Story of long-gone Chinatown told on new sign in City Park
The disappearance of a large but marginalized community in Kelowna is described on a new sign in City Park.
A century ago, the first few blocks east of the park had businesses with names like Jung Hung Shoe Repair, Wung Kim Laundry, Wong Bat Store and the Kuomingtang Club House.
Fifteen per cent of the city’s population lived in Kelowna’s Chinatown, long since erased from the urban landscape. Only one of the area’s residents was a woman.
Sue Lee Ping Wong, twice widowed, provided for her 10 children by making and selling tofu.
All the rest of Chinatown’s population were men, most of them married, and many of them destined to never again see their families back in China.
“Your daughter thinks about you every day, longing to see you,” a woman in China wrote to her husband, who was essentially marooned in Kelowna after coming to Canada in the late 1880s to help build the railways.
Her letter is one of the features on the new sign, at the entrance to the City Park parking lot, that was unveiled Saturday by local dignitaries and members of the Chinese-Canadian community.
“Very few people actually know that Kelowna once had a very large Chinatown,” Xiaopin Li, head of the sign committee and a college sociology professor, said Sunday.
The sign aims to inform passersby of a little-known chapter of Kelowna history, a period marked by racism and official discrimination, but also by the determination of Chinese-Canadian men to make the best of their situation and send money back to their families in China.
After the railways were completed, most of the Chinese men did not get the ticket home they’d been promised, Li said. Instead, they found work in agriculture or opened small stores and restaurants.
At first, they couldn’t afford to bring their families to Canada, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 forbade them from doing so.
“Chinatowns in Canada were full of lonely, married men,” the newly erected sign says. “(They) occupied a space on the margins.”
The government of B.C. passed more than 100 pieces of anti-Chinese legislation, including one that said older Chinese could not even be admitted to homes for the aged.
In 2015, the B.C. government issued a formal apology for the way the Chinese had been treated. But the contrition came too late to be of use to men like Wong Woo.
On Sept. 29, 1970, the signs says, he “died alone in Kelowna.”