Chinese Immigration to Canada

You’re a Chinese, 20 year old, male, peasant living in China in 1850. There is growing British domination in your country and there is a sense of political unrest and economic pressures. You have a new wife and child that occasionally go hungry because there isn’t enough money for food. Eventually you hear of the easy gold to be found in the west and know of someone that could get you there. <img src="http://emilymccue.ca/immigration/images/chinese-imigrating.jpg"> A: [[Stay and have faith that things will change in China. You can’t be sure if your family will be able to survive without your meagre income.]] B: [[Go to this new land that has been said to have untold riches. Your family can stay with your parents while you earn enough money for a lifetime and be back in a year or two.]]

You stay but things get worse. Both your wife and child fall ill and you have to stay home and take care of them. This means that you lose the little income that you have to buy food and other necessities. This forces you to steal to survive but you get caught and thrown in prison. Your wife and child die and you are left rotting in a jail cell. <img src="http://emilymccue.ca/immigration/images/great-chinese-famine.jpg">

You leave your family in the good hands of your parents and only took enough money to survive, leaving them the rest. The boat is cramped and disgusting but you push through, nothing can stop you from making a better life for your family. Once you get off the long boat ride, you don’t know what to do. Knowing almost no english and having next to no money, you make your way into the city and start looking for a place to stay. <img src="http://emilymccue.ca/immigration/images/cramped-boat.gif"> A: [[Find someone who’s also Chinese and ask them for help navigating this new country.]] B: [[Continue looking on your own, you should find something soon.]]

You find someone who is willing to help you and he agrees to let you sleep on his couch for tonight. He also shows you a few places to find a job that are willing to hire Chinese people. The next day you go out but don’t find much work, instead you find a flyer promoting the gold rush. A: [[After a lot of thought, you decide to follow what you came for and go out to work in the mines.]] B: [[You decide to try and make some money in town before heading of to the mines. Who knows what could happen!]]

You continue to look for on your own but nothing turns up. You sleep on the street that night and wake up hungry. Eventually you find your way to a place that might take you in and you decide to go for it. It turns out to be a gambling ring but you need money and a place to stay so you stick with it. Eventually you’re asked to deliver drugs to a location in return for $100. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pV93mS2Thtg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> A: [[You decide to do it, this money could change you and your families lives! All you needed to do is not get caught and you could be on track to making a fortune.]] B: [[You can’t do it. It’s against everything you stand for. How could you go home and tell your family that the reason that you have this new life is because their father is a criminal.]]

You say goodbye to the man who helped you and leave for the mines. You use the last of your money for the basic equipment that you need to start mining. Once you reach the mines, you befriend some other foreign miners that came to make money for their families as well. They teach you how to mine and get along with the white miners. Everything goes well for awhile, you don’t strike it rich but you make enough to send money home and keep you alive. Things turn for the worst when the old starts drying up. <img src="http://emilymccue.ca/immigration/images/railroad.jpg"> A: [[Wait for a new pocket of gold to be found and all is well again. Once that happens, everything will go back to normal and you’ll be accepted into the American culture again.]] B: [[Leave for north where there is said to be more gold. Apparently they recently struck it so there should still be a lot to go around.]]

After a few days of searching, you finally find a job at a laundromat. The owner came over 5 years earlier in search for a new life himself. Things are going great until the mines start drying up and the white people start coming back into town looking to get their old jobs back. When they realise that they aren’t there anymore, they get extremely angry and take it out on the immigrants. You’d heard of a few riots across the city and you know your area is next. A: [[Stay and hope that they don’t come for you. More gold should be found soon enough and they’ll go back to trying to get rich in the mountains. After all, they chose to quit their jobs and start mining, they can’t come back and expect everything to be exactly the same.]] B: [[Leave and go north, you’ve heard that there’s another gold rush there. You can finally try your luck at mining in the north. Once you strike it rich, you can go back to China!]]

You get away with it the first time. Eventually you decide to do it a couple more times because then you would have enough to go home to your family. This leads to you getting caught, the people giving you the jobs didn’t care enough to vouch for you and you got sentenced to life. You never know if your family is okay, for all you know they could be dead.

You hear that the person who took your place got caught and is in prison now. Eventually you hear of another gold rush happening up north and it might be your only choice to earn the money you need to return. A: [[Stay because you never know what could happen up north. You can always count on the people in the gambling ring, they’d never let you down or leave you without a place to stay.]] B: [[Leave because this could be your only shot to leave and make enough for your family to have a better life.]]

You stay but eventually you get busted, as does everyone else in the lower ranks of the ring. The higher-ups don’t care enough to get you all out, they just hire new people to replace everyone and continue on. Because you’re an immigrant in jail, you get treated very poorly and eventually die.

