The Chinese Canadian Museum (CCM) opened in Vancouver’s Chinatown on July 1st 2023, 100 years after the passing of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act (also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act). Its feature exhibit The Paper Trail to the 1923 Exclusion Act holds the identity documents that individuals of Chinese descent were forced to carry and the personal stories behind them. 

This week’s ACAM Dialogues podcast episode is part 1 of a series of two mini-episodes where we do a deep dive into the behind-the-scenes of the Paper Trail exhibit. In part 1, we speak to Naomi Louie and Andrew Sandfort-Marchese, who worked as members of the Archival Biographies Team at CCM to explore the questions:  What goes into the planning of something like the Paper Trail exhibit? And why does it matter?

Gavin Luke / At First Light / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com