The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion ACT

The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act explores a dark yet largely forgotten chapter in Canadian history. The unprecedented law, which targeted only the Chinese community, was in place for a quarter century and remains among the most tragic episodes in the country’s history. Yet this story, that left such profound effects on the individuals and families it touched, has been steeped in silence. Almost nothing about this period was shared by those who lived through it. Consequently, within a single generation, the trauma of exclusion was forgotten.

This is the first book to explore the human experience of exclusion as revealed through the stories of the lives it touched. The stories in this book reveal haunting tales of tragedy, loss and despair as well as powerful examples of courage, perseverance, and resilience. They chronicle the lives of ordinary people caught in extraordinary times. Many stories are being shared publicly for the first time.

An act of collective remembrance and historical reckoning, this book presents an unflinching look at a monumental and shameful chapter in Canada’s origin story. The pages offer a reminder of how the wreckage wrought by discrimination and exclusion, can be ignored and yet still ripple through the generations.

Catherine Clement is an awarding-winning community historian, author and curator. Her work focuses on excavating the lesser-known and forgotten stories of the Chinese Canadian experience.

While her surname is French, Catherine’s mother was Chinese. Yet she grew up knowing little about the painful history of the early Chinese community in Canada. Ironically, it was Catherine’s search to understand her white father’s WWII experiences that led her to discover her Chinese Canadian roots.

In 2009, she volunteered to interview the last of the World War II veterans in Vancouver. Her first interview was with an aging Chinese Canadian veteran. That conversation changed the course of Catherine’s life and has inspired much of her research and story work. Since then, Catherine’s historical projects have involved significant crowdsourcing of stories and material that help uncover the experiences of everyday people in extraordinary times.

In 2023, Catherine created and curated the national exhibition The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. Designed to commemorate the 100th-anniversary of this dark but largely unknown period in Canadian history, her landmark exhibition opened on July 1, 2023 in the new Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver. The exhibition displayed the largest collection of early Chinese head tax and related identity/surveillance documents ever shown publicly. These documents, as well as the lost stories, were gathered from hundreds of families across Canada.

Catherine then repurposed this crowdsourced material to establish The Paper Trail Collection, the most comprehensive community archive in Canada of Chinese head tax and related documents. The online collection is housed at the University of British Columbia Library.

The Paper Trail project has won numerous history and heritage awards. And in 2024, it was short-listed for a Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming. Prior to The Paper Trail project, Catherine was best known for her 10-year search uncovering the hidden works of Yucho Chow, Vancouver’s first and most prolific Chinese photographer. She uncovered his photographs one family at a time, one story at a time. Her research revealed that Chow not only documented the lives of early Chinese, but he was the favourite photographer of the marginalized and non-white communities. That project resulted in an exhibition of crowd-sourced materials in 2019, a book in 2020, and a comprehensive community archive of over 600 private photos taken by Yucho Chow. Catherine’s book Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow, was awarded the prestigious 2020 B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing and the 2020 Vancouver Book Award.

Catherine has written articles for British Columbia History magazine, PhotoEd magazine and history websites. She also has produced short documentary films and has curated exhibitions on Chinese Canadian military history.

Catherine has been the recipient of numerous historical awards. In 2021, she was bestowed with an Honorary Doctorate from Simon Fraser University. And in 2016 she received the Governor General’s Sovereign Medal for Volunteers. Catherine makes her home on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.