The Evolution of Chinese Graves at Burnaby's Ocean View Cemetery: From Stigmatized Purlieu to Political Adaptations and Cultural Identity

This thesis analyzes the practice of racism against the Chinese community in Vancouver-area cemeteries, and how it was modified by trans-Pacific political and cultural forces. It shows how, at Burnaby's Ocean View cemetery, the Chinese community moved away from segregation in the burial place and progressed to burial designs that responded to its cultural and religious needs. It analyzes the abandonment by some Chinese immigrants of their tradition of disinterment and repatriation to China, when they chose to be buried there rather than at Vancouver's Mountain View cemetery. It also argues that the Chinese community of the Lower Mainland modified its own burial traditions in a manner different from anywhere else in B.C., as a result of the wave of immigrants from Hong Kong in the 1980s-90s. These changes transformed the design, architecture and burial practices at Ocean View, and helped form a new physical Chinese identity in that landscape.