This essay has been published in Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being by Amy Fung (Book*Hug, 2019)
By Amy Fung
Spending the better part of 2011 in the northeast of Scotland, in a tiny, violent town, I wake up one cold, drizzling morning flooded with images of a riot happening half a world away. West Georgia Street had been taken over from Seymour Street down. Cars had been lit on fire and store- fronts completely smashed in. Bodies and heads had been painted blue and white, marching alongside jerseys that matched those distorted, jubilant faces. I could see flashes of a modern-day Roman Coliseum set in the background. Only in chaos did that architecture finally feel fitting.
Predictably, the media and the good people of Vancouver blamed their second modern-day hockey riot on a handful of hooligans. In a city with an already long history of civic riots, those to blame always came from elsewhere. These angry fans were most likely, surely, from the outlying areas of Surrey, or maybe even Richmond. The day after the riot, thousands of real Vancouverites reportedly flooded the streets with brooms in hand, ready to clean up the debris and wipe clean the city’s pristine image of itself. After the first hockey riot in 1994, when the New York Rangers defeated the Canucks, then-mayor Philip Owen was quoted as describing the riot as a symptom of the “deep social problems across the country.” In 2011, while I watched the city burn itself down after the Boston Bruins swept the Canucks, Mayor Gregor Robertson proclaimed, “Vancouver is a world-class city,” and that such violence “is embarrassing and shameful to see.”
The lesson, and the attitude, is that no matter what happens here, the problem is never Vancouver’s fault.
My mother, Cho Kei—or Maggie, as her friends in Canada now call her—lives alone in a condo tower just a few blocks away from where the riot occurred. Speaking over Skype, she described the riot as being very noisy, and that, simply, “those people” were mad and insane. Whenever she would describe someone as having gone mad, the translation from Mandarin to English conjured up images of a person who has eaten too much, to the point of choking. This person, being fulfilled, and with nothing better to do, has gone stark raving mad. In Mandarin, the inflection for insane also sounds a lot like the inflection for wind, as in those people are now in the wind. For a woman who has lived through the rise and reign of Mao, and who independently moved her three children across the Pacific Ocean to get farther away from China’s Communist government, those fulfilled people in the wind did not bother her so much. But she knew she might bother them a touch.
Walking her rescue dog, Sunshine—a snaggle-toothed Lhasa Apso—twice a day along the False Creek seawall, my mother makes a point of telling entitled and inquiring busybodies that she has lived in Canada for thirty years. She doesn’t want any of these nosy strangers to mistake her for one of those new Chinese immigrants, the so-called “Beijing billionaires” who are publicly and privately blamed across Vancouver for the bloated housing market, which is now unattainable for the average Canadi- an. She counts herself as lucky for getting into the condo market before it skyrocketed, knowing there was no way she could afford to stay as a separated retiree living off a modest old-age pension.
During early-morning grocery-shopping trips via the #23 bus, Cho Kei would watch as entire blocks started coming down and condos started shooting up along Main Street and East Georgia. She could not understand why anyone would choose to live in Chinatown if they didn’t have to. Why would anyone choose to live in a poor neighbourhood? she asked me once, confused, annoyed, and perhaps unaware of the historical arc from racial ghettoization to its inevitable collision with artistic ambitions, gentrification, and development potential.
Between 2011 and 2014, I saw a lot of art shows about pre- carious labour and gentrification. Moving to Vancouver after a half-year stint in the UK, I had been well-accustomed to the generously state-funded frameworks of art and art workers toiling away in a constant rate of precarity, which in and of itself perpetuates a precarious industrial complex all its own. Most of these ironic exhibitions occurred in galleries that had moved into Chinatown, or in those situated below single room occupancies or in pop-up spaces in the Downtown Eastside. I often walked in the drizzling rain from one show to another, in small, loose groups of people visiting from out of town or who were back in town for a short stint. We would trek up and down Main Street or Hastings, trying to end the night down the hill, if possible. The evening streets were always darker in Vancouver than in any other city, the paved roads slick with faint amber dew. The people I walked with would change from week to week. Never knowing any one of them too well, I generally found people in Vancouver to be socially aloof, but intellectually demanding and emotionally withholding. Even if I had met the same person three or four times, it would be a strange encounter if I was to say hello.
