I once spoke with a Chinese elder in Interior BC, who had a popular Chinese restaurant in Nelson before the millennium. I asked if he considered it part of Nelson’s former Chinatown. 

He immediately said, “No.” I pointed out that it was just across the street from where Chinatown had been. He explained that Chinatown was across the street from the restaurant and had already disappeared with the old timers, the early Chinese migrants, who had mostly passed away by then.

His distinction made me rethink my concept of “Chinatown.” I had taken it for granted as a living, physical place that persisted across generations. 

To me, it’s a pocket of Chineseness, passed on from one generation to the next. For him, Chinatown was temporal: a place that existed as long as the people who initially made it.

People often ask me why I fight so hard for it. I fight for it because it is my childhood. It’s the place where I formed my cultural identity: where I learned my mother tongue, learned Chinese folk dances, and participated in cultural life, from the annual Spring Festival parade to the sticky summer evenings at the night market.

These were formative years for me. As a second-generation Hakka Toisan Chinese in a white settler colonial state, Chinatown provided a rare space to connect with my heritage physically and socially, particularly my Toisan roots, outside the household. 

Despite gentrification, Vancouver’s Chinatown remains one of the few places where Chinese culture can be practiced freely, intergenerationally, within the broader white-dominated society. It’s a place where you can be who you are. You can still gossip in Toisan, hug a bakery uncle, dance with a longtime business’ granddaughter, get teased by a diner auntie, jam with Chinese opera aunties and uncles on a whim, and speak all the Chinese languages of my childhood — all within the same twelve blocks. 

Watching this foundation of my cultural identity, particularly my Toisan culture, being actively erased, its colours and businesses scrubbed from the landscape, is deeply painful and existential.

Chinatowns were created in BC, across Canada, and worldwide, from Tangra in Kolkata to Nelson to Vancouver. They first emerged as settlements of Chinese migrants, drawn together by economic opportunity as laborers or merchants, but often forced into undesirable lands for who they were.

I once asked an elder from Vernon what Chinatown had been like there. He described it as a place of “old timers”, mostly men who had arrived during the head tax era and became forced bachelors after the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinatown was where they lodged, socialized over games, organized politically, and sustained their culture through organizations like the Chinese Freemasons and the Dart Coon Club. But year after year, as each of them passed away, Chinatown grew smaller until it disappeared entirely. An elder in Nelson shared the same story. For them, Chinatown began and ended with the old timers.

From this perspective, Chinatown is a temporal creation — a social aggregation tied to a specific time and generation of people. Once that generation is gone, the Chinatown ceases to exist. This pattern repeats across mostly smaller towns, especially where there is insufficient renewal through younger generations or ongoing Chinese migration.

By contrast, Vancouver’s Chinatown has become both a spatial and temporal creation. It persists across generations as a living cultural container. 

I asked the Vernon elder, who was also involved with Vancouver’s Chinatown in his youth, how his understanding of Chinatown changed when he moved there. He explained that in Vancouver, Chinatown became a place for him to connect with his Chinese identity through culture and political engagement: fighting the freeway project that threatened to demolish Chinatown, opposing the establishment of a firehall in the heart of Strathcona, challenging the Chinese Benevolent Association for its undemocratic control of power, and building the Chinese Cultural Centre despite resistance and political divisions.

Like him, I see Vancouver’s Chinatown as a space of cultural identity formation. That is what makes it unique. It continues to exist because there is a density of Chinese people within and surrounding it, sustaining its cultural life. We are fortunate to have this small pocket of cultural vibrancy and heritage in a country that often equates “town centers” with chain stores, Panda Express, and McDonald’s. 

And before anyone says Richmond or Burnaby are the new “Chinatowns”, lion dancing in a mall that could be anywhere is not the same as lion dancing within a continual heritage environment in Chinatown. You can’t walk up to a clan building and feel a century of history at your fingertips, or sense the same distant yet familiar familial bond with the regulars at the Hong Kong diner that has been there since you’ve formed memories.

Even today, as I work with youth and children, Chinatown offers rare opportunities for them to speak and listen to their mother tongue, eat Chinese food with other Chinese people, hear a senior pass by and share ancestral songs, and be surrounded by aunties, uncles, culture, and heritage. Even if they experience it only once every few weeks, these precious moments create core memories that will follow them into adulthood, giving them the foundation to sustain their identity and continue cultural practices despite social pressures and assimilation.

I do not take Vancouver’s Chinatown for granted. All that I enjoyed as a child and now as an adult — the Chinese Memorial Plaza, the turtles at Sun Yat-sen Park, the strips of juicy BBQ pork still hanging, even the Chinatown Plaza Mall, and the mere existence of Chinatown itself — was fought for against urban planning and discriminatory government policies by generations before us. 

When we have the ability, we must invest in its continuation so that the next generation, and the one after, can continue to live their cultural identities fully and freely. 

For the living Chinatowns that still remain, they are bridges of culture across space, calling on us to steward our collective heritage and to carry it forward, linking past, present, and future generations.