Reawakening Chinatown
Old meets new with a fresh group of
people passionate about revitalizing a Vancouver landmark
The old Chinatown is dead -- long live
the new Chinatown.
That would be the one with hip-hop
parties, basketball leagues, tours that show outsiders the area's hidden
historic treasures, a mix of ethnic restaurants, Asian film festivals, a
centre for Chinese art, a Silk Road leading to a traditional gate, and the
home of magazines like Banana, the city's hip new publication aimed at young
Asian-Canadians.
It's the Chinatown that its passionate
fans are struggling to remake for the 21st century.
"What's not going to happen ever is
Vancouver's Chinatown going back to being the commercial core for Vancouver
Chinese the way it was for 80 years. It will never go back to being the only
game in town."
So says Andrew Yan, a 27-year-old
descendant of one of Vancouver's early arrivals who has become a scholar of
North American Chinatowns, which have all struggled for survival as new
Chinese immigrants and second-generation Chinese have opted for the suburbs.
Instead, says Yan, Vancouver's Chinatown
will have to recreate itself as something new:
- - A place that's open to everyone.
- - A place that pulls in young people.
- - And a place that's the cultural and
historic capital of the region, not just for the Chinese community, but for
all Vancouverites.
"It reflects Vancouver. It is a part
of Vancouver's identity. One of the unalienable competitive advantages
Chinatown has is its history and architecture," says Yan, who works as
a city planner in San Francisco.
"There are buildings here that you
can't find in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York. Just look at the
Masons Building on Pender, with its Italianate stone face. You don't see
that anywhere else. That is an under-appreciated advantage."
Yan, who is also consulting for the city
of Vancouver on ways to refashion Chinatown, is just one among many who have
reached the same conclusion.
"The old ways are no longer
working," says Fred Mah, a 66-year-old pillar of the Chinese community
who is the head of a "visioning" group in the year-old Chinatown
revitalization committee. "We have to think about serving the whole
community."
Especially, Chinatown needs to become the
kind of place that young people want to visit, as it was when he was a
science student at the University of B.C. in the 1960s.
Then, Chinatown had a basketball league,
a volleyball league and a wealth of restaurants that budget-minded
university students flocked to. He and his friends regularly went down to
Chinatown to teach free English classes for people who worked in the garment
factories nearby.
Another member of the committee, the
28-year-old publisher of Banana magazine, Mark Simon, agrees.
"We need to attract more kids to
Chinatown. The image most of them have is that it's old, it's weird, it's
where their parents go to buy groceries," Simon says.
"We're saying, 'There's a lot more
here than just herb stores.' "
Simon, whose ethnic background is
Vietnamese and Filipino, is doing his bit to kick-start the new Chinatown.
He plans to move the offices of Banana from Richmond down to Chinatown and
is organizing a May 31 hip-hop party and dance contest in the neighbourhood.
Those are things Simon hadn't even
considered a year ago, before he started hanging out with Fred Mah and
company.
He ran into them at his local community
centre in Strathcona, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, and
noticed this group that was getting together to talk about the future of
Chinatown.
He got invited to join, and that
encounter turned out to be quite different from what he expected.
"I didn't know what to expect at my
first meeting with the old fogies of Chinatown. And there they were speaking
perfect English and cracking Western jokes."
That sense of connection led him to not
just stay with the group, but also to move Banana's offices to Chinatown.
Simon is not the only sign that there's a
bridge being formed between the old and the new, in what has been a
community very much dominated by its pioneer generation of elders.
For the first time in the history of the
Chinatown Merchants Association, the president is a 30-something with a B.A.
in economics and Asian history who grew up in Richmond.
Albert Fok runs a natural-health-products
store on Keefer Street that his father, originally from Hong Kong, started
25 years ago.
"These older gentlemen watched me
grow up and I watched them do their business. I'm very aware of both
worlds."
Fok, who was chosen as president last
month, has already signalled a more conciliatory and positive approach than
in the past, when Chinatown representatives put a lot of energy into blaming
the city for not cracking down on the drug problem, for inadequate parking
and for just generally making their lives a regulatory hell.
He has suggested the association no
longer has to work so closely with the Community Alliance, a group formed
specifically to oppose city plans for more drug-addiction treatment and
social housing in the area.
That group's decision to file a lawsuit
against the city last year over the opening of a contact centre for addicts
on Hastings Street created considerable bad feeling at city hall, where it
was seen as a slap in the face from organizations that get generous funding
from the city.
There are still intense divisions inside
and outside Chinatown about what is the real cause of the area's problems
are.
