Date(s) -Thursday, February 27, 2025
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: James Bay New Horizons
Categories
Join Victoria Historical Society for a talk on February 27, 2025 with John Price about “Dr. Victoria Chung: The Exile of Canada’s first Asian Canadian MD” at James Bay New Horizons, 234 Menzies Street, Victoria V8V 2G7. James Bay New Horizons opens at 7:15 pm for refreshments and conversation. Talk begins shortly after 7:30 pm. Admission is $5 for non-members.
Dr. Victoria Chung’s story – growing up in Victoria, graduating from U of T’s medical school, and going to China in 1923 as a medical missionary is fascinating in its own right. What is intriguing, however, is her decision to stay after the 1949 revolution, never to return to Canada. Was this a self-imposed exile? Or was Canada’s refusal to recognize the new government a factor in preventing her return?
John Price is professor emeritus in history at the University of Victoria, where he taught for 21 years before retiring in 2018. His early research focused on Japan, Canada-East Asian relations, and transpacific migration. He is the author of Japan Works: Power and Paradox in Postwar Industrial Relations (Cornell, 1997), Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2011), and, with Ningping Yu, the biography A Woman in Between: Searching for Dr. Victoria Chung (CCHS/INSTRCC, 2019). More recently his work has focused on settler colonialism and anti-racism, co-editing with Christine O’Bonsawin a special volume of BC Studies (204), Unsettling the Islands: Race, Indigeneity, and the Transpacific (Winter 2019/20). He is a co-author of the recent Challenging Racist “British Columbia”: 150 Years and Counting available as a free download: https://challengeracistbc.ca. His opinion pieces are published regularly in the Times Colonist, the Tyee, the Georgia Straight, and Canadian Dimension. His recent eight-part series Decolonizing Canadian Foreign Policy is available at Decolonizing Canadian Foreign Policy.