Documentary explores how Chinatowns across North America, including Vancouver's, are fighting for their future
CBC
Vancouver's Chinatown neighbourhood has a storied, hard-fought past, and residents are now fighting yet again to secure its future.
It's a struggle echoing across North America, a documentary showing soon in Vancouver details.
Historic Chinatowns in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and New York are fighting for the space to define themselves in Karen Cho's Big Fight in Little Chinatown, which will be screened in Vancouver's Documentary Film Festival on Thursday.
"People don't sit there and watch gentrification happen to their community," Cho, a Chinese Canadian filmmaker, told CBC's North by Northwest on Monday.
"It was important for me to find those pockets of resilience and resistance."
Cho grew-up in Montreal, where Chinatown was both the setting and a central character in her personal life and early documentary work.
In recent years, Cho became concerned by the rising real estate prices, gentrification and city planning she observed eroding the important presence of Chinatowns in Montreal and elsewhere.
Early in the filming process in March 2020, she attended a gathering of Chinatowns against displacement in New York City, just days before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.
The pandemic brought a swell of anti-Asian racism and violence as multi-generational family businesses shuttered and residents, many of them seniors, were displaced by gentrification.
"How COVID played out so brutally in so many Chinatowns also really gave a kind of sense of urgency to the storytelling," said Cho.
A major challenge has been pushing back against the notion Chinatowns are relics of the past to preserve rather than dynamic, evolving communities in need of space to flourish and change.
"Change does occur and that one needs to have an openness for change ... but yet at the same time, there is this, I think, tremendous power in understanding where you've come from and kind of building towards that future," said Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University's City Program.
Decisions about Chinatown's fate Vancouver have been city-defining, with advocacy to protect the neighbourhood eventually halting the expanded viaduct project in the 1970s, though the project had already destroyed the historic Black neighbourhood Hogan's Alley.
But despite it being Canada's largest, the fight for Chinatown is still fierce, says Yan. The disappearance of what once was Canada's third-largest Chinatown in Cumberland is a sharp reminder of the high stakes.
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