Edith Maude Eaton was born in 1865 in a silk-weaving town in Northern England. A few months after her birth, her Chinese-born mother Achuen “Grace” Amoy and her white British-born father, Edward Eaton, moved with Edith and her brother Charles Edward to New York, where Edward established a drug and dye business. But the growing family returned to England in 1868. When the Eatons ventured to North America again in 1872, this time with five children under eight in tow, they settled in Montreal’s Hochelaga neighbourhood.

Edith and her siblings were probably the only half-Chinese in Montreal in the 1870s and 1880s, when the Chinese community numbered only a handful of men who operated laundries. Edith recalls her brother and herself being called racial slurs. Anti-Chinese sentiment, particularly after the completion of the Canadian transcontinental railroad, led several of Edith’s siblings to “pass” as Japanese, Spanish or Mexican.

But Edith, after she and her mother were encouraged by a clergyman to visit two Chinese women new to Montreal, began to openly identify as Chinese. She began to write anonymous articles about Montreal’s small but growing diasporic Chinese community for the Montreal Witness and Montreal Star. As a half-Chinese “lady reporter,” Edith had privileged access to the intimate lives of Chinese merchants and their families: their babies’ births, their ceremonies, their marriages, and their social lives, all of which later inspired her Chinatown fiction. Edith also wrote numerous letters to the Editors defending Chinese immigrants from racist government policy such as the Chinese Head Tax policy.

When she emigrated to the US in 1898, Edith assumed the pen name “Sui Sin Far,” which means “Chinese sacred lily,” and began to publish stories about the diasporic Chinese communities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, in local periodicals such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Westerner; missionary magazines such as The Interior, the Christian Evangelist, and the Sabbath Recorder; children’s magazines such as Children’s and Little Folks; and women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Delineator, Designer, Good Housekeeping, Housekeeper, Holland’s, and American Motherhood. She also wrote advertising copy for railway companies and a fifteen-installment travelogue from the perspective of a male Chinese merchant “Wing Sing” for the Los Angeles Express. By 1909, her work had been published in nearly 40 popular US and Canadian magazines and newspapers.

After 1910, Edith had achieved enough success through her writing that she no longer had to supplement her income with stenographic work. She moved to Boston where she devoted the next two years to assembling the manuscript for Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Fig. 2), her first and only book, which collected seventeen short stories for adults and twenty “Tales of Chinese Children”, most of which had already appeared in U.S. magazines. When Edith died two years later in Montreal of heart disease, she left a manuscript behind that has never been found.

 

George Sang Kee was born on the 29th of September, 1895, to Ho (Haw) Sang Kee and Chu Shee, a prominent Toysanese couple in Montreal, Canada. Described by Edith Eaton in the Montreal Daily Star as “the first pure Chinese child ever born in this city,” the infant George received notable attention from the press, a fact indicative not only of his father’s status as a successful business owner and influential figure in the Chinese community, but also of the novelty of more domestic Chinese life in a community comprised almost exclusively of men (“A Chinese Child Born”). George’s mother, referred to in contemporaneous newspapers as “Miss Chu Shee,” sometimes “Miss Chu See,” and later as “Mrs. Ho Sang Kee” or “Mrs. Sam Kee,” travelled as a bride-to-be from China to Montréal in Fall 1893. Two years later, George was born in Ho Sang Kee’s hotel on rue de la Gauchetière Street West, at the very heart of what would eventually become the city’s Chinatown. 

From the moment of his birth, George would not have wanted for companions or caretakers. Twelve-year-old Chu Kee, a girl recorded in the Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada, 1886-1949 as “Jew Guey,” would have been present among the intimate gathering to celebrate Sang Kee’s newborn son that day on rue de la Gauchetière. While a number of newspapers refer to Chu Kee as Chu Shee’s “slave girl,” Edith Eaton notes that the Chinese customarily “look[ed] upon slaves as family” (“Girl Slave in Montreal”). Indeed, an 1893 issue of The Montreal Star presents Chu Kee as Sang Kee’s “little eight-year-old daughter” (“Sang Kee and Miss Chu See”). In addition to the sister figure that Chu Kee likely stepped into as an older child in the family, George would have also grown up among the many associates and acquaintances of the Ho household. Wing Sing and his wife, in particular, appear in the news as close friends of the family, and in a publicized event of an otherwise private affair, one visiting friend from Boston, referred to as “Mrs. Moy Dong Fat,” is seen accompanying Mrs. Ho Sang Kee, Chu Kee, and George to have their family photographed. George eventually gains five sisters and brothers: Avis, Charlie, Grace, Florence, and Henry. Between his proud father and mother, their growing family, and a remarkable, transnational network of friends and associates who frequented their home, George Sang Kee would have found himself in a world of thriving kinships, both familial and otherwise. 

