Chinese veterans battled to end discrimination.
Chinese- Canadians hoped wartime service would prove their loyalty to Canada
Like any mother facing the prospect of sending a child into the killing fields of a distant war, Leong Shee Wong was very upset when she learned that her son Frank had decided to volunteer for the armed forces. But her grief had an added dimension not shared by most wartime parents. Why, she wondered, was her son willing to risk his life for a country that so stringently restricted where he could live, what he could do and denied him citizenship in the place of his birth?
Frank Wong was born in Vancouver in 1919 and grew up in Alert Bay, a small community off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island. He had to sit in the back row of the theatre when he went to the movies and was not allowed in the community swimming pool because he was Chinese. Volunteering for military service, he hoped, would help change all that.
“I decided that if I joined the armed forces and showed my loyalty to my country, hopefully after the war they would give me the right to vote,” said Wong, who is now 92 and living in Vancouver.
It was a debate played out in countless Chinese- Canadian households and community organizations during the Second World War and is the subject of a photo exhibition at the Chinese Cultural Centre starting on Tuesday. ChineseCanadian Veterans: Loyalty to Country tells the story of the men and women who risked their lives for Canada during the Second World War, despite the fact that this country did not consider them citizens and discriminated against them.
Many people have either forgotten about or are not aware of the important contributions of Chinese- Canadians to this country’s war effort, said exhibit curator Judy Lam Maxwell.
“In conventional posters and old photographs, everybody’s white,” she said.
It is also important for more recent Chinese immigrants to recognize what the pioneers went through, she added.
The Canadian armed forces were not enthusiastic about allowing Chinese- Canadians to serve because most countries at the time granted citizenship to foreigners who joined up, said Howe Lee, one of the founders of the Chinese Canadian Military Museum in Vancouver and the highest- ranking ChineseCanadian ever to serve in this country’s armed forces, holding the rank of honorary colonel.
“Discrimination was the worst in B. C. As you go east, it’s not as strict,” he said, explaining that many local Chinese- Canadians went to the Prairies or Eastern Canada to enlist. Much of it came down to the preferences of the individual recruiting officer, he said.
Surprising reaction
Wong was one of the few in B. C. who slipped through the cracks by encountering a sympathetic recruiter. He was surprised to find, while doing his training in Vernon and then near Kingston, Ont., that he did not experience any discrimination in the armed forces.
“Caucasian people would invite me into their homes for dinner or tea,” he recalled. “That had never happened before, so I was quite happy.”
That was also the experience of George Chow, who walked into Victoria’s Bay Street Armoury to sign up for the armed forces in 1940, when he was 18. But unlike Wong, he signed up looking for adventure after seeing several of his schoolmates in his hometown of Colwood — west of Victoria — come home in uniform. He had “no idea whatsoever” what he was getting into, he said.
Chow, now 90 and living in Vancouver, ended up as part of the 16th Light Anti- Aircraft Battery. They trained at Colchester, England, about 90 km northeast of London, where he also, incidentally, met his future wife. His unit was charged with defending the east coast of England against lowflying German planes that were bombing coastal towns such as Eastbourne and Brighton as a way to break morale.
“We were the first all- Canadian gun crew to shoot down a German plane,” he said.
‘ Just brothers’
Racial discrimination played no part in Chow’s wartime experience, either. He recalls becoming particularly chummy with a fellow Island resident from Nanaimo.
“Just brothers, that’s what it amounts to ... . We drank out of the same cup,” he said. “No discrimination at all.”
Both Chow and Wong landed at Juno Beach in Normandy shortly after D- Day in 1944, Chow as part of his artillery unit and Wong as part of the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, a mobile unit whose main function was to follow the artillery to service and repair the guns and equipment.
“What surprised me the most was that once we landed in Normandy, I was promoted to the rank of corporal,” Wong said. “I didn’t expect ... being the only Chinese in the unit, that they would take me to be a corporal.”
Wong’s unit came under enemy fire several times, an experience he recalls as terrifying.
“When I’m scared, I used to say the Lord’s Prayer and that sort of calmed me down,” he said.
Chow also had a couple of close calls, both in France. On one occasion, he was close enough to the front line to be within range of small arms fire; on the other, his position was accidentally bombed by fellow Allied planes near Caen, France, just inland from Juno Beach. He heard the whistle and dived into a trench in time, but three people were killed.
Both Chow and Wong also helped liberate Holland.
Wong recalls how emaciated the people were when they arrived.
“When we went into Holland, the people were starving,” he said.
He and his fellow soldiers gave half their rations to the skeletal children they found picking through garbage cans until their commanding officer