Claudia Kwan
Sun
Stephanie Yuen remembers well the bustling streets of Chinatown 35 years ago where pedestrians stood elbow to elbow on Pender Street, shoppers jockeyed for position to get the best fish, fruit and buns and the click click of abacus beads calculating prices.
“Now, it’s definitely slowed down during the day,” the food writer and Vancouver Sun contributor says. “Some of the empty stores have been closed for more than a decade. We’ve lost a lot of variety in businesses.”
Chinatown‘s future worries many people.
Its original residential purpose is much diminished, with the descendants of the original residents and new immigrants residing in the suburbs. As a residential neighbourhood, it is a community of older men and women.
Its retail purpose, too, is slipping away. The heavy competition from the businesses that serve them and relatively high property taxes and rents have made it hard for Chinatown’s stores to survive.
Andrew Yan, an urban planner at Bing Thom Architects, says he’s shocked by the level of poverty he’s seeing in the population of Chinese seniors.
“I saw an old lady take a rice box right out of the garbage and start eating from it,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Chinese seniors are a common sight in the lineups at neighbourhood soup kitchens.
Yan thinks Chinatown is struggling because it hasn’t diversified enough to deal with the drastic reduction in industrial and manufacturing jobs. Shifting its focus to tourism and retail isn’t enough, Yan says.
“We need to reintroduce an economic foundation for this area,” Yan believes. “We need to encourage young entrepreneurs, craftspeople, artists to come in.
“We need to use all of the buildings -after they’re modernized -not just the first floors.”
He says governments might have to give tax breaks to attract entrepreneurs to the neighbourhood.
Linton Chokie also thinks new blood is essential for the area. He’s the secretary and events director for the Vancouver chapter of the North American Association of Asian Professionals.
“I think we need to maintain development that caters to youth, with art, culture and food,” he says. “Chinatown is viewed as a historical place. We need to create the future with innovative socially responsible businesses where young people can start a career.”
For her part, Yuen would like to see more traditional restaurants that offer a wider range of regional Chinese cuisine. That could include Xinjiang lamb, Shanghai-nese juicy dumplings, and Hong Kong-style jalapeno garlic Dungeness crab -all concentrated in one area to give people the flavours of China.
But bringing a lot of new residents and businesses in means the very real possibility they won’t be Chinese. Would it still be Chinatown if the population base shifted significantly?
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