<em>Cedar & Bamboo</em> | Behind The Scenes Look at Schema : more than ethnic

Back in the spring of 2007, two UBC students of Aboriginal descent, Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault, put together a film called Why Do Indians Love Chinese Food?. The film explored how food was the binding element that reinvigorated a sense of interconnectedness and invoked sentimentality for Chinese restaurants in Vancouver's Chinatown. Crey and Perreault's film uncovered a long forgotten history of relations between Aboriginal peoples and the Chinese in British Columbia. Since then, the Chinese Canadian Historical Society (CCHS), along with a number of community sponsors (e.g. Aboriginal History Media Arts Lab) have picked up where Crey and Perreault left off.

Cedar and Bamboo is the film that will make you wonder why on earth you didn't know about the Chinese-Aboriginal relations in BC before.

What began as a small project, a student film of three or four minutes, blossomed as producers Karin Lee and Jennifer Lau honed their ideas for the focus of the film. With Dr. Henry Yu, UBC Professor and Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies (INSTRCC), on board as historical advisor, Karin and Jennifer found that the more they learned, the more the project grew and thus, became not just a student project, but a community endeavour.

While they had initially intended to bring on the student filmmakers from Professor Yu's class who made a documentary entitled "Why Do Indians Like Chinese Food", due to practical complications, other directors had to be found. Karin thought of bringing on board Kamala Todd and Diana Leung, who had already worked together. The project became about very personal stories of intermarriage between Chinese and First Nations people and families. Jenn constantly busy even after the new directors were brought on board. She tells us the entire project from birth to finish must have taken about 2 ½ years, even though total filming time was probably closer to two weeks.

In the beginning of April, Schema Magazine was invited to a private screening of the film Cedar and Bamboo. Sent to represent Schema were Gayatri and Claudia, two girls who soon discovered that what they knew about the history of British Columbia was shamefully limited. The film was an eye-opener, uncovering for us a history that could easily have been forgotten or unknown.

The storytellers featured in the film come from a range of backgrounds. They are Howard Grant, Judy Joe, Hannah Yow, Jordie Yow, Chief Mike Maquinna, and Marlene Liu. The one thing they all share in common is that they can trace (in some cases only recently discovered) their lineages back to First Nations and Chinese unions.

Photo of a young Judy Joe

Judy Joe, Lil'wat elder, spent most of her childhood in China with her father's 'other family' from a different wife. She recalls being beaten and her subsequent escape to Canada with the pride of a fighter. But her struggles did not end in Canada. She had a lot of anger towards the Lil'wat mother she did not know, and it caused her to make decisions she could not later undo, though she eventually tried to reconnect with her mother's side of the family.

Howard Grant, Musqueam elder, speaks of his Chinese father, who worked in the gardens near his Musqueam mother's family, and eventually asked her father for her hand in marriage. Grant knew while growing up that his father sent money home to his Chinese family, and supported his Musqueam family with what remained. Grant also remembers accompanying his father to the market. His past uncertainties about his identity and fondness for his father both come across as he recounts his stories.

The youngest of the storytellers are Hannah and Jordie Yow, sister and brother, of Chinese and Secwempec descent. They giggle as they talk about the awkwardly phrased question 'So...what ARE you?' that they so often get at school. Not having grown up close to their history, but always having known something of it, they have a new curiosity about their ancestry.

Cedar and Bamboo brings all these tales together with pictures, maps, and modern-day landscapes that were once historical points of contact between the First Nations and Chinese communities. We are reminded that their history is as old as European contact with the First Nations community, but became marginalized as the two groups of people involved were subsumed by European social and political policies over the years. History is worth knowing for its influence on our present-day perspectives. We have the storytellers to thank for the records that were left out of our textbooks.

Schema Magazine

Cedar & Bamboo | Behind The Scenes Look

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