Mr. and Mrs. Wing Sing: Stereotypes and the Lives of Early Chinese Residents of Montreal, by Ethan Xi Hao Eu
Figure 1: An illustration of Wing Sing in 1893 (This image is from “Sang Kee and Miss Chu See”. The Montreal Star, 20 Dec 1893, pg. 8.)
Very little is known about the early life of Montreal businessman Wing Sing (1860s-?). He was born in Canton (now Guangzhou), a city in Southern China that was heavily involved in foreign trade in the mid-18th century (Chapman 45; Po 143). Perhaps out of a desire to flee a region destabilized by wars or to pursue economic opportunities in the West that the foreign trade had acquainted him with, Wing Sing migrated to Canada probably before the imposition of Head Tax in 1885.
His early days in Canada also remain shrouded in mystery because of the paucity of reliable records and the commonness of his name. Archives housed by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and contemporaneous Canadian newspapers mention more than a dozen Chinese men in Canada named Wing Sing . This number swells even further if we factor in the fact that most officials and journalists tended to transliterate Chinese names inconsistently (Rao xiii). As a result, variations such as “Win Sing,” “Win Shing,” “Wing Xing,” “Wing Hsing” etc. also add to the confusion when we try to disentangle our Wing Sing from the crowded archives. There were roughly six Wing Sings who lived in Montreal around the same period. They could be deduced to be different men sharing the same name because four of them were laundry shop owners working in different parts of the city while the remaining one—who was involved in a famous court case that obliged him to swear before a beheaded rooster—only changed his name from Sue Ming into Wing Sing in 1898 (“Chinamen”; “Ethics”; “Woo Joss”; “Advertisement”; “Pole”).