Front Burner - Anti-Asian racism in Vancouver’s Chinatown

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

In the last year, there has been a tremendous uptick in reports of anti-Asian hate crimes across North America. In Vancouver, police in February reported a 717 per cent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes over the past year. Today on Front Burner, producer Elaine Chau’s documentary shows how these incidents have changed one neighbourhood in the city: Chinatown.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everybody, it's Jamie here. You've probably seen the heartbreaking headlines over the weekend. To come loops to Shwetmik First Nation in southern BC announced 215 indigenous children have been found buried on the grounds of a former residential school there. The Prime Minister announced Sunday flags at all federal buildings would fly at half mast

to honor these children and all the children who never made it home from residential schools across the country. This comes amid growing calls to identify other unmarked graves. We're working with our colleagues in BC to bring you an episode about this tomorrow, and we hope you'll tune in then. Today, though, another really important story. Producer Elaine Chao on anti-Asian racism in Vancouver's Chinatown. Here is Elaine. I'm here at the Sun Yat-sen Gardens in Vancouver's Chinatown. And you can see the water lily-covered pond and the winding paths, the beautiful pagoda.

And it's modeled after Chinese gardens in the Ming Dynasty. And when it opened in 1986, it was the first of its kind to be built outside Asia. And Lorraine Lowe is here with me. She's the interim director at the gardens, and her family has long connections to this neighborhood. And Lorraine, where we are now, you know, in Vancouver's Chinatown is really steeped in history. This is where Chinatown originally originated. This is block 14. We are in the center of it. And this is also, you know, really a place of community where before COVID, you might be able to see elders playing mahjong. Like, what are some of the kind of images from this neighborhood that really stick out to you? The one beautiful memory I have pre-COVID was having the seniors out here in the Zodiac Courtyard doing and practicing their Tai Chi

every morning. Yeah, that's something that we often get to see as well. And being able to walk around and, you know, seeing people pick up dried shrimp or like, go have afternoon tea or something like that. That's right. Yes. And then just having that vibrancy and that little hubbub of Chinatown. And that just also brings back memories of my childhood. It was going to get a Ming Pao Daily newspaper from this little old Chinese lady with a knitted cap, and then walking over to Dollar Meat Store and getting a little morsel of barbecue pork from who I call some some. And she was little old lady and she was at the glass window, chopping up the barbecue meats. And you know this is really also a place that's come up against some big forces this past year with fears around COVID as well as the rise of anti-Asian

hate crimes. It's been a tough year. It has and if you walk around Chinatown now you're going to see a lot of boarded up shops and and a of graffiti. And, you know, part of the reason why that's happening too is because the seniors in the community, they're afraid to go out. They're afraid to get attacked. And these are the ones that are supporting the little stores, the mom and pop shops here, because there are residences that live here and that support the local community.

On this episode of Front Burner, we hear from people who live and care deeply about Vancouver's Chinatown, who are not only worried about the rise of street-level violence and verbal assaults, but also about systemic issues of racism, from access to health care to affordable housing. Issues that have affected this community since the beginning, going back over a hundred years. Today, the story of how COVID-19 and anti-Asian racism has changed one neighborhood. I'm at the Downtown Eastside Women's Center, just a few minutes away from the heart of Chinatown here in Vancouver. Workers there support lower-income women in the neighborhood by providing meals, a community space to hang out in, and help with accessing government services. Chinese-speaking female elders, or popos in Cantonese, that's an

affectionate term for grandmas or older women, are a big part of the clientele here. Oh hi, how are you? Yeah, how are you? So the popos here in the center, how about I bring you down first and then I'll bring you down. Okay, sounds good. Ten Lai Lim is the Chinese senior's outreach worker at the centre. She shows me in. We're trying to figure out the right word for radio producer and have a good laugh. The po-po's say they approve of my job.

We sanitize our hands and settle down across a wide table, and I ask for their names. There's Mrs. Chung in her 70s and Mrs. Ip in her late 60s. And we're gathering at the centre for very different reasons than usual. So these two ladies, they are my clients. So I see them very often at the drop-in centre. It happened in April that both of them were sorted, but on different occasions. And I helped them to file a police report and give them some support that they need throughout the incidents. I talk to Mrs. Ip first. She's petite, has a pixie cut,

with a matching patterned pink sweater and jacket. For a while, she happily talks my ear off about her upbringing. But you can hear her voice change as soon as the attacks come up. She's standing there, she's cursing me. She's a bitch, she's a bitch. You don't live in Mrs. Ip says that in the last few months, she's been yelled at to go back to China, told that she doesn't belong here in Canada. And on another afternoon, while hanging out near the center, she was randomly attacked. A young woman ran up to her, slapped her so hard that she almost fell to the ground.

