![\"Tommy](\"http:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/Wong-TomCG-standingIndia.jpg\")
<\/a>Tommy CG Wong – in India<\/p><\/div>\n
Tommy CG Wong has had and amazing life. At the tender age of 7, his mother returned to\u00a0China and he was left in the care of his father on Vancouver Island. However,\u00a0his father needed to work out of town and that meant spending the entire\u00a0week far away from his kids.<\/p>\n
Wong, and his younger brother, were left alone without any adults to take care of them. They were housed in a tiny\u00a0room in a boarding house. As the eldest, Tommy was responsible for feeding and taking care of his baby brother.<\/p>\n
“On the weekends, when my father was back from work, he would cook food\u00a0for us,” Tommy recalls. “He would cut it up into pieces and that needed to\u00a0last us the whole week. That’s what me and my brother would eat during the week when we were on our own.”<\/p>\n
No other family seemed to notice these two young Chinese boys left to fend for themselves the whole week.<\/p>\n
By the time Tommy reached\u00a0adulthood, Canada was at war. And like hundreds of other young Chinese Canadian men, he wanted to serve his country.\u00a0Although most were initially rejected by the Canadian Army due to their race, once Japan entered the war and invaded large areas of Southeast Asia, suddenly Chinese Canadians were considered valuable soldiers. They could blend into to the populations of Asia and carry out clandestine work.<\/p>\n
Wong got the call up and was sent to Maple Creek, Saskatchewan for basic training.<\/p>\n
In late 1944, Wong\u00a0became a member of Force 136 – a Special Executive Operations group that was assigned to the\u00a0South East Asia Theatre of war. \u00a0Force 136 was created to help establish\u00a0and supply resistance movements in Japanese-occupied territory, and also\u00a0undertake\u00a0clandestine sabotage operations.<\/p>\n
He was seconded to\u00a0the\u00a0British Army and was shipped\u00a0to\u00a0India. Wong was trained\u00a0in\u00a0commando fighting and jungle survival, but he later specialized in\u00a0wireless operations.<\/p>\n
“We were trained in lots of things,” Wong recalls. “Because, when they would drop us in, we knew we would be more or less on our own. We would need to survive on our own. And we had to train the local people by ourselves, so we had to know everything.”<\/p>\n