What we regard as truth in public memory can be so arbitrary sometimes. A small error in an archival description can turn a celebratory parade into a funeral, a lion into a dragon, a dragon into a lion. A slight error in someone’s name can erase their traces and the people around them from history, as if they never existed and can never be found.

The Chinese faces in official institutional archives may not be named or remembered, but the white ones are. English correspondence is preserved, oral histories are transcribed, but Chinese ones rarely appear. When they do, they’re often left untranscribed, untranslated, even unlabeled, rendering them illegible to the anglophone world.

Every so often, I go to the City of Vancouver Archives to find a photo, verify a record, or follow a hunch.

And every time I go in there, despite uncovering hidden treasures of Chinese diasporic history in Vancouver, I leave with a sour taste. An incorrect label here, another incorrect label there. These errors compound because the labels are treated as authoritative, cited in books, news articles, and museum exhibits. Over time, the mistakes become truth, and the absences they create deepen what scholars call archival silences, meaning the omissions, distortions, and exclusions that shape who gets remembered, and how.

In the City of Vancouver Archives, Chinese lions are frequently mislabeled as dragons, and dragons as lions. Sometimes, in an act of hedging, a lion is labeled as both a dragon and a lion. It always baffles me. Over the years, I’ve requested corrections, and while some labels have been changed, many remain incorrect.

And it’s not just Vancouver. This specific error is persistent across major archives, including the Vancouver Public Library Archives, San Francisco Public Library Archives, Seattle Archives, New York City Archives, City of Sydney Archives. Even the U.S. National Archives mislabels Chinese lions as dragons.

What does it mean to remember?

Who gets to do the remembering?

In my medical laboratory science degree, we had an entire course on identifying cells through imagery. We were trained to notice both large and subtle differences in cell composition, like distinguishing a tongue cell from a bladder cell, an early-stage cell from a late-stage one, a healthy cell from one that could signal cancer. A misidentification could mean the difference between life and death.

And yet, the process was simple: you compare your subject to reference images and label it. Before microscopic photography, artists even illustrated cells for diagnosis by comparison. Precision matters.

How is it that archives can’t distinguish a Chinese lion from a dragon? One is a big furry cat with four legs. The other is a long scaly snake with antlers. They’re visually distinct. Even within Western mythology, lions and dragons are separate creatures. The resemblance is familiar enough that it’s hard to believe the confusion is innocent.

So is it a lion or a dragon? No, it’s racism.

Perhaps institutions just don’t care to remember, or don’t care to get it right when it comes to racialized people’s histories. To assume that all Chinese mythological creatures are dragons, because that’s the most visible part of Chinese culture you know, is to adopt a position of white supremacy that deliberately simplifies and flattens people’s cultures. Ironically, there is institutional rigor and sensitivity in creating policies and procedures to detect microscopic details of cells, yet the rich complexity of human culture is rendered invisible.

Outside of the City of Toronto Archives, I have yet to find another archival institution in a white-majority, English-speaking society in the Global North that consistently classifies Chinese lions and dragons accurately. It’s difficult to not view it as a form of overt institutional racism baked into how public memory is constructed.

Unsurprisingly, archives in places with large Sinophone diasporas, such as the National Archives of Singapore, have no trouble correctly identifying lions and dragons.

Because what harm is there in mistaking a lion for a dragon? Cultural erasure. Distortion. Appropriation. Structural racism. A rewriting of history. It may not be death, but it is harmful. It’s institutionalized dehumanization.

This isn’t just an honest mistake. It’s a form of epistemic violence. It’s a refusal to pay attention. It sends a clear message that the histories of racialized people don’t matter. And if the past is silenced, the future will be too, unless there are interventions.

I want to imagine a world where there’s a better way to do archiving—a care-based archival practice where histories are, at minimum, co-authored with racialized communities. Where we can help contextualize our own materials, and label them in our own languages and cultural understandings. Or, even to start, there could be more public-friendly systems that allow people to submit corrections, with transparency and accountability for when those corrections are verified and completed. Or perhaps even simpler: when you don’t know what a cultural object, symbol, or practice is, just ask.

Racialized people deserve a place in public memory. We deserve a say in how our histories are recorded, and how they are cared for. 

Lions deserve to be lions. Dragons deserve to be dragons.