Mrs. Zip came to Canada as a refugee from Vietnam in the early 90s. She spent the last few decades processing sea urchin at a plant. It's hard work. Sea urchin have these spiny shells that can sting you. So you have to be really precise when you're cutting them. Mrs. Ip says that her wrists still hurt from the repeat motions. She says she's survived poverty and discrimination all her life, but that she's never had to face this level of blatant violence.

I asked if she felt scared when the attack happened. Unsurprisingly, she was. She had just gotten the haircut, and out of nowhere, this violent slap. It was so sudden, it spooked her so much that she doesn't even go to Chinatown anymore. It was a similar experience for Mrs. Chung. She likes to go by Judy, and even though she was wearing a mask, I could see the care that she took in making up her face. She was attacked in broad daylight after a grocery run at the neighborhood market.

Judy's voice rises as she talks about it. She looks agitated, and her cheeks are flushed red. She says that her attacker came out of nowhere, and she points out the bruise that's still healing on her left cheek. For almost two decades, she worked at a hotel, would have to take public transit home at 2 a.m. But it wasn't until this year that she really feared for her safety. Judy says there were a lot of witnesses, so the police were called quickly.

And in a few hours, they actually caught the perpetrator. Judy says she would have fought back if she had her umbrella. She won't make that mistake again. Now she brings one everywhere. She won't make that mistake again. Now she brings one everywhere. Sadly, these stories are more and more common. Tin Lai, the outreach worker,

has seen it firsthand with other Popos who come to the center. Both of them, they have the courage to report to the police and speak up for themselves. But then there are some seniors who come to our dropping pretty regularly. They don't have the courage. They just, you know, because they are scared that the person who attacked them might come back and hurt them more.

And I told them that, no, no, it's not going to happen. If you report to the police, nobody will know. And then you're absolutely safe. But then they're just too scared to do anything. These types of racist acts have been unfortunately common this year. A suspect is accused of kicking the Good Samaritan and pulling her hair so hard part of it was torn from her scalp. The victim was just trying to stand up for two women who were being berated with racist comments. Here a man in his 90s shoved to the ground or here a woman punched in the face at a bus stop. Joshua Coe was out

walking his dog Tutu just about a block away from home when a couple passed him and made a comment. It was to the effect of like, I have a better chance of catching the coronavirus walking past this guy. According to the Vancouver police, anti-Asian hate crimes are up 717% over the past year. 98 anti-Asian hate crimes were reported in 2020, up from 12 incidents the year before. The Chinese Canadian National Council's Toronto chapter did a national survey of this and released their findings back in March of this year. They found more than a thousand self-reported occurrences of anti-Asian racism since the start of the pandemic. Reports of being verbally harassed,

the pandemic. Reports of being verbally harassed, of being coughed and spat on, or at worst, being physically assaulted. Most of these incidents happen in Ontario or BC, but the fears that they bring on have been nationwide. Vancouver's Chinatown has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic and this rise of anti-Asian racism. Businesses struggle to stay open. Cultural institutions have been vandalized. The vacancy rate on commercial and office space is now at 17%. We need the city, provincial or even federal to help us, you know, to maintain Chinatown as a heritage and as something to do with our Chinese culture. And for so many residents, this hits hard

because Chinatown is where they've built their Canadian identity. Grace Chan has lived in Chinatown for more than 10 years. When I moved to Chinatown, my English was very poor. So for me, it's very hard to join the community centre. But I'm happy for the community organization they really help and they have a lot of patient we can do the body language to help to communicate I started to to do the artwork and they helped me build up my exhibition. They helped.

So why I'm happy to stay in this community. And I saw a lot of labor doing the volunteer work too. I just want to do something back to help other people. Grace is just beaming when she tells me about the community she's found here. She lives in an old building and has to walk up four flights of stairs every day. It may not be the most convenient, but this is home for her. Grace knows the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood. She knew exactly where to go when I needed somewhere quiet to do this interview. That connection is why this past year has been so hard. She's had racist comments thrown at her before,

but they felt more serious and stung more this year. I meet a man, he walk by me, and then he just say, childless, violent, go to China. And then I say, no, I'm not. I'm Canadian. Don't say that for me. And how did you feel when he said that?

I feel, how do you say it? Discriminated. He discriminated me. So I feel not very well. Yeah, I'm scared. Before they only say, go to China. Don't stay here. And then I say, yeah, you go to your hometown too.

