The Decibel - City Space: Vancouver’s Chinatown fights gentrification

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Canada’s largest Chinatown has been under siege for over a century: first by race riots, then by poverty and most recently by the threat of development. We’re telling the story of why Chinatown, Vancouver, is one of Canada’s most resilient neighbourhoods, forced to evolve and adapt in the face of horrific racism. The future of Chinatowns everywhere should be in the hands of the people who live, work and find community there. So what does the future hold for a neighbourhood constantly in flux?This episode of The Globe and Mail’s City Space podcast is available to stream wherever you get your podcasts.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi there. Today, we're bringing you another episode of City Space. It's the Globe's podcast about cities, how we make them more livable, affordable, and how they meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. This episode is from Season 4 of City Space, which is out now. It's about Vancouver's Chinatown, how it's been under threat for over a century, and how it's adapted and evolved to become one of Canada's most resilient neighborhoods. So what does its future look like? You can find other episodes of the show wherever you find the decibel. Just search for City Space. If I say the word immigrant, and if you close your eyes and imagine who that looks like, it's generally someone who's brown or who's from Asia, and it's like you're late coming.

Well, actually, no, that's a product of our segregation of belonging. And when we say, were you allowed to live in a certain area? That's actually a way of thinking through how we segregate belonging. We kind of go, who gets to live in a neighborhood and own a house? And be the people who that neighborhood's built around. Canada was built on a railway. In 1890, a coal-powered, steam-spewing locomotive plunges south from the island of Montreal. The train thunders along the tracks that cut through the new capital of Montreal. The train thunders along the tracks that cut through the

new capital of Ottawa. They swing west. It's a seven-day journey through vast prairies and the treacherous Rocky Mountains to the final station, Vancouver, British Columbia. There, workers start unloading crates filled with goods from across the country, and passengers flood the platform as they disembark. Some are there to work and to find their fortune, to start a new life. Immigrants who've come all the way from the East Coast to here, the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. But before they got here, thousands of immigrants came in the other direction across the Pacific Ocean to the east. Many of them settled right here next

to the station. Those immigrants called it Saltwater City in their own language. Everyone else called it Chinatown. Canada's East and West were joined by the railway, and that railway was built on the backs of Chinese immigrants, over 15,000 of them. It was dangerous work, and hundreds died. As soon as the last spike of the CPR was driven in 1885, Canada started to limit new Chinese immigrants and find ways to exclude them from wider society. So they built their own. This is the story of

the largest Chinatown in Canada. It's a neighborhood that was created by racism, but became a place to welcome newcomers and celebrate a culture. Chinese immigrants have settled all over Canada, but it was the Chinatown in Vancouver that was their original gateway. So this is also the story of Chinatowns across North America. Wherever you look, these historic places are under threat, and they have been since the start. From a racist riot in 1907, to real estate speculators and empty storefronts today,

we're going to find out how Chinatown put on a mask to survive all that, and how that mask became part of its face. So how will Chinatown continue to evolve, to welcome newcomers and look after its people? How will Chinatown survive? This is City Space from the Globe and Mail. I'm Irene Gallia. We were in British Columbia,

one of the places that was pioneering and innovating forms of white supremacy. They set up patrols, they armed themselves, and they went to take back their streets. And that's when the hand-to-hand combat started. The highest concentration of Michelin restaurants or Michelin-recommended restaurants in Vancouver are in Chinatown. You see sites in Chinatown that have sat empty for years

because they're just waiting for the land prices to rise and then to be able to sell it. How Canada's largest Chinatown came to be after this. Chinatowns do not look like China. If I pick pretty much any city in Canada and walk through its traditional Chinese neighborhood, I'll often see red dragons on posts, a grand pagoda-roofed gate, and stone lions lining the street. So that's actually a really strategic thing, right? This is Linda Zhang. She's an architect, but she's also an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on architectural memory. Your experience of Chinatown like that is totally planned. Chinatowns tend to look like curated photos of China

that a Western settler might have seen in the 19th century. So this actually takes us back to the history of how Chinatowns kind of came to be. To understand why they look this way, we have to go back to the earliest days of Chinatowns. Let's start in China. In the 19th century, the country was in turmoil. The centuries-old Qing dynasty was nearing its end. Europe's imperialism had brought opium to China, and this had led to wars. Meanwhile, rebellions were tearing the country up from the inside.

