<![CDATA[Being a rugged outdoorsy Chinese-Canadian. What's that all 'aboot'?]>

He could see little of himself either in Canada's history or its contemporary culture " and he certainly wasn't anything like the flannel-clad white men proudly proclaiming "I am Canadian" in the popular beer commercial for Molson Canadian.

To be both Chinese and Canadian seemed almost contradictory given the degree of foreignness with which Chinese-Canadians have long been associated.

But then in his late teens, Ho discovered "traditionally Canadian" outdoor pastimes like hiking and mountain biking. As he rode down into lush valleys, and climbed the snowy mountaintops western Canada is so famed for, Ho felt a new sense of "Canadianness".

"I can't say taking up these sports had nothing to do with a desire to prove how Canadian I was," says Ho, now 40 years old.

"When people asked me what I liked to do, the answers wouldn't be 'go see my tutor' or 'karaoke' or something stereotypically Asian and bookwormy."

Ken Ho, with a can of Canada Dry

"Most people go in small groups, so often when others see us on the trails they think we are tourists because we speak Chinese and use a flag to keep the group together."

Ming Chan's hiking group.

Chinese-Canadians are now the nation's largest visible minority, accounting for 5 per cent of the total population in 2016. As their numbers and those of other minorities continue to grow " more than 7 million of the country's 37 million citizens identify as visible minorities according to a 2017 report by Consensus Canadamore " more people are questioning what it means to be Canadian in an ever-diversifying country.

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The first recorded Chinese arrivals in Canada came in 1788, when 70 carpenters from Macau were hired to build a ship on Vancouver Island. Later, between 1881 and 1884, 17,000 Chinese workers from Guangdong arrived to perform the arduous, and often dangerous task of building the Canadian Pacific Railroad.

They were not welcome, says Chen.

"It started with the very blatant racial attacks on the Chinese who were disenfranchised and marginalised especially in British Columbia where they were seen as the greatest threat," she says, citing The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of the labourers.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Chinese immigration to Canada slowed largely because of the infamous Chinese head tax, said Yvonne Xiao Tiberghien, a Chinese-Canadian journalist.

Waves of Hong Kong immigrants came in the 1980s and 1990s, while today mainland Chinese make up the largest number of arrivals. Since the beginning of the millennium, between 30,000 and 40,000 mainland Chinese have immigrated to Canada each year.

"Recent immigration from mainland China has generated a small group of very wealthy immigrants who live the high life, but they are not the majority of Chinese Canadians,"

Xiao Tiberghien, says the stereotype of uber wealthy immigrants does not represent the reality of most Chinese-Canadians.

The high visibility of Chinese-Canadians and Chinese immigration in major epicentres including Toronto and Metro Vancouver " the latter often referred to as Hongkouver " reflects the fact that Canada is seeing the fastest rate of ethnic change of any Western country, according to a 2017 report by The Vancouver Sun.

The report projects that within the next two decades non-white minorities will grow to account for up to 70 per cent of Vancouver's population, while up to 80 per cent of the country will become non-white over the next century.

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Nicole Kwan, 21, the vice-president of the Chinese Varsity Club at the University of British Columbia, says Chinese and other Asian cultures were extremely accessible to her while growing up in Richmond. However, this prominence didn't make everyone so happy.

"I remember reading the local news " even now, in letters to the editor, white Canadians who grew up here [write about] how the landscape is changing, house prices are really high, storefronts have Chinese signage on them ... people are livid about these things," she says.

"I personally think there is no such thing as 'reverse racism' [against white people]," she says, "especially in a city where the majority of citizens are Asian and everything else including education and social institutions favour the Caucasian race."

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Over the years, the stereotypes of Chinese in Canada have changed, from the impoverished coolies, to small grocery and laundromat owners to uber wealthy property owners. But so too has changed the cultural fabric of what it means to be Canadian in the face of rising Chinese immigration.

Ultimately, most Canadians are tolerant and willing to be inclusive of new cultures, says Yvonne Xiao Tiberghien.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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