Perhaps no one wanted to dwell on Macdonald’s comments because, well, there are a lot of Chinese people in British Columbia today, with more on the way (judging by that official provincial website).
And wouldn’t you know it, “abhorrent” “Asiatic principles, immoralities and eccentricities” (such as gambling, smoking, bribery, fraud, queue-jumping, littering, the abortion of female babies, class snobbery, copyright infringement, feng shui, and primitive numerical superstitions) are as thick on the ground as spit. (…)
Some Canadians have pushed back, literally. A few years ago, newspapers and human-rights busybodies were aflutter over the phenomenon of “nippertipping”: Recreational Chinese anglers mysteriously being “pushed into the water, fishing tackle and all.”
As it turns out, there was nothing “mysterious” about these attacks; Chinese immigrants had been “over-fishing, fishing illegally, fishing commercially, fishing all night and leaving garbage and human waste lying about, as well as crowding out locals and crossing fishing lines at popular fishing spots and then responding by saying ‘[I] don’t speak English.’”
