My Journey Page 5

  I knew that if I was to be true to my faith, and to my life priorities, I had to act now so that those who are most vulnerable are protected. Rather than being the last in line to be served, they should be the first.

  I was born in the Year of the Rooster in the Chinese zodiac calendar. I put as much faith in what that portends as I do in astrological forecasts—which is to say, no faith at all. But if you’re curious to know how those of us born under the rooster sign are characterized, here it is: we are said to be talkative, outspoken, motivated, hard-working, confident, multi-talented and healthy types who enjoy hiking and swimming. All of that, I would say, holds true for me. But we are also said to be vain and boastful; I will leave it to readers of this book to be the judge of that.

  When I arrived in Canada at the age of thirteen, I went through a period of shyness that was not at all in keeping with the bold girl who grew up in Hong Kong and who was clearly leader of the gang in playgrounds. And there’s no hint of shyness in me now, as my friends and political foes will attest. But during my teenage years, new language and culture and adolescent awkwardness combined to usher in a period of reserve.

  Winnie Ng and Dr. Joseph Wong were two individuals who were a major influence on drawing me into political activism in the late seventies. Winnie has been active in the labour movement all her adult life and now teaches courses in social justice at Ryerson University. But in 1977, a group she belonged to, Chinese Canadians for Mutual Advancement, hired me as a summer student to work as part of a team producing a documentary slide show about the history of the Chinese in Canada.

  At our first meeting, I was joined by a young filmmaker named Nancy Tong—another immigrant from Hong Kong who had also been educated by the Maryknoll nuns. Nancy would become my best friend. I was nineteen years old and a student at the Ontario College of Art; my task was to do research and create graphics—some of which were used in the slide show. While Nancy supplied the structure, the narrative and the texts, I helped with the visuals. For the first time, both of us learned about the history of Chinese Canadians and the injustice they had experienced.

  For Nancy and for me, this was the dawning of our political awareness as we came to understand the power of systemic racism. Both of us were art students at the time, and this project opened up our eyes and showed us how art and social justice can meld. Art is not just for art’s sake. Art can also foster social and political awareness.

  Still, my political awakening happened slowly.

  Winnie recalls that I was more reticent then. She assumed this owed something to my artistic temperament. Still, she saw my potential. Joseph Wong likewise remembers me then as having few to no political bones in my body—at least in the beginning. I struck him as very young, with few ideas on social justice. But through action, we all learned along the way. By action, I mean the rally in the park and a host of other activities that would mobilize the Chinese-Canadian community during the years and decades to come.

  There is a Cantonese word, guo, meaning “the hand that stirs.” Starting in 1979, Joseph, Winnie and I and a great many others started stirring the pot. Many, many pots. But the first pot stirred had to do with the boat people.

  “The Vietnamese boat people” was an umbrella term for the more than one million refugees who fled the war-torn countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the late seventies. They left their homelands in waves, at first because some of them had supported the South Vietnam–US alliance during the war against North Vietnam. The victorious Communist government was now exacting its revenge, sending countless Vietnamese to prison or labour camps. Then a second wave of ethnic Chinese fled during the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 when they, too, faced expulsion or forced labour. These refugees set out in leaky fishing boats in hopes that once in international waters, help might be forthcoming.

  Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. These desperate people had bribed government officials (the going rate was five to six ounces of gold per citizen) and then had to pay smugglers who packed them into barely seaworthy boats. Once at sea, the refugees were vulnerable to pirates who often raped the female passengers, tossed some passengers overboard and pillaged their possessions. Many drowned. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees put the number of deaths at between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand.

