Gold Mountain Quest, an educational video game, is part of the Chinese Canadian Stories project.
The successful completion of an ambitious multimedia project involving UBC Library is allowing users to discover the invaluable contributions of Chinese Canadians.
Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past is a collaborative initiative focusing on the legacies of Chinese Canadians. The project – led by Henry Yu, UBC History Professor and Principal of St. John’s College – received a $900,000 grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) in 2010. The project has also been supported by in-kind contributions from UBC Library and Simon Fraser University (SFU) Library.
Chinese Canadian Stories (CCS) unveiled interactive kiosks at Vancouver Public Library and UBC’s Museum of Anthropology in October 2012, and at the Ottawa Public Library in December 2012. The kiosks offer compelling stories of Chinese Canadian communities in three languages (English, Chinese, French); the project was organized through the UBC Community Learning Initiative and included work by UBC students from architecture, mechanical engineering, integrated engineering, sociology and the arts.
“The stories celebrate the history of Chinese Canadians without glossing over the discrimination and racism they struggled to overcome in Canada,” says Yu.
Meanwhile, a complementary website contains a searchable Chinese Head Tax Register of 97,000 digitized records, an educational videogame entitled Gold Mountain Quest and videos of oral histories that were conducted during the CCS project.
Chinese Canadian Stories staff held more than 10 workshops and community outreach events in the Lower Mainland during the past year. Several workshops on oral history research, filming and digitization catered to high school students, independent researchers, community elders and members of the public interested in preserving family histories. The CCS project also showcases the work of 29 community groups from across Canada that received CHRP funding to tell their stories.
One of those groups is the Chinese Canadian Military Museum, which scanned hundreds of images for CCS of veterans who fought for Canada, despite having no Canadian citizenship. Individual stories of veterans were also presented on the kiosks. “At the museum, we want to stress the importance of the Chinese Canadian veterans playing an important and integral role in the development and building of Canada as a nation,” says Larry Wong, Curator at the Chinese Canadian Military Museum.
Read more from UBC Library’s Community Report (2013).