The Montreal Gazette reported this weekend that the Hasidic community in Outremont and Mile End is suffering from a housing shortage. In 2002, there were about 4,200 Hasidim in the neighbourhood; today there are more than 6,000. Rising property values mean that many new Hasidic families are finding themselves priced out of their own Montreal heartland. Apparently, the hunt is on to find a new neighbourhood with suitable and affordable housing.
If the Hasidic community does move on, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a Jewish community has come and gone. The entire swath of city from Chinatown right up to Little Italy is littered with former synagogues that were abandoned when the original Jewish community moved west. But it wouldn’t be a good thing if the Hasidim leave.
First of all, a Hasidic exodus would be a disaster for Park Avenue’s economy. Hasidic Jews make up more than 25 percent of Outremont’s population, and even they have their own Yiddish bookstores and kosher eateries, they still rely on non-Hasidic businesses for everything else, like drugs, hardware, stationery and fresh fruits and vegetables. Most of those shops are on Park Avenue; imagine the impact if they lost a quarter of their business.
When it first launched, Urbania magazine had a pretty useless Flash-based website that replicated selected content from its print magazine. I’m glad to see it has embraced the full potential of the web. 14 “channels” of video, images and text add a new, more dynamic aspect to the quarterly magazine. One of my favourite features is the Urbania Minutes series of videos: one-minute vignettes of Montreal life.
Above is L’exil, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, a brief portrait of a Chinese dépanneur deliveryman in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Despite the annoying synopsis, which exoticizes Chinese immigrants (“En quête d’une vie meilleure, désireux d’offrir un avenir à leurs enfants, les ressortissants de l’Empire du milieu sont prêts à trimer dur pour réaliser leur rêve. Travailler 18 heures par jour dans une buanderie ou un dépanneur, ce n’est qu’une manière d’acheter sa liberté”), it’s a worthwhile glimpse into both immigrant life and the peculiar tradition of dep delivery, which has disappeared from other parts of the city.
Le métro de Montréal s’éveille, below, is one of those always-interesting behind-the-scenes looks at something we take for granted. We see the metro come to life in all of its antiquated glory, a 1960s flashback that begs to be seen as an old episode of Batman or something.
Ever since my first visit last year, the Jamia Mosque, located near the top of the Central-Mid Levels escalator, has had a special pull on me. Hidden behind its stone walls is a verdant respite from the noise and stress of Central. A stately wrought iron gate acts as a portal between a frenzied city and a quiet place of contemplation and spiritual release.
The mosque is a welcome diversion whenever I find myself riding up the escalator. I enjoy the well-worn appearance of its grounds, the songs of the birds in its trees and the particular coziness created by the wall of skyscrapers that surround it. It’s also a place I like to show visitors to Hong Kong, and on a pleasant evening last winter, I found myself sitting on a stone ledge next to the mosque with a couple of my friends from Montreal. As the sounds of the evening prayer drifted through the air, an old man with a beard and more than a few missing teeth came up to us and started talking about everything he could think of: politics, the weather, Islam, his childhood. He mentioned that he had grown up at the mosque and had witnessed the complete transformation of the neighbourhood around it from an airy collection of walk-up tenements to a dense, dizzying cluster of highrises. He said that there were many families that lived around the mosque, in haphazardly-built houses and an elegant, now-decrepit building once used to house travelling Muslims and Islamic scholars.
Unfortuantely, the old man dashed away before I could ask him for his name. The next time I saw him, he brushed me off, muttering under his breath. “Don’t bother him, he’s crazy,” said someone standing nearby. But my interest was piqued. I decided to make a documentary, with three of my classmates at the University of Hong Kong, about the mosque and the diverse community of people that worship and live there. People started moving in during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. They never left, and now 20 families call the mosque home.
Through the Gate is my first documentary. It offers a glimpse of life at the Jamia Mosque through the experiences of three people. Andy Putranto is an Indonesian grad student who sees the mosque as a home away from home. Leila Karchoud is a Tunisian woman who was drawn back to Islam when she moved to Hong Kong. Mustafa Mohammed was born and raised at the mosque. I’ve tried to use their stories to convey the atmosphere of the mosque and its significance as a place both sacred and secular.
