Person

Wong, Guey Dang

• Wong, James

1902-1983

WONG Guey Dang claimed October 11, 1902 as his birthdate, the day he arrived in Canada. He was a Water Tiger. His Liang birth parents were peasant farmers whose solution to feed the family was to sell their youngest.

Wong Gay Sieng, a successful “Gold Mountain Man” living in Canada, was visiting his wife, Lee Tew May, when he brought home the six-year-old boy they named Guey Dang. Dang replaced their dead infant son. When the boy was 18, Gay Sieng paid for his son’s passage on the Empress of Japan, and the $500 head tax demanded by the Canadian government. He looked forward to showing his son the new world, but he was diagnosed with cancer and returned to China, leaving the boy in Vancouver.

It took eight years before Dang could save enough money to fulfil his father’s wish for him to marry in China. Jobs for Chinese were low-paying and intermittent, labouring or cooking at work camps, or in Chinatown’s restaurants.

Dang chose his wife, Jiang Tew Thloo, from a matchmaker’s photographs, saying, “She is more than beautiful… I can see her goodness. She is the one for me.” Thloo would not see his face until after their wedding in 1929.

When he returned, alone, to Vancouver in 1930, jobs were scarce. A relative with a laundry in Montreal sent Dang a train ticket and provided him a home and a job. Dang later worked in Chinatown. He also cooked for a White family, and they might have called him James.

Dang returned to China to visit his wife and mother just four years later. He built a house and celebrated their daughter’s, Lai Quen, first-month ceremony in 1935. On his next trip in 1947, they had a son, Yuet Wei. Dang arranged for his daughter’s schooling; Lai would become an internist and raise her own family in China. The last time she would spend time with him was during a two-week guided tour in China, in 1973.

In 1954, he and two friends opened their restaurant, China Garden Café, on Stanley Street, in Montreal. Dang would retire in 1978, at age 76.

It took him a number of years after the Chinese Exclusion Act was rescinded before his wife and son could join him; arriving on Christmas day, 1954. She was over 40 and he was in his mid-50s, so both were surprised when a daughter, May Quen, was born.

On his first job at a work camp, Dang, the “Chink,” was beaten and lost two days of wages before he could get up again. But he learned to defend himself with a knuckle duster and a leather sap, earning a grudging respect among the White workers. He felt the sting of discrimination in the city too. Clerks refused to serve him as he strolled through the menswear section in Ogilvy’s, an upscale Montreal department store. A few years later, he went back to buy a cashmere sweater, just to show them he could.

His daughter May remembers “I snuggled into his bed as he prepared to sleep after working the night shift. He regaled me with Chinese fairy tales, and I felt cocooned in his love and familiar smell - a mixture of hair pomade, Old Spice aftershave, and peanut oil.

On my wedding day, Daddy walked me steadily down the aisle, despite the fact that he had not walked more than a few steps in years, due to complications of diabetes. The last time I visited, he didn’t recognize me. My parents’ story is recounted in “A Cowherd in Paradise (2012).”

Description supplied by collector/curator