Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Canada and develop culture-specific skills. I held three focus groups at the
centre with BIP entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea who
had participated in these programmes. While they valued the services and
networks that were offered, there was little difference in overall economic
performance or expectations between these groups and the larger popula-
tion of business immigrants.
Mitchell (2001) has identified agencies like SUCCESS with the 'shadow
state', the proliferating network of NGOs (and private companies) that dis-
tribute public services on a contractual basis in a neo-liberal governance
regime. Interestingly, SUCCESS emerged in 1973 during the heyday of
public participation, when the delegation of services to the grassroots level,
especially in Chinatown, was a plank in left-liberal, not right wing, agendas.
Like the Chinese Cultural Centre established the same year, SUCCESS,
facilitated by multicultural funding, was founded by professionals: 'teachers,
physicians, government workers, lawyers, health nurses, social workers, a
pastor and community activists' (Li 1998). Unlike the traditional Chinatown
associations it has a professional and entrepreneurial edge, and sees itself as
a bridging, not an inward-looking, institution. David and Dorothy Lam,
epitome of multicultural integration, have been patrons and the new head
office is named, in memoriam, the Dr. Dorothy Lam Building. As a bridging
institution, SUCCESS has responded effectively to the funding opportuni-
ties of the welfare state and the standards of middle-class immigrants
schooled in the standards of an efficient 'Asian modernity'.
Participation, Citizenship, Belonging, Identity:
Climbing the Integration Ladder
In the transition from stranger to host, from outsider to insider, several
milestones may be located in an immigrant biography. Participation, a sense
of interest and agency in the civil society around the place of residence, is a
good starting point. We have already seen an example of such agency in the
dramatic intervention of new business immigrants in the public hearings on
zoning change in Shaughnessy in the early 1990s. Angela Kan, Executive
Director of SUCCESS from 1977 to 1986, identified the period since the
1970s as the first era of widespread 'active participation and identification
with Canada' among the formerly marginalized Chinese-Canadian popula-
tion (Kan 1998). Her frame of reference was the activism associated with
the arrival of well-educated, middle-class migrants from Hong Kong fol-
lowing the pro-Communist riots in 1967, reinforced by the second wave of
economic migrants in the 1980s and 1990s. SUCCESS has always placed
a strong emphasis on voluntarism as a form of participation and claims a
massive volunteer force of over 5,000 that provide services beyond the
