Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sharpened and reproduced the representation of a people apart, a people of
minimal entitlement in Kay Anderson's (1991) aptly chosen words. Chinese-
Canadian literature has also pursued this spatial genre (Khoo 2003), in
autobiographical and historical novels like
Jade Peony
(Choy 1995) in which
a Chinese life-world, though vibrant, is internalized and contained in a
claustrophobic space of a few blocks.
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While some authors have properly
challenged the sense of disempowerment and victim status often evident in
these representations, few have broken loose of the magnetic, rooted and
static allure of Chinatown itself.
And yet… walk today down Pender Street, the spine of Vancouver's Old
Chinatown, past buildings like the home of the Chinese Benevolent Asso-
ciation (1909), the long-time workshop of the now-departed
Chinese Times
(1902), and its neighbour, the Chinese Freemasons' Building (1901), tempo-
rary home of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Figure 1.1). Moving beneath the self-
conscious new Chinatown Gate, we pass the Dr. Dorothy Lam Building,
a legacy to a remarkable family, and head office of the resourceful immi-
grant settlement agency, SUCCESS. The Lam Building fronts the site of
a one-time warren of former shacks and bunk houses in Canton and
Shanghai Alleys, on land originally scavenged from False Creek's tidal
marshes. Pender Street today is an outdoor museum, meticulously orien-
talized by a well-meaning multiculturalism where design, colour and
landscape texture are prescribed by a planner's rule-book.
But suddenly critical race studies confront the material and seemingly
colour-blind articulation of global capitalism.
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Continuing a short distance
west on Pender, leaving behind the mummified landscape of Old Chinatown,
we observe an altogether different district, the confident new build of con-
dominiums in International Village - España was branded and marketed in
the most recent buildings on offer. We are on the edge of the vast Concord
Pacific Place (Figure 1.2), orchestrated by Hong Kong's billionaire Li
family, a fleet of high rise towers lying at anchor on the two-kilometre long
waterfront site of the former world's fair, Expo 86, and more recently joined
by a younger and smaller Toronto sibling, Concord CityPlace, under con-
struction on former downtown railway lands.
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Pacific Place is a popular
landing strip for empty nesters, professional singles and a new cohort of
wealthy East Asian immigrants.
The landscape contrasts of this district and its other are profoundly ironic.
Behind us, to the east, in a Chinatown landscape of slowly decaying ethnic
stuff, some might identify the last gesture of Orientalism, sustained and pro-
moted by three levels of government in the designated Chinatown Historic
Area. Ahead of us to the west the massive economic power of contemporary
East Asia takes its cues if not from a concocted Occidentalism, then from an
alternate Asian modernity (Ong 1999). International Village strikes exactly
the right chord: the horizon here is expansive not claustrophobic, the mobile
