This week I examined one of the boxes from Jim Wong-Chu’s collection (RBSC-ARC-1710 Box 2) as part of an assignment on writers in archives, and in preparation of hearing a lecture from him next week. Having never really had any exposure to this artist before, looking through his boxes without any background knowledge at all was very intriguing. After looking through a few folders and having absolutely no idea of the context of what I was looking at, I decided to do a bit of background research (read: semi-intensive googling) into who Jim Wong-Chu is, and why he has a dedicated archive at UBC. While I learned the basics of Jim Wong-Chu, including a comprehensive list of the anthologies he has compiled and his works of literature and photography, I actually found that there was quite a degree of separation from the Jim Wong-Chu that I discovered in the content of Box #2, to who I read about online. For instance, the second folder in box 2 is labeled “[Information on Asian Gangs]”, and contains pages and pages about different Youth Outreach programs. While I am sure that Wong-Chu’s interest in youth involvement is no secret, it’s is not something that had come up immediately in my googling of Wong-Chu, the way it did in my examination of his archive. I also felt, from looking at the folder, that youth outreach was something Wong-Chu felt pretty passionately about, given that the folder contained a comprehensive selection of newspaper clippings, reports, and meeting minutes from groups that were in the process of implementing youth programs in the Asian community.
There was also a smattering of photos in one of the folders, which I later found out belong to a pretty important series which shows “Chinatown through Chinese Canadian eyes” (Kevin Griffin, The Vancouver Sun). The archive box brought together some facets of Wong-Chu that I had only been able to find as separate pieces in a smattering of articles on the internet, but also being just one box, it wasn’t a completely comprehensive picture of Wong-Chu. The archival materials presented merely a snippet of Wong-Chu’s life, but in way that felt much more personal that a general googling. Douglas and MacNeil suggest in their article “Arranging the Self: Literary and Archival Perspectives on Writers’ Archives” that “the arrangement of the records acts as a kind of mirror of the entity that produced them…a kind of synecdoche in which the part (the physical remains) stands in for the whole” (p 27) acknowledging both that the pieces in the boxes were a reflection of something greater, but also that it is impossible to represent an being in its entirety anywhere, but also in an archive. I’m not sure why, but I felt like I had really realized something in reaching the conclusion that archives have a sort of impossible task – I hadn’t realized that I assumed the job of the archive was to preserve the truth, but that is based in the assumption that art is a successful way of transmitting the “true self”, rather than just an artist’s best attempt.
There were some things that I found out in the internet research that I never would have guessed from the archive box I looked at, like that Wong-Chu’s day job for much of his life was as a letter carrier for Canada Post. I also found an interesting reference in that same The Vancouver Sun article by Griffin, which stated that Wong-Chu refused to “steal” photos of people without permission by taking the photos surreptitiously, and that he always tried to learn something about the person he was photographing them. I also read in the Sun about how Wong-Chu’s photography used unique shooting techniques that required supreme stillness from photographer, subject, and setting. These two things – the care in the actual physicality of the shot, but also the emotional care that accompanied them – seemed to imbue the photos with something special. Jim Wong-Chu was not the only identity being preserved in that file, because even though it was his signature on the back of the photos identifying his work, the liveliness of the captured moment, now decades old, also peripherally included the subjects of the photo as well as the artist whose collection they “belong” to.
I’m supposed to think of some questions to ask Wong-Chu in the lecture that he’s giving, but I’m not really sure yet what I should ask. It’s a strange experience to know almost nothing about a person, except for who they are as they exist in a box on a shelf. Maybe I’ll ask him if it feels weird to know that a little part of your identity is something that you can check out and read through on a rainy Thursday afternoon in the basement of the UBC library.
Douglas, Jennifer, and Heather MacNeil. “Arranging the self: Literary and archival perspectives on writers’ archives.” Archivaria 67 (2009): 25-39.
Griffin, Kevin. “Jim Wong-Chu: photographs of Chinatown through Chinese Canadian eyes.” The Vancouver Sun Vancouver). October 3, 2014.
Photo by Double Dot Magazine