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Fong, Wah Yen
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Dates of existence
1892-1972
History
FONG Wah Yen was born in China in 1892. He arrived in Vancouver in 1914 at the age of 22, paying the $500 head tax to enter Canada. He hailed from the Ning Kai Lee village in the [開平 Hoiping / Kaiping] district of 廣東 Guangdong province, and would travel home frequently to visit his wife and four children.
The village schoolteacher was separated from her husband; she would eventually become Wah’s second wife after his first wife died, securing a future for herself by writing Wah a letter proposing the marriage. She had gone to Nanking to learn about silkworm culture but had to flee on the last train when the Japanese descended in 1937, first to Shanghai, then to 廣州 Guangzhou. By that time, Wah was stranded in Canada, where he often went on business.
After the war ended in 1947, Wah sailed to Hong Kong to reunite with his second wife; they hadn’t seen each other for 15 years. In 1949, they had a daughter named Judy. The family immigrated to Canada in 1955, leaving the children from their first marriages in China. They lived in small Ontario towns, first Allandale (now part of Barrie), and later in Acton.
Wah and his wife ran a hand laundry. They had no refrigerator, no car, no bathtub, and no phone. Judy remembers watching from behind a curtain as customers came to hand over their dirty clothes and soiled underwear. “I never told my friends that my parents had to do this… It’s just with retrospect that you realize how humiliating it was.”
In the summer of 1972, Fong Wah Yen hanged himself in the basement of the tiny row house they had in Toronto’s Chinatown at age 80. His daughter remembers having just had lunch with her parents. The couple had quarrelled, as usual.
Judy would go on to share childhood memories in her novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café, as author Judy Fong Bates. "I think that writing this book was truly an act of love… It's giving back by saying this is what my parents did for me. They sacrificed for me."
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