What would life have been like for someone of Chinese ancestry living in British Columbia during this wartime period?

Yeah, I think because subsequent generations of Chinese Canadians have gone on to assimilate in Canadian society, gone on to be successful in many ways, and because new generations of Chinese immigrants often arrive already affluent or fairly affluent, I think we forget just how abject it was to be Chinese Canadian 100 years ago.

Many people know about the head taxes that were levied, uh, expressly to keep people of Chinese descent out of Canada.

By the time we, uh, reached the Second World War, the Chinese Immigration Act, otherwise known as the Exclusion Act, had been in effect for nearly 20 years.

Uh, the goal was to keep Chinese out and also to, um, essentially keep the population already in Canada from further growing.

One couldn't be a doctor, one couldn't be a lawyer or a pharmacist or even a teacher, and one couldn't be a British subject, and so on.

And so I think we really forget that Chinese Canadians were not just second, but, uh, even third-class citizens in the 20th century.

What does that do to a society when we sort of see some of that class or ethnic stratification break down because people are put in a, a situation where they have to serve together?