And for normal people, life in China was hard. Life expectancy was in the 40s. People started to migrate, looking for food and work. Canada had plenty of work. To build the railways, the CPR needed cheap labor. So between 1881 and 1884, over 17,000 Chinese people came to Canada. Most of them landed in British Columbia, in Victoria, and then Vancouver. Chinatown in what is now the city of Vancouver was there in 1885 as the railway was completed. Dr. Henry Yu is a historian at the University of British

Columbia. He studies the legacies of colonialism. And then the city of Vancouver was incorporated a year later in 1886 and started to grow. It grew literally around that area at the end of the railway tracks and Chinatown was right, you know, at the center of the city. British Columbia was home to almost all the Chinese immigrants in Canada at the time, but they were viewed differently to their European counterparts. They were here to build the nation, but not be a part of it. This idea of settlement is for white Europeans. Family formation is for white settlers and pioneers.

What Dr. Yu is describing here is white supremacy. When I say white supremacy, many of your listeners may go, oh my gosh, he's saying, you know, Canadians were Nazis and saying, well, we weren't Nazis. Nazis made white supremacy look bad. Anti-Asian racism was socially acceptable at the time. We were in British Columbia, one of the places that was pioneering and innovating forms of white supremacy. In 1885, in Parliament, John A. MacDonald argued that Chinese people should be excluded from voting in Canada. Heads up, you're about to hear some pretty ugly language from one of our most important historical figures. If they weren't excluded, then he said that, I quote, the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed.

This wasn't some minor far-right voice. It was Canada's first prime minister. He wanted to make sure Chinese people weren't elected to parliament, scared that they'd force what he called Asiatic principles, immoralities, and eccentricities on the House of Commons. He had a lot of support, especially from MPs in BC. They had already banned Chinese people from voting. One of the first acts of the British Columbia legislature upon the colony of

British Columbia joining the Confederation of Canada in 1871, one of the first acts, you know, in 1872 was to disenfranchise Indigenous peoples and Chinese. This was pure undiluted racism from some of the most powerful people in the country. And there are plenty more quotes like that which don't need to be repeated. They wanted Canada to be a place for the white man. So in 1885, the same year the CPR was completed, the federal government disenfranchised people of Chinese origin across Canada. Without the vote, you weren't really a citizen. You couldn't become a professional, for instance, joining an association, medical association, lawyers, if you couldn't vote.

And so disenfranchisement, taking the vote away, meant that you could keep the Chinese out of white-collar professions, would be the term we use later. But at the time, those things that were reserved for white settlers, for Europeans. From Parliament's point of view, taking away the vote kept Chinese people as a laboring class, and it kept them poor. That was a way to deal with the Chinese people who were already here. But they also wanted to discourage newcomers and limit the amount of children they had too. So they came up with what they saw as an elegant solution to both. The Chinese head tax, a hefty fee that new migrants from China had to pay to come to Canada. Immigration exclusion blocked women effectively.

And the head tax is a good example. I mean, you have to pay $50 and then by 1904, $500. That's two years of wages. If you're not going to be able to work and pay that off, and it might take you 10 years, 20 years to pay it off, then it's prohibitively expensive to migrate. Chinese migrants were mostly men. Paying the head tax for a whole family was just too expensive. Until World War II, women in China didn't typically work outside the home, so they couldn't pay their own way either.

Disenfranchisement and the head tax were among the more direct ways that Chinese people were excluded. But there were other, more creative methods too. It's also kind of similarly to the ways in which historically black communities have not been granted mortgages. Here's Linda Zhang again. You don't find like a law that will state this, but it's kind of in the way that things are practiced. And so it was kind of known that when you arrive here, someone who's like a Chinese worker would not have had access to get a bank account. But also this means there's no way to get access to get a loan if you want to start your own business.

