Wong, Claire
Claire Yim Tong Wong was born in Macau in 1942, and lived in Guangdong province (China) and Hong Kong before coming to Canada at age 11. Her father, Allen Jew Wong, moved to Canada from China as a teenager. In his twenties, he traveled back to China to get married. For many years, Allen traveled back and forth between Canada, where he worked, and China, where his family lived. When the communists took power in China in 1949, Allen urged his family to move to Hong Kong, which they did. In 1953, Claire emigrated from Hong Kong with her mother, Lee Ho, and siblings to reunite with her father and settle in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. There, Claire attended school and helped her family in their restaurant in the evenings. At the time, Yarmouth was home to very few other Chinese immigrants, which made Claire feel more like a curiosity than a target for discrimination. As a teenager, she moved to Montreal and lived with her sister while completing her last year of high school. After high school, she worked for Bell Telephone before getting married and starting a family. A devout Protestant, Claire has attended the Montreal Chinese Presbyterian Church and St. Genevieve’s United Church in Montreal.
In part one of a three-part interview, Claire Wong discusses her childhood in China and her family’s immigration history. She describes how her parents met and got married, and her father’s regular visits from Canada before the family reunited in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in 1953. She speculates about her mother’s experiences during this period and describes the arrival of her family in Yarmouth.
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