Gim Wong — page 3

By Julie MacLellan,reporter

His family, like many others of the time, lived in the poorest of conditions.

His father ran a laundry, and the family lived at the back in a small structure built of a single layer of clapboard.

The roof leaked; the floor was cement; there was one cold water tap without even a sink. Indoor plumbing, of course, was unheard of: the toilet was outside in the woodshed.

At that, he supposes he was lucky. In Chinatown at the time, many men lived in small quarters - just a room shared by all the men who'd come from one village.

"Most of the Chinese families lived way below the subsistence level," he says.

It wasn't so much being on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. As he puts it, "We weren't even hanging onto the ladder."

His parents never had much money. They had to borrow $1,000 to go to Canada - a sum that would take years to pay back. NEXT