While everyone talks about Chinatown's
decline, the streets east of Main where food shops predominate are packed,
new businesses are opening up, and a price war has broken out in some
sectors.
Property assessments dropped slightly in
Chinatown last year, compared to a slight rise in the rest of Vancouver.
But the properties that have sold in the
past year have gone for anywhere from $420,000 to $2.3 million.
Many focus on the most visible sign of
decline: the crowds of drug addicts and dealers on Hastings Street from
Vancouver's open drug market that have spilled through the alley between
Hastings and Pender west of Main.
Seventy-seven-year-old realtor Fred Yuen
expresses a common view.
"Nobody goes down there because of
the drug addicts," he says. "They spill on to Pender Street, so
[the merchants] all put bars on their doors and walk away at night. Nobody
wants to walk down the street because they're afraid."
A street that used to be crowded with
shoppers, restaurants and flashing neon signs until the small hours of the
morning is now dotted with empty store windows.
The city is supposed to be working on a
comprehensive plan to deal with drug addiction and bring back public order
to the streets, but so far there have been no visible signs of change.
Although the contact centre opened in December, the crowds are still just as
intense on Hastings.
But there is also a growing realization
that drugs aren't Chinatown's fundamental problem.
"My feeling is that even if the drug
problem goes away, the community has changed so much, people will not come
back unless we do something," says Fred Mah.
Nor is the much complained-about parking
shortage the main issue. Yan points out that Robson Street and San
Francisco's hugely busy Chinatown have terrible parking.
Instead, the biggest problem is the way
Chinese populations have changed, especially in Vancouver.
Chinatowns formed in dozens of North
American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both because the
mainstream white population encouraged it and because the Chinese themselves
didn't want much to do with the "white barbarians."
North America's two largest Chinatowns,
New York and San Francisco, remained lively because they continued to be the
entry ports for new immigrants, says Yan.
But in Vancouver, the new wave of
immigrants in the 1980s were middle class and well educated, and there was
no way they were going to settle in Chinatown.
Yan's study of Vancouver shows the
largest concentration of Chinese in Vancouver is not in Chinatown. And it's
not in Richmond, either, or Coquitlam.
"There are more Chinese-Canadians in
a one-kilometre circle around 41st and Victoria than in a one-kilometre
circle around Chinatown," he says.
The spread of the Chinese community to
all of those places, along with Burnaby and Surrey, produced a proliferation
of Asian shopping areas and malls and just regular grocery stores that
started stocking bok choy and oyster sauce.
Expo 86 could have brought people into
the area, but the Chinatown community didn't see a compelling reason to put
up its own money. When the provincial government didn't come up with the
cash either, they ended up with nothing, realtor Fred Yuen says.
"When Expo opened, there was no
gateway [from Chinatown] to Expo," says Yuen. "That was when
Chinatown's downfall started."
People hoped the new International
Village development would inject new life but that development has had its
own problems and the Tinseltown mall now sits half empty.
What's needed now is a refocusing, Yan
says.
One is how to get property owners to
preserve their unique heritage buildings -- one of Chinatown's selling
points -- without having so many rules that no one is willing to invest the
money.
Yan points out that Chinatown properties
are problematic for budget-minded developers because they are small lots
with unreinforced brick buildings.
Making them usable requires spending a
lot of money.
In addition, Vancouver's Chinatown is
covered by a blanket provincial heritage designation that creates even more
difficulties.
"For most developers, it's just not
worth it to do any of this stuff. It's easier to build a strip mall in
Richmond."
City planner Nathan Edelson said the city
is trying to find incentives that reward owners for fixing up heritage
properties. Edelson said the city is also looking at changes to the building
code, so that someone doing small improvements doesn't trigger an avalanche
of city requirements to update everything in the building.
Yan also believes Chinatown needs to
start developing housing -- not just for seniors -- that will create a local
community. That's what the Los Angeles Chinatown, the one he sees as the
most comparable to Vancouver, has done.
"They've pushed housing as a
deterrent to urban blight. The best customers for any Chinatown are
typically those who live near there."
And then it has to reach out to the
larger community in all kinds of big and little ways, from putting up better
signs (maybe even a SkyTrain stop marked Stadium/Chinatown) to market its
history.
There's a mix of pessimism and optimism
these days. Pessimism about the ongoing drug problem. Optimism as the
revitalization committee comes up with ideas:
- An urban media centre at Tinseltown.
- Fix up the Yip Sang building.
- Out-of-school tutoring programs where
teenagers can go while their parents are shopping.
