Читать книгу The Chinese in Toronto from 1878 - Arlene Chan - Страница 10

As long as the flint remains, the seeds of fire will never die out.

— LU XUN, 1881–1936.

The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway threw thousands of Chinese out of work. Although the Chinese had proven their worth as hard-working and dedicated railway labourers, the scarcity of jobs and high competition for work left them scrambling. Nearly one thousand men who had earned enough for the return fare to China headed home, but not in the numbers as assumed and hoped for by the British Columbia government.¹ Those who could not afford the passage fare looked for work as miners, domestic servants, farm labourers, food canners, and forest workers, with the unsuccessful ones left loitering on the streets, suffering from cold and hunger. These railway workers had been abandoned at no fault of their own. Andrew Onderdonk’s refusal to honour his pledge of a ticket back to China left labourers stranded in a foreign land.

A steady stream of Chinese, victims of these dire circumstances, began moving east on the very railway they had built to unite the country. Opportunities for starting small businesses beckoned where Chinese communities were smaller and anti-Chinese sentiment had not reached the same heights as in British Columbia. The Chinese willingly took jobs at almost any wage. By 1901, Chinese lived in every province of Canada. Although the majority remained in British Columbia until the 1920s, the gradual move eastwards saw a decline of Chinese living in the province, which had previously been home to 99 percent of all Chinese in Canada.

Undetermined numbers also arrived in Eastern Canada from the United States. There were many reasons for the influx from south of the Canadian border. The American economy soured in the 1870s and 1880s, followed by the national depression of 1893. With the growing number of unemployed white workers, the Chinese were among the scapegoats blamed for stealing jobs away from Americans. Many Chinese moved north to escape discrimination. Another influencing factor was the impact of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented the re-entry of American Chinese railway workers who had worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Anti-Chinese Racism

Even as the Chinese moved eastward, widespread anti-Chinese sentiment, which had been temporarily put to rest during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, was revived. White British Columbia was enraged at the Chinese who remained. Few minority groups attracted as much negative public reaction and discrimination as the Chinese, and this was at a time when a significant proportion of the Canadian population was foreign-born or a generation or two removed from their country of origin.

Racism and white supremacism played out on the international stage as European powers expanded their empires into Asia and Africa. The West’s perception of the Chinese was handily informed by Britain’s easy victory over China in the first Opium War (1839–1842). For a country that had dispelled all foreigners and viewed itself as the centre of the world, white imperialism was now on its doorstep. China was forced to open key ports to outsiders, and its position as the leading power in Asia was drastically diminished. Other countries, including the United States, France, Russia, and Portugal, soon followed Britain’s lead and demanded trade agreements that China was powerless to refuse.

Canadian attitudes were shaped by these events as well as those occurring on home soil. After Confederation in 1867, Canada needed large-scale immigration to expand settlement in the prairies. The immigrant of choice was of British and European stock — a white Canada. The Dominion Lands Policy opened wide the doors to farmers and agricultural labourers from the United States and Europe with offers of free farmland. From 1896 to 1905, an aggressive advertising campaign implemented by the federal government attracted over 650,000 farmers from Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Austria-Hungary. During a cross-Canada visit in 1907, author Rudyard Kipling made known his views for a white society and said that “the best way to keep the yellow man out is to get the white man in.”²

The popular media played no insignificant role in influencing public opinion during this time of unchecked anti-Chinese sentiment. Sensationalism not only sold newspapers but also perpetuated narrow stereotypes that included labels like chink, celestial, and Oriental. News stories depicted Chinese men as diseased, drug-addicted, indolent, morally bankrupt, unclean, and unlawful. Headlines like HEATHEN CHINEE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA were common, as well as caricatures that lampooned Chinese facial features, hair, and dress. Even as hundreds of Chinese moved out of British Columbia, those who remained were subject to constant scrutiny. Politicians and citizens viewed the Chinese as inassimilable and a threat to society for their inferior and backward ways.

The media in British Columbia reflected the strong anti-Chinese sentiment. This cartoon with the caption THE HEATTHEN CHINEE IN BRITTISH COLUMBBIA depicts newspaper editor, Amor de Cosmos, forcing an immigrant to leave.

In this cartoon from the Saturday Sunset, August 24, 1907, the gatekeeper, dressed in a Union Jack, closes the gate to the “Oriental” men, while the well-dressed “whites” are seen arriving with women and children.

Fears about the Yellow Peril and its threat to the British race became a powerful rallying point for politicians, who parlayed the deep-seated antagonism to handily steer the course of anti-Chinese legislation. Chinese could not purchase Crown lands. They could not work in underground coal mines or on any public works projects, like road and bridge construction. All Chinese over the age of 14 had to pay a $10 annual fee for a residential licence.

The law that sealed the alien status of the Chinese, however, was the Electoral Franchise Act. Up until 1875, Chinese exercised the right to vote in British Columbia. That year, provincial legislation barred the Chinese from elections. In 1885 Prime Minister Macdonald took disenfranchisement to a new level by introducing the franchise act, which gave the federal government control over the right to vote across the country at all three levels of elections. Chinese, even naturalized Canadian citizens, were not allowed to vote in a federal election. No vote in federal elections meant no vote in any provincial or municipal elections. Without registration on the electoral roll, Chinese were further disqualified from occupations like political office, law, medicine, and pharmacy.

Another government response to anti-Chinese sentiment was the establishment of a Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration to investigate the “Chinese question.” According to its 1884 report, there were 10,492 Chinese living in British Columbia, 4,000 of them railway workers.³ The testimonies of 51 witnesses, almost all prejudiced against the Chinese, were documented. In the words of one witness, “Unless the Chinese character should undergo a radical change they cannot become permanent settlers.”⁴ His comments were representative of most others.

The Chinese were regarded as sojourners whose intentions were to earn money and return to China. A sojourner is defined as someone who spends “many years of his lifetime in a foreign country without being assimilated by it.”⁵ The notion that the Chinese were in Canada merely as sojourners has proven to be highly controversial among historians and scholars. The issue in dispute is whether the early Chinese immigrants really did not intend on staying in Canada or wanted to settle but were rejected on racist grounds.

