Talk:In the Sea of Sterile Mountains

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RS or not?[edit]

This should count as a reliable source. What we should do is get the book reviews, read them, and use them to consider how best to use the source. There is no evidence I found that stated that the book's reputation is anything like Hmong: History of a People WhisperToMe (talk) 08:51, 25 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Who cares if it doesn't have the "reputation" a book on the Hmong has? It has content missing from all the cites you have been obsessively wallpapering pointillistic extracts from, and details of the actual politics of the early province, not POV allegations/generalizations like found in your well-cited, incestuously academic and politically-correct ("white people bad, Chinese people good and victimized") babble, don't have. Here you are pontificating about this book, and writing an article on it, without even having read it yourself. Comparing it to other works that have nothing to do with BC history (or Canada's for that matter) is totally irrelevant. Have you been reading other RS as I have suggested? Howay, Ormsby, Akriggs, Bancroft - other names come to mind like George Woodcock and Mark Sweeten Wade -and the local histories I've cited and your are page-cite niggling about? they're easier for you to get and read to find t hose page cites than for me....I just think you don't want to read anything but the sino-biased accounts of the types you have been empire-building your articles with.Skookum1 (talk) 03:08, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To write a Wikipedia article on any literary or creative work you have to consult the secondary sources, as that is what articles are supposed to be based on, and you do not have to consult the primary sources. It of course would be a good thing to get the primary sources too, but I am currently in a position where I cannot do an inter-library loan. Anyone with any questions on whether the article accurately reflects the secondary sources should feel free to consult the secondary sources themselves and take a look.

I have copies of the following two if you want them:

Hmong: History of a People was used as an example where the scholarly community believes that the work is seriously flawed to the point where it has questionable academic use. WhisperToMe (talk) 08:59, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Title of this article[edit]

Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(books)#Subtitles says: "Usually, a Wikipedia article on a book (or other medium, such as a movie, TV special or video game) does not include its subtitle in the Wikipedia page name, per WP:CONCISE. The only exception to that is short article titles, for disambiguation purposes. Examples:"

So the title of this article should be "In the Sea of Sterile Mountains" WhisperToMe (talk) 09:08, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Take it to a friggin ' RM though...but do wait until the AfD is over, it's against guidelines to screw with titles while they're under discussion.Skookum1 (talk) 03:03, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I take it that that same guideline you quote should also apply to your other creation, Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver. No, it doesn't; or you would have titled it Saltwater City, huh?Skookum1 (talk) 04:56, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
"Saltwater City" redirects to Nicknames of Vancouver (I set it up that way, because "Saltwater City" is first and foremost a nickname of Vancouver) so disambiguation is needed in the case of "Saltwater City." There is no disambiguation needed for "In the Sea of Sterile Mountains." Therefore the first should be Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (to disambiguate) but this article should be In the Sea of Sterile Mountains (no disambiguation). Please re-read Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(books)#Subtitles and see the examples.
@Nick: had pointed out to you that this page rightfully belongs under "In the Sea of Sterile Mountains" so an RM is not necessary.
WhisperToMe (talk) 07:38, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Content of the Robert L. Worden review[edit]

An internal comment from Skookum1 was saying that the Robert L. Worden review has more compliments for the book. I don't see any more compliments.

What I do see:

General overview of the book and what is inside (p. 347-348)
An overall positive reception of the book (p. 348: "Morton's book is a good presentation of how British Columbians reacted to the Chinese, but he seems to have been influenced by the same nine-teenth-century standards he weakly tries to justify") and then (p. 348-349) the reviewer's criticisms of the book. I will describe the criticisms:
  • Worden thinks the first half of the book was "objective" but that in the second half of the book Morton "seems to succumb to the racist rationale that the Chinese were indeed "mysterious." -- Worden points out to "all-to--frequent use of anti-Chinese cliches" and "examples of how certain anti-Chinese factions by the "god-fearing citizens" of British Columbia were "justified""
  • According to Worden, Morton "suggests" the Chinese knew that they were being discriminated in employment but were unaware of the true scale of the political and social opposition
  • According to Worden, book does not have "adequate expression of the Chinese view of their outcast position" since it relies overwhelmingly on Canadian newspapers
  • Recurring spelling mistake Kwantung instead of Kwangtung (Guangdong)
  • Worden feels there should have been tabulation of population statistics

