China and Chinese-Canadians

“Filled with enchantment and intrigue” (Toronto Star) and “a great choice for a book club” (The Huffington Post), Dragon Springs Road takes readers on an evocative journey a century in the past and half a world away.

In early-twentieth-century Shanghai, an ancient imperial dynasty collapses, a new government struggles to life and two girls are bound together in a friendship that will be tested by duty, honour and love.

Abandoned in the courtyard of a once-lavish estate outside Shanghai, se …

The history of the Chinese community in Toronto is rich with stories drawn from over 150 years of life in Canada.

Sam Ching, a laundryman, is the first Chinese resident recorded in Toronto’s city directory of 1878. A few years later, in 1881, there were 10 Chinese and no sign of a Chinatown. Today, with no less than seven Chinatowns and half a million people, Chinese Canadians have become the second-largest visible minority in the Greater Toronto Area.

Stories, photographs, newspaper reports, m …

As China rose to its position of global superpower, Chinese groups in the West watched with anticipation and trepidation. In this volume, international scholars examine how artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from the Chinese diaspora represented this new China to global audiences. The chapters, often personal in nature, focus on the nexus between the political and economic rise of China and the cultural products this period produced, where new ideas of nation, identity, and diaspora …

In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For them, the Prairies were a land of opportunity; there, they could open shops and potentially earn enough money to become merchants. The result of almost a decade's research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating Connections tells the stories of some of Prairie Canada's Chinese settlers – men and women from various generations who navigated cultural difference …

A masterful and gripping novel from “an undeniably talented writer” (Globe and Mail)

On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother’s belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s …

For decades, the Chinese Rescue Home was a feature of the landscape of Victoria, British Columbia. Originally a refuge for Chinese prostitutes and slave girls rescued from captivity, it became a residence and school where the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society attempted to reform Chinese and Japanese girls and women. They did so, in part, by teaching them domestic skills meant to ease their integration into Western society. This book offers the first in-depth history and analysis of this ico …

The May Fourth Movement launched an era of turmoil and transformation in China, as Western ideas and Western-style education encroached on the Confucian traditions that lay at the foundation of Chinese society. The reverberations for Chinese culture and literature were profound. The Republican period (1919-1949) witnessed an outpouring of poetry in a form and style new to China, written in the common people’s language baihua ("plain speech").The New Poetry broke with the centuries-old traditio …