CMC - First Son: Portraits by C. D. Hoy , Media Release

Biography - C.D. Hoy

Chow Dong Hoy was born in China's Guangdong Province in 1883 - the second child and first son in a desperately poor family. Despite its meagre income, the family placed a high value on education and, at the age of eight, Hoy was sent to school. After only three years, Hoy's family found it could no longer afford his education. As the firstborn son, he would now have to work to help support his family.

Hoy's first job was in an opium den, where he worked for room and board. This was followed by a three-year apprenticeship in a cotton and silk factory 400 miles away, where he earned two dollars a year, plus room and board.

Realizing that there were no real opportunities in China, and hearing of the riches to be had in Canada, Hoy's father borrowed $300 to send his son abroad. It was hoped that Hoy would make his fortune in North America, thus alleviating his family's poverty. Accordingly, by the end of 1902, Hoy was on his way to Canada aboard the Empress of China. When he arrived in Canada, Hoy paid the $100 head tax required of all Chinese immigrants, and settled in British Columbia. Unlike most Chinese immigrants, he arrived without any job prospects, and had no relatives to pave his way. Luckily, a shopkeeper from Hoy's village in China invited the boy to stay with him in Vancouver's Chinatown. The shopkeeper not only fed and clothed Hoy, but also helped him find a job as a houseboy to two Caucasian women.

Realizing the importance of learning English, Hoy used all of the five dollars he earned each month to hire a tutor. By 1903 - feeling more confident now in his chosen homeland - Hoy had borrowed $20 from a friend and set of for the Cariboo, where he heard there was still gold to be had. Taking the train as far as Ashcroft, he then bought a pair of boots and walked the remaining 148 miles to Soda Creek with three other Chinese men - a walk of six days and six nights. At Soda Creek, he used the last of his money to pay for steamer passage to Quesnel, arriving nearly penniless.

Hoy quickly found work as a hotel dishwasher, where he earned $15 a month plus room and board. For the first time, he was able to save money and, more importantly, send funds home to his family. After a year and a half in Quesnel, he moved 400 miles farther north to Fort St. James, where he worked as a Hudson's Bay camp cook for $30 a month. Deciding to go into the trading business himself, he learned some of the Central Carrier dialect, and started his own trading company. Following this venture, he went to work as an axeman, cook and surveyor for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Sometime in 1907 he learned that his beloved father had died in 1906. It was one of Hoy's greatest regrets that his father had not lived to see his son's later success.

By 1909, Hoy had made it to the gold-mining town of Barkerville. Although the gold rush was over, there was still gold to be had in Barkerville. Unfortunately, the gold was frozen into the ground until May, and there was little work until the spring thaw. Although Hoy found what work he could as a mining hand, he soon began supplementing his income by repairing watches and working as a barber. Somewhere along the way, he also acquired camera equipment and learned photography, and was soon taking photographs of local Chinese workers for them to send to their families back in China. At this time, Hoy probably worked out of a shop in Barkerville's Chinatown, paying a percentage of his revenues as rent.

It is not clear what kinds of cameras Hoy used in his work. Although a Kodak Model A folding camera is the most likely candidate, a number of different formats and types of negative - including some glass plates - were found in Hoy's archives. It is also of note that any of the cameras available at the time would have been quite expensive to the average Chinese labourer, and little is known of how Hoy was able to afford the equipment he used.

Hoy's photographic record is unique. Unlike photographers who set out to romanticize Native peoples, or anthropologists who recorded ethnic "types", Hoy simply obliged anyone who wanted their picture taken. Although most of Hoy's initial customers were Chinese workers, he was soon taking pictures of local Carrier and Chilcotin peoples, as well as the Caucasians who had migrated to the area.

In late 1909 Hoy returned again to Quesnel, where he worked at the Cariboo Hotel until February 1910. By then he had saved the $2,000 he needed in order to return to China to marry Lim Foon Hai - a bride chosen for him by his mother. His wife would not be able to join him in Canada until 1917, when he was finally able to save enough money for her travel and head tax.

Returning to British Columbia alone in 1911, Hoy worked as a farmhand and cook near Quesnel. Sometime in 1912 he returned to town, holding a number of jobs until late in the year, when he bought a log building, barn and log house from a Chinese rancher who was returning to China. Hoy now became a shopkeeper, as well as the town's first professional photographer. His business also took him frequently to Barkerville, where he continued to take portraits of local Native peoples, Chinese and Caucasians - including miners, farmers, ranchers, workers and their families. Taking more than 1,500 photographs between 1911 and 1920, Hoy worked primarily out of his Quesnel drygoods store.

In 1917, he travelled to China to bring his wife to Canada at last. Hoy and his wife raised 12 children, the first nine of which were girls. Large families were common in these days, particularly among farming families which needed extra hands, and it was remarked that Hoy's daughters were all strong, independent and personable.

Hoy's family-run store became a popular gathering-place. Never forgetting the kindnesses he had enjoyed in his new country, Hoy unfailingly offered credit to anyone in need. The buildings Hoy had bought in 1912 expanded, and in 1934 the Hoy family home became the first stucco house in Quesnel. The house still stands today, and can be identified by Hoy's name in the sidewalk, outlined in white marble stones. His other businesses grew over the years as well, coming to include the Wells Light and Power Company, and the Lode Theatre in Wells. Hoy also remained one of Quesnel's primary gold dealers until his death in 1973.

