Professional Sport, Settler Multiculturalism, and Exalted Chinese Arrivants: Re-Remembering the “China Clippers”

Abstract

This chapter examines the historically changing media discourse around two historically significant Chinese Canadian athletes, the “China Clippers”: Larry Kwong, the first player of Chinese (and Asian) descent in the National Hockey League (NHL), and Norman Kwong, the first player of Chinese descent in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Growing up in Chinese immigrant families in Western Canada in the 1920s and emerging as successful young male athletes, they initially appeared in mainstream newspapers as rare, exotic “Chinese” subjects. With the changing political and ideological context of Canada in the latter half of the twentieth century, their careers and achievements were differently represented and exalted within Canadian media in recent decades, serving the myth of Canada as a progressive, multicultural society. While their historic breakthroughs in hockey and football were symbolic of the Chinese diasporic communities and have, to some extent, served to disrupt the stereotypes of the emasculated Chinese man in Western media, I argue that the ways these stories were told should be critically scrutinized so that the normalcy of settler colonialism can be questioned and alternative visions of existence for racialized communities on Indigenous land sustained.