That's what you would say? That's your response? Yeah, here's your hometown. That's what I said. Right. These types of interactions are at once so vicious, so hurtful, but can also be so ordinary. Alicia Yao is the director of the Chinese Community Policing Center. She provides culturally specific victim services in Chinatown. And she says these racist incidents happen all the time. Pretty much every year we would receive phone calls from Chinese communities. They experience race-related crime, but it's really difficult to prove saying this is hate crime. Historically, it's underreported, and even now it's still underreported because the victims need to provide enough evidence to show this is anti-Asian, not something else. And if I experience

not something else. And if I experience someone push over, and how could I prove this is because I look Asian or because they were in a bad mood or something? Alicia says that through the pandemic, we have seen a rise in reporting of these crimes and lots of media attention around it. But the challenge remains that hate crimes are hard to prosecute. Even BC Premier John Horgan recognized this recently. It's easier to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed the act rather than the motivation for the act. It takes a lot for Alicia's clients to find the strength to report these acts. It's a lot of emotional labor to take on. And on top of that, you have to be incredibly patient and be willing to tell your story over and over again. And she's found that there can be a lot of fear around talking about these things too. One Asian descendant

person was beating up on the street and And people passing by were concerned. If they, also Asian, were concerned, if they took the phone, call 911, they would experience revenge. That is something heartbroken. That incident happened close to where I'm standing now, on Pender in Maine. A few minutes down the street, you've got Klan Association buildings from over 100 years ago. As more and more Chinese immigrants came to Canada, Klan Associations came to be to support their needs,

help them find their way in Canadian society. Think of them as community network spaces. And they're really a physical reminder of what life was like for early Chinese immigrants here, of living elbow to elbow in single rooms, having to endure police raids. These were people subject to the Chinese head tax and survived the 1907 anti-Asian riots. That resilience persisted decades later when Chinatown residents in 1967 fought off a proposed freeway that would have razed the neighborhood. Michael Tan says Chinatown, historically, was always about surviving. What was the genus of Chinatown? It is racism,

right? It is marginalization. Chinatowns were created as ethnic conclave back in settler days. Chinatowns became the de facto place for all marginalized people. It wasn't just Chinese people. If you weren't white Anglo-Saxon, that's where you ended up. If you were Latino, Italian, Jewish, Black, Indigenous, that's where he ended up, in Chinatown. So that's always been that kind of commonality, no matter what type of Chinatown you visit. When Michael was born, his family actually lived in one of the single-room occupancy buildings here. Six people crammed together with a curtain dividing the kids from the parents.

His grandmother lived here too. That family connection is a big part of why he advocates for the neighborhood now. So my role as the co-chair of the Chinatown Legacy Stewardship Group, it's really being mindful of like just what's the, you know, what are all the different things that make Chinatown amazing, right? So why, what makes it special, what makes it unique? And for a long time, like people were always just talking about buildings, but it's not just, you know, the physical built structures. It's all the happenings in the neighborhood. It is all the shops. It is all the people. And what's been really highlighted is probably the seniors in the neighborhood. And so

it's, it's, it's been identified really critically right now just how important culturally appropriate housing for seniors is to the character of Chinatown. And I mean, we're looking right now just at a barbecue shop and then like a seafood shop next to it. It's all kind of open doorways and like i feel like that's also like a characteristic of chinatown that you kind of get a real sense of the markets and and the and the people in them and and there's a like openness absolutely it's it's it's a lot of

those like weird characteristics or customs that are so informal and how you know there's this feel like when you're in chinatown like it's just very different and yeah all these dry goods stores so yeah i still remember like coming to terms with that phrase like dry goods store it's like you know it's a herbal shop not type of not that type of herbal i don't know what kind of audience you have but it's like you know so like ginseng and like ginkgo like that type of stuff but yeah there's like we're passing a joss paper store so they sell things for uh that are related to uh prayer but also um uh funeral ceremonies so that's i mean it's it's this weird like kitch shops that are very niche sometimes but are just so integral to the neighbourhood that you don't really think about.

But, you know, as we've seen that, you know, with the additional pressures on the neighbourhood from gentrification, like just rising property prices in general across Vancouver, and the COVID pandemic, these small businesses are, you know, they're feeling more pressure all the time. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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For big condo developments to go where mom and pop shops used to be. Those pressures are even more acute in a city like Vancouver, where real estate is so expensive. Michael says these pressures can often make it challenging to build housing for the most vulnerable populations in this community, Chinese-speaking seniors. Very recently, there was actually a pending sale of the Grace Seniors Home. That's a culturally supportive care home. So that means they were provided support in their language, Chinese food, other social programs for the residents. But it was actually at risk of being sold to another housing provider

that would essentially evict them, right? Because they were looking to house a different type of population in that building. And what it highlighted was that there's only 400 culturally supportive housing units in the neighborhood. In Chinese culture and in Asian culture, it's like there's that significance of family and taking care of each other. It's just so strong.

