Analyzing the Interviews
Analyzing the interview responses inspired me to organize this exhibition into four galleries. Each gallery explores how a generation of Chinese Canadian women applied self-fashioning strategies to express themselves and fit into the larger society. The names of these galleries demonstrate my understanding of the interviews. Together, they showed that Chinese Canadian women’s attitudes toward Chinese fashion changed from adoption to rejection to re-invention, driven by socio-political events in both Canada and China, as well as evolving immigration policies. The first gallery, Eye of a Phoenix (the 1910s – 1920s), came from Paul Yee’s description of his aunt Lillian Wong. “Eyebrow of a Swan, Eye of a Phoenix” was a Cantonese phrase that people used to describe Lillian’s beauty when she was young. Here, I used it to capture the spirit of Chinese Canadian women living at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their sufferings of social exclusion and pursuit of fashion reminded me of the Phoenix, a mythical bird rising from its ashes. The second gallery, Living the Fantasy through Fashion (the 1930s – 1940s), refers to mid-twentieth century Chinese Canadian women adopting Hollywood fashion as a survival strategy against discrimination and racial inequality. The third gallery, Exploring and Reinventing the Self (the 1950s – 1980s), echoes Stuart Hall’s theory of “identity as a becoming”. Chinese Canadian women from this era had different relationships with their Chinese identity and continuously changed their self-expression in adulthood. The fourth gallery, Entering the Millenium: Performing Transnational Identities (the 1990s – 2010s), explores how late twentieth-century women living across continents communicated their multiple worldviews by mixing Chinese and Western clothes and accessories to raising questions.
The interview responses also revealed three critical themes: using fashion as a survival strategy, a citation of power, and an extension of one’s personality and lived experience. These discoveries inspired me to read the act of dressing as a “politicized practice” and interpret fashionable garments as a vital site where complex issues of ethnicity, hybridity, and cultural belonging can intersect. The following discussions present my brief analysis of the interviews:
Fashion as Strategic Hybridity
Among the nine people I interviewed, Lillian Ho Wong and Wong Shee's fashion choices showed how Chinese Canadian women exercised agency through dressing in the early twentieth-century Canadian context within uneven social power dynamics. In The Limits of Dress, Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee argue that Asian American youth carved out a unique cultural space for themselves through self-fashioning that was drastically different from their immigrant parents. Cultural hybridity in clothing symbolized these young people's constant negotiation with their immigrant families and their encounters of marginalization and exclusion from the larger North American society. In contrast, the older generation continued to wear Chinese clothes and used Chinese accessories to teach their children about cultural pride and pass on their blessings. The interviews about Lillian and Wong Shee communicated how the challenge of self-fashioning was experienced differently by the first and second generations of Chinese Canadian women. Like many second-generation Canadians with Chinese heritage, Lillian wore Western clothes in her daily life, though she had a few cheongsams.
She didn't seem to care that much about wearing the cheongsam. Wherever she went to Chinese banquets, weddings, whatever, it was always Western women's suits. (Paul Yee)
Even though Lillian did not wear Chinese clothes to highlight her cultural heritage, she wore them to her son's wedding and was eventually buried in a black cheongsam. In contrast, Jeanette Lee described Wong Shee as wearing Western clothes on the outside to show her willingness and ability to adapt to the Canadian lifestyle, but always wore a Chinese blouse underneath.
Underneath the exterior (of Western outfits), she wore the Chinese. It was not a cheongsam but a short, half-blouse. (Jeanette Lee)
Lillian and Wong Shee's strategic "hybrid" fashion was common for diasporic Chinese Canadian women. These women refused to abandon their heritage completely; instead, they selectively mixed objects and customs from both cultures to invent a uniquely Chinese Canadian lifestyle. Early twentieth-century Chinese Canadian women embodied a strong sense of Chinese cultural pride and embraced their Chinese identity well. As a first-generation who immigrated to Canada at thirty, Wong Shee made Chinese slippers for her grandchildren every year. Surprisingly, as a second-generation Chinese Canadian who never had been to China, Lillian was also very proud of being Chinese and remained curious about the Chinese language, Chinese opera and celebrity culture even in her old age.
