Description

During the early twentieth century, thousands of predominantly male migrants from China and their families in Guangdong were embroiled in two seemingly separate discussions on women’s roles in education. In emigrant areas, while promoting education was upheld as a badge of Chinese patriotism and modernity, the absence of many able-bodied men and changes introduced by sending girls to schools created a backlash where many parents on both sides of the Pacific blamed schools for turning their daughters into “freedom girls,” girls who disobeyed parental wishes in their heedless pursuit of personal gratification. The academic achievements of female students in North America, on the other hand, were uniformly celebrated by newspapers on both sides of the ocean. The accomplishments and activities of a handful of female students at the Chinese Public School in Victoria BC, the largest overseas Chinese school in Canada, particularly captured the public imagination. By examining events in Guangdong and Victoria together as two integrally connected halves of a migration-created trans-Pacific society, this paper will suggest that the treatment and perception of women on both sides of the Pacific mutually influenced each other. In many ways, the transgressions of distant “unsupervised” women in Guangdong provided the foil that helped migrants in Canada identify with and celebrate the achievements of girls who were closely supervised by their parents and the community at large. The interconnectedness between Guangdong and Chinese Victoria highlights the need to examine migration-created settlements in Canada through a transnational lens.

Belinda Huang completed her Ph.D. In the Department of History, Princeton University under the supervision of Prof. Susan Naquin. Her dissertation examines issues of generational conflict, identity formation, and gender in the trans-Pacific society created by Chinese migrants in North America and their families in Guangdong, China.