Morning Coffee: The Boss

Milk tea at a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong. Photo by Lisi Tang

It was the Saturday before the Lunar New Year and The Boss was crazy. People crammed inside the small bakery that fronts this old Chinatown restaurant, buying cakes, buns and cookies. Others stood around, waiting for their names to be called so they could finally be seated. Hungry, we pushed through the crowd and gave our name to the host. Then we waited. My girlfriend’s sister decided to buy a box of cocktail and curry buns. As she walked towards the counter, I stared at a large painting of a rosy-cheeked, contented old man that loomed over the bakery, flanked on both sides by festive red New Year banners with gold script. His long white beard flowed towards large pots of gold coins that rested at his feet.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to my girlfriend, Laine.

“Choi Sun wah,” she whispered back. “The, uh, god of wealth.”

When our name was called, we went to the rear of the bustling restaurant where there was a long dining hall with four rows of booths. My eyes wandered to the back of the restaurant, A strangely dour-looking jiu choi mao, or lucky cat, was perched on a ledge near the ceiling, its paw solemnly raised to beckon good fortune. As I stared at the cat, a remarkably fast-moving waitress placed four glasses of tea on the table and slapped down our menus before running off. I opened mine, stomach growling. My eyes widened as I perused the dozens of items: ox-tongue spaghetti, lovebird fried rice, baked Portuguese chicken, Hong Kong milk tea. Ah yes, this is what I had come for: cha chaan teng food.

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Two Moments, Seconds Apart

Parades in South America

Marines in a landlocked country. La Paz, Bolivia

Lining up. Lima, Peru

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You Are Here: A City In Its Street Signs

Rue Groll St., reads the street sign, jutting out from a wood hydro pole. This isn’t a sign in officially bilingual Ottawa: it is found in officially French Montreal, on a tiny lane in Mile End. The original sign was in English, but some time ago a sticker reading “Rue” was added, in a rather haphazard fashion, at the top of the sign.

Lost in the clutter of the urban landscape, street signs go largely unnoticed, but small details like this speak volumes about Montreal’s past and present. They convey more than just the names of streets. They are part of what is known as our “living heritage,” the everyday things we take for granted but are nonetheless a vital part of who we are. They tell us about Montreal’s complicated relationship with language and place.

Street signs did not appear in Montreal until 1818, when crude wood planks bearing the names of streets were erected on buildings adjacent to squares and intersections. In 1851, the system was refined when bilingual wood signs were used to identify all streets and parks.

Today, dozens of different types of street signs can be found across the city, from the red-and-beige ones in Old Montreal, which maintain the colour scheme and typeface of Montreal’s first 19th-century signs, to the bulbous, oval-shaped plaques de rue of Outremont and St. Laurent.

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A Moment Alone

Drinking alone near Covent Garden, London

Thinking alone at McGill University, Montreal

Urbanism on the Big Screen in Two New Films

Director Gary Burns (Waydowntown) moves from fiction to documentary mode, teaming up with journalist Jim Brown to bring us Radiant City, a look at suburban sprawl from the point of view of a typical family living in a new tract development in Calgary, interspersed with commentary from the likes of Mark Kingwell and James Howard Kunstler. It is now playing in select cities (but not in Montreal, yet).

Toronto documentarian Gregory Greene, meanwhile, presents a sequel to his earlier End of Suburbia, with a look at how we move forward in an era of energy scarcity: Escape from Suburbia, which is due out in theatres soon. Interviewees include the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins, the Hon. Ed Schreyer, economist Jeremy Rifkin, and researcher/journalist Richard Heinberg, among others.

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Hot Day, Black Iron

Not In My Back Yard: A Storm on St. Clair

“Riders on the Storm” by Mondo Lulu. St. Clair Avenue, Toronto

Since the term first arose sometime in the 1980s, NIMBY—“Not In My Backyard”—has taken on pejorative connotation, becoming a word that symbolizes selfish, irrational or arbitrary opposition to any development—even the sort that could benefit the community or city at large.