This bureaucratic segregation was so effective that Canada and the U.S. became the prototypes for apartheid in South Africa. They actually sent people to study our methods. They modeled apartheid on the American South and British Columbia. And so a lot of these things that I've been kind of talking about, disenfranchisement, keeping people in certain areas of employment through depriving them of the vote and saying you can't work here if you don't have the vote. South Africa adopted it. And from 1948 onwards into the 1980s, they perfected a system we helped invent. It's against this backdrop of racism and exclusion that they built a community in the marshy area they knew as Saltwater City that white people called Chinatown.

Today, it's one of the oldest neighborhoods in Vancouver, centered on the intersection of Main and Pender Streets. The infamous downtown east side rubs up against its northern border. Downtown is to the west, and residential Strathcona to the east. This wasn't the only place Chinese people lived. Some were live-in servants in wealthy white neighborhoods. They could work and live in upscale neighborhoods, but they couldn't buy property. Those areas had restrictive covenants, which explicitly banned people with East Asian heritage from buying there. But lots of Chinese immigrants did live in Chinatown. And even for those who didn't, it was their center of gravity. In the early 1900s, there were no pagodas, no dragons,

and no red lanterns in Chinatown. The buildings looked a lot like the rest of the budding city of Vancouver. The only architectural giveaway would have been some recessed balconies, covered patios which mimicked the cooling features of buildings in subtropical China. That's where most of the immigrants came from. Because Chinatown wasn't about the buildings. It was about what people did there. They looked after each other.

So at that time, there was a lot of family associations, there were Tong associations, where literally people came together to make kin. So you would go by family last name, which does not mean you're related. There are just common last names. The Tong associations that Linda's describing were sometimes called clan associations or family societies. They were a big part of the reason that Chinatown was a landing pad for new immigrants. Say your last name was Li. You could go to the

Li Society when you arrived in Vancouver. There you would find friendly faces in an unwelcoming country who might not be your blood relatives, but they probably knew your dialect and your culture. You'd also find help with basics like finding a place to live or access to financial services. So a lot of people's first businesses and mortgages were started through kind of, you know, in other communities, it's known as like Roscoe's, where everyone comes together and just kind of pools money. And then it's like an interest-free loan within the group that everybody pays back. Once you'd found your feet and made some money, you'd pay it forward by donating to the Lee Society. No one doesn't pay back because you'd be so ashamed, right? So there would be all of

this kind of mutual aid happening that's actually for the community just to be able to kind of live your life. The societies would also help you out if you were sick or became disabled. They'd settle disputes, and they were places for rituals like funerals and the Lunar New Year. They filled the space left by Eurocentric society who didn't want to welcome people from East Asia. They made settling in Vancouver easier and safer. That's not how white people saw it, though. To them, Tongs were secretive societies at the heart of Chinatown, and Chinatown itself had a shadowy reputation, too. They were kind of seen as these sort of dangerous places, as kind of blighted neighborhoods,

where sort of illegal activities took place, whether that was, you know, true or fabricated. Polite white society viewed Chinatown as dirty and poor, full of crime and opium. Those single Chinese men, the bachelor society, becomes really demonized as a threat. These are bad things. We don't want them around. They threaten our women. They might have sex, oh my God, with a white woman. And with Chinese immigrants forced into their roles as cheap laborers, unions turned against them too. They felt their wages were being undercut. All this racism came to a head in 1907.

Early 1907, there was a stock market crash in New York. There were more people out of work. The white laborers had been organizing for a while. They were very antagonistic towards the East Asians. This is Henry Tsang. He's an artist and author of White Riot, the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver. The Asiatic Exclusion League was an organization that began in the U.S. In 1907, their Canadian chapter had just formed. Their stated goal was

to keep East Asian immigrants out of British Columbia. At their first meeting, the Liberal MP for Vancouver warned of, I quote, an invasion of Asiatics who are swarming into our country every month. The Asiatic Exclusion League organized a rally in September of that year. East Asian folks here were really nervous because it wasn't the first anti-Asian organized event. And it was also not the first anti-Asian riot. Twenty years earlier,

a crowd had marched on a Chinese workers' camp, beaten them, and burned their clothes and bedding. Now, the Asiatic Exclusion League was gathering to demand a stop to immigration from East Asia. People were really nervous. They locked their doors.