Living with his father, mother, and Chu Kee on the top floor of their boarding house, George’s early years unfolded in peculiar contradiction, at once isolated and communal, intimate and public. Days and nights would have been punctuated with the clatter and bustle of boarders just a floor below –Ho Sang Kee relegated the sleeping quarters of his hotel to the second floor, while the first floor hosted a Chinese store with “eating and lounging rooms” (“The Chinese Colony”). Beyond the boarding house, George’s life as one of the few Chinese children in Montreal would not have proved a simple existence. Recounting the experiences of mixed Chinese American children in the late nineteenth century, Edith Eaton recalls one boy who is “persecuted for nearly an hour by a crowd of roughs” (“Half-Chinese Children”). While his own reception as a purely Chinese child in Canada is unclear, representations of George in the Montreal newspapers paid special attention to the “peculiar customs” that marked his foreignness as the first Chinese infant in the city (“‘Completion of the Moon’”). Yet even in the news, George Sang Kee emerges as a liminal figure, the “only Canadian born Chinese baby,” who at one moment is “dressed in the conventional attire of a common, everyday American baby” (“The Baby Photographed”) and at another appears clothed “à la Chinoise, in a padded gown and . . . two jackets . . . made of bright quilted pink silk” (“‘Completion of the Moon’”). 

George Sang Kee was certainly the recipient of a rich cultural inheritance. At one month old, he had his hair shaved according to Chinese custom, and in the years that followed, George would have crawled and toddled along the rooms of the boarding house with the beginnings of a queue on his head. No elementary schools for Chinese children existed in the city. Instead, Chinese language school took place after school at the Chinese Presbyterian Church, where George would have learned Cantonese. George performed remarkably well at school, winning several prizes and often achieving top of his class. In keeping with the general trend of the Chinese in Montreal, Mrs. Sang Kee showed little interest in the Christian religion. George’s Christian baptism is recorded in the register of Knox Church a little more than a week before his death in 1908. 

George was admitted to the Children’s Memorial Hospital and passed away at the age of twelve on March 3, 1908, after having stayed at the hospital “for some time” (“Death of Chinese Boy”). Though the cause of death is uncertain, it is possible he contracted a respiratory illness in the winter months. George was followed closely by his mother in July of the same year and is buried next to her in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery. 

For further inquiries, you can reach the author at lopez.camilla@gmail.com.

Updated on 3 August 2023 to include a photograph from the Collection of the late Avis H. Lee, a citation correction and additional information provided by a descendant of Ho Sang Kee.

Sources

Anderson, Delaney. “Ho Sang Kee: At the Heart of Montreal’s Early Chinese Community.” Chinese Canadians: Recovering Early Chinese Canadian Literature and History, 19 Feb 2023. https://blogs.ubc.ca/chinesecanadians/2023/02/19/sang-kee-at-the-heart-of-montreals-early-chinese-community-by-delaney-anderson/

“Completion of the Moon.” Montreal Daily Star, 23 Oct 1895: 6. 

“Death of Chinese Boy.” The Montreal Gazette, 5 Mar 1908: 3. 

Eaton, Edith (Unsigned). “Another Chinese Baby. The Juvenile Mongolian Colony in Montreal Receives Another Addition – It Is a Girl and There Are Schemes for Her Marriage.” Montreal Daily Star, 12 Oct 1895: 6. 

—. “A Chinese Child Born. At the Hotel on Lagauchetiere Street.” Montreal Daily Star, 30 Sept 1895: 1.

—. “Girl Slave in Montreal. Our Chinese Colony Cleverly Described. Only Two Women from the Flowery Land in Town” Montreal Daily Witness, 4 May 1894: 10. 

—. “Half-Chinese Children.” Montreal Daily Star, 20 Apr 1895. 

Ancestry.com. “George Sang Kee.” Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2008. 

—. “Sang Kee.” Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2008. 

Helly, Denise. Les Chinois à Montréal 1877-1951. Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1987.

“Pneumonia is Frequent and Fatal Disease.” Montreal Daily Star, 17 Jan 1908: 11. 

“Pneumonia Most Fatal During Winter Months.” Montreal Daily Star, 27 Jan 1908:6. 

“Sang Kee and Miss Chu See.” Montreal Daily Star, 20 Dec 1893: 8.  

“The Baby Photographed.” Montreal Daily Star, 28 Nov 1895: 8. 

“The Chinese Colony.” Montreal Daily Star, 15 Jun 1895: 8. 

“Vital Statistics in the City.” Montreal Daily Star, 9 Mar 1908: 6. 

Ward, W. Peter and Henry Yu. Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada, 1886-1949. 2008. 

Wm. Notman & Son, Mrs. Sang Kee and her children, Montreal, QC, 1897. McCord Stewart Museum, II-120280. https://collections.musee-mccord-stewart.ca/fr/objects/142147/mrs-sang-kees-group-montreal-qc-1897

Described as a “well-to-do, well dressed individual” (“Girl Slave”), in Edith Eaton’s journalism of Montreal’s Chinatown in the 1890s, Mr. Cheeping or Wong Cheeping (黃志平), was an established businessman and a respected member of the Chinese community in Montreal. Eaton describes that he was fairly fluent in English, well informed, and well mannered (“Girl Slave”), and gestures to a grocery business he was planning to open. In 1894, with five business partners, Lou Chan Hoy (盧燦開), Wong Chun (黃昌), Lou Sum (盧深), Chan Man (陳晚), and Lee Jian (李見) (“Sociétés et Dissolutions”), Cheeping opened the Tye Loy (泰萊) Company, a vendor of Chinese and Japanese goods, at 82 Bleury Street (Lovell’s 1894-95 40).  It likely attracted Asian customers seeking familiar tastes and smells from home, but also non-Asian customers interested in “exotic” and unfamiliar goods and products. Chinese laundries saturated the Chinese business market in Montreal, but Tye Loy was one of only thirteen Chinese groceries established between 1893 and 1900 (Helly 92). In 1895, Tye Loy was described as the most important of the six Chinese stores operating at that time (“Chinese Colony”).

Cheeping was not only an established figure in Montreal’s Chinese business landscape, but he was also an active member of the Chinese community in Eastern North America. While he did not have a wife with him in Montreal, he had several local and transnational friends and associates. For example, when Mr. Li Sing, another Chinese merchant, stopped in Montreal on his way to New York after visiting China with his wife in 1895, Cheeping hosted the couple at his residence on Bleury Street for three weeks (“Chinamen with German Wives”). This suggests that Cheeping had an expansive social network that extended well beyond Montreal and Guangzhou (Canton).He had established himself as a merchant in New York City as well, evidenced by his signing the agreement for the Tye Loy Company, as a “merchant of the city of New York” (“Laundry Ticket”). While he learned English and adapted to Canadian manners, which Eaton praises in “Girl Slave in Montreal,” he held on to Chinese customs and traditions, and shared his knowledge with people outside of his community. Continue reading →

The following was edited on 3 June 2023 to include corrections and additional information provided by a descendant of Chu Shee. 

The Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada, 1885-1949 records four Chinese women entering the country through Vancouver on November 21st, 1893. Two of these women, recorded in the ledger as Jew Nuey and Jew Guey, proceeded from Vancouver to traverse the country towards their destination in Montreal. In a sense, this journey from Hong Kong to Montreal was a historical novelty. The ship that carried them across the Pacific, the Empress of China, had only been built two years prior, and the Canadian Pacific Railway, which linked the two sides of the country, was less than ten years in operation. And, as an overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants entering the country during this period were men, the two females represented a departure from the norm. The 12,000 km journey from Hong Kong to Montreal these two endured (and perhaps at times enjoyed) was motivated by an immigration strategy new to the nascent Chinese community in Montreal — an immigration not sparked by the promise of temporary work but by an intention to set down family roots. It was a strategy made difficult and dangerous by institutional and cultural racism directed towards the Chinese people of Canada.

The 20-year-old woman recorded as “Jew Nuey” in the Register was Jew (Chu) Nuey and headed to Montreal to marry Ho (or Haw) Sang Kee, a man 14 years her senior and a prominent hotel operator, merchant, and figurehead within the city’s nascent Chinese community. An account of their wedding dinner found in The Montreal Star on December 20th, 1893 refers to her as Chu Shee (meaning from the Chu family and now married) and states she is from Peking (Beijing), although the Register states she is from the Cantonese village of Lai Yee Gong in Hoiping. After their marriage, history records her as Mrs. Ho Sang Kee (or variations thereof) or as Chu Shee.

Travelling with her and settling within the Ho residence and hotel on rue de la Gauchetière was a nine-year-old girl described by Chinese Canadian author as Jew Nuey’s “slave” —  although, as Eaton notes, “slave” is a misnomer of sorts, as “it is custom in China to look upon slaves as family” (Eaton 1894). It was noted in papers of the time that Chu Shee, her young companion, and Mrs. Wing Sing (a friend and acquaintance of the Ho family) were the only Chinese women living “in all Canada east of the Rocky Mountains” (“Sang Kee and Miss Chu See” 1893).

An 1897 photograph shows Chu Shee with baby Avis on her lap, and son George standing beside her (“Le Groupe de Mme Sang Kee” 1897).  George died young, in 1908 at the age of 12, and Chu Shee died later that year, both of unknown causes. After her death, Chu Shee was buried in the same plot as her son George in the hilltop cemetery at Mount Royal (“George Sang Kee” & “Mrs. Sang Kee” 1908). She was survived by her husband and four children. In terms of recorded history, so ends the singular and pioneering life of one of Montreal’s first Chinese women.

However, these biographical details say little of Chu Shee’s personality and experience  — except we might assume that the end of her young life was marred by tragedy and pain with the loss of her son. In terms of Chu Shee’s character, we are left with a series of newspaper accounts written at the time. These accounts are of a likeness: they describe her as small, diminutive, bashful and “hidden away”. Montreal journalists constructed her identity through an orientalist lens, as simultaneously a mysterious foreign presence and a benign automaton, whose adherence to Chinese customs of patriarchal obligation and obedience rendered her as less than human. In a description of Chu Shee during her wedding banquet, one journalist states that “bashfulness is far too weak a word to convey any sense of her embarrassment” and noted her seemingly strange behaviour, stating “her position on the chair was at right angles to that of the guests who sat beside her. Her face was constantly turned to her husband, with eyes apparently fixed on her feet” (“Sang Kee and Miss Chu See” 1893). This is read by the journalist as timidity.

An alternate reading is that her behaviour during the banquet represents a performance of defiance, perhaps against the nature of the ceremony or her fiancé. In a painting of a Chinese wedding banquet from the latter 19th century the seated bride faces outwards, away from her husband and towards the guests at the table, as was customary (“Hun yan = A Chinese wedding banquet” circa 1850-1900).

 

 

Admittedly, this painting cannot be taken as representative of all Chinese wedding banquets of the time. However it does suggest that Chu Shee’s seated posture might not be accounted for by ceremonial tradition alone. In a speculative mode (although no less speculative than the journalist who interpreted her actions as an expression of timidity), I venture that it would have been difficult, in terms of social pressure, to remain seated at right angles to her guests, and that Chu Shee’s posture might show a certain strength of character and resolve. Regardless of one’s interpretation, the image of Chu Shee sideways in her chair during her wedding is a moment worthy of further contemplation.

 

 

 

Sources

Ward, W. Peter & Yu, Henry (2005). Register of Chinese immigrants to Canada 1885-1949. Retrieved from https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/facultyresearchandpublications/52383/items/1.0075988

“Sang Kee and Miss Chu See” The Montreal Star, 20 Dec 1893: 8. Retrieved from https://www.newspapers.com/image/740890294/

Eaton, Edith. “Girl Slave in Montreal. Our Chinese Colony Cleverly Described. Only Two Women from the Flowery Land in Town.” Montreal Daily Witness, 4 Mar 1894: 10. From Becoming Sui Sin Far. ed. Mary Chapman. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016.