Before NIMBYism, however, there was only activism—earnest, well-meaning community activism. Jane Jacobs rallied ordinary citizens to fight against government-imposed highways in New York and Toronto; in Montreal, residents of the McGill Ghetto fought a massive development that would have obliterated the neighbourhood. They saved dozens of rowhouses and incorporated them into a progressive new cooperative.

The battles of the past have helped to change North American attitudes towards development. People are less likely than ever to accept “progress” at face value. At the same time, citizens’ voices are heard by government more than ever before. Is opposition to new urban development increasingly waged by people whose interests are purely selfish? Or has legitimate grassroots activism been unfairly tarnished by the NIMBY label?

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Tourists Lost on Three Continents

Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris

Spring Returns to the Lachine Canal

This is a video and still photo slideshow I created of the Lachine Canal and some of the former industrial buildings near the Côte-St-Paul Locks. The Lachine Canal was opened in 1825, allowing boats to bypass the Lachine Rapids for the first time and sail directly to the Great Lakes. It sparked an industrial boom in this part of Montreal, but in 1959, it was made obsolete by the St. Lawrence Seaway. It closed in 1969. Since then, its banks have been redeveloped with parks and bike paths. In recent years, many new condos have been built here and many of the nearby industrial buildings have been converted into office and living space. Nonetheless, abandoned industry remains, especially towards the west.

Why Is Canada Ignoring Its Vast Diaspora?

Canada Day celebrations in Hong Kong. Photo by Eric Fung

Last summer, when the “new government of Canada” (as it insists on calling itself) was forced to evacuate 50,000 Canadian citizens from Lebanon, there was a sudden and unexpected focus on the vast numbers of Canadians living overseas. Many of them are former immigrants who returned to their homeland after years or even decades in Canada. In particular, many are in Asia. This is especially evident in Hong Kong, where the pop culture is dominated by a completely disproportionate number of born-and-bred Canadians (Christy Chung, Karena Lam and Nicolas Tse, to name a few) and Hong Konger who now live in Canada (Eric Tseng, for example).

“An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Canadians make up [Hong Kong]‘s single largest contingent of foreign passport holders and Canada’s largest diaspora outside the U.S.,” writes Andrea Mendel-Campbell in this week’s edition of Maclean’s. “Their ranks read like a who’s who of Hong Kong’s rich and powerful: from Victor Li, scion of Li Ka-shing, one of the world’s richest men, to the family of fellow real estate and jewellery tycoon, Cheng Yu-Tung.”

Over the past thirty years, immigration to Canada has created a transnational web of economic and social connections. Recently, many Chinese immigrants who grew up in Canada have left to make their fortunes in Hong Kong and China, drawn by a booming economy and pushed away by a deeply conservative business environment at home. On the whole, an estimated 2.7 million Canadians live abroad, making it the world’s fourth-largest group of expatriate citizens. Yet the Canadian government and business establishment remains wary—perhaps even ignorant—of the potential represented by these overseas Canadians. Why?

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Sham Shui Po Taxi

Finding Your Way in 1894

I was one of those kids who decorated his room with National Geographic maps. I am still fascinated by them—especially by old maps. Take the above, for example. This 1894 map of Montreal (click on it to see the full version) is a guide to a city that is at once familiar and strikingly, surprisingly, foreign.

What stands out most are all of the places that no longer exist. The whole lower town has changed enormously; look at how seamlessly it flowed into the areas now known as downtown and Old Montreal. Today, this part of the city is strangled by expressways, its landmarks erased: Bonaventure Station, Chaboillez Square, Haymarket Square.

What is also fascinating is how the toponymy has changed. The streets bordering St. Louis Square were known as Ernest Street and Albina Street; what happened to these names? Sometime after 1894, the name of Mitchison Street was changed to Clark Street, Shuter Street and Oxenden Avenue were merged into Aylmer Street and Madison Avenue became Hutchison Street. Peel Street below Dorchester used to be named Windsor, which explains how Windsor Station got its name.

There is one thing about this map that leaves me scratching my head: it would seem that today’s Duluth Street used to be called Brébeouf Street; the current Brébeuf Street was once named Duluth Street. Did they swap names and lose the o?

Next Stop Please

Asleep—Eastbound On Sheppard