Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
We have learned too of substantial gendering in the emotional burden of
migration. There has been insufficient attention in the literature to male
vulnerabilities. Not only the depreciation of income but also a serious loss
of status with de-skilling in Canada drew men readily into the astronaut role
of re-opening (or maintaining) their economic accounts in East Asia, while
their wives and children remained in Canada. While women had a very dif-
ficult year or two, effectively as single parents, over time they usually came
to terms with North American society and shaped a
habitus
of child care
and social activities that were rewarding. Frequently a return to East Asia
was undertaken reluctantly and with a sense of loss.
'Hongcouver'
Around 1990, media in Hong Kong and North America both fabricated an
apparent fusion of the transnational social field into the imagined entity of
'Hongcouver', a Vancouver society and landscape heavily impregnated by
immigration and investment from East Asia. The motivation for presenting
this entity was in part satirical, possibly on occasion racist, but like all satire
there was a significant insight in the exaggerated caricature. Vancouver had
changed substantially as a place, with its society and landscapes internation-
alized in an Asian idiom. Old Chinatown of course remained but increas-
ingly as a cultural relic that was of limited relevance to middle-class migrants
from East Asia who were much more at home in suburban Asian-themed
malls. A far more representative landscape of a contemporary Asian moder-
nity was emerging adjacent to Chinatown in the high-rise residential towers
emerging in the downtown mega-projects of Concord Pacific Place and
nearby Coal Harbour, the largest and most visible of many development
projects sired by investment capital from East Asia. While city planners had
beaten back the developer's desire for Hong Kong style densities, nonethe-
less an internationally-financed and marketed landscape was propelling a
provincial city into a new age of global logics. Immigrants bring embodied
cultures and values from other places and these have entered into Vancouver's
existing human geography. Andrea Eng, a top real estate executive for
Collier's International in Vancouver and then Hong Kong, saw herself as a
'cultural translator' of East Asian dispositions in Canada (Hyslop 2008),
observing astutely that in Hong Kong, 'the two ways to get ahead are through
education and land. They study hard and buy property' (Claiborne 1991).
1
Education has proven an important component of Vancouver's globaliza-
tion (Waters 2006, 2008; Kwak 2008). Universities and school districts
have played the globalization game with vigour, recognizing that there is a
large market for Canadian education in East Asia and that foreign student
fees add substantially to budgets depleted during the economic recessions