They stayed off the streets. It was deserted, more or less. There were some people who actually left town. They were so nervous. They didn't want to be anywhere nearby. About 10,000 people gathered. They were carrying signs saying things like, for a white Canada.

Racism this overt is shocking to most people now, as it should be. But in 1907, those views were not considered extreme. You know, white Canada forever. That was a bar song. It was one of the most popular pieces of music in the early 1900s that you could buy and play at home. Or you could go to the bar, drink and sing White Canada Forever. Prominent members of Vancouver's community felt no shame in turning up to the rally.

It was wildly popular. One of the first people to sign up as a card-carrying member was the mayor of Vancouver and city councillors as well as clergymen. The parade was led by the major at the Beattie Street Drill Hall, Military Drill Hall. There were two brass bands, crowds of people waving Real Britannia and White Canada Forever. They marched from central downtown, Cambie Street grounds, which is now called Larwell Park, went down to the central business district along Hastings Street, and they went to City Hall to give their speeches. So talk about being officially supported and sanctioned.

Speeches were given inside City Hall, with the anti-Asian message being passed back through the doors to the crowd gathered outside. They had anti-Asian activists, special guests, to come and participate and speak to the people, to rile them up. Guests from the United States and New Zealand. And of course, you know, local, local agitators. And the crowd got to work up that a mob broke out and went to attack Chinatown, which was adjacent to City Hall. The crowd, now a mob, worked their way down Market Alley and then Pember Street. They methodically targeted

Asian-owned businesses, smashing windows and destroying property. White-owned businesses were left alone. Meanwhile, the Chinese local leaders organized and they set up patrols, they armed themselves, and they went to take back their streets. And that's when the hand-to-hand combat started. The Japanese neighborhood was next to Chinatown, but that fighting kept the crowd occupied in the Chinese area for a while. Their Japanese neighbors were given a chance to prepare. They had more time to set up actual barricades on the streets. And they collected, they brought out their swords, they brought out their clubs and their baseball bats.

This was in the early hours of a Monday morning. It started to rain heavily as rioters tried to burn a Japanese school. They weren't successful, possibly because they were either too drunk or it was raining too hard. Some combination of the two, possibly. By the time the mob had broken up, Chinatown was a wreck. And then Monday morning, proper rolls around, and the Chinese by that time had decided, and they'd met,

enough of the leaders had met and had basically told all Chinese people to shut down their businesses and or refuse to report to work. This strike, which the Japanese community joined, brought Vancouver to a standstill. It lasted two days. It only ended when the mayor of Vancouver, the card-carrying Asiatic Exclusion League member Alexander Bethune, was forced to apologize. It ended the strike, but it didn't end the racism. And in the end, the AEL still got what they wanted. The Chinese head tax was still at $500, but it wouldn't be long before

there's a complete restriction of all Chinese coming in. And that was the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. The Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, lasted until after World War II, when Chinese immigrants were allowed to come to Canada again. Chinese Canadians were finally granted the right to vote in 1947. Remember when I said we have to go back to early Chinatown to understand why it doesn't really look like China? It's because after assaults like this, they were looking for ways to defend themselves.

The 1907 riot wasn't the only example of Chinatowns being destroyed. In San Francisco just a year earlier, an earthquake had leveled most of the city. Essentially, they let Chinatown burn after the earthquake, while other neighborhoods that were also on fire, they brought fire trucks to and kind of helped mitigate that damage. As they rebuilt San Francisco's Chinatown, they developed defensive architecture. I don't mean barricades or spikes. I mean architecture that was supposed to remove the targets from their backs. One of the things that they did is they actually hired a team of white architects, led by Bernard Madebeck, who had literally never been to China before,

had maybe only ever seen like one book that had some photos of, you know, tokenizing Chinese architecture that certainly wasn't even modern architecture that was, you know, being built in China at the time, and to literally design a Chinatown that white people could love, that they could consume, that they could enjoy, because they knew that so long as the rest of the city didn't love Chinatown, they would always be forced out. And then the San Francisco Chinatown architecture sort of becomes the basis on which other communities start organizing. And then the Chinatowns that we know and love today, it's all of these overly kind of exotic and oriental details to be easy to understand and palpable to a kind of Western Eurocentric audience at that time. Linda says this cartoonish, pagoda-forward, red-lantern-heavy style of Chinatown was more appealing to white people.

