Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
motion as 'discriminatory, racist and unfair… If these new building by-laws
are brought into effect, it will be akin to returning to the early 1900s where
some of our land titles specifically excluded people of certain origins from
owning land'. The builders clearly felt that this heavy-handed intervention
provided a knockout punch for it was a strategy they had used repeatedly
before Council since the first challenge to the design of new large houses in
1986.
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Such a strategy is not unique to Vancouver: '… in Monterey Park
[Los Angeles] Timothy Fong found that coalitions between American city
bosses, big developers, and Asian investors wielded racism as a weapon to
push through pro-growth policies' (Ong 1999: 100).
Other interested business groups had made similar interventions.
Following the Regatta affair and the debate about off-shore investment,
the British Columbia business magazine,
Equity
, published a special issue
with the eye-catching title, 'Racism: will it kill investment billions?' The
front cover included a full-page photograph of Victor Li along with the
issue's probing title, while inside stories sustained the moral panic with
such titles as 'Racism is an ugly word' and 'Prosperity in the balance'
(
Equity
1989).
Once the racist genie was out of the bottle, there was no controlling its
global dissipation. Racism offered a simple explanation for conflict in media
sound bites, particularly for reporters at a distance. Imputations saved them
the trouble of researching more nuanced interpretations. Radio-Television
Hong Kong had aired a documentary,
The Hong Kong Connection
, in
November 1989 that presented 'Vancouver as a thoroughly racist society'
(Moore 1989a). What the
South China Morning Post
had called 'The battle
for Shaughnessy' kept rhetoric at a high level,
26
and the 1992 public hearing
led to the troubling headline 'Vancouver planning law fuels racist fire' in the
SCMP
's 4th October edition. But Vancouver media had also stepped up to
the plate when it came to insensitive name-calling. Fundamental to their
representation of the conflict was an uncritical use of the unhelpful moniker,
the monster house. Prominent headlines used the derogatory label rou-
tinely, and the offensive barb was carried into popular discourse, including
letter writing to Council. Cavell (1997) has properly challenged this term
with the question, who lives in monster houses? Without accepting all of his
psychoanalytic speculations he is surely correct to see in such a term at best
name-calling and at worst a racist gloss. The houses had their supporters for
whom they were far from monstrous. As a Chinese-Canadian correspond-
ent observed in the
Vancouver Sun
: 'Who are we to insult other people's
pride and joy by labelling these modernistic, beautiful, million-dollar homes,
designed to suit today's lifestyle, as 'monsters'?' (anon 1993).
Race, however, was only part of a complex constellation of culpability
and effects. Consider the following Anglo-Canadian letter, unusual in its