  Refuge seekers put themselves at the mercy of passing ships in the South China Sea. At first, both refuge and mercy were shown. Men, women and children were picked up and then dropped off at ports in Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. But governments there, wary of being overwhelmed by refugees, began to insist that refugee claimants present guarantees that Western countries would offer them permanent resettlement. For its part, the no-nonsense government of Malaysia warned that Indo-Chinese refugees deposited on its shores would be shot. At that point, humanitarian help at sea dried up. In one case, bad weather drove a ship with ninety-three refugees aboard onto a reef off an island in Vietnamese waters where soldiers used artillery, machine-gun fire and mortars to kill all but eight of them. Many such atrocities reached the Western press, and as awareness grew, so did outrage.

  Dr. Joseph Wong, a family doctor, remembers going home after a day at his medical clinic and heading for the back of the bus so he could weep without being noticed. Nothing was being done to help these people. Finally, Joseph met with a small group that included his wife, Christine, and Winnie Ng. They formed an organization, the Toronto Interagency Project for Southeast Asian Refugees, and they joined forces with Operation Lifeline, a refugee sponsorship group led by Howard Adelman, a philosophy professor at York University. Eventually, the Canadian government responded. More than a hundred thousand refugees landed in this country, an extraordinary achievement.

  For me and for many others, the starting point for getting the Canadian government, Canadian citizens and Canadian churches, synagogues and temples involved in sponsoring refugees was that rally in Grange Park. Cleverly, Dr. Wong had arranged for a child of ten to address the rally. The boy’s family, the Luongs, had set out in one of those overcrowded boats, and of his twenty-five relations aboard, only seven survived the ordeal. Having someone describe social injustice is one thing; hearing from an actual victim of such injustice is quite another.

  Sponsorship took off—because of all the publicity, because of the sheer number of victims, because of the staggering cruelty. And also because Canadians were being praised around the world for our generosity: on a per capita basis, no country took in more refugees than Canada. Sophocles once said, “Kindness begets kindness.” Widely circulated stories of Canadian generosity only served to encourage more Canadians to be more generous as they saw the goodness in themselves.

  “Many people became full-time volunteers,” Joseph Wong remembers. “Sponsorship spread like wildfire. I have not seen anything like it since.”

  All these dispossessed families needed help settling in. I got a job in immigrant services at WoodGreen Community Services and started working with Vietnamese refugees and Chinese immigrants. Typically, sponsor families looked after them for one year, but at the end of that year they were expected to manage on their own. I was profoundly affected by their suffering. This was a humanitarian crisis on a level I had not seen before, yet these new Canadians valiantly struggled to move forward in life. I organized all sorts of classes for them—cooking, income tax, badminton, swimming, English as a second language—and I advocated for them in every way I could.

  But it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. I remember one time being at the church for Saturday-afternoon fellowship and hymn singing. Through the window I spotted a homeless man, and I wondered: What’s our response to his plight? The church choir would sing at the nearby Scott Mission (it has offered food, clothing and shelter to the poor and the homeless since 1941) in hopes of “saving” these people. But what does saving mean? Where was the justice? I was now having debates with elders at my church about other religions, about how the Bible should be interpreted and about the church’s response to social injustice. I wanted to retain my faith but felt that I needed to find another spiritual home and to seek out another place where people of similar beliefs were gathered to worship.

  One day I saw on the front page of the Toronto Star a sculpture of a female in the form of a crucifix. The sculpture was hugely controversial, for how dare a church put this female crucifix in front of the altar? Intrigued, I went to a Sunday service at the Bloor Street United Church, and here I learned from Reverend Clifford Elliott the power of mercy and forgiveness, and a feminine aspect of Christianity that was being ignored by the traditional male-dominated churches. I learned that the crucifix does not represent justice alone, and that equally important are the concepts of love and grace. This inspirational sculpture and message spoke to me, so I stayed and became a member of the United Church.

  In the meantime, I could see a change in how I viewed the world.

  Winnie Ng puts it this way. “We all need time to connect the dots. When you started working for WoodGreen Community Services, the personal became political. We all became stirrers of pots.”

