Autobiography

Abstract

I was born and passed the first two decades of my life in the vicinity of Vancouver, British Columbia, an area now overwhelmed by immigration from the Orient, above all, China and India. More precisely, I was born in New Westminster in 1936, spent the first few years of my childhood on the shore about seventy miles to the north, in Lang Bay close to Powell River, returned to New Westminster to begin school, then moved to White Rock, where I passed my adolescence, and then went to Vancouver, of which New Westminster is now a suburb, to the University for five years, leaving in 1958 for graduate school, never to return except for short visits. I recall first the geography of the area, then the circumstances there in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as well as the circumstances of my family and me. It is an area that has seen changes that, although peaceful have been definitive: a semi-rural, even partly rural environment, with a population that, apart from a visible, but small, indigenous component, still had close ties to the Old Country, generally meaning Great Britain and Ireland, and to Eastern Canada, has become more urban, much more cosmopolitan, and undoubtedly much more sophisticated, and apparently, much wealthier.