Using Oral History Methods to Document 75 settle in Vancouver, Canada. Soon after I began this inquiry, however, I came to the realization that the difficulty did not just lie in demonstrating the academic value of understanding people’s subjective experiences of being stateless. Nor was I just confronted with the challenge of building upon the very little information that exists about the ethno-political history of Brunei as a whole, much less the conditions of a minority group whose very legal existence has largely gone unrecognized. In addition to these predicted difficulties, I discovered that many of the respondents themselves simply did not believe that their own stories were worthy of being heard. My requests to speak with them about their pasts were often met with incredulity or skepticism: ‘Why do you want to study such a small country?’; ‘I left [Brunei] such a long time ago! What does it matter anymore?’; ‘Who would care about Chinese people there?’ While these reactions may partly be attributable to shyness or modesty about divulging personal details in an interview, more profound factors may have played a part in producing the self-effacing and dismissive attitudes of many of these respondents. Thus, the outcomes of this research grew to being twofold in nature. Firstly, I sought to humanize the issue of statelessness by describing its emotional and material impacts on Chinese-Bruneian immigrants in Vancouver, and by showing how Brunei’s and Canada’s citizenship policies differentially mediated their civic attitudes. Secondly, by providing an opportunity for people to tell their life stories using their own words, this project served as a way for stateless Chinese-Bruneians to revalue their own histories, and to raise greater awareness about a crisis that has largely remained invisible to the public eye. 2 A Brief Background on Stateless Chinese-Bruneian Immigrants in Vancouver The people upon whom this study focused originated from Brunei Darussalam, a small oil-rich hereditary monarchy that gained independence from Britain in 1984. Covering a relatively tiny area of 5765 square kilometers on the northern end of Borneo island in Southeast Asia, it currently has a population of 402,000 comprising several ethnicities. This includes the dominant Malay group, which forms just over two-thirds of the country’s inhabitants, with the Chinese constituting the largest minority group at around 11% of the population, according to 2011 estimates.1 Despite its multiethnic makeup, citizenship in Brunei 1 United States Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Brunei’ (The World Fact book, 24 September 2013) <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bx.html> accessed 31 August 2011. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 74-80