You send all that you can back to your family including a letter explaining where you’re going. You have a lot of hope for this place in the north, hopefully within a year you can go home to your family. Once you reach the new gold rush, you need to start a small life for yourself like you did in San Francisco. Now you know some English and are much more settled into the ways of these countries. You go into the mining work but it is starting to dry up too. A: [[Stay with it, it hasn’t ended yet, you can still find enough to be able to return to your family before it ends.]] B: [[Try and find a job somewhere that has a steady paycheck. You can’t afford to be stuck without any income if you want to survive while still supporting your family.]]

You continue to wait but things don’t get better. Riots start coming for immigrants accusing them of stealing their gold and jobs. Chinese businesses and homes start being ransacked and people are getting killed. You become penniless and end up dying like many others forced out into the streets or killed at the hands of angry, entitled, white men. <img src="http://emilymccue.ca/immigration/images/mining.jpg">

You continue to mine but things don’t turn around. You find just enough to send one last amount to your family with a letter explaining that you’ll keep trying. Because you’re so desperate, you don’t take the necessary precautions while mining and end up being crushed by rocks. The letter that you sent is the last thing they hear from you.

You get a job in the railways being built. Luckily they are hiring many Chinese people because we’re willing to get paid less. Apparently there are many desperate people like you needing minimal money to survive. Once you get the job, they ask you if you have any experience which would affect your pay. A: [[Lie, tell them that you’ve done these things before so you get paid slightly more, you’re a fast learner anyways. This way you can return faster.]] B: [[Tell the truth and accept the lower pay, you haven’t done anything like this before. But you’re a fast learner, you’ll rise up through the ranks in no time!]]

They assume that you know how to use some of the more complex equipment and expect you to use it efficiently. You get lucky and one of the other people at the camp show you how to use them and you catch on. Eventually you get asked to do something that you haven’t been taught how to use yet. A: [[Wing it, you’ve been doing it this far and it’s been working. What’s the worst that could happen?]] B: [[Come clean and say that you don’t know how to work the machine, it’s better that they know then you go in blindly and possibly hurt someone else or yourself.]]

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You overestimate your skills and find yourself trapped in a figurative corner. You die in an accident and the railway companies only concern is that they lost a good pair of boots because of it. It was rare that the deceased’s family was informed so they don’t know what happened.

You get punished for coming clean but it’s better than dying. Because of the situation they ‘forgot’ that you’ve already paid your fees for your work equipment and bed and they ask for more money which you don’t have. A: [[Tell them that you’ve already paid and hope that they’ll trust you.]] B: [[Just pay again, you don’t want to make them even more angry by saying that they’re wrong.]]

They get extremely upset at you and fire you. There’s nothing that you could’ve done though because you didn’t have the means to pay anyways. You would’ve gone into debt and who knows what would have happened then. Now you have to find a new job quickly or you won’t be able to get by for even a week. A: [[Go into the city and try and find work there.]] B: [[Try to go elsewhere and find work, possibly working as a gardener or housekeeper for someones house.]]

You manage to get enough money to pay but nobody would loan to you which meant you had to go to some shady people to do it. When you couldn’t pay them back in time, they paid you a visit and you couldn’t walk which meant you couldn’t do your work. Eventually you die, still with a debt to the people who he borrowed from.

When you enter the city, you seem to be lost. Things have changed since San Francisco. You are still determined to find something to do so you try your best and start looking. Eventually you find a Chinatown. You didn’t even know that these existed but you’re ready to start your new life here and you enter. Suddenly, you see more Chinese people at once than you had since you were living in China. A: [[You find a job and place to stay immediately.]] B: [[You decide to meet people first and get to know their stories. Making friends and connections before you start on getting a place to stay and job.]]

You eventually find a job as a gardener for someones house and they pay you better than the railways. You keep sending money and letters back to China but eventually you stop getting replies but you keep sending them regardless. After a year you know what has happened but continue to write letters but stopped sending money, you need it more now. You never do manage to make it back to China like many other immigrants but you are one of the lucky ones. You survived things that many others didn’t.

You have to find a job first because you won’t be sure that you can pay for a place to stay before you do that. You don’t find much work and instead decide you want to be a shopkeeper. This means that you rent a small place using the last of the money that you have and sleep there for the time being. You slowly develop a customer base and items to sell and it becomes a booming business. You start to notice that the letters that you’re sending aren’t getting replies. You still continue to send them for another year before accepting what happened. You decide that in order to be happy, you need to move on and have someone to share his life with. You marry a woman and live in Canada for the rest of your life, still wondering about your first family and if they were possibly still alive or not. You never do return to China like most other immigrants but you are one of the lucky ones who managed to survive everything.

You get to know people and they help you find a job and place to stay. You work as an assistant shopkeeper and continue to get to know people and their stories. As luck would have it, you meet a captain of a ship and you befriend him. He offers to take you back to China on his next outing for free because he’s going there anyways. You jump at this chance and you make it all the way back home. You sent your family a letter a month before you left so when you arrive, they were waiting there for you. Your wife was old and gray like you and your daughter was fully grown now. You all cry as you meet again and you live together, reintroducing yourselves and sharing the stories that you all missed over the many years.