Why Did I Interviews?

As a crucial part of my project, Fashioning the Decades: 100 Years of Dressing in a Chinese Diaspora, I conducted oral history interviews with nine Canadian women (or their descendants) of Chinese heritage who came of age from different decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The discussions focus on Chinese Canadian women's lived experiences between 1910 and 2010. I then compared and contrasted the participants' answers to trace the evolution of Chinese Canadian women's self-fashioning practices and explore their identity through clothing. The conversations showed me Chinese Canadian women's relationship with Chinese ethnic clothing and their Chinese identity evolved through generations. These women's clothing choices were not purely aesthetic or political. They combined Chinese and Western clothes, Western-appropriated Chinese clothes, and clothing accessories, demonstrating that fashion engages and responds to socio-historical events and the changing relationship between Canada and China. The totality of these interview responses showed that Chinese Canadian women's self-fashioning communicates complex material, cultural and political perspectives by bringing these questions to the appearance level.