Ying Liu, the Asian Studies Librarian at University of Victoria Libraries, did the background research and the interview with Mr. John Hsu, one of the chief editors of both The New Republic and The World Journal Vancouver. The purpose of this research is to create a digital exhibition of selected articles from the two newspapers, related historical photos and interviews of the chief editor. We wish to raise awareness of these crucial research resources.

The interviews were done in person in Mandarin on November 13, 2018 at 10351 Leonard Road, Richmond, B.C. and were video-recorded. Ying worked out an interview outline with the interviewee in advance. The interviews aim to record the history of, and Mr. Hsu’s personal experience with, running the two Chinese-Canadian community newspapers as the chief editor. The interviewer asked six to eight open-ended questions to lead the conversation and had the interviewee talk freely. Follow-up questions were only asked occasionally and interruptions were avoided. The interview videos, totaling four-hours of footage, were later edited and divided into sixteen short videos. Full transcripts and English translation were created and added to the videos as subtitles.

The following criteria were used in selecting articles from The New Republic and The World Journal Vancouver newspapers.

Chinese words or phrases used in the documents and their metadata are transliterated into Roman characters in English. Because our interviewee and related community members may come from different regions of China, and speak different dialects, we have maintained the transliterations that the interviewee and relevant individuals have come to know and use, resulting in spelling variations.

If an individual has a common English name in use, we tend to keep the English name. If there is no English name that can be found and no preference was indicated by the relevant individuals, we will transliterate the name according to the Pin Yin system.

For the Chinese names of North American places used in different historic periods in the two newspapers, we created an index of place names for your reference.

English translation is provided for all the documents including selected articles and interviews so that a wider audience can read and search in the exhibition content. The Chinese texts of the selected articles are transcribed and edited with the hope of leaving the transcripts as close as possible to the original texts. Where necessary we have added extra notes that do not belong to the original text in square brackets, “[ ]”. Where we have guessed a word, we have added “[?]” following it. The symbol “□” is used to represent an unrecognizable character or a missing character. If the original text has more than one character missing, we have added “[missing]” in the transcript. For articles with photos, we did not attach the photos in the transcripts and translations as they can be seen in the articles. However, if there are captions below the photos, we have translated and added “[Photo caption]:” at the end of the text.