Beijing Foreign Studies University Chinese Canadian Library Collection

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Beijing Foreign Studies University Chinese Canadian Library Collection

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Publication Donation Project of BFSU -- Introduction:

In Sept. 2013, a group of four Chinese Canadian writers visited Beijing Foreign Studies University to give a roundtable talk on their individual writing as well as Chinese Canadian literature in general. This meeting not only left a very pleasant impression on both sides but inspired a book donation project that soon involved dozens of writers and scholars on the other side of the Pacific. Initiated by Denise Chong, writer and former senior advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, this project was warmly embraced by Chinese Canadian authors such as Judy Fong Bates, Paul Yee, Anthony Chan, to name a few, and scholars interested in Chinese Canadian Studies such as John Price and Pat Parungao. The Canadian Studies program of the University of Toronto and several publishers including Random House also made generous contributions.

Under the efficient organization of Jim Wong-Chu, poet, historian and founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, nearly 300 books, films and journals were gathered from across Canada and sent across the ocean. They are now shelved in a special section within the China Canadian Studies Resource Centre at the University Library of BFSU, accessible to readers all over the country. Hopefully they will provide a much needed resource for Canadianists in China and give rise to many scholarly writings and ideas.

Selected Book List:

Judy Fong Bates, The Year of Finding Memory 2010, Random House Canada

Anthony Chan, 'Linking African American,Ghettos with Chinatown",2010 Asian Profile.

Tony Chan, Li Ka-shing: Hong Kong Elusive Billioanire,, 1995, MacMillan Books.

Tony Chan, 'Gagging the Hong Kong Press', 1995 Gazette,Vol 1.No. 2.

Tony Chan, 'Born Again Asian,'1984, Journal of Ethnic Studies.

Tony Chan, 'Citiizen Alliens.' 1990, Asian Profile.

Tony Chan, 'Revisiting Anna May Wong,' 2006, Cinemaya.

Tony Chan, 'ESL for Refugee Learners.'1983. Adult Education.

Tony Chan, Gold Mountain, Electronic.

Anthony B. Chan,Perpetually CooL The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 2003, 2007 (paper), Scarecrow.

Arlene Chan, Chinese in Toronto, 2011, Dundurn.

Lien Chao, 'Beyond Silence,' 1997, TSAR.

Lily Cho, Eating Chinese,2010, University Toronto Press.

Denise Chong, The Concubine,1994, Penguin Canada.

Denise Chong, Lives of the Family, 2013, Random House Canada.

Denise Chong, Concubine's Children, 1994, Penguin.

Pat Parungao, Olivia Chow, My Journey, 2014 Harper Collins.

Wayson Choy, Not Yet? (Australian pbk. ed.) 2009.

Not Yet.? 2009, Random House Canada.

This page is created to recognize the generosity and passion of these donors, though it is far from enough to express our gratitude. The project is ongoing and we hope more people can join us in making a Chinese Canadian Canon.

For those interested in Asian Canadian writing, the following lists will prove helpful.

Booklist on Asian Canadian writing compiled by a group of authors: http://www.asiancanadianwiki.org/w/Authors

List of Asian Canadian authors and their works as compiled by Val Lem, librarian of Ryerson University:

http://library.ryerson.ca/asianheritage/authors/

Selected Donor Biography

Home Donors’ Bio

Canadian Donors (in alphabetical order, not a complete list) Please visit the BFSU site for the donors' profiles: [1]

Judy Fong Bates:

--- “When Professor Wenli Wang first sent an email at the end of September, 2013 to Denise Chong asking for contributions from Chinese Canadian writers for the library at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, Denise immediately contacted every writer she knew. The response was immediate and generous. This endeavour has personal resonance for me. As a child growing up in my father’s hand laundry in Canada, I have a clear memory of listening to him sing arias from Chinese opera and reading poetry that he had written. I never understood his poems; and yet I listened. The language was classical and my spoken Chinese was colloquial. But there was something about the rhythm of his words that captured me. Somehow through this act of sharing his work, my father impressed on me the power of language. It is one of life’s ironies that I too now write, but in English, a language that my father would not have been able to read. When my novel Midnight at the Dragon Cafe was translated into Chinese it felt like the completion of a circle. That my work should now be in a library at a university in Beijing, the centre of learning in China, would be beyond my father’s wildest dreams. Were he alive he would weep tears of joy.”

