Going to Victoria to see the Queen's representative…
and receive the BC Community Achievement Award

Okay it's finally sinking in….  I am going to receive a wonderful honour from Lt. Gov. Stephen Point and Premier Gordon Campbell.  The BC Community Achievement Award is recognizing my many years of community service, most notably my work in promoting Asian Canadian arts and literature, my multicultural work through the creation of the Gung Haggis Fat Choy Robbie Burns Chinese New Year Dinner which also inspired a CBC Vancouver television performance special and the SFU Gung Haggis Fat Choy Festival, and most importantly – helping to save the childhood home of author Joy Kogawa and turn it into a writing centre and literary and historical landmark.

I have also served as a Terry's Team member, cancer survivors who serve as living examples that cancer research has helped to make a difference, by speaking at Terry Fox Runs and elementary schools since 1993.  And I have also helped to develop the dragon boat racing community not only by coaching many different teams, especially my own Gung Haggis Fat Choy dragon boat team that has been featured in many news stories and documentaries about multiculturalism, but also by serving on the Alcan Dragon Boat race committee, the CCC Dragon Boat Association and helping to found the Vancouver International Taiwanese Dragon Boat Race in 2003.

There are some incredible people who are among this year's 45 award recipients.  I am very pleased to find my friend Judy Caldwell named. She is an inspirational to many breast cancer survivors, as she helped to found the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation and was a founding paddler on the Abreast in a Boat dragon boat team. Judy and I also both work at the Vancouver Public Library.

Fellow North Vancouverite Gordon Barrett is founding pipe major for the BC Regiment's Irish Pipes and Drums.  Patrick Reid always invites one of their bagpipers to special events for the Canadian Club Vancouver.

Terry Hunter and Savannah Walling are co-founders of the Vancouver
Moving Theatre, which does incredible work creating artistic productions and telling the stories of and for the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, especially through the Heart of the City Festival for which Terry is executive director.  For the inaugural festival, I was a story teller for a special event bringing Chinese Canadian and First Nation people to share stories.

We will be travelling on the
9am ferry to Swartz Bay with my parents and my nominator David Kogawa,
and hopefully Joy Kogawa.  We will be going to the BC Royal Museum to
meet another Vancouver East End raised boy… Gary Geddes – who will be
receiving the Lt. Gov. Literary Achievement Award at the BC Book Prizes
in Vancouver on Saturday April 26.

Gee…. now I have to get my hair cut.  What am I going to wear?  2007 Community Achievement Award winner Dr. Kerry Jang tells me I should wear my kilt!

Achievement Awards recognizes 45 British Columbians