Fashion as a Citation of Power
I was struck by how Chinese Canadian women coming of age in the early mid-twentieth century radically resisted Chinese fashion by looking up to Western celebrity culture and the clothing styles of the British Royal Family. Growing up in Western society and speaking English as the primary language, many second-generation Chinese Canadian women wished to be entirely accepted as Canadians since their childhood; thus, they resisted anything that was encoded with Chinese culture. Two women I interviewed (their descendants) from this era, Lillian Sam and Rose Lee, followed the trend described above. Jeanette discussed how Rose struggled to be seen as “Canadian” by making her own clothes that imitated the British Royal style.
My mom and her sisters did everything to dress in a Canadian style. I never saw my mom wear anything Chinese. Growing up, there was only one time that she wore something Asian. (Jeanette Lee)
Marielle Wall, on the other hand, further analyzed why her grandmother Lillian Sam was fascinated with the Hollywood way of dressing and made various symbolic 1940s matching suits.
I think of her, she saw that white people had the wealth. White people, they had wealth, they had glamour, they had beauty. Well, she (Lillian) felt like she was segregated. She was stuck in a place that was for segregation. So she loved old Hollywood. She loved the glamour of it. A lot of her friends were people who were social outcasts as well. (Marielle Wall)
As second-generation Chinese Canadian women, Rose and Lillian’s self-fashioning practices and attitudes of Chinese culture demonstrate that women used fashion as a citation of power to re-make and mark their immigrant identities in Canadian society. These clothing choices were politicized practices to refashion themselves as Canadian citizens and reclaim their cultural citizenship in public. Women like Rose and Lillian attempted to use self-fashioning to create a new cultural position in Canadian society. Though the second generations resisted Chinese cultural influences, when these young women reached adulthood, some chose to wear cheongsam during special occasions. According to Jeanette, she saw her mother Rose in a Chinese dress from Rose’s wedding portrait. As a Chinese national dress with hybrid nature, cheongsam blends binary concepts such as the East and West, modern and ancient, and male and female. In the Chinese Canadian context, modernized cheongsams embodying Chinese and Western elements have functioned as a powerful garment to negotiate the wearers’ transnational identity. It was also a way to show respect and preserve connections with her Chinese family members.
Fashion as a Parallel Self
Women who came of age between the 1960s and 1980s surprised me with the intense individuality and creativity they employed through self-fashioning practices. Lillian Tzang, a first-generation Chinese Canadian woman I interviewed, informed me that she viewed fashion as an extension of her personality, not an emotional outlet. This quote lingered in my mind, making me wonder how this generation of women’s experiences differed from the early Chinese immigrants and how unsetting ideas on race, culture, and belonging functioned as stimulants for their creativity and autonomy. The Chinese diaspora was no longer traumatic for them — they wanted more than social acceptance and capabilities to fit in. Fashion was not only their armour to survive harsh realities, but also an opportunity to ask and keep asking, who am I?
Ann Heilmann’s interpretation of cultural hybridity within the diasporic communities encourages me to consider hybridity as a bridge between fixed identities. Thus, diaspora is a mode of cultural production that can be performed through self-fashioning and clothing. As Heilmann explains, “The unsetting of fixed identities based on gender, class or race can lead to a creativity which is made possible, precisely by inhabiting the spaces between the old fixed categories.” Identity as a fluid, autonomous, and continuously evolving concept echoed Stuart Hall’s idea of “identity as a becoming”. These liberating views helped me understand the post-WWII Chinese Canadian women’s dynamic relationships with their Chineseness and their consciousness of fashion being “political”. A fourth-generation Chinese Canadian woman, Linda Yip grew up resisting Chinese fashion and even felt uncomfortable in her grandmother’s wedding dress. However, a coming of age trip around the world changed her perceptions of her Chinese heritage, inspiring her to reinvent a new sense of self through fashion. Linda stopped trying different strategies, from wearing black clothes to curling her hair to look more Canadian to her peers. She embraced her natural beauty, thus learning to be “Chinese”.
When I started to embrace my hair and get used to starting working with my hair, it was around the same time that I started getting my own identity. I am more comfortable with who I am once I have sorted out the straight hair thing. Every picture after that is a picture that I don’t shrug to look at. (Linda Yip)
As the outside world changed Linda’s perception of her identity, these changes were reflected simultaneously through her choices of fashion and clothing. After the world trip and attending university, Linda made Chinese-themed clothes to attend cultural festivals and shared her family history in public. In contrast, Linda Tzang deliberately chose not to wear the cheongsam, and maintained connections with Chinese culture through different ways, such as working at Chinese cultural institutions and curating exhibitions. Her choice of resisting the cheongsam demonstrated her belief of individuality and agency.
That (not wearing the cheongsam) was a deliberate choice. Party motivated by purely practical. I am taller and heavier than most Chinese women so the clothes do not look good on me. What would you wear something that looks awful on you, just for cultural reasons? So I don’t wear those things just because of aesthetic reasons. (Linda Tzang)
Linda was also fully aware of the political aspects of wearing Chinese ethnic jewelry in public. She believed that such pieces would make certain statements about the wearer; thus, she rejected Chinese jewelry as an adolescent. However, moving into adulthood, Linda started to wear Chinese jade as memorials of her family members. Like Linda Yip and Linda Tzang, the women I interviewed for the 1970s and 1980s convinced my ideas that in the contemporary diaspora, Chinese Canadian women used fashion to negotiate their cultural identity, define and redefine their social positionality. Their changing fashion styles often mirrored changes in their perception of the self and relationships to their Chinese identity. Fashion is a site of exploration for them to portray a persona and express their state of mind in their life journey.
Fashion as Performance of Lived Experience
In exploring Chinese Canadian women’s fashion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I reached out to Joyce Wang, who immigrated to Canada in her thirties, and Tiffany Le, a first-generation Chinese Canadian artist who came to Canada at five. They made me realize the new generation of Chinese Canadian women prioritized the concept of “pleasure” in their everyday fashion. Compared to the previous generations, millennial Chinese Canadians often came in contact and were familiar with both cultures. Their clothing choices were not purely aesthetic or political, but a constant play between different cultures reflects their transnational experiences and worldview. Soon after she moved to Canada, Joyce noticed apparent differences between Chinese and Western clothing styles. When I asked Joyce about what the differences were, she replied:
First of all, it is the colour. Canadian clothes seem to be low-key in colour, but they are very flashy in China. All colours are possible, bright red, striking blue, or something outstanding. The personality is a bit too prominent. At first glance, it looks like a different kind of clothing. (Joyce Wang)
Joyce replaced part of her wardrobe to follow the Canadian aesthetics and professionally present herself at the workplace. However, the change of clothing did not symbolize Joyce’s attempt to assimilate into Canadian culture or identify herself as wholly Canadian, as some of the earlier Chinese Canadian women attempted to do. Instead, Joyce identified herself as a “global citizen” because she had lived in various places in the world. She enjoyed working as a part-time collector to collect jewelry pieces on her travels, including Tibetan necklace, Chinese jade, Italian belt and Western precious stones. Instead of wearing ethnic clothing, Joyce mixed these accessories with Western fashion in her daily life to show her cultural background and symbolize her transnational experiences. Like Joyce, Tiffany also highly valued the creativity and pleasure of self-fashioning, but she embodied a bolder attitude of standing out in the crowd.
I don’t shy away from the fact that I am loud. People are going to look, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. There might be societal pressure like, you shouldn’t want people to look at you and check out what you are wearing. But I’m like, this is the fun part of fashion. I want people to enjoy this as well, the people around me. (Tiffany Le)
Tiffany was aware of the performative aspect of dressing; therefore, she utilized clothes to make statements, raise questions and challenge people’s perceptions of being Chinese Canadian. She believed that fashion was the most immediate way of human expression. Before a person approaches someone, their appearances already made the intruder wonders so much. This realization allowed Tiffany’s distinctive fashion to empower and make changes. Unlike older generations of Chinese Canadian women who wore authentic Chinese clothes in Canada, Tiffany liked to buy Western refashioned Chinese pieces. When describing a Western-made Hawaiian shirt with Chinese motifs, she said:
It is really interesting because for me it is Western culture appropriating Chinese and Asian art, and repurposing it into this mass-produced, sort of flashy, white aesthetic. And for me to buy it, and reclaim “actually this motif comes from China”, I found it pretty cool. (Tiffany Le)
Tiffany’s mixing Western-appropriated Chinese clothes with her Western makeup and aesthetics created agency in the contemporary Canadian context. It demonstrated her knowledge and familiarity of Chinese and Canadian cultures as a transnational individual and her ability to move freely between both worlds to raise questions and deconstruct binaries. Instead of clearly defining oneself to one culture, Tiffany fashion choices communicated a cosmopolitan fluency shaped by their travelling experiences, cultural knowledge, rapid economic and technological development, and intercultural exchange in the global world.
