Former Stratford Festival director delves into impacts of Chinese Exclusion Act in new documentary, Exclusion: Beyond the Silence

Exclusion: Beyond the Silence director Keira Loughran (centre) interviews a great aunt (right) with the help of a translator (left) in the ancestral hall in Guanzui Village, Guangdong, China.

For nearly three decades in the first half of the 20th century, the Canadian Government outlawed Chinese immigration and impeded family reunification, community development, social integration and economic equality among Chinese Canadians through the Chinese Immigration Act, commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Enacted in 1923 as the culmination of anti-Chinese racism and policies including the preceding $500 Chinese head taxes, which it replaced, the Chinese Exclusion Act almost entirely prevented immigration to Canada from China until it was repealed in 1947, effectively separating families for generations, the impact of which is still felt by Chinese-Canadian families today. Over the past four-and-a-half years, former Stratford Festival director, actor and playwright Keira Loughran teamed up with producers from Stratford’s Ballinran Entertainment to explore the impacts of that racist, anti-immigration legislation in a new documentary, Exclusion: Beyond the Silence.

“In February (2020), we did an undercover film in Wuhan on the Coronavirus, which we thought was an isolated China thing, and of course weeks after that, it spread around the whole world. So, I had my eyes out for stories that were tied to COVID because, at the time, everybody was looking for the angle on COVID,” said Ballinran Entertainment executive producer Craig Thompson. “In May of 2020, I read an article in The Globe and Mail; one of the oldest women in Canada, Foon Hay Lum, age 111, dies in a Toronto nursing home. I read the story and I said, ‘Not only is this a COVID story, this article talks about this woman surviving something I’d never heard of – the exclusion act.’

“The very next day, I did some digging and I got in touch with her granddaughter, Helen (Lee) … and I said, ‘This is an amazing story, Helen.’ … I immediately got the rights to the story.”

As a result of the exclusion act, Foon Hay Lum was separated from her husband, Jack, for more than 30 years – a tragically common story among Chinese Canadians from that generation. At the time the story of Foon Hay Lum’s death broke, Thompson had been working with Loughran on another project. While Loughran’s family was not impacted by the exclusion act, her own grandmother, Jean Lumb, was instrumental in getting the legislation reversed and was the first Chinese-Canadian woman to be named to the Order of Canada.

When Thompson asked Loughran if she’d be interested in working with him on a documentary about the generational impacts of the exclusion act, she jumped at the chance.

“When I left the Festival, one of the reasons I left the office was to have more time to work on my own artistic projects,” Loughran said. “What I was researching was my family history, which I could date back to the Chinese Exclusion Act. My grandfather (featured) in the film had come to Canada in 1921, but I knew as a kid that my grandmother had been like a superstar, so it kept me with a sort of feeling of pride and place in the community. Because I was doing this research, I started to recognize that the Chinese audience for the film, for this topic, was really spread out across the country and the chances of any story routed in that being able to reach them was more likely through film (than theatre).

“ … So when (Craig) brought this project to me, there were two things that struck me. One was that I did know about the exclusion act and if (Foon Hay Lum) was 111 years old and that she’d been separated from her husband, she had a lived experience and those stories were possibly in her family and were very different from mine because my family had been here, my grandmothers were both born in Canada. The other thing I said was, ‘I don’t know if this is of interest or not, or even if this is a thing, but her last name is the same as mine in Chinese.’ From my preliminary research and the era from which those people were coming over, it’s not a huge family name. … There might be a connection there.”

Thompson, in turn, encouraged Loughran to follow those threads as a documentary storyteller. She met with Lee, spoke with her about her grandmother’s experience, learned about her family and began digging into her own family’s story.

In those early days of her research, Loughran said she was struck by the parallels between the anti-Chinese racism of Foon Hay Lum’s time and the uptick in outward anti-Chinese racism of the COVID-19 pandemic, something that spurred on Loughran’s drive to achieve activism through her art.

“It really upset me that elder women were bearing the brunt of it; they were the ones who were being spat on in the street,” Loughran said. “They were the ones being pushed, they were the ones in these (Chinese nursing) homes not able to be with their families. The irony of it was such an unknown story. The fact that Foon Hay was separated from her husband during those years of the exclusion act, and now in COVID, she can’t be visited by her granddaughter. … It’s so unfair because of the story of exclusion not being known.”

Lee and Loughran travelled across Canada speaking with Chinese-Canadians about their family members’ experiences with the exclusion act and how its impacts spanned generations. The pair and Ballinran’s production team also travelled to China’s Guangdong Province, where Loughran and Lee met members of their extended families for the first time, many of whom already knew who they were.

“What we found was we had two very personal stories because Helen and I were alive and we could tell about this period of exclusion in a very personal way,” Loughran said, adding that the 100th anniversary of the passing of the exclusion act in 2023 and the resultant upswell of activism among the descendants of those Chinese-Canadians who were directly impacted by it made the story they were telling that much more timely.

“For the first time, people were willing to talk. In the community before, because of the trauma, the stories were at risk of being lost. At the 100th anniversary celebration, that third, fourth generation started to ask questions and that was happening for people in their 70s, people who were 50, people who were 40, 30, 20. We all started to come together and come on this journey to find our stories together. Because we knew about it, we were able to shoot a lot of those events and really document that groundswell of activity and community building and activism, which was very inspiring and insightful for me.”

While in China, a place with which neither Loughran or Lee felt connected before shooting this film, they found themselves welcomed with warmth and understanding everywhere they turned, both by the members of their own families they had never met and total strangers who understood the importance of the story they were trying to tell and did everything in their power to help them tell it.

“The time in China and being able to connect with family there completed the story,” Loughran said. “ … We didn’t know what was in China. … It was pretty exciting; it was kind of that feeling pf being able to discover something that really healed a lot and offered a chance for many descendants to look for their stories, to rediscover their community.”

Exclusion: Beyond the Silence will premiere at Toronto’s 28th Reel Asian International Film Festival at the TIFF Lightbox on Nov. 16. Visit www.reelasian.com/festival-events/exclusion-beyond-the-silence/ for more information and to purchase tickets to the premiere.

For Stratford locals, Thompson said Ballinran Entertainment will also screen the film at the Tom Patterson Theatre on Dec. 5. It will be broadcast on Telus, Knowledge, Rogers OMNI and YES TV next year.