Red Guards set Meena Wong, Vancouver mayoral candidate, on path to politics

Meena Wong received her first lesson in the importance of representative democracy sitting in the dust outside her family home in Beijing as Red Guards hunted for evidence of her parents' bourgeois lifestyle.

She was seven years old.

"Our photos were burned, our camera gone, my mom's clothing even," said Wong, 53. "Our neighbour kept me out. And I was worried, playing on the dirt ground outside, worrying about my parents inside, wondering what was going on."

In an interview with the Sunday Morning Post, Wong recalled how the Red Guards' raid set her on a path she hopes will lead to Vancouver City Hall. Wong, a community health worker and long-time activist, was endorsed last Sunday as the mayoral candidate for the left-leaning Coalition of Progressive Electors (Cope). She hopes to become the first ethnic Chinese mayor of one of the most Chinese cities in the world outside Asia and its first woman mayor.

Wong's family fled to Hong Kong when she was 11. Eight years later, she was on her way to Vancouver as a student. But the impact of the Cultural Revolution never left her or her family.

"There was that fear," said Wong in an interview on the banks of the Fraser River. "I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and I saw my parents sitting under this one light bulb, writing self-criticism and quietly asking each other 'do you think that is good enough?', afraid that they were not doing enough self-criticism. That affects my parents to this day, that emotional trauma. But they survived."