In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, hundreds of thousands of people fled war, famine and social upheaval in mainland China, ending up in ramshackle settlements on the hillsides of Hong Kong. Some photos from a 1962 issue of LIFE magazine—now available online thanks to Google—capture the experience of those migrants. Looking at these images, it’s worth keeping in mind that virtually no traces of these shantytowns and refugee camps are left today. The only obvious reminders of this defining period in Hong Kong’s history are the giant housing estates that stand in the place of the old squatter settlements.
For reasons that don’t quite take a doctorate in sociology to fathom, employment and ethnicity are often interrelated, especially when it comes to certain service-sector trades. Haitians dominate the taxi industry in Montreal; Greeks are well-represented in the ranks of Western Canadian pizzeria owners; and the Hui have a lock on the sale of barbecued brochettes in the streets of Beijing. Another interesting example? Mohawk high-steel workers.
In High Steel, a 1965 documentary short by Don Owen, we are introduced to the men who travelled between Kahnawake, a Mohawk town in the Montreal suburbs, and New York, where they arduously pieced together the city’s iconic skyscrapers. By then, high steel construction was a Mohawk speciality, dating back to 1886, when the Dominion Bridge Company built a railroad bridge over the St. Lawrence River. In order to pass through Kahnawake, the bridge company agreed to hire local Mohawks for the project, and a generation of men was trained in the delicate act of lifting heavy steel on high and narrow structures.
That experience was passed down through the generations. Beginning in the mid-1920s, so many Mohawks moved to New York, they formed their own small neighbourhood in Gowanus, a working-class part of Brooklyn, recreating the community life they had known in Kahnawake.
Mohawks lived in other cities, too, working wherever their skills were in demand. In 1924 or ‘25, however, the United States tightened restrictions on immigration, and native people were often lumped into the same undesirable category as Asians, making it harder for them to cross from Canada into the United States. In 1926, one Kahnawake man, Paul Diabo, was working on the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife Louise. Police arrested them for working without papers and they were ordered deported to Canada. In response, Diabo filed an injunction. His lawyer argued that, as a Mohawk, he was entitled to free movement between Canada and the United States. He was deported anyway, but Diabo persisted, returning to the United States to contest his deportation. This time he won, establishing an important precedent for First Nations people.
All of this has been very well-documented but, somehow, the Mohawk contribution to cities like Montreal and New York remains an historical footnote. In Montreal, Kahnawake sits on the fringes of the city’s imagination, seen mainly as a place to buy cheap booze and cigarettes. The same is probably true in the United States. How often, I wonder, does this Mohawk history come to mind when people gaze at the bridges and skyscrapers of Montreal, Philadelphia and New York?
I’ve always had a thing for Sexy Beijing, Danwei’s offbeat, good-natured sendup of the HBO television series Sex and the City. Its host, Anna Sophie Loewenberg, explores some of Beijing’s social and culture issues through the guise of a funnier, more awkward and self-effacing Carrie Bradshaw. Its treatment is decidedly lightweight but, like a lot of supposedly light fare, it touches on some pretty fundamental truths in an entertaining way. In the latest installment, Loewenberg quizzes some of Beijing’s many migrant workers on their love lives; their responses are often quite candid. It’s a nice peek into the lives of the “floating population.”
It’s fun to see Jean-Paul Riopelle, now considered to have been of Canada’s foremost artists, described as a “young abstract painter” in Les Canadiens errants, a 1956 National Film Board documentary. He describes the open atmosphere of Paris as being particularly conducive to the creation of art. Implicitly, of course, he is referring to the atmosphere back home in Quebec, which was decidedly hostile to any sort of innovative thinking. In 1948, when Riopelle joined fifteen other artists and intellectuals in publishing the Refus global, a manifesto against the conservative Quebec establishment of the era, he was essentially chased out of town. He moved to Paris in 1949 and he continued to split his time between France and Canada until the 1990s.
Canada has always been a country of immigrants but what isn’t as widely known is that it has been, for just as long, a country of emigrants. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration and a high birth rate were the only things preventing Canada from losing population as hundreds of thousands of people left for better economic prospects in the United States. Throughout its history, many of its luminaries have found it more worthwhile to live abroad — Mordecai Richler in London, Leonard Cohen in Greece, Mavis Gallant and Anne Hébert in Paris, just to name a few. Even today, an estimated two million Canadians live outside of Canada.
