Paul Yee

Four short stories about a group of 5th-grade friends who live in Strathcona (inner city Vancouver, adjacent to Chinatown). Each story is told from the point of view of a different child. One is a thoroughly assimilated 3rd-generation Chinese-Canadian girl, two more are first-generation immigrant boys (one from very urban Hong Kong and one from a farming family in mainland China), and the fourth is a white girl who lives in public housing and is stigmatized by teachers as a bit of a troublemaker. They're all on a kids' hockey team at the local recreation centre. The different viewpoints give the reader a chance to see the kids as they see themselves and each other, which is a great reading experience for middle-school kids learning to evaluate the reliability of narration. It's also helpful in exploring questions about race and identity. And each story has the children experiencing personal growth in some small way. Overall, a really good book.

It's also a period piece now. I'm not familiar with Vancouver, but I do know that the huge influx of wealthy Chinese in recent decades has fueled incredible increases in real estate prices and I would be surprised if Strathcona has escaped the gentrification that I've seen in Toronto. Still a good book, and the excellent afterword on the history of Vancouver, of Strathcona, and of the Chinese in British Columbia (with photos) brings the history up to 1983, the date of publication.… (more)

Saltwater City pays tribute to those who went through the hard times, to those who swallowed their pride, to those who were powerless and humiliated, but who still carried on. They all had faith that things would be better for future generations. They have been proven correct.

Canada’s first Chinese arrived in British Columbia in 1858 from California. Almost all mee—merchants, peasants, and laborers — and almost all from eight rural counties in the Pearl River delta in what is now Guangdong province — they came in search of gold and better fortune, escaping the rebellions, flood and drought of their homeland.

By 1863 over 4,000 Chinese lived in B.C., filling jobs shunned by whites: miners, road builders, teamsters, laundry men, restaurateurs, domestic servants and cannery workers. Between 1881 and 1885, thousands more arrived, most imported to build the transcontinental railway. They were to create, in Vancouver, Canada’s largest and most dynamic Chinese Community, known to its original inhabitants as Saltwater City.… (more)

I looked forward to reading A Superior Man by Paul Yee because I am a descendant of early Chinese Canadian immigrants who settled in the geographic area during the same timeframe covered in the book. Mentally I was engaged by the stories and travails of Hok, but the style of writing and coarseness of language was offputting to me. I can well imagine the turns of phrase used by these uneducated and rough China men may be true to life, but it made for unpleasant reading. The story contained enough tragedy, violence, racism and poverty as it was.

Many characters were only thumbnail sketches and our antagonist seemed unpleasant, arrogant, greedy and shallow. So points for the research and storyline generally but outweighed by my distaste for the writing.… (more)