WhisperToMe (talk) 14:47, 27 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

that last line makes me laugh; those tables of population statistics won't be found in all your modern ethno-history/POV sources, but population details are throughout Morton. And his comment about "examples of how certain anti-Chinese factions by the "god-fearing citizens" of British Columbia were "justified"" is just more POV ranting by ethno-tub-thumpers; who regularly ignore ALL points made by non-Chinese in the period and sum up with pejorative summations and glosses. The notion that "the same nine-teenth-century standards he weakly tries to justify" is a distortion; he's not justifying them, he's reporting them, something the bulk of Chiense-ethnic historians do not do. Ever. That many of the same complaints i.e. about low-wage temporary workers or Chinese-only work environments/businesses remain active issues today is lost on the whole of the ivory tower, while propaganda that non-native positions (Anglo-British positions) were invalid because they were "white" is rife, and apparently is used as a reason to not report, or to distort and POVize, antyhing they said.Skookum1 (talk) 03:51, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Kwantung/Kwangtung were new in English at the time, the spelling not fixed. "Canton" is what will appear in older books; so in other words that's not a "mistake", it's a spelling variation.Skookum1 (talk) 03:52, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Those book reviews often do include minor mistakes (such as spelling errors, possible statements in the book that are presented as fact but may be disputed elsewhere) but very often the review is still positive. Worden believed there were some more serious issues but he still had an overall positive review of the book. Documentation of the minor errors specified in the book review, of course, don't belong in the article body itself, but I use talk pages to do this to assist Wikipedians who are using these books (anybody who wants to double-check what I found/say can ask me to e-mail a review and/or ask WP:RX for a copy).
About the objectivity of the second half of the book, this is the full quotation discussing it in Worden's review:
  • ""[...]in later chapters he seems to lose that objectivity and gives examples of how certain anti-Chinese actions by "god-fearing citizens" of British Columbia were "justified" (e.g., see p. 225). His all-too-frequent use of anti-Chinese clichés merge into his own vocabulary as he seems to succumb to the racist rationale that the Chinese were indeed "mysterious."" (p. 348 of the review) - He knew that Morton was reporting them, but he also felt that Morton was also entirely believing what was being reported. With modern book reviews you can e-mail the authors and ask for clarification about what they said in the review. Unfortunately it is likely that this book review author is dead or retired.
About Kwantung/Kwangtung: Were they new in 1975? Did Chinese specialist academic sources only use Canton or did they use Kwantung/Kwangtung? (A book review of a China-related academic book from the 1950s may answer this question)
WhisperToMe (talk) 15:59, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
A book review?? Has it occurred to you to look for such a book, or to scan BC newspapers or sites like nosracines.ca for uses of"Kwan(g)tung"? in 1950? Simple enough to discover that "Canton" was the standard in English until about 1970 or so, which is when we also started using Beijing instead of Peking. You're grasping at straws about this; once again challenging English usage norms but you're not even a fully competent native speaker. As for this:
" He knew that Morton was reporting them, but he also felt that Morton was also entirely believing what was being reported. With modern book reviews you can e-mail the authors and ask for clarification about what they said in the review. Unfortunately it is likely that this book review author is dead or retired." talk about wanting to conduct original research, geezus. That you have presented only negative slant about Worden's review and focussed, as you have been doing, on discrediting it as a source, even though it contains (a) detailed population figures and (b) the non-Chinese perspectives that are glaringly absent from the modern anti-"white" ethno-focussed academia you are relying on to build what amounts of a very POV account, with only one side being taken as valid, and that side maintains that books and sources that don't tow their line are either racist, misled, or (god help us) don't cite things formally as if that meant that what as in the book was made up, or a lie. Yet a lot of what I see in your ethno-history cites are distortionts, glosses and lies...but they don't review each other critically and don't challenge opinions presented as if fact (Barmans' particularly bad about this, and leaps to conclusions from stray quotes) Just as you have treated points of information I have tried to give you - relentlessly AGF, from our first encounter over Air Indian and your attempt to overturn Canadian English norms re "Asian Indian" and what "Vancouver" means. Now, about Morden, note "he" Worden felt that Morton was entirely believing what was being reported is only an opinion, I didn't pick that up at all from the book, but then I've read it and you haven't. The "clarification needed" is for you to start reading books recommended, instead of trying to pick them apart before you've even read them; or niggle about page-cites - see instruction creep and read it while looking at a mirror. Your disputatiousness and wordgames are very AGF, and not collaborative; rather it's like you reject collaboration and treat anyone in the way of your agenda as an enemy (me).Skookum1 (talk) 03:02, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

About books about Chinese in BC from back then, Morton was one of the first addressing the subject at all; another book about immigrants to BC, Strangers Entertained, publ BC Govt 1971, barely covers them at all, but will get into personal histories of Slovak and Hungarians and others; but then in those days the Chinese community in BC was also reticent to talk to outsiders, and may not have been cooperative to his efforts to get input from them; I know when I wrote (more than once) to the Chinese-resources library at UBC for information in business records and diaries from Lillooet or Barkerville or other places, I got no reply at all. And that from a government-funded repository that is where all the records of the Chinese of the past who lived all over BC can be found. What other papers and histories published in the same period or before use re Canton/Kwantung isa good question;but most likely if they were published in English, they would have used "Canton".Skookum1 (talk) 03:16, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Now that I think about it, I believe "Canton" is supposed to be "Guangzhou" (the city), distinct from Kwantung or Guangdong (the province). WhisperToMe (talk) 09:04, 18 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese title[edit]

