Gim Wong — page 8

By Julie MacLellan,reporter

"Me, a loyal Canadian, I had to fight to get my wife here," he says.

"When they granted me a few little rights, it was too late."

Yet he's not bitter, not really. He knows there are two sides to every story; he knows there was fear and hysteria in society at that time.

It was that fear that closed the door to Chinese immigration, once people started to worry what would happen when the men who had come over to work on the railroad and in the mines wanted to bring over brides.

"There was the rhetoric, 'They're going to breed like rabbits, you're going to have Chinese all over the place,'" Wong says.

"Let's not say it was wrong. It was no more of hysteria than interning all the Japanese in World War II."

Still, he wants the government to acknowledge past mistakes.

Not so much for himself, but for the earlier generations: the fathers, the grandfathers, the brave young men who left their homeland to search out a better life for their villages by working in the gold mines, on the railroad. NEXT