What interests me about this is how the expatriate experience has informed the Canadian identity. Unfortunately, the film above doesn’t really offer much in that regard, dwelling mainly on the surface of why such talented people decided to leave Canada for Paris and London. Unlike immigrants, who leave their countries to join family abroad or to pursue better educational or economic opportunities elsewhere, expats tend to come from positions of relative privilege. For them, moving abroad is a lifestyle choice more than anything else. That has been my experience in Hong Kong, at least, and from what what I can glean in Les Canadiens errants, it was true in 1950s Europe, too.
In the past, Roy Chipowoaminga walked the streets of Hong Kong as a tourist. In August, he was sleeping on them. Penniless and far from home, he found a bench in Admiralty and stayed there for a month.
“My biggest hope is to be able to go back home,” said Chipowoaminga, a 31-year-old asylum-seeker whose name has been changed to protect his identity. “But it’s unlikely that the situation in Zimbabwe will improve anytime soon.”
It has been nearly a year and a half since Chipowoaminga left his job as a banker in Harare to live, without family or any source of income, in Hong Kong. He had been doing financial work for the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe’s beleaguered opposition party, he said, when he was threatened with arrest by agents from President Robert Mugabe’s notoriously oppressive government. In recent years, as Zimbabwe has plunged into economic and social chaos, members of the opposition have been detained, tortured and killed. Chipowoaminga took no chances.
Now, he is one of the roughly 2,000 refugee claimants in Hong Kong, a territory that offers asylum-seekers no clear rights, no system to process their claims and almost no chance to stay, even if they are granted refugee status.
With the exception of cases involving torture, which are handled by the Hong Kong government, applications for asylum made in Hong Kong are dealt with by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, an international organization responsible for dealing with refugees worldwide. Most refugee advocates agree that it is not well-equipped to deal with Hong Kong’s refugee situation. The waiting time for decisions can be more than a year, for instance, and it offers no financial aid to refugee claimants. If their claim is denied, they are given no specific reason and offered only a limited chance to appeal.
According to information provided by the Hong Kong Immigration Department, the UNHCR processed 4443 refugee claims between 2005 and 2007, more than half of them in 2007 alone. Only 182 were accepted.
For all the times I went to buy groceries at Montreal’s Chinese supermarkets, it never once occurred to me that much of the food I was buying was in fact locally-produced. Then I saw Yung Chang’s short documentary, Earth to Mouth, which my friend Cedric screened last year in a fifth-floor room in Chinatown. In his disarmingly quiet way, Chang introduces us to Wing Fong Farm, just outside Toronto, which grows the produce sold and consumed in the city’s big Chinese malls and supermarkets. In a particularly inspired scene near the beginning of the film, the farm’s 73-year-old matriarch, Lau King Fai, introduces us to some of the produce she grows, like gai lan (best prepared with smashed ginger and stir-fried with wine and salt) and go lai choi (stir-fry with vinegar and serve with oyster sauce).
As you would expect from someone who made Up the Yangtze, which put a defiantly human face on a massive technological achievement, Yung Chang has made a film that is more about the people who run Wing Fong Farm than it is about the food they produce. We learn about Lau’s path from Changsha to Guangzhou, and then, late in life, to rural Ontario, where she slipped quietly into the role of a farmer after a lifetime spent in cities. She rises at dawn each day, putting in long hours overseeing the farm’s operations, but it is the six Mexican workers she and her son employ who do the real grunt work. Watching the interaction between the farm’s Chinese owners and their Mexican employees is one of the things that makes Earth to Mouth so fascinating: this is the ordinary, everyday face of globalization.
“Huwag Manigarilyo” is not what you would expect to find written on an official banner in Hong Kong, but that’s exactly the message that greets visitors to Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, where Indonesian and Tagalog join Chinese and English on the park’s official signage, such as the banners meant to remind park-goers that smoking is prohibited.