Three levels of government have poured
money and effort into Chinatown recently. Thanks to that, Chinatown is
getting its Millennium Gate, improvements to the Sun-Yat Sen Garden, the
Silk Road that is planned as a connector between Robson Street and
Chinatown, new ornamental lighting, and more.
"I think Chinatown is
restorable," says Alan Herbert, a former city councillor who has thrown
himself into volunteer work with several Chinatown groups.
"But the method for doing that is
not putting on the jackboots to get rid of undesirables. It's to flood an
area with many people who are there for other, legitimate reasons."
- by Frances Bula and John Mackie Vancouver
Sun February 09, 2002
Saving Chinatown
It's just before noon on a crisp, bright
January day as Albert Fok steps gingerly along an icy sidewalk in the heart
of Vancouver's Chinatown.
With only 10 days left before the Chinese
New Year, shoppers crunch up and down East Pender Street buying fruit,
vegetables and seafood for the upcoming celebrations.
"The snow over the weekend has kept
the customers away, so now there's a panic," says Fok over the chatter
and bustle that has been unique to this area for more than a century.
"But it's not busy like it used to be."
Fok, newly elected chairman of the
Vancouver Chinatown Merchants Association, runs into Willie Chan who's
standing outside his empty store waiting patiently for customers to buy his
dried seafood and herbal remedies.
Asked how business is doing, Chan, owner
of Nutra Trading Co., grins and tilts his hand from side to side, as if
pouring a drink.
"So, so," he says.
It's an answer the 200-plus merchants of
this historic community are all too apt to give as they continue to see
business dwindle. Chan, who operates two food shops along East Pender, says
business is down 50 per cent from four years ago.
The reasons are many. Merchants cite
development of large-scale Chinatowns in Richmond, Coquitlam and Burnaby
that have lured customers away. They also complain that exorbitant lease
rates and property tax bills-Chan pays $24,000 a year in property taxes for
one shop-have discouraged prospective tenants and investors.
The end of the unprecedented Asian
immigration influx to the Lower Mainland in the 1990s has played a role, as
has the lack of attractions for the younger generation-there are no bowling
alleys, no Chinese theatres and only one bubble tea house-which some say has
turned Chinatown into a place for the old.
And of course, some merchants place the
blame squarely on crime seeping in from the city's most infamous drug
corner, Main and Hastings.
It all makes for a formidable challenge
for Fok, who runs Kiu Shun Trading Co. on Keefer Street, a herbal medicine
business that has been in his family for 25 years, and other merchants and
residents, who are trying to revitalize what used to be a vibrant, bustling
community.
"One must evolve with the trends or
you will be eliminated," says Fok.
Fok's view is shared by Glen Wong, an
accountant who works a few blocks west of Fok's business. Like Fok, Wong's
roots in Chinatown are deep-his father started Bing Wong and Associates
accounting firm decades ago.
Wong is the chairman of the one-year-old
Chinatown Revitalization Committee, which consists of some two dozen
community groups, including the merchants' association. The committee is
leading the charge for renewal in Chinatown, organizing small groups to find
solutions to attract customers back to the community.
They want to rejuvenate Chinatown's arts
and culture scene, clean up alleys, remove graffiti from buildings, reduce
crime, organize sports events and poll customers and non-customers about
their shopping habits. To solicit ideas from the younger generation, they're
establishing youth groups composed of students from Strathcona, Simon Fraser
University and UBC.
Unlike Richmond or Burnaby, where
Chinatowns have only evolved in the past decade, they can draw upon
Vancouver Chinatown's best marketing tool: its rich history. "We want
to build on that," Wong says from his third-floor office, which
overlooks a series of heritage buildings on East Pender. "We're not
going to compete with Richmond, Burnaby and other places to get people to
shop down here specifically for Chinese groceries. So we have to offer
something else."
Evidence of that "something
else" is already visible at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden on Carrall
Street, the Chinese Cultural Museum and Archives on Columbia Street, the
West Han Dynasty Bell at the foot of Canton Alley and, of course, the rows
of heritage buildings that line many of the streets.
Within the next few months, those
attractions will be bolstered by construction of the much-anticipated
Millennium Gate at West Pender and Taylor, finally providing a traditional
entrance to Chinatown. Not far from there, at Columbia and Keefer streets, a
rectangular column-like monument will be erected to commemorate Chinese
railroad workers and war veterans.
Eventually, the core of Chinatown will be
lit up with street lamps, complementing the Silk Road pedestrian route from
Chinatown to Library Square recently opened by the city.
