Gim Wong — page 4

By Julie MacLellan,reporter

At the time, Wong recalls, average lots in Vancouver were selling for $100 each, and the equivalent of 10 pieces of property was simply far out of reach.

As a child, he remembers the arguments about money every year around Christmas time, when the family would prepare to send money back to their home villages for Chinese New Year. His mother wanted to send back $20 to each village, both hers and her husband's.

"That was three months' rent," he remembers.

All around him, he saw people living in poverty who were forced to scrape out a living while trying desperately to pay back the money they had borrowed to make it into Canada.

The $500 was money that would have paid two years' wages for an average worker - and that was for a white man.

"I've seen so darn much of it. I can't tell you some of the suffering of my cousins, uncles," Wong says. NEXT