Transcript
[00:00] SCREEN TEXT:
Suzhou Alley Women’s Mural
digital stories
[00:10] SCREEN TEXT:
A Tale of Two Tailors:
Yet-Moi (Lillian) Chang
[00:15] DONNA CHANG: You know that kind of person who doesn’t care about what the societal norms were and she was going to hold her own opinion? That’s my mother.
She’s a very kind of a dreamy person. She’d rent a rowboat, and she’d go on lost lagoon. She really enjoyed that. Just being on the water. And we would ask her– we’d say, “well, by yourself?” And she’d say, “Yeah!” She wasn’t thinking of the consequence. She was thinking about how much she was enjoying that experience.
My mother was born in Vancouver on February 1st, 1926. Her first place that she was born into was Mandarin Gardens, which no longer exists.
[01:00] YET-MOI WONG: We lived down on Keefer Street, where that SUCCESS is, because at that time, we know the Chinese people couldn’t buy a house outside of Chinatown. Until after World War Two, then we can move out of Chinatown.
[01:17] SCREEN TEXT: Central School, Strathcona Vancouver
[01:17] DONNA CHANG: She told us that when she first went to school, that she had to have an English name. Her English name was Lillian. And she’d always hated her name. She was always called by her friends and family as MOIGY because her name was Yet-Moi. That was her Chinese name. But you know, anyone who is English called her Lillian.
She was very independent, she really wanted to be able to be someone or achieve something. And so she actually didn’t get married until she was 31. So all in her 20s, she was having the time of her life. She was having a full social life.
This was a group of Chinese who were born in Vancouver, in Canada, who had money. Their world was very, very specific, and a lot of privilege as Chinese while inside the Chinese community.
She had a store, she worked, she was bringing in money. There was less dependency on having, you know, a husband. She had to organize all sorts of, you know, money transactions and maintain budgets and, you know, do these things to carry her store. I mean, I think it was really an exciting time for her. I think she was happy.
[02:43]: Everyone has stories of my mother. After she’s done everything she had to do for the kids in the house, is her sewing until late, late at night.
My mother was this amazing tailor. Unbelievable wedding dresses! Full ornate gowns! Beautiful. For her to be able to put her ideas into something, whether it was a painting, or whether it was a sketch, there was something that it really made her both proud of herself, but also, her real appreciation of beauty was so much a part of her.
In the early 50s, in the late 40s, the likelihood of women being independent was very limiting. There was a lot of arranged marriages still. And my mother, she always – she wasn’t going to have any of that. She was going to marry for love. That’s what she told us.
[03:43]: He was 11 years older than her and my mother said, my father needed her. And so she married him. My mother was 31. I think it was really about– it was time to have children. It was time to settle down. It was more probably that. But it was a pretty dramatic change from what she knew to what she went into, into her marriage.
My father actually didn’t have a career. He was physically not well. I think being– becoming that dutiful wife and mother just wasn’t something that she had lots of experience doing. She could run a whole business, but that was different. [Laughs]
When we moved in out of Chinatown, and my mother had five kids and my father wasn’t well and we didn’t have any money, it really took a toll on her mental health. She carried and didn’t talk about any sense of her shame or you know, her disappointment. She just didn’t want that to be her. But then what happened was, she became unwell.
I think it was very much women of the time and how much they had to carry around their responsibilities and not to speak up. I mean, that’s the cultural piece. You don’t speak up. You carry your sense of duty and you– you do what you have to do.
[05:13]: She was really supported by her mother. And when her mother died, when I was 12, my mother had a pretty dramatic breakdown at that time.
I’m the oldest daughter. And so I spent a lot of my time looking after her. Everything my mother ever wanted, she’d say, “you have to go to school,” I would go to school. She’d say, “you have to go to work,” I would go to work. Because it was– I was so busy trying to make sure that my mother was well. And so I think that it really, it almost made me not want beauty.
I always thought it as her weakness, but it wasn’t. There are many ways that people get what they want out of life. For someone through everything to still hang on to beauty, that’s amazing. Her words, her exact words were, “I want you to be successful in the whole world, not just in Chinatown.” I’m guessing that that was that restriction she felt. She could have this wonderful sense of achievement inside her own world, but it really, it wasn’t beyond that.
We need to celebrate the women of that time and what they had to pave the way. What’s really nice is, both my kids, they’re mixed, but they’ll identify as being Chinese. And I think that there’s greater acceptance and for this generation to have that. It can be part of who they are, and it can help lift who they are, but it doesn’t have to be who they are.
[07:02] SCREEN TEXT:
Created by
Catrina Longmuir
Co-Produced by
Catrina Longmuir
Yun-Jou Chang
Featuring
Donna Chang
Yet-Moi (Lillian) Chang
[07:07] SCREEN TEXT:
Special Thanks
Elisa Yon
Helen Lee
Imogene Lim
Jackie Ing
Janet Wang
Jessica Quan
June Chow
Kelsey Lee
Laurie Landry
Lily Lee
Mengya Zhao
Sarah Ling
Stella Zheng
Winnie Cheung
[07:12] SCREEN TEXT:
Community Partners
Lim Sai Hor Kow Mock Benevolent Association
Chinatown Transformation Team
Chinatown Legacy Stewardship Group
UBC Quan Lee Excellence Fund for Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies
United Aunties Arts Association
Vancouver Heritage Foundation
[07:17] SCREEN TEXT:
Photos courtesy of Donna Chang
Video footage from Chinatown: Three Stories of Home courtesy of Tanya Fink and Joshua Welsh
City of Vancouver Archives
Mandarin Gardens photograph by Walter E. Frost CVA 447-64
CVA 1376-74, CVA 99-4154, CVA 457-33
[07:21] SCREEN TEXT:
Captions and Subtitles
Catrina Longmuir
Translation
Yun-Jou Chang
Produced by
Cinevolution Media Arts Society
Made possible by
Canada Council for the Arts
BC Arts Council
[07:25] SCREEN TEXT:
This video was created on the traditional, unceded, and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
We respect, honour, and give thanks to our hosts.