Tommy C.G. Wong, a World War II veteran from British Columbia, attends the opening ceremony for the exhibition on Chinese-Canadian contributions to the war at the Chinese Canadian Military Museum on May 9. YAXIN LIU / FOR CHINA DAILY

During World War II, Chinese Canadians faced discrimination, but as the war's focus shifted to the Pacific, resistance to their service ebbed, Hatty Liu reports from Vancouver.

When Canada entered the Second World War in Europe, another conflict already had been brewing at home about the status of its Chinese population.

In the days when even Chinese born in Canada did not have full citizenship rights, and Chinese immigration to Canada was still banned under the Exclusion Act of 1923, there were debates in the federal government, the provinces and each branch of the military on whether Chinese Canadians should be allowed to serve.

Like many young Chinese Canadians in the early days of the war, British Columbia veteran Tommy C.G. Wong was eager to volunteer, "but when some of us went to enlist, they wouldn't accept us", he recalled. "They said they weren't accepting any Chinese."

Wong and more than 100 Chinese Canadians would eventually end up serving in Force 136, a branch of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) whose creation was responsible in many ways for turning the tides of discrimination.

Although Chinese Canadians could usually volunteer in the army in all of the provinces, there were veterans in BC like Wong who recalled Chinese being turned away. BC had the largest Chinese population in Canada at the time, but along with Saskatchewan, it was one of two provinces that did not grant Chinese Canadians the right to vote.

Because provincial voting rights automatically granted the federal franchise, this meant that the Chinese in BC, who were the majority of Chinese in Canada, had no voting rights on the federal level.

BC also was instrumental in getting the federal government to place a nationwide ban on Chinese and Japanese Canadians being called up to active service under the National Resources Mobilization Act of 1940 (NRMA).

Due to the strong associations between military service, patriotic duty and the concept of full citizenship, there was a dreaded possibility that these ethnic groups would demand the right to vote if they were called up to service.

Faced with discrimination

In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, BC Premier T.D. Pattullo stated that this possibility was something "which we in this province can never tolerate".

Neill Chan, another BC veteran who belonged to the same unit as Wong, remembered that when the war started in 1939, he took part in military training for air cadets with the rest of the student body at Vancouver Technical Secondary School.

"As the war went on, the white students all went off to war," Chan said "But they didn't want [the Chinese] since we were ‘immigrants', so we stayed in school."

Chan also got a registration to serve in the Chinese Nationalist Army but lacked the funds to travel to China. In Vancouver Chinatown at the time, both he and Wong recalled, there were many campaigns to support China in the war against Japanese aggression, and the prospect of helping out in the Chinese war effort was a major motivation behind Chinese Canadians' attempts to enlist.

Wong recalled that it was only "when the war progressed in the South Pacific and the Japanese were sweeping all of Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Burma, then all of a sudden the Allied forces thought they could use more Chinese help over there".

Marjorie Wong (no relation to Tommy), a historian of Chinese Canadians in World War II, has claimed that the "necessary political change in Ottawa" to reduce discrimination against Chinese Canadians during the war resulted directly from the British War Office's request for the Canadian government to send Chinese to serve in the SOE.