Shui Jim Wong – update
身在異鄉為異客
A fond farewell to a man without a country: Kind 72-year-old fought for Canadian citizenship
by
Nicholas Keung, staff reporter
Toronto Star, March 17, 2002
They each knew a different facet of Shui Jim Wong during his life, but it wasn’t until they assembled to mourn his death that a complete picture of the homeless Chinese man began to emerge.
In recalling the “kindness and generosity” of the 72-year-old man who lived in Canada with no real name and family, they saw beyond the stark facts of Wong’s life. Instead of his poverty, isolation and homelessness, they focused on the good he did during his life, and the bonds he forged at the end as he worked as a counsellor in a Toronto homeless shelter.
“Perhaps it is precisely the ordinariness of his life which made the circumstances of his death so much more compelling and tragic … and brings us all together to understand what his life and his death mean to us,” Avvy Go told 100 mourners yesterday during her eulogy. Go, director of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, befriended Wong during his last years as she pitched in to help the man fight for the Canadian citizenship he’d been denied for years.
Many of the people who mourned Wong’s death yesterday didn’t know about his struggle for survival until reading about it in The Star last week. But they were among the first to offer assistance to ensure the elderly Chinese immigrant received a dignified burial.
Wong came to Canada from Guangzhou in 1955 as a “paper son” – one of about 11,000 Chinese migrants who purchased the immigration papers of an unrelated Canadian-born or naturalized Chinese man who had died – during an era when restrictive immigration laws tended to exclude Chinese. He died of a massive heart attack last Wednesday.
For years, Wong assumed the name of On Wong and worked as a chef at Chinese restaurants across Ontario. But in 1985 he was laid off by his employer in Fort Erie because he was considered too old. Homeless, he stayed in garages, abandoned buildings and bus shelters. At one time, he applied to become a citizen under a federal program, but it was never followed up.
He did not have any family in Canada other than a supportive “adoptive family” at Seaton House and Birchmount Residence, where he stayed the five years before his death.
James Pong, who met Wong in the 1950s while the two were working in the food industry, was shocked when he read about his pauper’s death. “I last saw On Wong in the mid-1960s. You can’t help feeling sad for the sorry ending of a great man like On Wong,” said Pong, who is now a director at the Cheung On Chapel/Ingram Funeral Home.
Pong immediately contacted Wong’s shelter workers to provide a free funeral service. A woman also donated a plot at the York Cemetery at Sheppard Ave. and Yonge St., where Wong was buried with a headstone marked with his real name.
Friend Ken Wong, 74, said Wong was very generous and would always lend a helping hand to others in need. Ironically, Wong was a community activist in his early days in Canada, helping new immigrants from his homeland, said friend Jeffrey Wong. “On Wong helped run a credit union to help others with money problems. He worked in a restaurant for 13, 14 hours a day, but still contributed a lot to the community,” said the 78-year-old man. “But On Wong was a very dignified man. Even in his homeless days.”
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