Oyen Briefs: I hope to share stories about community happenings

By Diana Walker

I was excited to go to work February14 (Valentine’s Day), my first day working for The Oyen Echo. It reminded me of the excitement Mom and I felt on our first day as a weekly newspaper April Fools, 1974!

Sunshine streamed into my office in the Schindel Agency building. A beautiful floral bouquet on my desk, from Harland, greeted me with open petals. My first walk-in— Randy Wiechnik. My first email— Heather Norris. My noon lunch—compliments of Michael and Marie Kulyk. What a great first day!

I look forward to next Wednesday, February 20 although ATCO has a planned power outage from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Always a challenge waiting around the corner!

There is a story about a boy standing on the shore. Hundreds of starfish were on the beach and he was throwing them one starfish at a time back in the water. “What are you doing?” a passer-by asked. “You can’t possibly make a difference; there are too many fish.” The boy threw another one in the water and replied, “I bet I made a difference to that one.”

Over the next few weeks, I hope to share some Oyen Briefs with our readers, telling of folks coming and going.

I also hope to share stories about community happenings. I welcome contributions and look forward to your suggestions as to what you would like to read.

Lastly, I would like to recognize some of the countless individuals who, like this boy, have persevered and made a difference (young and old, living and deceased) by giving generously of their time, talents and expertise.

A contribution by Bernie Krewski: We recently learned of the death in Red Deer on Dec. 27, 2023, of a former Oyen resident, Frank Wong, then known as Frank Chiu, born in 1948. Frank graduated from Oyen High School in the mid-1960s.

Frank’s remarkable life and his contributions to Canada are summarized in his obituary published in The Red Deer Advocate. It’s a story of hardship common to many immigrants, especially the Chinese, that has few parallels with much of the Canadian population of his generation. 

Easy to forget is that the Chinese played a significant role as labourers in building the Canadian Pacific Railway across this country in the 1880s, suffering hundreds of work-related fatalities. Then they were excluded from coming to Canada due to the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.

As his obituary describes, Frank arrived in Canada as a nine-year-old with Susan Chiu and her husband, posing as his parents. He was reunited with his grandparents in Swift Current, moving to Oyen with his grandmother in 1963, and working at the Star Café owned by his uncles.

Frank graduated from SAIT with a diploma in Architectural Technology and secured employment with the Red Deer Regional Planning Commission. By then Canada was granting amnesty to immigrants who arrived in Canada under difficult circumstances like Frank’s. He was then able to use his birth name Wong and bring members of his family to join him in Canada.

Frank Wong was elected to Red Deer City Council in 2004 and served in that capacity for seventeen years.

His experience is part of a much larger story documented in Alison Marshall's book, “Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada” (2004).

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