Waterscapes – 交融的河流

En route back to Vancouver

Gu: How do you feel about this trip? Do you think we can work together?

[pause]

Jennifer: Um….yeah!

Over Breakfast, Kamloops.

Jennifer: Whenever you say Chris’s name…..[pauses]
Gu: There must be something wrong…..But Jenny, you don’t need any help — you know everything.

Husky Station, Kamloops

Gu: This gas is 104! But it says 101 on the sign!
Attendant: That’s self serve. This is full serve.
Gu: What do I do?!?!?! What do I do?!?!?!
Attendant: Don’t panic. Just hang it up.

…of course, it depends a lot WHERE you leave it behind. The night we got to Mount Robson, we were supposed to spend the night in Valemount, about 20 minutes away. But on a whim, we decided to pull into a campground about 5 minutes from Moose Lake and it turned out that someone had just cancelled and the cabin was free! So we ended up staying the night on the banks of the River in sight of Mount Robson. We took talks by the River bank, listening to the steady swishing as the sun slowly snuffed out. Then fade in the stars and we were treated to a show of shooting stars and shimmering constellations.

In the morning, Gu got up at 5AM and woke us up an hour later to go back to Moose Lake. The night before, we found out that the campground was connected to an adventure excursion company. They did two tours — one where you float in a raft and just enjoy the scenery in a still section of the river and then a classic white water rafting tour. So Jennifer and Gu took all the gear onto the (slow) raft and started filming.

Meanwhile, I had read that there was Japanese Internment camp by the Highway and so set out to find the remains. But I kept driving by the site and there seemed to be nothing. After 45 minutes of this, I returned to the campsite and asked the office, who told me to drive into the little village of Tete Jaune (pronounced Teet John) and ask at the Lodge. So I went over and met Ailee Beaudry, who runs the lodge and is an expert on local history and she told me a bit more about the area. It turns out that during the Fur Trade, Valemount was a major centre of activity because of its proximity to the River. Over the years, there were Chinese settlements (railway workers) and settlers married local First Nations women. But in 1907, the Shuswap people were moved under duress south to “empty out” the wilderness. During WWII, there was a Japanese internment camp with gardens and a tea house. Today, though, it’s just a highway that you take on the way to Mt. Robson and Jasper. Talking to Ailee was eye-opening because it revealed the histories and communities that have been repressed in order to make the wilderness, well, the wilderness. I’ll blog more about our conversations at a later date. I never found the camp remains.

Conversation overheard in the van:

Gu: The RV in front of us is ideal – it has a kitchen, bikes, a boat, a bathroom….

Jennifer: I don’t like bringing my own bathroom along on roadtrips. I prefer to leave it behind.

I’m in Kamloops right now catching up on some blog posts – for reasons I’ll explain shortly, I didn’t have internet access last night.

Yesterday, after we left Tim Horton’s in Prince George, we drove directly to the headwaters of the Fraser River, located in Mount Robson Provincial Park near Jasper. We were originally going to just to Valemount to find a place for the night, but it was only about 8PM so we just drove straight to the Lake. Mt. Robson itself is incredible — the tallest peak in the Rockies. But Moose Lake itself is as still and smooth and glass, a turquoise mirror of the landscape that surrounds it. We took some pictures of the lake as the sun was setting. Here, glacial waters flow into the River, which accounts for its unique colour. The River is almost completely still here as a lake slowly transitions into a river. It only takes a few kilometers, though, for the rapids to start up.

Mount Robson and the Fraser

Tai Chi by Moose Lake

Moose Lake Sunset

We returned to the Lake this morning around 7AM to take more pictures. Having traced the Fraser all week, it feels amazing to finally have reached the end of the River, the source of one of the great waterways of the world and hopefully a source of creativity for this project.

Moose Lake Flowing into the Fraser

c

Another meal with Gu and Jennifer (this was in Cache Creek)

At Tim Horton’s in Prince George:

Gu: [picks up ringing cell phone] Hello? Jenny? Wait a second… [passes phone to Jennifer]
Jennifer: Hello…..who is this…….do you have the right number?

Gu: Oh no! My wife’s name is Jenny!!!!
Jennifer: What??? What’s going on [phone is snatched away]

Gu: Hello? This is Jenny’s wife — no husband! I’m in Prince George…….

Archaeological excavation near Chinese quarter

Barkerville is a fascinating site because it is, all at once, a place of historical research and restoration as well as a recreational and tourist site. Archaeological excavations take place metres away from gift shops and ice cream parlors and even people who do research (like Yingying and Jimmy) double as tour guides and help welcome tourists and visitors. In a broader sense, Barkerville is also an ideas factory, a place where our understanding of BC history is literally manufactured and then disseminated through the education system. Barkerville, in other words, is about ideology.

What does it mean, then, to have the main stretch of Barkerville broken up by a “Chinatown gate” that says “歡迎到加列布“ －Welcome to “Jialiebu” or Cariboo.

