The Children's Aid Society of Vancouver was established through the efforts of a group of private citizens concerned about child neglect in the city. The goal of the Society was to protect children from abuse and neglect and to provide them with the family life or other forms of care necessary to enable them to become good citizens. Expenses were met through voluntary contributions and small grants from the provincial and municipal governments. Following World War II, there began a gradual shifting of responsibility from the Children's Aid Society to the developing Child Welfare Services administered by the provincial government.

CHIN Dip was born in China in 1888, an auspicious year in Chinese culture with the number eight sounding similar to the word “fortune” or “wealth.” So, believing he was destined for riches, he wanted to join his uncle in Canada on the Cariboo gold trail. Dip arrived in May 1902. He was 16 and his name was incorrectly recorded as YEN Shar Jap.

Dip never did make a fortune. Instead, he ended up working in his uncle’s food depot serving gold miners in the area around Quesnel Forks, B.C.

Like many Chinese migrants, his loyalty was to the motherland and he aspired to return to a better China. He joined the Chee Kung Tong in Kamloops and raised funds to bring down the Qing Dynasty.

Kwoi Gin recalls that his great grandfather “never spoke much about his life on the Cariboo Trail, except that he handcrafted a knife from metal scraps found along the railroad tracks. He used that knife for protection against those that came into his uncle’s food depot to cause trouble. This blade also was used to cut off his queue after Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s successful 1911 uprising ending centuries of Qing rule. I was gifted this knife on my 15th birthday, nine months before he passed away.”

Around 1911, Dip wanted to return to China to find a wife, but his identity certificate had been destroyed in a kitchen fire in Quesnel Forks. His journey was delayed while he was interrogated by immigration officials and forced to prove his identity. After waiting a year, he finally was issued a replacement certificate for travel to China. There he married a Chinese-German bi-racial woman who was the daughter of missionaries. His wife remained in China and gave birth to a son.

In 1924, Dip travelled from Canada back to China to find his young son a bride. After the wedding, his son reportedly squandered much of the family’s savings and died at age 16, shortly before his young wife gave birth to a baby boy. Dip never returned to bury his son. He travelled to China again around 1932 to meet his grandson (later known as Suey Kee GIN). Shortly after he returned for Canada, the Japanese invaded China and Dip’s wife was killed when the Army invaded the village. It was a dark time for the family with war and the Great Depression making it difficult for Dip to support his surviving family in China.

After WWII, Dip found his best job. He was hired into the household of Joseph Albert Sullivan, a Canadian Olympic ice hockey player, physician, surgeon, and senator. Dip was treated like family and he remained with the Sullivans for over a decade until his retirement in 1956.

Dip’s grandson eventually made it to Canada in 1951, arriving as a “paper son” under the identity of WONG Dai Hing. It should have been a warm reunion. However, Dip, perhaps feeling he had somehow failed his late son, was overly tough on his grandson.

Dip’s dream was to retire in China, but political upheaval meant he was stuck in Hong Kong living near his daughter-in-law, his grandson’s wife, and his great-grandson. He spent his final years back in Canada where he passed away at age 88, another auspicious year, mirroring his birth in 1888.

CHIN Mee Hang arrived in Canada on May 3, 1914, as a single woman. On May 8, she was married by an Anglican minister to WONG Chong Fong in the immigration shed in Vancouver. She claimed to be aged 18, but her year of birth was 1898.

Her new husband was 32 years of age and working as a porter, likely at the same place he lived, at the West Hotel near Vancouver’s Chinatown,

The couple eventually moved to Cumberland on Vancouver Island, and Fong worked as a cook for the local coal miners. By 1921, the couple had two children. They would eventually have five children in total: two daughters and three sons.

As was common at the time, Fong had another family in China and there were long periods he would be away visiting them, leaving Hang to care for their five children on her own. On one visit to China, Fong was murdered, apparently by a member of his own family. That left Hang to struggle on her own in Canada and we are not sure how she made ends meet as there were few social services for Chinese during that period.

