William Chow's Personal Web Page

The year is a sub page dedicated to my cousin, Ed Chow.

Below are some of my memories of Ed.

Ed is actually my non-related cousin. My mother and his mother are both raised in the same village part of Macau. When they arrived in Canada, my mother ended up in Prince George while his mother ended up in Mackenzie.

There was a time during our PGSS time, he had a house very near mine. He lived in the basement suite (on the left side).

It was at this house, I could remember quite a few drinking and smoking parties that he had. It was between his house and Dave Urquhart's house, I could remember nights of head banger music, a smoky haze in the basement and smell of beer in the air. I guess that was "in" thing to do on a typical weekend in Prince George.

Here is what his house looked like. On my 2004 trip back to Prince George, it pretty well still looks like this after all these years.

In Mackenzie, his parents ran a Chinese restaurant, much the same way mine did in Prince George. I really knew his dad, and he like my dad, pasted away. His mom, was quite instrumental in helping our family with the arrangements when my dad died too.

I remember visiting his house once in Mackenzie. Don't remember too much about it though.

We had went to school at PGSS. In our years, there was only ever the twins Yvonne and Yvette Chow in the schools. Growing up in redneck country, there wasn't many of us Asians, so everyone thought we were related, well, we weren't. Nevertheless, like most Asians, we shared our spots on the honour roll. I didn't have any classes with Ed, although we did take the same courses. I remember Ed took band as one of his courses. He played the clarinet.
Ed was in our 1985 PGSS grad class.
When we moved down to Vancouver, his mother also moved down to as well. They opened a Chinese restaurant on Broadway and Commerical, right beside the Chinese theatre. They closed it down when the theatre got changed over to playing more Hindi movies. Ed's house in Vancouver was very close to mine in the early Vancouver days. I was on Battison Street near Joyce and his was up Rupert Street. I remember, there was a tiny church on the corner of Rupert and Kingsway that had a huge neon sign that said "God Will Show You The Way". It really was my guide marker to turn on Rupert to get to Ed's House (or turn on Kingsway to get back to my house).
I remember Ed worked for McDonald's in the early Vancouver years, and quickly accelerated to crew chief. One of the biggest career moves he got was working at the McDonalds inside Expo 86. I remember, many times I would use his employee pass to get in through the security gates. The pictures on those things were so badly taken and nobody really looked at them anyways. It was very handy for me to use that pass to get access to the employee areas for getting around people jams and getting close to the concerts. I remember another night, we were bored and driving around. Out of the whim, we decided to go invite a bunch of friends and have a bonfire party on Ambleside beach. So we drove to a 7-11 to grab a starter log and some food wieners to cook on it. Well, we realized when we hit North Vancouver that you can't sustain a fire using a starter log, we would need real wood, Ok, so we were driving around the back alleys of North Vancouver with our headlights off looking for a wood pile. As soon as we saw one, the car stopped, we both got out, grabbed a log, whipped it into the truck, back in the car, and off we went. It was just like some covert hit squad mission. We had a nice warm burning fire that night. We didn't get home till next morning, I remember getting pulled over by the cops in the morning but we weren't drinking so they had nothing on us (since we burned the evidence har! har!).

I remember quite a few late late nights. Ed was the prepetual night owl. We would be meeting up with quite a few different persons including co-workers and aquiantances very late at night. Doesn't surprise me, since one of Ed's lines was "Hey, lets go for coffee". Which even at 2:00pm in the morning was some weird place on Davie Street.

Speaking of Davie Street, Ed had a many interesting friends. I guess at that post Expo 86 time, was one of those adventurous times of our lives. Back in the day, they never had a P.C. term like "gender curious", however, that never stopped us from making up our own. This was where we labelled Ed as the "HAPPY" guy. Even Andrew Coates, a year before Expo 86, with a pencil wrote by his grad photo "Ed is a happy guy".
One of the fun things he did was he did at this time was run a BBS system on an old Apple computer. He had fun with the various users on the board and even had the opporunity to meet some of them. He had a fond interest in Christian music. He had went to a few concerts and such. He wasn't exactly a Sunday church person and certianly, I would not use him has the ideal Christian, but hey, it was another chance for him to use the line "Hey, you want to go for coffee?"
Ed took another career change when he entered school to study nursing. He studied intensely and of course still made time to "go out for coffee". It was about this time, I slowly lost track of him. One day, my friend who had to go and get x-rays from the hospital mentioned Prince George and PGSS, which prompted the girl who was working in Radiology a conversation which eventually bought up our names. Her name was Heather Davidson and still in 2006, I still can't locate her. I thought I had found her, when I found a Heather Davidson working for the Ministry of Health in Victoria but that wasn't her.
In 2006, my sister May, who was working for a container company got a call from one of her clients. The contact information they had was old and still had her maiden name Chow listed. So the natural question came out, "You wouldn't happen to know an Ed Chow?". Well, the person revealed that Ed had died back in 2002. A little library research downtown, revealed this obitutary in the May 21, 2002 Province.

On a closing note, I wish I had gotten back in touch with Ed before he passed. I would hope that those people from Prince George Senior Secondary (PGSS) that come across my web page to please contact me. We have already lost Joel, and now Ed. Who is next? What will they have to say and will they have a chance to say it? Please, I would love to hear from you.