One of the lone voices in support of the Chinese was that of Huang Zunxian, the Chinese Consul General of San Francisco, appointed by the Chinese government and given jurisdiction over the Chinese in Canada. He countered the majority of other witnesses by giving evidence of Chinese who had settled with their families in other locales, like the West Indies, Cuba, and the Philippines:

It is charged that the Chinese do not emigrate to foreign countries to remain, but only to earn a sum of money and return to their homes in China. There are quite a number of foreigners in China, but few of them have brought their families. You must recollect that the Chinese immigrant coming to this country is denied all the rights and privileges extended to others in the way of citizenship; the laws compel them to remain as aliens. I know a great many Chinese will be glad to remain here permanently with their families, if they are allowed to be naturalized and can enjoy privileges and rights.⁶

Head Tax

Consul General Huang’s voice fell on deaf ears. The report of the Royal Commission secured Canada’s first anti-Chinese immigration law. In 1885 a head tax of $50 was levied on every Chinese landing in Canada, with the intent of discouraging their further immigration. Prime Minister Macdonald’s address to parliamentarians in 1886 reflected the attitude of the day: “I do not think that it would be to the advantage of Canada or any other country occupied by Aryans for members of the Mongolian race to become permanent inhabitants of the country.”⁷ The head tax was even more sinister because the Chinese were the only group ever assessed such a fee, based purely on race. It ranked among the most anti-Chinese legislation of the day — institutional racism at its worst.

Head tax certificates were required for all Chinese immigrants as proof of their payment for entry into Canada. Officially called C.I. 5 certificates, “C.I.” an abbreviation for Chinese Immigration, these were issued by the federal authorities to show the amount of the head tax and the port and date of arrival. An official stamp was required on the certificate for those who wished to return to Canada following a visit to China. Because copies were not kept by the government, the certificates were all the more carefully guarded from damage and loss.

At $50 the head tax was a financial hardship, and deliberately so, to discourage Chinese immigration, particularly wives and children. The Royal Commission estimated that the average Chinese labourer earned $225 a year, spent $130 for food and clothing, $24 for rent, $28 for other expenses, and saved a modest $43.⁸ As such, the $50 head tax exceeded one year’s savings and made it impossible for most men to pay for a spouse or child to come to Canada.

Lem Wong was among the 1,762 Chinese immigrants who came in 1896 and paid the $50 head tax, collectively generating $88,000 in taxes for the federal coffers.⁹ Born in 1881 in a small village near Guangzhou, he departed at age 15 with his uncle and landed a job in a Vancouver laundry. He moved eastward, working in other laundries before settling in London, Ontario, where he set up his own hand laundry. After a few years, he opened a restaurant that ensured the future of his wife and four children, one of whom was Gretta Wong Grant, the first female Chinese Canadian lawyer.

The punitive head tax had short-lived success in curbing immigration. At first, the number of Chinese immigrants dropped drastically, from the thousands of previous years to 212 in 1886.¹⁰ By 1890, however, the trend reversed and the numbers climbed again. The outrage of British Columbians led to the doubling of the head tax to $100 in 1900. A year later, the federal government appointed another royal commission.

This time, the subject of investigation included not only the Chinese but also the Japanese. The Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese. Immigration recorded public opinion from many individuals, whose prejudicial comments reiterated how Canadians in the nineteenth century generally felt about the “Orientals.” One witness demeaned the Chinese as “a most undesirable class of immigrants” who “retard the progress of the country, and keep good immigrants from coming in here.”¹¹ Another considered the Chinese “physically and mentally an inferior race, and if allowed to come into the country without restriction … the white race would be driven our [sic] or be degenerated and degraded.”¹² The issue of the Chinese sojourner was resurrected.

The head tax certificate shows that Chew Ying Bull paid $500 in 1918 for entry into Vancouver. He became the owner of the Oriental Trading Company at 624 Yonge Street.

While there was no shortage of opinions that the Chinese were not wholly adopting Canada as their country, some people recognized that negative public opinion, racist laws, and discrimination discouraged the Chinese from considering Canada as their permanent home. The pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto reported that he had “met Chinese who had expressed a desire to become citizens, but claim they could not do so and maintain their self-respect… they said they could not bring themselves to belong to a nation that treated another nation so unfairly.” He continued in his testimonial to the Royal Commission that there was “hope of Chinese becoming permanent settlers if treated the same as other nationalities.” ¹³ The commissioners concluded that the Chinese did not “assimilate with the white race in British Columbia, and it would not be desirable if they did.”¹⁴

In 1903 the head tax was increased once again, this time to $500, an exorbitant amount that immediately curbed the influx of Chinese. In the first half of 1904, no Chinese entered the country, while in the latter half, only a trickle managed the monetary feat.¹⁵ Without a doubt, this $500 tax was a financial challenge. A typical farmer of the day in China, who earned seven cents a day, would have to work for 20 years to pay this tax, while a Chinese labourer in Canada would have to work for two years. At the time, $500 was enough to purchase two houses in Vancouver.

Fourteen-year-old John Kuong paid the $500 head tax when he arrived in 1921:

You worked for $5 or $6 for a seven-day week, if you were lucky. But back then you could buy 100 pounds of potatoes for 25 cents. That’s why paying $500 for a head tax was a lot of money.¹⁶

After Kuong moved to Toronto from Saskatoon, he worked in a restaurant, and in 1967 he owned a laundromat at Dundas and Keele streets in the Junction.

With some Chinese, such as Kuong, still managing despite the immense head tax, a strongly worded circular was issued by the Victoria Chinese Board of Trade Guild in 1913 and widely distributed in China. Created as a communication to deter Chinese from immigrating to Canada, the flyer, in part, described the hardships and miseries of those already in the country, so that the “people in China” would “give up the idea of coming.”

Why should you, brothers, leave your parents and your wives and children to come over here? Don’t you know that our lot in life here is very much harder than it is in China? There are now about 20 thousand Chinese in Canada, who are unemployed and without a permanent home. They can get no work to support themselves. They go about begging old clothes and bread to save themselves from cold and starvation.¹⁷

The circular further detailed the revenue collected by the Canadian government and showed that over $9 million was collected from 1885 to 1913 (see Table 1).

TABLE 1

Victoria Chinese Board of Trade Guild Circular

Source: Kootenay: An Exploration of Historic Prejudice and Intolerance, www.fortsteele.ca/exhibits/kootenay/ethnic/circular.asp.

Against all odds, the head tax proved ineffectual in deterring the Chinese. From the 1891 to the 1921 censuses, the increases were substantial, ranging from 108 percent to 42 percent (see Table 2). One explanation for the influx was the expanding Canadian economy; labour contractors willingly advanced money to Chinese immigrant labourers to cover the head tax. But the strongest factor was the burning desire to come to Canada, and the Chinese resorted to any means possible. They borrowed money from their families, friends, and fellow villagers, money that they would spend the rest of their lives paying back.

