Demographic

Age: 29

Gender identity: She/her/heterosexual

Race: Chinese/Ashkenazi Jewish

Indigenous: No

Class: Middle class, working part-time to afford to go to university

Other identity: (e.g. linguistic, religious) Fluent in Cantonese/Mandarin/French/English, raised Catholic but is agnostic

Education: Bachelor of Fine Arts/BA in Art History

Language: English (with other fluencies)

Personal Responsibilities: Father is unwell

Location: Relationship to Lower Mainland (from here, were from here, from elsewhere) Born in Vancouver

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Transcription – Transkibus
• Curation – HistoryPin
• IIIF – Mirador
• Visualization – Gist

Brief Biography

Yvonne Lee-Gales is a 29 year old mixed race Chinese-Canadian woman who currently lives in Vancouver, a city where she was born and raised. She is very close to her family who immigrated from Hong Kong in the 1970s and has good ties with her Ashkenazi Jewish family that are affective not cultural or religious. Despite close family ties she has struggled with othering on the part of both communities.

She grew up in a family that loved classical Western music (a cousin is a leading classical musician) and played cello at a near professional level for many years. However, she opted for a visual art degree which expanded to a BA and MA when she realized her interest in academic research and history. 

She is an avid reader whose research has centered on secondary sources. Hence archives offer a refreshed source for her research.

Her doctoral research will address significant gaps in understanding women’s history in the Lower Mainland, and it will fill a personal need.  It will be emotionally challenging for her if it proves frustrating to find relevant records in the archives or if the interface is too illusive to navigate. She has a sense of humour however, which will inform her response to challenges she faces.

Character description

Yvonne Lee-Gales is a rigorous researcher of history who is focused, at times driven. She wants to be able to go with the flow of a research process once she engages and can get frustrated however when systems do not work well and interrupt her process. She is sensitive to bias when she encounters it and withdraws and recalibrates her interest in working with the individual or organization. She is supportive to other students. She is witty and quietly amusing.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: She is a feminist scholar who is exploring histories and representations of Chinese women immigrants and communities across many roles, including their practices and identities as creators. She is interested in identities, tensions, and acceptance, in relation to both the white and Chinese communities for mixed race women. She is looking for cultural content (audio, visual, video), publications, diaries, organizational records and any other materials.

Community affiliations: Emily Carr University of Art and Design Alumna; SFU Student; Centre A member

Represented in archives: She is not represented in the archives.

Professional affiliations: She does not have a professional affiliation.

Access needs and mobility: Uses public transit to access all resources.

Motivations

Why: There are few publications if any on the topics she is exploring although there are art works and media. She feels that archival research will bring her to original records that can inform her research interests. She is excited about learning more about how archives are structured and the potential for archival research. She also sees opportunities for her artistic expression as a result of this research.

Frustrations

Barriers: She sees the first part of her research as being quite broad and is concerned that finding aides will not help her to discover the cultural histories of women who are Chinese-Canada. She is then concerned that there will be few records regarding mixed race women’s experience, and even fewer that address culture, so she sees herself looking for clues across multiple fonds. Her schedule and responsibilities as a partial caretaker for her father mean that digital access would greatly benefit her research.

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: She has an iPad, a MacBook Pro 14”

Software: Adobe Suite, Google suite, MS Suite

Network connectivity: She has good connectivity at home and can use SFU network

Experience with archival tools: She has used the universities’ library systems to search for books and articles but has no experience with archival tools

Experience with archival frameworks: No experience with archival frameworks.

Comfort with learning technology: She is comfortable with learning software but does not have programming skills.

Goals

What do they want to do: Yvonne Lee-Gales is shaping her cultural studies/history doctoral thesis and would like to undertake a wide sweep of archival material to discover records that speak to the history of Chinese women who came to the Lower Mainland, and the women in generations of families that have lived in the Lower Mainland. She is interested in their cultural expressions in the broadest sense of culture. As  a subset of this research she hopes to discover the mixed race experience of women and the ways that their identities were expressed with an interest in cultural expressions. She hopes to undertake a multi-generational approach. She also uses Research/Creation in some of her work and sees the opportunity for a media project as well as a written thesis.

What relationship do they want to the archives: She would like to spend considerable time following these threads in different archives and looking at patterns that may emerge within families, communities and subsets of communities and over generations. She sees the majority of her exploration as being online although she will examine physical records when appropriate.