A transcontinental railway was one of the terms required by British Columbia in order to agree to assimilation into the political construct of Canada. At least 10,000 labourers were needed to complete the job of completing the coast-to-coast railway line, enabling British Columbia to join confederation.

In 1881, the B.C. population included 19,500 whites, approximately 25,000 First Nations people and approximately 4,500 Chinese. Under the auspices of Andrew Onderdonk, the American engineer hired to complete the B.C. section of the railway, some seven thousand Chinese labourers, primarily from Guandong province, arrived to serve as three-quarters of the required labour force.

Paul Yee's diary-styled I Am Canada: Blood and Iron (Scholastic $14.99) is the journal of Heen, a young Cantonese teenager in China, who sets out with his father on a journey to British Columbia in 1882 to help build the new railroad that will connect the West Coast to the rest of the country. He hopes the wages he earns will erase the stigma of gambling debts incurred by his father and grandfather.

Yee dedicates the text to Wong Hau-hon, from Sun-wui county, Guangdong province, a member of the 'Gang 161' on the Canadian Pacific railway in 1882. You have to read the fine print to realize Lee Heen-gwong is a fictionalized character created by the author.

"When I was a child growing up in the 1960s,"; Paul Yee explains, "there were no books about my world-the world of immigrants, of racial minorities, and different histories. I had to learn about these things much later in life... Such books can reassure those in North America that it is valid to be different from the mainstream.";

978-0-545-98593-2

[BCBW 2010]