Inside Vancouver
Chinatown Syndrome - continued
By Frances Bula published Jan 1, 2010
The survival of Vancouver's Chinatown is threatened by a polarized debate between the Old Guard and the Young Turks. But a new generation seeks a middle way
In front of Rennie’s building, city councillor George Chow meets me for a walk to show me the history of dozens of the buildings on these few blocks. Here, just up the street, is the building that fellow councillor Kerry Jang’s family association owns. There, the Wong Benevolent Association building. As we pass the musty smell of herbal-medicine shops, the fish store, the barbecue duck hanging in the windows, the roll call continues: the Lee family building, the Chinese Freemasons buildings, the Mah Society building, the Chinese Benevolent Association buildings, and more.
Along the way we see signs of the changes that have crept in over the past 10 years. Furniture stores like Peking Lounge, in the Jang family building, and Bombast are looking healthy. The Sun Yat-Sen Gardens is thriving, a model, many say, for the elegant way it has made a site of traditional Chinese culture a go-to place for the city. A couple of other buildings have been lovingly restored. Financier Milton Wong has turned his father’s Modernize Tailor at Pender and Carrall, with its ghostly Pekin Chop Suey announcement painted on the side, into a near museum piece. The benevolent association building next to Foo’s Ho Ho has a beautiful new sage-green façade, thanks to the city’s program to give money for restoring Chinatown’s heritage buildings.
When we circle back to Rennie’s gallery, we find ourselves next to the chunk of land owned by Chow’s clan association. The Yue Shan building is one of the last to retain some of the hutong-like Chinatown that existed a hundred years ago. There’s an interior courtyard, laundry hangs on a line and vegetables dry on windowsills; a small passageway, historic Market Alley, connects it to the lane between Pender and Hastings. It’s buildings like this that need to find their identity in a new Chinatown.
A UBC architecture professor, Inge Roeker, is working with the Yue Shan elders on a project to open up the alley and courtyard. Roeker, who has worked with other groups on façade-restoration projects, is even talking about re-creating a market here, an ambitious project that will require finding a way to move along the current alley occupants, addicts looking for a quiet place to shoot up.
It’s hard not to be seduced yet again by the turning-the-corner narrative. So many people are passionately interested in this patch of ground. World-renowned architects James Cheng and Bing Thom have offered to hold an urban-design workshop to help the community come up with the kind of finely detailed plan the area needs. UBC professor Henry Yu, a specialist in Chinatowns, has his students recording oral histories of the elders. Community champion and architect Joe Wai continues to fight for and work in this neighbourhood, as he has for 50 years. Fok has been successful in bringing in yet another cluster of younger people, who organized a Chinatown Arts Festival this year that included, yes, a hip-hop contest, and playful variations on the Year of the Bull theme, with Red Bull and Lamborghini as sponsors. And Jessica Chen, a senior city planner dedicated to the area, is always looking for new people and ventures to encourage. The latest is Tannis Ling, a young woman from a mixed Taiwan-Hong Kong background who is opening a restaurant that will bring in the new Chinese flavour that everyone says Chinatown needs.
As Vancouver busily transforms itself into a bland anime city, there’s another momentum as well. It feels as though unreconstructed Chinatown is more cherished every year by people looking for a different quality of urbanism. “I arrive at work as the Chinese grocers are setting up for the day,” says Monte Paulsen, an editor at the online Tyee, which recently moved into the Golden Crown building at Main and Georgia. (That tenancy is one of the green shoots tended by David Wong, who is working with the owner of the architecturally unremarkable building to transform it into a grass-roofed, green enclave that houses a collection of media, arts, and culture types.). “It’s the most enjoyable office I’ve ever worked out of because the street experience is so good. I walk through the smells of fish and strange-smelling herbs. I listen to the call-and-response of the mostly Chinese workers unloading trucks full of vegetables. And on the sidewalks, I stroll past elderly Chinese residents, young Chinese professionals, younger hipsters, and a smattering of addicts and the mentally ill. For that 10 minutes, it feels like an actual world city, instead of some shiny ‘world-class city’ that consists of little more than Starbucks and yuppie grocery stores.”
Andy Yan
Planner working with Bing Thom Architects“We’re facing a generational shift. All of these formerly marginalized Chinese areas are going through the struggle of modernizing. I think with the debate over towers in Chinatown, the towers are dead. But not embracing height is just as problematic.”
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There is little opposition to increasing the number of residents or opening up the community to rest of Vancouver – the increasing number of businesses opened by non-Asians in the community attests to that.
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I think the new transformation going on in Chinatown should reflect the diversity of traditional cultures without any racial discrimination.
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I am unfortunately disappointed by the lack of research and over-simplification of the situation in Chinatown. It’s a shame that the thoughts and views of the media savvy are being peddled as the whole story, especially by such an experienced and respected journalist who should know better and dig deep enough to fairly capture the different facets of the truth.
There is general consensus in the Chinatown that development is welcome in community, but there is disagreement in the form. There is little opposition to increasing the number of residents or opening up the community to rest of Vancouver – the increasing number of businesses opened by non-Asians in the community attests to that. There is no desire in the community to lose the heritage and character that defines the area and its significance to the rest of Vancouver. The complexity of how all the different issues inter-relate is lost in this story, and that’s ultimately where the challenges really lie. The community deserves to be properly represented, and this article does little justice to many.
The framing of this piece of writing reflects the incomplete context with which the conclusions were conceived before the insufficient research never was able to clarify.