Toronto’s Gim Wong recounted the extremes that his uncle underwent, selling whatever land that could be spared, borrowing money from people in the village, and selling one sister into slavery. According to Wong, “villages did everything they could to send one person over, in hopes he would do what he could to help the village … Even when I was in high school, I remember my parents still fighting every New Year’s about whose village they were going to send $20 back to, my father’s or my mother’s. Our rent at the time was $5 a month, so $20 was a lot of money.”¹⁸

TABLE 2.

Chinese Population in Canada, 1881-1921

Source: Census of Canada, Statistics Canada, (1881–1921).

While the head tax was in effect from 1885 to 1923, 82,369 Chinese paid a total of $23 million, reportedly equivalent to the cost of building the British Columbia section of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This would amount to over $1 billion in the current economy.¹⁹

Family Life

Most of the Chinese people living in Canada were men without families, men left to live in what was called a bachelor society. Although the Chinese cherished large families, they would never experience the joy of being with their wives and raising their children. Some were single, but most were married men, who came to be known as bachelor husbands. They had wives in China but lived their lives in Canada like bachelors, their family arrangements split between two continents. The men sent money home regularly, where, in many instances, their home villages were supported almost exclusively by these remittances. Only the fortunate few, like merchants, made enough money to bring their families to Canada — the majority endured their hardships alone.

The strong loyalty to family was instilled through the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BCE), a political figure and teacher whose philosophy shaped the fundamental interactions an individual had with self, society, and government. Everyone was expected to obey and respect superiors: the subject to his ruler, the wife to her husband, the son to his parents, and the younger brother to his older brother. Great importance was placed on the family as the foundation of society, every man linked in the chain of ancestors and their descendants. This system of kinship was strictly patrilineal, in that sons, not daughters, continued the line, inherited the family property, and carried the important obligation of worshipping their deceased ancestors and parents. Filial piety or respect of the ancestral home was a highly honoured virtue. The structure of the Chinese family was not limited by blood ties alone. Rather, it applied beyond the household into broader kinship groupings. Families living together in the same locality regarded themselves as relatives, since they were descended from a common ancestor through the male line.

These Confucian values were brought to Canada by Chinese immigrants, who left their villages when they were in their teens or twenties. More often than not, the eldest son remained to work the modest plot of family land while his younger brothers were forced to leave out of necessity. Very few peasant families had land large enough for more than one son. Despite the vast distance, these men fulfilled their Confucian obligations by sending their meagre savings home and visiting as often as possible.

Few Chinese women ventured overseas, not only due to the prohibitive costs for passage and the head tax but also cultural taboos. In China’s patrilineal society, daughters were regarded as a burden. Often, out of desperation, they were sold into bondage as servant girls, concubines, or prostitutes. By tradition, Chinese women were initially family-centred daughters, then wives who were tied for life to their husbands, and finally widows. The role of a wife, some betrothed as young as eight, was to care for her parents-in-law, children, and household.

What separated the Chinese from other immigrants was the migratory pattern. Typically, men were the first to move abroad, followed by women, children, and parents. This sequence did not take place with the Chinese, due to the head tax. The 1911 census figures alone tell a sad tale of when there were 2,800 Chinese men in Canada for every 100 Chinese women — a male–female ratio of 28 to one. Comparatively, the proportion among immigrants overall was 158 men for every 100 women.²⁰ The 1921 census (see Table 3) shows that, until the post-war years, the gender imbalance for Chinese in cities remained the most severe among all ethnic groups in Canada.²¹

TABLE 3

Ratio of Chinese Men and Women in Canada, 1921

Source: Census of Canada, Statistics Canada (1921).

Men who saved enough money would temporarily return home, many to be married and father children. A few years later, they might return for another visit and father another child. One such bachelor husband married at the age of 18 in 1917 and left China to work at his father’s laundry, in Canada. His daughter was born in 1918, after his departure. In 1922, 1926, and 1934, he made three short trips to his village, each time fathering a son. Not until the 1950s was he able to bring his wife and four children to Canada.²²

The Beginnings of Chinatown

The origin of the designation Chinatown is not known, and this term survived other labels assigned by white society, like “Chinese quarters,” “Chinamen’s quarters,” and “Chinese district.” What is known is that the Chinese lived and worked in close vicinity to one another. The Chinese called these areas “the streets of the Tang people,” a phrase that is commonly used to this day. The word Tang is the name of the imperial dynasty of China (618–907 AD), considered the height of Chinese civilization. Over time, the word Chinatown evolved into the internationally recognized term, designating the ethnic enclave of overseas Chinese and a Chinese quarter of a city outside of China.

Whether the Chinese settled voluntarily in these segregated areas or were forced into isolation by mainstream society remains a controversial topic. During the early years of the gold rush and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Chinese were clustered in tent camps pitched beside gold mines and railway tracks, and later in housing occupying the poorer parts of towns. White landlords would not sell or rent properties to the Chinese except for on the fringe of town. In Victoria and Vancouver, they occupied the cheapest districts, with low-class saloons and brothels as neighbours. This early segregation perpetuated the stereotype that the Chinese were undesirable foreigners who lived in unsanitary neighbourhoods rife with social vices like gambling and prostitution. The term Chinatown became associated with a full range of negative connotations and was used by politicians and journalists in political speeches, newspapers, and legislation.

This tent camp, located beside the railway tracks near Kamloops in 1886, was a precursor to the later segregation in towns.

Chinatowns did serve the needs of their community, and the influx of Chinese workers brought consumer demand. They developed as safe places to live and find Chinese goods and services. Grocers imported and stocked familiar goods and foods, like tea, dried fish, and rice. Just as the home villages in China provided identity and belonging to the Chinese, so, too, did the Chinatowns of the New World. They were the hubs and gathering places desperately needed by a society lacking in women and children. They became the heart and soul of Chinese Canada, a safe haven from the hostile and racist host society that surrounded them. Chinese people faced violence if they stepped outside of Chinatown. As new immigrants arrived, they tended to live in Chinatown with their sponsors. While this arrangement provided comfort for newcomers, their confinement in Chinatown perpetuated cultural exclusiveness and the isolation of the Chinese.

The Chinese quarters, in 1886, were located on Cormorant Street in Victoria, home of the oldest Chinatown in Canada.