“The Chinese Colony” The Montreal Star, 15 Jun 1895: 8. Retrieved from https://www.newspapers.com/image/740718942

Laurence Lee (great grandson), correspondence, May 2023.

“Le Groupe de Mme Sang Kee” (1897).  Musée McCord-Stewart. Montreal, QC. Retrieved from https://collections.musee-mccord-stewart.ca/fr/objects/142147/mrs-sang-kees-group-montreal-qc-1897

“George Sang Kee” (1908) Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968. Retrieved from https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/2877535:1091?tid=&pid=&queryId=3b0d297ac5599a2fa81168c6f10104cc&_phsrc=Fld47&_phstart=successSource

“Mrs. Sang Kee” (1908) Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968. Retrieved from https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/2377416:60527?tid=&pid=&queryId=3b0d297ac5599a2fa81168c6f10104cc&_phsrc=Fld46&_phstart=successSource

“Hun yan = A Chinese wedding banquet” (circa 1850-1900) National Library of Australia Digitised Item. Retrieved from https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-300139263/view

 

In the early 1870’s, Chinese immigrants to Boston flocked to Harrison Avenue in search of affordable housing and a sense of community. By the turn of the decade, Boston Chinatown had formed on both sides of the Avenue, spreading all the way from Essex to Beach Street (Chinatown Atlas). Over time, Harrison Avenue grew into the beating heart of Chinatown, where community and business coalesced. The neighborhood comprised primarily tenement buildings and was regarded by the Bostonian public to house a “decent and self-respecting lot of tenants” (“Our Model”). Among Harrison Avenue’s residents were some of Chinatown’s best-known businessmen and leaders, including the “Grand Old Man of Chinatown,” Moy Ni Ding (China Comes to MIT).

Continue reading →

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”).

Continue reading →

Ho Sang Kee (AKA Sang Kee, Haw Sang Kee, Sam Kee, San Kee, Charlie Hore Sang) was born in 1859 in Guangdong Province, China. Around 1878, he made the journey across the Pacific and began making and saving money in Canada. Ho Sang Kee initially lived in Toronto and attended a Chinese Sunday School in the city. He would also begin his employment with the Canadian Pacific Railway sometime after its incorporation in 1881, as he would later take a contract from the company to board Chinese passengers travelling across the country, and it is possible that he was the same “Sang Kee” who served as the CPR’s first Chinese interpreter. However, it was in 1890s Montreal where Ho Sang Kee would become a pivotal early Chinese figure in Canada as a successful businessman, naturalized British citizen, and point-of-contact for Chinese men travelling across the continent during a period of anti-Chinese legislation in both Canada and the United States.

Upon moving to Montreal, Ho Sang Kee established the Quong Hing Tea Co. wholesale retailer, grocery, and boarding house on rue de la Gauchetière in the heart of Montreal’s Chinatown, and he quickly became one of the central figures in Montreal’s Chinese community. At its inception in 1891, Quong Hing Tea Co. was the only non-laundry Chinese-owned business in the city. Continue reading →

Arthur Lee was born on August 15, 1916 in Montreal, Quebec, to Chinese immigrants, Hee Chong Lee and Fong Shee Lee, who had come to Canada in 1890 and 1915 respectively. Fong Shee was required to pay the Head Tax meant to deter Chinese people from immigrating to Canada.

Continue reading →

Achuen “Grace” Amoy Eaton was born in China, probably Shanghai, soon after the Treaty of Nanking (around 1846) gave European and North American merchants and missionaries access to key Chinese ports. Her parents, possibly because of extreme poverty caused by drought or war, sold her at a young age to Nanjing-based Tuck Quy and his wife Wang Noo, who led a group of Chinese jugglers and acrobats that toured the world billed under various names including the “Chinese Magicians”. The name “Achuen Amoy” was probably given to her by her owners because “Amoy,” a corruption of “mui tsai” meaning “little sister”, was a common euphemism for “slave girl”; “Achuen” could mean “Spring,” to indicate that she was born or purchased in the Spring.

Continue reading →