Chinese Railway Workers Memorial | Part 1
Transcript
I’m Eldon Garnet. I created this public sculpture. It is the Memorial to Commemorate the Chinese Railway Workers of Canada. When I started construction of this monument or when I was doing the design for this monument, I would say it was 1986, 1987 is when I started construction of it, the Chinese railway workers or the Chinese in this country were never really given their due. I know there was a recruiting process to get inexpensive labour to build this transcontinental railway, and that was the importation of cheap labour to build our country for us. Can you imagine the difficulty of these railway workers coming thousands of miles from their home country, not being able to speak the language of the country they’re coming to? But once they’re finished working there, they were stuck in Canada.
And the site is one of the aspects that initiated the concept of a trestle, because it was right next to the railway lines. And the scale of the piece is very important. This is not a small sculpture, which you look down on. You look up at the work. You walk under the work. It overwhelms you the same way that the landscape would have overwhelmed these Chinese railway workers building this trestle. In this trestle you can see that the one worker is on top and he’s in a very dangerous position. Of course, many Chinese railway workers died during the construction of the railway and I wanted to allude to that. I wanted to make it involved in some kind of dangerous task or some difficult task. Even the figure on the lower part of the monument is stretching his body, arching it very forcefully to try to release this beam that seems to be caught on the trestle.
I think the injustices inflicted by the Canadians upon the Chinese railway workers is an indication of the entire 19th century notion of the worker. It is not them particularly who are being singled out for persecution, but the worker himself in the 19th century, the late industrial revolution, was expendable and very much to be exploited.
Want to hear more? Check out Part 2.
Runtime: 00:01:58