The first Chinese resident recorded in Toronto’s city directory of 1878 was Sam Ching. He was the owner of a hand laundry at 9 Adelaide Street East, a two-storey building owned by the barrister Thomas Ince. The neighbours, all with Anglo-Saxon names, included a machinist, a blacksmith, oil merchants, and book keepers.²³ Another man, Wo Kee, operated a laundry nearby, at 385 Yonge Street.²⁴

By 1881 10 Chinese lived in Toronto and there were four Chinese laundries. Seven Chinese resided in the St. James Ward, bordered by Yonge Street to Jarvis Street and King Street north to Bloor Street. Three lived in the St. Andrews Ward, bordered by Yonge Street to the western city limits and King Street north to Queen Street.²⁵

A barber shop, import store, and tailor occupied one-and two-storey buildings at 70½–74 Elizabeth Street in 1937.

The population growth was slow, insufficient in numbers to constitute a defined community. In 1891 the Chinese in Toronto numbered 33. Three years later, there were 50.²⁶ This rate of growth changed, however, at the dawn of the new century. As the city grew rapidly during the early 1900s, so did the Chinese population. In 1900 there were 200 Chinese and 95 businesses that were widely scattered. In 1905, 228 laundries, a few grocery stores, some restaurants, and at least 15 merchants appeared.²⁷

By 1910 there were two clusters of Chinese businesses in small yet identifiable Chinese sections.²⁸ The first cluster was located on Queen and George streets, where there were six Chinese businesses and the Toronto branch of the Chinese Empire Reform Association, which had opened in 1905. This office closed after the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, and the businesses moved away, halting the growth of what had appeared to be developing into a Chinese area. By this time, the Chinese numbered 1,001 men and 35 women, a negligible proportion of the city’s population of 130,000.²⁹

Yet, even such a small population, less than 1 percent, was grounds for concern among Torontonians. The city’s first neighbourhood association, the Rosedale Ratepayers Association, announced the need to keep Chinese laundries out of its neighbourhood.³⁰ Jack Canuck, a Toronto newspaper, mounted its attack on the growing number of Chinese:

There are not less than 25 Chinese stores, laundries and restaurants in the blocks bounded by King, Queen, Yonge and York Streets. How many of them are ‘dens’ in the Police court parlance? One need only stroll through the above mentioned blocks and notice the throngs of Chinese lounging in the streets and doorways to realize that the ‘Yellow Peril’ is more than a mere word in this city.³¹

It was not until after 1915 that Toronto’s Chinese settled in a clearly defined area, with nine businesses and residences.³² This early community was on and around York Street but was soon disrupted due to a redevelopment, the first of many to come. The Chinese then moved west to the low-rent area along Queen Street between York and Elizabeth streets. When this location was also designated for redevelopment, the Chinese moved north up Elizabeth Street toward Dundas Street West.

This area was located in what was then known as the Ward, bounded by Yonge Street, University Avenue, College Street, and Queen Street. Close to the railway station, the Ward was a major immigrant reception area and provided low-cost housing for the city’s poorest settlers, largely East European Jews and Italians. It was a maze of broken-down cottages and unpaved alleys and laneways, like Foster Place and Hagerman Street. The Ward gained a reputation as a slum after the House of Industry, a poor house, was opened at Elm and Chestnut streets in 1848. One block away was Centre Street, a red-light district until the late 1800s.

This vacant property, adjacent to the Great Wall Company and a tailor shop at 60–70 Elizabeth Street in 1937, was a sign of the high turnover of businesses in Chinatown.

The living conditions in the densely populated Ward were deplorable. As more Jews settled there between 1905 and 1912, housing demand increased, rents soared, and landlords neglected to improve their properties. Dr. Charles Hasting, the city’s medical health officer, reported in 1911 that 108 houses in the Ward were unfit for habitation.

The Jewish businesses, including poultry shops, grocery stores, fish stores, and bakery shops, eventually moved westward to Kensington Market, and the Italians moved to Little Italy at College and Grace streets. After these groups had departed, the Chinese moved into the area and Chinatown began to develop along Elizabeth Street.

A Chinese store adjacent to the Markowitz Bakery at 109–111 Elizabeth Street in 1937. When Jewish businesses and residents moved westward to Spadina Avenue, the Chinese moved in.

The first Chinese to own property on Elizabeth Street, as recorded in the 1911 city assessment rolls, was Gip Kan Mark. A wholesale grocer, Ying Chong Tai, occupied the first floor of Mark’s three-storey building at 16 Elizabeth Street, where neighbouring businesses included a blacksmith, a dairy, veterinary surgeons, and horse stables.³³ Within the next 10 years, many more Chinese purchased properties, and by the 1921 census, Toronto’s Chinatown ranked as the third largest in Canada, after Vancouver and Victoria, a position it held until the end of the Second World War. The 39,587 Chinese in Canada were no longer confined to British Columbia as in the early years of settlement. The western province’s share of 99 percent had declined to 59 percent; Ontario had 14 percent; Quebec, 6 percent; Alberta, 9 percent; Saskatchewan, 7 percent; Manitoba, 3 percent; and the Maritimes and Territories, 1 percent. The growth of the Chinese population in Toronto from 1880 to 1931 went in leaps and bounds (see Table 4).

TABLE 4

Toronto’s Chinese Population, 1870-1931

Source: Valerie Mah, An In-Depth Look at Toronto’s Early Chinatown, 1913–1933 (master’s thesis, University of Toronto, 1977).

While these population statistics are historically significant, they may not be 100 percent accurate, due to challenges of deciphering and transliterating Chinese names. Surnames always appear first, followed by the given names. Errors often occurred in the name order, which in English has the family name at the end rather than the beginning.

Lack of knowledge of the Chinese language was another source of confusion and errors for English-speaking enumerators and registrars. They transliterated Chinese names as closely as possible into English, with the result of numerous anglicized names for the same individual. For example, Lee Hong, who operated a laundry at 48 Elizabeth Street, is recorded on the Toronto assessment rolls from 1908 to 1913 as Lee Chong, Cong Lee, and Yee Chong.³⁴ “Ah” is another example of inaccuracy in government records. Positioned at the beginning of one’s name in conversation, Ah means “that person.” However, it often was recorded in English as part of the surname — Ah Chong instead of just Chong, for instance.

