The Cantonese Pacific, Part II: Chinatown is Changing

This is the second in a three-part series of stories exploring historian Henry Yu’s theory of the Cantonese Pacific. The series is an excerpt from The Dragons That Crossed the Sea, an upcoming Zolima Culture Guide publication.

This article contains material adapted from Zolima’s previously published articles on historic Chinatown communities.

Each Chinatown is unique

Each Chinatown is unique, but there are remarkable parallels in their evolution, wherever they happen to be located. In Karen Cho’s 2023 documentary Big Fight in Little Chinatown, she crisscrosses North America to discover how historic Chinatowns are fighting to stay alive in the face of real estate pressure and changing demographics. Though the film focuses on Chinatowns in New York, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, it has resonated with audiences in just about every city where it has been screened. “Wherever we go, people are like, ‘That’s the story of my Chinatown,’” says Cho. “Every city is unique, but on a certain level the choices that cities have made around Chinatown are similar. It’s been a dumping ground for all the things you don’t want.”  

Vancouver’s Chinatown is a case in point. After booming with a constant stream of newcomers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it fell into decline in 1923, when Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all Chinese immigration. Home to 13,011 people in 1931, Chinatown’s population dwindled to 7,174 just ten years later, as the old generation died off and families left for other cities in Canada. In his novel The Jade Peony, Vancouver-born author Wayson Choy evokes the struggle of those lean years: 

In the city dump on False Creek Flats, living in makeshift huts, thirty-two Old China bachelor-men tried to shelter themselves; dozens more were dying of neglect in the overcrowded rooms of Pender Street. There were no Depression jobs for such men. They had been deserted by the railroad companies and betrayed by the many labour contractors who had gone back to China, wealthy and forgetful. There was a local Vancouver by-law against begging for food, a federal law against stealing food, but no law in any court against starving to death for lack of food. The few churches that served the Chinatown area were running out of funds. Soup kitchens could no longer safely manage the numbers lining up for nourishment, fighting each other. China men were shoved aside, threatened, forgotten.

Things improved slowly after World War II. The Holocaust had thrown the government’s racist policies into disrepute, and the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947. After nearly a century, Chinese-Canadians were finally given full citizenship. But immigration restrictions endured until 1967, when Canada officially abolished race from its immigration policy. That ushered in a new era for Chinatown, as thousands of new migrants moved to Vancouver from Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Taiwan. In a sense, these were the golden years of Chinatown, when Pender Street basked in the glow of neon signs and banquet halls like Ming’s served Cantonese food late into the night.

Chinatown was just bouncing back from decades of decline when city planners threatened to kill it. In 1967, a plan was announced to demolish the historic Vancouver neighbourhood for a new freeway, which would have wiped out part of the neighbourhood and isolated the rest of it behind walls of concrete. Chinatown residents knew it would spell the end of the neighbourhood they had spent generations building. So they took to the streets in noisy protests and began lobbying the local political establishment.

Many in that establishment took a dim view of the freeway opponents; then-mayor Tom Campbell dismissed them, bizarrely, as a gang of “Maoists, communists, pinkos, left-wingers and hamburgers.” Chinatown residents and their allies lost a few battles. A nearby viaduct was expanded in anticipation of the freeway, wiping out Vancouver’s only Black neighbourhood, Hogan’s Alley. Large blocks of Strathcona, the residential counterpart to Chinatown’s commercial district, were bulldozed to make way for social housing. But they ultimately won the war, defeating the freeway plan and putting a stop to more urban renewal. 

Many other Chinatowns faced similar challenges. And in this context, the deeply rooted cultural practices of the early Cantonese migrants turned out to be useful marketing tools for proving Chinatown’s cultural worth. “There was a need to create a customer base that wasn’t people from your village or county,” says historian Henry Yu. Chinese restaurants played up their Chineseness with exotic decor, placemats styled like zodiac calendars, and signage in so-called “wonton fonts” that mimicked brushstrokes. Japanese fortune cookies were appropriated by Chinese restaurateurs in San Francisco and soon became synonymous with Chinese restaurants across North America. “There were all these kinds of adaptive inventions that were incredibly innovative and clever,” says Yu. “At the same time you have the rise of the Chinese New Year parade and Chinatown gates. You get that exoticisation of Chinatown.”

Lion and dragon dances were an integral part of the branding. “It became part of the spectacle of Chinatown,” says Yu. “It’s a political tool. In Vancouver, when they were trying to block the freeway from wiping out Chinatown, [community leaders] played banquet politics. You show the politicians a good time. You show them there’s 900 people in the restaurant who aren’t happy about the freeway.”

New challenges

Today, historic Chinatowns — the products of the Cantonese Pacific networks of migration and the spiritual heart of traditional Cantonese culture — face another era of challenges. In the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, anti-Asian racism and physical attacks on Asian people in many North American cities echoed the mob violence that had threatened Chinatowns a century earlier. At the same time, gentrification is putting pressure on many Chinatowns just as their businesses and institutions are strained by the changing nature of Chinese immigration.

Consider Vancouver. There are now Chinese commercial districts throughout the city, serving a continuously growing Chinese population that now includes one in every five residents of Greater Vancouver, or about 600,000 people. In suburbs like Richmond, whose population of 219,000 is more than 50 percent Chinese, big box grocery stores sell fresh locally-grown Chinese vegetables; shopping malls are filled with chain stores from Hong Kong and mainland China. These days, when somebody is looking for great char siu, or a Cantonese-speaking doctor, they head to Richmond or any number of other suburbs, not Chinatown.

At the same time, fewer and fewer Chinese people have connections to the traditional culture rooted in Chinatown. “They don’t do a lot of lion dances in Richmond because the people there are urban migrants from Hong Kong and other cities in China and they don’t have that sensitivity or connection to lion dance tradition,” says Yu. “They’re as much outsiders to these traditions as non-Chinese.” 

It’s understandable. If you’re a typical Chinese immigrant in 2025, there’s no need for a clan association when you have Xiaohongshu and WeChat. For mainland immigrants from places like Chengdu, Tianjin or Shanghai, Chinatown is an anachronism; they find little cultural resonance in these old Cantonese enclaves. Even Hongkongers who share their Cantonese heritage might find it alien: “Chinatown is too lou5 waa4 kiu4 (老華僑),” as one Hongkonger living in Vancouver’s suburbs describes it – too “old immigrant.”

Stay tuned for the final instalment of this three-part series.