New book explores struggles of early Chinese immigrants to Canada

By Lethbridge Herald on July 25, 2025.

Alejandra Pulido-Guzman
Lethbridge Herald

A newly released book is showcasing a forgotten chapter in Canadian history as the author shares stories collected from Chinese Canadians across the country, and information found through in-depth research of various documents and photographs. 

“The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act,” written by Catherine Clement, includes a story from a late Lethbridge resident who owned a store in what is now the heart of Downtown Lethbridge.

Clement, who has Chinese Canadian roots, is an award-winning community historian and curator. She says her journey of compiling information for her book began with her interest in history, but not the big-picture history that covers a wide swath in many similar books. Instead, she prefers to delve into what she calls the “lived experience of history.” 

“Experiences of everyday people living in extraordinary times and a lot of that is based on memory, so a lot of the work that I have done in the last 15 years is to try and uncover and capture the memories of those people living in extraordinary circumstances.”

Clement says the desire to write the book first came in 2019, when she realized that the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act was coming up in 2023. 

“I had done a lot of work on the Chinese Canadian community based on memory and I realized that nobody has talked to me about the Exclusion Act in all the interviews that I’ve done.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act, officially the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, was a Canadian law that virtually banned all forms of Chinese immigration to Canada from 1923 to 1947. Prior to that, there was a “head tax” imposed on Chinese immigrants that charged them a fee to come to Canada.

It intrigued Clement to learn more about how the situation affected the immigrant community.

“I thought there was one thing I could do, I know there are all these identity documents that are associated with that period of time, so I will go out and try and find as many as I can,” she says.

Clement decided to scan the documents, collect the story of the person and create an archive. And from there she was going to do an exhibition called “Portraits of Exclusion,” to take the portraits of the identity documents and create an art exhibit. 

“So, I started to collect these from across Canada, and every time anyone gave me one of those documents, I asked what happened to the person in the document, but resoundingly every Chinese Canadian I interviewed that had a family member live through that period of time said they shared nothing about it,” says Clement. 

Some of the people she interviewed were unfamiliar with the documents they had in their possession and were ready to throw them out. 

“One person told me that when they found a certificate and asked their dad about it, he got angry and asked the document be put away,” says Clement. 

It was then she realized the task at hand was going to be a little more difficult than she anticipated. 

“How do you do a story about memory, when there is so little memory to go on?”

That is when she realized that a photographic exhibit was not the only path to take to tell the story. And the 100th anniversary was a time to really delve into it, which led her to gather information for a book instead.

With the help of students from the University of British Columbia, she embarked on what she calls “an excavation project,” where hundreds of hours were spent going through newspapers issue after issue, roughly between 1922 and 1947, looking for little stories they could then follow up on and research. 

One of those stories was found in the Lethbridge Herald archives from April 1924, about an Oriental Silk Goods store owner named Long Woe. According to local historian Belinda Crowson, the store was located at 418a 5th Street South at the time, and the article shows that Woe opened the doors of his store for people to take goods freely in a case of temporary insanity. 

In the book Clement shares that on April 4, 1924, as a result of Woe’s actions “Pandemonium ensued as crowds stormed the store hauling away bolts of silk fabric and other goods. The police were called to halt the looting, and Woe was carted off to the station.” 

“We looked into who he was and because Chinese were so heavily documented, we were able to find the paper trails to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And we found that he had been in Canada for about a decade working on a farm,” says Clement. 

Clement says it’s unknown why he made the leap into opening up his store, but it is believed that he wanted to become a merchant to be able to bring his wife from China and not have to pay the head tax. 

“But his timing was off and I think because the act closed off the opportunity to bring his family over, he had the breakdown and was admitted to the Provincial Mental Hospital in Ponoka, Alberta,” says Clements. 

She says after that he never returned to his silk store and records from a census in 1931 showed him living in Medicine Hat and once again working in a farm. 

“The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act” is available from plumleafpress.com.