The quadrilingual signs are an indication of the thousands of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers who descend on the park each Sunday, when they meet with friends and compatriots in what might be best described as a giant communal picnic. Every open space in the park is thronged with women eager to make the most of their only day off. The same is true in nearly every major public space in Hong Kong: in Central, where an especially large number of Filipina women gather in the streets and plazas around Statue Square; in Tsim Sha Tsui, where Malay, Indonesian and South Asian women flock to Kowloon Park; and in many smaller parks throughout the city.
Domestic workers from Southeast Asia first arrived in Hong Kong in the 1970s, at a time when its middle class was growing and countries such as the Philippines faced particularly tough economic times. Since then, the population has swelled from several thousands workers to nearly 250,000, the vast majority of them women. For most of the week, they remain relatively unseen, living and working with their employers, who play them a minimum wage of $3,580 per month. On Sunday, however, the true bulk of Hong Kong’s domestic worker population becomes evident.
Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s attempt to rename Park Avenue two years ago was a turning point in the street’s history. When that controversy emerged, a number of the street’s Greek merchants were already asking the city to create a Hellenic Quarter similar to Little Italy or Chinatown. The city spent $15,000 on a feasibility study that suggests emphasizing Park Ave.’s Greek-yet-multicultural character could be a boon to business. This spring, the city invested $50,000 in new banners, benches, garbage cans and bike racks there. The city says it will announce the next phase of the quarter’s development in two weeks. Chris Karidogiannis, executive secretary of the Park Ave. Merchants’ Association, is one of the project’s main proponents.
What is the Hellenic Quarter concept?
The idea started in the early ’90s, but it didn’t really develop until the past couple of years. We were trying to find a way to re-imagine Park Ave. commercially. We were looking for a way to bypass certain negative things the city has done that have really damaged the viability of our businesses – like the bus lanes, high property taxes and, most recently, exorbitant parking meter rates. Like it or not, this past generation of Park Ave. has been very Greek. It hasn’t always been Greek, but for the past 30 years it’s been known as the Greek area, and we thought that we should officialize it and create something a little more touristy, like Petite Italie or Chinatown.
What would this entail?
We’ve been working closely on developing a concept that’s similar to Little Italy. Fortunately for the merchants there, they had a mayor that was really into the concept, Pierre Bourque, and who invested $9 million into it. Now you cannot even rent a spot there and business has gone up 50 per cent over the last eight years.
What do you think of the city’s efforts for Park Ave.?
The city spent $20,000 on 32 new banners. They’re visible but discreet at the same time. I know the city wants the project to happen but they don’t want to ruffle any feathers at all. As you can see, on the banners there’s an Asian child with a Greek flag right under her. They’re trying to show the multiculturalism of the area, the roots of which are Greek. That’s what I think they’re trying to accomplish, anyway.
Park Ave. is Greek, but it’s also very multicultural. Why should one of its communities be privileged over others?
Little Italy is as Italian as Park Ave. is Greek – not a lot of Italians still live in that area but a majority of businesses and properties are still owned by them. We’ve been working on this for four years and we haven’t had anyone who has come up with another idea or who has said that they don’t want it because it’s Greek. We want this to be a gift to the Hellenic community in general, but hopefully it will benefit the businesses, as well. We were worried about the scale of the project at first, since it goes from Van Horne down to Mount Royal, but then we visited the Danforth in Toronto (that city’s Greektown centres around Danforth Ave.) and it’s just as wide and just as long and it’s 10 times as busy. There’s unlimited potential.
The night before last, as the remnants of a thunderstorm drizzled down on Bernard Street, I walked to the Outremont Theatre to see Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze for the second time. Seeing it again only confirmed that this is truly a remarkable film — and one of the best and most important foreign-made movies made about modern China.
That’s quite a statement, I know, but what makes me say that is the profoundly human way in which it approaches a truly monumental subject: the impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the people who live in the basin of the Yangtze River. Two million people have already been displaced by the dam’s flooding and another two million are expected to be moved as a result of design flaws and environmental degradation. The film focuses on one of the “farewell tours” that take tourists up the river to wave goodbye at the disappearing landscape, and it follows two teenagers, Yu Shui and Jerry—one shy, stubborn and poor, the other arrogant and middle-class—who leave home to work on one of the boats.
