King, Victoria
Victoria King was born in 1930 in Victoria, British Columbia. Her mother came to Canada in 1912 to join her husband, bringing with her two female servants (mui tsai), who later went to an orphanage. Victoria recalls that her mother’s feet were bound and that she never left the house by herself. One of nine children, Victoria was expected to help her siblings with household chores such as chopping kindling, lighting the stove and doing the washing. She attended elementary and secondary school, and though she was a top student, she looked forward to leaving school after Grade 10 to work and earn money. Over the years, Victoria has held many jobs: as a worker at a Dad’s cookie factory, an order clerk at the Hudson’s Bay Company, a flight attendant for Canadian Pacific Airlines and a hostess at the Rickshaw restaurant. An enterprising spirit led her to the real estate field and the buying and management of properties. While she was raising her family in the 1960s, she began running successful restaurants just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia in the towns of Whally and Langley. When she wanted to open a restaurant in Langley, some of the neighbours didn’t want a Chinese-owned business on the main strip. In response to racial prejudice, Victoria responds: ‘I’m born in Canada….I pay my taxes. I have just as much right as them.’ At the time of the interview, she continued to reside in the Vancouver area.
‘I [was] born in Canada. I'm not from Timbuktu, taking the food out of their mouth. I have just as much right as they [do].’
In this audio clip, Victoria King tells an anecdote from her days as the first Chinese Canadian selling real estate in Whalley, British Columbia. When a fellow real estate agent asked her if her client was White, implying that she was encroaching on his client base, she cleverly replied: ‘He’s green.’
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