Refugees in Hong Kong

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.

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The Mohawk Skyline

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?

Migrant Worker Seeks Love

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.”

The Errant Canadians

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.

Stranded in Hong Kong

Refugees on a Sham Shui Po rooftop. Photo from

Our Life in West Kowloon, a book published by the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group

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.

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Earth to Mouth

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.

“Where We Can Find Our Family”

“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.

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The Case for Greektown

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.

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Up the Yangtze

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.

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The Evolving Landscape of the Ethnic Media

Chinese and English newspapers at a newsstand in Vancouver

When Sept Days sent Montreal journalist Xian Hu to Afghanistan last December, the weekly Chinese newspaper was not only making a statement to its competitors in the community here, but to mainstream newspapers as well.

“We want Montreal to know that the Chinese community wants to integrate into society,” said the newspaper’s publisher, Ling Yin, and part of that involves giving Chinese immigrants an opportunity to debate national issues like the Afghanistan mission in their own language.

“Our initial goal was to see, from our own eyes, what the NATO and Canadian troops are doing there. We don’t want to hear just from La Presse or The Gazette, we don’t want to know what the so-called mainstream is saying, we want to know ourselves,” she said.

Rather than send Hu to cover Canada’s military operations in Kandahar, Yin decided that it would be more effective to send her to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, to hear from ordinary Afghans what they thought of international reconstruction efforts and life after the Taliban.

For the 54-year-old Hu, who had no experience in journalism before joining Sept Days, the trip was a revelation.

“I was shocked. I thought it would be more developed, especially after six years of reconstruction,” she said. Her experience was made all the more tangible by the fact that, rather than living in a hotel for the week she spent in the country, she stayed in the houses of “friends of friends of friends” and explored the city to speak with ordinary Afghans about their experiences.

Her journey gave Hu enough material for two feature articles, one that looked at how Afghans perceived reconstruction efforts and another that examined why Afghan women continue to wear the burqa.

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Chinatown’s Jewish History

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.”

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Urban, Multicultural Environmentalism

Volunteers at the 2007 Chinatown Clean Up, an event designed, in part, to raise environmental awareness

A few years ago, Sandra Lee was a McGill marketing student with a budding interest in environmental issues. Involved with a mainstream environmental advocacy group, she found herself increasingly alienated by what she terms the “camping culture” of the people around her, not to mention the fact that she was the only visible minority in the organization.

It dawned on Lee that concern for the environment, as universal as it might seem, manifests itself in different ways for different people. “A lot of environmentalists grew up with a focus on nature, going hiking and canoeing and stuff like that. I just don’t relate to that culture at all. What I’m interested in is environmentalism as it relates to an urban setting,” she says.

Around the same time, Lidia Guennaoui, another young environmentalist, was coming to a similar realization. Shortly after she graduated with a degree in environmental studies from the Université de Montréal, Guennaoui started work in a Côte-des-Neiges Écoquartier that served immigrants from dozens of countries. She found that she lacked the resources to engage them in environmental issues.

“There’s a lot of environmental education we need to do, but I realized that we don’t have the tools to do that. The tools that we have are very unilateral,” she says. “We’re at the stage now where we need to open up more and communicate. We all have our own set of cultural and social references, especially when it comes to the environment.”

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Don’t Bulldoze the Slums

Street scene in Dharavi. Photo from the Economist

“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.

Potters at work. Photo by Akshay Mahajan

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Indo-Fijians, Filipinos and Romanians

Winnipeg: it’s a long way from the Philippines. Photo by Jezz

I’ve been pouring over the new 2006 census data on language and immigration released by Statistics Canada last week. Nationally, all of the attention is being paid to the fact that one-fifth of all Canadians are foreign-born, one of the highest rates in the world. Here in Montreal, the focus is on both a surge in immigration (especially from North Africa and China) and the changing linguistic makeup of the city.

Francophones — people whose mother tongue is French — are now a minority on Montreal Island, thanks mostly to high levels of immigration from non-francophone countries. The number of anglophones, meanwhile, has increased for the first time in 30 years. Arabic, Spanish and Chinese have become the fastest-growing non-official languages in Montreal.

But enough with the big picture news; it has already been dissected ad infinitum in the media. What interests me are some of the odd, surprising and overlooked trends in immigration that are having an impact on Canada’s cities.

Indo-Fijians in Vancouver

Looking through the census data, I wasn’t surprised to see that nearly 17 percent of Vancouver’s population now speaks a Chinese language, and I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that China and India were its top sources of immigrants. I was a bit surprised, however, to note that there are more than 17,200 immigrants from Fiji who live in Vancouver. Most of them arrived before 1991, but enough came between 2001 and 2006 (1,670) to make the tiny Pacific island Vancouver’s fifteenth-largest source of new immigrants, after Mexico and before Afghanistan.

People from Fiji have been immigrating to Canada since the 1960s and most of them have landed in Vancouver. The vast majority are Indo-Fijian and they have a distinct sense of cultural identity, not unlike other immigrants of Indian descent from countries like Guyana.

Filipinos in Winnipeg

Winnipeg is not normally a major draw for immigrants, yet it has become one of the principal centres of Filipino immigration to Canada. Winnipeg is home to Canada’s third-largest Filipino population despite being the eighth-largest city (even then, at 694,000 inhabitants, it has only a couple of thousand more people than Hamilton). 6,885 Filipino immigrants arrived in Winnipeg between 2001 and 2006, more than three times as many people as the city’s second-largest source of new immigrants, India. One-fifth of all immigrants in Winnipeg, or roughly 25,000 people, come from the Philippines.

The reason why so many Filipino immigrants settle in Winnipeg is obvious: friends and family who are already there. That’s the case for most immigrants across Canada, whatever their origin and wherever they choose to live. But what is especially notable is that Winnipeg has maintained such a large Filipino community despite continually losing people — both native- and foreign-born — to other provinces.

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