Abstract
This chapter examines the historically changing media discourse around two historically significant Chinese Canadian athletes, the “China Clippers”: Larry Kwong, the first player of Chinese (and Asian) descent in the National Hockey League (NHL), and Norman Kwong, the first player of Chinese descent in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Growing up in Chinese immigrant families in Western Canada in the 1920s and emerging as successful young male athletes, they initially appeared in mainstream newspapers as rare, exotic “Chinese” subjects. With the changing political and ideological context of Canada in the latter half of the twentieth century, their careers and achievements were differently represented and exalted within Canadian media in recent decades, serving the myth of Canada as a progressive, multicultural society. While their historic breakthroughs in hockey and football were symbolic of the Chinese diasporic communities and have, to some extent, served to disrupt the stereotypes of the emasculated Chinese man in Western media, I argue that the ways these stories were told should be critically scrutinized so that the normalcy of settler colonialism can be questioned and alternative visions of existence for racialized communities on Indigenous land sustained.
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Notes
- 1.
This de facto entry fee was raised to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903.
- 2.
This was equivalent to 1.2–1.5 billion Canadian dollars in the early 2000s. In 2006, then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in response to Chinese communities’ decades-long campaigns for redress, eventually issued an apology to the Chinese head taxpayers (Friesen, 2013).
- 3.
Cominco was a mining company based in the region of Trail, BC, Canada. It started as Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co. (CM &S) in 1906 and changed its name to Cominco in 1940. It merged with Teck-Hughes, another mining company, in 2001. The corporation was rebranded as Teck Resources in 2008 (Nesteroff, 2020).
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Chen, C. (2022). Professional Sport, Settler Multiculturalism, and Exalted Chinese Arrivants: Re-Remembering the “China Clippers”. In: Bien-Aimé, S., Wang, C. (eds) Perceptions of East Asian and Asian North American Athletics. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97780-1_8
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