Judy Fong Bates came to Canada from China as a young child and grew up in several small Ontario towns.

Her stories have been broadcast on Canadian radio and published in literary journals and anthologies. She has written for The Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. She is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection, China Dog and Other Stories, and the novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café, which was an American Library Association Notable Book and a winner of the Alex Award for cross-over fiction. It was chosen by Portland, Oregon for its 2007 Everybody Reads Book, and by Toronto, Ontario for its 2011 One Book Community Read. Her latest work, The Year of Finding Memory, a family memoir, was a Globe and Mail Best 100 Book for 2010.

Judy lives with her husband on a farm outside of Toronto. They are both devoted gardeners and enthusiastic hikers.

The Canadian Studies program, the University of Toronto

The Canadian Studies program at the University of Toronto is delighted to foster good relations between itself and the Canadian Studies program at Beijing Foreign Studies University. The undergraduate program at University of Toronto encourages students to think critically about contemporary Canadian issues from a wide range of perspectives. In 2011 a new minor in Asian Canadian Studies was launched, and in 2013, the new Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies was announced. In light of these initiatives we are particularly interested in forging trans-Pacific partnerships to further the international study of Canadian Studies, and Asian Canadian Studies in particular.

Anthony Chan:

An accomplished scholar, teacher, academic leader, filmmaker, television journalist, and writer, Anthony B. Chan's last academic position was Professor and Associate Dean of Communication in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario.

Chan is currently co-authoring a new book about the lives of Chinese Canadians in Victoria and Vancouver from 1931 to 1932. This is based on his parent's letters and primary archival sources. In this manuscript, he recounts the notion of arranged marriages, the economics of managing a cafe catering to a predominantly European clientele, 1930s fashion, greeting cards communication and a swing band among Chinese Canadians, interracial relations and the murder of Mary Shaw, and the social impact of the Depression among the Chinese in Victoria and Vancouver, among other topics. He is also working on a sequel to his Gold Mountain with a special chapter on the criminalizing of the Chinese in the Canadian/western media.

Tony's latest film project is entitled Cosmic Energy.

He continues to serve as a Consulting Editor on the Editorial Board of Asian Affairs: An American Journal (Washington, D.C.).

His latest publication (2013) is a review essay of 3 recently published works on Chinese Canada: Arlene Chan on the Chinese in Toronto, May Q. Wong on a Chinese family in Montreal and David Wong's path breaking graphic novel on the Chinese in North America.

Born and raised in Victoria, B.C., Professor Chan returned to Canada after serving as the Chair of the B.A. and M.A. degree programs in Canadian Studies and Director of the Canadian Studies Center in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and as an Associate Professor of Communication and Head of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at California State University, Hayward. As an adjunct/sessional, he has also taught at the University of Victoria, University of Alberta, Saint Mary's University and Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan.

His family has been in Canada continuously since 1893 when his grandfather, Chan Dun settled in Victoria, B.C.

For more information, please check the link： [2]

Arlene Chan:

Arlene Chan, a third generation Chinese Canadian born in Toronto, is a writer and retired librarian. She has authored non-fiction works for children, young adults, and adults about Chinese festivals, dragon boat racing, and the Chinese in Canada. Her book The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From Outside to Inside the Circle (Toronto: Dundurn, 2011) was nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award and the Ontario Speaker's Book Award.

