Historic neighbourhood in transition, thanks to entrepreneur
Joanne Lee-Young
Sun
Entrepreneur Carol Lee wants to broaden the business community’s awareness of Vancouver’s Chinatown. Photograph by: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
When members of a Vancouver Board of Trade delegation to Beijing meet, they almost always fall back on the same location: downtown’s venerable Vancouver Club. But recently, Carol Lee, president and CEO of Linacare Cosmotherapy Inc., cajoled the group to a simple, family-run restaurant on Pender Street in Chinatown.
“I told them, ‘It’s 50 to 60 dollars per head, plus parking, at the Vancouver Club’,” Lee said, “‘or we can have lunch at Jade Dynasty.’ Once people come down, they see what I mean by the great atmosphere.”
For Lee, it was a small exercise in a much bigger commitment she has made to widening the broader business community’s awareness of Chinatown.
Now, she is being joined by other movers and shakers. This Thursday, many of them — including heads of major banks, real estate developers and prominent architects — will gather at a gala to raise trust funds for revitalizing the five or six blocks around Main Street, off the Downtown Eastside. At the same time, a major Simon Fraser University conference will highlight academic research on how Chinatowns elsewhere in the world have evolved beyond their original roots.
When Lee chose a physical location for her therapeutic skincare company, she could have picked just about any Vancouver office building. Lee is an entrepreneur, but she also sits on and chairs many company and foundation boards, from BC Hydro to the province’s Asia Pacific Trade Council. She advises government and business types on the how-tos of trade with Asia, just as her father, Robert H. Lee, the real estate developer and former UBC Chancellor, does. Also, just as her father did, Lee chose to base her office right in the same Chinatown building that once housed her grandfather’s dry goods and furnishings store in the 1920s.
Wally Chung, former head of the department of surgery at UBC Hospital, and Joanne Mah, the granddaughter of H.Y. Louie, “of the London Drugs people,” are others who are similarly “coming back to Chinatown,” activist Fred Mah said.
It’s a wave of interest that Mah, who has been championing Chinatown causes since its heyday in the 1970s, hopes will translate into something concrete. The gala is a kickoff point. More than 400 people have taken $100 tickets. Tables have been sold for $5,000. And when attendees see the collection of old photos and newly-compiled videos, maybe they will be inspired to donate more. Beyond money, Mah thinks these power-broking supporters might jumpstart efforts to get Chinatown officially designated for its heritage value.
“I think whether you are plugged directly into the Chinatown scene or not, people recognize that there is a piece of wider Canadian history there,” said Paul Crowe, director of the David Lam Centre at SFU. “But it presents a dilemma. There are older people who are still active there with their family associations and businesses, but the second generation, the professionals, haven’t really felt a connection. There has been a gap.”
“What’s interesting now is that this group of second-generation people have decided they are going to take this on and make something of it,” Crowe said. “They have their feet firmly planted in broader society, and they are marrying the two places.”
Rosalie Tung, a professor of international business at Simon Fraser University, will tell conference attendees how many of these second-generation players have facilitated trade from B.C. to Asia. “The word diaspora used to be used in a pejorative sense to describe the plight of people removed from their homeland, but now it really signifies a dividend where trade is concerned,” Tung said.
When it comes to Chinatown, Tung emphasizes that there is a delicate balance. “All of us need symbols and [Chinatown] is a place that has geographical significance. But to revitalize it from the standpoint of Chinatown being the heart and centre, and that everything emanates from there, it could be very confining because then, in a sense, it would bring Chinatown back to the pejorative status it once had in the early days when it was more of a ghetto, the only place Chinese could live and transact business.”
Lee is innately aware of this. “It’s not just about making it what it was, but what we want it to be in the future, to have that discussion now,” she said. “We want it to be for everyone.”
And in her myriad of connections, from childhood friends with similar emotional ties to wider business and community contacts with a whole other set of memories, she sees that the question is one that tugs.
“It’s gone through a difficult transition, so now, what would we hope for it? We want everyone to ask themselves this,” Lee said.
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