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Education Lifestyle

Vince Wong: Staff lawyer, Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic

You can call the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic a poverty law clinic. We work with people who are not only low-income, but also do not speak English – or speak very limited English. We help people in the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian communities. I speak Cantonese and very limited Mandarin.

A large part of my job involves talking to people on the phone or to walk-in clients. They come with all sorts of troubles that run the legal gamut from immigration and refugee problems to landlord-tenant disputes. I often deal with people with mental illness whose kids are being taken away or are being deported because they committed a crime. 

We help people apply for disability when they have problems that leave them unable to work or do household chores. Employment law is a big piece of what we do, especially in this community, which has a lot of restaurant workers who are not being paid or are getting low wages or don’t know their rights.

I went to the University of Toronto for undergrad and law school. As an undergrad, I studied commerce and majored in finance and economics. I decided finance may not be my thing after working in two banks and at a hedge fund during my summer breaks. Generally the people were fine, but I didn’t feel like I was adding value to society by working for a hedge fund to help people make a ton of money. I didn’t feel fulfilled. 

I wanted to go back to school to find something more meaningful. I did two years in law school and came out of it thinking I wanted to do something in the public interest. Law school at U of T let me see what society was really like. I realized how sheltered I had been, both in my undergrad bubble at U of T and at home. I had a family that was not perfect, but we love each other and I didn’t have to go through a tremendous amount of hardship growing up. 

When you go to law school and learn more about the disadvantages people face – aboriginal people in Canada, refugees – you start to get a sense that people really need help. I decided that if I could find a career that could pay the bills and make an impact on the lives of people who need it, then I should pursue that. 

The class I really liked was law and development, a mix of development, economics, law and learning what the world is like, especially outside Canada – the challenges people face in Africa, for example, but not in an oversimplified way. 

The other thing that really helped me was working with the magazine Rights Review, which is part of U of T’s international human rights program. I ended up editing and became the co-editor in chief. That was a great way to understand human rights around the world and learn more about the refugee situation. 

U of T also has an internship program. I took that opportunity to go to the University of Hong Kong, where I did a paper on forced evictions and unfair compensation in Mainland China. That’s a huge issue still – I’m dealing with a few refugee cases in that area. 

A lot of people go to law school feeling the way I do. They want to be lawyers and help people, but it’s very difficult to do so because there’s so much pressure to make money and listen to your boss, who might force you to do things you’re not comfortable with. I’m privileged enough to be in a position where I don’t face those pressures. 

Law school is what you make of it a lot of graduate school is like that. Nobody is going to hold your hand. You should be mature enough to know what you want to get out of it. That’s difficult if, like many people, you go to law school not because you want to be a lawyer, but rather because you don’t know what else to do in life. 

I used law school to focus on learning and whatever piqued my interest, and because of that I got the best I could out of U of T law. It prepared me for the workplace, but more importantly, it prepared me to be an engaged global citizen.

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