It's a deliberate disguise, a tactic known as strategic orientalization, a defense mechanism chosen in the face of overwhelming racism. But there are new threats today. So our producer Kate is going to see how Chinatown continues to evolve and to talk to people who've been there for decades. That's after this. City Space producer and Vancouverite Kate Helmore is in her local Chinatown.

She's met up with historian Judy Lam Maxwell. I met Judy in in her local Chinatown. She's met up with historian Judy Lam Maxwell. I met Judy in a cafe in Chinatown. It was a new swanky looking place with exposed light bulbs and a minimalist look. There's writers and readers and some business bros behind me discussing politics at work. But on the bench right next to me is a man obviously sleeping rough, passed out on the live edge bar table. The owner comes over and tells him that he can't sleep here. He does it in that tired way that tells me that he does this every week, over and over again. I'm telling you this because I think that small interaction tells us a lot about the challenges this neighborhood faces today. There's a duality here, a fancy cafe and a person sleeping rough. It's a tension that's hard to reconcile.

This used to be one of the most desirable areas to run a business. It's in the heart of one of the most expensive cities in Canada. There was a lot of foot traffic and a lot of potential customers. But Chinatown borders the downtown east side, often referred to as Canada's poorest postal code because of high rates of drug use, poverty and crime. In recent years, and especially during the pandemic, that poverty has become more visible in areas near the downtown east side, especially here in Chinatown. It was a constant presence, as Judy showed me around. Now 105 storefronts is empty, so Chinatown is looking for ways to bring that foot traffic back. People are what make a neighborhood. It's not really the buildings. And so as you lose that

vibrancy, as people stop coming down, there's no longer children going to like language school or like playing in the streets that it has a very different feel to it. This is Carol Lee. She's head of the Revitalize Chinatown Initiative. She's been working on that for a decade now. Well, I think that, you know, our vision from the very outset was that we were looking to have a, you know, prosperous, vibrant and inclusive Chinatown where people wanted to live, work and play. And if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I would say, you know, it was kind of a bit of a dream. We didn't think we'd get there, but 10, 12 years later, it actually doesn't look so

impossible. Carol's job involves making Chinatown a safe and lively destination for everyone to visit. She's doing that with festivals, new lighting, repairs, all the small things that signal a neighborhood is open for business. You know, lighting up the cultural icons, the Millennium Gate, the exterior wall of the Sun Yat-sen Garden, the Chinese cultural center. So people are noticing the differences. I'm actually surprised in the last, I would say, six months, people coming up to me and saying, wow, we really noticed a difference in Chinatown. But no amount of repairs can put a roof over unhoused people's heads. And with generations of single Chinese

men who lived their lives on labourers' wages, Chinatown itself has a lot of SROs, single-room occupancy dwellings, also known as rooming houses. So Carol is also working on a social housing project at 58 West Hastings Street. That's in the downtown east side. There'll be 230 units, half of them at welfare rate, but all affordable, and a new community health center. It's one of Vancouver's largest ever social housing projects. You know, I think that people in the beginning, so I had my first meeting in 2011, probably thought it was a bit unusual that the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation, which is a small organization, was going to do a project with the next door neighbor in the heart of the downtown east side. But I think we had a philosophy that in order for us to revitalize Chinatown, we wanted to make sure our neighbor was also healthy.

Just a five-minute walk from 58 West Hastings is another housing development, 105 Kiefer Street. The Vancouver Development Permit Board denied permission to build there six times before finally approving a condo building in 2023. This one does not include any social or affordable housing. Every one of the 111 units will be market rate. Building new housing at any price point helps overall market affordability. You can understand why the men living in rooming houses, their friends, their neighbours, feel like market rate condos in a city where those cost over $800,000 will do nothing for them. And a shiny new tower overlooking the Chinatown Memorial Plaza has been seen as a little insensitive. A local told the CBC,

I want them to respect Chinatown, our ancestors, and their blood and sweat, so they can rest in peace. Being a downtown neighbourhood in an expensive city is tricky. Prices go up, locals get pushed out. That's a problem in any neighbourhood. When that neighbourhood is also a hub for a specific cultural or ethnic group, it begins to look like erasure. There are little things that are easy to overlook which are really important to this community. Like the specialty appliance shop Judy took me into, Form Home Appliances.

