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CHINESE have a mythological origin in North America that is difficult to retrieve; the alleged discovery of this continent by a Chinese Buddhist monk named Hoei - shin in the fifth century remains a controversial hypothesis.(f.1) It is a historical fact, however, that Chinese have been settled in Canada for 138 years.(f.2) Like other immigrants and their descendants, Chinese Canadians seek opportunities and pursue dreams; but unlike European Canadians, Chinese in Canada were treated, for about one hundred years, as an undesirable race and convenient scapegoats for social woes. While the contributions made by Chinese immigrants were not recognized in Canadian history,(f.3) racial discrimination against Asian Canadians, especially the Chinese, was recorded in three Royal Commission documents (1885, 1902, and 1908).(f.4) In Order to avoid unnecessary contact with the dominant groups, Chinese in Canada were confined for many decades in a Chinatown and tried to survive as a community. Life and business were conducted in the heritage language within Chinatowns, where Chinese were deprived of equal access to mainstream media.
Evidence shows that collective efforts were made in the Chinese community to help members communicate with the majority of Canadian society in the official languages, especially in English. As early as 1894 - 95, Chinese and English Phrase Book and Dictionary was published to help labourers from Taishan grasp basic English.(f.5) The wide coverage of the phrase book includes daily greetings, vocabularies for employment, various legal disputes with whites, sample business letters, and other practical subjects. The book is also marked phonetically in Taishan dialect to give the readers, who all came from the same county, a sense of spoken English, though what was produced might not have been accurate. The phrase book was widely marketed in North American Chinatowns for at least three or four decades, and probably went to several reprints. Its wide circulation illustrates that early Chinese immigrants made continuous efforts to enter mainstream society.
More evidence can be found to illustrate how Chinese immigrants were trying to communicate in the official languages with the rest of Canada. Jean - Michel Lacroix's research on Canadian ethnic - community newspapers shows that, among the twenty - three newspapers published by Chinese Canadian communities across the country, at least ten were written in English,...