It all sounds good, but Wong knows no
matter what type of building, monument or festival the community has to
offer, it still has to attract customers year-round for business to prosper.
One obstacle, he admits, is Chinatown's
inability to attract younger people-teens and 20-something-year-olds like
Irene Wong.
Wong, a 23-year-old clerk who works at
the Golden Crown bookstore on East Pender and lives in Burnaby, only goes to
Chinatown for her job, which involves selling books and making cappuccinos
and bubble tea, a Taiwanese drink popular with young Asians. Wong points out
that while Golden Crown is the only bubble tea house in Chinatown, Richmond
has dozens, along with bowling alleys, karaoke clubs, hip restaurants,
Chinese movie theatres and retail stores catering to the younger generation.
The array of entertainment options frequently attracts Wong and her friends
to Richmond, a city with more than 50,000 Chinese residents.
"Too many elders here," says
Wong from behind the store's counter.
"It's closer for me to come to
Chinatown, but nothing for us to do."
For Fok, a 1983 Richmond High graduate,
incorporating some of Richmond's ideas to attract the younger generation is
worth looking at. As a teenager, he remembers travelling from Richmond to
Chinatown to watch Chinese movies at now vacant movie theatres.
But opening a bowling alley or a theatre
requires interest and money from the private sector and, so far, that hasn't
happened. The only large-scale entertainment-related development recently in
Chinatown is International Village on West Pender Street. Though it bills
itself in a Chinatown tourist brochure as "one of the greatest retail
entertainment centres," featuring 12 stadium-style movie theatres and a
"spectacular collage" of designer stores, salons and boutiques,
business isn't exactly booming. During a recent visit, store clerks and food
servers appeared bored, some reading newspapers and talking on phones to
pass the time.
Only 34 of 150 spaces planned at the mall
were ever occupied, and at least eight former tenants are suing the mall's
developer, Henderson Development (Canada), accusing the company of
mismanagement and misrepresentation.
Difficulties attracting tenants aren't
unique to International Village. A ground floor land use study of Chinatown
in 1980 found 28 vacancies; by 2000, there were 80. Fok doesn't want to see
those numbers increase but when property taxes surpass $20,000 per year,
luring an investor from doing business in Richmond or elsewhere is almost
impossible.
The merchants' association has lobbied
the provincial government to reduce assessments by at least 30 per cent,
arguing current assessments are based on the "glory days" of real
estate transactions in the mid-1990s. But no changes are in sight, says Fok.
At the same time, the provincial
government's 1971 decision to designate Chinatown a historic site has given
government control over all major changes, demolitions and renovations to
buildings-effectively limiting development.
"Business is dwindling and the
prospects don't look good," Fok says. "In some cases, property
taxes are more expensive than the lease rate itself. We have situations
where the landlord is offering his shop rent-free as long as the renter pays
for the property taxes-just to get rid of the landlord's burden. Some shops
have a higher tax rate than London Drugs on Broadway."
Last May, the revitalization committee
hired a research group to survey almost 400 Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver,
Richmond and Burnaby about shopping in Chinatown. The top three reasons
cited for not going to
Chinatown to shop were distance (33 per
cent), lack of parking (20 per cent) and fear of crime (15 per cent).
When respondents were asked what changes
would they like to see in Chinatown over the next 10 years, almost 40 per
cent called for a reduction in crime, 32 per cent cited cleaner streets and
30 per cent wanted drugs and dealers kicked out of the Downtown Eastside.
"Crime and safety in the
neighbourhood ranks as the most important element in encouraging visitation
to Chinatown," the survey concluded.
"We find that adding restaurants,
entertainment or movies has a more limited effect on potential visitation.
In fact, adding nightclubs or bars has virtually no effect on the
attractiveness of the area."
Eddie Li, who runs Novelty Gifts Express
Ltd. on East Pender, couldn't agree more with the survey's conclusions. In
January, criminals broke into his store twice in one week, stealing more
than $5,000 worth of merchandise.
Li thinks the break-in was likely related
to the Health Contact Centre, a controversial drop-in centre for drug
addicts that opened in December on the ground floor of the Roosevelt Hotel
near Main and Hastings.
"The drug addicts have got no money,
so they break into my store," says Li, noting police have made no
arrests. "They should put these people out of the city, not in
Chinatown. It's terrible for business."
Such accusations don't sit well with
Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen, who supported the creation of the Contact
Centre. The facility is part of the Vancouver Agreement, a three-government
plan to create service centres for addicts to get them off the streets and
rehabilitated.