The housing for seniors is just so critical. So all these reasons together, it's really just highlighted just how significant of a need that is. According to a recent study by Simon Fraser University and the social service agency Success, there is high demand and long wait lists for housing and care options that cater to East Asians. And that's just one kind of need. Take seniors like Mrs. Ip, who we heard from earlier. She was randomly and violently attacked back in April.

She lives alone in social housing and despite being fiercely independent, also needs support accessing basic services because of language barriers, like filing taxes or applying for old age pension, translation help at the doctors. For many people who support elders who live and are connected to Vancouver's Chinatown, these types of needs have only grown during the pandemic. Beverly Ho works with Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice. It's a non-profit that supports youth and low-income immigrant seniors in Chinatown and the downtown eastside. The past year has been really emotionally and physically taxing because of pandemic restrictions, and especially so for our elders here,

who a lot of them are already isolated, and this just sort of exacerbates it even more. And we're starting to print little badges that were made by a organization in in san francisco i think and it says in in english and chinese the the senior's name and if they need help just so in case they get get attacked or harassed on the streets then they can show the badge to someone we we know that a lot of them are scared to come out of their houses, not just because of catching the virus, but also at high risk of being attacked.

So often, community advocates like Beverly tell me, elders just grin and bear these fears. When you've endured so much hardship through immigration, settling for jobs you're overqualified for, or keeping quiet when a racist remark is made because you don't want to jeopardize that job, inequality is often normalized. But young people like Beverly and her colleagues at Yarrow, they're confronting these issues head on. Not only laying bare the inequalities that many Chinese elders face, but also building supports around them.

Beverly helps run a grocery delivery program that brings familiar foods for seniors during the pandemic. Veggies like bok choy or gai lan and rice noodles rather than spaghetti. Through the program, I met Mrs. Li. She likes to go by Sisi. I call her Sisi Popo. She reminds me a bit of my grandma, actually. Cici's in her 90s. She tells me she used to exercise regularly, but she gets tired way too easily these days. Cici says it's hard for her to get the health care she needs. She's actually supposed to get her heart monitored more regularly.

But because she's on her own now, it's hard to make that commitment. She says it's a hassle, and she doesn't want to fuss because of her age. I asked whether she's gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. Cici says she doesn't want it because she's scared it'll make her weak, that she won't be able to take care of herself. The local health authority, along with outreach workers who have the knowledge and language skills to help, are hosting pop-up clinics to reach elders like Cici. But Tin Lai Lim from the Downtown Eastside Women's Center, we heard from her earlier,

says that vaccine hesitancy is a big issue for this population. They are very hesitant because they hear news that, oh, you know, the vaccine might cause the blood to clot or, you know, all sorts of like, I don't know if it's true or not, the medical misinformation. So, yeah, I would say like a portion of the seniors here, they do not want to take any vaccination. And I respect that because it's their personal choice. But I would encourage them that it's actually better to have the vaccination because the autonomy site is a very dense area and then if they don't take care of their masks or hand hygiene

then it's dangerous for them. For many people who live and work in Vancouver's Chinatown, this past year has been a real reckoning around the need to address anti-Asian racism. And that's not just about putting a stop to traumatic incidents of verbal and physical assault, but it's also about addressing these other issues of inequality that we've been hearing about. The need for more health services in languages other than English. Support for businesses that make Chinese-speaking seniors feel welcome. Culturally appropriate and affordable housing. making seniors feel welcome, culturally appropriate and affordable housing.

Michael Tan hopes that this painful year will, at the very least, help people better understand the needs of this neighborhood, and especially for the many seniors who call it home. Racism is always multifaceted. It's definitely a hydra. There's so many things you have to deal with. I don't like to i don't like to use the word you know one-off incidents right because it is this pattern this fabric you know these these things that are happening it's this wave right it's when you're talking about the pandemic it's not just uh you know from coronavirus it's this pandemic of hate right and you know racist acts

you know sometimes that are violent as well but But it's, there's the underlying systemic racism that, you know, it's, that's just always there, right, that prevent communities from thriving. Now is a great opportunity to help highlight a lot of those systemic issues, but not just highlight, but for us to start addressing them. Today is the last day of Asian Heritage Month. And for the last few weeks, the CBC has been featuring stories that center Asian voices. First person pieces about struggling with the model minority myth. Thanks for listening. I'm Elaine Chao. Jamie Poisson will be back tomorrow.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.