“We're Here to Help”: Discourses of Canadian Nationalism and British Colonialism in Chinese-Canadian Anti-Same-Sex Marriage Campaigns, 2001–06

In 2001-2006, Chinese-Canadians in Toronto emerged in unprecedented numbers to participate on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate. In many mainstream English media outlets, however, Chinese-Canadians were represented overwhelmingly as “homophobic new Canadians” who stood in stark contrast to queer-friendly, English-speaking, and white Canadians. This paper investigates the historical arguments employed by the leaders of the Chinese-Canadian anti-same-sex marriage campaigns and the leaders’ complicity in rewriting both the Canadian and Hong Kong’s historical pasts in the names of multicultural tolerance and freedom of religion.            During the anti-same-sex marriage campaigns, key leaders pointed to the central roles of Chinese-Canadians in the history of Canadian nation-building as an argument for mass mobilization against same-sex marriage. Many leaders believed that Chinese-Canadians had to revive this history of Chinese social engagement in Canada and view the fight against same-sex marriage as a patriotic act aimed to better the welfare of Canada as a whole. At the same time, the Chinese-Canadian anti-same-sex movement, which was organized mostly by Chinese evangelical Protestant churches, also focused on the urgent need to “save” Canada from the moral depravity signaled by same-sex marriage, much like the ways British missionaries “saved” Hong Kong with Christianity in the city’s colonial past. This paper argues that these discourses actively erased the violent and discriminatory history of Chinese immigrants in Canada and the racist and exploitative nature of British missionaries in Hong Kong. While leaders of the campaigns encouraged nationalist sentiments to secure what they believed to be Chinese-Canadians’ rightful place in wider Canadian social and political debates, they furthered the already-salient stereotype of people of colour in Canada as uniformly and necessarily anti-queer.