Chinatown is Changing

In September, the owner of Swatow, an import/export business, announced he will replace his St. Laurent Blvd. store with a $20-million shopping centre – the first major real-estate investment in Chinatown since the 1980s – that will include a supermarket, office space, a rooftop banquet hall and small boutiques similar to those found in Toronto or Vancouver’s trendy Asian malls.

Earlier this year, a number of new businesses opened elsewhere in the neighbourhood, including the third Canadian location of Xiao Fei Yang, a Chinese hot pot chain with hundreds of locations across Asia.

These changes in Chinatown’s retail landscape – toward businesses that appeal to a wider segment of the population, like young people and Mandarin-speakers from the mainland – are happening as Montreal’s growing Chinese population is becoming increasingly dispersed throughout the city.

“The demographics of Chinatown are definitely changing,” said Ting Kwan Hung, a community organizer who lived in Hong Kong, Liverpool, New York and Toronto before coming to Montreal in 2004. “There are more and more non-Cantonese speaking people and you also see more Chinese youth who speak French.”

Nodes of Chinese businesses and services have emerged outside of Chinatown, especially in Brossard, home to the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in the Montreal metropolitan area. Other neighbourhoods, like Ville St. Laurent, Côte des Neiges, Verdun and the west end of downtown, also have large or growing Chinese populations.

Now that Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, dentists and other services are found throughout the city, can Chinatown stay relevant to Chinese Montrealers?

“There’s a lot of new immigrants, but they don’t spend much money,” said Tran Tao Cam, the vice-president of the Montreal Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “There are also lots of students from very rich families, but they don’t come to Chinatown. Look at the area near Concordia, along Ste. Catherine. There used to be only two or three Chinese businesses, now there’s 30 or 40.”

Tran worries the high cost of parking, issues with cleanliness, competition from business in other parts of the city and even the rising dollar will keep people from coming to Chinatown in the future. Still, he said, it remains “a very special area for business,” one that continues to draw a large variety of people.

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A Night Market in a Suburban Parking Lot

You can’t find an urban tradition more firmly rooted in Asia’s cities than the night market. Since emerging in Tang dynasty China, about 1,200 years ago, they have become a quintessential part of the urban experience in Taiwan, Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia. In Taiwan, night markets are so firmly rooted they have spawned an entire cuisine of street foods known as xiao chi, or “small eats.”

Now, just as Chinese immigrants brought the night market tradition to other parts of Asia, they have taken it across the Pacific. The largest night market in North American can be found in Richmond, a flat, sprawling suburb of Vancouver about a twenty minute drive south of downtown. Since it first emerged in a shopping mall parking lot in 2000, the Richmond Night Market has grown into a 400-stall behemoth that draws up to 35,000 people per night. It is held every weekend between May and October, from 7pm to midnight. Although most of the people who visit the night market are Asian, including many Chinese — all of the announcements over the PA system are in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and signs on nearly all stalls are in English and Chinese — it still manages to attract a fairly diverse crowd of Vancouverites, especially as it has gained attention in the English-language media.

Unlike its Asian counterparts, the Richmond Night Market does not take place in the confines of a street. Instead, it’s held in a vast open space, sandwiched between the Fraser River and an industrial park, accessible only by car. But the stalls are arranged in rows, creating the illusion of a crowded lane. Despite its distinctly suburban setting, it offers a kind of outdoor space of interaction that is normally foreign to the suburbs. This is especially true in the most crowded part of the market, around the food vendors. Amidst the odd scent of curried fish balls and miniature donuts, thousands of hungry people munch red bean pancakes, barbecued squid, noodle soup and tong shui.

Despite its popularity, though, the night market’s future is threatened. Earlier this year, its landlord decided not to renew its lease, perhaps seeing development opportunity in its waterfront location. Even with strong support from City Hall, the Richmond tourism bureau and the local chamber of commerce, the market has been unable to find a home for its upcoming 2008 season. It would need at least 15 acres to operate, but finding such a large chunk of open space in Richmond is a huge challenge.

Recognizing the market’s potential both as a tourist attraction and an incubator for small businesses, one Richmond city councillor proposed creating a permanent market space underneath the guideway of the Canada Line, an elevated railway that will link Richmond to Vancouver in 2009. “When I was in Beijing, I saw markets under the roadways and overpasses. They utilize any available space,” he told the Richmond News.

While the councillor’s proposal would do nothing to solve the night market’s immediate need for space, it is a brilliant long-term solution. Not only would it reduce the need for parking, it would create a hub of activity around the Canada Line, which is already attracting new high-density development. Wouldn’t it be fitting if the Richmond Night Market, so suburban until now, ultimately ended up resembling its more urban counterparts across the Pacific?