Social spaces were detached from their urban fabric, sitting invisible to those who had not been led in through darkened entranceways, back alleys, and shuttered front windows into the packed humdrum of artist-run speakeasies. Walking by their storefronts in the daytime, I would often pause for a second to see if this was in fact where I had been the night before. For artists who could afford to live in this city, was exclusivity a cherished prize for surviving?
I would overhear on a constant rotation:
Entire blocks of mansions are being bought up by the Chinese, who just let them sit empty in West Vancouver. Houses are being flipped by them, six, seven times in the span of weeks, from seller to final buyer. These illegal Chinese businessmen are dumping their stolen equity into Van- couver real estate, laundering their dirty money in our housing market!
…
But remember how unfair Vancouver has been to Asians “in the past.” The Chinese head tax, their treatment on the railway. The formation by union workers of an Asiatic Exclusion League, who chanted “White Power” as they walked through the streets of Chinatown. We have to save Chinatown, for historical reasons. We can’t blame Chinese foreign investment, because we can’t be seen as scapegoat- ing them again.
I hear all sides of the housing crisis, and how it relates to foreign investment. I hear it almost always anecdotally. Intergenerational guilt and shame co-mingling with continual invisible entitlement rendering an impotent desire to right to white all that has been passed.
The task of holding class-based differences across race seemed impossible for the right and left to hold.
In a city littered with draconian bylaws, the artist-run speakeasy was something, anything, to do at night. Long serious conversations took place in such cafés or studios-turned-bars. Over bitters-infused cocktails and fresh-squeezed orange juice, skinny bodies pressed closer together to talk at length about neo-liberalism. On the rare occasion a dance party started, groups of sullen faces could still be seen huddled in dark corners, sharing lucid critiques of late capitalism, negativity, and revolution. These conversations carried over into dinner parties, birthday parties, and outdoor gatherings, where I always felt pulled into performing rather than relaxing. One evening, after another failed dance party at the Astoria, a small group of acquaintances—mostly academic poets and myself—ended up in the backyard of a young self-identified socialist. The conversation was already circular, posturing with no power, before the host started making a show for the small, drunken crowd by reading aloud the youthful poetry of Mao Zedong. I put my drink down and turned to the host. What do you think you’re doing? I asked this pale, skinny boy. Do you know what kind of man he was? I sneered the words, unable to hide anything. Do you know who you’re actually reading? The socialist boy with brown hair and brown eyes kept reading Mao’s poems aloud. He continued steadily even after I erupted into a What kind of fucking ignorant idiot would even read this shit? monologue. One of the senior poets laughed at my profanity from either nerves or ennui. Another boy, who was studying at Simon Fraser University, made an intellectual observation about Orientalism, and everyone slowly went inside.
A few weeks later, at a panel on decolonization, the skinny boy with the serious expression comes up to me sheepishly to say he was just joking around about Mao. I don’t respond and start to actively freeze him out of conversations. Mutual friends notice my animosity toward him, and when they hear what happened, they enthusiastically tell me how he is actually really nice, how he was raised by a single mom and fights for affordable housing. Exasperation lingers in their voices when they defend him, or those like him, who are nice and actively erase me.
“We are not yet strong enough to assimilate races so alien from us in their habits. We are afraid that they would swamp our civilization such as it is.” —Editorial, Nanaimo Free Press, May 29, 1914
“Perhaps we should seriously consider whether we can continue to admit so many immigrants…maybe we should make it less desirable for people to migrate to Vancouver from other areas of Canada by making it more attractive for them to remain where they are.” —Former BC premier and then-alderman Mike Harcourt, The Housing Crisis, 1970
“So you can now enjoy the ‘privilege’ of being marginalized in the community your forefathers built, have neighbours who refuse to speak your language, and not be able to afford a home!” —anonymous flyers distributed across Richmond, BC, 2016