I presented my research as a first person account  in order to give a voice to a section of society in 1885 Victoria that was largely neglected not only by the citizens, but by historians as well.

I know there is no possible way for me to understand the depth of misery faced by these young girls but what was important for me was to represent their feelings not just historical facts.

I feel like my illustration of a slave-prostitutes life if a far cry from the justice the girls deserve but that is the restrictions faced by the historically curious onlooker.

 Attempting to piece a life together through seemingly unrelated facts from a totally disconnected the culture and a society that is separated by a century are concerns that I constantly battled.

Once we recognize the limits of our own historical lenses then a the representation of a reality not historical truth results the outcome.

Government of Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration 1885 (Ottawa: Report and
    Evidence, 1885): 363.

Anthony Chan, Gold Mountain (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983): 11, 45, 81-82.

S.S. Osterhoust, Orientals in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929): 171-179.

Edgar Wickberg, From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto:
     McClelland and Stewart, 1982): 14.

Dorothy Ko, Every Step A Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 51.

Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Chinese Immigrant women in Nineteenth-Century California,"  Women in America: A
     History, Edited by Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979): 223-224, 240.

R. Brown, "White Canada", Harper’s Weekly, Oct 5, 1907:1446-47.

W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever, (McGill: Queens’s University Press, 1978): 6-10.