Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 39, Part Two.

     The Lady was A Paranoid. Part Two by Dave Jaffe.


         Irene Wang, born Irene Chow was the eldest of the Chow's five children. Another sister, older than Irene, died in childhood. So Irene had to take care of her younger siblings. She often cooked the meager night time meals of rice and cabbage. She helped her mother pack their tiny piles of possession as the Chow family scuttled from one low rent apartment to another. She even took her younger siblings to school to register them on their first day of public education.
    "I was the head of my family," Chow said. "There was no one else to take care of us all, except for my mother and she was always working in some laundry or restaurant." At times Irene Chow had to confront and deal with creditors who came around to get their bills paid. When she was fourteen Chow dropped out of an east end high school, where she'd faced racism. She ended up working alongside her mother in a laundry, washing and cleaning other women's clothes.
     In world war two, some better paid jobs at lasts opened up to the Chinese. Yet even now, Chinese people had to be careful. Many whites still thought that they were Japanese. And Japan was now at war with Canada. At the start of the war with Japan in the early 1940's, Japanese-Canadians were rounded up and herded into camps in south-eastern B.C. Normie Kwong, the star Edmonton Eskimos' 1950's football player used to walk to school in the 1940's, with a sign pinned to his back saying,"I am Chinese, not Japanese.
     Irene Wong said, "Kwong was clever. Many people hated us back then and I'm sure they wanted to put us Chinese in camps too." At war's end in 1945 Irene took  a cooking course and got a job in a Chinese restaurant. Here she met Arthur Wong, a man who delivered fresh fruit and vegetables to restaurants, including the one where Irene worked. Yet even now, Chinese people had to be careful. The Korean War erupted in the 1950's, and Chinese soldiers from the Chinese army and Canadians fought each other on the Korean peninsula. Once again anti-Chinese hostility surfaced in Canada.
      Anyway Arthur and Irene got married in the early 1950's and started to save money. "We must buy a house," Arthur said and that became the couple's long term goal. For Irene found out that she couldn't have children and so she kept on working.
    By the mid-1960's, the pair had saved enough money to put a big down payment on a house. They bought a small place on Vancouver's west side, not far from city hall. Total price of the home? $10,000. Arthur gave the old owner $6,000 and took out a mortgage to cover the rest of the cost. Yet even here white racism reared its ugly head.  The day after, a happy Irene and Arthur moved into their new home a white male knocked on their door. He soon explained why he'd come. "I''ll give you $1,000 more than you paid for this place if you'll move out of here as soon as possible," he said.
      Like most of the white neighbours, he didn't want any Chinese in the neighbourhood. "Get lost," Arthur told the man who then vanished. No more white people asked them to move again, but most whites didn't come near them again either.