Ah May Chung, later known as Dr. Victoria Chung (or Cheung) was the first Asian Canadian to earn a medical degree in Canada. She also spent most of her life working for the United Church. Vancouver’s Chinatown Storytelling Centre has featured her as one of the “6 Women You Should Know”:
In 1922, the University of Toronto graduated its first Chinese Canadian physician. Born in Victoria, BC, Dr. Chung decided to bring Western medical care to China after her residency at Toronto General. She would not have been able to practice in BC, her home province, because of her race. Practicing for over 40 years in Guangdong, Dr. Chung is the only Canadian missionary to have worked throughout the second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the Cultural Revolution.
Dr. Chung was well documented by the women of the Methodist Oriental Home and School (Victoria, B.C.), where at the age of two, Ah May arrived with her mother in 1900.
Excerpt from a register of the Oriental Home and School fonds, PMRC Archives
Read more about Dr. Chung in The British Columbia Review article on A Woman in Between: Searching for Dr. Victoria Chung (2019). Read the Chinatown Storytelling Centre’s 6 CANADIAN WOMEN YOU NEED TO KNOW.