All inaccuracies aside, there were only 13 Chinese families among 2,035 Chinese in 1921. The heads of these families were two herbalists, one professional gambler, one Canadian National Rail agent, four merchants selling groceries and laundry supplies, one minister herbalist, one laundryman, one Canadian Pacific Railway agent, one man employed on lake boats, and one wholesaler in tobacco.³⁵ There were 31 daughters and 34 sons in total, all but four born in Canada.³⁶ Nine of the families lived in the Chinatown area, mostly in rented premises.

A cart with live chickens is pulled along Hagerman Street in 1926. Chinese could not obtain licences for selling live poultry, but there were three Jewish poultry shops on Chestnut and Elizabeth streets, and others in Kensington Market.

A police officer was on-site at a traffic jam caused by a disabled truck on Elizabeth Street in 1934.

The increasing number of Chinese residents and businesses did not go unnoticed. The editor of Toronto’s Saturday Night warned the public of the Chinese influence and advocated “keeping the Chinese on the move.”³⁷ Jack Canuck reported that the development of a Chinatown would have “dangerous consequences” for the city.³⁸ In 1907, the Globe published an editorial, “Asiatic Peril to National Life,” proclaiming that Asian immigrants could never become good citizens, because Asians would lead to “national decay” and their intellect was incompatible with Anglo-Saxon ideals.³⁹

These printed opinions reflected and directed the negative attitudes of Torontonians. Although Chinatown was crowded and unsanitary, these conditions were equally true of other city neighbourhoods. The outcome of public and media opinion had an unintended effect. Rather than dispersing them, the Chinese showed more determination in staying closer to one another for mutual protection and support.

Chinatown grew into a bustling commercial and residential centre, and it was during this period that the most recognizable and enduring icons of the Chinese business community appeared on the scene — family-run laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores. By investing a small amount of money, the Chinese could create their own jobs, go into business, and, above all, avoid hostility from white workers and employers. In China, people who were merchants or businessmen were not respected, and they fell to the bottom of the Confucian social order that valued the scholar, the government official, and the farmer. In Toronto and the rest of the country, however, financial success in business was highly valued. This new perspective brought a semblance of prosperity.

Laundries

That laundry work fell to the Chinese is a testament to invention by circumstance. In China there were no laundries. Traditionally, men were not responsible for this household task; washing clothes was considered women’s work. The Chinese living in Canada were no more adept at laundering than any other immigrants at the time. In fact, during the gold rush, clothes were worn until they fell apart, or for the Chinese with money, clothing was sent home to be washed and returned months later.⁴⁰

What the Chinese found was a niche, a business opportunity that could be taken without persecution and objection. The Chinese filled the demand of a rapidly growing urban economy by providing quality, low-cost laundry service to a workforce of single men who lived in boarding houses or apartment hotels, men who needed their clothes washed. The gravitation into the laundry business was not so much a choice but a response to what was available. The washing work, “which white men who can get anything else to do will not do,” as was reported in the House of Commons, was easily relegated to the Chinese.⁴¹

The earliest Chinese laundries date to the days of the gold rush in the 1850s, at which time they were among the first businesses to be opened in any town.⁴² This enterprise eventually extended eastward from British Columbia to cities, towns, and villages across Canada where the first Chinese were, more often than not, laundrymen. Without a working knowledge of English or experience in running a business, they opened laundries with low startup capital and eked out a modest living from meager profit margins. Chinese laundries also charged less than competitors: a laundered shirt cost 12 cents, compared to 15 to 18 cents in white establishments; a bed sheet, 15 cents; and a handkerchief, 3 cents.⁴³

The work was tedious and physically demanding. Twelve to 18 hour days, keeping the doors open as long as there were customers, and toiling away for six or seven days a week were the norm. Even when the store was closed on Sunday, there was work to be done sorting and packaging laundry in preparation for the following week.

The setup was typically in a small space of a modest building. In the reception area, wall-to-wall counters and shelves divided the public area from the work space. Clean laundry was packaged in brown paper, stacked, and labelled in Chinese to identify the customers. Hidden behind the partition was the workroom. There were kettles, washtubs, scrubbing boards, wringers, a stove to boil water, and enough space to hang laundry to dry. Clothes were hand-scrubbed and squeezed dry through a wringer. Irons, warmed on the stove with buckets of coal hauled from the basement, were used to press the laundry items by hand with minute attention to detail.

An interior shot a Chinese laundry in Toronto, circa 1900, shows the cramped living and working space. The average wage paid to Chinese laundry workers ranged from $8 to $18 per month, including room and board.

Also behind the partition were the sleeping quarters and eating area. The absence of family life and the priority to save money led to living conditions that reflected little concern for personal health and well-being. The Chinese ate, slept, and worked in these small and crowded workplaces, which often reached temperatures upwards of 38°C (100°F). Common health problems included lack of sleep from working long hours, and chronic leg, arm, and back pain.

As noted, Sam Ching was the first Chinese resident, who owned a hand laundry on Adelaide Street East. The fact that his laundry opened for business eight years before the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway suggests that this man may have come from the United States, where Chinese laundries were already flourishing.⁴⁴ The preponderance of Chinese laundries in Toronto may not have been coincidental.

By 1881, with a population of only 10 Chinese, there were four laundries, all within the working-class ward of St. Patrick.⁴⁵ Sam Ching’s laundry was now at 15 Adelaide Street East, Sam Lee at 42 Jarvis Street, Sam Sing at 1331/3 Queen Street West, and Tan Gee at 121 Yonge Street.⁴⁶ Seven more laundries opened, including addresses at 40 St. George Street, 91 Queen Street East, and 208 King Street East. Chinese continued to flock to the laundry business, numbering 24 in the 1891 city directory. This was at a time when there were only 33 Chinese in the city — an indication that most, if not all, were involved in laundries.⁴⁷

Not without an eagerness to attract customers, one Chinese laundryman updated his manner of attire and store sign, as reported in the Toronto Star: “A wishee washee up town has been badly bit by Anglomania. He has sacrificed his queue and has put on trousers and tail coats … The new sign over his laundry, in white letters on a red ground, reads elegantly ‘J. Lee Wah.’”⁴⁸

Chinese laundries became increasingly more newsworthy as their numbers grew. In 1894, torrential rains and high winds flooded and damaged many buildings in the city, including a laundry owned by Sam Lee at Jarvis and King streets. “The Celestial didn’t want to move,” reported The Toronto Star. “His countrymen were appealed to, but they took little interest and replied that if he didn’t know enough to get out he ought to be killed. Finally he was persuaded and he left none too soon, for almost before his chattels were all removed the building came tumbling down.”⁴⁹

Another Toronto Star article in 1895 reported on a robbery. A laundry owned by Wah Sing on Queen and John streets was robbed of “a quantity of laundry and $1.50 by Charles Edwards.”⁵⁰ Chee Mo Lew, who owned a laundry at 399½ Queen Street West, later testified and identified a dagger and other stolen items found in Edwards’ possession.⁵¹ In another robbery, Chong Wing appeared in court to testify against a man who was charged with robbing his laundry of $10.25 at 611 King Street East. The laundryman had difficulty in taking the oath, even with the assistance of a Chinese interpreter, who spoke “very pigeony,”⁵² which is a reference to the pidgin language used by the Chinese, in this case, to speak English.