Denise Chong:

“I know that the authors and academics at this end in Canada feel privileged to have been asked to help out. Scarcely two decades ago, when I published my first book, The Concubine’s Children, I asked academics and teachers in Canada why I had learned nothing of the history or social conditions of what I wrote about when I was in grade school. The reply came back that “Teachers need books with which to teach! We didn’t have any resources!” In that way at least, The Concubine’s Children, published in 1994, was ground breaking. In a similar way that Canadian authors have since been prolific in writing based on the experience of the Chinese in Canada, I hope the modest contribution to building your library spawns many writings and ideas on the part of those in China.”

Denise Chong is an internationally-published, award-winning writer. The Concubine’s Children, a memoir of her family, which the New York Times Book Review called “beautiful, haunting and wise”, was the first non-fiction narrative of a Chinese family in Canada. Published in 1994, it was a Globe and Mail bestseller for 93 weeks. In 2014, the book joined the library of Penguin Canada's series of "Modern Classics." In her subsequent books, Denise again followed individuals who began life abroad but ended up as Canadian citizens: the napalm girl, the Vietnam War’s most famous casualty and her family's life in the war-torn country; a bus mechanic and his family's life spanning the twentieth century in Hunan, China, and most recently, a book that explores the experience of the lone Chinese immigrant family in small-town Canada. Two of those, The Concubine's Children and The Girl in the Picture are published in Chinese translation. Having begun her working career as an economist and senior advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Denise turned to writing upon a two-year move to Beijing in 1985. In 2013, she was awarded Canada's highest civilian honour, the Order of Canada. Married with two children, she lives in Ottawa.

Jim Wong-Chu:

Jim Wong-Chu is a poet, editor and historian. He is a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society, Pender Guy Radio, Asian Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR) and Ricepaper Magazine and liter ASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing. He has published Chinatown Ghosts and has co-edited Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians, Swallowing Cloud: an Anthology of Chinese Canadian Poetry and Strike the Wok: New Chinese Canadian Anthology.

Lydia Kwa:

“Since I situate some of my work in Singapore and Canada, including a novel set in 8th Century China (The Walking Boy), I would like readers at your Canadian Studies Centre to become acquainted with a writer who is creating work outside of the mainstream Canadian literary content, and who writes from a queer perspective.”

Lydia Kwa was born in Singapore but has lived in Canada since 1980. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her first book The Colours of Heroines was published by Toronto's Women's Press in 1994. She has been called by George Woodcock as a "memory writer of Proustian intensity". Her first novel This Place Called Absence (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2000) was nominated for several awards, including the Lambda Literary Prize. The next novel, The Walking Boy (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2005) was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Book Prize. Pulse was the next novel published by Key Porter shortly before the publisher went bankrupt. Kwa has a book-length poem out with Turnstone Press (2013) called sinuous. She has also self-published an unbound art/chapbook called linguistic tantrums. A new edition of Pulse will be released in July 2014.

Fiona Lam:

Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and the children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in over twenty anthologies (Canada, Hong Kong, and the US), including In Fine Form: The Anthology of Canadian Form Poetry and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010. Her work has been featured twice on local transit as part of B.C.’s Poetry in Transit, as well as aired on CBC Radio. Thrice short-listed for Event magazine’s literary non-fiction contest, she is a co-editor of and contributor to the creative non-fiction anthology, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She also edited The Bright Well, a collection of contemporary Canadian poetry about facing cancer. Her poetry videos have been screened at poetry film festivals locally and internationally.

Born in Scotland, she emigrated to Canada at a young age with her family. She has a B.A. in political science (UBC), an LL.B. (Queen’s University) and an LL.M. (University of Toronto). She articled and worked as an associate in a Vancouver law firm, and later as a staff lawyer at the Law Society of British Columbia. She also has an M.F.A. in creative writing (UBC). She facilitates writing workshops for people of diverse ages, backgrounds and circumstances, including at UBC Continuing Studies and Langara Continuing Studies.

Val Lem:

Val Ken Lem is a librarian at Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada. He compiled a list of Asian Canadian authors at http://library.ryerson.ca/asianheritage/authors/.

