Alpha's goal is to raise awareness of the atrocities that took place almost a century ago on the other side of the world, giving the next generation of Canadian students a global perspective on that dark period.
To spread this information outside the classroom, Alpha, after a five-year effort, officially opened the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto on June 8. The museum claims to be the first museum in the world to comprehensively address what happened in the Asia-Pacific region during World War II. Dr. Joseph Wong, founder of the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum, outside the museum in Toronto. Photo: Handout
The peace museum is the brainchild of Wong, a Toronto volunteer with more than 45 years of experience working on everything from disaster relief to fighting racism. He founded Alpha 27 years ago after realizing that the majority of high school students in Canada's largest city didn't know what happened in Asia during World War II.
“They knew about 10 percent of the world's population in Europe and North America, but nothing about the rest of the world,” Wong says.
Mr. Wong grew up in North Point, Hong Kong, the second of five children, with all seven of his family sleeping in the same bed. Then, after his father began making money installing safe deposit boxes in bank vaults in the 1970s, Mr. Wong went to study at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he and his wife lived across the street from the synagogue.
“I heard about how the Jews suffered during the war, how the Holocaust happened,” Wong says. “I cried with them. But at the same time, there was a war in Asia, and 23 million Chinese were killed. It seemed like no one cared about these people. And Japan was trying to erase and rewrite the history of World War II.” Wong lobbied the Ontario Ministry of Education to include Asia in World War II classes, but found that the teachers themselves didn't know much about the subject. So in 2006, Alpha raised $100,000 Canadian (about HK$695,000 at the time) to take its first group of 50 or so educators to places like Shanghai, Nanjing, Hong Kong and Seoul to hear stories from war survivors. Cheung accompanied them and acted as an interpreter for the English-speaking teachers during their stay in China. People attend the opening ceremony of the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto on June 8. Photo: Handout
In 2012, after cutting his travel expenses to about C$40,000 per year, Wong felt the best way to educate not just educators but all Canadians who wanted to learn was to open a museum.
It would take a long time to bring his vision to fruition, he says — “we couldn't afford to build something like the Holocaust Museum” — but he began searching for a suitable location and raising funds.
He had known Dennis Avery and Sally Tze Wong Avery (no relation to Joseph Wong) for many years, and when Wong pitched the couple his plans for a museum, Avery immediately pledged $2 million and Wong gave them naming rights.
The exterior of the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto. Photo: HandoutWong also received generous donations from Paul Yuen and Kathy Lee, founders of a private high school in Vancouver, and an anonymous donor from Hong Kong who Wong says runs a small shipping business. Alpha itself raised more than C$8 million to buy and renovate a building in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga with more than 5,000 square feet of exhibition space.
“The whole project ended up being much more complicated than we anticipated,” says Chung, who is now Alpha's executive director, “and then the pandemic started, so it took five years to complete.”
Dr. Joseph Wong, founder of the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto, giving a speech. Photo: Handout
Located in a quiet suburban area, the two-storey museum has 10 galleries covering topics such as what caused the war to break out in the region, the major atrocities, the end of hostilities and its impact on areas including China, Korea, the Philippines and Japan.
The section called “Justice” focuses on postwar events such as the war trials, “raising the question of how this history has been remembered,” Chung says. “Some choose to forget, some choose to revise, while others try to preserve it.”
Chung says the museum strives to be as objective as possible, using primary sources to ensure authenticity and not hesitating to condemn denialism or revisionism.
The Biological and Chemical Warfare Gallery at the new Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto. Photo: Handout
A section titled “Biochemical Warfare” describes the atrocities committed by the Japanese military's Unit 731, who developed biological weapons and tested them on Chinese civilians in Harbin.
Another gallery, “Prisoners of War and Civilian Forced Laborers,” provides detailed information about the Filipinos, Javanese and Thais who were captured by the Japanese military and subjected to forced labor and torture, many of whom died as a result.
More intimately, Chong says, “Chinese Canadians couldn't serve in the military at the time.” But what many people don't know is that 150 Chinese Canadians were conscripted into the British Army and enlisted in Force 136, a secret guerrilla unit tasked with infiltrating the Japanese military.
“They were allowed to join Unit 136 because of their looks,” Chung said. “They were sent to Southeast Asia… to look like locals so they could carry out sabotage missions without attracting the attention of the Japanese.”
“But once deployed, it was extremely difficult because they received no help in locating local resistance fighters or destroying Japanese equipment and supply lines.”
Fortunately, all 150 survived and helped secure the right to vote for Chinese Canadians after the war, a “double victory” as the heroes called it.
An exhibit on Japanese military sexual slavery at the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum in Toronto. Photo: Handout
In 2010, two students from the University of Toronto approached Alpha about starting an Alpha student club on campus, which became the first of what are now five Alpha Collegiate chapters in Ontario.
Chen Chen, who served as president from 2018 to 2020 of the McMaster University chapter in Hamilton, a former steel town southwest of Toronto, had already learned about the horrors of World War II from her grandparents, who still live in Nanjing.
“When I was little, my grandfather would tell me age-appropriate stories about the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai, so I kind of knew about them,” says Chen, who is originally from Shanghai, “but I wasn't familiar with, for example, everything that happened in Southeast Asia. So when I tell my grandparents what we're doing at Alpha, he's really happy about it, because I love history, I love reading books about history, and it's important to preserve Chinese history.”
Charmaine Chin Chiang, a peace museum researcher, began working at Alpha soon after relocating from Hong Kong in 2019. Chin has a background in cultural management and practical experience curating exhibitions in the Hong Kong SAR with the Commercial Museum of Art, Arts Development Council and the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles. An overview of the Second World War in Asia, 1931-1945, at the Wong Avery Asia-Pacific Peace Museum. Photo: Handout
She didn't know much about World War II in the Asia-Pacific region.
“I grew up in Hong Kong, so I learned about Hong Kong, but I didn't know too much about it,” she said. “I just know the facts, and I don't analyze it too much or think about it too much.”
Chin wasn't aware of the nonprofit's plans to open a museum when he joined Alpha, but he quickly became interested in the project and now oversees the development of the permanent exhibits.
“I knew a little bit about World War II, but I definitely didn't know the details, so I started researching from scratch,” she says. “Luckily, technology has improved so much these days that it's easy to find resources online.”
“But at the same time, I have learned to be very careful because not everything online is genuine, so I have to go through multiple verifications. Sometimes I even contact other organizations like museums or professors to verify information before I decide to post it or not.”
A 1937 archive photo shows Japanese troops burying people alive during the Nanjing Massacre on December 13. Photo: Xinhua Photo The photo also includes the number of people killed in the Nanjing Massacre, for example: The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal recorded 300,000 deaths, while the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal put the figure at 200,000. Chin says the museum presents both statistics side by side to allow visitors to see the transparency of the research and draw their own conclusions.
“We don't just take what historians and scholars have documented,” she said. “People think this was just a China-Japan conflict, but in fact 20 countries were involved.”
And not everyone in the West realizes how many Western nations were in the Asia-Pacific theater, including Canada, the U.S., Britain and the Netherlands. “So we have to reflect.”