Sadly, the tide of tolerance turned, not even six years after the opening of the first Chinese laundries. These establishments were condemned as a curse by labour union leaders and businesses. On December 26, 1883, the Canadian Labour Congress met in Dufferin Hall, where the president Charles March urged delegates not to disregard the “Chinese immigration curse.”

The voice of opposition to the growing number of Chinese laundries was aired in a Toronto Star article, “The Evil the Chinese Do,” in 1894. A non-Chinese laundryman lamented the plight of the men, women, and girls whose economic survival was dependent on the employ of laundries. The news report claimed that the “Chinamen” were crowding them out of business with “no less than thirty separate and distinct Chinese laundries scattered over the city.” Further, it was difficult to ascertain the number of Chinese working in each laundry, because they were “seclusive in their habits and very reticent in giving information concerning themselves.” However, it was reported that a count made of “all the Chinamen who could be seen in the front working-room of their work-shops, showed exactly 73 men at work. And this number does not include those who were working in the rear part of the premise.”⁵³

A year later, another Toronto Star news article in 1896 condemned Chinese laundries as “not the first shadow of claim for public patronage worthy of consideration.” Reportedly, Chinese laundrymen in Toronto did not pay taxes; rather, they sent $1,200 of revenue a week to China.⁵⁴ In another report in 1911, Jack Canuck was equally unflattering:

One need only stroll through the above mentioned block [King, Queen, Yonge and York streets] and notice the throngs of Chinamen lounging in the streets and doorways to realize the ‘Yellow Peril’ is more than a mere word in this city. The average citizen would stand aghast did he but realize the awful menace lurking behind the partitions or screens of some of these innocent appearing laundries and restaurants.⁵⁵

When Ah Chong tried to open a laundry at 1061 Bathurst Street in 1906, property owners faced him in opposition at City Hall. His application was turned down because the city’s Board of Control had visited the area and determined that there were already enough Chinese laundries.⁵⁶

The Laundry Association and its white laundry owners urged health authorities to press attacks on the “dirty laundries” to prevent the spread of infection.⁵⁷ A Toronto Star report described the living conditions that were not “all too agreeable to the tastes of their patrons.” It was “alleged by those who claim to know, that in most of these places their working boards are used for bedsteads, and the soiled linen which comes from the houses of Toronto citizens are utilized for bed clothes.”⁵⁸

While these and other protests were filed under the cover of endangerment of public health, the underlying issue was the competitive edge realized through lower operating expenses. Despite this advantage, Chinese hand laundries were hardly a threat to white-owned steam laundries that supported more profitable bulk washing for hotels and restaurants. It was a match of David and Goliath, but in this battle, Goliath was the victor. The city passed by-law No. 41 in 1902 to “license and regulate laundrymen and laundry companies and for inspecting and regulating laundries” and implemented a licence fee of $50. Chinese laundry owners protested that the fee did not take into account the number of employees and heavily penalized their small businesses. W.P. Hubbard, municipal alderman, successfully advocated on their behalf and the fee was changed to correspond to the number of employees. Small businesses, like the Chinese ones, paid as little as $5, while larger ones, like those owned by white laundrymen, paid up to $20.

There would be further protests. At its annual convention in 1906, the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada demanded an increase of the head tax from $500 to $1,000.⁵⁹ The head tax remained as it was; however, the provincial government introduced “an Act to Amend the Factory, Shop and Office Building Act” in 1914. No Chinese person could “employ in any capacity or have under his direction or control any female white person in factory, restaurant or laundry.” The Chinese in Toronto pooled their funds to challenge this discriminatory law, but their case reached the Supreme Court of Canada without a successful outcome. The Consul General of China voiced disapproval, and the law was not strictly enforced until 1928.⁶⁰

Undeterred by the hostile sentiment and restrictive legislation, Chinese laundries kept multiplying. Even the Toronto city directory began to list them separately from other laundries, starting in 1908. By 1921 there were 374 laundries, representing an increase of fourfold within 20 years. At this time, the Chinese population in Toronto was 2,134. Over half of the Chinese in Toronto were estimated as being involved in the laundry business.⁶¹

From 1921 to 1941, the number of laundries expressed as a percentage of the Chinese population in Ontario ranged from 40.9 percent to 25.8 percent (see Table 5). The 1930s marked the decline in the growth of laundries that fell to 258 by 1947.⁶²

TABLE 5

Chinese Laundries Relative to Chinese Population in Ontario, 1921–1941

Source: Ban Seng Hoe, Enduring Hardships (Gatineau, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2003), 9.

Although the early laundries were clustered in downtown Toronto, they spread across the city. George Lee, who later became a dentist, worked at his father’s laundry at 1132 Yonge Street. Harry Lem, owner of Lichee Garden, worked at a laundry operated by his father and uncle in the Danforth area. Tom Lock recalled that his father, who arrived in Toronto with his hair in a queue, was “one of the pioneers, a small businessman who was forced to open a laundry because of the language barrier.”⁶³ He described hand laundering at his father’s business in the St. Clair and Lansdowne neighbourhood:

To make the linens white, we used to put the soiled linen in a big square steel tank 4’ x 4’ x 6’ deep on top of the coal stove. We would feed the tank using a hose and add bleach, stirring the washing with a big stick. After, Ma would stand on a stool, reach into the boiling water and drag out the clothes with the stick. She would then drop them in a pail and transfer them to the washing machine.⁶⁴

A Torontonian reminiscing about his youth during the Great Depression described a local laundry:

Outside of Chinatown there were a number of Chinese who ran laundries… They must have done a good business because any time I visited one of these establishments to pick up some finished washing for a neighbour (my mother always did her own), I noticed their shelves were full of the wrapped finished product.⁶⁵