His father immigrated to Canada from China in 1923.

Yan Li:

Yan Li was born in Beijing, China, where she worked as an instructor, a translator, and a journalist before coming to Canada in 1987. Yan started teaching Chinese culture, literature, history, and language at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, since 1997. She is the Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Waterloo, and the Coordinator of the Chinese language program at East Asian Studies. In addition to her teaching, Yan is also a bilingual author. Her first English novel, Daughters of the Red Land, was a finalist for Books in Canada’s first novel award in 1996. Her major works include English novel Lily in the Snow and Chinese novels The Deep, Married to the West Wind, and The Lambs of Mapleton.

Vivienne Poy:

"I am glad Chinese Canadian Studies have gained prominence in academia in China. Chinese Canadians are very active in Canadian society, and Toronto has the largest ethnic Chinese population in the world outside of cities in Asia. Chinese is also the third most spoken language in Canada, after the official languages of English and French."

The Honorable Dr. Vivienne Poy, PhD from University of Toronto, is an author, entrepreneur, historian, fashion designer, and community volunteer. In 1998, she was the first Canadian of Asian descent to be appointed to the Senate of Canada where she focused on gender issues, multiculturalism, immigration, and human rights, and was instrumental in having May recognized as Asian Heritage Month across Canada. After her retirement from the Senate of Canada in September 2012, she continues to be actively involved with communities across Canada.

She is Chancellor Emerita of the University of Toronto, member of the Board of ORBIS (Canada), Member of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights National Advisory Council, Hon. Co-chair "For All Canadians", Canadian Blood Services, Hon. Patron of Chinese Canadian Historical Project, Simon Fraser University, Hon. Chair of Advisory Committee of "Hong Kong-Canada Crosscurrents Project, 1962-2012,” Advisor to the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre, Museum of Migration Society, Member of the Advisory Committee of Journal of Modern Life-Writing Study, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

She has received numerous honorary degrees and professorship from universities in Canada, USA, China, Hong Kong and South Korea, as well as many honours and awards.

John Price:

John Price teaches Japanese and Asian Canadian history at the University of Victoria. He moved to Japan at the age of 18. After returning to Canada he completed his graduate work at U.B.C. His dissertation was published by Cornell University Press under the title Japan Works: Power and Paradox in Postwar Industrial Relations. Beginning around the year 2000 he began to broaden his research interests to Canada-East Asian relations and this work culminated in the publication of his recent book Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2011). He is currently working on a biography (with his collaborator in China, Ningping YU) of Victoria Chung, the first Chinese Canadian to graduate from University of Toronto Medical School and one of the longest-serving medical missionaries to China. An additional book project is an experiential Asian Canadian history examining the politics of race and empire in the colonization and decolonization of Canada and the world.

Betty Quan:

As a playwright, Betty Quan's work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Prize for drama (Mother Tongue) and the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play (adaptation of Paul Yee's Ghost Train). Quan also writes film and animation, including the series Wild Animal Baby Explorers co-produced by Beijing's Xing Xing Digital, as well as a comic book about the Chinese participation in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway called Nitro (publisher: McClelland & Stewart, True North Comics).

Eleanor Ty:

Eleanor Ty (鄭 綺 寧) is Professor of English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She has published on Asian North American and on 18th Century literature. Author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U Toronto P 2004), Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 (U Toronto P 1998), and Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (U Toronto P 1993), she has edited Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford 1996) and The Victim of Prejudice (Broadview 1994) by Mary Hays. She has co-edited with Russell J.A. Kilbourn, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2013), with Christl Verduyn a collection of essays, Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2008), and with Donald Goellnicht Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen (Indiana UP 2004).

Larry Wong:

Larry Wong was born in August 1938 in Vancouver’s Chinatown and attended the University of British Columbia for two years.

His career was with the Federal Government which took him from Vancouver to Ottawa to Toronto and back to Vancouver. He was a financial planner with a background in accounting and computer.

