Chapter 39: The Lady Who Was Paranoid. Part One
Suppose you met Irene Wang just before the year 2000. You'd see a short, thin 70 something Chinese Canadian woman who walked briskly and seemed content. Yet then when you probed a little further, her problems or obsessions would pop up. "My brother and sister, " this long time resident of Vancouver would say, "want me dead. They want to kill me and take my house."
A man who met her in 1999 simply replied, "Irene, they don't want you dead. They just want your house after you die. They're not going to kill you, believe me." No, Wong would insist. Her brother and sister , the older ones any way - for she had two of each - wanted to kill her. They also were stealing money from her right now. Though how this was happening, she couldn't really say, since as she admitted, "I don't have much money at all."
Irene didn't start off as a paranoid. She was born in Vancouver in the 1920's to a Chinese couple. The father, Irene 's father whose last name was Chow, disappeared after he and her mother had produced six children. After he left, the Chow family was really poor. And they were Chinese or as people used to call Chinese back then, they were 'Oriental"
Chinese people came to British Columbia in the 1850's. Yet they were not welcome there. "Hostility towards the Chinese began to emerge among non-union workers during the late 1860"," writes George Woodcock in his history of B.C.. By the 1880's, more Chinese immigrants arrived. Then anti-Chinese feelings really heated up. Anti-Asian sentiment soon targeted not only the Chinese but also the new Japanese and Indian immigrants. Anti-Asian riots swept Vancouver in the early 20th century. Most unions were totally hostile to Asian newcomers. One exception to this sad fact, was the International Workers of the World, or the 'Wobblies' as they were called.
New racist anti-Asian laws were soon enacted in Ottawa and Victoria where the provincial government now sat. Chinese newcomers faced massive so-called 'head taxes' which were designed to stop any Chinese immigrants from coming to Canada. By the 1920's, few Chinese or other Asian peoples came to B.C. or Canada. Most Chinese people lived in small Chinatowns. Few of them ventured out to live elsewhere since most laws forbade Asian buyers in Caucasian neighbourhooods. Nor could any Asian peoples change the racist set-up they faced. They weren't even allowed to vote in most Canadian elections until the late 1940's.
Most of the time they were a powerless minority. Chinese men and women worked mostly in market gardens, laundry shops, and restaurants. Some were servants in white people's homes. Chinese women toiled away in lousy jobs with poor pay. Irene Wong grew up in tough times that made the lives of Chinese people even worse In the 1930's the Great Depression swept across the world. It hit B.C. really hard. Mines closed, sawmills shut down and owners shuttered their fishing plants or slashed the wages of their workers.
Many years later, Irene Wong had a bet with a Caucasian man who had also been poor in his youth. "I bet my family moved more times than yours did, because we couldn't pay the rent," she said. It was no contest. Irene won the bet hands down.
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