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The Immigration Debate Takes to the Streets

In Quebec, the question of how to “reasonably accommodate” religious minorities has morphed, over the past year, into an all-consuming debate over immigration. It has tangled together every conceivable strand of Quebec’s identity issues: language, religion, ethnicity, sovereignty and geography.

Many people, myself included, have become frustrated with the xenophobic tenor of the discussion and the lack of strong voices in support of immigrants and ethnic minorities. While politicians like Pauline Marois cynically exploit (and obfuscate) the issue with appeals to linguistic nationalism, and old-stock Quebeckers in homogeneous villages fret about the threat posed to their culture by immigrants who reside hundreds of kilometres away in Montreal, the real problems faced by immigrants — barriers to employment and discrimination, notably — have gone largely ignored.

Still, as painful as this whole process as been, it has remained abstract. Some might say that this is because the people most fearful about immigration are those who live in the most homogeneous settings. I certainly haven’t experienced any tension on the streets of Montreal or in the day-to-day interactions of its culturally diverse citizens.

That isn’t quite the case in Prince William County, Virginia. Over the past several months, this exurban area on the fringes of metropolitan Washington, DC, where one-fifth of the population is foreign-born and nearly half is non-white, has been the setting for a sometimes vicious quarrel over immigration and, more specifically, Latino immigration. More specifically, the debate has revolved around a resolution that would force police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally.

In response, two filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to document the conflict. Annabel Park and Eric Byler, Asian-Americans who grew up in Prince William County, have launched 9500Liberty, an interactive documentary that straightforwardly explores all facets of the debate. Park and Byler are editing their footage as they shoot it and uploading it to YouTube as quickly as possible, giving viewers the chance to shape its direction and engage with it in a way that would not be possible with a traditional film.

So far, the filmmakers have documented county meetings, interviewed key players in the debate and shot confrontations between supporters of the crackdown on illegal immigration and its opponents. The most-viewed video, which you can watch above, deals with the so-called Liberty Wall, a large banner that urges Prince William County residents to “stop your racism to Hispanics!” After it was erected, several attempts were made to destroy it.

Byler and Park’s project has been widely viewed and discussed. Like any documentary, it creates an opportunity for reflection. That’s something we could use here in Quebec. Unlike the proposed resolution in Prince William County, or even the larger debate over illegal immigration, the question of reasonable accommodation is astoundingly vague. That, in large part, is the reason why it has veered so drastically off course. What we need, most of all, to explore, as honestly as possible, the ground-level reality of immigration and multiculturalism in Montreal and Quebec.

Ethnic Depanneurs

Although most depanneurs are owned by immigrants or people from what Quebec politicians like to call “cultural communities,” they typically bear few traces of their proprietor’s ethnic origin. Sometimes there might be a heater on the counter containing churros or samosas but, for the most part, deps focus on the holy trinity of beer, tobacco and lottery tickets.

In some neighbourhoods, though, depanneurs are transformed into hybrid businesses that are half ethnic grocery, half ordinary dep. Marché Chanab, at the corner of St. Roch and Querbes in Park Extension, is one example, selling a variety of imported products along with the traditional depanneur staples. Like any dep, it draws a wide cross-section of neighbourhood residents, but the Punjabi scripts on its sign let potential South Asian customers know that it offers something extra.

Similar are the many Chinese depanneurs that have emerged in Verdun over the past several years, which sell Chinese veggies and packaged food alongside the usual soft drinks and potato chips. It’s a good business strategy: cater to the borough’s growing Chinese population while still serving as the corner dep on which nearby residents rely.

A Saint On Your Doorstep

You can almost always tell when an apartment in Montreal is home to a Portuguese family: there’s usually a small tile mosaic depicting a saint next to the door. On some blocks in Montreal’s old Portuguese neighbourhood, which includes much of the western Plateau and eastern Mile End, especially the areas around Duluth, Rachel and St. Urbain streets, nearly every apartment has these tiles.

Portuguese culture has a strong tradition of azulejos, or ceramic tiles. In Lisbon, there are entire houses and churches covered in tiles. Here in Montreal, that might have been prohibitively expensive, so I guess the smaller tilework we see is a small way for Portuguese immigrants to assert their heritage. I’m curious to know what happens when a Portuguese family moves out of their apartment: do they take their tiles with them, or do they leave them for the next occupant?

Signs of Koreatown

Toronto’s Koreatown, strung out along Bloor Street between Christie and Bathurst, is a brief but intense blitz of signage, the sidewalks along its six blocks lined by sandwich boards, vertical shop signs and hand-drawn posters hanging in store windows.

Urban Village, Shenzhen Style

The rapid urbanization of Shenzhen since 1980 has generated a contemporary landscape dotted with a series of urban villages, enclaves of buzzing urbanity and street life situated on land owned by Shenzhen’s original rural residents. These areas house much of Shenzhen’s floating population of workers from across China.

