A Cowherd in Paradise

“Wong's description of the enforced polarization of one nuclear family, set asunder by a Canadian law excluding ethnic Chinese immigrants—no matter if they are wife, daughter, or son—should be required reading for anyone who cares about citizenship and human rights.” —Jan Wong, author of Red China Blues

In 1979, Wong Guey Dang and Jiang Tew Thloo celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in Montreal surrounded by family—a milestone all the more impressive because for the first twenty-five years of their marriage, Canada’s exclusionary Chinese Immigration Act forced them to live an ocean apart. In this powerful, intimately written family history, May Q. Wong recounts her parents’ epic quest spanning two continents, five generations, and nearly a century to reunite their family.

In China at the turn of the century, Thloo was a young cowherd responsible for tending her family’s fortune—their water buffalo. She grew up to marry a stranger, and when her new husband, Wong Guey Dang, left for Canada to maintain his immigration status, she learned to shoot and defended her village from bandits, survived a brutal famine during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and became a valued community leader during the first blooms of communism—all while raising the children she and Dang had during his brief visits home.

In Canada in the 1920s, Dang faced arbitrary imprisonment for four months at the border and paid the exorbitant Chinese Head Tax to be let in. Once inside, he learned to survive in the wilderness while doing hard labour, protected himself from racists and ruffians with a knuckle-duster and a leather sap, and picked up Canadian culture as a domestic servant to a white family. Dang eventually prospered as an entrepreneurial restauranteur, but by then his wife and children were forced to remain in China, sometimes unreachable even by mail during violent and turbulent years.

A testament to the resilience and devotion of the human spirit, A Cowherd in Paradise is an important memorial to the challenges faced by tenacious immigrants across the country and a loving tribute to one family’s indomitable efforts to be together.