Anti-head-tax activist Foon Hay Lum, 111, was one of the oldest people in Canada

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Foon Hay Lum appeared indestructible. Born July 26, 1908, in Canton (now called Guangzhou) during the final years of China’s Qing dynasty, she survived war and revolution, privation, separation and life in a faraway country where she did not speak the language. But she could not survive the pandemic that had spread around the world from the country of her birth. At the time of her death at the Mon Sheong long-term care home in downtown Toronto, she was the fifth-oldest person in Canada. At the age of 111, she succumbed to COVID-19 on April 24 – one of 33 residents to have died of the disease at the same care home.

According to her granddaughter Helen Lee, medical researchers had repeatedly sought out Ms. Lum during her last years, marvelling at her low blood pressure and normal cholesterol levels. She took no regular medications, and though she occasionally fell, she got up without injury. “The nurses at the home considered her a rubber ball,” Ms. Lee said in an interview.

She was born Foon Hay Chiu, the eldest of three surviving children. Her father, being a Christian, was more egalitarian than traditional Chinese fathers and sent her to school to learn to read and write – uncommon for girls in China at the start of the 20th century. An exceptionally pretty girl, she married a 23-year-old adventurer named Nam Jack Lum in 1926, when she was 18.

“There was another suitor as well but my grandfather came with his father and that made a good impression,” Ms. Lee said.

Mr. Lum had left Canton six years earlier to seek his fortune in Canada. His family had cobbled together the $500 head tax (worth more than $6,000 in today’s currency) that was required. He returned to China to find a wife but in 1926 he could not take Ms. Lum with him to Canada after their wedding. By then there was no head tax, but three years earlier, in 1923, the Canadian government had passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which banned immigrants from China except for merchants, diplomats, clergy and foreign students.

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Mr. Lum returned alone to Toronto, where he worked odd jobs and sent money back for his new wife along with such exotic gifts as canned salmon and scented soaps. In the 1930s, he returned for a longer stay, which resulted in the birth of a son, Sam Seek, followed by a daughter, Har Ying, both of whom would grow up without seeing their father.

Back in Toronto, Mr. Lum worked in a Chinese laundry, picking up and delivering clothes and linens on his bicycle. He continued to send his wife and children letters, photographs, gifts and money. Ms. Lum used the money to buy land, which enabled her to grow enough food for her family and even help feed her neighbours as conditions in China worsened. With the outbreak of the Second World War, communications between the couple stopped. Ms. Lum worked and patiently endured.

Finally, in 1947, after the war ended, Canada repealed the law that had broken up the family and not only permitted Chinese immigration but offered citizenship to people of Chinese origin for the first time. It took another 11 years before the couple were able to reunite in Toronto. Their grown children had already come separately.

When Ms. Lum arrived during the winter of 1958, she was 50 and – according to Ms. Lee – “had no idea where Toronto was and didn’t know about winter. My grandfather had to buy her boots.” After not seeing each other for 22 years, the Lums could at last restart their married life and Ms. Lum could get to know her Canadian grandchildren.

Their daughter, Har Ying, had married, and her husband’s family owned a popular family restaurant on King Street named Bing’s, where Ms. Lum worked in the kitchen while her husband tended the cash register. By 1965, the Lums had saved enough for a down payment on a Victorian semi-detached house on Cowan Avenue in Toronto’s Parkdale district that cost $10,000. The house represented success, stability and luck to them, a place the grandchildren could visit any time (their daughter lived nearby), a place to grow old together. In the backyard, they grew a remarkable assortment of flowers and vegetables. Ms. Lee recalls giant melons, rose bushes and tiny orange trees. Then, in 1971, Mr. Lum died after a fall down the basement steps.

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Ms. Lum continued to live in the 2½-storey house alone, gardening and hiding money here and there in the drawers, following the habits of a lifetime. She became an accidental activist at 70 when she joined with other elderly members of the Chinese community in seeking redress for the government’s collection of the head tax prior to 1923. She was in the House of Commons in 2006 to hear then-prime minister Stephen Harper issue an apology, though the proceedings had to be translated for her.

She had kept her late husband’s head tax certificate and was thus able to claim, as his widow, the $20,000 compensation promised to anyone still living who had paid it.

Four years ago, she was admitted to hospital with an inflamed bladder. “After that, the hospital recommended long-term care and the use of a walker. She ended up at the Vermont Square home, and I came every day and brought her food,” Ms. Lee recalled. Her lucky house on Cowan Avenue, having increased in value to $700,000, was sold in 2017, after a long clean-up. “They saved everything,” her granddaughter recalled.

From the archives: Foon Hay Lum sells the home she bought in 1965

A little more than a year after she moved into Vermont Square on Bathurst Street, a place was found for Ms. Lum, then 108, at the Mon Sheong home in Chinatown, where the staff spoke her language and the food was more familiar. Every year the home holds a joint birthday party for its centenarians. “Last year there were 14 or 15 [residents] over 100,” Ms. Lee said. “Old people were treasured there.”

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Foon Hay Lum was predeceased by her two brothers, her husband, her son, Sam Seek Lum, who had settled in St. Louis, Mo., and by a granddaughter, Lissa, also of St. Louis. She leaves her daughter, Har Ying Lee of Toronto; her other grandchildren, Helen, Susie, Gordon, Pearl and Laurence; and nine great-grandchildren.