Margaret Chen

Margaret Chen spent sixty years making everyone around her feel seen. Born in Vancouver to a family of fishermen, she was the first in her family to attend university, graduating with a teaching degree in 1965. She spent thirty years shaping young minds at Eastside Elementary, where former students still call her "the teacher who believed in me."

Outside the classroom, Margaret was a tireless gardener, an adventurous cook, and the unofficial historian of her neighbourhood. She filled twelve journals with stories about the block she lived on for fifty years: the families who came and went, the little store that became a coffee shop, the elm tree that survived three storms. Those journals now live with her grandchildren.

She passed on a warm September morning with her daughter Linda by her side. Her smile, her soup dumplings, and her habit of writing notes in the margins of library books will be deeply missed.