To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

A familiar litany, in short, of exotic myths and stereotypes of the "treacherous
Oriental"; 3 and proof (if proof were needed) of the capacity of romance
to turn attraction to revulsion: to transform the object of desire into a vehicle
of loathing. For exoticist romance—like the genre of romance itself—is
dangerously double-sided. In exotic literature, says Tzvetan Todorov, the
tendency is to glorify foreigners; in colonial literature it is to denigrate
them. But the contradiction is only apparent:
Once the author has declared that he himself is the only subject ... and that the
others have been reduced to the role of objects, it is often of secondary concern
whether those objects are loved or despised. The essential point is that they are
not full-fledged human beings. (323)
"Not full-fledged human beings": such—without undue romantic exaggeration—was
an all too common assessment of Canada's early Chinese
immigrants. 4 Brought over in the mid- to late nineteenth century to work in
the mines and on the railroads, later recruited to low-paid jobs unfilled by
the white European workforce, many of these indentured Chinese labourers
were not considered "immigrants" at all. Instead, they were seen as
"sojourners"; they were expected, in time, to return to the wives and children
they had left behind in China—expectations frustrated, on one notorious
occasion, by CP Rail's withdrawal of its promise to pay its workers'
passage home. As Chinese communities in Canada began to grow and,
gradually, to prosper, they became subject to increasingly discriminatory
legislation. This culminated in the passing of the 1923 Immigration Act,
which decreed that, until further notice, there woulcTbe no more Chinese
immigration into Canada (the Act was not repealed until 1947). And it was
not until after the Second World War that the Chinese in Canada acquired
the right to vote. "Aside from the indigenous people," says Peter Li in his
sociological survey of Chinese communities in Canada, "no other racial or
ethnic group ha[s] experienced such harsh treatment in Canada as the
Chinese" (1).
Two recent fictional accounts of the Chinese presence in Canada, Marilyn
Bowering's To All Appearances A Lady (1989) and Sky Lee's Disappearing
Moon Café (1990), appear against this background. Both books are, to some
extent, "realistic" family sagas, drawing on historical record to place their
tales of domestic discord within a wider context of social struggle. Both
might be more accurately located, however, within the deliberately hyperbolical
tradition of genealogical romance: a tradition in which romantic
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