Immigration, no doubt, is a difficult process. The amount of sacrifices and struggles associated with it are innumerable. One of the books that captures the sacrifices of Asian-Canadians is “The Excluded Wife” written by Yuen-Fong Woon. In this essay, I will summarize and critically analyze this Asian Canadian text to tackle some of the main issues associated with immigration and the problems faced by Asian Canadians. The book is set in a village in China in the 1920’s and focuses on the life of a Chinese woman named Sau-Ping. The book describes her eighteen year struggle of fleeing from a chaotic and politically charged China to Canada, where her husband Yik-Man lives, and continues to describe her life there. Sau-Ping gets married to Yik-Man …show more content…
Asians tend to view these countries and the people who live in them as extraordinary if they haven’t been exposed to them before. In the book for instance, any guests who came from the USA or Canada to marry girls in China were referred to as the “Gold Mountain guests”, and were deemed important and admired particularly because of the western attire they were in. Similarly, when Sau-Ping was on her way from Hong Kong to Canada, she kept imagining that the roads of Vancouver would be made with gold or “at least a foreign stone colored like the sun”. (Woon 1998, pg188) The expectations of the immigrants are not always matched though because while the living conditions in these “Western” countries are better, they are not in any way astonishing and don’t guarantee a well settled life for immigrants. What Sau Ping thus discovers is that even though Vancouver is very pretty, the streets are the same black and grey as they were back home (Woon 1998, pg. 191). Also, contrary to her expectations, her husband did not live a grand life and did not throw any grand ceremonies for her. He lived in a very small house and worked in a small restaurant in China Town, where she also had to start working as soon as she arrived there. (Woon 1998, pg.