A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

The Diary of Dukesang Wong

Edited by: David McIlwraith

Translated by: Wanda Joy Hoe

Here is the only known first-person account from a Chinese worker on the famously treacherous parts of transcontinental railways that spanned the North American continent in the nineteenth century. The story of those Chinese workers has been told before, but never in a voice from among their number, never in a voice that lived through the experience. Here is that missing voice, a voice that changes our understanding of the history it tells and that so many believed was lost forever. Dukesang Wong’s written account of life working on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a Gold Mountain life, tells of the punishing work, the comradery, the sickness and starvation, the encounters with Indigenous Peoples, and the dark and shameful history of racism and exploitation that prevailed up and down the North American continent. The Diary of Dukesang Wong includes all the selected entries translated in the mid-1960s by his granddaughter, Wanda Joy Hoe, for an undergraduate sociology paper. Background history and explanations for the diary’s unexplained references are provided by David McIlwraith, the book’s editor, who also considers why the diarist’s voice and other Chinese voices have been silenced for so long.

AUTHOR

David McIlwraith

David McIlwraith has been a writer, teacher, actor, and director. During a career in theatre, film, and television, he wrote and directed award-nominated documentaries and television programs, including Celesta Found, The Lynching of Louie Sam, In Chinatown, and Harrowsmith Country Life. He has worked across Canada in the development of new Canadian plays. As an actor, he has played roles from Romeo to Prospero, and he has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta. He spent a decade searching for and then researching this first-person account of the nineteenth-century Chinese experience in North America. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his wife and daughter and spends summers with friends on Salt Spring Island.


AUTHOR

Wanda Joy Hoe

Born in 1947, Wanda Joy Hoe translated selections from the diary of her grandfather, Dukesang Wong, for an undergraduate sociology course at Simon Fraser University in the mid-1960s. After serving for many years with Canada’s delegation to UNESCO, she retired and now lives in Ottawa.


Reviews

[The Diary of Dukesang Wong] puts a human face on the thousands of Chinese who came to Canada in the 19th century and gradually managed

Awards

  • Roderick HaigBrown Regional Prize BC and Yukon Book Prizes 2021, Short-listed
  • Excerpts & Samples ×
    There are no other resources for this book.

    Reader Reviews

    Details

    Dimensions:

    144 Pages
    8.5in * 216mm * 140mm * 5.5in * 8mm0.3125in
    184gr
    6.5oz

    Published:

    September 16, 2020

    Publisher:

    Talonbooks

    ISBN:

    9781772012583

    Language:

    eng

    No author posts found.