1

Project Integrate, conducted by six high school and university students in 1973, was an attempt by several young members of the Chinese community to explore their history.

2

Article about Project Integrate
15 June 1973

3

Of the project's three foci – a written report, visual record, and organization of community-based activities – the students encountered an interesting twist to the third component: children from the Chinese community asked if they could bring along non-Chinese friends to weekend activities and parents politely requested to keep them separate.

4

Cover of Project Integrate's final report
1973

5

Parents had hoped to keep some activities Chinese to help preserve a Chinese cultural identity in the face of integration and assimilation. In the dialogue that resulted, Canadian-born children and their parents discussed life in Canada as each saw it, two generations trying to reconcile some of the unexpected realities of immigrating.

6

Second page of Project Integrate's final report
1973

7

Tim Yee, one of the students who headed up the Project Integrate research and programming, explains the perspective of the younger generation: "That's where a few of the parents I think did a pretty decent job instead of trying to brush it under the carpet, were quite willing to sit down with us as a group to say, to try to argue the case to try to maintain this, uh, this interaction only on a limited basis. A lot of it was social... This is a way to maintain history. I think they had a difficult time to say, what we would say, was really the motivation - that was, they really weren't so interested in, in losing themselves because of that fusion, you know, mixing with other cultures, you know, people who weren't Chinese. They were having a hard time trying to express it that way. We interpreted it that way, you know, as younger people. We said you're being just as discriminatory as sometimes the people you complain about."

8

Introductory page for the Project Integrate final report
1973

9

Neither viewpoint was ever established as wrong or right, but discussing these differing opinions helped children and their parents come to an understanding concerning life in Canada.