“The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain”

“I’d kill a Chinaman as quick as I would an Indian and I’d kill an Indian as quick as I would a dog.” This chilling remark, recorded in a police report, was made in 1884 by a man who had taken part in the lynching of Louie Sam, a fourteen-year old indigenous boy from the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He had been waiting to be tried for murder in New Westminster when he was kidnapped by an American mob, taken across the border and lynched, presumably because the alleged murder had taken place in Nooksack, Washington. It later transpired that two members of the lynch mob were likely responsible for the murder.

This incident, redolent with ignorant, vicious racism, was made when Dukesang Wong  had been living four years in British Columbia, employed as an underpaid laborer in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It serves to highlight an extreme case of the attitude taken not just by Americans, but by many Canadians as well, towards the thousands of Chinese workers who had been providing the sweat and toil needed to complete the railway since the mid-1860s. It also illustrates how Chinese were thrown, together with Indigenous people, into a maelstrom of hatred, fear and discrimination, abetted by the activities of scurrilous groups such as the Victoria (British Columbia) Anti-Chinese Association. The Canadian government did little to intervene at the time, and when it did it was to impose a “head tax” of C$500 on Chinese who wished to emigrate to Canada.

 

The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain, Dukesang Wong, David McIlwraith (ed), Wanda Joy Hoe (trans)
The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain, Dukesang Wong, David McIlwraith (ed), Wanda Joy Hoe (trans) (Talon Books, November 2020)

Dukesang Wong (1845-1931) was the son of a regional magistrate in China who in 1867 (ironically the year of Canadian Confederation) was poisoned by arsenic over a legal decision he had made. The first entry in the diary is a poignant memorial to Wong’s father. “I must constantly remember only him,” he writes, “But I can only remember the black nails of his fingers and they torment my sleep.” A year later his mother killed herself. The circumstances of his father’s death had meant disgrace for Wong’s family, and one of the ways he coped with it was by keeping a diary; this diary would eventually come to be the only known written source of information about the life of a Chinese railway worker in the so-called “Gold Mountain”, as western North America was optimistically called. The diary came to light in the 1960s, when Wong’s maternal granddaughter Wanda Joy Hoe, then attending Simon Fraser University in Vancouver,  translated excerpts of it for an undergraduate sociology paper. The notebook ended up in the local clan office, and tragically disappeared in a fire. To compound the loss, some tapes on which Hoe’s uncle had recorded himself reading the translation were also lost, simply thrown out after the uncle’s death. All that remained was Hoe’s paper, put away in a box for years and fortuitously rediscovered.

The outlines of the Chinese railway workers’ struggles against overwork, racism and physical cruelty at the hands of white people in Canada are now better known than they were, but until this remarkable diary came to light they were seen as little more than a nameless mass of mostly illiterate people. Dukesang Wong, an educated person from the mandarin class, was an exception. He was trained in Confucian philosophy and had a good knowledge of Chinese literature, as well as having sat several examinations in the complex system of China’s civil service. “These influences,” David McIlwraith explains, “shaped Wong’s literary style and even the particular script in which he wrote.” He believes that “it is writing that makes us mourn the permanent loss of the many untranslated sections of those diaries.”

Enough nevertheless remains that readers can get a good idea of what the Chinese went through as well as a portrait of Dukesang Wong himself, who emerges as a strong, hard-working, compassionate and intelligent man. “It is hard, this labouring,” he wrote in 1881; “but my body seems to be strong enough. The people working with me are good, strong men.”

Dukesang Wong was, however, a man who never considered Canada his “home”. In 1883, for example, we find him writing wistfully, “I wonder when I shall have laboured enough to journey back to my home village.” In 1899, now a happily-married man with a family, he asserts “My children are Chinese people!” and goes on to declare “I wish for my children one day to return to China… We must not be buried on foreign land!” Photographs of Wong family graves, however, show that fate didn’t grant his earnest desire.

 

What will probably interest most readers is Wong’s account of his work with the CPR, after which he started up a successful tailoring business. He embarked in Portland, Oregon (he initially thought it would be San Francisco), which he at first found was “a good place, even though we hear tales of wild and crazy events outside town.” With a rather touching naïveté he adds “I doubt the truth of these tales,” only to witness, sometime later, “a man being violently beaten by another of his own kind,” adding “I could not believe what my eyes were seeing… Surely there are no manners and rules here.” In spite of this, he is determined to succeed: “I must save as much as I am able,” he says, “and live humbly in piety… My years of learning, however, will be a great aid, and I shall try to teach once I have saved some money.”

His “years of learning” and his Confucian values probably helped him get through the years of racism, injustice and exploitation at the hands of his CPR bosses and the Canadian authorities. “So many of us Chinese suffered and died recently,” an entry for 1885 reads; “But the western people will not allow us to land here any longer, while they scold us for not working enough… The work is great, but there aren’t enough labourers.” He concludes this entry: “These mighty lands are great to gaze upon, but the laws made here are so small.” Indeed they were. “My old way of life—my soul desires it,” reads an entry for 1887; “and my mind continually wanders to those days of no cares and worries.”

Another fascinating aspect of Wong’s diary, despite the brevity of its entries, is his attitude towards other non-white people. He met indigenous people, Indians (he calls them “Hindus”) and Japanese during the course of his CPR job and, presumably, afterwards as well. “The Hindu people,” he says without explanation, “cannot labour as we are able to.” When he went on a journey to Victoria, he got some guidance from Indigenous people: “their help in the return journey was great,” further observing that “they are solitary people, but they know the land so well,” and in 1900 he noted that “the Indians have great ways to obtain food—meat from the wild animals. Sing has brought some deer meat from one such Indian family, tasting wild, but meat still.” As for the Japanese, Wong tells us that they are “treated with great deference by the westerners,” and he’s not sure why, as “their ways are so much like ours.” He did not live to see the Japanese placed in internment camps by the Canadian government during World War II.

The book puts a human face on the thousands of Chinese who came to Canada in the 19th century and gradually managed, by dint of sheer determination and hard work, to make themselves good lives. Wong himself eventually finds his calling in tailoring, a profession in which he seems to have done well and which was, likely to his great relief, a far cry from the days of hard labor on the CPR. “My life is now good,” he says in the autumn of 1888, “The tailoring work has been worthwhile and is of a good trade, for which we can hold our faces up.”

Judy Fong Bates, who has written about her own experiences as an immigrant child in Canada, states that Dukesang Wong’s diary “gives him back his humanity and his individuality.” I wish that there had been more of it, but we should be very grateful for Wanda Joy Hoe’s undergraduate effort (she did get an A in the paper) and for David McIlwraith’s helpful commentary. As Dukesang Wong so thoughtfully and poignantly observed after seeing his old world gone with the end of the Qing dynasty and the outbreak of World War I,

 

It is said that the old ways cannot last and that people must change and be continuously renewed. I have even taught this—yet I fear that I cannot change enough for this new world.

John Butler recently retired as Associate Professor of Humanities at the University College of the North in The Pas, Manitoba, Canada, and has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria and Japan. He specializes in early modern travel-literature (especially Asian travel) and seventeenth-century intellectual history. His books include an edition of Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels in Africa, Persia and Asia the Great (2012) and most recently an edition of Sir Paul Rycaut's Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667) and a book of essays, Off the Beaten Track: Essays on Unknown Travel Writers.