The owner, Russ, was showing me some of the things that lots of East Asian people use, but I had never seen. Hot water pot. Every Asian family has one, but most North Americans have no idea what it is. Yeah, no idea what it is. So what you do is you put in tap water, close the lid, plug it in, and it automatically boils your water and keeps it hot all day long. So you can have tea anytime you want, instant noodles anytime you want, instant coffee anytime you want. What is that? That is a Chinese herbal medicine cooker. Russ's family have run this store for 35 years, so I asked him how his customers have changed in that time. When our store first started, it was all Chinese and various dialects of Chinese.

So it was fun listening to little old ladies of their old dialects and trying to figure out what they're asking for. But now it's kind of the older generation Chinese are still here. The newer immigrant Chinese are more into other parts of the Lower Mainland. So we have locations in Richmond and Burnaby to service those customers. But we've also got a lot more mainstream customers. So white people coming in? Yeah, about at least 50% of the customers that come in don't speak Chinese. My guide Judy told me that the change in customers mirrors a change in the business owners. Parents retire and their kids don't always want to take over the family store.

Which means that those specialist stores that serve the needs of a specific cultural community are slowly being replaced. Their new occupants often serve a different kind of crowd. The highest concentration of Michelin restaurants or Michelin recommended restaurants in Vancouver are in Chinatown. There really are great restaurants in Chinatown and I'd encourage people to visit them. Many are owned by locals. My favourite is blind tiger dumplings. If you know, you know. But part of me can't help but feel like this is a modern form of strategic orientalising. Reversing the trend of empty storefronts isn't easy, and doing it in a way that is sensitive to the needs of locals is even tougher.

Henry Tsang, who we heard from earlier talking about the 1907 riot, wants to make sure that Chinatown is more than just a part of Vancouver that looks Chinese. It'd be sad if it's just an artifact. It'd be sad if it's just these buildings that have been kept up, but they're just effectively facades

and they represent something that happened in the past but are no longer fully activated and relevant today. Those restaurants bring people and their money to the neighborhood. That's got to be better than an empty storefront. But Chinatown, like any neighborhood, is so much more than just the shops and restaurants. It's still a landing pad for immigrants and the Tongs, the family societies, are still here. I was lucky enough to be invited into one from Memorial Service.

So we're sitting in a room. This is their memorial hall. Memorial hall. And so there's these shelves of plaques. Yes, so people buy them. This person is deceased. This person is not. If their name is covered, they're still alive.

But they buy this. It's an alternative to going to the cemetery. Okay, so it's like... There's no ashes. It's just a plaque with the name engraved. It's hard to imagine a place more important than where we honor our ancestors. But it's also obvious that Chinatown has challenges. The single men who live in those SROs probably can't afford the Michelin-recommended restaurants here. Henry Tsang says it's important to remember that those people are part of the neighborhood too. Are you going to displace the people who are here? And are you able to encourage a community that's diverse enough economically

because a lot of these communities are priced for a specific socioeconomic class and historically Chinatown has been the underclass they didn't have other options because they weren't educated their English language skills weren't that great. They had to work there. They had to live there. Revitalization means more than bringing in shiny new shops. It means people in the street. It means socializing and community space.

It means bringing in new money and spending it on the people who have always lived here. As a reporter who has covered this city for five years, space. It means bringing in new money and spending it on the people who have always lived it. As a reporter who has covered this city for five years, I know that we can't preserve Chinatown as it was. Trying to freeze a neighborhood in time always has unintended consequences. So if we can't make it what it was, we have to look at what it is and figure out what it can be. That was City Space producer and resident Vancouverite Kate Helmore reporting from Chinatown, Vancouver. What Kate was showing us there is one specific Chinatown

with one specific set of challenges. But these challenges are familiar to Chinatowns across North America. A common challenge for I think all of them is speculative real estate. This is architect and academic Linda Zhang again. And then to whoever will develop something on that piece of land and so it not only is it a kind of detriment for like you're taking away spaces that would have been spaces for the community, and it's just sitting empty for a long time. But also, you know, what's being put in place of them are things that don't serve the community at all. It is completely gentrifying the neighborhood.

