Veteran and club owner made a difference to Vancouver
Alex Louie was among those Chinese- Canadian soldiers whose Second World War contributions resulted in them getting the right to vote
Alex Louie, a Vancouver businessman and a veteran who made a difference in this city and country, died Saturday of heart failure. He was 86.
Louie might be best known to Vancouverites as one of the trio of brothers who ran the Marco Polo Supper Club from the 1960s to the early 1980s. The Marco Polo, the first Chinese smorgasbord restaurant and night club in Vancouver’s Chinatown, featured big acts for the time, including Mitzi Gaynor, The Fifth Dimension, Linda Ronstadt, Bill Haley and the Comets and comedian Pat Paulsen. He and brothers Victor and Henry were also pioneers of the Asian food import business with Le Kiu Asian Foods. Louie was a grandson of H. Y. ( Hok Yat) Louie, whose descendants have grown what began as a general store in Chinatown, into the H. Y. Louie Co., the second largest B. C. company which includes London Drugs and the IGA food chain.
During the Second World War, he was trained as a Morse code operator to serve on Force 136, an elite British operation that assisted resistance movements in enemy- occupied territories in Southeast Asia. ChineseCanadians soldiers were recruited to blend into the population for covert operations behind enemy lines. Previously, Chinese- Canadians had been prevented from serving in the Canadian military.
Louie enlisted and trained, knowing he had an 80- per- cent chance of not returning home, but the war ended before he was dispatched behind enemy lines. Force 136 was portrayed in the 1957 movie, Bridge Over the River Kwai. The Chinese- Canadian soldiers’ wartime contribution resulted in them receiving the right to vote in 1949.
One of Louie’s daughters, filmmaker Jari Osborne, wrote and directed a 1999 National Film Board documentary, Unwanted Soldiers, about the Chinese- Canadian men who participated in Force 136. In it, she focused on her father who “polished his medals every Remembrance Day and marched to the cenotaph” in Vancouver. The documentary won four major awards, including a Gemini and a Hot Docs.
Louie rode the Redress Train to Ottawa in 2007 to hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologize in the House of Commons for the head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act. After visiting China when Louie was 13, his mother had been prohibited from re- entering Canada to raise her family, even though she bore her children here and three of her sons had served in the Canadian military. She was finally allowed to return in the 1960s. His daughter Alexina Louie of Toronto is an officer of the Order of Canada and received an Order of Ontario and won two Junos for her work as a composer in several musical genres. She wrote the orchestral score, The Ringing Earth, for the opening ceremonies of Expo 86.
Louie is survived by his wife, Pat, their children Alexina, Jari, Karen and Mark, and sister Dorothy Sing. He has seven grandchildren, Brea Jovanovic, Brodie, Jamie and Tanis Louie, Alexa Lin Osborne, and Jasmine and Jade Pauk.