The local farmers or fishers who are now the village landlords have usually completely re-arranged their village space, which is increasingly hemmed in by commercial or residential high-rise projects. Shenzhen’s urban villages are typically a fabric of tightly packed ten to fifteen storey walk-up apartment buildings, with ground floor commercial, arranged around a very permeable street grid, punctuated with the odd public space or market. There are usually some fairly spacious main streets, but most of the buildings are accessed through a warren of alleys and pathways, most less than two metres wide, that wind their way between the buildings. Amazingly, there’s still some commercial activity within the maze—such as informal bicycle repair shops or very small canteens.

While they have struggled with a poor reputation in Shenzhen, and in other Chinese cities in which the phenomenon occurs, urban villages are starting to be perceived as islands of vitality, street life, and holdouts of traditional culture in the sea of modernity that is Shenzhen. One village in Shenzhen’s Futian district, Shuiwei, is even being targeted for tourism, while many others are falling under the scope of the somewhat ominous-sounding Urban Village Renovation Project.

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Where Latinos Speak Korean

Se habla español in LA’s Koreatown. Photo by Hunhee.

Multiculturalism is usually framed in terms of the relationship between immigrants and a “host society.” But what about the relationship between immigrants themselves? In Los Angeles’ sprawling Koreatown, a growing population of Latino immigrants is leading to a cultural and linguistic exchange that is unprecedented in recent American history.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes the trend: “At the Galleria, a large Korean supermarket here, store manager Yoonah Yoon greets Hispanic cashiers and bag boys each morning with a hearty ‘buenos dias’—’good morning’ in Spanish. The Latino workers, who make up more than half the store’s 162 employees, answer him with the equivalent greeting in Korean: ‘Ahn-nyung-hah-seh-yo.’”

Korean immigrants began settling along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s, gradually establishing a vast Korean neighbourhood that eventually became the epicentre of the world’s largest Korean community outside of Asia. Eventually, most of the neighbourhood’s Korean residents decamped for other neighbourhoods and suburbs around Los Angeles, motivated in no small part by the 1992 riots that targeted Korean-owned businesses above all. Over the course of the 1990s, Koreatown became home to a new wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Despite the area’s changing demographics, Koreatown remained the most important hub of commerce and culture for the Los Angeles Korean community. In fact, in recent years, Korean investment in the neighbourhood has increased, including the construction in 2001 of a $40-million Korean spa and a new Korean shopping mall.

That’s where things get interesting. Many of these Korean businesses draw their employees (and, in some cases, customers) from the surrounding area’s largely Latino population. The relationship is such that many Koreans business owners are learning Spanish—and many Latino workers are learning Korean.

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No Ching-Chong Here

“Yeah, but where are you really from?” It’s a question familiar to many Chinese-Canadians who grew up feeling torn between different cultures, identities and places. Tomorrow, seven young Montrealers of Chinese descent will share a roundtable discussion on what it means to be Chinese in a multicultural Canada: General Tao, Kung Fu, Ching-chong: Chinese Identity in a Multicultural Canada.

I met up with three of them last week at Magic Idea, a popular Chinatown café. Shuang Liu is a 19-year-old college student who is one of ten students allowed to skip her undergraduate studies and enroll straight into dentistry at McGill University in the fall. Sandra Lee is 26 and an environmental activist. Cedric Sam, also 26, is a web developer who runs Smurfmatic and the upstart subway-oriented restaurant review site Métro Boulot Resto (to which he has graciously allowed me to contribute). As we made introductions, a Jay Chou song came on and the café staff cranked up the stereo. We almost had to shout.

I started with the obvious question: why pick a title that plays so heavily on stereotypes? “The media plays such a huge role in how others see us,” Shuang answered. “When you think about Chinese food, you think about General Tao. When you think about a Chinese guy, you think he must do kung fu and talk like ‘Ching-chong ching-chong.’ The influence is huge and how I perceive myself is not really separate from that.”

Like many young Chinese-Canadians, Shuang has struggled to find her place in Canadian society. Born in Beijing, she immigrated with her family to ethnically homogenous Sherbrooke when she was two years old. (They later relocated to Quebec City, which isn’t any more diverse.) After a few years of being the only Asian kid on the playground, Shuang adopted a non-Chinese name, Melissa, to better blend in. It wasn’t until after her family had finally moved to more cosmopolitan Montreal that she decided to change it back. “It’s a name I’m really proud of. My parents happened to have the same [family] name and ‘Shuang’ sort of means ‘bringing together.’ It’s really beautiful,” she said.

