Description

A panoramic account of Chinese diaspora in Australia and North America during the 19th and 20th centuries, from the perspectives of the Poy family.

Readers will experience life of the Chinese in the gold fields in Australia at the height of the White Australia Policy, the horrors of the Second World War and of heroism, the life of high society in Hong Kong and the Japanese invasion, filled with spies and infiltrators. The turbulent events of the Chinese civil war, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, are felt through the suffering of family members who remained in China. As luck would have it, due to wartime diplomatic bungling, one member of the Poy clan entered Canada with his family during Chinese Exclusion, where they eventually remained and prospered. This is the story of a family from the village of Suizaikou, where the streams meet, in Taishan County in south China.

The Honourable Dr. Vivienne Poy is Chancellor Emerita of the University of Toronto, an author of non-fiction and a historian. In 1998, she was the first Canadian of Asian heritage to be appointed to the Senate of Canada where she focused on gender issues, multiculturalism, immigration, and human rights. She retired from the Senate in September 2012, and continues to be actively involved with communities across Canada. She travels extensively and has special interest in the study of Chinese diaspora.

Dr Barry McGowan is a Canberra-based heritage consultant and historian and a Research Associate at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He has written extensively on the history and heritage of Australian and Chinese-Australian mining communities and Australian ghost towns. His best known books are Ghost Towns of Australia, Fool’s Gold. Myths and legends of gold-seeking in Australia, and Dust and Dreams. Mining Communities in South-East New South Wales. Barry has also written several thematic histories and helped curate exhibitions of the Chinese people in regional and rural Australia. He is currently working on a thematic history of the Chinese people in Central New South Wales. In October of this year his most recent publication, Tracking the Dragon: Thematic History of the Chinese people in the Rutherglen/Wahgunyah region of the Indigo Shire, Victoria, was short listed and commended in the 2015 Victorian Community History Awards.

Ruth Hayhoe is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her professional engagements in Asia included foreign expert at Fudan University (1980-1982), Head of the Cultural Section of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (1989-1991) and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (1997-2002). Recent books include Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation: An Untold Story (2016), China Through the Lens of Comparative Education (2015), Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (2011) and Portraits of Influential Chinese Educators (2006). She has received many honors including the Silver Bauhinia Star of the Hong Kong SAR Government (2002), Commandeur dans l’ordre des Palmes académiques of the Government of France (2002), Honorary Fellow of the University of London Institute of Education (1998) and of the Comparative and International Education Society (2011), Honorary Doctorates from the Hong Kong Institute of Education (2002) and the Open University of Hong Kong (2015) and the Mingyuan Education Prize (2015).

5:30 – 7:30 PM, followed by a reception