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.