Of course, those of us who have spent time in Chinatowns around the world are familiar with Chinatown gates. They mark a space as belonging to a particular ethnic or racial group and symbolize the cultural barriers between the Chinese and other communities. But as Jimmy told me when we were hanging out, the gate is a bit misleading for a few reasons:

(a) the typeface is quite modern – older gates would have more traditional calligraphy and probably wouldn’t say welcome to the Cariboo, but rather something more poetic to mark Chinatown.

(b) the most common term for Barkerville during the Gold Rush days wasn’t Jialiebu (or Gah-leet-boh) but rather 新金山 or Xinjinshan (Mandarin) or Sun Guum saan (Cantonese), which means “New Gold Mountain”. Not only does this title reflect the mythology of Gold Mountain (especially appropriate given why Barkerville was founded in the first place), but it also recalls San Francisco, which is still called “Old Gold Mountain” by many Chinese to this day. This places Barkerville in relation to its Southern cousin and reminds us that Barkerville used to be the second largest Chinatown in North America. But indeed, if almost half of the town’s population was Chinese, does it make sense to speak of Chinatown anymore?

(c) It turns out that some of the buildings in the “European” side of town used to be in Chinatown. The Nichol Hotel, for instance, contains Chinese writing pasted on the walls that reveals its previous function as a gambling den. Why was the building moved “outside” Chinatown?

Chinese sign in Nichol Hotel

In sum, does building a Chinatown Gate help us understand the history of race relations in Barkerville (and indeed, BC) or does it impose our contemporary understandings of race relations onto a historical site? Why do we naturally assume that the Chinese lived apart from the rest of the community when, according to Jimmy, there is ample evidence of constant intermingling.

I am not trying to reimagine Barkerville as a racial relations paradise – a quick glance at all the anti-Asian legislation passed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tells us otherwise – but it does suggest that we have to keep questioning our assumptions. For example, when we call Chinese sojourners (they wanted to make money and leave), how does that make them different than anyone else in Barkerville? Who wasn’t trying to strike it rich (and in fact, remittances were also sent back to England from BC)?

Yingying mentioned that over the years, many of the old-timers came to realize that they would never go back to China in their lifetime. In fact, many of the Chinese buildings had signs that read “Tang Fang Di/唐藩地” or “Colony of the Tang People” (Tang people being a synonym for Chinese people) – so it appears that the locals once thought of themselves as a colonial settlement, a settlement within a white settled colony.

Yingying told this moving story of a Chinese man who lived for decades in Barkerville, and only took one trip, by foot, to the Fraser River and never even visited cities like Victoria or Vancouver. He died in Barkerville and his spirit still haunts the town.

Other old timers eventually moved to other towns in BC and established families. During our trip, we bumped into Karin Lee, a well known Chinese Canadian filmmaker whose mother’s family once owned a major store in Barkerville. Their family house has now been restored with artifacts on loan from the family.

As we were driving to Prince George last night, the three of us kept talking about how common narratives about “pioneers” and “sojourners” hide the complex lives of those who lived during times of overt racial discrimination. How do we listen to those lives now, in 2009? As Walter Benjamin asks in “On the Philosophy of History, Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? How does studying and indeed living Chinese Canadian history resonate in the lives of people like Yingying and Jimmy? Does someone with Chinese ancestry (even if not connected directly to the early community) react to such histories differently than someone with another background?

Overheard conversation between Gu and Jennifer while taking photographs of the Fraser & Netchako Rivers:

Jennifer: Every time I move my arms, I’m swatting away mosquitoes!
Gu: Man and woman smell very different. The insects know.

J: Well, next time I do a group research project in a rural area, I’m only going to take women not men!
G: The women just need to wear more clothes.

We arrived in Prince George about an hour ago and have settled comfortably into our hotel. Prince George is only two hours or so from Wells, but we spent most of the day at Barkerville, the centre of the Gold Rush. Having grown up in BC, I have been learning about Barkerville since elementary school, but this trip completely exceeded my (and also our) expectations – not so much for what we saw, although there was a lot to see, but rather because of who we met and the issues they brought to our attention. Since it’s late, I’m going to give a brief sketch of our day and blog more about it tomorrow.

We arrived at Barkerville just before 10 AM. It took a bit longer than expected to get there because Gu wanted to take photos of the spectacular scenery. So Jennifer took a camera and decided to take pictures of Gu taking pictures.

But we got to Barkerville just in time to take in the first tour of the day. It was well executed and informative, although a bit hokey (which is to be expected). The idea is to transport you back in time to hear from “locals” about life in this pioneer town. So for a while we played tourist (actually, Jennifer and Gu wandered off into the various restored buildings, but I’ll let them blog about that another time).

Tour guides

Me trying out an old piano

We learned at the visitor information centre that at one point, almost half of Barkerville’s 12-15,000 residents were of Chinese descent, a percentage that rivals Richmond or Vancouver today. But the intriguing thing is that the main tour ends right at the gates of Chinatown – the Chinatown tour is a separate event. While that division may well be practical, it has the odd effect of making the Chinese community seem completely closed off from the rest of town. But is that actually possible in a (still small, although for that time big) town like Barkerville?
This question haunted us for the rest of the day. It turns out that Barkerville’s recognition of its Chinese history is fraught with implications that demonstrate the difficulty of public history. Luckily, we met two people who work there in the summer who helped us understand the real stakes of this historical site for Chinese migration – chance encounters that made our day.

