Vancouver Sun 2002:
Toddish McWong marks Bard's birthday – the newsclipping

Here's the story that the Vancouver Sun's Pete McMartin wrote about me
in January 2002.  I just sent it to Toronto to be included for the
CBC Generations documentary.

It was a fun interview, and we went to the Vancouver Sun for the photo
shoot.  My friend Sonia Baker co-hosted the 2002 dinner with
me.  Neither Scottish nor Chinese, Sonia was actually born in
Holland.  If you watched the movie “The Mummy,” you heard Sonia's
voice… she voiced the Mummy. “Errrrrgggghhhh!!!!”

2002 was the first year the Gung Haggis Fat Choy dinner attracted major
media attention.  I did an interview with Bill Richardson for CBC
Radio's flagship afternoon show “Richardson's Roundup,” for which Sonia
and I read the Jim Wong-Chu poem “Recipe for Tea.” It is a poem written
for two voices and describes how tea travelled from China to
Scotland. 

VTV (which was became City TV) sent a reporter and cameraman to the
dinner at the Spicy Court Restaurant.   Highlights of the
newscast included hearing the entire restaurant chanting “We want
haggis,” as well as seeing and hearing a verse of Robbie Burns “Address
to a Haggis,” read with a Chinese accent by Raymond Chan, who was inbetween member of parliament stints at the time.

Just over two hundred people attended that 2002  dinner in the
midst of a snow storm, an increase over the previous year's dinner of
one hundred attendees.  The following year we moved the dinner to
Flamingo Restaurant on Fraser Street, where we hosted 390 people. 
Now we host 450 to 550 people at Floata Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown.

I'll try to find a better photo scan for this news story.