‘The Chinatown of her childhood’
Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History
by Donna Seto
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2025
$29.99 / 9781487011970
Reviewed by Linda Rogers
*
What a bargain, at $29.99 this book of visual and verbal delight costs about the same as a breakfast of dim sum. I will have both, please.
Donna Seto, a scholar labouring in the lofty realms of facts and theories, appears have been longing for her phenomenal self. And then Covid gave her the gift it offered so many who found themselves in solitude.
Like many who had shelved their artistic selves in real time, Covid gave back her dreamer, her creator; and what she found was the key to understanding herself as a continuum, the daughter of a family that crossed an ocean to guarantee freedom of expression and domestic comfort to its young.
The Chinatown of her childhood was fading from memory, as a new group of émigrés, those with the privileges of wealth, began to replace the early settler community that had depended on Chinatown’s resources of comfort and belonging. “Socio-economic changes in Vancouver, as well as elsewhere in Canada, permitted middle class Chinese to move into better neighbourhoods, reducing the community’s dependence on Chinatown,” writes Seto.
That phenomenon, added to the isolation that came with pandemic and the proximity of the old community to the Downtown Eastside with its social problems, wasted the vitality that had persevered through many decades.
Seto, mourning the past and given time to resurrect her creativity, recreated the buildings of memory and left them empty so that memory and desire could replace the ghosts inhabiting them with real lives configured with real information, the sensory details, smells and sounds that gave them life.
When I read Ed Ho’s book Hopes, Dreams, Lies about Chinese emigration and settlement, his data revealed some uncomfortable truths. Head taxes and the cruel bigotry of European settlers made life on the Gold Mountain so lonely and unbearable as to make opium a plague here as it had been in China where colonialism undermined ancient cultures.
The antidote lies at least partially in cuisine, feeding basic human needs. As Ho described the seduction of racist crews by the Chinese cooks aboard the Empress liners and the establishment of restaurants across the country while labourers laboured and died to make the Trans-Canada railways a reality, the realisation arrives that cooking was and still is diplomacy.
They say the way to our hearts is through our stomachs. That is never truer than the case of the Chinese mom and pop cafes and restaurants across the country. Perhaps the real definition of a Canadian as opposed to an American might be that Canadians grow up using chopsticks.
Food is the love language that helped to blur the lines between Asian and European cultures. Seto refers to literary icon Jim Wong-Chu who commented that place acts as a cultural artifact, and “the smell and taste of food sparks something in our brains.”
Seto revives that awareness in her chapters on restaurants with features on Ming’s, The Bamboo Terrace and Ho Ho, where, as a greedy child, I was blessed with special deference. Given my dad lawyered for these restaurants and nothing was too good for his family, we enjoyed unbelievable luxury, the tastes and scents of the Orient. One special memory is a wedding banquet for the Mah Fong family where every table had a special teapot filled with Scotch whiskey. That is so East meets West.
These are memories with empirical reality as Seto, whose Covid experience, the gift of time to resurrect her childhood pleasure in painting, connects the phenomenal world of Chinatown with the abstract illusions of memory. Her paintings are as vivid as dreams as she reconstructs what was felt and seen in the buildings of Chinatown, giving her memoirs added distinction. Her pleasure in being there adds brilliance to the images that evoke a similar response in the reader.
The chemistry this book of fanciful architectural renderings and empirical details based on historical fact reveals is a form of magic realism that depends on the response of the reader, which will probably vary in intensity according to individual experience.
When Seto catalogues baked items and dim sum, heart pleasures, in her chapter on cuisine, curiosity activates hunger in real time, and, in the shared nature of this reaction, we indulge the impulse to gather around food with sentimental attraction.
“The hallways always smelled of incense mixed with tiger balm, while the sounds of a familiar language and crashing mahjong tiles blended with the jingle of jade and gold bangles dancing on wrinkly wrists,” writes Seto.
It was not all roses in the banquet halls of mutual admiration. Single men attracted to the potential of belonging and healing found comfort in the cultural familiarity of Chinatown, its family run shops filled with imports and streets smelling of spices from home, encountered bias when the head tax prevented family reunification and educational obstruction prevented assimilation in the middle class.
Farther afield, Seto recalls a story about the high rocks where Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park meets the Pacific, not far from the Chinese graveyard. That is where, she heard, lonely Chinese men leaped to their death. It is hard not to wonder about the longing of souls buried nearby for their homeland across the sea. Such a wide sea, such a heartbreaking distance from the familiarity of family and home.
When Harry Locke, musician, artist, and literary scholar, was hired by University Hill, a separate school board, to educate the children in our community, another boundary, the isolation of settler children was challenged. I was one of Harry’s scholars, and he became a lifelong friend and inspiration. He had stories to which none of us otherwise had access, those of his grandmother, a lady in waiting to the last Empress of China. At the time, we had no idea he was an anomaly.
Integration was difficult and the integrity of Chinatown continued to be contingent upon the separation of populations, Chinese in Chinatown, Indigenous on reserves, Europeans in class-determined neighbourhoods, and Jews within walking distance of the shul. Of the many unofficial ghettoes, Chinatown was the most accessible because good cuisine is universal and business was business.
“Chinatown began to change as it saw a new generation benefitting from integration,” writes Seto.
For years Chinatown shops thrived, but factors like recent gentrification and Covid, which kept people at home and away from restaurants, have driven out many small businesses. The old authenticity of a neighbourhood that primarily serviced the needs of indentured labourer and immigrant families now leans to fabrication of the past, tourist attraction, and local entertainment. Seto describes a recent adventure:
We arrive at Floara Seafood Restaurant, once a regular hangout for weekly family dim sum outings before the pandemic. The largest restaurant in Chinatown with space for a thousand guests. Floata was solemnly silent for a Saturday morning. There were only five or six tables of diners, most of whom were non-Chinese. Where did all the Chinese seniors go?
I can hear Joan Baez singing the lament of our past and present as cherished friends become ghosts, one word for the lo fan who still haunt the present.
“The whimsical illustrations and the vision of a reimagined Chinatown blur the present with the past, honouring the stepping stones laid by early Chinese settlers for subsequent generations to succeed,” writes Seto.
It is a treasure of a book.
*
Linda Rogers, a Canadian People’s Poet, is a third generation Canadian whose life has been dedicated to the boundaries between cultures, where mutual appreciation is essential. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Dacia Maraini, translated by Genni Gunn, Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, Edward H. K. Ho, Evelyn Thompson-George & Art Thompson, Bruce McIvor, Cheryl Troupe & Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.) for The British Columbia Review.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster