China and Chinese-Canadians
By 49thShelf
The Animals of Chinese New Year
Drawing on the myth of the Chinese zodiac, The Animals of Chinese New Year follows twelve animals as they speed across a river, competing to represent the imminent new year in a race held by the Jade Emperor, the most powerful Chinese god. Each animal competes in its own unique way. The ox works hard, the tiger is brave, the dog smiles kindly, but who will win? Bright photographs of babies demonstrating the same traits as the animals in the text, complemented by traditional Chinese graphic eleme …

Dragon Springs Road
“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 …

Chop Suey Nation
In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. It was only after the story was published that she discovered her own family could have been included—her parents had run their own Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe, before she was born. This discovery, and the realization that there was so much of her own history she didn’t yet know, set her on a time-sensitive mission: t …

Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China
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 …

Cultivating Connections
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 …

The Conjoined
Longlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award
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 — trou …

From Slave Girls to Salvation
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 …