Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
continuity in the monster house idiom with earlier more pernicious categories,
a flattening of mainstream imagery revealing the author's own positionality
(Sun 2002).
The viewpoint and interests of the immigrant are effectively embedded in
the ethnic press. With an ethnic Chinese population of 380,000 in Greater
Vancouver in 2006, there is considerable competition among local editions
of the Hong Kong dailies
Sing Tao
and
Ming Pao
and the Taiwanese-based
World Journal
(Leung 2006). The significant national television and radio
empire of the Fairchild Media Group, based in the Vancouver ethnoburb of
Richmond, offers Cantonese and Mandarin coverage to a Vancouver televi-
sion audience of over 240,000 daily. These are only the largest players in a
mediascape with its own capacity to sustain and reproduce distinctive social
realities.
Immigration stories featured prominently in both the English- and
Chinese-language press in the 1990s, reflecting distinctive community
interests. In a celebrated case they offered their own very divergent accounts
of the mysterious figure
homo economicus
, so divergent that their conflicting
accounts led to mutual recrimination. An unsolved murder occurred in a
high status westside neighbourhood of Vancouver in 1997. The victim was
an entrepreneur who had entered Canada from Hong Kong through the
BIP. Living in a wealthy district, apparently with a Mercedes in his garage,
he had been shot in his own driveway before dawn one morning while leav-
ing for work at one of the Chinese-language newspapers where he had a job
as
an early morning delivery boy
. The status incompatibilities of the case were
incomprehensible to Canadian-born readers who were not ethnic Chinese.
Why would a wealthy entrepreneur be delivering newspapers? Familiar car-
icatures speedily occupied the information gap. The English-language press
extrapolated from the premeditated murder by someone who clearly knew
the victim's pre-dawn movements. Was he indeed a victim or was he also a
member of a criminal subculture, whose posture as a simple deliveryman
was in fact a cover for more sinister activities? Journalist Kim Pemberton's
(1997) scare quotes around 'paperboy' in the title of her page one story in
the
Vancouver Sun
threw doubt on this job status, while the remainder of the
second part of the title, 'paid cash for $1 million home', pressed home
the incongruity and raised suspicions of undisclosed money sources. So too
Moira Farrow's (1997) subsequent story picked up the thread of pursuing
this mysterious 'money trail' while challenging the Chinese-language press
for 'bullying' the mainstream media.
For the Chinese-language media responded to these innuendos with
unusual robustness, pointing to an altogether different interpretation of
events. In a flurry of some 20 stories, they rejected the 'phobic reporting' in
the
Vancouver Sun
and the factual error that the house had been paid for by
cash (
Ming
Pao
1997a). They lamented the effects of the tone of the
Sun
's
