A year after Sarah de Vries—an Aboriginal sex worker and drug addicts from Downtown Eastside—was murdered and her DNA was found in Robert Pinkton’s pig farm in Port Coquitlam, her sister and a renowned author Maggie de Vries published a memoir, “Missing Sarah: A Vancouver Women Remember her Vanishing Sister” in 2003 in the remembrance of Sarah and other missing women. Written in Maggie’s point of view and supplemented with Sarah’s letters, poems, and journal, “Missing Sarah” reveals the Sarah’s struggle of discrimination, self-loathing, lost and unacceptance in her childhood and teenage that led up to her tragedy in 2002.

In the book, Sarah’s writings play out an important role in bringing Sarah to life by manifesting her characters and engaging her into the conversation about sex work, drug addiction, and life of Aboriginal people. They are the windows that allow readers to have a glimpse of Sarah’s personalities as reflected in the content and the style of writing. Letters by Sarah, for example, were written intimately to her sister or other family members.  She expressed her emotions openly without having fear of being judged. By reading them, readers get to know more about Sarah’s “personality as it presents itself in [her] letters” (Walker). In one letter, she complained that “I am not happy here (her mum’s home in Ontario) at all” (21) after having to live away from her home where she grew up in Vancouver before her parents separated. She exhibited her distress about her divided family and her longing for family love. It is also worth noticing that she used the word “love” repeatedly when greeting her family in the letters (such as “I really love you a lot…” [55]) and in her signature (for instance “All my love, Sarah” [41] and “LOTS OF LOVE, YOUR SISTER SARAH!!!”[183]). It shows how much she treasured family bonding and that she could find a sense of belonging and recognition in them. Her family is where she wanted to fit in. Thus, these letters are the sources that offer us unique insight into Sarah’s character — as a caring and compassionate person who is devoid of yet willing to give others love.

Furthermore, Sarah’s writings set up a platform for communication between sisters, as well as between Sarah and readers. After mapping Sarah’s painful life with plentiful letters and journals, Maggie iwas able to understand her sister better (De Vries xv). Not only that, in an interview with Allyson Latta, a Canadian literary editor, Maggie mentioned that “[w]hen I read her words when I am speaking, I feel as if she speaks through me. All of this is a joint project between her and me. But it is also a team project.” In engaging Sarah’s writings, it seems as though Sarah and Maggie have genuine contact that enables them to co-write the book (although they may have written their parts in different time periods.) Moreover, her writings are dialogical which “[open] up channels of communication and reciprocity not only between the correspondent parts, but also between the writer of the letter and any reader” (Tamboukou 173). As Maggie pointed out, Sarah imagined readers as she wrote (xv). Sarah is not only telling a personal story in her journals, but also a public issue that requires public attention and action.

An important feature in “Missing Sarah” is that despite having plentiful sources of diary entries, poems, and letters, a significant majority was written by Sarah. It is not to say that her family did not reply to her letters. In fact, Maggie is using the setting of one-way letters and journals from Sarah to shift the power dynamics between the marginalized and dominant group. As Yasmin Jiwani and May Lynn Young argue,  aboriginal sex workers are often being narrated under hegemonic discourse which undermine the value of missing women (897). They then follow Debbie Wise Harris in suggesting that Aboriginal women subject to “strategic silences,” which they seldom have the chance to speak for themselves (899). Through incorporating her writing exclusively, Sarah is given the voice and isempowered to defend herself, to express her misery, and to pledge for help. She is an “active agent” (Jiwani and Young 899) seeking out to others. Maggie and readers, however, are put in a powerless and passive position where we are “unable to reach back to her, unable to change one single thing” (De Vries49) What is most distressing and heartbreaking when reading this book, as suggested by Maggie, is that we feel how real Sarah is, when she is “calling out to me [Maggie] from them [letters]and I couldn’t help her.” For instance, when reading  Sarah’s journal  about her work, we as readers acknowledge that she was impotent to fight back. We hear her berating her clients for they are to blame for making her “dirty ” and “ashamed”. Yet, neither Maggie nor readers are given the opportunity to lend Sarah a helping hand, no matter how willing and eager we are. Sarah’s writing therefore serve to counter the hegemonic discourse.