  Winnie Ng, Dr. Joseph Wong, Olivia Chow: we were all born in Hong Kong, where no political dissent was allowed. As Joseph says, “You listened, you obeyed.” Canada wasn’t like that. The boat people issue taught us what was possible if we took a stand, if we educated ourselves, if we organized and strategized, if we garnered media interest and mobilized public opinion. The refugee issue was our training ground. And when, a few months later, CTV ran a program titled “Campus Giveaway” suggesting that Asian kids were pushing out other students in Canadian universities … or years later, when a deputy mayor in the suburban city of Markham suggested that “everything is going Chinese,” implying that an influx of Asians had somehow
damaged the social fabric of her community … or when resolution to the longstanding Chinese head tax issue looked to be stalled, we knew how to proceed.

  We stirred the pot.

  By this time, I had changed. The artist became an activist—and then she got political.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Two Dans

  I learned from Dan Leckie that a key ingredient of success is to bring diversity together—whether you are gardening, cooking a good meal or getting things done politically.

  The first time I saw Dan Heap was in the pouring rain at Grange Park in Toronto. There he stood, bearded and rumpled, his bicycle close by.

  Hundreds of people had assembled there in 1979 to protest the plight of the Vietnamese boat people. The gathering at the park was meant to raise awareness of their situation and to goad the Canadian government into action. But what was a city alderman, as Dan Heap then was, doing here? He was a social justice advocate and an ordained Anglican priest who believed that compassion does not end at constituency borders. He was calling on Canadians to offer these refugees sanctuary.

  As a Christian, I was there out of a love-thy-neighbour sense of compassion. It struck me then that if this man cared enough to come out in the rain to speak for the dispossessed, he must be all right.

  One year later, at the end of 1980, Dan was running as a federal candidate for the New Democratic Party in the Spadina riding. (Now called Trinity-Spadina, it’s the seat I would represent many years later.) Dan wanted to honour his commitment to the large number of Chinese constituents, and was looking for a Chinese-speaking assistant. Dr. Joseph Wong, who had introduced me to community activism, now played a hand in the next phase of my political life.

  Joseph asked Dan to seek me out. So late one evening, Dan came by WoodGreen Community Services, where I was organizing a large group of volunteers stuffing fundraising letters into envelopes. He asked if I would join his campaign team. Soon after, I became one of his constituency assistants. I moved into the basement of a house one street away from the office and literally spent all my waking hours at the office.

  Thus was I drawn into the maw of politics.

  Dan Heap was a sincere man who practised politics with a particular style. He was dedicated to giving voice to the voiceless and to social justice—and these goals would later become my goals, too. Many of the issues that Dan embraced—poverty, homelessness, the peace movement, immigration matters, social housing—were ones that I would later embrace as an elected official. I admired Dan and his wife, Alice, for the way they lived their lives, offering their own home as a base of operations (and free bunk) for young people who fought the good fight. When it came time to sell their home in Kensington Market, they sold it at much below market value to a community organization that was helping refugees. And Dan was co-founder, in the late nineties, of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, which for more than a decade waged a vigorous campaign on behalf of the homeless.

  I can see Dan now: he’s wearing flat shoes (no fancy loafers for him), black jeans, a white shirt in need of pressing, and over it a tweed jacket with patches at the elbows.

  What I loved about Dan Heap was his integrity, his bravery and his passion. He was a worker-priest and an authentic man. When he had first been elected as an alderman in 1971, he made a joyous promise during his victory party: “We’re going to organize the ward!” He didn’t mean organize so he could stay in power; he meant organize to give neighbourhoods a say in issues that mattered to them. The Italians in his riding, the Portuguese, the working people who lived south of Bloor Street, all loved him because he knew how hard it was to make a living. And the affluent folks in the Annex north of Bloor likewise loved him because many of them embraced his work on peace and disarmament.

