Gu Xiong has known many low points in his life. One of the lowest was shortly after he moved to Canada from China following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Before emigrating, Gu had been a well-respected professor of art. He was also a well-known artist.
In Vancouver, while he was working at the University of B.C., it wasn’t as a professor or an artist. He was cleaning tables as a busboy in the cafeteria.
“The first time I wore the busboy uniform, I couldn’t hold my head up,” he said in an interview in 2003. “I couldn’t look at anyone. I started to question myself.”
Gu, however, was resilient. It didn’t take him long before he was looking at garbage differently. He started to identify with the trash — he imagined he was getting rid of his inner garbage every time he cleared a table and threw leftovers in the bin.
“He began to think of his life like a crushed Coca-Cola can,” wrote Yvonne Zacharias in the profile of the artist.
Gu turned his job working as a busboy into art about garbage. Two years later, Gu’s World opened at the Diane Farris Gallery.
It didn’t take long for Gu to live up to the immigrant dream of success. Nine years after working as a busboy, he was hired by UBC, where he is now a professor in the department of art history, visual art and theory. He is also a multimedia artist and writer.
Gu doesn’t play down how difficult it was for him to adapt to a new life and learn a new language in Vancouver.
Born in Chongqing, Gu came from a family that suffered because of the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956. His father was imprisoned in a labour camp for nearly 30 years. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, because of his father’s legacy, Gu was sent to the countryside to work up to 16 hours a day as a farm labourer.
After arriving in Vancouver, he worked at three jobs in the first month: in a laundry, a car wash, and then making pizza. His job as a busboy at UBC was a big improvement as his hourly wage doubled to $10.
In The Yellow Pear, a book he wrote and illustrated, Gu recalled living in a basement suite with his wife, Ge Ni, and daughter, Gu Yu.
“It had two small windows that faced the concrete wall outside, which made us feel closed in,” Gu wrote.
“The rooms were dark and the ceiling so low that my head almost touched it. The people who lived upstairs were very noisy and constantly drunk. … Although Vancouver is a beautiful city, we could not enjoy it because life was so hard. My wife and I worked every day at low-paying jobs to support our family. The basement was our only landscape.”
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