Linda worries that attempts to revitalize Chinatown can lead to gentrification if the local community isn't properly involved. She doesn't want to lose what's been built, even the deliberately exaggerated Chinese art. These exaggerated features in this Bogota roof lines are simultaneously hark back to a kind of, yeah, dark origin story. But the origin story of Chinatown has always been one of resistance, and it's also then been one of resilience. And so all of

these things are kind of tied up in it at the same time. Linda says the way that Chinatown looks today represents something different than it did 100 years ago. Those python gates and pagoda roofs tell people, you're welcome here. Don't hide your culture. But Linda also worries that focusing on that architectural style misses the point of protecting and preserving a neighborhood. I think that also ties into some of my worst fears of what could happen for Chinatown. And when I describe what's my dystopian version of what that is, it's actually not – you would think it would be Chinatown's totally erased, there's no more trace. That's actually not the worst possible scenario to me. The worst scenario to me is there's a cultural heretic designation. There's a Chinatown that does exist. It looks very oriental. Nobody lives there. There's no

community there. Nobody works there. It's all essentially Chinese franchises that are not from here that are basically have nothing to do with a Chinese Canadian community or Chinese American community. And it looks like there's a Chinatown. So people got to keep the thing that they love to kind of fetishize and go out and, you know, get a boba. However, there's no community left. That to me is much more dangerous because then there's the idea that, oh, we're so inclusive and we were able to have this neighborhood in our city and we can celebrate it. And we have cultural heritage designation for it. However, there is no actual community way of living. It's been completely

evacuated. That's almost a worse erasure because there's not even a remembrance of the fact that it's been lost. The future of Chinatowns everywhere should be in the hands of the people who live, work, and find community there. People like Carol Lee and Linda Zhang. For people like me, it's important to remember where their resilience came from. Chinatown has been forced to evolve and adapt in the face of horrific racism. People are still living with the effects of that racism today. And so we'll leave you with this story from Dr. Henry Yu of hanging out with his grandfather as a kid. Almost every day we would walk to Chinatown. It was so important to him because he would take me into these cafes that were full of men of his age, you know, in their 60s, 70s, 80s. And there were all of these elderly men.

And I remember how they would be so happy when I came in and they would pinch my cheeks and, you know, give me candy or a quarter. And so I didn't realize literally until years later when I became a historian, what was my grandfather doing? And what he was doing was he was bringing me there to share this grandchild because he was one of the lucky ones. He went back to China for a trip in 1937, was able to get married, impregnate his new wife, leave before my mother was even born. And eventually, he had a grandchild in me that he could take to these men who never were able to form families. And so they were living out their days, not alone, but with each other. But for many of them, you know, they didn't have children or grandchildren to play with.

And so that's why they would get so excited when I walked in. They literally, you know, my grandfather, here's my grandchild, and here, sort of play with him for a while. Because, you know, without saying so, you don't have one of your own. On the next episode of City Space, should Canadian cities host major sporting events? Toronto is spending $380 million to host just six soccer games as part of the 2026 World Cup. Mayor Olivia Chow has already said this isn't the deal she would have done. We'll be looking at two previous sporting events held in Canada. Two Olympics in two cities with two different legacies, Montreal and Vancouver. And we'll be asking, how can Toronto

make sure that once the final whistle is blown, the city has something to show for it? City Space is produced by Jake Hoburn, Kyle Fulton, and Kate Helmore. Our theme music is by Andrew Austin. Our executive producer is Alicia Sani. Thanks to Dr. Henry Yu, Linda Zhang, Carol Lee, Dr. Henry Tsang, and Judy Lam Maxwell. I'm Irene Gallia. Thanks for listening.