Chinese pioneer, 95, knew head-tax racism
James Pon was known for his “bitter melon face” and as a “no-play-but-work kind of guy.” For years, the Toronto man sealed his Chinese head-tax certificate in an envelope and hid it from his wife and children, so they would not have any bad feelings about their homeland in Canada. But the nuclear engineer was all smiles when he was invited to Ottawa on June 22, 2006 to hear an official apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper that the country owed him and thousands of other Chinese pioneers who endured 62 years of legislated racism. “I’m grateful that I’ve lived to see this day after years of trying to get Canada just to say sorry,” Pon, then 88, told the Star. “We’ve been waiting for this day for so long. It feels like a dream.” Pon, one of the last Chinese head-tax payers, died Friday morning, his family confirmed. He was 95.
“Mr. Pon was a visionary and founder of numerous communitybased initiatives including Mon Sheong Home for the Aged,” said Victor Wong, of the Chinese Canadian National Council.
Born in China, Pon came to Canada when he was 5. His grandfather was among thousands of Chinese labourers recruited in 1880 to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
In 1922, Pon’s father borrowed $1,000 to pay for his wife and son to join him in Alberta — part of the $23 million Canada would collect through the tax, levied to discourage immigration from China.
In 1939, Pon moved to Toronto to study aircraft design. He was hired as a design engineer only when a sympathetic recruiter at De Havilland Aircraft changed the race on his application from “yellow” to “white.”
He ran his own restaurant for a while before earning engineering and MBA degrees in Michigan and he worked at Atomic Energy of Canada until he retired in 1982.