Sid Chow Tan.Courtesy of the Family/Courtesy of the Family
Fuelled by the history of his own fractured family, Sid Chow Tan was a driving force behind the long, often frustrating campaign for the federal government to recognize, redress and apologize for the notorious $500 head tax paid by all Chinese immigrants to Canada until 1923. As founding director of the Head Tax Families Society of Canada, he reached out, along with others, to elderly payers of the head tax, their spouses and descendants in Vancouver’s Chinese-Canadian community, welding them into an effective movement that finally succeeded in winning a formal government apology and individual compensation from the Stephen Harper government in 2006.
Mr. Harper, then in opposition, had been won over the previous year during an emotional private meeting with surviving head tax payers in Vancouver, arranged by Mr. Tan’s organization, which beat back a proposal from previous Prime Minister Paul Martin to merely award lump sum compensation to groups, rather than to those who paid the tax.
If that was his signature cause, and he kept fighting to better the terms of the head tax settlement, it was far from the only one Mr. Tan embraced during his three decades as a ubiquitous whirling dervish of activism on behalf of the people of Vancouver’s Chinatown and the disadvantaged Downtown Eastside (DTES). There were so many over the years, he acquired the label “Rebel With A Cause.” For his part, Mr. Tan adopted the credo: “My art is activism.”
The bulk of his ongoing crusade against injustice centred on a lengthy association with community television. With his ever-present camcorder, Mr. Tan seemed to be at every march, every protest, every cultural event, recording them for broadcast on the various community-based shows he fronted on cable TV. Over time, he built up an invaluable archive of hundreds of tapes of DTES residents taking to the streets and giving voice to Chinese-Canadian seniors and literary figures. Efforts are under way to digitize Mr. Tan’s vast video library. “It represents the collective memory of our community,” award-winning documentary filmmaker Karen Cho said.
Mr. Tan, who died Sept. 26 of a suspected heart attack at the age of 73, tended to avoid established groups and institutions. Although he had connections everywhere, he preferred the grassroots and doing it his way, frequently with a sense of fun. “To shamelessly promote our friends and neighbours” was the motto he adopted for his cable-TV shows, regularly holding up a sign saying “We are not Shaw,” lest anyone think he was somehow part of the mega telecommunications company that provided airtime as part of its mandated commitment to community television. A routine mic check became a rehearsed monologue that began with “I’m a good time man, a Gold Mountain dragon and a Rocky Mountain Warrior,” diverged into a fanciful account of a live rat-eating contest won by Mr. Tan, and finished with “There’s not a person alive who can’t make a fool out of me.”
Community TV producer Deborah Angrave worked with Mr. Tan for many years. “Every community has someone who is always there, always keeping people aware, getting people involved,” she said. “In Vancouver, one of those people was Sid Tan.”
Remarkably, Mr. Tan’s volunteer activism, which forced on him a very frugal lifestyle, followed a career that could not have been more different. Up to the early 1980s, he had been a successful stockbroker, driving a yellow Porsche and living the high life. But taking up the cause of head tax redress, prompted by growing reflection on his family’s experience, changed his life.
That history is a tangled tale of unsaid truths, separations and estrangement, brought on Mr. Tan’s family by Canada’s racist immigration policies. The $500 head tax, paid by his grandfather in 1919, was followed by the even more insidious 1923 Exclusion Act that barred all immigration from China until 1947. Sid Chow Tan was born May 20, 1949 in China. A year after his birth, Mr. Tan came to Canada with his grandmother as a “paper son,” a route used by countless Chinese to ease their entry into Canada with false documents. He was raised by his grandparents, Norman Chow Gim Tan and Wong Nooy. Only in his teens did he learn they were not his birth parents.
Mr. Tan’s father, Chow Wing Kong, had been born in 1926 during his grandfather’s short visit to China to marry Ms. Wong. But the Exclusion Act separated the elder Mr. Tan from his wife for 25 years. In the meantime, the grandfather had been running a confectionery store in North Battleford, Sask, where Sid grew up. They were the small city’s only Chinese family, and it wasn’t easy. “There was no getting away from the fact that you were different,” Mr. Tan recalled. “We were different simply because we lived at the back of the store.” He nearly lost his eye when a boy threw rocks at him.
Sid Chow Tan. Courtesy of the FamilyCourtesy of the Family
Mr. Tan’s grandfather, however, was tough, known to frighten away would-be thieves by brandishing a knife, and standing up to city officials who tried to close him down for staying open on Sundays. Although it was difficult for him to be brought up by an older couple, Mr. Tan considered his grandfather a hero. He liked to point out that he adopted his English name after the Normans, who conquered England by “kicking the Anglos’ butts.” His grandfather didn’t like him playing pool because the lowest ball was yellow and the white ball was used to knock it around. Mr. Tan paid tribute to his grandfather after he died by adding Chow to his surname.
During all this time, Mr. Tan’s mother and father had lived in Hong Kong, producing six more children, a son and five daughters. After years of saving, Norman Tan was finally able to bring his son’s large family to Canada in 1972. He had not seen him since he was an infant, 46 years earlier. Sadly, there was no happy ending. Nearly half a century of separation had taken a toll. They were strangers to each other. There was a falling out over money, and they became permanently estranged. Sid Tan, who sided with his grandfather, lost all connection to his parents, brother and sisters.
The searing, personal impact on his family was a major factor that led Mr. Tan to take up the battle for redress. Similar schisms caused by the Exclusion Act played out in countless other Chinese-Canadian families across the country. In a family whose roots stretched back to the California Gold Rush in 1849, Mr. Tan’s two children were the first to be born in North America. “That tells you what a skewed immigration system will do,” Mr. Tan observed.
Mr. Tan married Emi Michaloski, whom he first met in North Battleford, in 1974. They divorced in 1981. By then, Mr. Tan had abandoned his studies for a master’s degree in social work at the University of British Columbia to become a stockbroker. Before that, he had spent two years working as an orderly and therapist at the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster. (The private hospital was famed for dispensing LSD to mostly wealthy patients as part of a treatment for addictions and other disorders.) But five years in the brokerage business was enough.
He told an interviewer: “You’re not doing anything except making more money. That’s not a life. I wanted to do something more. Life should be a time to smile, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”
That meant living cheque to cheque, surviving on grants and the occasional paid gig, and residing happily in subsidized housing in the heart of the DTES at Main and East Hastings streets. Not until he began receiving his seniors pensions did he have a form of income security. “I have never known anyone who lived so close to their values as my father,” his daughter, Kalee, said.
Mr. Tan received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
Mr. Tan was predeceased by his grandparents and former wife, Emi Carmichael. He leaves his children, Kalee and Jordan; and granddaughters, Zuva Turner-Tan and Alexandra Tan.