The World Journal stated the Chinese title as "在荒山之海"

WhisperToMe (talk) 14:18, 28 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You mean a Chinese edition of the book exists? If not, what the Chinese translation of the title is doesn't matter squat about this article; we wouldn't include German or French translations of the title, either.Skookum1 (talk) 03:45, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if a Chinese version of the book exists, but the point of these sections are to assist Chinese speakers who may want to translate the article for the Chinese Wikipedia. Somebody on the French or German Wikipedia would only have to use the English title, but Chinese uses a completely different set of characters. "Exact translations" from English to Chinese and back often may not exist or cannot easily be guessed. WhisperToMe (talk) 15:35, 29 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
You have English comprehension problems, as is clear by that response. Unless this book was published in Chinese there is no reason at all to give its Chinese title....it doesn't exist in Chinese. Including that constitutes cultural imperialism; just because an article is about people of Chinese descent does not mean that Chinese-language names of English language sources should be used, or have any relevance whatsoever.Skookum1 (talk) 02:47, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
No, there is a reason to give a Chinese title: if you are writing a Chinese-language article about it on the Chinese Wikipedia, you need a Chinese title if any exists. If a Chinese person wants to write a Chinese Wikipedia article about this book, that's okay. It doesn't matter if no Chinese edition exists.
Even though the issue is technically not a matter concerning the English Wikipedia, a Chinese person wanting to write an article in Chinese about this would need to consult this article anyway. This note, therefore, is beneficial. Because the World Journal wrote the title as "在荒山之海" the Chinese person would simply start: "zh:在荒山之海" instead of zh:In the Sea of Sterile Mountains ::::WhisperToMe (talk) 02:57, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Who cares then? And are you saying that you have created a Chinese-language version of this article? And its negative/POV tone and content? Maybe finding out about its existence might encourage actual Chinese (Canadian or otherwise) to actually read it; they might learn a thing or two and (gasp_) might come to understand the reasons for the political climate/reality, instead of jsut listening to their own choir and generalizing about bad 'ol whitey.03:11, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
This book is about the Chinese diaspora, a subject that ethnic Chinese all over the world are interested in studying. I would not be surprised if a Chinese person would want to write a Chinese Wikipedia article about this book. Wikipedia is an international project and there are people in Hong Kong and Singapore who are active on both the Chinese and English Wikipedias. By the way I have not written an article about this in Chinese. WhisperToMe (talk) 03:23, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Tell you what, why don't you order and buy it and read it and translate it into Chinese? Since nobody in the BC Chinese community has seen fit to do the same, or even acknowledge the book at all (other than to shit on it like the reviews you've found) seems it might be a worthwhile project for you to undertake.... you'd learn some things in the process, present non-Chinese views honestly instead of through a lens of prejudice and victimization, and maybe make a good buck in China when it hits the best-seller list. Speculating that this Chinese title is "beneficial" because someone might want t o write an article on it is just more specious nonsense and self-rationalization. Read it adn translate it, then go write that article in Chinese.....the Chinese title has no place here, nor any relevance whatsoever to this article.Skookum1 (talk) 03:39, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]


Actually the original publisher - JJ Douglas? - I think is now part of Douglas & McIntyre and might well be interested in someone coming out with a Chinese translation, and the success of that in the Chinese-Canadian market (let alone Singapore or HK) might lead to an update or reprint of the English version. And same goes for many local histories in BC that Chinese Canadians know nothing about (they don't know too much about "the rest of us" other than waht their media/scholars/politicians say about us). There's lots of books in English that could use a translation for Chinese readers.....but I don't see much interest in that from Chinese or Chinese Canadian scholars or authors. That there is no comprehensive history of the gold rushes in Chinese is truly a tragedy....but then CCNC pages start with bleats about railway labour, and what little they say about the gold rush is distorted and a-factual or vague (like Yee's "After the Gold Rush many Chinese left" (without giving actual figures, or saying which gold rush - I'm assuming the Fraser, where the first months of the rush were a "bust" as water levels were high, and Americans and others, including Chinese, did return to California or other parts of the mining sphere in the American West like the Colville Gold Rush; but many stayed in BC throughout the goldfields and ranching communities, and re the canning industry and the market gardening industry in the Lower Mainland. The claim in Yee and other places t hat Chinese avoided new gold rushes is complete horseshit, they were at all of them and the Governor himself, on numerous occasions, stepped in to admonish Americans that the Chiense had legal rights to mine and should not be harmed or harrassed (see Rock Creek Gold Rush; did you know that Judge Begbie assembled juries from each group of ethnics within the mining community and allowed the use of Chinese in court? i.e. Germans tried Germans, Chinese tried Chinese,Italians tried Italians etc....Don Hauka's McGowan's War has incredible historical,political and economic information and is very readable; another book you could spend your youthful energies on translating for a Chinese Canadian (or Chinese in general) readership. There's no translation that I know of for Ormsby or the Akriggs or Bancroft or other major regional historians....... you could make quite the career out of translating lots of them, and would learn something from their content other than the politicized academic-tubthumps you seeem to prefer.Skookum1 (talk) 03:53, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Book contents[edit]