Hoy had come from a desperately poor background in China, but was able to make a good life for himself and his family. Using his early earnings to learn English, he seized opportunities as they came, and was to become one of his town's most successful citizens. He was also one of a handful of early photographers who recorded ordinary people of all ethnic backgrounds in the rough-and-tumble B.C. Interior - leaving us with a valuable record of a world now lost forever.

Faith Moosang
Exhibition Curator

Faith Moosang is a photographic artist, a filmmaker and the author and curator of both a book and a photographic exhibition about a pioneering Chinese photographer in British Columbia named Chow Dong Hoy. Both the book and the exhibition are entitled First Son: Portraits by C. D. Hoy. Both the book and Moosang have been the recipients of numerous awards. First Son: Portraits by C. D. Hoy won the prestigious Alcuin Design Award for Best Designed Canadian Publication in 1999 and was nominated for two B.C. Book Awards. The book also won the B.C. Millennium Book Prize. Moosang garnered the Research Award from the Canadian Museums Association for her three years of research into the photographer and his images. Currently Moosang is working on an hour-long documentary about early photographic history in Western Canada.

Speech by Faith Moosang, curator of the exhibition First Son: Portraits by C.D. Hoy delivered at the media preview on January 31, 2002 at the Canadian Museum of Civilization

Hello everyone. Thank you for coming here today. It is truly a great honour to be here and if anyone had ever told me that my first incursion into curating a photographic exhibition would find me here in these halls, I would certainly have not believed them. It is a testimony to the timeliness of my discovery of Hoy's photographs and the timelessness of Hoy's work that finds us here together today.

My journey with Mr. Hoy began in the summer of 1996. I happened to be visiting a friend in the small 1930s goldrush town of Wells, British Columbia, in a geographical area known as the Cariboo. This town neighboured onto the 1860s gold rush town of Barkerville. Barkerville, as you may or may not know, was restored beginning in 1958 and is now a major tourist destination in that province. I was informed that it would take two days to see all the town had to offer. Having just graduated from photography at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, I was interested only in whether or not the historic town had left behind a photographic record of its citizens' activities, whether or not the town had an archives or a library. Indeed Barkerville did and I went there to meet the Curator who set me up in the library and began placing large photographic albums in front of me. I was overly entranced by the photographic albums, which is to say that I was inadvertantly ignoring the curator as I turned these pages. Luckily, I snapped out of my trance long enough to hear him say things like "C. D. Hoy" and "Chinese photographer at the turn of the century." And that was my introduction to Hoy's fabulous work. The curator, Mr. Quackenbush, placed 3rd hand photocopies (photocopies of photocopies of photocopies) of Hoy's images before me, and even that far removed from the original images, I found myself holding my breath. For before me were hundreds of nameless Chinese men, First Nations women, Caucasian children, families, couples, individuals - all beautifully rendered by one then unknown photographer. The thing that first struck me and made me hold my breath when I saw these images was the dignity and silence of the sitters and the beautiful way in which Hoy had rendered these things. If any of you are familiar with the terrain of historical photography that documented First Nations or Chinese people, you know that it is littered with images that either heighten the exoticism of the anonymous individual or debase the individuals into what are called "stereotypes." Hoy's did neither. At first viewing, they seemed to resonate with honesty and respect. I asked Mr. Quackenbush if any research had been done into these images and into the man himself and was informed that very little was known about Mr. Hoy and nothing at all was known about these photographs and the identities of the people who had lined up for Hoy's camera. Suffice it to say that I quit my day job and launched myself into an enviable career of research into British Columbia photographic history. Uncannily, about one week after I had seen these images, Mr. Quackenbush phoned me and informed me that the Canadian Museums Association and the Department of Canadian Heritage were seeking submissions for a project called The Canadian Image Project which was created to initiate new research into images of the differently cultured people who played a role in the history of the development of this country. It was a perfect fit.

What followed was approximately three years of oral history research into the images, the identity of the people in the images and into the photographer himself. I purchased a 22 year old FORD van, (not a good idea) and loaded it with copies of the Hoy photographs to track down people who were old enough to remember Hoy and who some of the people in his photographs were. Initially my research was concentrated around Barkerville, Wells and Quesnel, where Hoy ultimately had set up his photographic studio and later, I expanded my search to include small hamlets like Alexandria, south of Quesnel and then much further south and west into the Chilcotin region of the province. Through those years, with the oral histories being gathered in the summer months, I basically drove the van into the ground, filled hundreds of sheets of paper with hastily scrawled notes and slept in road-side pull outs. Ultimately, I ended up interviewing over 100 elders of the First Nations, Chinese and Caucasian communities. These interviews have been deposited into the Barkerville Archives with the hopes that research will continue into the groups that lived together in the Cariboo in the opening years of the twentieth century.

I discovered quite a bit about Mr. Hoy but want to impart to you simply this. Hoy spoke three languages - Cantonese, English and the dialect of the Central Carrier people, which meant that in some way he was able to communicate with the majority of his clientele. Hoy was a small town professional photographer which meant that these people paid Hoy to have their photographs taken, and given the history of the photographic treatment of non-European peoples, it is compelling and important to understand that the people in these images, through the simple act of passing money to the photographer, were therefore largely in control of how they were represented. They are not wearing costumes, they are not ennacting traditional rituals for the benefit of a Caucasian audience - in fact the only ritual being performed is one that we are all familiar with - the desire and act to have photographs of our own beings, our own families, our own friends, so that both ourselves and our descendants might see what we looked like at a particular time and in a particular place.

Thank you.