Canada Knows How to Respond to a Refugee Crisis
When I saw the photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying dead, facedown, on a Turkish beach last month, I felt an electrifying stillness.
At the same age as that toddler, I came to Canada as a Chinese refugee soon after Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in late December 1941. Thanks to the Red Cross, my family took two ships and a train and arrived in Canada in August 1942; the voyage took us through Mozambique, South Africa and Brazil before we arrived in New York harbor and, eventually, Ottawa.
My parents, my seven-year-old brother and I were nearly turned away at the dock when boarding in Hong Kong because someone noticed that we weren’t white and Canada at the time had a notorious restriction against Chinese immigration.… Seguir leyendo »