Yeh, Alice
Alice Yeh (née Yook-Lin Gee) was born in Victoria, British Columbia on October 10, 1919. Alice’s mother, Gee Wong Moey, was widowed in the early 1920s and rented rooms in her house to support the family. The house became a hub of activity in Victoria’s Chinese community. For instance, Alice and her friends used the house as a meeting place for a youth forum, which staged dramatic productions and conducted neighbourhood tours in Chinatown to combat negative stereotypes and raise funds for charitable causes. Alice was extremely active in both her community life and work life. She worked for the postal censorship department in Ottawa, Ontario during World War Two, served as a private secretary to the Taiwanese Ambassador to Japan in the early 1950s, and worked as a social worker for the Catholic Children’s Aid Society in Toronto until her retirement. She also led the Young Women’s Guild at the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Toronto, Ontario, and was an organizer for Canadian branches of the Kuomintang (Nationalist) party. At the time of the interview, Alice resided in Etobicoke, Ontario.
We all called it the chicken house. That school for Chinese – a chicken house.'
In this audio clip, Alice Yeh discusses the protests that followed the segregation of Chinese students in Victoria. In the early 1920s, students of Chinese descent were segregated into a separate school, nicknamed ‘the chicken house.’ By the time Alice was school-aged, schools in Victoria had re-integrated following the protests. She was the only Chinese Canadian in her class, and she says she was ‘put on a pedestal’ because she was different.
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