Gim Wong — page 7

By Julie MacLellan,reporter

"You draft me and I have a right to refuse, because I'm not even a citizen the way you guys have us labelled," he says.

In fact, he and the 500-odd other Chinese men who served in the Armed Forces didn't even have the right to vote - Chinese people had been barred from voting under legislation passed in B.C. in 1871.

They didn't regain that right until the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947.

Wong first voted in 1953, a full decade after he first joined the Air Force.

"Crazy, isn't it?" he muses.

Then, in 1959, he met with government opposition again. He got married in Hong Kong, but his wife was denied immigration papers because she'd attended a Communist school in Canton in 1951 and 1952. She was declared a "Communist" and not allowed into the country.

It wasn't until their MP intervened and they fought for a year that his wife was finally allowed in. NEXT