Olive N. Graham remembered the laundry being picked up at her house by Lem Brother Laundry, which was located near the Scarborough Bluffs in the 1920s:

Not to be forgotten was the small sad figure of the Chinese laundryman who came regularly to the neighbourhood carrying his load in a white sack on his back. Mother would give him her best cloths and shirt collars which he finished beautifully in his little shop at Birchcliff. Tickets would be in Chinese characters and this, of course, was very mysterious. What a lonely life he must have led.⁶⁶

Kay Chong’s experience, so typical of the strong kinship in the laundry business, shows the young age at which some early immigrants came to work under sponsorship of a family member. Chong’s father, who arrived in 1920 at the age of 13 to work in his relative’s laundry, later owned and operated two hand laundries in the Broadview and Arlington areas. He brought over his 17-year-old son, Kay, from China in 1950. Kay later took over the laundries from his father.⁶⁷

Even as laundries multiplied across the city, Chinatown was not lacking in other types of businesses (see Table 6). A fancy goods store, Wing Tai and Company, opened at 405 Yonge Street. In 1902 a shop at 69½ Queen Street West was operated as the Quong Ying Yune Tea Company. Other tea businesses included Lee Chong Yung at 154 York Street, Yee Quong Teas at 156¼ York Street, and Kwong Yong Loy at 85–87 Queen Street East. Additionally, a cluster of businesses extended between 173 to 187% Queen Street East: two laundries, four goods stores, one cigar store, and a men’s furnishings store.

One goods store offered a variety of provisions, including Chinese herbs, homemade Chinese sausage, and various other imported products from China. It operated not only from the storefront but also from a truck, delivering to restaurants and laundries. The owner’s son remembered how deliveries were made to the customers:

Chinese laundries provided delivery service. The truck for Hoy Jack Laundry, located at 95 Harbord Street, is parked in Chinatown in 1923.

One goods store offered a variety of provisions, including Chinese herbs, homemade Chinese sausage, and various other imported products from China. It operated not only from the storefront but also from a truck, delivering to restaurants and laundries. The owner’s son remembered how deliveries were made to the customers:

The business card of Y.S. Chu, who owned the export and import store the Oriental Trading Company, lists the inventory, including “coolie coats.”

My dad would go out two or three times a week on a circuit. He had to deliver because a bag of rice was 45 pounds, a barrel of soap was 120 pounds, a barrel of starch was 120 pounds, and a bag of soda, 100 pounds. You couldn’t take that on the streetcar very well.⁶⁸

TABLE 6

Chinese Population and Businesses in Toronto, 1881 to 1931

Source: Valerie Mah, An In-Depth Look at Toronto’s Early Chinatown, 1913-1933 (masters thesis, University of Toronto, 1977).

Restaurants and Cafés

A second occupational niche that appeared in great numbers was the business of restaurants, cafés, and hamburger joints (see Table 6). Downtown Toronto was a popular spot to open eating establishments for office workers, store clerks, labourers, and travellers, who were hungry for reasonably priced food. These establishments were started for similar reasons as laundries, as Chinese could borrow startup money and learn the business on-the-job, but partnerships.

were the only way that low-paid Chinese with limited savings could start their small businesses.

Although the initial capital investment of $1,000 to $2,000 for restaurants was two to three times greater than for laundries, the margin of profit was greater. Using the premises for working and sleeping kept costs to a minimum for more profitability. And they hired from within the family. One immigrant, who arrived as a 21-year-old in 1912, worked at a number of Chinese restaurants where he was consistently replaced by a family member:

During those years most Chinese employers only hired their relatives or people who had the same surname. Even if you were hired by an employer to whom you were not related, as soon as he found a relative to take your place, you would immediately be fired. Thus, over the years, I moved around to many towns and cities.⁶⁹

Sing Tom’s Restaurant was Toronto’s first Chinese restaurant to open in 1901. It was located at 37½ Queen Street West, later the site of the Robert Simpson Company.⁷⁰ The name changed to Sing Wing Restaurant in 1902, but within the next year, the address was occupied by Kong Yee Teas.⁷¹ As more restaurants opened, so did fears that these and other Chinese businesses would hire white women and corrupt them with opium or sell them into white slavery.

In 1908 Toronto’s city solicitor advised the Board of Police Commissioners to refuse licenses to Chinese restaurants that employed white women. Chinese restaurant owners in Toronto protested that their businesses would suffer, and the policy was largely ignored by the police.⁷² Even when provincial legislation was enacted in 1914 to prohibit the employment of white women by Chinese, it was not strictly enforced. In 1923 there were 126 white women employed in 121 Chinese restaurants in Toronto.⁷³

A tremendous expansion of restaurants occurred between 1917 and 1923, with an increase of 900 percent from 32 to 202 establishments.⁷⁴ The restaurants in Chinatown served mostly Chinese food. Two restaurants, Hung Fah Low and Jung Wah, gained some notoriety at 12½ Elizabeth Street. The clientele were mostly Chinese and the few non-Chinese were predominantly Jewish, there to enjoy Chinese food. Vaudeville actors, who performed nearby at the Shea’s Hippodrome Theatre on Bay Street or the Casino Theatre on Queen Street, were known to frequent the restaurants in Chinatown. Actor Edward G. Robinson, whose stage career peaked in the 1920s and subsequent screen career culminated in over 100 films, claimed that “12½ [Elizabeth Street] was the best place to eat.”⁷⁵

Not all visitors to Chinese restaurants were welcomed customers, however. In 1919 the Toronto Star reported a major disturbance when a mob of 400 men raided Hop War Low’s café at 31 Elizabeth Street, stole $300, and then proceeded to smash the store windows of neighbouring Chinese businesses, including Louis Ling’s barber shop at 11 Elizabeth Street, Kwong Chun’s store at 6 Elizabeth Street, and Wing Ching Tank’s grocery store at 8 Elizabeth Street. The incident was allegedly caused by a remark made by the waiter as he refused to serve some soldiers the previous evening. Toronto Mayor. Thomas Church strongly condemned these actions and quickly restored order.⁸⁹

A Chinese restaurant at 31 Elizabeth Street made the news when it served a sumptuous banquet, featuring an eight-course menu with birds’ nest soup, sturgeon’s fins, whole breaded chicken, fish rolls Manchu-style, lichee duck, chicken with mushrooms, and grilled squab. Dr. McCulloch and his wife were the hosts for the guest of honour, Dr. C.H. Yen, who was in Toronto from Beijing for post-graduate work. Another dinner guest was Bishop William White, whose work as a missionary in China for 38 years established 11 Anglican churches. During his mission there, he amassed a collection of Chinese cultural and art objects that he donated to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library. At age 60, he became the first curator of the museum’s Chinese collection and the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Toronto.