The appearance of Sarah’s work in Maggie’s memoir also play out the concept of relationality—an auto/biographical term that other people, communities, societies, or political forces interweave with narrator’s story that in turn give form to  the identity of the narrator(Smith, and Watson 86). Although Sarah is the subject of the memoir, she is not the protagonist herself. She comes out as Maggie’s relational other, whose image is being constructed through a collective of her own works and interviews with her family and friends. When looking through the Sarah’s life, Maggie connected her own narrative of growing understanding and awareness towards sex workers on Downtown Eastside and her increasing engagement in the advocacy for missing women. Her identity is developed in relations to Sarah.

Every life matters. By integrating Sarah’s poems, journals, and letters in her memoir “Missing Sarah”, Maggie brought Sarah to life and gave her the power to speak for herself. At the same time it urges readers to reflect on the issues in Downtown Eastside and take action before it’s too late.

Works Cited

De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah: a memoir of loss. Toronto, Ont.: Penguin Canada, 2008. Print.

Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. ProQuest. Web. 26 Feb 2016.

Latta, Allyson. “Maggie de Vries.” Allyson Latta. WordPress, 2004. Web. 26 Feb 2016.

Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. “Auto biographical Acts.” Reading Autobiography : Interpreting Life Narratives. Feb 2010: 63-102. Project Muse University Press. Web. 26 Feb 2016.

Tamboukou, Maria. “Relational narratives: Auto/biography and the portrait.” Women’s Studies International Forum 33.3 (2010): 170–179. Science Direct. Web. 27 Feb 2016.

Walker, Pierre A. “Seeing a Life Through Biography, Letters, and Fiction.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Nov 2004. Web. 26 Feb 2016.

This week in my ASTU class, we did a presentation on our archive project that aims to bring archival materials in Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC to the public. As all the groups had pointed out, archives play a role in recording and preserving historical event which allow future generations to remember to past. This project thus allows us to gain a better understanding on little-known history as we tried to organize materials that we found disoriented in meaningful ways (such as in chronological order and under different themes), and provide context for each of the item. Furthermore, by showcasing archival materials in various forms like websites, Tumblr page or infographic, we brought archives that we worked on beyond the scope of academia and engaged the public to this collective memory. The public could access to those valuable experiences that are often neglected and use them to reflect on their present life. Take me, as an example,  this project matters a lot to my identity building when I  know more about the history of Chinese immigrants in Canada. It is only when I looked through the archives in the Chung Collect that I realize the discriminatory treatments Chinese immigrants once had in Canada. I felt a stronger sense of belonging and pride as a Chinese after acknowledging their achievement and contribution in Canada. At the same time, I came to appreciate the progress made by the Canadian government to mitigate racial discrimination (for example abandoning immigration restrictions based on race), and cherish the acceptance and diversity in Canada nowadays.

Inspired by this project, I am interested to further investigate the significance of archives, particularly immigration archives, and the ways in which archives are presented by looking at an interactive webpage—Redress Remix.

Redress Remix  surrounds the topic of Canadian government’s apology in 2006 for their unfair treatment on Chinese immigrants in the 1900s. A combination of photography, government documents, archived documentaries, and interviews are gathered and put under 16 themes to reveal the unfamiliar but important chapter in Canadian history. Each theme explores issues like head tax imposition, Angel Island Immigration Station, and Chinese Exclusion Act through a series of videos and brief introduction to the background history and speaker’s personal information.

