Said Doctor Munro, one of the medical staff of the Immigration
Department: "Even in complicated international negotiations, where each
country is jockeying to protect its rights, Canada has to depend on
representatives of China or Japan to translate state documents and
transmit state messages. Here we are on the verge of great commercial
intercourse with two of the richest countries in Asia, countries that are
just awakening from the century's sleep, countries that will need our
flour and our wheat and our lumber and our machinery; and we literally
have not a diplomatic body in Canada to speak either Chinese or Japanese.
I'll tell you what a lot of us would like to see done--what the southern
states are doing with the Latin-Spanish of South America--have a staff of
translators for our chambers of commerce and boards of trade, or price
files and lists of markets, etc. How could this be brought about? Let
Japan and China send yearly, say twenty students to study international
law and English with us. Let us send to China and Japan yearly twenty of
our postgraduate students to be trained up into a diplomatic body for our
various boards of trade, to forward international trade and help the two
countries to understand each other.
"When trouble arose over Oriental immigration a few years ago," continued
Doctor Munro, "I can tell you that it was a serious matter that we had to
have the translating of our state documents done at that time by
representatives of the very nations we were contesting."
Unless I am misinformed, one of the men who did the translating at that
time is one of the Orientals who has since "suicided," and the reason for
that suicide you might as well try to fathom as to follow the windings of
a ferret in the dark. Certain royal clans of Japan will suicide on order
from their government for the good of their country.
"The trouble with these foolish raids on Chinatown for gambling," said an
educated Chinaman in Vancouver to me, "is that the city police have no
secret service among the Chinese, and they never raid the resorts that
need most to be cleaned out. They raid some little joint where the
Chinese boys are playing fan-tan for ten cents, when they do not raid
up-town gambling hells where white men play for hundreds of dollars. If
the police employed Chinese secret service, they could clean out every
vice resort in a week. Except in the segregated district, which is
white, there would not be any vice. They need Chinese police or men who
speak Chinese, and there would be no Chinese vice left in this town."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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