Yu Shui’s story is the most compelling of the two and she, more than Jerry, becomes the real focus of the film. After her family’s hometown, Fengdu, is abandoned and rebuilt across the river—the old town will soon be flooded—her family builds a shack near the water where they can grow their own food. They eat well but have no money, so instead of going to high school, Yu Shui takes a job on a farewell cruise, scrubbing dishes in the boat’s kitchen. Before making his film, Chang earned such trust from the Yu family that he was able to film some truly extraordinarily intimate family scenes.
If Chinatown’s Jewish heritage isn’t obvious, it’s probably because it has been erased by time and redevelopment, swept away like Chenneville St. and its quietly imposing synagogue.
Makom: Seeking Sacred Space, an ongoing exhibition at Hampstead’s Dorshei Emet synagogue, examines the historical traces of Montreal’s Jewish community with photos of former synagogues near the Main.
“The exhibition raises some really interesting questions about the way that spaces that are claimed by one group of people or one community are also claimed, in their own way, by other communities,” said Leanore Lieblein, a retired McGill English professor who helped organize the exhibition. Even in a synagogue that has been renovated and used for something else, she added, “you can feel the presence of past lives in that building.”
Chenneville’s synagogue was a case in point. Located on a small street (now shortened and written as Cheneville) between St. Urbain and Jeanne Mance Sts., below Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Blvd. and above Craig (now St. Antoine) St., it was built in 1838 by Montreal’s oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.
In 1887, when Shearith Israel moved to a much larger home on Stanley St. – following the westward migration of Montreal’s older generations of Canadian-born, anglicized Jews – the synagogue was rented by Beth David, a congregation of Romanian immigrants who arrived in the late 19th century, part of a huge wave of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Over the next three decades, the area around present-day Chinatown – with Bleury St. to the west, Sanguinet St. to the east, Craig to the south and Ontario St. to the north – became the heart of Jewish Montreal, a haven for Yiddish-speaking immigrants who established businesses, synagogues and many of the Jewish institutions that still exist.
Israel Medresh, a journalist for the Kanader Adler, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper, sketched a portrait of the neighbourhood in his 1947 book Montreal Foun Nekhtn, translated into English in 2000 as Montreal of Yesterday.
“The corner of St. Urbain and Dorchester was the very heart of the Jewish neighbourhood,” he wrote. “Nearby was Dufferin Park, then a ‘Jewish park’ where Jewish immigrants went to breathe the fresh air, meet their landslayt (compatriots), hear the latest news, look for work and read the newspapers.”
“Around 6am, the squealing of copulating rats—signalling a night-long verminous orgy on the rooftops of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai—gives way to the more cheerful sound of chirruping sparrows. Through a small window in Shashikant (“Shashi”) Kawale’s rickety shack, daylight seeps. It reveals a curly black head outside. Further inspection shows that this is attached to a man’s sleeping body, on a slim metal ledge, 12 feet above the ground.”
It’s not the most flattering description, but the Economist’s December 19th story on Dharavi is actually a remarkably sensitive portrait of Asia’s largest slum, revealing a particularly complex social and economic space that is now threatened by redevelopment.
One million people live in Dharavi, which is somewhat incredible when you realize that it covers just one square mile. Although conditions are rough, life in the slum has improved remarkably over the past several decades. Part of the reason for that is that it has become an important economic centre, containing an estimated 15,000 single-room factories and functioning as the centre of Mumbai’s jewellery, textile and recycling industries. All of the trash thrown away in Mumbai passes through the workshops of Dhavari, where it is sorted and sold. For the slum’s residents, the line between home and work is blurred, since many living spaces also double as workshops; every inch of Dharavi is put to great use.
Government planners don’t approve of slums like this; they never have. For at least a decade, Mumbai’s officials have been trying to get rid of Dharavi. What they overlook, however, is the innovation and entrepreneurialism it produces. Dharavi is packed with an almost unimaginable number of people, but it’s also full of small businesses that were built by the most marginalized members of Indian society. Most are poor migrants from the countryside. For them, living in a slum, where living conditions are squalid but opportunities are immense, is the best way to improve their lot.
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