Photographers waited to greet the planeload of immigrants arriving in the Canadian city of Calgary the day Jim Chu Xiaosun and his family first set foot in the country. It was 1962 and a picture taken for a newspaper shows an excited group of 30 people from Hong Kong and China arriving to start new lives. One of them - Chu, who was three years old - would, 45 years later, become the first Chinese police chief of a major Canadian city.

Of those who arrived that day, Chu's father was the only one who could speak English. He had become fluent in the language 20 years earlier, during the second world war, by talking to American Flying Tigers pilots, who had come to help China fight the Japanese.