Perhaps because of these struggles as a single mother of five in a hostile country, Hang was remembered as being very tough and strict who sometimes played favourites with her grandchildren.

She passed away on September 28, 1955. Her death registration papers indicated she died of pneumonia, with malnutrition likely a contributing factor to her death.

CHIN Nee Yeong (known in Canada as Charlie Chin) was born in China in 1895. He was a mere 13 years old when he stepped foot onto Canadian soil in 1908. Charlie, who arrived in Vancouver the year after the 1907 race riot in Chinatown, still sported a plaited queue. This resulted in him being teased by white boys who pulled at his hair.

Charlie soon found work as a cook with the Pacific Cable Board Cable Station. He lived and worked in Bamfield, B.C., which served as the eastern terminus of the trans-pacific telegraph cable.

In 1959, the company shut down the station. By then, Charlie had worked there for over 50 years. He then moved to Victoria, B.C. where his wife and daughter were living and soon found a job as a cook for Kiwanis Villa, a retirement community. He was also a pastry chef and baker.

Charlie was married twice. His first wife died in China but left him with two children: a boy and a girl. Shortly after, Charlie married a second time in China and had another son born there. Following the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the couple reunited in Victoria and added a daughter to the family who was born in Canada and named Grace (later known as Grace Wong Sneddon).

Later in life, Charlie became a dapper dresser. He always dressed for outings, and believed that impressions matter and “we need to dress like we belong.” Perhaps it was because he had been teased as an impressionable teen in Vancouver when he wore Chinese clothing and still had the long queue down his back.

His daughter, Grace, remembers Charlie accompanying her each year for “back to school” shopping. Grace recalls "we couldn't afford many outfits, but the ones I had were always good quality and fashionable." Although his wife had some difficulty understanding the purchases, Charlie explained, “She has to compete at and above their level.”

Charlie passed away in 1983.

CHIN Ng Jai was born in China in Koo Lung village in the [台山 Toisan / Taishan] district of 廣東 Guangdong province on June 14, 1898.

He arrived in Canada in 1918 and worked as a laundryman in Toronto.

He had a family in China from which he remained separated due to the Chinese Immigration Act. As a result, Chin Ing Jai married a Jewish woman named Rose in Toronto. Together, they had three sons and one daughter.

Chin eventually lost all his laundries and restaurants to gambling debts. After he passed away, Rose married another Chinese man, Lew Doo (also known as Frank Lew).

CHIN Quen Shing was born in Nanaimo, B.C. on April 13, 1923.

He was the eldest son and lived with three brothers and a sister. He also had an adopted brother and an adopted sister from his father’s other wife. His mother sold vegetables from her garden.

Quen moved to Vancouver, where his parents operated a rooming house. Later, they moved due to the construction of the Georgia Viaduct. In 1948, he moved to 15th Avenue and Ontario Street.

Quen attended one year of university. Afterwards, he married Nellie Bake Sun Wong. She was a young Vancouver-born Chinese woman who was an only child. They would have eight children in total.

Quen operated a grocery store on 34th Avenue and Victoria Drive.

In 1951, after his third child was born, he decided to join his brothers in Winnipeg, Manitoba who were in the restaurant business. First, he managed a restaurant in Winnipeg. Later, he became the cook for another restaurant that the families owned together.

A year or two after he moved to Manitoba, his wife and three children joined him in Winnipeg.

In the 1990s, he had a stroke that disabled him, but he lived for another 11 years.

His daughter, Nancy Sze, shared that Quen taught himself to speak Mandarin, practiced tai chi, took Arthur Murray correspondence dance lessons, and studied both accounting and electronics. He also helped people in the Chinese community.

His daughter’s most memorable memory of him was that he “was always learning new skills [and] playing the banjo in his spare time.”

He died on March 20, 2005.

CHIN Sha Wou was born in China on September 16, 1892.

In Canada, he worked as a general labourer on the farms near Ladner, B.C. He stayed in bunkhouses where many other Chinese "bachelor" men lived. He never had enough money to afford to bring over his wife and children during the head tax period. When the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act was made law, it became impossible for him to be reunited with his wife.

