English

The artist’s nickname is “Crabby Tanabe,” and despite his daunting reputation, Alexandra Chu wanted to interview him.

When Takao Tanabe finally called, the 80-year-old Governor General award-winning landscape artist wanted to know exactly what the UBC student knew about visual arts to write an article about it.

Chu, who graduated in May 2006 with a BA in English literature and minor in history, admits she didn’t know much, but she loved the artist’s work and, more importantly, she could write.

Chu considered her profile on Tanabe, which appeared in Ricepaper, the Vancouver-based magazine focusing on Asian Canadian arts and culture, as one of her favourites.

Other profiles she has written include Whistler’s own National Alpine ski racer and Olympic hopeful, Britt Janyk, and illustrator Marcos Chin, the artist behind the “look” of online dating giant, Lavalife.

“Anyone who does reporting, you feel so proud when you have your name out there,” Chu says. “You can google yourself and things come up.”

You could say Chu is building her future one word at time. Literally.

Chu was the recipient of the first-ever UBC Arts Co-op Student of the Year Award, a recognition she received after spending a term writing for FrontCounter BC, a one-stop shop for natural resource businesses wishing to obtain required paperwork.

From the pilot office in Kamloops, BC, Chu assisted in setting up nine other locations throughout the province. She developed content and layout for the agency’s website, created marketing brochures, and produced an online newsletter that caught the eye of an assistant Deputy Minister.

Impressed by the quality and language of Chu’s work, the agency continued publishing the newsletter past its scheduled end date of December 2006.

“She’s a good example of a student who really understood that career development is not something that happens overnight,” says Julie Walchli, founding director of the UBC Arts Co-op Education Program.

“So step-by-step, co-op term by co-op term, and freelance writing assignment by freelance writing assignment, she built a very impressive portfolio and is now graduating with a lot of experience under her belt and a lot of contacts.”

Chu got her big break at the Whistler Museum and Archives, her first co-op work term in 2004. Asked to do an independent research project to contribute to the museum’s records, Chu profiled the movers and shakers of the famed mountain resort community.

“I’d never interviewed, I didn’t know how it would go. I didn’t know if I’d follow the questions I’d set out, or if I’d talk freely,” Chu recalls.

“A few months later, the curator sent me an e-mail and she wanted to use parts of my project for a feature article that was on the cover of the news magazine The Pique for women’s history month.”

When the article appeared, the curator had written an introduction and a conclusion, but the rest was all Chu’s work. “And so that was my start,” she says.

From her first publication at Whistler to writing articles for the Faculty of Arts’ newsletter and website, to being the visual arts editor at Ricepaper, to helping launch FrontCounter BC, the judging committee was impressed, says Walchli.

“A lot of students in Arts want to be journalists, or professional writers in some way, and often it’s hard for them to know how to get started in that career,” Walchli says. “And Alexandra knew that each of her co-op terms and the things she did outside of co-op were building blocks to that ultimate goal.”

Chu’s spot on the Dean’s List during every term at UBC and her onerous role as the editor of the UBC Arts Co-op student newsletter were a some of the many reasons that set her apart from other award candidates, adds Walchli.

From having career goals of wanting to write for a living to interviewing prominent people, Chu has built a hefty portfolio.

“It’s been really exciting because [Ricepaper] is nationally published, and it’s nice to know that someone in Toronto might be reading your work,” says Chu of her feature articles.

Chu acknowledges she was intimidated by the prospect of interviewing Tanabe, but she was in for a surprise after his unexpected call, which produced a personal invitation to his retrospective exhibition.

“He was just so nice. He was the kindest person,” she recalls. “He talked — he was really candid. I love meeting people like that. And some articles, they just come. You just write them, they’re there.”

Today, Chu is the assistant director of marketing and client services at Canadian Education Centre Network, a non-profit company aiming to promote Canada as a study destination for international students. She is one of roughly 2,000 students graduating with an Arts degree this year.

Not bad for a girl who didn’t know what she wanted to do with her English degree. But after four co-op terms at UBC, Chu thinks of her degree as a valuable learning opportunity, helping her to develop her career.

“It’s been about finding what I could do with my English major,” she says.

“At first, with English literature, it seemed like there was not a lot to do,” recalls Chu. “But I think of my writing skills and my research skills as traits. And a lot of people don’t think of it that way, but I think of them as traits that I’ve developed because people commission me to write articles and pay me.”

Chu considers the network of contacts she has built to be invaluable.

“The people you meet are just as important as the jobs you do because you’ll meet people who will be really supportive, who will be references for you to get a career when you graduate, who will help you find other things you’re interested in,” Chu says.

“Like in Whistler, I was really interested in writing. They let me go with it. They helped me to make it something more than just a book in the museum that people may or may not look at.”

Chu, who spent the other co-op terms writing and researching for the Dean of Arts office, the Richmond Museum, and the Whistler Museum and Archives, credits her UBC degree for providing her with transferable skills.