After his retirement he became a member of the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop and wrote a short play, Siu Yeh, which was produced at the Firehall Art Centre in 1995. More than a decade later, he wrote Empress of Asia which was work shopped for a staged reading.

In 1993, he was asked to join the Chinese Canadian Military Museum Society as a director and became their curator and historian. In conjunction with the Canada War Museum in Ottawa, he designed a special exhibit telling the Chinese Canadian war experience of World War Two which opened May 2012. The exhibit was on display until February 2013. It was then shown in Vancouver at the Chinese Cultural Centre in June. The exhibit travelled to the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria for a November showing and as of January 2014, on exhibit at the Esquimalt Naval Museum.

Larry was the vice-president of the Vancouver Historical Society for several years and was their programming officer. He ran a series of successful talks featuring speakers from all walks of life, accompanied usually by PowerPoint presentations.

He was the founding director of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C. in 2003 which was formally a registered society the following year. He continues to be active in the society with his blog.

His stories of early Chinatown appeared in a 2007 anthology, Eating Stories: A Chinese Canadian & Aboriginal Potluck which was reprinted in Learning Chinese Canada. His latest book, Dim Sum Stories: A Chinatown Childhood was launched September, 2011.

He has served on a number of heritage committees and as a mentor, consultant and resource person for a number of writers and scholars.

Rita Wong:

Rita Wong is the author of three books of poetry: sybil unrest (co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood 2007), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang 1998). forage won Canada Reads Poetry 2011. Wong received the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award in 1997, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008. Building from her doctoral dissertation which examined labor in Asian North American literature, her work investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology, and decolonization.

An Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, she is researching the poetics of water.

Paul Yee:

Paul Yee’s余兆昌grandfather and father were from Guangdong province and both worked in Canada. Yee’s mother arrived in Canada in 1950, and Paul Yee was born in a small town in the prairies where they were the only Chinese family. However, Paul was soon taken to Vancouver, where he was raised amidst its thriving Chinese community. Paul grew up speaking Cantonese but studied Putonghua at university, where he received two university degrees in history. Paul first visited China in the summer of 1976, for a six-week tour, and he has returned for several visits since then. Paul writes mostly for young readers, but has also written adult non-fiction and a play (“Jade in the Coal, 金山惊魂”), 2010, which involved actors from the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Academy First Troupe广东粤剧院一团.

About the Canadian Studies Centre

The Canadian Studies Centre of BFSU was founded in early 1980s. A number of scholars, Prof. Wu Zhenfu, Yuan Henian and Zhang Yun, offered courses on Canada and published papers and attended international conferences on Canadian studies. In 2006, the Centre was re-activated and an graduate program on Canadian Studies was initiated in 2007, the first of its kind in Chinese universities.

The Centre offers a unique opportunity for the study of Canada from a variety of perspectives.It has currently 9 faculty members and 9 adjunct and guest professors. Major areas of research and teaching include Canadian politics and foreign policy, Canadian social and public policy, Canadian economic development, and Canadian literature and culture. We offer two undergraduate courses on Canada and 9 graduate courses for the Canadian Studies program.

The Centre is active in the circle of Canadian Studies in China. It has successfully hosted the 14th ACSC biennial conference, The 9th Canada-China Energy and Environment Forum and a number of other international conferences and symposiums. Faculty members have successfully completed national and ministerial-level research projects, published on Canadian foreign policy, China-Canada relations, Canadian literature and culture and other areas on Canadian Studies. With the support of the Canadian Embassy, we have set up the “China Canadian Studies Resource Centre” in 2011, sharing academic resources with Canadianists in China.

The Centre has established extensive collaboration with Canadian institutions like University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of Alberta, York University etc. We regularly invite guest speakers from Canadian universities and research institutions to give lectures or offer mini-courses to the students. Almost every Canadian Ambassador to China made BFSU the first university in China to visit and give speech at.

In 2011, the Centre was entitled by the Ministry of Education as the National Research Base for Area Studies (Canada).