C
Christopher DeWolf
Guest
some interesting points here. i think the biggest difference between the chinatowns of montreal, calgary, vancouver and toronto is that the first three will always exist whereas toronto's is, essentially, just another immigrant neighbourhood.
toronto's chinatown is only the product of a 1960s era shift from the original one to the east. by contrast, vancouver's chinatown is as old as the city itself: it has always existed as chinatown. it has a century-year old history of benevolent associations, businesses, family, clan and community associations, distinctive architecture and so forth. even if those things because irrelevant to the greater chinese community, they still exist as permanent and totally organic markets of an old community.
vancouver's chinatown has already been marginalized. it's a tourist attraction and it draws some people from the suburbs and immigrant neighbourhoods in east vancouver, but it is totally incidental to the chinese community except as a cultural beacon. vancouver is so chinese that a large parts of the metropolitan area -- vancouver, burnaby, richmond, coquitlam -- functions as an enormous distended chinatown of varying intensity. nobody needs to go to chinatown for daily necessities or a bite to eat unless they work or live there. (the T&T supermarket mentioned earlier in this thread is actually on the fringes of chinatown and caters more to downtown condo-dwellers than chinatown residents.) every chinese shop and cantonese- or mandarin-language service you need can be found throughout the city, from bookstores to rental car agencies to supermarkets.
yet chinatown remains and it will always be nominally chinese, because of the community centres, the tourist appeal, the social housing, the old age homes and so on. it's too engrained in vancouver's history not to be chinese.
in toronto, on the other hand, what permanent markers will remain of the chinese presence? spadina/dundas has never seemed like a chinatown to me, not in the traditional sense. it feels more like a typical immigrant neighbourhood, one that could just as easily be little somalia in a generation's time. there's nothing wrong with that; in fact, it's exciting for all the reasons people have mentioned here.
calgary's chinatown remains vibrant. its streetlife is pathetic compared to montreal's chinatown (which is the same size) yet, ironically, it manages to be more dynamic and less superficial as a functional neighbourhood. montreal's chinatown is busy and pretty, with picturesque old people sitting in all the right places, but it lacks the variety and quality of bakeries, bootleg DVD/CD shops, bookstores, cafes and dessert places that can be found in calgary's chinatown. its supermarkets aren't as good as those in montreal, though.
calgary being calgary, its suburban equivalent to chinatown is located directly across the bridge from chinatown. "suburban" is a bit of a stretch, i admit, since there is streetside retail and it's a century-old neighbourhood. but it's essentially an auto-oriented colony with no relation to the surrounding residential area. there are two large chinese supermarkets, many other shops and services and a handful of restaurants.
further out, in the northern suburbs, there is a bona fide asian mall with a T&T. the mall is small but the T&T is large. there are random chinese businesses scattered around the northeast and northwest of the city, which is where a large part of the chinese community lives. "international avenue" in the east is a long collection of strip malls filled almost entirely with immigrant businesses, scarborough-style. it's very polyglot but not very chinese, although i mention it because there are some large pan-asian supermarkets there.
so yes, calgary has the same suburbanizing trend as toronto, especially since the demographic makeup of its chinese community is so similar (mostly HKers with mainlanders now arriving). it's like a miniature toronto in that sense.
montreal is probably unique because its chinese community is so dramatically different than what's found in toronto, calgary or vancouver. overall, it's very dispersed and is only especially noticeable in côte-des-neiges (pan-ethnic immigrant neighbourhood) and brossard (south shore suburb) with emerging chinese neighbourhoods downtown (students and recent immigrants) and in verdun (mainlanders arrived within the past five years). the ethnic makeup is different, too, biased more towards mainlanders and vietnamese-chinese instead of hong kong chinese, who tended to have come in the 1970s and 80s but bypassed montreal in the 1990s.
