Vancouver’s resilient Chinatown fights back against new danger: gentrification

In White Riot: The Anti-Asian 1907 Riots in Vancouver, essays by artist Henry Tsang and others explore the 1907 riots as well as issues that the Chinese, Japanese and other Asian communities are facing today. The following essay from the book is titled “A Changing Chinatown: On Gentrification and Resilience,” by Melody Ma.

Next to the steaming windows of an Instagram-worthy café, young twentysomethings in beanies coddle their hot lattes. Down the street, a lineup snakes outside a streetwear shop for the latest sneaker drop. A DoorDash bike courier speeds by, carrying a steaming vegan pizza he just picked up from around the corner.

This scene could be in just about any bustling North American city today. But the flaring red dragon lampposts, the looming century-old Chinese Benevolent Association buildings, and the waft of Chinese barbecue pork reminds us that we’re situated in Vancouver’s Chinatown — a gentrifying Chinatown.

Over a hundred years ago, Chinese labourers from six rural areas of Guangdong, the southern province of China, migrated to Canada’s West Coast. In search of jobs and better wages, these men toiled away on the Canadian Pacific Railway, on farms and in canneries.

Separated from their families, they slept in shifts in rooming houses above Canton Alley. Together, this early group of Chinese migrants created the dozen blocks we call Chinatown today. They set up shops, restaurants and societies to support each other, despite being away from their kin.

However, the presence of Chinese migrants was not welcomed by everyone. In 1885, the federal government introduced a Chinese head tax aimed to halt Chinese immigration. The Chinese Immigration Act was passed in 1923, further limiting the possibility of any family reunification. Despite the racist state-directed efforts to eradicate them, the Chinese community remained steadfast and resilient in Chinatown. The presence of the neighbourhood to this day is a mark of the community’s strength.

Today, Chinatown faces a new threat: gentrification. Gentrification is a powerful displacing force creating crisis in the communities we live in. It is a process of class displacement wherein an influx of wealthy people displaces the existing poor.

The trail signs of gentrification are familiar: Cafés get a little fancier. A new grocer moves in, selling nine-dollar juice. The faces on the street start to look different. Rents hike upward. The sights, smells and sounds of the neighbourhood change. Local residents find themselves excluded from places that used to be their old haunts. Slowly but surely, an unfamiliar neighbourhood emerges.

Though Vancouver’s Chinatown is recognized as a national historic site in Canada, the neighbourhood has been squeezed by the intense pressure of gentrification over the last decades, along with the rest of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Alongside class displacement, Chinatown faces another threat: the erosion of its distinct cultural heritage and history.

Take, for example, the fate of the magnificent three-storey mural of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (also known as Laozi) astride an ox that is painted on the side of the hundred-year-old Lee Association Building. Now, the original mural is hidden by a bright-gold micro-suite condo tower at 303 East Pender St. called Brixton Flats that boasts a cold-pressed juice and coffee lounge on the ground floor.

A budget-friendly Hong Kong-style café on Main Street has been supplanted by a hip pizza shop. Affordable, culturally appropriate greengrocers lining Gore Avenue are replaced by millennial-esthetic boxing gyms that cater to the gentry, resulting in the loss of valuable cultural food assets.

The combination of economic and cultural displacements resulting from the building of new housing and amenities that cater to a new, wealthier demographic creates “zones of exclusion.” Long-time residents no longer feel welcome in their own neighbourhood. Gentrification and cultural erasure are contemporary versions of the historical anti-Asian riots and Chinese head tax, and they are just as violent and exclusionary in displacing people and their lives.

But the Chinatown community is not known to sit on the sidelines. Repeatedly throughout history, the community has risen and pushed back against forces seeking to eliminate its place.

In the 1960s, moving cars efficiently was all the rage in North America. The urban planning philosophy of the day encouraged cities to build freeways to facilitate the movement of cars. In Vancouver, the drive for urban renewal led to a proposal for a freeway to be constructed through Chinatown and the surrounding Strathcona neighbourhood.

This resulted in the formation of the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA); members rallied and fought vehemently against the destruction of their home and, unlike their counterparts in most other cities, succeeded. Their tenacity helped save Chinatown, although the Black community’s Hogan’s Alley was demolished to build a viaduct.

Decades later in 2017, multiple generations banded together to push back against a shiny new condo tower proposed for 105 Keefer, situated right next to the Chinatown Memorial Monument for Chinese labourers who built the national railroad and Chinese war veterans who fought for Canada, despite not being recognized as citizens.

Multi-generational activism against the real estate development proposal sparked protests and an unprecedented turnout of community members and allies for three days of city council public hearings on the project. The fight brought all corners of the community together, including Chinese-Canadian veterans, Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice, the Chinese Cultural Centre, Youth Collaborative for Chinatown, #SaveChinatownYVR, and many others. The power of collective community resistance led to the eventual government rejection of the development.

Both battles, over the freeway and 105 Keefer, were watershed moments for Chinatown. They demonstrated that there was a fighting chance the neighbourhood could be saved by the same resilient spirit our forefathers had when they fought for their survival more than a century ago.

The story of Chinatown isn’t finished. As I write this, the global COVID-19 pandemic has created an onslaught of new challenges for the neighbourhood. With anti-Asian hate on the rise, that same racist sentiment toward Chinese people and Chinatown is replayed again and again like a broken record. Asian people are being attacked and killed simply because of the colour of their skin.

Artist Shu Ren (Arthur) Cheng’s mural at the intersection of Columbia and East Pender, “Snapshots of History,” was defaced with grotesque blotches of red paint meant to look like bullet wounds on the foreheads and bodies of the Chinese pioneers depicted. Long-established Chinatown shops and restaurants like the Goldstone Bakery, which served as a community hub, have shuttered.

But at the same time, throughout the pandemic, we saw the steadfast resilience of the Chinatown community in full force.

When lockdowns began, youth immediately came together to organize a grocery delivery program for neighbourhood seniors called the Chinatown Cares Grocery Delivery Program that is running to this day. Community members successfully advocated for a culturally appropriate local vaccination clinic that prioritized the most vulnerable. And amid the crisis, the community found the time and energy to resurrect, after a 50-year hiatus, the Fire Dragon Festival, celebrating the legendary fire dragon dance that wards off plagues.

Some critics say that Chinatown advocates should move on from the past and stop trying to resist the supposed economic growth and development that’s coming to the neighbourhood. But they don’t understand how Chinatown represents our way of life, our cultural identity, and our living heritage and history, which have been passed on for generations since our ancestors arrived as labourers on this land.

For over a century, we have fought for the survival of our people and for our place, and we will continue to fight for Chinatown to endure.

Reprinted with permission from “White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver” by Henry Tsang (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023)

SHARE: