This vivid first-person account of the realities of working on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 19th century features excerpts from Dukesang Wong’s diary, translated by his granddaughter, Wanda Joy Hoe, with historical information provided by editor David McIlwraith. Dukesang Wong’s entries highlight the exhausting work, friendships, disease, starvation, encounters with Indigenous Peoples, and the shameful history of racism perpetuated against Chinese immigrants during this period in Canadian history. This book emphasizes the important contributions made by Chinese immigrants in the shaping of Canada and sheds new light on the horrific experiences of racialized people during Confederation and beyond. The Diary of Dukesang Wong is a unique primary source and would be an excellent addition to a social studies or history classroom. Footnotes and historical photographs support the text’s accessibility for a wide audience.

144 pp., 5.5 × 8.5", b&w photographs • Bibliography

Source: Association of Book Publishers of BC - BC Books for Schools (2021-2022)

David McIlwraith has been a writer, teacher, actor, and director. During a career in theatre, film, and television, he wrote and directed award-nominated documentaries and television programs, including Celesta Found, The Lynching of Louie Sam, In Chinatown, and Harrowsmith Country Life. He has worked across Canada in the development of new Canadian plays. As an actor, he has played roles from Romeo to Prospero, and he has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta. He spent a decade searching for and then researching this first-person account of the nineteenth-century Chinese experience in North America. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his wife and daughter and spends summers with friends on Salt Spring Island.

David McIlwraith's profile page

Born in 1947, Wanda Joy Hoe translated selections from the diary of her grandfather, Dukesang Wong, for an undergraduate sociology course at Simon Fraser University in the mid-1960s. After serving for many years with Canada’s delegation to UNESCO, she retired and now lives in Ottawa.

Wanda Joy Hoe's profile page

Born in a village north of Beijing, China, in 1845, Dukesang Wong travelled to North America in 1880 and worked for several years on the construction of the CPR in British Columbia. He eventually settled in New Westminster, BC, where he worked as a tailor and started a family. He died in 1931.

Dukesang Wong's profile page

• Short-listed, Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize (BC and Yukon Book Prizes)

"[The Diary of Dukesang Wong] puts a human face on the thousands of Chinese who came to Canada in the 19th century and gradually managed, by dint of sheer determination and hard work, to make themselves good lives."
—Asian Review of Books