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April 15 is the 112th anniversary of when the RMS Titanic sank off the coast of Newfoundland. The disaster killed one of Canada’s most influential business leaders at the time, Charles Melville Hays. It would also kill large numbers of immigrants who were enroute to stops in Canada, and Canadians would end up monopolizing efforts to process the immense numbers of corpses left in the sinking’s wake. The director of the blockbuster 1997 film about the disaster also happens to be Canadian James Cameron, who named the movie’s antagonist after the Ontario communities of Caledon and Hockley.
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In previous years, the National Post has covered many of the lesser-known aspects of the disaster, such as how the ship’s chief baker survived by getting severely inebriated, and how, for days after the sinking fellow ocean liners had to pass through seascapes of the Titanic’s floating victims. This year, we looked at the one passenger who actually did survive by clinging to a door. Watch the video above or read the transcript below.
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The ending of James Cameron’s Titanic famously features the protagonist, Rose, surviving the 1912 sinking by climbing aboard what looks like a floating door.
Of those who were plunged into the water by the sinking Titanic, basically the only people who lived until morning were men who managed to climb aboard this; an overturned collapsible lifeboat.
But there was one passenger who did indeed survive by climbing onto a door. He also happened to be one of just eight Chinese passengers on the ship. Traveling in third class under the name Fang Lang, a returning rescue lifeboat found him among a mass of about 200 bodies, barely clinging to life atop a floating door he had tied himself to.
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His real name was Wing Sun Fong. And while he would spend much of the rest of his life as a major figure within the Chicago Chinese community, his connection to the disaster was unknown until quite recently. He was deported almost immediately after arriving in New York with other survivors, and although he would survive just long enough to see the Titanic’s discovery in 1985, he never told his family about his narrow brush with death in the North Atlantic.
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