Gold lantern visor talk6/21/2023 ![]() ![]() For nearly three decades in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb where Asian communities form nearly 70% of the total population, one mall hosted over 200 practitioners of tai chi every morning. The Asian mall can be a site of community outside of shopping and eating. Others have arrived with money and professional degrees, and in the Asian mall we see the recent prosperity of Asia reflected back to us, be it in shops that sell luxury handbags or one that hawks space age Japanese toilets. Some of these migrants fled political and economic turmoil, looking for a better life for their children. We get the Taiwanese and Vietnamese immigrants who came in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Koreans and Hong Kongers who showed up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the mainland Chinese who arrived in the last two decades. Read More: How the Asian Golden Hour Dawned In the Asian mall, we get the next chapter, and full story, of migration. I still visit regularly and whenever an elderly senior in mismatched outerwear and face visor shuffling down the street, I think I see my recently deceased grandmother and my heart skips a beat.īut the Chinatown of arched gateways, single-room occupancy hotels, and mahjong tiles clacking from the second story over a greengrocer represents only one part of the Asian immigrant saga. I spent parts of my childhood in Vancouver’s Chinatown. But maybe I should cool it with my diss take. Buffeted by anti-Asian violence and COVID-19 restrictions, Chinatowns are seeing diminished retail activity and fewer visits from tourists. That same tea-spitting elder might also point out that inner-city Chinatown is already in a tough spot. It’s in Chinatowns (which often held space for other non-white minorities), that the Chinese diaspora weathered homesickness, scapegoating as sources of disease and low-wages, and racist riots, rallied to support democracy back in their homeland, and found work and housing from various tongs or fraternal organizations. ![]() These ethnic enclaves were formed at the turn of the 20th century, as the Gold Rush and later railroad construction brought over droves of Chinese from Guangdong province until racist restrictions stopped further migration across the Pacific. Chinatowns, the ones that are over a century old, usually somewhere in a city’s downtown area, are the traditional homes of the Asian diaspora. I can already imagine elders spitting out their Iron Buddha tea in a dim sum hall at my blasphemy. Also, my parents’ friends who routinely mispronounced my first name as “Kelvin.” And I was irked by how Hong Kong Chinese style and culture seem to revolve around prosperity and conspicuous consumption, something that presaged my pre-grunge years. The meals felt long and pointless, the same way Chinese-language school did. Sometimes they were enclosed malls, at other times strip malls, from one Asian restaurant and shop to another as my parents, who’d outgrown the Chinatown that first welcomed them in the ‘70s, connected with friends and family. Growing up in the suburbs in the ‘80s, I was shuttled back and forth from mall to mall. “The concept of ‘mainstream’ no longer held.” Bucking retail headwinds like the rise in online shopping and the demise of the department store that have caused the number of shopping malls to plummet from their high of 2,500 in the ‘80s to only 700 in 2022, Asian malls have become the new Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Saigon.īorn in Hong Kong but raised in Vancouver, I work through my own ambivalent relationship to my heritage every time I step foot in a shopping mall. “The pressure to appeal to non-Chinese shoppers or diners casually disappeared,” Hua Hsu writes, explaining the advent of Asian malls in the Silicon Valley in his acclaimed memoir, Stay True. ![]() In the so-called “ethnoburbs” like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, Asian malls first began to appear in the 80s and 90s. And that’s the point: As a gathering place for family and friends, and as a retail portal to their countries of ancestry, malls have become the heart of Asian American community. Instead, I’m in an air-conditioned complex in a suburb east of Vancouver where Asians account for 60% of the population. I could be in Tokyo or Guangzhou, except I am not. ![]()
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