The wet market on Haiphong Road comes as a bit of a surprise, tucked as it is beneath a busy flyover that shudders with the weight of passing trucks. The crowds streaming along the road towards the shops on Canton Road pass it by without much thought. If a passerby were to wander in, though, he or she would be in for another surprise. Instead of the usual row of fishmongers and butchers selling every cut of pork cut imaginable, there is a small collection of halal butchers.
I’ve been to the market on a number of occasions, and each time, the butchers seem vaguely surprised to see me. They ask me where I am from. “Canada,” I reply, to which they usually tell me about a relative in Toronto or offer some platitude about the beautiful scenery. On my last visit, I asked one of the butchers, Asif, how long he had been working there. “More than twenty years,” he said. Born in Pakistan, he came to Hong Kong as a child and started working in the market when his father opened a shop there in the 1980s. “We don’t come from a family of butchers, so we had to watch others and learn from them,” he said.
I had always assumed that the market’s customers were mainly Pakistani from the surrounding neighbourhood, but it draws a more diverse crowd than that. “Indians will come and buy goat — they don’t eat beef — and cook it for breakfast,” Asif told me. “Chinese people come here too. They say our meat tastes better.” He gestured towards cuts of beef hanging from hooks above his stall. “In our country, beef is tough and goat is softer, but here, beef is very tender and goat is tough.” I asked why, but he shrugged.
From the Loop, the Pink Line El bursts west, floating among the rooftops of a low-rise industrial district. As the city’s wall of downtown skyscrapers drifts away and the train enters an expanse of limitless sky, it’s as if the Pink Line is darting toward far more distant destinations than its terminus in neighboring Cicero. The slightly undulating horizontals of the warehouse roofs take on the characteristics of the rolling, arid Plains and desert beyond, stretching almost ceaselessly to the south and the west.
Stopping at 18th St., though, it’s more apparent the journey transports mentally further than it has physically; the Sears Tower still looms totemically, as it does over most of pancake-flat Chicago’s south and west sides. But something else has happened: the station is covered in a riot of color; art infuses every step and crevice. Alighting here, the rider descends this urban canvas into Pilsen: first settled by crafty vrais Bohemians, resettled by Mexicans and increasingly claimed again by bohemians of a different sort, Pilsen is a neighborhood where artistic traditions run deep.
Before there was Gold Mountain — the promised land of North America — Chinese immigrants flocked to Southeast Asia, where they settled in countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. Eventually, they came to dominate the regional economy, earning themselves scorn from some of the local native populations. 90 years ago, Thailand’s King Rama VI called them the “Jews of the East,” a sentiment that has been echoed more recently by political leaders in Malaysia, where Chinese make up more than a quarter of the population.
In the 1980s and 90s, some of these overseas Chinese began to move to Hong Kong, another step in generations of migrations across Asia. They make up the bulk of Hong Kong’s Thai population, which numbers around 30,000. Many Thai-Chinese are literate in Thai but not Chinese, and their culture is an interesting amalgam of Thai and Chinese traditions. A couple of months ago, I visited Hong Kong’s largest Thai neighbourhood in Kowloon City, where they are served by restaurants, grocery stores, karaoke bars and beauty parlours.
You can see the fruits of my visit on CNNGo or in the extended photo collection above.
French football fans celebrate in 2006 on the Plateau Mont-Royal
Photo by Oliver Lavery
It’s been a long time coming, but the French — in the words of a shop manager on Mount Royal Avenue — “are taking over the Plateau!” French immigrants have been coming to Quebec for decades, but the past few years have seen an especially large influx. This year, Canada will issue 14,000 temporary visas to French people between the ages of 18 and 35, most of them on working holidays. Many choose to live in Montreal, and especially on the Plateau Mont-Royal, where French accents have become common enough to elicit half-joking exclamations like the one above. According to the French consulate, there could be as many as 100,000 French citizens living in Montreal.
In today’s La Presse, Émilie Côté takes a look at the growing community of young French émigrés on the Plateau. Many of the people she encountered say they want to stay in Montreal long-term, but finding permanent employment has been difficult. There’s also some lingering prejudice against “les maudits Français,” though some admit that the animosity could be well-deserved, considering that French people “have a chauvinistic streak” and are “notorious whiners.” In any case, the French influx is beginning to reshape the social fabric of the Plateau in some potentially fascinating ways.
Though Montreal is unique in that it is the only large, economically-developed French-speaking city outside Europe, it is not the only place with a growing French community. More and more French people are moving to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver; a number of American cities, including Boston, San Francisco and New York, have been popular destinations for quite some time now. According to the French magazine Les Echos, there are 210,000 French expatriates in Canada, 175,000 in the United States and 158,000 in the United Kingdom. But here’s a surprise: the country with the absolute largest number of French expats is China, with 252,000.
Last Saturday, I stumbled into Cinema du Parc after fighting a losing battle with some serious wind-chill. I found myself watching Lixin Fan’s documentary, Last Train Home, a jarring film that expertly chronicles the world’s largest human migration.
Every year, 130 million Chinese migrant workers attempt to make it back to their homes in rural China in time to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The last decade has seen China catapulted into a new economic reality as its GDP and infrastructure experience sustained and unprecedented growth. This has resulted in the dismantling of families in China’s poverty stricken countryside as younger members leave their homes for the city.
The film follows the lives of one family, the Zhangs, as they take part in this annual migration. The mother and father have gone to pursue jobs in Guangzhou and they have left behind their children and aging grandmother. Through the story of this family, Fan addresses the much bigger story of globalization and a country’s struggle between old values and new realities.
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.
