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The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act chronicles silenced lives of heartbreak and hope
An extension of her national exhibition of the same name, Catherine Clement’s latest book shares individual experiences of Canada’s dark period of Chinese exclusion
A book launch for The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act takes place at the Chinese Canadian Museum on June 24 at 6 pm. The LiterASIAN Festival 2025 presents The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act on June 28 from 3 to 4:30 pm at the same location.
WHEN CATHERINE CLEMENT FIRST volunteered to interview aging World War II veterans, she was searching for a deeper understanding of her late father’s wartime experience. What she found instead was an untold history that would change her life and lead to an unexpected discovery: a century’s worth of silenced stories.
“The first person I interviewed was a Chinese Canadian veteran. He started telling me things I had no idea about—not just about war—but about being Chinese here… The things that they had to endure,” she recalls. “That was the beginning of my journey to discover the Chinese Exclusion Act.”
Clement’s 2023 national exhibition The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act marked the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, displaying hundreds of certificates of identity documents (known as C.I. certificates) that were used to track Chinese Canadians during this time, alongside stories of individuals who shouldered the burden of these papers.
It is this largely forgotten chapter of Canadian history that Clement documents in her new book of the same name. The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act is a testament to the human experience of Chinese exclusion, chronicling not only the tragedies of this period, but also the resilience of the Chinese community. It features additional stories and images that were not part of the exhibition.
As a historian, curator, and author, Clement reveals that her interests lie not in writing, but in the lived experiences of ordinary people during extraordinary times. “I would not say I’m an author first, I’m a community historian,” she explains. “It [writing] is something I have to do because it’s part of the legacy of the project. An exhibition is temporary, but a book will live on.”
Throughout the book, each person and their story are accompanied by their paper trail—photographs with the sombre faces of old men forever estranged from their families, despairing letters pleading for reunification, newspaper clippings in English and Chinese.
“One of the stories that really affected me was a man who’d been here 50 years, and he had been good, and he worked, and he died a month after his wife arrived,” Clement says. “How do you measure that heartbreak?”
Even stories of successful reunions are touched by tragedy. Eleven-year-old Matthew Yan was interrogated and barred from entering Canada to reunite with his father Jun Bing Sun in 1961. Nearly a decade later, around 50 years after Jun Bing arrived in Canada, his now 21-year-old son and wife would finally be able to join him. Yet he would not live to hear himself addressed as “Father”.
In the early process of her research, Clement discovered that these stories of exclusion were shrouded in silence. Most family members of those who held C.I. certificates knew nothing about the Chinese Exclusion Act or the papers, as their parents or grandparents never mentioned them.
“Silence became the way to bury the tragic memories,” Clement writes in the book. “Silence ensured those born after the exclusion would not be burdened by the scars of the past. Intergenerational silence helped ensure that the humiliation of exclusion would be forgotten within a generation.”
Catherine Clement.
She describes one conversation she had with a woman who found her father’s C.I. certificate as a child, but was merely met with an angry “It’s nothing,” and another with an older woman who chose to keep silent about her experience to protect her children. “I asked, ‘Why did you never tell your kids anything about it?’ And she said, ‘You have to remember that we had been targeted for so long and all we wanted to do was blend in and disappear,” Clement says.
With the crumbs of memories shared by living friends and family members, she and her team of students from UBC foraged through anything and everything to unearth these lost stories of individuals: newspapers, clan society files, coroners’ reports, trial records, and fifty-six thousand JPEGs of documentation that the government previously held under privacy. For Clement, the despised C.I. certificates that were once a reminder of a second-class status in Canada also hold a new meaning for the community, providing a glimpse into the courage and sacrifice of these individuals.
With over 800 stories to tell and only 256 pages in the book, Clement’s only regret is that she was unable to include all of them. However, in partnership with UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections, she repurposed her crowdsourced materials to create the Paper Trail collection, an online archive of documents related to the Chinese Immigration Act.
Clement will speak about her work at the Chinese Canadian Museum on the day of the book’s release, June 24, and on June 28 as part of this year’s LiterASIAN Festival. At the events, she hopes to share some of the stories and describe the process behind the project. The Paper Trail is a physical manifestation of the community’s unspoken history.
It’s the first time that some of these stories have been told publicly. “This is the biggest public history project of its kind in our community,” Clement says, “and I also want to bring it down to the human level by sharing some of these remarkable stories of what people went through.” 
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