- Person
- 1891-1976
After a month at sea aboard the freighter Inaba Maru, 20-year old Chow Fun arrived in Victoria on July 19, 1911 and paid the $500 head tax to enter Canada.
At some point, Chow Fun left Victoria for the B.C. mainland. By 1924, he was living in Mission City and working as a labourer. His family believes he worked at one time as a farmer, then a laundryman and, later in life, as a waiter.
Chow Fun traveled back to China twice. On these visits, he fathered two daughters: Lai Ping and Lai Kwan. Following the repeal of the Exclusion Act, Chow Fun applied for and was granted Canadian citizenship in 1954.
The following year, he sponsored a “paper son” to Canada. CHOW Chew-Leong was, in fact, Fun’s son-in-law married to his daughter, Lai Kwan. It would take another decade before Lai Kwan arrived in Vancouver in 1965 with her two children: George (14) and John (10). Fun’s other daughter, Lai Ping, and her family were sponsored by a Winnipeg church as a refugee family and landed in Winnipeg in 1963.
Even with his family in Canada, Chow Fun continued to live a solitary existence. In Vancouver, his daughter, Lai Kwan and her husband were busy trying to survive and earn a living.
After decades on his own, Chow Fun was familiar with and comfortable with the bachelor’s life. He continued to live independently in a rooming house in Chinatown where he rented a tiny room with a hotplate and a shared washroom down the hall. At one point, Chow Fun lived in the back of the same building as his daughter at 634 Main. Generally, he was quiet around his family and kept to himself.
Chow Fun died in 1976. He passed away knowing he had done his job well. He had sustained his family in China for years on what were likely meagre wages and had managed to get them all safely over to Canada after the repeal.
His grandson, George King Chow, would go on to become a mechanical engineer, and become involved in municipal and provincial politics, with the City of Vancouver and Province of British Columbia, respectively. In fact, in his role as minister in the B.C. government, George Chow would be instrumental in establishing the Chinese Canadian Museum of B.C., an institution dedicated to sharing the story of the Chinese Canadian experience.