How a Canadian museum is preserving Asia’s WWII history: inside WongAvery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum

Doctor and activist Joseph Wong Yu-kai spearheaded the opening of Toronto’s new WongAvery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum to educate people about Asia’s blood-soaked history

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Published: 12:15pm, 10 Aug 2024

When Flora Chong Mei-ling was a student in Hong Kong, she didn’t know much about colonialism, let alone Chinese history. She says her history textbooks stopped abruptly at 1911, the year the Qing dynasty ended and the Chinese Republic began.

She didn’t think much of it and, in 1978, a teenage Chong emigrated to Canada. It wasn’t until 1997 that she learned more about China’s modern history, specifically, reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1991). She was overwhelmed to learn about the December 1937 massacre, during which Japanese soldiers looted homes and raped, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

“It was shocking”, says Chong. “I could not finish the book because it was too much for me to handle since I grew up without much idea about all these human atrocities.” And then “[Iris Chang] was invited to Toronto, I volunteered to help out at the event, and I bought six copies.”

Flora Chong, executive director of the WongAvery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto. Photo: Handout

That event, where some 6,000 copies of Chang’s book were snapped up, was organised by medical doctor and community activist Joseph Wong Yu-kai, founder of Alpha Toronto, now called Alpha Education (or, the Association for Learning and Preserving the History of World War II in Asia).

Through fostering greater awareness of atrocities that happened halfway around the world almost a century ago, Alpha’s goal is to give the next generation of Canadian students a global view of that dark period.

To spread this information beyond the classroom, after five years of hard work, on June 8, Alpha officially opened the WongAvery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto, which claims to be the first museum in the world that comprehensively covers what happened in the Asia-Pacific region during World War II.

Dr Joseph Wong, founder of the WongAvery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum, outside the property in Toronto. Photo: Handout

The Peace Museum is the brainchild of Wong, who has been volunteering in Toronto for more than 45 years, championing causes ranging from disaster relief to fighting racism. He established Alpha 27 years ago, having observed that the vast majority of high school students in Canada’s largest city did not know what happened in Asia during the second world war.