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Chinese-Canadian Dreams and Disillusions: 'Tales from Gold Mountain'

© Irene Tanner-Yuen

Tales from Gold Mountain (1989) is a collection of short stories about some experiences of Chinese immigrants in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The Chinese who came to North America in the gold rushes of the 1850s, and later, as cheap labour for primary industries and building transcontinental railroads, suffered many hardships after they settled down in the bachelor settlements in frontier towns and Chinatown shanties. Paul Yee, a writer and noted historian, teams up with illustrator Simon Ng to create a folkloric and ultimately affecting picture book for readers interested in the history of Chinese immigrants in Canada.

Each of the eight stories in Tales from Gold Mountain is prefaced with a full-page illustration. The paintings are a blend of traditional elements and a deliberate ageing effect, achieving a partly abstract, partly expressionist quality. The cracked texture of the paintings lends an antique air to the stories. The tales are set in the late nineteenth century--the first Chinese gold miners reached Victoria, British Columbia in 1857, and the western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway was built from 1880 to 1885 by thousands of Chinese men--but the art and devices of the supernatural and legends make the stories ageless.

The book leads with "Spirits of the Railway", a tale that tells of the first Chinese peasants to leave south China, ravaged by floods and starvation, for the New World. In this story, Chu embarks on a two-month long voyage to Canada in search of his father, a poor farmer who left his family months ago to find work. Chu finds work in Canada on a work gang, building the railroad. But there he encounters the bitterness of the Chinese men that were there before him, who experienced mistreatment and prejudice of the white overseers.

"'Search no more, young man!' one grizzled old worker said. 'Don't you know that too many have died here? My own brother was buried alive in a mudslide.'
'My uncle was killed in a dynamite blast,' muttered another, 'No one warned him about the fuse.'
The angry memories rose and swirled like smoke among the workers."

One day, Chu enters a half-finished tunnel even though the other men warn him of ghosts inside. He meets the ghost of his father inside, who explains to him that an accident killed many Chinese and white men. "'A ton of rock dropped on us and crushed us flat. They buried the whites in a churchyard, but our bodies were thrown into the river...We have no final resting place.'" Chu and the other workers gather bundles of chopsticks and straw to perform a symbolic burial on a mountaintop. Afterwards, a rope turns into a snake, to guard the graves of the Chinese who were killed in the accident.

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