Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
0
2 miles
Chinatown-Strathcona
0
2 kilometers
Downtown
Percent Chinese
50-100
30-50
15-30
5-15
0-5
Oakridge
0 (includes suppressed data)
Figure 2.1
Distribution of self-designated ethnic Chinese, City of Vancouver, 1971
Exploitation of labourers with limited power to object sustained the class
advantage of a merchant elite within the district's boundaries.
While external impositions began to be lifted after 1945, it took decades
before Vancouver's Chinese were separated from the spectre of Chinatown.
Peter Li (1998: 72) has suggested that of the 17,000 Chinese-origin families
in Canada in 1951, almost 13,000 comprised lone males living separate
from their overseas wives. Even in 1971 Chinese-Canadians remained geo-
graphically clustered around the Pender Street axis. The metropolitan popu-
lation had by then reached 30,600, but the vast majority lived within the
City of Vancouver and almost a fifth in the two poverty-stricken census
tracts covering old Chinatown. The detailed distribution by enumeration
areas (Figure 2.1), each area including only a few hundred people, shows
that even among these small districts only a handful contained a majority of
ethnic Chinese and these were all located in Chinatown, or immediately
adjacent to it. Beyond this core there was slow eastward diffusion of the
population into working-class East Vancouver, pushed in part by urban
renewal, and also southwards into middle-class Oakridge, where ten enu-
meration areas recorded 15-30 percent Chinese-Canadians, demarcating a
beach head that would later become the home of wealthy immigrants arriv-
ing from East Asia.
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