The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided by Denise Chong

Written in 1995, The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided by Denis Chong is a multigenerational memoir that reconstructed the fractured and transnational legacy of Chinese-Canadian identity through Denis Chong’s grandmother May-ying—a concubine who immigrated to Vancouver in the 1920s—and her divided family’s immigration experiences between Southern China and Vancouver’s Chinatown. The memoir is not merely a account of Denis Chong’s family and her personal journey, but also a political act of remembrance—testifying to the historical traumas inflicted by policies like the Chinese Head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (Exclusion Act). In fact, the novel’s subtitle, Portrait of a Family Divided, speaks to a national policy that disallowed familial unity for decades. Hence, I argue here that The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided is not merely a family memoir but also a structural critique, one that interrogates diasporic fracture, racialized labor, gendered discrimination and marginalization, and the politics of silence within the Chinese-Canadian experience.

Gendered Labor

May-ying, a young concubine—or kay-toi-neu, “stand-at-table girl”---learns after landing in Canada that “she was under contract to the Pekin tea house until she’d worked off what it cost to bring her to Canada”. How May-ying is demanded to work in tea-house labor mirrors the colonial, sexualized gaze on Chinese women at the time, where waitresses at teahouses are sexualized and commodified, as “bringing food to the table was indeed not difficult; the real art of the tea house waitress was her ability to entertain with witty conversation”, where men expected “their favorite waitresses to join them”. However, the situation contains deeper implications—it is not merely using Chinese women for beauty, but rather carried hidden violence behind the scenes: “there were the days when waitresses came to work with especially heavy powder on their faces. When washed off to be freshly reapplied, it revealed the bruises of their men’s anger against them”----revealing how Chinese women’s bodies are used as sites of profit and reduced to commodities enduring punishment. 

May-ying’s “attractiveness” in the teahouse, “her diminutive size and beauty were her trademarks, which drew customers to the tea house like moths to a flame”, co-exists with a growing distance from herself and her daughter, Hing. In the novel, May-ying’s daughter Hing recalls May-ying’s job as “nothing but a kay-toi-neu”. At home, Hing remembers being “spanked …and ordered…to kneel in obedience afterwards”----linking gendered shame in Chinatown’s patriarchal moral order to intergenerational silence.