Most of the items in this website are archival materials that serve as a “tangible memory site” (Hume 184). They give information about the cultural and social settings of their users, and allow us to revisit and remember the past in present days. When it comes immigration archival sources in particular, archives play a vital role in unifying people with the same ethnical background, as each group has their own unique ways to record their past influenced by their culture (Hume 191). More importantly, archives on immigration give voice to immigrants whose participation are often omitted or being written out in official government record. Personal or community archives are therefore a place for them to channel their anxiety and frustration. In Redress Remix, the section of Discrimination exemplifies this idea. Frank Wong, a World War Two veteran, recalled his experiences of being treated as an “alien” in Canada as he were not given the right to vote, not permitted to go anywhere but Chinatown, and not even allowed to sit in the front role at theaters. His oral history about his trivial, yet thought-provoking, everyday lives provides another facet of the story that can supplement official government documents and reflects a more complete situation of society.

Immigration archives are by no means exclusively important to the community involved. The representation of archives on immigrants is crucial to the construct of a country’s history as well. Daniel turns to Schereck when discussing the function of archival material, and suggests that archives reveal how different groups in society contribute to “progress and development of the state” (174). Immigrants are often marginalized by the dominant group in the host country. Their contributions are not may not be always taken into account in official records. Thus, collecting, organizing, and analyzing immigration archives offer scholars a “bottom up’’ as well as an ‘‘inside out’’ view of the host country’s history (Daniel 177). In Contribution, Bill Chu, the founder of Canadians For reconciliation, stated that Chinese people had engaged in a variety of tough and unpleasant jobs in addition to the well-known Canada Pacific Railway construction; they had also taken part in mining, farming and installing telephone wire, to name a few. This often unsaid piece of Chinese is integral to the whole puzzle of Canada’s nation building as it laid the groundwork for future transportation and economic development.

Moving beyond the content of the webpage, the medium itself  is also worth noticing. Redress Remix is a digital archive that uses internet “as a vehicle of collecting, preserving, and displaying traces of the past” that is an easy access to people from all walks of life (Haskins 401). Digital archives are a “much better medium than print culture for capturing the fluidity, spontaneity and multilayered quality’’ of a culture as it enables multiple medium for presentation, such as photographs and recordings (Harney cited in Daniel 194). Visitors to the webpage can gain a vivid experience through videos which exhibit speakers’ reaction and emotion. For example, when they watch the video of a woman who talks about the hardship she had on Angel Island immigration station, they can feel her anger, sorrow, and fear as she describes the station as a “jail.” These feeling are not as easily felt when looking at  mere words.

An interesting feature in this website is that visitors can respond to the videos by shooting a short clip expressing their thoughts. As the filmmaker, Chan, said, the webpage can track historical changes as respondents’ feedbacks differ with time. By inviting people to engage in this “living documentary”—a documentary that is made interactive by networked media and digital technology to establish relationships between producers and users, and induce changes in both parties (Gaudenzi 27)– we can track how our attitudes towards racism evolve and hopefully come up with methods to alleviate it. This kind of participation in the production of collective memory online is difficult to achieve in many conventional archives.

“The history should never be erased out of the book. It should be continued regardless [of] what kind of history. It should be passed on to the next [generation] people to know about it.” Memory matters. And an effective way to preserve memory is through archives, especially digital archives that are accessible to many, that can persist through generations.

Works Cited

Daniel, Dominique. “Archival Representations of Immigration and Ethnicity in North American History: From the Ethnicization              of Archives to the Archivization of Ethnicity.” Archival Science 14.2 (2014): 169-203. ProQuest. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.

Gaudenzi, Sandra. “The interactive documentary as a Living Documentary.” Doc on-line 14 (2013): 9-31. Directory of Open                       Access Journals. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.

Harris, Jake. Redress Remix. Stitch Media, 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.

Haskins, Ekaterina. “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.4 (2007):          401–422. JSTOR. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.

Hume, Janice. “Memory Matters: The Evolution of Scholarship in Collective Memory and Mass Communication.” The review of              communication 10.3 (2010): 181-196. Taylor & Francis Combined Library. Web. 6 Feb. 2016.

Takeuchi, Craig. ‘Redress Remix addresses Chinese Canadian head-tax with “living documentary.”’ The Georgia Straight. 3 Nov          2010. Web. 7 Feb. 2016.