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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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The Age of Chinese Laundries

Chong Sing Laundry, Notre Dame Street

The Chinese laundry seems like such an inexplicable stereotype. References to them still exist—witness Abercrombie and Fitch’s infamous “Wong Brothers Laundry Service” t-shirt from several years back—yet Chinese laundries long ago vanished from the North American landscape. There are no indications today why Chinese people would ever be associated with the laundry trade.

Sixty years ago, the link was more evident. In 1949, Montreal was home to 231 Chinese laundries and they were a fixture of every neighbourhood and every commercial street in the city. Twenty years before that, the number was even higher: 405 Chinese laundries in a city with less than a million people.

Over at Coolopolis, Kristian and J.D. Gravenor—authors of the indispensable book Montreal: The Unknown City—have been digging up all sorts of great material on Montreal’s Chinese laundries, including a fascinating interactive map that charts the location of every single one of them. (The densest concentrations were in the east end of downtown, around the old Forum, near the Main and in Mile End.) These laundries—not to mention the very history of the local Chinese community—are an oft-overlooked facet of Montreal’s past.

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A New “Chinatown” Grows in Montreal

On a cold January night, Fabian Jean and his mother, Lily, were enjoying a warming bowl of tong shui (sweet dessert soup) at the Chinese restaurant Prêt à Manger on Ste. Catherine St. West.

“I find it’s actually a lot better than the Chinese restaurants in Chinatown,” Fabian said.

“It’s so hard to park in Chinatown, too,” added his mother, who was born in Hong Kong, but moved to Montreal “too long ago to remember.”

Lily Jean (the name, which is Toisanese, is pronounced like the jean in blue jeans) and Montreal-born Fabian, an artist who lives on the Plateau, have seen the area west of Concordia University revitalized by students and immigrants.

“It was a struggling part of Ste. Catherine St. for many years,” Fabian said. “It’s refreshing to see a bit of life here.”

The transformation goes beyond Ste. Catherine. In the last few years, thousands of students, immigrants and business owners from Asia have turned the west end of downtown, from Guy St. to Atwater Ave., into a sort of Chinatown West.

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Dépanneur Weijia

I can’t remember what was there before Weijia. Another depanneur, sure, but obviously not a remarkable one. I’m not even sure it had a sign. But then, a couple of years ago, a friendly, middle-aged couple from the northern Chinese province of Shandong bought the depanneur and mounted a large vinyl banner that clearly announced both the store’s vocation and the ethnic origin of its owners. Neither of the couple can speak French or English; instead, they speak a mangled hybrid, so that when you buy a bottle of beer they are likely to say, “Bonjour! Two dollar! Merci!”

Dépanneur Weijia is located on Park Avenue in Mile End, between a laundromat and a vacant building that onced housed Marko’s Textiles. (The story of Marko, which involves a shooting death, flags and a mysterious fire, can read here.) Although it has a Chinese name and sign, there is nothing particularly Chinese about what is sold at Weijia, just a run-of-the-mill assortment of newspapers, snacks, soft drinks, beer and cigarettes.

Intentionally or not, however, Weijia is part of a neighbourhood trend. As new Chinese immigrants buy Mile End’s depanneurs, they are giving them distinctly Chinese names: Zi Yuan, for instance, or Xin Ying. This appears to be a break from the tradition of maintaining old or generic names. Of course, every Montrealer knows that a depanneur’s name is hardly important. Some stores don’t even bother to display them, or even to mount a sign—the Molson placards in the windows will suffice.

Perhaps, then, giving their dépanneur a name like Weijia was a way for an immigrant couple to claim a bit of the Park Avenue landscape for themselves. That certainly seemed the case last summer, when the neighbourhood was experiencing a bout of World Cup fever and flags from around the world were paraded around Montreal. China’s team didn’t even qualify for the cup, but that didn’t stop Weijia’s owners from mounting a small People’s Republic flag on their door, five yellow stars shining in the summer sun.

The World Comes to Smallville

Lewiston, Maine. Photos by Samantha Appleton from the New Yorker.

“‘Who authorized this?’ Lewiston officials say that this is the question they heard most often when the Somalis began showing up in town. The answer was: Nobody did. The Somalis had simply decided to come.” So writes William Finnegan in the December 11th edition of the New Yorker. (The article is not available online, but a portion of it can be read here.) Since 2001, about two thousand Somali refugees have left Atlanta and other large cities for Lewiston, a small Maine mill town of 35,000 whose population is almost entirely white and French-Canadian. Their sudden arrival, and the resulting emergence of a large, multifaceted and highly visible Somali community, might seem odd in such an out-of-a-way place. Increasingly, though, many immigrants and refugees in the United States are choosing to settle in small towns, where their presence has been greeted with a mixture of bemusement, wariness and, sometimes, hostility.

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