Now that I am in a position to access U.S. libraries, I was able to use (but not check out) a copy at Rice University. I will be able to access it until March. In the meantime I can take pictures of the pages for personal use only so I can read/confirm information even when I do not have the book in my possession.

Chapter list

Chapters:

  • Prologue - viii
  • Introduction - x
  • Chapter I 1858-1871 - 1
  • Chapter II 1871-1880 - 31
  • Chapter III 1880-1883 - 79
  • Chapter IV 1883-1886 - 106
  • Chapter V 1886-1887 - 143
  • Chapter VI 1887-1890 - 154
  • Chapter VII 1890-1898 - 165
  • Chapter VIII 1899-1908 - 185
  • Chapter IX 1909-1923 - 214
  • Chapter X 1923 to the present 242
  • Chronology 259
  • Sources 269
  • Index 271

I will attempt to get the source listing tomorrow so Wikipedians can review the sources. Also I will get the full quote on p. viii of Morton (mentioned partially on Scott p. 76, cited in footnote 10). WhisperToMe (talk) 22:12, 25 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have received the list of sources and I also have the full quote (which I will cite in the article). The list of sources is only non-newspaper sources. I don't see an exact listing of newspapers consulted with dates and times (it's a pity since somebody could go into the archives and upload scans of the said newspapers).

The list of sources is on p. 269.

  • 1. Willmot, W.E. "Approaches to the Study of the Chinese in British Columbia." BC Studies, No. 4 (Spring 1970).
  • 2. Cheadle, Walter B. Cheadle's Journal of Trip Across Canada 1862-1863. Edmonton: M.G. Hurtin, Ltd. 1971.
  • 3. Baillie-Groham, Mrs. Fifteen Years Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America and British Columbia. London: Horace Cox, 1900.
  • 4. ibid
  • 5. Canada, Report of the Select Committee on Chinese Labor and Immigration, Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. XIII, 1879.
  • 6. Canada, Ottawa. Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration. Printed by the order of the Commission, 1885.
  • 7. Willmott, op. cit.
  • 8. Personal communication to author

WhisperToMe (talk) 18:20, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I archived Willmot's article here. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:22, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Re Samantha Scott's pejorative review[edit]

re "Samantha J. Scott, the author of "Text as Discourse: The Chinese in Canada in Historiographical Perspective," argued, "Morton relies at random upon a very minute selection of newspaper articles and government records"."....she's not the only one; that "very minute selection of newspaper articles and government records" still provided more information than most modern "scholarly" sources, who also "rely on a very minute selection [of sources]" and rarely give anything like the in-depth coverage of data and period politics/personalities like Morton does. Also very ironic given the campaign to block/exclude even mentions of sources that dispute "scholarly" modern academic writings from a purely POV framework on Talk:Chinese Canadians in British Columbia currently being escalated. I daresay that Samantha Scott herself hasn't read anywhere near as much as Morton has......Skookum1 (talk) 10:03, 27 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Possible error in Worden review[edit]

Worden's review states on p. 348: "[...] and the once-unthought of occurrence came in 1965 when a Canadian-Chinese man, Peter Wong, was elected mayor of Victoria."

I think he meant the guy who was elected Mayor of Kamloops, Peter Wing. I don't remember a "Peter Wong" being mentioned in Morton. WhisperToMe (talk) 01:55, 10 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Just another example of crappy/mistaken research/information in "scholarly" sources, and yet another example of why Worden is not a "quality source". Relying on them when there's plenty of other accurate sources (including the city of Victoria's own, or the Victoria Times-Colonist newspaper) is not useful - or reliable, as in many other such cases of major gaffes in such sources, never mind their ongoing bias. The first Chinese mayor of Victoria was Alan Lowe from 1999 to 2008; it's all the more important to get such facts RIGHT by not relying on sources that are "reliably questionable" about facts and biased reporting; because this claim that Peter Wong was Victoria's mayor and the first Chinese mayor in Canada is now all over the internet on Wiki mirrors. Adding such material without fact-checking from normal sources is an ongoing pattern and the CCinBC article has been deluged with them, without any thought of correctness or any knowledge of context; and no effort to find normal sources.Skookum1 (talk) 05:54, 10 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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