“One of the things in Arts is thinking outside the box. You may not graduate with something like an accountant where you have a specific job, but you have these skills to do anything,” she adds.

“I have a wealth of experience working with children, working as a writer and reporter, working on websites, working with customers in museums, communicating through all sorts of avenues.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

Associate Professor Mary Chapman won the 2006 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize from the American Studies Association for an essay on writer Sui Sin Far, believed to be the first Eurasian to publish in Canada and the United States.

The paper is part of a book-in-progress on American suffrage literature, and examines Far’s work during the Progressive Era, a period of reform from the 1890s through the 1920s that saw many Americans push for social justice, general equality, and public safety.

Separated from her two-year-old son for nearly a year, a Chinese mother sacrifices everything to get him back. After spending her life’s savings to hire a lawyer, the woman is reunited with her child. But he no longer remembers her, or their native tongue.

She can’t believe that the government would take away her child in what she thought would be “the land of the free.”

The story — entitled “In the Land of the Free” — was published in 1912 in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a popular short story collection by Sui Sin Far, pen name of British-born writer Edith Maude Eaton (1865 – 1914).

The story collection reflects the struggles and joys in the daily lives of Chinese families in North America. Far, who lived in Montreal and later moved to San Francisco and Seattle, depicts the anguish of Chinese immigrants, and the suffering inflicted by discriminatory immigration laws.

Associate Professor Mary Chapman, who teaches in the Department of English, recently won the 2006 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize from the American Studies Association for an essay she wrote on the pioneering writer.

Chartered in 1951, the American Studies Association has more than 5,000 members, including teachers and other professionals, concerned with American culture.

Prof. Chapman’s paper is part of a book-in-progress on American suffrage literature, and examines Far’s work during the Progressive Era, a period of reform from the 1890s through the 1920s that saw many Americans push for social justice, general equality, and public safety.

Among other things, the progressive movement called for the humane treatment of mentally ill people, worked for the organization of unions, and gave citizen women in the United States the right to vote by 1920.

Prof. Chapman probes into Far’s awareness of the shortcomings of the Progressive Era and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from fundamental rights.

“At the very same time that they were advocating greater access to government, and votes for women, they excluded the Chinese from immigrating,” Prof. Chapman says.

Born to a Chinese mother and a British father, Far began her career at The Montreal Star and wrote one of the first public statements in opposition to the Chinese Head Tax in Canada. She wrote numerous articles and stories, which appeared mainly in American newspapers and magazines.

Prof. Chapman has found new material through what she calls intense digging in Far’s life. After searching for works not included in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” she has found articles showcasing the writer’s interest in China’s efforts to change outdated laws.

The enfranchisement of women in a Chinese province in 1912, while progressives in the U.S. were still campaigning for women’s right to vote, exposed the limits of American efforts to reform, says Prof. Chapman.

“So all of a sudden, this culture, which even the most progressive-minded Americans had perceived as inferior and backward, had given their votes to women,” she says.

“Far was very supportive of the Chinese reform movement which had, as one of its goals, the enfranchisement of Chinese women,” she adds. “She took great delight in showing how liberated Chinese women were.”

Prof. Chapman believes it was clear to Far that the progressive movement had an exclusive agenda. The writer’s “In the Land of the Free” pinpoints just that.

The story simultaneously captures the humanity of Chinese people while demonstrating the human costs of racist laws. A young boy’s inability to recognize his mother and the loss of his native language at the story’s end signals the costs of cultural assimilation.

“There were so many racist policies that coincided with the progressive movement. So I think Sui Sin Far was a very canny judge of that,” Prof. Chapman says.

As the first Eurasian to publish in Canada and the United States, Far’s writing in prominent magazines such as Good Housekeeping and New England Magazine gave Americans of Chinese ancestry and women a literary voice, notes Prof. Chapman.

“What I’m finding really interesting about her is that she is broadly concerned with questions of mixed race, hybrid cultures, and other races in the broader continental context,” she says.

“Her focus, and her topics go way beyond her interest in the Asian American community, which is what she is well known for.”

The story of a white stenographer in Seattle who, on her wedding day, discovers that her husband has fathered an Alaskan child sheds light on Far’s curiosity, suggests Prof. Chapman.

“Her interest in hybridity goes far beyond the Asian American experience,” she adds.

Prof. Chapman’s current project on American suffrage literature and interest in how women find voices in historical contexts that do not allow them to speak has brought to light the writer’s unique position.

“I was finding that so many of my chapters were focused on white women from the northeast,” she adds, “so I was so happy to find Sui Sin Far’s stories, which offered a very different perspective.”

Prof. Chapman hopes to publish a second collection of Far’s writings to move the writer away from a position that is strictly pro-Chinese, or anti-Progressive.

“There are big gaps in her publication history and I think that most people have just focused on this book that appeared, but the fact is she was an active journalist for at least 15 years,” Prof. Chapman says.

By Michelle Keong, an English and Classical Studies major. She is in the Arts co-op program.