Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
So to speak of a Chinese-Canadian population - let alone community - is
to speak conventionally, engaging in a practice that is as much purposeful
as it is true. It is in this sense that we employ official statistics, that tell us a
good deal, but less than we may infer. Census data disclose considerable
spatial concentration in the residential pattern of Chinese-Canadians; in
2001, 73 percent lived in the census metropolitan areas (CMAs) of Toronto
(410,000) and Vancouver (343,000) that housed in contrast just 22 percent
of all Canadians.
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Split almost equally between the two CMAs, more than
280,000 members of this population comprised Chinese-speaking immi-
grants who landed during the 1990s (Statistics Canada 2003). These recent
arrivals were even more spatially concentrated, with Toronto and Vancouver
assembling 82 percent of the national total. Imputing intentionality, it is
perhaps understandable for a mobile transnational population to be highly
clustered in Canada's two most cosmopolitan cities, with excellent air con-
nections to East Asia.
This topic is about the encounter of people and place, wealthy overseas
Chinese, originating mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and transnational
residents or sojourners in Canada's two major gateway cities. While noting
events in Toronto, the primary focus is Vancouver, the preferred destination
of wealthy migrants. However, with their diffuse diasporic identity, both
here and there, our attention cannot be confined to static statistical and
cartographic displays of two cities, for this is a story about life lines, a
broader pan-Pacific field including not only East Asia, but also similar
places in Australia, New Zealand and the United States that will be refer-
enced comparatively throughout. We now move to four vignettes that intro-
duce and distil some of the themes to be developed in greater complexity in
the following chapters. The first episode confirmed the strength of transna-
tional linkages between distant sites, displaying, in this case brutally, the
effective geographical proximity of two world cities, Toronto and Hong
Kong, within a pan-Pacific socio-spatial field.
SARS: Toronto Goes Global
In large cities today a number of candidates present themselves for iconic
status as harbinger of globalization. Not for want of trying, Toronto has
never snagged one of the global spectacles, the Olympics or a World's
Fair, events that provide a defining moment in the evolution of a metro-
politan identity, a breaking out from the regional and national to universal
visibility. Instead, salient events for Toronto might include the proliferation
of international banks arriving in the 1980s, the escalating world-wide
immigration the same decade, or in popular culture perhaps the success of
the Toronto Blue Jays as baseball's 'World Series' champions in 1992 and
