerging stories of immigration carry strands of old narratives, even if there are stark contrasts.
The Canada Maoming Association was formed four years ago and counts some 300 members who have origins in the city of Maoming in China’s southern Guangdong province. It recently moved into a new location on a leafy street tucked among a few small businesses in west-side Dunbar neighbourhood.
In some ways, it might be compared to the associations established in Vancouver’s Chinatown starting in the 1880s, in that those clubs also brought together members who had the same last name or geographic roots.
But the old associations existed in times of racial segregation and were places where Chinese men — further isolated when the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 restricted immigration and kept families apart — could play sports and enjoy music. They also facilitated the transfer of the men’s meagre wages to family in China and were a source of news from afar, sent slowly by steamship.
Members of today’s Maoming association are corporate businessmen with means and mobile lives. They have generally come to Vancouver as “investor immigrants,” according to Zhu Zhu Yu, secretary-general of the group.
“We get together to celebrate the usual holidays ... We can understand each other,” said vicepresident Hua Ji Liang.
Their common interests include finding ways to develop local business plans and investment projects, he said. There is a desire to contribute to nearby, philanthropic causes. Last year, they raised funds in support of the Fort McMurray wildfire rescue effort in Alberta.
And yet, because stories about immigration are never straightforward, Liang mused that, for now, adapting to a relatively new place and still being part of another makes “really being part of the (surrounding) community a challenge.”
“It sometimes feels like even though there isn’t any outright conflict, it’s like there are two tracks running side-by-side.”
Perhaps, he said, it will feel different to the sons and daughters of their families.