Actually, I was strolling down Chinatown when a voice called out to me “Ei! Ni jiang zhongwen ma?” – which means “Hey, do you speak Chinese?” in Mandarin. When I said yes, I met Dr. Yingying Chen, who has been doing research in Barkerville since 1991, soon after she immigrated to Canada from China. Even though she finished her dissertation research in Anthropology from SFU and moved to the US to teach and still lives in the Midwest, she returns to Barkerville for about half the year, often at her own expense, to continue her research. And what she has found is amazing: records for clan associations anad secret societies (such as the Chinese Freemasons) that are unavailable almost anywhere else in the world. Because the community petered out in the 1940s, much of this material was just left lying around unlike in places like Vancouver where they got thrown away. I’ll blog about her discoveries another time, but it was amazing to meet someone who has labored her whole life to recover this history, often receiving very little recognition from others.

Our other new friend was Jimmy Ji, who immigrated from China when he was ten and recently graduated from University of Northern BC in First Nations Studies and Archaeology. This is, needless to say, a very unique background and he’s been spending his summer working as a tour guide and researcher. He has also studied filmmaking and will be starting his MFA at UBC this fall, which is a great boon for us! Here he is in his “tour-guide” attire:

We spent the afternoon filming their respective Chinatown tours, hanging out, sipping tea, and talking about the challenges of doing public Chinese Canadian history in Barkerville. We also did in-depth interviews with both, which yield a goldmine (pun intended) of information. We’ll come back to some of their insights in future postings.

After dinner with Jimmy (Yingying had to leave early), we finally left Wells around 8:30 and headed up to Prince George as dusk fell on the Northern landscape. Once we got into the van, we realized how tired we all were, espeically Gu, who has been holding a heavy camera and running around all day in 32 degree heat. Since it’s late, I’ll sign off with one more landscape shot and a word of wisdom from Gu: “In a time when we know too much and everything seems to be out of reach, we have to listen to individual stories and believe they can bring light into darkness.”

Gu, Jennifer, and myself are taking a road-trip this week to trace the Fraser River. This is the first trip we are taking for the Waterscapes Project and after driving most of the day, we’re spending the night in Wells, BC. Tomorrow morning, we’re headed to Barkerville, one of the boomtowns of Gold Rush in the nineteenth century and a centre for Chinese migration.

Most of today was spent on the road and we’re really not going to start work until tomorrow, but we had ample time to touch on some themes that will be central to this trip:

(1) Even though the purpose of this trip is to track Chinese migration from a historical perspective, the towns we visited have attracted immigrants from many different places. We were especially surprised by the large number of recent Korean immigrants in towns like Hope and Cache Creek, most operating motels and stores. We plan to spend more time tracking their stories.

(2) The history of the Chinese themselves is well-documented throughout the Gold Rush trail, which suggests that their stories have been absorbed into our prevailing narratives of multiculturalism. Is it easier to recognize their stories when the community is no longer active or even present?

(3) This trip is the first time the three of us (minus our superb research assistant, April Liu who, sadly for us, is buried in dissertation writing) have spent a significant amount of time working together. While we get along well as colleagues and friends, we have very different disciplinary backgrounds – a multi-media artist, a sociologist, and a literary theorist. The exciting aspect about this collaboration is that we notice very different things and complement each other’s approaches. But we are still at the beginning of learning how to collaborate — how to listen and learn from each other while holding onto our unique perspectives.

(4) The landscapes are breathtakingly beautiful. We spent most of the drive in awe of what we were seeing (not all that safe if you happen to be the one driving). Much of this project revolves around the relationship between migrant cultures and land/water-scapes and we’ve been constantly reminded of the aesthetic dimensions of these settings.

A few pictures from our trip today:

Our first stop was in Yale, where we visited a motel owned by Korean immigrants. Jennifer is talking with the guy manning the front desk (he just woke up). He came to Canada for high school, recently graduated, and is about to head back to Korea.

Our next stop was Cache Creek, where we had lunch at a Chinese/Canadian Restaurant called the Wanderer-Inn. The restaurant has been there for 41 years and is currently operated by the son of the original owner. What surprised us was that the cooks and kitchen staff have come here alone, leaving their family in Vancouver. While in Cache Creek, they stay above the restaurant and make it home once every few weeks. This gentleman came to Canada from Hong Kong in 1953. He told us that it was hard to find work in Vancouver.

Around dusk, we got into Quesnel, where signs all over town mark the history of a once-vibrant Chinese community. We tried to see whether there were Korean-owned motels in Quesnel, but met South Asian and Eastern European staff instead.

Finally, a few shots of the gorgeous land/waterscapes we saw today: