Asian Heritage Portal

Nellie Yip Quong National Historic Person (1882-1949)

Location: Vancouver, British Columbia

Date designated: 2008

The designation:
Nellie Towers married Vancouver jeweller Charles Yip Quong in 1900. Interracial marriages were rare at that time, and the Chinese were under persecution as a supposed threat to British Columbia’s dominant society. Nellie Yip Quong nonetheless joined her husband’s family in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and for more than thirty years worked to mitigate the hostile conditions Canadian life inflicted on Chinese women and their families.

The Wing Sang & Co. building at 51 Pender Street in Vancouver's Chinatown. Nellie Yip Quong and her husband Charles lived here for 17 years after their arrival in Vancouver.
© Lisa Kilner / 2010

She was effective because she was a Caucasian woman who learned skills useful to her adopted community. Nellie Yip Quong mastered five Chinese dialects, enabling her to communicate with everyone despite the diverse origins of the area’s Chinese population.  She also acquired the knowledge to serve as a trusted midwife for some 500 Chinese Canadian women.  In so doing, she represents the thousands of midwives working in similar communities across Canada where access to maternity care was constrained by prejudice or poverty.

Nellie Yip Quong was able to provide health and social services to immigrant Chinese Canadian women and their families in their own language. Affectionately known as “Granny Yip,” she played the respected role of adoption broker and foster mother within the Chinese Canadian community. She also provided Chinese immigrants, especially women, with translation services, often serving as a court interpreter. She campaigned against injustices, particularly in health care, and was well known for her insistence that Vancouver General Hospital stop confining its non-Caucasian patients to the basement.

783 Pender Street, former home of Nellie Yip Quong during her later years as a midwife in Vancouver's Chinatown
© Lisa Kilner / 2010

Nellie Yip Quong was a bold and outspoken advocate for her adopted community. She worked effectively through both Caucasian and Chinese organizations – the Anglican Good Shepherd Mission, the United Church in Chinatown, the Chinese Benevolent Association and the Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association. With an excellent understanding of both worlds, she served as an intermediary between the Euro-Canadian and Chinese Canadian societies. Over time, Nellie Yip Quong achieved renown in Vancouver’s Chinatown, which was home for about 30 percent of Canada’s Chinese population by the 1930s.  Her knowledge, skills and ready wit improved life for Chinese families at a difficult time in Chinese Canadian history.