Like hundreds of thousands of other Canadian teenagers who came of age during the Second World War, Gordon Quan yearned to fight for his country. But there was nothing typical in his quest. In those days of rampant racism, Chinese-Canadians had no citizenship rights. They were unable to vote, cloistered in their community’s Chinatowns and excluded from most professions. Those exclusions extended to the armed forces, which consistently turned away aspiring Chinese-Canadian recruits from British Columbia, who were willing to serve despite their second-class status in Canada. Mr. Quan was…