"It annoys me that people are
against it. Should we just leave them in the lane?" says Owen, who
argues putting addicts on a bus and sending them to Hope is the wrong
approach. "If you don't like what we're trying to do by spending all
this money to fix up your neighbourhood, then tell us what you'd like us to
do. And none of them have come up with a realistic, practical
solution."
Whether or not the Contact Centre is to
blame, the reality is that Fok, Li and Chan have all been victims of
break-ins and thefts. The problem got so bad five years ago that the
merchants' association hired a 24-hour security firm that now patrols the
streets.
All agree the most common type of crime
is petty, where disheveled-looking people, likely drug addicts, run into
their stores during the day and grab $20 to $50 from the till before
escaping into the streets.
The day before his interview with the
Courier, Chan says, his neighbour was robbed of about $20 but didn't report
it to police. Many merchants don't bother to phone police for such small
amounts of money. "Too much trouble, it takes time."
The frequency of such incidents fuels a
perception that crime is increasing in Chinatown, which merchants insist is
the main reason many customers prefer Richmond. Yet Richmond's Chinatown,
particularly in the No. 3 Road and Cambie area and surrounding streets, has
its own problems.
Over the years, criminals have pulled off
daring daylight jewelry heists, robbed a Loomis security truck with machine
guns, kidnapped children and women, killed fellow gangsters and attempted to
extort money from several shop owners. Yet, business continues to boom in
that city.
At the same time, violent crime in
Vancouver's Chinatown has dropped by 30 per cent in recent years and police
statistics from Jan. 1 to 15 of this year show no purse snatchings, no
stolen autos, one fight, one drug arrest and three robberies.
The biggest problem for police in
Chinatown is criminals breaking into vehicles-there were 16 incidents during
the first 15 days of the year. In fact, while Const. Wayne Windrim was going
over recent statistics with the Courier in the Chinatown Community Police
Office, a 20-something man broke into a Toyota SUV directly across the
street from the police office, which had a police car parked out front.
Police officers on bicycles quickly
nabbed the man, but not before he broke the window to the truck. With the
window smashed, police were forced to have it towed to an impound lot so
nobody else could break in.
"It'll ruin the owner's day, and
maybe he won't come back to Chinatown," says Windrim, noting any
vehicles in Chinatown with out-of-town licence plates are almost guaranteed
to be targeted.
"It happens so much that it
embarrasses me. That's terrible for tourism. A tourist goes home and tells a
hundred people."
Windrim isn't surprised to hear that Chan
and fellow merchants don't report petty theft, admitting that unreported
crime is huge in Chinatown. Nonetheless, he and his partner Const. Gerry
Wickstead encourage them to call police, who they insist are doing their
best.
"If year after year, a shop owner
sees people dealing drugs in front of their business, and they see no
results, they have a right to criticize the police," Wickstead says.
"The thing is though, if you went
and checked that drug dealer, we've probably charged him three, four, five,
10 times already. Police are one part of the justice system, the courts are
another and the jail space is another. And the merchants don't see
that."
Currently, Windrim and Wickstead work
with two Cantonese-speaking bicycle police and four other police units, who
also patrol Hastings Street. As community police officers, Windrim and
Wickstead don't see their job as solely enforcing the law, but working with
merchants to revitalize Chinatown.
The Chinatown office has organized
graffiti removal projects, volunteer bike and foot patrols, the cleaning of
store awnings and visits to seniors' homes to teach them crime prevention.
"If you allow drug dealers to come
in here and you have dingy lighting, graffiti, decrepit buildings, open
street drug use, then it becomes the criminals' town," Windrim says.
"Crime is really only a small part of the problem down here. A lot of
change is up to the merchants."
This isn't Chinatown's first fight to
reclaim its community. Roy Mah, who founded the Chinatown News in 1953,
remembers the days of battling city hall to prevent a freeway from running
through Chinatown in 1973.
These days, the 83-year-old former
activist, now retired and living in a Yaletown apartment, seldom visits
Chinatown, aside from a weekly visit to read newspapers at a seniors'
centre. The older generation, he says, is dying out. A good friend, Douglas
Jung, who was Canada's first Chinese-Canadian MP, died last month.
Mah doesn't see Chinatown's latest fight
as about racism or government inaction. It's about Chinatown's need to look
at what it was, what it's become and how it can reclaim a rich identity that
is being lost to more than crime. Mah says he has faith in the new
generation leading the community's renewal.
"They're idea people, they're
dynamic. If nothing else, they at least have the initiative to do something
about the problems, and that's a good sign." - By Mike Howell
Vancouver
Courier February 2002