Not until 1956 did one of Sha Wou's sons, Tan How Chin, come over from China. But his son's wife and two children--Chuck Chin Sue Lee (nee Chin)--would not arrive until 1959. Two more children--Suzie (who would become Suzie Mah after marriage) and Kenward--would be born in Canada to his son.

Sha Wou, who was by now a senior citizen, would sometimes babysit his grandchildren.

His style of babysitting was described by his granddaughter Suzie: "On his special chair out on the porch, he enjoyed smoking his pipe. He would often supervise me riding my tricycle while he smoked his pipe. One day when my mom came home from work, she was really upset with my grandfather. Years later, she told me why. That day, my grandfather had allowed me to light his pipe with a match. I got too close to the pipe with the lit match, and the flame from the match burnt half of my right eyebrow off! He didn't seem alarmed at the time, and he basically laughed at my mom and said she was just being too dramatic. After all, what was wrong with a four-year old girl playing with matches? At least she was doing something useful!"

Sha Wou never did get to reunite with his wife in Canada. He died on January 25, 1967. His wife did not get approval to immigrate to Canada until 1976.

Sadly, once both Sha Wou and his wife had passed away, they were buried directly across from each other in the same cemetery. However, their grave plots are separated by a road. Just like they were apart in life, they are apart even in death.

CHIN Thick Foo was born in China in 1898 in Ai Long village, Thum Gup township, in the [新寧 Sunning / Xinning] county of 廣東 Guangdong province. The area would later be known as [台山 Toisan / Taishan]. He came from a farming family and was raised by his two older brothers and older sister as his father died when he was an infant and his mother later on.

He arrived in Vancouver, BC on April 6, 1914 and paid the $500 head tax. Although he is recorded as 20 years old, his family shared that he left China at age 16. He traveled in place of his older brother, who was selected to come, but became ill; someone else had to use the purchased passage. At age 16, he was underage and had to prove he was 20, the minimum age of entry.

His youngest son, Wes Chan, shared: “The Chinese interpreter/official said that there was no way that he was 20, but kindly allowed him to enter. My dad told us that the official knew he wasn’t 20, but looked the other way because he was compassionate… The immigration officer who interviewed him was Mr. Won Alexander Cumyow, the first Chinese born in Canada… [Cumyow] took pity on this boy orphan, [and] let him enter and [go] to Weyburn, a small town of a few hundred people in Saskatchewan… [My dad] also told us he came with only 50 cents in his pocket. Pretty amazing story for a 16-year-old to live through and tell and he always made sure we remembered it around his kitchen table talks.”

Thick Foo was sponsored by an ‘uncle’ who brought him over to work in a hotel/restaurant in a small town in South Central Saskatchewan. Over the years, he worked in many towns.

He learned English from Sunday school teachers at the Baptist Church and eventually saved enough to buy his own hotel/restaurant. This was the beginning of his business success. These Baptist teachers also gave him the name Fred, because it sounded the most like Foo.

He returned to China a couple times in the early 1920s to marry (an arranged marriage) and have two sons and a daughter.

The Exclusion Act and war separated them and he lost contact with his family in China; this is when he married Jessie Chow in 1946. However, well after the war, he found out his ‘other family’ was alive, with the exception of his oldest two children who died from disease and possibly starvation.

Fred and Jessie had four children. After many years on the prairies, Fred had eventually settled in the Maritimes and his four children were born in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 1949, Fred's son from his first marriage, Howe Chan, arrived in Canada at age 16 and lived near the family.

He and his family returned to Vancouver in 1968, five years after he sold his business and retired.

Fred passed away in March, 1971 in Burnaby, BC.

Wes Chan noted that his father “truly embraced Canadian culture. He loved all sports, but none greater than ice hockey and Hockey Night in Canada was a Saturday night ritual. His favourite movies were Westerns because they reminded him of the days when cowboys rode into prairie towns wearing six-shooters. And a memorable moment was when Prime Minister Lester Pearson came into his restaurant, The Palace Grill in Moncton NB, where they shook hands.”

Administrative history unavailable.