Outside of Chinatown, Chinese mostly operated small cafés and hamburger joints, typically furnished with booths and counters. These catered to Canadian — not Chinese — customers and served Western food, like roast beef, steaks, apple pie, and ice cream. Lithuanian men were known to pick up box lunches from Chinese lunch grills during the week, on their way from boarding-houses to factories in the east end of the city.⁷⁶ The main attraction was the price, which was much more reasonable than non-Chinese restaurants. A typical meal cost only 20 cents for soup, sandwich, and dessert.⁷⁷ By 1923 the first Western-style Restaurant Owners’ Association was established in Toronto, with members in other cities and towns across Ontario.

There were two types of Chinese restaurants: one for Chinese clientele in Chinatown, the other for non-Chinese outside of Chinatown. Toronto Quick Lunch, at 301 Yonge Street in 1922, likely served Western fare, like roast beef and hamburgers.

Chinese restaurants in the 1930s provided “cheap meals,” a “bonanza for the many unemployed men who crowded the city during the Depressions years,” as recalled by George Heron in his memoirs.

On Queen Street near Sherbourne there were a couple of these restaurants which offered full course meals for 15 cents. By full course is meant soup, a Salisbury steak or fish main course with vegetables, a piece of pie and a drink of tea, coffee or milk. Not only that, each had plates piled high with white and brown bread.⁷⁸

In 1929, as an 18-year-old, Doyle Lumb worked at the Rex Café on Yonge Street, near College Street. He recalled, “The Rex Café was considered one of the best restaurants. Got paid $3 a week. I worked every day, including Sunday, seven days a week from ten in the morning to ten at night.”⁷⁹ Later, he owned the Kwong Chow Restaurant. Another early Chinese remembered working at both a laundry and restaurant:

If you were Chinese, there were only two things you could do — run a laundry or a restaurant. Our family did both. When I came home from school, I had to work in the restaurant, then I’d jump over to the laundry, work there before running back to school. You know, we didn’t serve Chinese food — nobody ate Chinese food then!⁸⁰

Gradually, along with the standard Western fare, restaurants began serving Chinese food adapted for the Canadian palate. Their owners were unknowing innovators in making the Chinese restaurant business an ethnic specialty that would eventually attract loyal fans.

The most popular Chinese dish was chop suey, meaning “mixed bits.” It consists of a hodgepodge of meat and vegetables in a starchy sauce. Food lore has it that chop suey was likely introduced to North America in 1849 during the gold rush, which attracted thousands of Chinese fortune-hunters to California.⁸¹ According to Andrew Coe in his book, Chop Suey, that this dish was invented in American restaurants or by Americanized chefs for the visits of a Chinese diplomat named. Li Hongzhang in 1896 is urban legend.⁸² Another version of its origin is that a Chinese restaurant didn’t know what to feed an important American dignitary, so the cooks tossed odds and ends into a pot and called it chop suey.⁸³ Other stories link the origins of chop suey to the early Chinese settlers, who brought this dish as an Chinese local specialty from the Guangdong province. The dish was a stir-fry of chicken giblets, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, tripe, dried seafood, and whatever else was at hand.

Regardless of its origins, non-Chinese diners asked for this chop suey dish and a dedicated following blossomed. Restaurant owners adapted by replacing all the foreign and unfamiliar ingredients with ones that were common in North American households. Already a hit in New York City by the 1880s, it was further popularized when Sinclair Lewis wrote in his 1920 novel, Main Street, that “the Babbitts and Rieslings went festively to the movies and had chop suey at a Chinese restaurant.”

Chop suey eventually made its way north to Canada and grew in popularity. Harry Lem, owner of Lichee Garden, recalled his early days as a waiter in Oshawa, where American engineers from the General Motors plant insisted on ordering chop suey.⁸⁴ Due to the dish’s popularity, many Chinese restaurants, like International Chop Suey House, named their eateries accordingly.

Chow mein, literally translated as “fried noodles,” was another dish that looked Chinese and appealed to the Canadian palate. Chow mein consists of boiled noodles that are stir-fried with an assortment of meat and vegetables; however, the Westernized version bears little more than faint resemblance to the original. Legend has it that a Chinese cook accidentally dropped some Chinese noodles into a pot of hot oil and turned them into crispy, brittle noodles. The deep fried noodles of the Western-style chow mein are not considered Chinese cuisine. But the ever-growing popularity of chop suey and chow mein gained these dishes permanent places on menus as Chinese Canadian cuisine. Soon, other items were added, like sweet and sour chicken balls, egg rolls, and egg foo young, all popular for Canadian diners but noticeably absent from menus catering to Chinese clientele.

Another food item that became associated with Chinese restaurants was, and remains to this day, the fortune cookie. Contrary to popular belief, fortune cookies are not a Chinese dessert. It is true that, in the Yuan dynasty, rebels hid secret messages in cakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, but this was a single occurrence. Some credit Japan as the country of origin because of references to generations-old family bakeries making fortune cookie-shaped crackers outside Kyoto, and Japanese literature and history mention them many years before the first reports of American fortune cookies.⁸⁵ Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese American, is considered to be the inventor, first serving fortune cookies at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, at the turn of the twentieth century.⁸⁶ David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, claims it was he who invented the fortune cookie in 1918.

Toronto joined the growing ranks of fortune cookie production in 1966, when Far East Products was opened by Edmond and Raymond Lee. Their factory produced 10,000 cookies an hour.⁸⁷ Even the mayor of the City of North York, on a goodwill mission in China, took 400 giant fortune cookies that were stuffed with messages inviting everyone to come and make a fortune in North York.⁸⁸ For the grand opening of The World of Suzie Wong at the Hollywood Theatre in 1961, Nanking Tavern supplied 2,000 fortune cookies, 25 of which had the extra fortune of winning a free meal. Regardless of their origin, fortune cookies remain a popular dessert at Chinese Canadian restaurants.

For Chinese laundries and restaurants, hard work and long hours gained a toehold in Toronto, against all odds. These businesses flourished and, by 1923, reached a pinnacle of florescence in Toronto’s Chinatown. The number of restaurants and laundries was the greatest of any year in the history of the community.⁹⁰