  We ran his constituency office in Toronto much like a community drop-in centre. And Dan wasn’t the sort of politician who filled his constituency newsletters with fluff. Ours were substantial, with stories about the anti-war movement and cruise missile testing, immigrant workers who were being exploited in the garment industry, and the union of unemployed workers.

  Dan Heap would talk to the press if necessary, but he preferred the direct route to get his message across. But as his assistant, I often talked to reporters. I would get so outraged about some injustice inflicted on immigrants that I would pick up the phone and call a journalist so I could shine a spotlight on the issue at hand.

  I also realized that very few Chinese Canadians, or any other new immigrants in the riding, had any idea what their member of Parliament did—or could do—for them. So I wrote a weekly column in a local newspaper and I had a weekly radio show on CHIN so I could explain the intricacies of immigration policies and other federal issues such as unemployment insurance (as it was then called), pension and income tax. I had already established a good working relationship with a few journalists when I was at WoodGreen Community Services, and now these contacts came in handy. Dan was the immigration policy critic for the NDP in the House of Commons, and I had to know immigration law inside and out. His passions lay more towards peace and disarmament and oppression in Central America, while I was drawn—in no small part because of my background—towards the plight of immigrants.

  When government-sanctioned death squads began operating in Central America, and the United States refused to accept refugees fleeing the violence, many of those desperate people looked to come north to Canada. And suddenly Dan Heap’s personal passion and mine intersected. We did not want to see these Chilean and Salvadoran refugees deported back to face death squads.

  So Dan Heap mounted a campaign. We worked with progressive lawyers and Latin American groups in Toronto to pressure the federal government to establish a special program. We called on lawyers, law students and legal workers at the Law Union of Ontario (whose offices were in Dan’s riding) to help. Many progressive immigration lawyers would figure largely in this campaign. So would smart, young and dynamic law students at the University of Toronto. Together, we’d frame the policy and draft the right questions. Dan Heap would then pose those questions in the House of Commons.

  We won. It was incredibly rewarding to see the relief on the faces of many of these Latin American refugees. They were now safe and no longer had to live in fear of deportation to face torture, beatings or even death. I went to many of their joyous, colourful and exuberant dances to celebrate this victory, and to fundraise to help sponsor others to Canada. Through a program that allowed these refugees to stay, Canada admitted some sixteen thousand people from war-torn Central America between 1982 and 1987.

  I was learning the ropes, all manner of ropes. My goal was to get Dan re-elected and to change policy at the federal level using tactics and strategies I was learning at the community level.

  Around this time, friendships and allegiances were forming that would have a powerful influence on my political and personal life.

  On the very day that Dan Heap became the MP for Spadina, he hired Dan Leckie as his executive assistant, based in Toronto. Leckie had a Heap-like beard and a Heapian approach to fashion. If I close my eyes now, I can conjure Dan Leckie: open shirt, no tie, rumpled brown jeans, nothing matching, and his bicycle nearby. Dan Leckie rarely dressed up, even for formal events when he was later a city councillor, and on the rare occasion when he put on a tuxedo, he would refuse the limousine service offered by the city. (“No thanks,” he would say. “I’m going to ride.” Even if that meant cycling in a tux.) And if Dan Leckie is doing anything in my little daydream, it is this: he’s making a list. This is where the two Dans part ways. Dan Heap needed help with structure and organization; Dan Leckie was supremely organized and a master strategist. He was, quite simply, brilliant.

  Before becoming Dan Heap’s assistant, Leckie had been a school trustee and chair of the Toronto Board of Education. During those early years on the board, Dan had been an integral part of a group of pioneers who included Gordon Cressy, Bob Spencer, Doug Barr and others. This young and dynamic group of trustees and educators helped usher in progressive urban reforms—such as the working group on multiculturalism and a ban on corporal punishment—that changed the course of urban education in Canada. Following that stint, Dan was a special assistant to Mayor John Sewell. Later on, he became Jack Layton’s executive assistant and then a city councillor between 1994 and 1997.